The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - The State of New York City and Rock and Roll with Matt Welch of Reason Magazine

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Matt Welch is the Editor-at- Large at Reason magazine and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast.

Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the World Famous Comedy Seller. I'm Perriel, the producer of the show. I am here with Noam Dwarman, the host of the show and the owner of the ever-expanding world-famous comedy seller. I have a very special guest this evening. Matt Welch is editor at large. Not to be confused with anyone else. Matt Welch is editor at large at Reason. magazine and co-host of the fifth column podcast.

Thank you for joining us, Matt. Thank you so much for inviting me here. It's great to be in this room. Never been. We were talking about rock or roll. Let's get back to the rock and roll. But just, you know, that guy Matt Walsh, he tweeted out that adultery should be punishable by prison sentences. I saw that.

That's... Are you serious? Yeah. To which at least one person responded pretty quickly, like, who did you vote for in 2024? for it's just like insane right what are you even talking about uh poor matt i think both of us have over time been uh like booked to go on fox or someplace and they realized after the booking like whoops after you showed up uh yeah yeah oh my god that makes me feel so much better because i did that for this show once and noam almost murdered me we we had on um is he named

dr seers is he the guy writes the children's books I think so. And about child rearing. So we had, and we booked, we booked the wrong Dr. Sears. And I started asking questions about childbirth. It's like, I don't, I don't really know much about child ering. Did you call an audible and like, yeah, we talked about he was a diet guy. So we started talking about diet. Anyway, so do you want to talk about rock and roll or you want to talk about Israel? I will always talk about rock and roll before Israel any day. So we were talking about how these guys, Ozzy Osbourne lived a very long time, seemed to outlive. what you'd expect, given his use of drugs and all that.

But Keith Richards is alive and going strong. And your theory on that is? Is that he married his drug and alcohol counselor. I think like 30 years ago, even more now. So I think he figured out a system that worked for Keith. How old is Keith? Keith is 81. 81.

All these guys, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, they're all about Joe Biden's age, right? But Mick Jagger does yoga like every single morning. He's in better shape than all. all of us were at age 18. He is, like, Mick is really, like, one of those guys who takes, like, such good care of himself, and, but Keith is, like, still, like, I think, smoking cigarettes and drinking God knows what. I think he's learned to water it down over the years, and, uh, and, you know, he's, he's built

out of spite. That's great. And, uh, and he's, I mean, he wants to outlive Mick. I mean, that's the whole point. Totally. Like, that's the only way he's ever going to get his revenge on him, uh, when we're, once and for all, but we were talking about the Hail, Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll movie,

which I think is part of how Keith ended up saving his life. I think some time around then is when he met his wife, and it's when he got himself together after a really long detour in the 80s. It was kind of bad, and Stones weren't really doing anything between Tattoo You and Steel Wheels, and... This is an expert talking about. Keith is bored, and he wants to get things back. He comes out with a solo record, which is really great.

Talk is cheap if you haven't listened to it in a long time. I re-listened recently, and it's fantastic. But he does hail, hail, rock and roll throws what was the 60th or the 50th birthday of Chuck Berry. I think 60th. He'll be 60th. And Taylor Hackford did this incredible documentary. And Keith gets an all-star band around him and forces Chuck Barry to rehearse.

Yeah. To which Chuck Barry then forces Keith just to eat shit while he's trying to like play the lick that he ripped him off of all those years. It's great. But also you could sort of see, and I mean, maybe I'm reading too much into it, But you could see in the context, the documentary, that Keith is getting his band leader back on. That's the, like, his role in the Stones, he had a great connection with Charlie Watts. He was the band leader. He's a great rhythm guitar player, band leader.

He sees what's going on. And, you know, he can play some solos here and there. But, like, he's mostly, he organizes the band. And when he organized Chuck Berry's band and kind of did it, you could sort of seem, like, have this accomplishment. And if nothing else, he's been a great kind of road band leader of the Stones. since then, even if the artistic kind of production isn't quite there. I've gotten two insights in life from Keith Richards, both by analogy. One is, one is in that documentary, but I'll do that second.

The first one is, if you've read his autobiography, which I didn't finish like most books, but I read about half of it, he talks about having no interest and no kind of inkling that he could ever write a song. It's just like, the record company insisted that we write songs, like, all right. I guess I got to try to write a song. And, oh, son of a bitch, I happen to be one of the most talented songwriters in history. Which is a fascinating thing to imagine that you might have a talent, a world-class talent, that you have zero. You imagine if you have it, you're compelled to do it, it comes out of it, it oozes out of your pores.

No. No, I never, he never had the urge to write a song. Like, it's just, that's an amazing thing to me. The second thing is, in that documentary, there's a scene. Is it, oh, Carol, one of those songs. And there's a riffy play. Now, I'm a guitar player. It's not a very hard riff.

The thing is that you start with the notes already bent up, and then you release it. Instead of going, you go, eh, yeah, and you remember that. And they get a big fight. Keith Richards cannot get it. He can't. And that made me feel good, too, the point being that, this happens to me intellectually all the time, there are blocks, there are little things that even geniuses can't get or miss, It doesn't come naturally to them.

And literally, like, I'm so sensitive. I can be depressed all day because, like, somebody was able to do something or get an answer that I couldn't get. That should have been relatively easy for someone like me, right? And so when I saw Keith Richards, and in music too, by the way, I have that issue. When I saw Keith Richards having trouble with something pretty elementary, I said, oh, this is not just me, like the even the great. So those are two little, and I always think about these things. They periodically come up in various situations. You shouldn't beat yourself up that much, you know, especially in the podcast realm and your music is its own beast.

But, I mean, part of doing this all is, hopefully, is that you're approaching it with a sense of humility. Like, I don't know. You can't possibly know anything and everything. You can't be the best at it. Moynihan does. You guys seem to know a lot on the- Moynihan is just fronting. He spends his life trying to act smart.

So he's like the good, he's like the good wheel hunting kid. on the other side of the tracks, trying to show off for the rich kids and succeeding, because he's really fucking smart. But, you know, journalism should be about humility. It should be like, you can't do this every time when you go on cable news, but at least once a year when I go on,

I will deploy a well-placed, I don't fucking know. You have to, because you actually don't know. And, like, there's so many people who are so self-assured with everything at all time, and they're so trying to impress people with their knowledge that they're not allowed. allowing for a good conversation to happen or, you know, there's a lot of people, you know,

it's like Columbo, right? Like act a little bit dumb and you will get a lot of really interesting things out of the people that you're talking to. So it's okay. Don't beat yourself up. But I will say about the Stones and Keith writing songs, we forget this now because the world tumbled out as it did. But it was kind of novel when the Beatles and then the Beach Boys basically, and maybe you can say Buddy Holly before them and Chuck Berry to his own degree. But when they're like, oh, people who are performing the songs are going to write the songs too. And there's an element of competition to it. The Beatles gave the stones a shitty song and that became their first hit. And they're like, okay, well, you know, we're a different flavor, but we can compete with them and do

that. And that sense of competition in those early 60s when everything started to plug in, it's crucial to them. They were all trying to beat each other up. I mean, I'm sure you've heard or remember the story. I think there's a day in 68 where they're having a party, a listening party and it's like it's one of their birthdays like mix 25th birthday something preposterous something like i want to go back and just like put my thumbs on their adam's apple because they're also talented and so uh i think on one hand it's john and paul say hey we got this uh we got this single we think it's pretty good uh it's uh hey jude and revolution on the other side and uh and on the stone side it's like cool we have this thing

called jumping jack flash and maybe it was uh some other thing too but like street fighting man Or street fighting, something like that, from a beggar's banquet. Just crazy. Imagine that. But it was that competition, like, lived with all of them and really prodded them up, I think. Yeah. But, but not to beat the dead horrors. But you hear that Paul McCartney talking about, yeah, I wrote this one.

I was 14. I wrote this one. Like, he was always kind of, like, had tunes coming out of him. And John Lennon had, I think, was not as much, but similar. And had all these, he's always writing these little poems. Like, these guys were more the profile of what you'd expect. creative geniuses to be behaving like at a younger age, right? Yeah, Keith Richards had to kind of punk rock his way into being a songwriter,

but it's great from the jump. I mean, no, I have a little bit of insight into this only because one of my good friend's husband has been Keith's, like, right-hand guy for probably like 15, 20 years. He gets so much good Keith stuff today. He has to, you know, sometimes fly to London because Keith was like in an airport and like was sitting at his laptop and then just like decided to. like get up and walk away and then he has to like go fly to retrieve it yeah and like and find keith and find the laptop so imagine being like the wolf from pulp fiction except just for keith richard

no i mean it's insane so since we're doing keith richard's show i'll tell the last story i told it already before we started but it's the most interesting to me which is that i have a good friend sasha allen uh she star broadway and the voice and all sorts of things she was touring with the stones for many years and sings sings with our band matt you've heard her too matt's heard her And she was touring with the Stones, and I asked her, you know, what is it like with the Stones? Do they even ever rehearse at all? I mean, they're playing the same, you know, 20s, 30 songs for 50 years. She says, rehearse.

They rehearse. Then Keith Richards records the rehearsals. Then he goes back to his room to listen to the rehearsals. Then he comes out and he gives the band notes on what they're doing wrong. And he does this routinely, and it never stops because things degrade. Now, as a musician, and anybody's ever played. played in the band. You do understand that. Things do degrade. Little things here, little things there. And before you know it, it's just not happening anymore. And it takes the band leader

with a big picture talent to understand why it's degrading and also not to prevent it from evolving, which is not the same thing as degrading, right? Because sometimes you want to give it a little, it's like a kite. You know, you got to let it out or pull it back to keep it in the air. So with a band, you want to let it evolve a little bit because it gets stale. But you also need to put your foot down. So I just found the whole thing fascinating. Anyway, are we done with Keith Richards? Can we get to Israel now? You can do it all day.

What's Keith's position on, Israel? I'm afraid to ask. So yesterday we did this podcast, Josh Sepp's uncomfortable conversations. And it was pretty fun. I was flattered to have been invited to do it. I was very intimidated by all the people around me being so

quick, quick-witted and knowledgeable. Of course, I'm also having trouble my hearing lately, so I feel like I missed a few things. But in the pre-shall notes, one of the things he said he was going to ask us that he didn't, but it's a good question for you, is, I forget how he put it, but essentially what do you think the worst thing about New York is and what do you think Mamdani should do about it? Like, what do you think is the worst thing that's about New York City right now? I don't know if it's the worst thing about New York City, but one of the biggest public policy areas that is just obvious and that could and should be fixed and isn't.

And I hear I agree with Donald Trump. When Donald Trump came president, the first time, it's like, New York has shithole airports. He's totally right. I mean, now half of LaGuardia is okay. Newark, which isn't in New York, but it's part of the tri-state area is garbage. It's horrible. JFK is horrible. And it's also the most dangerous area to fly in the country by a lot.

It's true. Like the whole traffic control system is terrible. It's not in the purview of the mayor necessarily to do this. And that's part of the problem with New York because the governance of New York is this just like Rube Goldberg contraption from 110 years ago. None of it makes sense. You have to ask the governor to do this and who's in charge of the MTA and all that. But, you know, the rest of the world has moved on. They don't have cities or these, you know, the port authority contraptions running airport. They're like, oh, you know what? There's no reason for a government to like hold a monopoly over running a business in this. And so, you know, Europe, I mostly agree with my friend Ben Dreyfus that on average on things like, you know, ice and air conditioning. Europe can get bent. America like in general prosperity. We do pretty well with all that stuff. Europe has much nicer airports.

And they're not owned by the local government. Something like half of the colonoscopies in Europe are with local anesthetisties. aesthetic. They don't even put people's sleep for colonoscopy. It's crazy. Holy crap, as a few years ago, but go ahead. Sorry. So I would like to see more energy like that. And also in L.A. where I'm from, I'm from Southern California. And let's just like privatize some airports. It's actually not a crazy, weird, that's right thing to do. The world does it. Canada has private air traffic control. We should do that instead of like, we're going to have a major crash in this area in the next four or five years, almost guaranteed. And that's terrible.

If you, there's a completely predictable disaster coming down to pike. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the worst thing about living in New York. We just, you know, you walk around. You see the worst thing about living in New York on a daily basis. For me, it's when I drive in, I spend a lot of time upstate. And as soon as you cross and you see the, you know, welcome to the Bronx or whatever, immediately the road is just like, kong, kong, kong, you're changing your tires. Every bit of infrastructure sucks.

It's just awful, awful, awful. And they're taxing you at rates that are twice as high as what Florida. taxes their people and their roads are great in Florida. It's just like stop having the government have monopolies over the provision of infrastructure and maybe some of this begins to unwind. Well, I agree with you. Well, let me start at the end because now you didn't live in New York in the 70s or in the 80s. Certainly not. No, no, no. My first time here was in the beautiful, very crime-free summer of 1990 when I think there was about like 17 murders a day, including a beheading in Tompkins Square Park.

My God, really? Oh, yeah, I know. It was super famous. It was nuts, and I was there. I was like staying in Lower East Side near Rivington and just like, I'm not going to go outside today. It's a little bit too scary. But I was a sheltered kid from California.

So, yeah. So through the 70s, it carried through to the 90s with very little oscillation between the worst and the best times. But in those days, like it or not, whatever New York was, no matter what shape it was in, you were stuck here. If you worked in finance, if you worked in the garment business, like if you worked in show business, television, whatever it is,

you could not up and leave. So you just had to make the best of it. So the end of my whole worry is that that's really not the case anymore. They could run the entire Wall Street district from an apartment in North Dakota, I believe. You know, I'm probably exaggerating a little bit. So these problems that New York has, I worry that they could lead to the demise of New York

in a way where that was never really a risk before. I don't know what the gravitational force is anymore. There's some just because of the inertia of the talent all being centered here and gathered here. But it can dissipate, I think, pretty quickly. So I'm really worried about that. And one of the things that bothers me about New York is that, and you remember this from the 90s

and I think you'll agree, used to walk around, you used to hear music coming out of bars, used to be open late. It was a city which used to promote itself with the mayor going, I love New York,

it's open all night, remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now what happened to all these people who moved to New York because they probably wanted to live in these raucous neighborhoods, they became older,

they didn't want to give up their rent-control apartments, they're on community boards, and they are changed, the very nature of New York City. Now, they want bars to close at 1 a.m. They're hyper-concerned about noise. You really can't even barely run a nightclub anymore

that has music playing anymore. And they're just taking the specialness out of New York. If you go to Nashville now, it's a lot more fun. That's much more of a party town than... Then Greenwich Village is. Now, Greenwich Village was known all over the world for a long time to be... This is the center of not.

nightlife in the world. And the people who moved here for that are now shutting it down. So I guess what I'm saying is I'm sure there's many examples of this. They have to stop catering to the squeaky wheels. And they have to try to maintain a vision of what they want New York to be. Not just for the citizens here, but for the citizens of the entire world that view New York is kind of the center of the planet, right? We're losing anything special about New York that entitles us to say we're the greatest city on earth anymore. I think that there's something of a success curse that exists for New York City, for the country, United States, for plenty of places. California, where I'm from, too,

California's the most beautiful place on Earth. It's incredible. And they've governed it really, really badly. And this place where, when I grew up, it grew every 10 years at a rate, two and a half, four times faster than the rest of it. Everyone wanted to come to California. California hasn't gained a congressional seat since 1990. It has stopped growing. And the difference of that mentality is staggering. And you're right. Like, it can stop.

All you have to do is look at Chicago. It's still a great city, but also governed so horribly. And as a result, you know, their pension situation is horrible. The state of Illinois is losing all this population. State of New York loses population, too. So, like, it can get smaller and people do have choices. I think part of that, and granted, you're a nightclub owner. So you might be a little bit focusing on this on this story a little bit. But you're right to, I think part of it is that it's hard to be young here anymore. It's really hard to have a young family here. You're driven out by the costs of everything, but especially housing. And also by the crappiness of the schools, which have gotten a lot crappier in the last 10 years. I have two kids in the New York City public school system. They've been in and out of the public school system based on what they did during COVID and some other factors too. But the culture of it is sort of

dominated by people who've managed to be successful in law, in finance, in media, in the industries that are clustered here, and they can afford to stay. But they're now my age or older, and I'm not young anymore, and I'm not apt to go out as often. You need young people to go out. And you need them to be able to afford places somewhere within, like, 45-minute train right of here. And that's much, much more difficult. I mean, you know, you you would start at the top, like what's the, what's like one of the worst things about living here, policy-wise, definitely housing. I mean, just it is the most insane housing market in the country in ways that, you know, I'm married to someone who does private investigative work

sometimes for on landlord-tenant disputes and other things, like the rent control rules in this and the rent stabilization rules in this, and who owns this co-op? And, you know, you can, you can pass on this $650 apartment around the corner. from here to your kid, even though you don't own it. This is all madness. This policy of the people who want to eliminate the estate tax, by the way. I mean, who want to increase the estate tax. So all that is, but it like it reinforces each other.

So it really becomes this sort of like donut city where if you're young and you want to do something, at some point you're sort of faced with like, should I have to move to Nashville? It is like inheriting millions of dollars. Oh my God, yes. And it is a big hypocrisy that these people want the rich. people who inherit to pay a lot of money on their estate inheritance, but they want to keep the rent control apartments. But anyway, when I was a kid in Manhattan, I grew up middle class and all my friends were middle class. I went to public school, PS75. We lived on 100th Street.

Everybody had these huge apartments. Have you seen these apartments? Like four or five bedroom apartments. Each bedroom is, I mean, this would be a small. Yeah. Yeah. And middle class people were able to have apartments like that in those days. It seems impossible to believe. It's impossible to imagine now. Yeah. No. You have to make good, good, good money for that. I live in

Carroll Gardens, which is an old Italian neighborhood. A whole on the waterfront movie is basically sort of set all there and with everything that comes with that. And it's been interesting to watch a place that was poor-ish in the 60s and had its own problem. But it was super Italian. It was

like 85% Italian or something. And then it, the Brooklyn Browns zoning gets sort of re-entrified in the 21st century. And there's all these familial fights because grandma wants to stay. The kids, like, want to sort of, like, squabble over the inheritance. Like, we can sell this thing for $5 million now. We paid $10,000 for it. And eventually, everyone buggers off and moves to Staten Island on the Jersey Shore. I mean, there is kind of like a yogi bearer.

Nobody goes through any more. The lines are too long. Yes. There's something that doesn't quite add up about what we're seeing. saying because if the entire city is so expensive to live in now, it would imply a huge demand, which would not imply that New York is going downhill, right? It means, you know, and why were the apartments affordable when I was a kid? Well, it had to be there was a lot less money in the city at the time. And also there's just brutal amounts of crime and

dysfunction. I mean, like the 70s were not awesome in New York except for maybe all of art and, you know, retrospectively, some of the fashion and the clubs. But, like, there's a lot that was really, really bad about it in ways that, like, it's hard to describe to the kids nowadays, you know. Like, it was like I was an abject terror rolling into Port Authority for the first time in the summer of 1990. But do we agree, it really can't be allowed to get anywhere near like that again. I don't know if it could.

People don't really carry on cash anymore. I don't know what kind of crime could come back. So many ways to foil it. But if it were to, if people won't. up in 1980s, 1990s, New York City, they would leave. They would leave in a heartbeat. In a way that they couldn't back then. And that's also kind of great.

We should have that kind of mobility. And I think one of the weird problems of modern America is that people forget that they do. Not necessarily in New York, but just people around the country, they don't have the same kind of get up and go. Like, I can leave this crappy place and go to this good place instead. They do. I mean, again, I'm from California. So like the only population growths outside of Texas and Florida in the country that are like serious or just whatever borders California because people leave.

But they do show that they can do that, but they should do more of it. I'm not ultimately like everyone who's bet against New York long term is lost. And I'm still now that I'm living here, I'm going to continue making that bet, but I am worried. this is i i spent time uh in the early 2000s maybe late 90s on the community board as a member of the community board and um it really was these kind of old bitties and people with uh axes to grind who were just wielding power over people struggling to make a living in open businesses and i remember and they were very harsh on nightlife they didn't want any nightlife here or nightlife unless they kind of had a friendship with the guy,

then they let him have his sidewalk cafe. I remember Keith McNally, the restaurateur. They just was so unfair to him, just because they didn't like Keith McNally. But anyway, one time we're in this, I was on the committee, business and institutions committee, which is in charge of giving out liquor licenses.

And everybody wanted to go home early because on PBS that night was the first episode of the Ken Burns Jazz documentary. Oh. You know, you wasn't streaming at that. time and like we got to get home and i actually said you guys do all realize that you want to go home to watch this documentary about this beautiful art form that came out of these nightclubs that you would have never allowed to open and and it was at one ear and out the other like they didn't

i mean they got me but they didn't care and that's that's really it was like you have to decide do you want new york to spawn culture and arts and all that stuff or you wanted to become a gated community where you belong in Florida, you old farts, you know, get the fuck out of here. All right. So what do you think Mamdani's impact will be? He's almost certain to win, right? I don't know, probably, I guess.

It's just the impact of who's running, you know, who's going to drop out and who's not. And since all these guys are just absolutely egocentric billweeds. If it was one-on-one with any candidate, do you think that candidate could take him? I think Adams versus him could win. you think so. Could win. And I do not say that with any love lost for Eric Adams at all. He's just

kind of a bizarre person among other things. But I think he might. Yeah, sure. You can organize an anti-Mammandani block of people who are worried about some of the stuff that you're worried about. I think that like the biggest, partly because of the way that all these overlapping governance structures are set up, like one mayor can only do so much harm. You can have an impact on public safety and policy, for sure, on the schools very much, and less so kind of on the budget. But I think the impact that he would have that's most likely is that the people with means are going to move their feet. They're going to find that 183 days a year that they can spend in the Hamptons or upstate or just they'll up and move to Connecticut or wherever. you can have a little bit of a better financial situation.

I think they will preemptively go in that direction. And I think Wall Street, I mean, again, people who have bet against Wall Street or bet on Wall Street leaving have all lost those bets. But, you know, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, who just loves Mom Donnie and is like tethering himself to him. He's sort of a competitor. He's awfully used to be my city councilman. And he has been using the Comptroller's office just to harass Wall Street constantly

with just like, oh, you're not, you're not pro-union enough Starbucks, so we're going to issue a lawsuit against you or like try to get them to do all these ESG standard stuff. Like, you know, we talk a lot in our broader culture about how the woke thing is now really starting to be in remission. South Park just had an episode that kind of talked about that. That's all true, but there's some legacy structures in which that is not. And Bradlander's office, the Comptroller's office, and certainly under a mom-dani, administration, they would still be structurally trying to do all this kind of crap and

like harassing people. And I think that some of Wall Street will try to delocalize as a result. That's not great for business. You can't just tax your way into prosperity. Matt, are they dumb? Like, I understand you wish the world were different that the rich didn't have all the money you, whatever it is that animates you. But there's too much empirical evidence and proof at this point to demonstrate that if you go too far with this, these billionaires do move out, 183 days out of the year. We all know people who've done this. And without that money, you blow a hole in the budget, which means you can't do any

of the things you want to do. And yet, these people still pursue these pilots. policies. And I often find myself wondering, well, are the idiots? Like, how do you explain them not seeing what's right in front of their face? I have a hard time answering that with confidence, especially because we write the same thing every year at reason. Like, you know, like, oh, Maryland does a millionaire, or Baltimore, forget, which does a millionaire's tax. What happens. Turns out pretty small borders around this polity. We can we can move out and the whole thing crumbles around. This has been tried again and again in many of these ideas. But let's not

sleep on the fact that there are many ideas on the right that have been tried in the past or that are popular now on the right that have been tried to do tariffs. We're going to tariff our way to prosperity. So like it this bad economic thinking is especially if it's sort of a populist laced. I mean, how many times is Bernie Sanders going to talk about the billionaires and the oligarchy over and over and over again? He's made, I mean, he's a true believer when he's a socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont. But he has not been introduced to, he just like is impervious to anything from the contrary. It's stupid example. But it sticks on my cross, someone who lived abroad for a long time, is that he always talks about international trade being a race to the bottom. And it's like, I don't know, talk to Bono about. that. Talk to the United Nations about that. Like the single biggest generator of not just wealth, but of lifting a billion people out of extreme poverty in 30 years by acclamation, by consensus is international trade. And yet Bernie Sanders has achieved a huge stratospheric level of popularity saying BS. He will say over and over again, as just basically almost every Democrat,

that the problem with schools is that we don't give enough money, public schools. We give as you well know, $39,000 per student in the K-12 system in New York City. The highest in the world? I think so. I think so of public education, certainly the highest in the United States. And we kind of spend more than most people do. It's not the money. That is not the problem.

That's a pretty soon results. And just like with rent control and some of these other kind of issues, this has been studied a lot. There are very few, as Paul Krugman once wrote, I think, in the 1990s. There are very few issues that economists are close to a consensus at. and rent control is one of them, and tell me when rent control is not going to be popular, not even among, like, progressives and the Mamdaniites. It's popular among every New York politician for them. I think Curtis Lewa is in favor of rent control.

What the hell? Like, everyone does it. You either, like, align yourself because that's where political power is, or just it makes intuitive sense to you that you need to limit the greed heads. And so, Perry L. would probably think that. Yeah. That rent control is a good thing. I think having a certain number of rent control apartments is a good thing.

Yeah, I mean, it just, like Santa Monica, California is an example that they, you know, used to be called the People's Republic of Santa Monica, and they had more rent control than just about any other of the 88 cities in Los Angeles County. Isn't that why the city of New York, like back in, I don't know, was it the 40s or 50s where they put up, like, structures like Stuytown and Peter Cooper Village, wasn't the idea that you could have people who weren't incredibly wealthy living mixed in with... It was a motivating factor, but in the process of doing that, they tore down a whole lot of housing for exactly those people.

But the neighborhoods that were raised to make that were neighborhoods on the Upper West Side and other places where, you know, they were deemed as blight. um so they basically didn't like the way that those middle to lower middle class uh people were were congregating they wanted to have their own kind of uh uh sort of top down uh structure of that and that became i mean of all of the uh controversies around what's his face power broker guy um fishman spire uh no no no i'm blanking no i fill in the blank for me uh you know Robert Moses? You're Oliver Moses.

You know, you can, one can say many things about Robert Moses, but of all of the things that he did that I think are, um, were kind of unequivocally bad. It was those. And it was done for that motivation. Like, let's just raise this place so that we can, A, build a freeway and be, I will be in charge of housing because I am the benevolent person who could provide it. And he made ghettos by doing this. And he disabused.

He kicked people out of the property that they trashed. in the neighborhoods they treasured. You destroyed neighborhoods in that process. So you can have that as a motivation and sometimes it can produce partially some of those results, but then it also contributes very much to the fact that the market as a whole doesn't have the ability to kind of create new housing around it. And the creation of new housing, as we see in places like Austin right now and in Florida and in Texas writ large, if you allow people to build it, the prices are going to go down. And New York has this like, no, we can't like. people to build and we have to sort of control it in this way. That's reasonable. I accept that and

I think that that works. Of course, the irony is that the apartments now are, you know, insanely expensive over there, right? Well, I'm, where? In Stuytown and Peter Cooper Village. In some of the ones that have been allowed to kind of go back on the private market. Yeah, they totally have. But some of them are not. I mean, I live next to a couple of housing projects where the the prices are not expensive at all, but also they're kind of crappy and people don't like them. So it's all a mess.

So tariffs are interesting. So first of all, I just want to say, I agree with you, basically every word you've just said. But I think when you're dealing with policies where people will up and leave, you're playing with all the marbles as opposed to experimenting with tariffs,

which is just not the, the atomic bomb, potential atomic bomb that what they're contemplating and taxing the wealthy in New York City and state are. But tariffs, by the way, just because it's interesting to me, you know, when there's all this inflation after COVID, I didn't raise my prices. I took the hit. And I remember when everybody first started talking about tariffs, I said to myself, and I think I said to Moynihan. I said, you know, I don't know. The Chinese profit margins in this slave

labor country may be so high that they may just suck up these tariffs and still be able to give the products cheaper than American goods. And I think we are seeing some of that, although probably eventually we will see the prices go up. But I just, you know, it's not like unions are another way of looking at it. Unions are like a tariff, right? It's raising the cost of the goods. But we support unions for some sort of greater good. I think the, I'm kind of just rambling, but the bigger question is, is there any real chance that they're going to bring this manufacturing back to this country? And I, that's where I don't think. I mean, we have a lot of manufacturing this country. That's sort of a misnomer that we don't. The place.

the type of manufacturing that is left. It is manufacturing jobs. And so we have this kind of nostalgia for jobs that most of the people expressing the nostalgia don't want to take, which is fine. I mean, there's a lot of dignity that. We also have, you know, I don't know what the number is, but like a shocking number of just like welding jobs that are right now unfilled because for whatever reason we are not prioritizing that.

Can I just interrupt you for that? Because the MAGA is so dumb sometimes. And if they could get those jobs to come back here, who would who would the capitalists need to fill those jobs? Immigrants. It doesn't have to be.

Go fucking learn how to weld and you have a job in this country. There's no, there's no barrier to that entry except you, the homegrown people are getting older. I mean, like you... When I was a kid. Full employment. You need immigrants if you want to have more welding jobs in America.

That is... Likely true. It doesn't necessarily have to be true. So no, I don't think that we're going to see this kind of, you know, we're not going to redo Detroit as a gigantic car city. But like also, we have a lot of huge car factories in the southeast, usually in non-union states or right to work states. And we make a lot of cars. And that's great. And America does a lot of, a lot of manufacturing already. I think with the tariffs, first of all, you're crazy with your. prices, as Moynihan has told you many times. You already charge way too little. I'm not going to complain about it. I'm just telling you that as advice. So maybe you have a different view of elasticity on stuff. But unilever, right? Largest like the dry goods or consumer goods company in the world said like, hey, look, we have to raise prices because the margins on those places are so small. The margins at Walmart, you know, I used to work in newspapers used to with the LA Times. The margins at newspapers in the 1990s were annual 20, 25% profit margin was the

industry standard. Now the industry standards that you're going bankrupt and you're firing all your employees. But it used to be so high. Walmart is well below that. I mean, these places are, and supermarkets in general are really, really, they have to count pennies. So there's only so much eating of those tariffs. I think it definitely does happen. That's which country you're dealing with too. But, you know, we have right now a 50% tariff with Brazil on coffee. So enjoy your cappuccino there, no. That won't matter because you'll buy Colombian coffee or Costa Rican coffee, right? It's just going to kill Brazilian coffee. Every, every country that makes coffee is being is being tariff. I don't know if it's all 50. I think some, it's 35, but it's going to be a lot.

I think we'll see more of those prices starting to show up. And we're not going to see, the kind of jobs on the other side, and two other bad aspects of it that are worth thinking about is that one, it just sort of fosters international political friction, right? It fosters dysfunction, and it centralizes power in the White House based on the whims of one man. I saw a lot of them. He calls it an emergency man. He doesn't, he does not have the authority to do this. He doesn't. And it's going to be challenged at the Supreme Court. And I, I hope and predict with my fingers crossed that some of the national emergency stuff

is going to be struck down. Like a national emergency with Canada over lumber? What is that emergency precisely? And when that gets struck down, then it's going to be all catty wampas again. But just to central... What? Caddywampus. I never heard it. Totally a word. That's fine. It's fine. We have a... No, I believe it's a word. Here, it's an old-timey word. But we should, you know, there's a... I saw a lot of people on the right

making fun of the no kings rallies and protests that happened. And I didn't. I actually went to one and walked around and looked at it at least in Brooklyn because, you know, we're getting ready for the 250th anniversary of the Revolution and I've been gorging and all this kind of stuff. And also like pooling all this power in one person regardless of who that person is. If that's Elizabeth Warren or Donald Trump, it's bad. It's not what we do.

Like it shouldn't be like that. We diffuse power should be diffused between the legislative branch and the judicial branch and the executive branch. It should be diffused between federal, state, national, local, whatever. Like, it needs to be like that so that you can't just press a finger, press a button, and decide what happens. And we are doing that right now. And that means that so much of American public life right now to just a gross degree

is a ring kissing exercise where people are just trying to figure out how to like angle themselves next to Donald Trump. And I've been surprised in his second term about how many people are willing to kiss the ring, like universities trying to settle with him and all this. And granted, he has a whip hand and he's using it. And that's really, really bad. But I think we all need a little bit more self-respect to. What, you know, some stories for some reason, I don't look into them like I should. What are they settling over these universities? I saw headline Brown is settled with them. A lot of it is, the Trump administration is using civil rights law to the sort of

clever clawback saying that you're violating the civil rights of people by by pursuing DEI policies because they inherently disfavor populations, usually white, Jewish, Asian. But it's just like you you're using discrimination. We told you you couldn't. And, you know, the Supreme Court at jurisprudence right now, you really can't use affirmative action too much anymore. And they're trying to figure out all these workarounds. And so they're using civil rights and other levers to, um, to Or just like, we will suspend your funding if you don't do jump through these hoops. And so people like, okay, I guess I'll jump through a hoop. Pay us $200 million and we'll leave you alone.

This will be our settlement of the lawsuits that we have against you. Yeah. It's bad. Like we shouldn't really want the White House to be dictating what universities do. And I say this is someone who I don't like what those universities do frequently. I've very purposely lived my life away from universities. I'm a college expelly, not even a dropout, I was kicked out. Kicked out?

Yeah, for bad grades. For what? Bad grades. What college? Blue Tarski. Zero point zero. I did have a zero point zero for the winter quarter of 1980, six to seven. But I was spent all my time of the college newspaper, so I wasn't like completely slack.

It was at UC Santa Barbara, a great place. And I did three and a half years of, living there and working for the newspaper and doing other stuff. But I was kicked out for my freshman. It's like you and Jeffrey Epstein didn't finish college. See? What else you guys have in common? We know some friends in common, probably.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of, like, technology people who were, like, in sort of the internet finance and, like, genetics stuff were, he was funding a lot of that stuff. And so I know a guy who went to his island. You predicted an airplane crash. Yes, I did. What's your prediction on Epstein? None. Just there's like what, what is there to predict at this point?

Like, he's dead. Are we going to find out that some famous people are implicated in having sex with minors? The Trump administration is covering for it. I really don't think so. And he was murdered. I mean, when you can't, when Dan Bongino can't deliver the goods, poor bastard. This is what happens. You hire a troll to be your deputy, FBI.

director and you cultivate a culture that wants to believe constantly that there's an international pedophile ring just in some direction. I know it's happening somewhere. People I know and I interact with and friendly with will just like say like, you know, have they found the trafficked kids yet? And it's like, my dude, do you know who gets sexually abused as kids? It's horrible and it's not like a joke in any way, shape, or form. It's people they know. It is like preponder. There isn't. There never was a international trafficking ring for kids. I saw taken. Eyes wide shut. Yeah, I'm sure.

Like, there's a lot of holes in all those stories. I grew up very close to the McMartin preschool. Which one is that? That was the satanic panic in the, I think it was in the South Bay, Manhattan Beach, if I'm not mistaken. I'm from Long Beach. That's when they tried and convicted a whole bunch of people. It was based in the idea that this kindergarten was doing satanic sexual rituals to kids. And they had all these like four-year-olds or ex-four-year-olds testifying and like they're prodded to find memories that didn't exist.

It's one of the worst like moral panics in the history of the country. And it happened in our living lifetime. This is you were talking about Ozzy Osborne before the show. This was all in the middle of the panic about satanic heavy metal. You know, Tipper Gore is going to go out there and like read lyrics of Prince songs and like, like metal songs and Twisted Sister and all of that. Parents, music, resource, counsel, so, P.M. Whatever. Counselor Center. My favorite bit of that. And everyone should go and watch the video highlights of Tipper or the big hair.

She's reading the lyrics of a Dead Kennedy song. Dead Kennedy, it's like super duper lefty punk, like Barry a punk. And she's like, kill, kill, kill. Kill the poor. Can you believe he's doing it? It's like, you ever heard of satire? He didn't want to kill the poor. He was satir, anyways. But, yeah, there was in the middle of the satanic panic. And they jailed people who did nothing for a long time.

It was eventually kind of overturned. But there's even some, like people who prosecuted cases like that. I believe in Bakersfield, California, who just stayed in their job as prosecutors, even after they railroaded people based on this kind of sense of panic. So we are always one step away of being panicked about elites doing crazy pedophile satanic shit. And it's just not true.

So I don't think it's going to be true in this case. And eventually, I think here's my prediction of it. Donald Trump will successfully browbeat his own base to stop talking about it because he has never not been successful in doing that over the last 10, 11 years. He's brought his side, the Republican Party, Fox News, everybody on the right. He's eventually brought to heal. The Freedom Caucus used to be opposition. They became lap dogs. He'll do it in this case, too.

Yeah, I mean, there's a few circumstantial bullet points which make us make this whole thing hard to believe that there's anything there. One is that the Biden administration had this information about Trump and didn't use it or leak it during the election. Two is that he would hire Cash Patel and Dan Bongino these two Epsine fanatics and put them in charge of the Epstein files. Like, why would you want to put those guys in charge of the files if you knew it was catnip for them? Yeah. And there was another one. Oh, and that, how do you, it couldn't be possible that her name has the word jizz in it, right? It's not Jis Lane Maxwell.

We just say Jolene. Jolene Maxwell. We just ignore how it's obviously spelled. It's like a town name in Massachusetts. So Jeline Maxwell, she's sitting with her legs up, you know, in minimum security prison. Apparently no one's afraid anyone's going to kill her, even though she has all the same information that Epstein had, right? So I just don't think there's anything there. But I thought of this in a while.

I grew up with a guy, I guess I could say his name. He died recently. He's very tragic. His name was Jonathan Seiger. John Seiger. You can Google him, S-E-I-G-E-R. And he was the guy who supposedly, or did blow the whistle on the alleged pedophilia ring at Horace Mann School.

Oh, oh, yeah. Private school. Yeah. And he was the main witness about all this. Now, this guy was an interesting guy. I loved him very much. He was amazingly gifted and talented. But I never really knew whether to believe him or not.

The stories, if you read the post did a long thing about it. If you Google it, the stories are so horrifying, so over the top. You'd feel like you'd have to tone them down for a Hollywood script. so you know I just don't I just don't know what to think about that I've been why wouldn't why do you think they weren't or possibly weren't true for the reason that it just seems it just seems too hard to believe it's it's and and that he'd be the only one who's come out and and really reported this I don't know I've been only wanting to look into it hard and things it sounds like a very good thing to look at

too. Yeah. I have a question if I wouldn't. Go, we've got to finish up. Go ahead. I just want to ask Matt, so if Trump has successfully sort of, you know, pushed everybody to decide, do you think he'll successfully be able to browbeat like the Tucker Carlson's and the Candace Owens, like the Jew hatred out of them? No. No. I don't, I don't think that he will be, I don't think that he'll be motivated enough to do that. Not through, because he's like anti-Semitic, I don't think he is at all. No, I don't know.

But that it's just not going to be enough of a priority for him. I think getting on the other side of the Epstein files is a priority for him. I think he's been making those like individual conversations, phone calls to a lot of those people. About the Epstein file.

Absolutely. Like, you know, look, I looked into it. You have to trust me on this. And you hear some of these people say, like you know what it's time to trust the president you know someone who spent the last three years talking about nothing except it uh are now like changing their tune i think you'll see that because it's a problem for him i don't think that he sees um the ambient you know anti-semitism or like cozying up with anti-semitism that's happening a lot uh just disturbingly in the culture right now i don't see i don't think that he sees that as a problem that he needs to combat um right now i mean

if it was, then he would have maybe combated it a little bit harder in 2017. He had an opportunity to, and he chose not to. So until it becomes a very specific problem for him to solve, I don't think we're going to hear anything from him. You know, we're going to wrap it up. When you talked earlier about, you know, being humble and realizing that you can't know many things, many things are unknowable and not what they appear, that's really the way I felt all along about Israel,

but I feel that way more than ever now like you just don't know what's really going on I was early in really thinking that something was that there was a big blunder

with this aid idea that they had and clearly it was you remember me the first time I heard that people were shot maybe it's because I have experience dealing with crowds

I don't know it could be something as stupid as that I said what the hell are they doing you have a system that prevents you from having to shoot people who are showing up to get food. They didn't even claim that they look like terrorists or, you know, the usual claims. It was really just like, you know, they had no excuse for it. They were using live ammunition to disperse it. They had this dumb idea of taking over all the food, which probably, you know,

caused people to hoard the food, made it hard. Like, and then it's just, it's a perfect storm of, of terrible, I hate to use word PR, because it's much more serious. It's not just public relations. People are actually dying, 800 people dying just to try to get food. That's, some number like that. It's, it's unbearable. Yeah. It's unbearable.

And, you know, and so I think that's true. But beyond that, you just don't know what to believe. And even on this starvation thing, I mean, I did have this video I wanted to play. I don't know if I'll play it, it's, because it's part of this story. I'm kind of shoehorning it in it with you because I wanted to play it with the other guy who's not on the show. But I'll play in a second. But, you know, this Times, the New York Times had to, I guess retract is not the word, but they had to explain. Yeah, you want to.

Did a little modifier. They had a front page story with a dramatic photograph of a starving kid. or a kid with ribs sticking out and the, I think the PR of either the paper or of the union of the paper, I forget which, said, actually, that kid had a preexisting condition. We didn't, we should have mentioned that in the story and did not. I don't know if they mentioned in that tweet also. No, they didn't. They put it on their PR page, which has significantly, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. But I don't know if they mentioned in the tweet that also, the kid, his brother or sibling was next to him and was not starving to death because he didn't have that pre-existing condition. Well, also the kid was in Italy. He had been... No, we're not sure about that.

There's some report that he was then taken to Italy for medical care, but I don't want to go on record saying that, but look, it's like the enforcement mechanisms that we lived through with wokeness where I remember, like, I was afraid to say out loud. I don't think that Christina Blasey Ford, you know, is credible. Like, you're petrified to say the wrong thing. They're in full force now on this Israel thing.

You don't want to question, like if you say, well, you know, this child had a preexisting condition. What? You don't think that it's serious if a child with a preexisting condition dies? Don't you know that the Nazis use as an excuse when they would say that their prisoners died because they were frail? Like, you know, like you're, so you're, you, you want to ask what you're like kind of common sense questions. Like, well, how is it that this child is so is starving while his brother is fully fed? And just like part of the unknowable thing is like how many people are actually starving right now. And we have a lot of reports that there are people starving.

Are all of them non-credible? I have a tendency to believe no. They are probably. That's just a preponderance right now, you know? I think some of them are credible. That's why I want to play this face. So this guy that you could see his face. before she plays it.

His name is Faroz Sidwa. And he's a very nice man. I spent time with him. And he is the doctor who the New York Times published his column about the children that they found in Gaza with the bullets in their heads. Do you remember that? It was a big thing. It's almost a year ago, I think October or something like that. And we had him on to talk about that.

And, you know, anybody can go back and listen to it. I mostly believed him. There were certain parts of the story, which I felt. He seemed to be he was exaggerating or at least changing what he had said earlier. But he showed me the scans of, he had them on his laptop, and I don't think they were fabricated. I don't think he was planning to show them to me,

and he showed me real scans. You were there, right? I wasn't there, but I said. Of the bullet in a child's head, and doesn't mean it was, you know, I mean, plenty of bullets wind up in children's heads in Chicago, too, but it doesn't mean it was a murder. But he seemed credible.

But then towards the end of the interview, He started talking about the starvation in Gaza. Now, this guy is one of the leading experts on this. He was in Gaza. He's reporting about it. And so I went back and I cut out this part of the interview. And if you lived through this, what you're about to see, then it becomes reasonable that you were skeptical of the reports that came now,

especially if you didn't follow it. And I guess it's kind of like the boy who cried wolf. But I think there really is a wolf. Now I'm very happy Israel seems to be doing everything it can to reverse this problem. They're probably doing it mostly because it's so harmful to their strategic interests. But I also hope that many of them at least are doing it because it's the right thing to do. When you speak to Israelis privately on the right, I've yet to hear an Israeli tell me one-on-one

that they're happy to see children die or they want the children to die or they're heartless about it. But you do hear these crazy right-wing ministers from time to time saying things. Anyway, so just play this video. It's a little bit longer than I wanted it to be. It's like three, four minutes,

but I cut out a lot. So I didn't mean to cut anything out to try to spin it one direction or other and invite anybody to go and listen to it. But this is for Osir-Sidwa, And this was a year ago telling us about starvation in Gaza. It's quite interesting. Go ahead.

Play it, Tiana. Make sure the sound is working. I went through the integrated food security phase classification data for Gaza. That's the technical group that monitors food insecurity in the world. And if you look at their data, which admittedly everybody admits is not great because it's very hard to get data out of Gaza. But if you look at their data, the minimum number of Palestinians that you can estimate that have died from starvation or starvation-related causes since October 7th of last year is, 62,000. Seems like a lot.

Now, it's a huge number, and I sincerely hope it's not true. And if it doesn't turn out to be true, that would be wonderful. How can it be true? We'd be seeing social media videos of people that look like concentration. You do. By 62,000? So this is what I'm saying. We see almost none.

No, that's not true, Norman. And maybe you can explain this, because from time to time when I do see somebody, like that, is surrounded by people who are sometimes pudgy. Yeah. And I'm like, what is going on? How can one person be starving to death around friends and family that are overweight? So famine almost never affects an entire. Famine is not usually like what was happening in a Nazi concentration camp, but that's what we think of in our heads, right?

I'm just using it to mean a time when people don't have enough food and or and some of them are dying because of that. Famine usually happens in circumstances of scarcity, but it always affects people who have fewer mechanisms to cope with it. It's not uncommon. It's very, very uncommon for an entire population all to be starving to death. But I'm saying that we see these isolated videos of a child in a bed. And no adult is going to let a child get to that level of starvation while they're eating comfort. maintaining their weight. And the notion that there could be, I think about $60,000, $30,000. But this is what I'm sorry to say. More people starving in Gaza. Well, everybody has a cell phone.

And we don't know about it. And Hamas is not announcing it. And the Gaza Ministry of Health is not adding it to their numbers. This is a credulousness. Well, who am I being credulous towards the integrated food security phase classification? To whoever it is that saying terrible thing. That is similar to... The IPC, which is funded by the United States, the EU, Canada, and Australia. What I said is that with the available data, that's the lowest number that can be estimated. I don't know.

But it's obviously not true. I wouldn't say it's obviously not true. I don't know if it's true. bet you $1,000. I'll bet you $10,000. This is all over. We're not going to find out that on top of all the poor people who have died, 60,000 people starve to death. Okay, fair enough. Like I said, I don't know. We would see the videos. There are, there are people in Gaza. I mean, you, you would have seen it. You were there. I did. You saw people, you saw, you, you put, you, you saw whole groups of people, like Auschwitz victim. So, uh, let me, so you, so you, uh, so you, uh,

I think you said you saw the one picture of the child. Yeah, I saw the one picture. Right. So that kid, do you think we admitted into the hospital? I don't have a thought about it. You tell me. Well, how, so, okay, so this is important to understand. Our hospital, European hospital, which was the best one at the time, lacked even the most basic things that are needed to medically feed a child.

So with that kid, if you just start pumping tube feeds into his stomach, you're going to kill him. He's going to have huge electrolyte shifts, and his heart's going to stop working. working. Same thing that should have. Why was he starving to death? Was he sick? Was he injured? Why wasn't he? Yeah, he was injured. I need he's injured, but he'd been to Shifa hospital. But this is my point. We sent him home and we told his family just give him little bits of food, but we knew that wasn't going to work. So he probably, unless he made it out to Egypt,

which is all was possible. But that's my point. He was starving like that because he was injured. If he was home with his family, he wouldn't have been starving like that. Well, how do you know? Okay, so. He wasn't starving for a lack. He wasn't like that for a lack of food. He was like that for a lack of the ability to take in food. I don't know that that's true. The IPC's numbers say that 495,000 people, about a quarter of the population, are in the catastrophic phase of food insecurity. In that phase, two of every 10,000 people per day, per day, die of starvation-stabation-related causes.

And if you calculate that out, that's the number we came up with. All right. So that's what we were told for a year. It's so outlandishly, obviously, incorrect. And this was the credible position of the New York Times experts. So of course, you know, we discounted it, or I didn't discount it. But people began to discount it because they've been telling us for a year already. Not just some Gazans are dying, but tens of thousands of gods and dying of starvation. And then you see an article now by the same people will tell announced a hundred and i've seen something like 135 people are known to us and they pretend they haven't been saying like they they don't have any compunction about pretending that they ever said otherwise that they ever used the numbers in the thousands five months ago they'll just take a new number no shame and you follow me right um this is all very frustrating and you just don't know what to believe and what not to believe and that's dangerous because then you don't because then you throw up your hands up and say it's too hard and

and I'm just not going to pay that close attention to it. I have long thought of all of the many things that I'm ignorant about and just don't ever want to say a word in public that the Israeli-Palestinian issue was literally number one. That's why I ended up going to Israel with you. Thanks to my masters in the Israeli government who paid for us to go over there, but also to look around and see whatever we wanted to see.

And it was wonderful to go there, not because now I'm an expert, but because now I am this, much less absolutely stupid about all of it. Because people have decades, centuries of history behind it, contentious history that they disagree with and they're locked in and there's all these interest groups that have just stayed there forever and they have this side of the opinion. Like, it's impossible. It's not rewarding at all. You dip your toe into it and start talking about it. You're immediately like, comes all at you. But nonetheless, it was a,

rewarding to do that. And I talk a little bit about certain aspects of that life now. But I'm very frustrated on a daily basis by this exact story for the exact same reasons. It's so hard to sort it out. It's obvious that Hamas, I think it's obvious, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but that Hamas is using the distribution of food as this pressure point, a thing that they can kind of control and then meet out for their own purposes. And one of those purposes is undoubtedly international PR. This is the first time this week that Benjamin Netanyahu has had a negative rating in American

popular opinions in 1997. Oh, well, I know that. And that's kind of new. You know, international regard, American public opinion, public regard for Israel is fundamental. It's the thing that I learned kind of from you, or at least thinking about in a different way from you while we were in Israel

is that you kept interrogating everybody that we saw. Like, don't you realize you're losing young Americans? What do you doing about that? You're losing the Democratic Party. What are you doing about that? And for the most part, people didn't want to engage, right? They were sort of like deflecting and thinking that this wasn't a problem. Well, it's a big problem for them right now. And this particular story is a huge problem for them right now. And it should be a problem. You don't want people dying of starvation who you have control over while you're also in the middle of a war. And it's this damned if they do or don't moment for

sure. I think Stephen Whitkoff landed in Tel Aviv just today. In the region, the Trump administration seems pretty engaged on like they don't like this either and they want to see about making it stop. But it's really, really hard to sort through the competing claims here. And Jews among all people are not supposed to let this happen. Go ahead. Why isn't the UN tasked with distributing aid to do their fucking job? From my understanding is that they had been for a long time. That's not my understanding. And they don't. And they do it. very battling. Perry L.

Okay. So that's, there's no question that there are people to lay blame on here in this entire cast. But it doesn't change. No, it's horrible. Of course. But it's very difficult to have a conversation, not with the two of you, but in general, in good faith, when nobody acknowledges that fact, right?

it's like that that's a major and very important part of this conversation we've heard for for and by the way i'm sorry i just want to say the other people who have not gotten any food for over 600 and something days are the hostages of course yeah this is this is true too that's all but i don't think it's a i don't i you know i don't this happens in life all the times very often you say something to somebody and they come back at you with something and you say, listen, that may be 100% true what you're saying. But the only time you shouldn't be saying that to me is an answer to what I'm saying. Because I want to talk about what I'm talking about now that I've come to you with. And yes, of course what Hamas is doing to the hostage is, deserves to be talked about all the time.

But the time to bring it up is not as an answer to whether or not Israel is or is not responsible for these people. It's not an answer to that. I'm saying that there's more than one thing going on and to have a conversation about the horrors of anybody starving. I think it's a horrific thing that anybody should go hungry is that you can't just blame the Israelis. Well, I'll say this. For two years now, we've been hearing about everything,

and more than two years, but, you know, and 77 years or 76 years, whatever, 77 years we've been hearing, but really now concentrated. I've been hearing about everything Israel shouldn't do. Shouldn't have done. And we really have yet to hear from anybody what Israel should do. Even Omar Bartov said to us,

the guy who says that Israel's committing genocide, says, yes, Hamas must be destroyed. Remember? He says, Hamas must be destroyed. How should they do it? He says, militarily, and by giving them the Palestinian people another option. He's presuming they want another option.

and he had no he felt no obligation to explain how his version of defeating them militarily would differ from Israel's version of defeating them militarily like so it's just it's fundamentally unsurious that's what I'm saying anybody

I mean anybody who thinks that a civilian shouldn't be fed is a monster right like that's and I imagine I had this thing I said yesterday you know what's always get the quote wrong Hemingway said they went bankrupt gradually, then suddenly. All at once, yeah. Gradually and all at once.

I feel like that's what's happened with the future. In our lifetimes, the future came gradually, and now, like, in the last five years, it's come all at once with AI and drones and everything you can imagine. And Israel, Netanyahu, I'm sure, is saying to him, he'd love to just end the war. And yes, we could probably live with this, you know, emissurated. Gaza next to us without having another October 7th for a long time. He says, but five, ten years from now, I'm going to be the guy who kicked the can down the road. And we're going to be swarmed with these $400 drones like Ukraine. And all of Israel is going to be overtaken because I would be the guy who let this problem just come around again.

And I feel like that's what he's, the pressure he's under, it's like, I have to stop this now. Yes, and, and I think in some respects, in many respects, that kind of motivation or mindset has led to some pretty amazing Israeli victories over the past two years. Hezbollah and Iran. Hezbo and Iran, and that's just gigantic. And it was sort of unfathomable a couple of years ago. I've long said that the, you know, what October 7th showed in many ways was that October 6th was on tenable in a thousand different directions, including, you know, having this sort of emissorated strip of poverty that is blocked off from the world, not only by Israel, as you well know, and just the whole thing doesn't make sense. what's happening in the West Bank, the conditions of people there, and the expansion of settlements, I would include as part of what is intolerable in October 6th and has a pathology

in Israel. Feel free to disagree about it. No, I agree. But so that's led him to good places of like, okay, we just can't tolerate having Azbollah pointing 100,000 rockets at us. Also, the endless rockets that were coming into the south of Israel for... Non-stop. Like, every day we really expect rockets.

That's intolerable. You just can't... You can't have that on a... a daily basis. So it led to some good ends or like some product from Israeli security ends. But then I think from the beginning, there has not been some idea about what Gaza looks like, how it's governed, who's responsible for its security, where the people can go from October 8th on. There hasn't been. Like they haven't worked out endgame with this at all. And it's the choices are terrible because defeat them militarily. Defeat a terrorist army that doesn't wear uniforms,

except when they're handing over at photo stage events, handing over people, hostages in their limited releases. Only then will we wear any kind of military garb in photo ops. That's really, really hard when the usage of emisseration and death is being used as basically the primary weapon of Hamas, besides occasionally killing people and doing so spectacularly October 7th is international PR. And international PR works better for them when there's a starving child and a blown-up baby or a mosque or a church or something. So all of that is really, really difficult to overcome. But I think I haven't seen, and I don't, I pay attention to this one hundred amount as you do. But I've never seen it. And the Israelis that I've talked to, including in fairly senior positions,

I've never heard, like, what's the plan? How do you take that mindset saying it's intolerable the way that this was going on, and how do you end this thing? And I don't think anyone has a good idea. Well, I think they were hoping that Hamas would collapse. All the, I think I said it's to you yesterday. All the ways that the world has dealt with these problems are no longer.

They've all been discredited. How do we deal with it in Germany? Total war, which Bartov said, was not even a war crime. He said they targeted and killed 600,000 German civilians on purpose, and it was not a war crime, let alone

genocide, because they rebuilt Germany afterwards. And he said in his thing, he said, the only way to, we had to destroy Germany to rebuild it. This is what the guy who says Israel's committing genocide wrote, and he stood by it. But obviously, total war a la Germany

is discredited. Throw them all out. like they threw all the Germans out of the sedaten land. Well, no, you can't throw an entire population out anymore. Even if they're sworn to your destruction and swearing to do it again, like, you know, if there was ever a candidate for, you know, a rationale for throwing people out, this would be it, but that's discredited. And regime changed the way we tried to fix Iraq.

Well, you know, regime change doesn't work. We can't take an international group and go. go in there and take over Gaza and set up a government. So everything that has worked in one way or another when the world has had this problem is no longer available to Israel. And also... So what are they to do?

And also the visible... You know, my answer is, they're supposed to give them one more chance. That's what it is. They're supposed to give them one more chance. I think that the, and again, as a naive ignorant outsider, that a solution would have to be given, having

neighboring countries take responsibility for governance of the place. But it can't, well, I guess it could, but just want to make one more practical point, that no one is going to put a dollar into Gaza to rise, to raise new structures, if they know

that Hamas is going to send rockets, and Israel's going to have to come back and destroy them. So even to have an outside Arab, what do you call, like a sort of coalition? Coalition. It requires Hamas being gone. They

cannot rebuild Gaza with Hamas there. Yeah. So it's the most complex problem we've ever seen in international relations. And you're not allowed to talk about it. I think you're allowed to talk about it. Don't go Tucker Carlson on us yet. No, when I say, you know, I do talk about it. Yeah.

When I say, but I, yeah, that was, I didn't put it well. But if you discuss it, you will be attacked as being heartless. And it's at some risk to your personal. personal reputation. I'm, you know, walking a tightrope all the time because of my position, because of my deep friendships with Arabic people, because of, you know, like all the things that could go bad for me. So far, so good. I haven't stepped in a, on a landmine yet, but I'm quite worried about it, you know. So I try to choose my words carefully. But the starvation thing is, you know, just back to where we started about this, it becomes very difficult to express any

skepticism of the story because they'll immediately say, you're heartless, you don't care about people starving. In the same way, you couldn't express any skepticism about a Me Too story because that meant you didn't give a shit. If you said, well, Louis C.K. is not like Harvey Weinstein, you're complicit. In both cases or both types of cases, I think that if you present yourself as a good faith seeker of how to figure out what the facts are, people will respond to that. And people will Snipe, yes, sure, but you can be skeptical of things early if you are not wearing on your sleeve. I intend to arrive at this conclusion. That takes some practice and skill, and we're doing it in an atmosphere as we were talking last night, where the institutions that used to do that

with some regularity have been decimated. And so, like, that habit is less and less in our civic discourse, and that's a problem. But screw it. We have to build it. from the ground up, we have to sort of, like, practice it individually. All right. Great guest, huh? I can't believe we never had you on before. How the fuck were we thinking? One hand is sort of dazzling and he can, you know, drop accents and stuff.

Listen, there's two things that go on. First of all, it's unusual for me to invite someone I'm friends with on the podcast because I always feel that if they don't want to do it, then I've created a predicament for them. So I don't like to ask you. So I just, I really don't even consider it. Like Moynihan, I invited him on this show before we were friends. A lot of the people that I'm friends are, and you see they don't come on anymore is because

I met them through the podcast, right? And she'll always say, well, can you invite like Barry Weiss on? I'm like, I can't ask Barry, you know. And I'm always like, Barry will say no. Like nobody's doing us a favor. He doesn't agree, though. And the other thing is. But she might say no, but she doesn't want to say no.

So she might say, yes, even she doesn't really want to. I mean, I'm the one who books everyone. and I feel like I really do. He worries too much. Yeah, but I feel like I really do have like a good sense of like when I'm getting like an answer that like you're sort of doing it begrudgingly. Like people say no. People say no to me all the time. And the other thing is, is that he doesn't like to have people on that he agrees with.

That's true. That's really like he likes to argue with people. We could have argued about gatekeeping. I know you don't exactly agree on that. I don't think we really disagree somewhat in in shades. Well, you want to just summarize the disagreement? Look at how excited he is now. Jesus Christ.

Because I don't expect us to really disagree. Noam is worried about the loss of gatekeeping in media and sort of discourse and that there used to be a function that was helpful of we could sort of trust people to say, hey, you know what, we don't need, we shouldn't talk to those types of people, we should talk to these people. That was a, that was not just a bad thing. It was a good and helpful thing. I'm less, I disagree in that the gatekeeping function to me is, I don't like it. It's sometimes on the outside of the gates. And it can build in its own filter bubbles and biases that are a problem. But I think that what we think is the gatekeeping function was actually leading by example, by being good at actual journalism or being good at.

at adding to the level of knowledge and fact-based discourse in the world, that has collapsed. That's collapsed for economic institutional reasons. A lot of people will shut themselves in the foot institutionally, but it's collapsed by 80 or 90% in the last three decades. It's a big thing. It's bigger than our imaginations are for it. And so what I think Nome where people like Nome sometimes think is the gatekeeping function of like, you can come in the tent, you can't, was actually just like, no, we used to

be able to trust the New York Times more than we do now. And in that, as they have withered in influence and trust and leading by example, there's been a market for people who are much less tethered. The new media that replaced it is much less tethered in just sort of institutional truth seeking and the mechanisms by what you get there. So I don't, see, I don't disagree with any of that. I, you know, one of the things you hear me say a lot is this line from Oppenheimer that really stuck with me. Theory will only get you so far. And there is, we all grew up in this

notion, or I did, and Matt did that, you know, free speech is fantastic and it'll, it will always work out for the best, the marketplace of ideas, and sunlight is best disinfectant and all that. And I believed all that. But now we have to acknowledge in some way that the truth, the truth is not the heavy anchor that we thought it was. People are just not as interesting. in the truth as those theories assumed, right? The assumptions behind those marketplace of ideas and some ice and best disinfectant is that the truth carries this, has this force, this gravity. So we're discovering it's not true, and I'm more just lamenting it.

I'm not, I don't even have an idea how we would reinstitute gatekeepers, but I think it's helpful just to acknowledge it rather than blindly say what we want to free. Everything is great. Free speech is great. I think it's important to say free speech is actually not working out quite like we thought. It was just like legalizing weed is not working

out quite like we thought it was. We don't want anybody to go to jail for smoking pot. I don't want that to bring that back. But shit, everybody's high. It smells like weed everywhere. We have customers collapsing. There's candy going around. My kids are not going to, like this is not, you know, we didn't think

it was going to be this hard. So that's, and when you see people like Candice Owens and all the people associated with her saying that, you know, Jews are killing, I'm sorry, it's just the first thing I came to my head, but there's all sorts of issues about COVID, about this, you know, this predates October 7th. But this is just such an obvious example,

saying that Christian babies still disappear every year at Passover and Jews are killing them. And people like Joe Rogue, and Tucker Carlton and Dave Smith and they all talk about how awesome she is. And, you know, she said, well, obviously, this would not have been happening in 1990. It's not a better thing that's happening.

There are 20 other benefits that we have. You're probably right. There's probably, if we could go back and really tear apart all those New York Times stories that we thought were true in the area. This is all bullshit. No, but the counterweight was weightier. And we do suffer from,

it being not there anymore. It doesn't mean we can rebuild it. A lot of it was an artifact of just a weird moment in time, often analogized, and this obviously will make sense to you, that the peak of newspaper industry between 1960 and 2000 was basically like Hungary during the dual monarchy, you know, from 1867 to 1914. Hungary has lost seven consecutive wars.

Hungary always sucks. Great people, beautiful, all that kind of stuff. But they just are usually on the wrong end. But for those 50 years, man, they had, they ran the table. That map was big. And from now, ever since then, the Treaty of Trianen, when they chopped off the map and stranded five million Hungarian speakers outside the borders, everyone was nostalgic for the past era, thinking that that was normal.

We think that the era of that institution, the 1990 was actually the date, the peak of all of that, of that counterweight, it was actually an accident of history. Most of American history has been a free speech cacophony with a lot of garbage out there and with a lot of consumer-driven garbage. It's just that there is a 40-year period there where there was this very intentional and then also product of monopolistic markets that went away, counterweight that produced bad stuff and good stuff, but a lot of good stuff. And it was a big pile of that that was a counterweight to the weekly world news of the world in a way that in the future Candace Owens is that doesn't exist now. But she didn't have it supercharged by technology, you know, like, people always use whatever available tech, right? I'm saying, like, now it's really, one person can distribute to the entire planet, you know, it's crazy.

Sounds great. So what's the only answer? The answer is that powerful people, like the Joe Rogans of the world, we have to create some sort of ethic or norm that we expect something responsible from them. I totally agree. The way they behave. I think that like this... And that's what I've been fighting for it. This begins on the consumer level.

The demand side is absolutely underrated for this. And so if you see a person, a publication, a podcast, or whatever is doing good work, or just an individual piece from that, reward it in some way. Follow it, recommend it, share it with somebody, do something like that, and look for more of that in your life. And this is just, I'm not telling people what to do, but I think this is helpful. and then also notice who is feeding you crap and maybe find a way to not consume that as much. I spend so much time trying like hell to curate my Twitter feed so it's less trolls and more people who are actually trying to seek truth.

Not that you can be successful with these things anymore, but you have to try. If we don't try, then we're not going to build the next thing. All right. I don't think we would disagree. All right. I think everybody, I said this to, somehow thought I was calling for, like, speech regulation or something. But I never was.

I was more just trying to say we should spend more time talking about the problem. And from that, clever people will devise solutions like community notes on Twitter was actually a very effective thing, right? And maybe there's, I'm sure there are, 20 other things no one's thought of yet that help us. us regulate ourselves with unfettered free speech. But it can't, it, it has to start with acknowledging that there actually is a problem. We can both say we're completely dedicated to free speech and it's not working out quite as we thought it would have. Anyway, that's it.

All right, Matt, thank you very, very much. Thank you. Any last words on anything you want to talk about? Follow me on Twitter if you do that kind of crap at Matt Welch, Fifth Column podcast, reason. Hooray. Nothing about Sidney, Sweeney. handsome gal. Okay, good night, everybody.