There Are No Girls on the Internet - Harvard’s Real Scandal Was A Black Woman Leader — NEW EPISODE

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

Happy New Year! We’d intended to air the first newscast of 2024, but instead we have to talk about what happened to Dr. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard. She resigned last week after an intense campaign to get her fired led by right wing activist Christopher Rufo. Yup, the same right wing activist who created the moral panic over Critical Race Theory. He’s been completely transparent, through public tweets and interviews in big outlets like Politico, that his goal in creating the campaign against her was a broader desire to destroy the concept of “DEI” (Diversity Equity & Inclusion).  And yet, legacy media outlets like the New York Times uncritically legitimized his bad-faith framing with multiple featured articles. People like tech podcaster Jason Calacanis have celebrated her resignation as evidence of a return to meritocracy, a ridiculous idea that only makes sense if one believes that prestigious leadership positions are just being handed out willy-nilly to unqualified Black women, which is obviously not true! Black women have to work twice as hard to get half as much, and even then one misstep is all it takes for bad faith allegations to take down a powerful Black woman in the eyes of a public that is all too willing to believe that DEI initiatives are the only way a Black woman could possibly achieve a leadership position.  We Sat Down With the Conservative Mastermind Behind Claudine Gay’s Ouster: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618 Why White Women Won DEI: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-white-women-won-dei-aparna-rae/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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So we were meant to air a new newscast, the first of 2024, but instead we have to talk about this clotting gay thing at Harvard. So this is kind of an unplanned emergency episode. We weren't even actually going to do it, but then Mike, you and I started talking and it was clear that, I'll just say that it was clear I had a lot to say and I had a lot of opinions and I had a lot of big feelings. And eventually you said, you know, if you feel like getting on the mic and yelling at me about it, I'm here. I'm here for you, Bridget. Okay. So let's do it. I generally want to give some broad strokes about how we got here and then give you all my take on it. But I feel like I need to say a few things right off the top. First of all, some of these issues that we're going to talk about are thinky, right? They just deal with facts and what happened. But some of them are feely. This issue is really personal for me. It felt personal and it was clear when I was putting together in my research and my thoughts that I have a lot of big emotions about it. When gay resigned, a bunch of the like black. women's group chats that I'm in were all buzzing about what it means and how we should all be

feeling in this moment. So I say all of that to say this, which is that it is important to me that I am giving y'all very clear facts and also separating my feelings and my opinions from those facts so that y'all can make sense of what's actually happening and also come up with your own take on it. But this story was, I have to say, pretty complex for me. It's not a terribly complex story, but it has a lot of intersecting feelings and thoughts. And a lot of those feelings and thoughts were really raw and nuanced. And so at times, it was, like, difficult for me to say where my own feelings ended and the facts began. So I just want to say that right off the top, if this seems like a more emotional episode than you're used to getting for me, that is why, because this feels really personal.

So let's start with the basics of what's going on. Dr. Claudine Gay was the first black woman president, first black president, and the only the second woman president of Harvard in the university's almost 400 years. On January 2nd, she announced that she was resigning from that position, making her tenure as Harvard's president the shortest in the university's history lasting only six months. And here's how we got here. So after the attack in Israel in October 7th, there was a big conversation about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

This is my opinion, so I want to state. carefully, I think that those conversations were hijacked by people with other agendas, and that concern about anti-Semitism was being used as a smokescreen to mount larger attacks on cultural issues on university campuses, and also some just personal grievances unrelated to anti-Semitism at all. I'll get into that in a moment, but first, here's a timeline. Amid concerns about anti-Semitism on campuses, there was a congressional hearing with the heads of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania being questioned before Congress. When Gay was questioned by Republican representative, Elise Stefanik, on whether calls for genocide

of Jews violated Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, Gay responded, it can be, depending on the context. Gay went on to say, anti-Semitic speech, when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, and intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action. Now, this moment was a particular moment that became a big flashpoint. from the hearings. It got a lot of attention on social media, mostly negative. But the university stood by gay. Next, in an unexpected ad homonym attack that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, right-wing activist Christopher Rufo surfaced plagiarism allegations against gay, calling her academic

integrity into question with allegations of plagiarism. Then, a right-wing newspaper based here in D.C. called The Free Beacon wrote about it. From then, the New York Times starts writing about it a ton, multiple times per week, and then it becomes a larger thing. Now, Harvard did an investigation that cleared gay of any academic misconduct, and they were standing by her. The Harvard Corporation, which is, I guess, the university's like overall governing body, conducted a review of her published work, and they found that she had not violated the university standards for, quote, research misconduct, but they did find, quote, a few instances of inadequate citation and stated that as a result, Dr. Gay was, quote, proactively requesting four

corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications. So here's a little bit of a caveat, which is that I am not an academic. So I don't even really want to weigh in too much here beyond what Harvard's governing body has already said. I was once sort of an academic. Like I dropped out of a PhD program after completing my coursework and really struggling, like, struggling, struggling, struggling to finish a dissertation. So technically, I'm what you call A, B, D, like, all but dissertation. But, you know, I could not manage to adequately put together a dissertation, and I was like, nah, I'm out. So what the hell do I know? Mike, do you consider yourself an academic? You kind of, you have a PhD, but like, what do you

consider yourself? Yeah, I somehow managed to put together the dissertation, get it published, and, you know, have been publishing academic papers ever since. So, yeah, I do consider myself an academic. I've got several manuscripts that I'm working on with right now with co-authors. And, you know, plagiarism is a super serious allegation. And it sounds like she didn't do it, right? Like there was an investigation by the governing body. They had independent experts who looked into it and determined that nah, there wasn't plagiarism there. So here's my thing. I don't even necessarily want to get into a thing of like, well, did she plagiarize or did she not plagiarize?

One, because as I said, I'm not an academic. And I think part of the issue is that we are in this situation where people who are also not academics like myself and have never done academic writing like myself. are now the ones who are attempting to set the standard for what is or is not plagiarism and what is it is not acceptable in academic writing. And it's like, well, you know, I'm not the expert. I don't know why these people who don't have any expertise in it, why they have become the expert, but whatever. Like these charges are not coming from her academic colleagues or her peers or like

other academics. They're coming from people who have explicitly already said they have a grievance against her. If they wanted to do a survey where we looked at, the academic publishing records of every college president in the United States, totally fine, let's do that. But that is not what they're saying or doing. They are saying, we need to zero in on just her for some reason. And that reason is race. Like, that's not me saying that. That is what Chris Rufo, the person who initially surfaced these allegations against her, has said. He explicitly has said that his disdain for DEI or

diversity, equity, and inclusion is the point of why he is doing this, why he is mounting these allegations. So the focus on if she plagiarized or not totally allows what are explicitly bad faith actors to set the agenda and the terms of the conversation. So they say she plagiarized. And rather than responding with like, well, what kind of standard are you setting with regards to plagiarism accusations, mainstream media outlets like the New York Times are just scrambling to cover and answer the like, well, did she plagiarize question? In dozens of front page stories without doing any of the examination of the larger question of why they are presenting this as a question that needs to be answered. And that is what I object to. All of this is at the

explicit urging of right-wing education activist Christopher Rufo. If that name sounds familiar to you, it might, because he is the person who brought us the disingenuous moral panic on critical race theory that dominated our national discourse and led to a flurry of state laws against teaching critical race theory or really anything related to like black people, really. This is not me saying this. This is from Christopher Rufo's own words and public tweets. In March 2021, he tweeted, We have successfully frozen their brand,

Critical Race Theory, into the public conversation, and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic as we put all the various cultural insanities under that brand category. So, as he says, it is not about critical race. theory. It's about anything that he thinks is a, quote, cultural insanity, putting it under the umbrella of critical race theory and then being like, critical race theory, there it is. Let's get it. Let's make a law against it. He goes on to say, the goal is to have the public read something

crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory. We have decodified the term and we'll recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans. So by his own admission, anything that he don't like is critical race theory, and that's going to be what he's trying to make toxic. And I got to give it to him because he did it. Mission accomplished. Like people passed laws. There are laws on the books banning critical race theory from being taught, even though he's saying, I'm not even operating from the actual definition of whatever it is. I'm just saying anything that I don't like, anything I have a grievance against. I'm going to fold. I'm going to get people to fold that

in with critical race theory and be against it. And by the way, I just recently found this out, thanks to journalist Kaylee Holloway. Rufo, who has positioned himself as the person who should be reshaping our academic institutions, has been saying that he himself holds a, quote, masters from Harvard, when in reality, dude went to Harvard's extension school. Not a real Harvard. That is a different thing. I know this might sound like a little bit petty, but, But it is just too ridiculous to ignore. The Harvard Extension School is not Harvard. Like, when I say Harvard, you're thinking of Harvard, the university.

The Harvard Extension School is a different entity. Yeah, right. Like, one asks the question, what does that word extension mean? Who is it being extended to? It is being extended to the public. It is being extended beyond Harvard to general members of the public. Right. This is how best colleges.com describes it.

quote, Harvard College, the undergraduate school at Harvard University, can be difficult to get into, to say the least. For the class of 2027, Harvard received almost 57,000 applications and accepted 3.5%. Admissions to the undergrad extension program is, that, dot, dot, less stringent. Anyone can sign up for a course at any time. So the fact that anyone can sign up for a course at any time of the Harvard Extension School should probably be a giveaway. that it is not real Harvard, where famously, not everyone can just decide to go and then go at any time. Yeah. And to be clear, extensions are great. Lots of universities have them. That's not what this is about. We won't get into it. But just to be clear, we're not dunking on extension schools. What we're pointing out is that he is claiming that he has a degree from Harvard when he does not. So, side note, do you know who else did the very same thing? Also at Harvard? one of your favorites Yes, Tyra Banks She went to the Harvard Extension Business School

Which is like, as far as I can tell us, like a week program or something, she did notably have to stay on campus For like a couple of weeks And it was a big deal She's been dining out on being a Harvard Business School graduate ever since And it's funny, I actually was joking about this Before I even knew about Rufo

not having actually gone to Harvard. I was actually joking a few weeks ago that I think in 2024, I want to go to an Ivy League extension program and then start telling people I graduated from Harvard because I don't think that people really check. And by the time anyone, like, actually looks into it, you've already said you've gone to Harvard so many times

that, like, everybody's accepted that. And I don't think anybody is, like, really checking. Yeah, I remember you joking about that, like weeks ago. This was going to be your big plan for 2024. So when your next podcast is coming to you from Columbia University master's degree holder, Bridget Todd, y'all will know what's up. Don't blow up my spot. You heard the plan. But like, let's just see. Well, actually, question, if I actually did an Ivy League extension program and then started publicly, but often like obnoxiously and smugly, claiming that I went, that I was like a graduate of Harvard University or whatever, how long do you think it would be until somebody called me out? publicly. It was like you didn't actually go to Harvard. You didn't actually go to MIT. It would probably happen. I mean, you're online a bunch.

A lot of people looking into what you say, you know, you're a black woman, so it might be a little harder to get away with it. Maybe this will be my pet project in 2024 to see how long it takes. I feel like if you did it, well, you already have a PhD. So like, what are you trying to prove at this point? But I feel like, I would be curious to know how long it would take. each of us to be called out publicly. I feel like you should make a performance art piece out of your own CV and just like see how

many of these you can rack up. Like Bridget Todd holds degrees from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, UCSD, Stanford. You know, just throw in a couple to keep them guessing. Why not finish it Maryland? I, that's where I actually dropped out of my PhD program. I'm University of Maryland College Park. My parents, almost every time we talk, it comes up. Like, are you going to go back?

And I'm always like, oh, maybe. No, I'm never going back. I was a terrible student. You could just go back for a weekend and say you got the whole degree. They'd take your money. It was a crazy summer. What did I do? I got a PhD.

Crazy summer. Pass fail. Yeah, pass fail. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

uh, You only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt Yard's, right? Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor Me. I need some jokes to make me. Seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

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That's 844-844-I-heart. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time. You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with Deanna Maria Riva, where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate Midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own.

I was like, what the hell is that? I was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that nest was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex? Dating at 45. How high can it be getting naked at 50 with the new guy? That one's kind of hard, you know? Well, that's lighting.

They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter, and dive into it, unfiltered and unbothered and ask, how hard can it be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of my Cultura Podcast Network available on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So the reason why I'm curious, like, how long it would take for people to call me out is because

I do think that once you say it enough times, people just start keep repeating it like, oh, they went to Harvard, they went to Harvard. Because even after all this, Rufo is still claiming that he went to Harvard, Harvard, Harvard. Rufo, in an email to the New Republic, disagreed that there was any difference between the Harvard Extension School and any other school. He said that he was unaware of any debate over whether Harvard Extension School should be referred to differently than any other graduate degree from Harvard. So we are meant to believe that Rufo is uniquely qualified to be determining how higher education functions in the United States, how it should be run and all of that. And also, if we take him at his word, he is also too unfamiliar with higher education to know or understand the difference between the Harvard Extension School and actual Harvard. And that he doesn't understand that he did not actually graduate from the real Harvard University after having gone to an institution, that he didn't even really have to like apply to attend.

Either he's lying, he's stupid or boat. A complete mess. So Rufo was behind this pressure campaign to El-Scan. bad actor number one, the guy who literally surfaced the plagiarism allegations. And this is what I mean when I say that bad actors with agendas have nothing to do with the state of goal of eradicating anti-Semitism on college campuses or concern about plagiarism. They are the ones who are setting the agenda. And again, this is not, I don't know this because I'm super smart or have done some like super sleuthing.

The reason why I know this is because he says it explicitly in his own. own words. In an interview with Politico, he says this in very clear terms. We will link to the piece in the show notes, but here is a bit. Gay's resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. It shows a successful strategy for the political right, he told Politico, how we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaign in order to be successful. So basically, he describes it as a three-pronged attack. Political, led by Representative Stefanik, the member of Congress, who grilled gay about anti-Semitism during the congressional hearing,

who, by the way, is a graduate of real Harvard, not the Extension School, but who was later removed from a senior advisory committee at Harvard School of Government after she declined to resign voluntarily. Can you guess what happened with her that she was basically forced out of this position? It could be anything with her. Well, it's because she was one of 147 congressional Republicans who opposed certifying President Biden after he won the election fairly

and continued to lie about non-existent election irregularities that just like did not exist and were made up. There was a pressure campaign for Harvard to cut ties with her and it worked. So she has unrelated beef with Harvard. Here's what she said after she was pushed out. The decision by Harvard's administration to cower and cave to the woke left will continue to erode diversity of thought,

public discourse, and ultimately the student experience. So again, not exactly somebody who has no agenda in all this and is purely worried about rooting out the rot of anti-Semitism in our institutions. And because like, come on. She supports former President Trump and has said nothing when he had dinner with Nick Fuentes, like a literal Nazi. She also found herself in hot water last year when she ran a campaign ad that warned immigrants could overthrow our current election. electorate, which is pretty much a not so subtle nod to the Great Replacement Theory touted by white supremacists like the Buffalo Gunman and other trolls and bad actors. And so I just do not believe that this is somebody who was purely motivated by sniffing out the rod of anti-Semitism

in our universities. Yeah, she's superpartisan, insurrectionist, supported Trump on January 6th, supports him today. It's just hard to take it seriously. Exactly. So we have Gay, a woman being pushed out of her job at a private university with the help of an elected official. Again, this is not me saying this. This is Rufo who publicly owns this as a win. He says that Representative Stefani used her position as an agent of the state, and that is what helped push Gay out of her job. So let's talk about how he used the media to help push gay out of her job. On December 19, Rufo tweeted that it was his plan to, quote, smuggle the plagiarism story into the media apparatus from the left,

which legitimizes the narrative to center left actors who have the power to topple gay. So this is what really pisses me off in a story where there is a lot to be pissed off about. Here's what Rufo told Politico about the strategy of getting folks on the left and in Legacy Media at the New York Times to comment on and thus legitimize this story. He said, it's really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunette and I broke the story of Claudine's plagiarism on December 10th. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter,

and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into left-wing media. But the left-wing media uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it. So I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard's history. Side note, there's just no way that can be true, right? Like, in 2019, Harvard released a report talking about how many of the faculty and staff owned enslaved people during slavery and taught racial eugenics. Oh, no, but this president might have misattributed some citations.

is the biggest scandal. Yeah. And again, there was an investigation and independent investigators determined that there was no academic misconduct, right? Like, you can't have corruption. It can't be a corruption scandal if there's not misconduct happening. So Rufel goes on to say, finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect. CNN, BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing gay's plagiarism. And then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all those publications calling on gay to resign. Once my position, which began on the right, became the dominant position across the

center-left, I knew it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful. He goes on to say that this strategy gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign. And this is why I am really looking at legacy media publications at the New York Times about this. Like, I'm not saying that it shouldn't be written about, but it can't be newsworthy enough to be written about that amount. As Adam Johnson of the Citation's Needed podcast put it,

articles about Claudine Gay and her various, quote, scandals were top five featured stories on the New York Times homepage December 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th. 14th, 17th, 17th, 22nd, 25th, and her firing is now their top story. There is simply no way this is proportionate, sober, or reasonable coverage. And I agree. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been written about, but that is not a reasonable amount of coverage. And especially when Christopher Rufo is out here saying, explicitly saying, oh, we're playing the New York Times, we're getting them to legitimize this issue. We're getting them to make this into an issue and write about it and write about it and write about it until it becomes true. Just like me not going to Harvard, if I say it enough

times, eventually, who's going to really check whether or not I went? Who's going to really check? Well, are these actually plagiarism allegations, or is it like a few case of sloppy citations, which the governing body says is not plagiarism? And I think when grifters like Rufo, who are explicit and clear about their intentions to use these institutions to launder these disingenuous attacks, you are just letting them set the ejection. And I don't understand why. When he flat out says, I plan to make this plagiarism thing, a smokescreen to get this woman fired as a larger attack on DEI, why pretend that that's not what he's saying? Why act as if these are conversations legitimately about just anti-Semitism or legitimately about plagiarism when plain as day in English he is saying that they are not?

Because again, here is what he says in his own words. When asked by Politico, what is your broader objective here? forcing the president of Harvard to resign. He said, my primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America. There it is. So in all of these articles where you are saying he was the person to surface these plagiarism allegations, why don't you say, why don't you follow the thought that he gives you dot, dot, dot, dot, because I hate DEI. So I don't understand why legacy media continues to allow themselves to be used in this way over and over

again by this one grifter who is so clear about what he is doing. So as revealing as I think his interview with Politico is, here's where they kind of lose me. Because after the question where he says, oh, the entire thing is about how much I don't like DEI, the next question that that interviewer, if I had been interviewing him, I would have asked is what does Claudine Gay have to do with DEI? Because that's the threat. I see here, right? I have said this before on the show, but I really want to underline it. DEI is the new critical race theory. It's already happening. And the same way that when Rufo's attacks on critical race theory were happening, they weren't really about attacking critical

race theory because that would be absurd because, as we know, critical race theory wasn't actually being taught to like grade schoolers or preschoolers. And it was barely even a thing that your average person was encountering in their day-to-day life. It was about labeling any having to do with race or wokeness as critical race theory and then making that label a toxic brand. In her resignation letter, Gay kind of alludes to that.

She says, it is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses, a black woman selected to lead a storied institution, someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism.

Someone who was advocated, a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long neglected history of Asian Americans, someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation's oldest university. Gay is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Also, fun fact, she is the cousin of the writer of Roxanne Gay. So I think what Chris Rufo and people like him are actually saying is that they are looking at this institution that is Harvard, right, this big, shining school and saying, if there is a black woman who is at the house, of that institution, it could not possibly be because she is qualified. It is because she is black.

She's been given this job as a diversity hire, and that is representative of all that is wrong that needs to be right in a society that has gotten too woke and too obsessed with identity politics. And that she is a black woman at the helm of the oldest and most prestigious university in the country is representative of that, representative of all that is wrong with our current society, our current woke agenda, blah, blah, blah. So Rufo says, said that Bill Ackman represented the financial plank of getting gay pushed out of Harvard. So who is he? Well, he is a billionaire hedge fund manager and a donor to Harvard. He has given tens of millions of dollars over the years to Harvard, but that money actually does not rank him even close to the top donors, not even a little bit.

He has not given near enough money to rank as a top donor to the school. He said that he was really upset about the way that gay handled charges of anti-Semitism on campus. And like, that is what he has said is his issue with her. But according to a piece in the New York Times, even before the October 7th attack, the relationship between Ackman as a donor and Harvard had already begun to deteriorate. Mr. Ackman has privately steamed at Harvard over at least the past three years, several people who have discussed the subject with him, say, in part, after the university's administration brushed off his suggestions for how to set up a testing lab

to get students and staff back to campus during the pandemic. Two years ago, in an incident not previously reported, Mr. Ackman told members of Harvard's fundraising team, he might not give another dime because they hadn't heeded his advice on how to invest an earlier donation, said two people with knowledge of the exchanges. Mr. Ackman sent off a series of fiery letters to Harvard administrators questioning their financial acumen. He wound up donating more money anyway. So it is possible that Ackman was concerned about anti-Semitism. I'm not saying that that's a lie or made up. But it's also clear that this is somebody who felt that because they were giving some money, again, though, not even close to a top donation that Harvard receives.

And I guess because he's like got business acumen, he's a billionaire or something, that like he should be having more say in how things are run at Harvard. And honestly, like, to really keep it 100, to extrapolate a little bit from what I've read in the New York Times, Again, this is my opinion. I think he probably felt like when Gay got into that position of president at Harvard and then didn't immediately like look to him with the reverence he felt he deserved. I bet that he was like, who does this black bitch think she is?

Not capitulating to me. I'll show her. Like I think that that's probably how he felt. It sounds like even before Gay was ever at the helm, that relationship was deteriorating. and now having a black woman at the helm, not listening to his brilliant financial advice, I think that probably chapped his ass. Like, I have dealt with my fair share of this kind of dynamic,

and that's what it reads like to me. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, Help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriters, Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle. A one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. bind. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-4-i-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart.

Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend, Janet. And we have been joined at the Hipsons High School. Now a redacted, a amount of of years later. We're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar.

Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here? Just hit it. What are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. Come on. Could you move? I would buy it. Cut through the defense like a hot knife

through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky. I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh.

Listen to soccer moms on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So you all might recall that after the October 7th attack in Israel, the Harvard undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee published an open letter in which they said that they hold, quote, the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence, declaring that millions of Palestinians on Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison and called on Harvard to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians. After they published this letter, Ackman called for the publication of the names of all the

students involved in signing the letter so that he could ensure that his company and others do not inadvertently hire any of the people who sign the letter. Ackman posted, one should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield with issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists, and the name should be made public so that their views are publicly known. Keep in mind, we are talking about undergraduate students here.

Now, this is my thing. Whether or not you think that these undergrads should have written this letter or not, I'm not saying that's what I think, but let's say for the sake of argument, that's what somebody thought. I can tell you having an aggrieved 60-year-old billionaire donor to the school who has his own unrelated gripe against the university litigating what should happen to a bunch of undergrads is not good.

Like, issues of campus protest and speech are, you know, I guess they're important in a kind of sense. Like, this is a whole other episode. But, and this is my opinion, even if you think that these undergrad should not have written this letter, they are in college. They are undergraduates. It's like, where else are you meant to be working out your political and social opinions as a young person, if not in college? Like, I don't even want to get into some of the stuff I believed and publicly said when I was an undergrad. I was walking around identifying as a libertarian thinking that that sounded cool and smart.

But in reality, I was 19 and I was just like stoned all the time and I didn't know what I was saying because I was young. So I just don't think a dynamic or a billionaire who thinks everybody. should be countowing to him, injecting himself into what is happening on a college campus with undergrad is going to be good for anybody. Like, I listen to a lot of the podcast you're wrong about. And Michael Hobbs, friend of the show, talks about this a lot when he covers issues about, like, campus culture wars where he says, like, when stuff happens on a college campus, outside forces with an axe to grind, swooping in and pouring gasoline on the fire, is not making things any better. especially at a time and you had trucks displaying the names and faces of undergraduates who were supportive of Palestine on campus.

Like, this is not a safe or reasonable college campus climate for anyone. So the day after gay resigned, Ackman published a 4,000 word screed against DEI on Twitter, where he says that DEI is, quote, the root cause of anti-Semitism at Harvard. Which, like, think about that, right? because Harvard is almost 400 years old. DEI wasn't even a thing until like around the 60s. So he is saying that say back in 1922, when Harvard's then president, A. Lawrence Lowell, was doing all kinds of stuff,

like proposing a quota on the number of Jewish students that Harvard should allow. Well, it turns out that was actually because of DEI, a school of thought that would not even exist for another 40 years. And it's such a rewriting of history. Like, I do think an honest assessor. of anti-Semitism in institutions is a worthwhile practice. But pointing to DEI as your starting point is ridiculous when history exists.

But, you know, why look at the rot in our institutions? When you can just blame black people and blame wokenness and call it a day. Ackman writes, under DEI, one's degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and or women are deemed to be oppressed. DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people,

and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out. This country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism, and it is the lack of equity, i.e. fairness and how DEI operates that contributes to this resentment, he continued.

So what he is actually saying, in my opinion, is that it is not about anti-Semitism, it is not about plagiarism, and they are saying that out loud and in print. It is this attitude that says that black people and people of color have, like, gotten too much handed to us because we are black or because we are women or because we are black women. And honestly, I agree with them that it is about resentment, white resentment and white grievance and white anxiety that people like him are stoking. And this anti-D-EI campaign is about stoking those white grievances and resentment and saying, hey, look, those freeloaders get everything and it's gotten out of hand. Let's put a stop to it.

To put a point on the argument that I think he's making, Ackman and Rufo see a black woman at the helm of an elite institution like Harvard and say, she could have only gotten there because she's an affirmative action hire, and she took that job for a more qualified white person, and that needs to end. Vivek Ramoswami, current Republican residential candidate, tweeted after Gay's resignation, here's a radical idea for the future, select leadership based on merit, who, by the way, for as much as he is hand-wringing about people who might have gotten any support based on their identities, Ramoswami himself got a fellowship from the Soros family

intended to support the educational pursuits of students who were raised by immigrants. And to me, like, that is really what it comes down to. It's different when he does it. When he is successful, it is because of merit, even if he objectively got a fellowship because of his identity. When gay is successful, it's because she's a diversity hire who just didn't work hard and deserve it like he did. Like, of course, he deserved it, not like her who gets things because of her identity. He doesn't do that. That fellowship was something else.

He worked hard and it's merit for him. And that is why you see this infuriating double standard that only gay is being held to. Like, do people think that gay is the first and only university president to have omitted a handful of citations over her academic career? Why are we not digging into all of their publishing records if this is such a big deal for university presidents now? Like, if you are affiliated with the university, is the standard that we're going to go through every piece that you've ever published and every citation that you've ever published to make sure that it's a big deal for university. checks out? If so, fine. But if that's not happening, why are we only talking about it with regards to gay? And this is what really pisses me off and where I kind of get into my feelings about the whole thing, because when this happens to qualified black women, what they are really saying is that

none of us deserve to be anywhere or have power over anything. If you're Vice President Harris, you got power because you slept your way to the top. Or if you're Supreme Court Justice, Katanchi Brown Jackson, it's because of affirmative action. Like, it doesn't matter if you have a PhD from Harvard, which gay has. It doesn't matter if you've gone to the best schools and been at the top of your class forever as gay has. Black excellence will not protect you. Because what the fuck makes these people think that this is a woman who didn't get where she did on merit? It is only because she is a black woman. By virtue of just being a black woman in these spaces, these people automatically think that we were just handed up position or a fellowship or a job or support.

It is automatic to them. The people tweeting about gay, just assume it and don't even give it a second thought. And that wouldn't be so infuriating if it did not also coincide with this reality that they do not give us a fucking thing. Like, if black women had been handed cushy positions at Harvard all this time, why did it take almost 400 years for one of us to collect. If there is a black woman working in a space where you do not usually see black women, trust and believe she is there because she earned it. They do not give us a thing. It takes so much work. You have to claw for it, fight for it, put up with shit that people could not even imagine to stay there day after day. It truly reminds me of that episode of scandal

where Carrie Washington's dad is yelling at her and he's like, we have to be twice as good to get half of what they have. Like, that really is the truth of what it is like. And I don't know, just like seeing this unfold, seeing how quickly all of these people so quickly turned to her not being qualified as an automatic given, it just really hurts. And I think that's one of the reasons, like, why this was so hard for me and why it's so personal for me. After Gay resigned, Jason Callikis, who is one of the hosts of the all-in tech podcast. So I feel like I talk about that show a lot on this podcast. And it's probably because, like,

it is generally like the number one or number two tech podcast in the world. And so I think, like, what they say, they have a huge platform when it comes to shaping opinions and technology. So what they say, I think really matters. He tweeted, we are returning to a colorblind performance-based society where we judge people by their character, effort, and achievements. Identity politics is a road to nowhere, and it focuses a society on what divides us as opposed to what binds us.

As we bend back, however, we must acknowledge that the world isn't there and everyone has a different starting line in life. It is virtuous to support everyone who starts behind us to catch up, but we should do this at the source, education, internships, and skills training. So, this tweet is what really got me. Yeah, I remember you reading it to me, and it was, you had a, a, a, um, you had a, a, um, big reaction to this tweet. Yeah, I did. I don't exactly know why. I think part of it is because we're both tech podcasters and so ostensibly we're kind of colleagues. And I think it really cut deeply because this is how they really feel about me. This is what they really think about me if we, if, if, if, I don't know Jason, as far as I know, we've never been at the same room

together, but if we were at a tech conference or a podcast meetup or something and he saw me there, this is what he would really think about me, that I didn't get there on my merit, that I couldn't be qualified. And it just really hurts. Like if somebody listening knows Jason or listens to his show or has a connection to him, I honestly hope he hears this. And, like, I don't mean that in, like, a badass bitch way. I wish I did. I don't, I don't mean that in a, like, tell Circe I want her to know it was me kind of way.

Nice job with that reference. Thank you. I never watched Game of Thrones. So I was kind of like, ooh, this is the right reference. Yeah, I hope that he hears this somehow. I'm sure he's not a listener of the show. But I mean it in the way that, like, I really want him to hear this. And I would be happy to talk to him about this.

Like if he does hear this and he wants to talk to me off the record or on the record, I want to have a conversation about this. If you were to scroll the Apple Tech Podcasts where Jason and I both sometimes show up, him all the time, me, if I'm lucky, the top Apple Tech podcasts. And you were to tell me how many of those shows were hosted by Black women, or even how many of them had Black women behind the scenes. How many of those shows even had Black women as guests? I'll say they have white hosts.

How many of them regularly spotlight black women's voices, even just does guests as commentary? Take a look at those numbers and then tell me, Jason, with a straight face that we are in a performance-based, colorblind society here in the tech space that we're both in. Look how few of us there are in this space and tell me with a straight face that you think that I got here because they are handing out positions and jobs and funding

and podcasts and support to black women because of our identities. I am not saying that I am the only one of us out here. Thank God I am not the only one of us out here. I would not want to be in the space if I was the only black woman out here doing this. However, if what Jason is saying is true and we're all just getting whatever be thrown at us because we're black women, then where are the rest of us? Why is this space so white and male? Why does this space feel so lonely sometimes?

When I look at the all-in podcast, why is your podcast have no black women? Why do you almost never spotlight black women? Our research, our commentary, our analysis. Where is it? If we have just been being forced into these spaces, not because we deserve it, not because of merit, but because they're just giving them away because we're black women and so we're just getting everything, where are the rest of us? Where are we?

I would love to know if what are you saying is true, and that people are just being given things. When it comes to VC funding, why is it that black women get less than 1% of all VC funding? Not even, like less than one, not even one. One is the smallest amount of a number that something can be and still be a number, and we don't even get that. Why? If what you are saying is true, how can that be possible?

And I think hearing comments like that from people like Jason against the backdrop where we already get so few of anything, so little of anything, we already get the crumbs, the scraps, the less than one. And to have people say, well, what little you do have, you don't even really deserve that, it was handed to you. It's just such a slap in the face. And what upsets me about this is that it negates the reality that people on the outside don't always. way see. And I honestly work very hard to not get down on it and not focus on it. But the reality

is that we are dealing with so much just to be in these spaces. Like, I had to fight to have shows on the same chart as Jason's, albeit a hundred slots down, but I had to fight to be there. You think they gave me anything?

You think anybody knocked on my door and said, here, take this? I I fucking wish. If that were the case, I would be the first person to be like, oh my God, like, can you believe I got this? How cushy? And this assumption that it is about merit for him and not about merit for me on the basis of me being a black woman, it's not just wrong. It's offensive. Like, it's a lie. It is hurtful because these are my colleagues and this is how they really see me. This is what they really actually think about me. And yeah, I do take it personally to have someone say like, oh, well, for him, it's about merit. But for me, I got to be the diversity hire. And so we have to work very hard to fight for what we get. And what we get is not often a lot and not often what we deserve.

And they kind of have to like make a meal of that. But then on top of it, to have people like them who set the agenda, set the tone, and be like, oh, well, you don't even deserve what you have. Meanwhile, if they knew the stuff that I have to smile through, the amounts of shit I have to eat regularly, the kind of responses that we get from people who don't think that we deserve to be where we are, just to have the opportunity to work and make less,

it would shock him. Like, y'all remember, they had to have public campaigns to remind white people not to touch black people's hair in public places. This has happened to me before in a professional context. Jason, has it ever happened to you? Have you ever had to experience that in front of your colleagues? And then just smile through it and brush it off and keep going and do your job because that's just how it is? We just did an ad for the service, Delete Me.

And when I got the ad, I was like, oh, I know exactly what I'll say, which is that even before the podcast started when I was just working out what we were going to be talking about, one of the first things I did was sign up for Delete Me. I was afraid that people were going to come after me and come after my family and come after my loved ones because of the things that I was saying on here. And those fears are not unfounded. They are actually very reasonable. Like people like Jason have no idea what people like me have to go through just to be here and get less. Like he could not be me for one second. Again, like it just upsets me to hear to hear what you always expect, to hear what you really know deep

down, it just really hurts and yeah, I mean, I'm hurt. Like, it's upsetting to me. And I think it goes for women, it goes for black women, it goes for other people of color, it goes for trans folks, it goes for queer folks. Like, if people really knew

how hard it is to do what we do to have to show up in some of these spaces, how much of ourselves we have to like cut and cut off and cut out to be in these spaces. Like, we know, we feel it every day. We deal with that reality every day. But they don't know.

And then on top of it, they get to go out in public and say shit like this and not just say it, but have what they say, set the agenda, set the tone, establish the conversation, be accepted as truth. It is just like so wrong and so ignorant. And it hurts. Like, it hurts. These are the people that I've like, in the. same space with, it hurts that this is how they, this is genuinely how they see us. And I know,

I know this sounds like very woe with me right now and I'm, I am sorry. But it, it hurts me very personally, very deeply. And the reality is that it hurts all of us. The data is super clear that these kinds of public conversations trickle down to other marginalized people. And it paints us all as unqualified and bad leaders. Like, it is, it was so easy for people. to say Claudine Gay is unqualified. She's a PhD from Harvard. Do you how many people have that? They are so quick to cut her down and tell us that she didn't deserve to get where she is. And other people see that and it has a real impact. It makes it so easy to look at marginalized people and leadership positions and say, we don't belong there. We shouldn't be there. This stuff has

real consequences. It keeps us out of rooms where decisions are being made, which makes it makes us all worse off. It makes us all less safe. It makes technology worse because it's being designed by less people who are in more silos. Everybody suffers when this kind of stuff flourishes, as it's flourishing right now. Other marginalized people see this and they think, well, it's not worth it to strive if this is going to be what it is. It prevents us from having a truly representative democracy, the democracy that we deserve and keeps us from having civic and public spaces that look like the communities that they're supposed to be working for. And I think that that is what people like Rufo are saying, that we shouldn't be able to have any

avenues to be in civic and public life and build power in those spaces. We shouldn't have any avenues to power. Black women who we already hold so little institutional power and they want us to not have that either. And honestly, like, the thing about gay, it's not really about her as an individual, but I do think I might have a little bit of an unpopular opinion about her, which is that, like, I don't know gay, but she is unquestionably qualified to be the president of Harvard, the question of whether she got there by merit or not, like, is laughable, does not deserve a response. But I think that maybe part of gay, maybe thought that, like, carrying weight for Harvard's status quo was going to be the answer for her. And that, like, maybe that would

save her. Like, if she doesn't mix it up too much, the storm will pass. And in the end, it didn't save her. My friend Tim put it really well on Twitter. Her resignation is proof that you can be middle of the road, apolitical, and innocuous, and your black ass will still get clipped, so you might as well stand for something and fight back. Sorry, I'm like, I'm genuinely upset. Yeah, that was a lot. Yeah, thank you for that. It, it, the emotion really came through. So, that was a lot. What does it all mean? Well, this month in Texas, Texas SB 17 went into effect, which is a law that requires public universities in Texas to no longer have offices dedicated to DEI or employees focus specifically on that purpose. Higher education workers and job applicants can also no longer sign any statements dedicated to upholding any kind of DEI standard or attend trainings that reference race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation according to this law. DeSantis signed a similar law in Florida last year, too.

So I think the next iteration of this is going to be corporations and brands facing pressure to drop or distance themselves from DEI. I don't know if you saw, but the former CEO of the active wear brand Lulu Lemon basically said like, oh, we have to get away from DEI. You need to make it clear that you don't want certain people buying your clothes, which is like, whoa. Trust and believe when I say, I will never buy another, like mission accomplished. Your stuff is overpriced garbage anyway, but trust and believe that my black asses. never will. You will never get a dime of my money. Can do. Don't got to worry about me. We'll never be buying another Lulu lemon item again in my life. Wow, what a statement. I had not seen that. Yeah. And so I think that's going to be the next push, getting brands and

corporations to distance themselves. And I think the bigger game is to make DEI, just like with critical race theory, into a toxic brand, you know, where anything that right-wing culture warriors don't like can be labeled DEI and automatically conjure up negative association. So like a black woman in a leadership position, DEI, a book written by a black person on a college syllabus, DEI, a black woman in an ad campaign, DEI. And I think the goal really is a society where marginalized people do not hold power in civic and public life and any avenues whereby we might have access to power or support toward power are obliterated. It's the same reason why, after or gutting affirmative action. Edward Blum, that right-wing activist, went after funding fellowships

that support black women, like fearless fun. And I think doing this via attacks on DEI as racist, or like reversed racist or whatever, just sets up this fictitious idea that we're living in a society where black folks are being given everything, all the power. It is the most callous, disingenuous way of stoking the fears and anxieties of the dominant group, while they get to continue enjoy being the dominant group and also pretending to be underserved. But as always, those attacks always end up hurting everyone, right? Like they end up making us all worse off. Rufo has said that one of his goals is to make DEI work at the professional level obsolete dead end jobs. He said, one goal for 2024, 50% net reduction of DEI jobs in corporate America, put the entire industry

into chaos, make it a career path to nowhere. And do you know who has held the majority of DEI jobs in the United States? White women, the data is very clear. Over the past 10 years, white women not only hold the majority of executive and consulting DEI roles, but are also the best compensated for this work with the longest tenured. This is according to a write-up by a parna R of data for inclusive change, which we'll link to in the show notes. And so I say all of this to say, like, it is not just about black women. These attacks, if left to fester, hurt all of us. And so women, white women, all women, all of us should be concerned about this because it's like Prince said, when you play me, you play yourself. And like, if we are to, if he succeeds in making DEI not tenable as a career, it's white women are the ones who are holding those jobs.

You could, you could ask the question as to like, why that is. That's a whole other issue. But like, that's who is currently holding power in the DEI space currently. The data is very clear. Yeah, and more broadly, it harms all of us by excluding talented, insightful people with unique and valuable perspectives from conversations, from positions of authority. It hurts all of us. That's exactly right. That, like, diversity and inclusion is, like, what makes our country good. It's what makes our companies good. It's like not even from the level of like it's nice to do, which it is.

It makes our products better. It makes our business is better. It makes people more money. It makes it makes us more creative. It's like it's a good thing. And so I think that we're just in this place where it's like people have to decide whether or not they agree. And Mark Cuban, he made the point that you made.

He said, the loss of DEI phobic companies is my gain. Cuban went on to defend the core principles of DEI and saying, having a workforce that is diverse and representative of your stakeholders is good for business. Yeah, it's like an obvious thing. Having employees who are representative of the stakeholders who you're trying to serve, who you're trying to sell products or services to is a good, smart thing. And I can't believe that that's not clear. And I guess the question is like, do these people care more about grievance mongering than they do

about having successful companies and making money. Maybe they do. When we did our miniseries internet hate machine last year, we broke down how right-wing grievances are weaponized into these kinds of attacks. Now, it is long past time for institutions like corporations, legacy media, universities, et cetera, to understand these kinds of attacks and how they work. It has been going on for so long. It is time to figure out the game and figure out what you are going to do. It is past time. to figure out the game and figure out what you're going to do. These same disingenuous tactics have been used too many times for these institutions to continue to feign ignorance and powerlessness and not know how to respond when they happen.

And to not be anticipating them. One of the biggest takeaways that I had from that series is that you cannot capitulate to these people. If you give them an inch, they will smell blood in the water and they will know they can take a mile. Gay announced her resignation like a couple of times. of days ago, Ackman has already called for the entire Board of Harvard to resign right after that, even after he got his way and she resigned. When trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney made that one video for Bud Light, the company apologized, basically threw her to the wolves, never called

her, never even sent her an email like, how you doing, let her have to deal with death threats, have to leave her home, all of that. They parted ways with employees who had been involved. And these people were still not satisfied. They went after Target for Pride merchandise next. There is no pleasing these people because they are bad actors. So if you relent at all, they will know like, oh, this is a winning strategy. Let's just keep doing it. So it is time to stand by your staff, stand by your people and say, listen, if you come for them, we will not budge, go pound sand. And to legacy media, you do not have to be Chris Rufo's bitch. Like, you can make a different choice. Victor Ray, who wrote the book on Critical Race Theory,

put it so beautifully. He said, accepting bad faith framing is a choice to ally oneself with bad faith actors. And that is absolutely the truth. And yeah, I guess that's really where we got to leave it. Like, I really hope that we see institutions who do have power really preparing for this and understanding this. And yeah, I mean, it's not how I wanted to start my 20, with a whole massive national conversation about how black women are unqualified. You know, when this was all going down, one of my mentors, Sabrina and I were talking about like what we should be doing in this moment. Like should prominent, visible black women be like publishing an open letter, putting legacy media on blast and being like, we see this happening. We see you doing it and we won't take it.

And I thought about this for a minute. And I was like, you know, all I really want to do is. is like exist and do my work and do my job and that's it and just like live our lot like live my life all I want to do is live my life the same as anyone else without these attacks when we get into leadership positions all I want to do is know that I'm not going to be tossed out like garbage as collateral damage when the attack comes right I just want my humanity recognize and so I don't know the idea of like putting out a letter saying this I just think in 2024, we should be done having to advocate for our humanity in this way, in public.

And yet, here we are. So I don't know. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoody.com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangooty.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangooty.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd.

It's a production of IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creight. creative. Edited by Joey Pat. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio,

check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest,

S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends

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