 Yesterday was 420, or as my listeners called it, Thursday. It's Friday, 3 a.m. April 21st, 2017. We have a lot of show, so let's get right to it. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman, DavidFeldmanshow.com. On today's program, one of my heroes, Phil Hentry. Welcome back. I'm David Feldman, DavidFeldmanshow.com. Please friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter. On today's show, this is really special. Phil Hentry from the Phil Hentry Show is on our program, and we're going to talk about comedy. Without a doubt, he is one of the most original minds in the history of comedy. He reinvented talk radio. He is up there with Robin Williams, Jonathan Winters. Nobody can touch this guy. And every great comedic mind in Los Angeles listens to Phil Hentry. Seth MacFarlane, Judd Apatow, the guys from The Simpsons, the guys from Futurama. Everybody who knows anything about comedy knows that Phil Hentry is state of the art. He reinvented talk radio, reinvented radio. I cannot be more excited than I am to talk to Phil Hentry today. Some of you may not know who Phil Hentry is, so I have Mark Thompson coming on to just set the table for you. Mark Thompson will explain to you, better than I can, who Phil Hentry is and why he means so much to the comedy community in Los Angeles. Everybody should go to PhilHendryShow.com. I think it's eight, nine bucks a month. I just did this. You can have access to 30,000 hours of his archives. If you don't think this is the funniest audio you've ever heard in your life, you shouldn't be listening to this show. You should just give up on comedy. Trust me on this. Go to PhilHendryShow.com. Sign up for a month. Give it a month. Get access to his archives. Go through it. If you don't think this is the funniest stuff ever committed to audio, you should find another interest. Comedy should not be your thing. Also on the show is an unsung hero of comedy, Bruce Smyrnoff. One of the funniest people I've ever met in my life. Bruce has been knocking around doing comedy for decades. One of the great storytellers of all time. I talk about this on my show constantly when all the comics were doing one-man shows. Bruce Smyrnoff launched a one-man show. The hardest I've laughed, one of the happiest memories I have, is driving down the 101 with my family, listening to PhilHendry, and the other happiest memory I have is going to see Bruce Smyrnoff with my father. Bruce did a one-man show where he just told stories about how close he came to making it in Hollywood, but just couldn't measure up. One of the funniest men you'll ever meet, Bruce Smyrnoff, is on the show. Then Professor Corey Brettschneider is back to give us a $200,000 legal education. We're going to talk about Trump's travel ban, the Arkansas executions, and Aaron Hernandez's suicide, and the treatment of prisoners here in America. What an amazing show. Phil Hendry, Bruce Smyrnoff, Mark Thompson, and Professor Corey Brettschneider stay with us. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you. You sad pathetic humps. Bill O'Reilly lost his job this week. I want to talk about Bill O'Reilly. I want to talk about jobs, what a job means to a white man and what it means to a woman. I want to talk about what I consider the most sacred thing we have, and that is our jobs. And jobs, a job is not who you are. A job is what you do to become who you want to be. If you're defined by your job, you end up becoming a monster. There's no way around it. For example, Bill O'Reilly, he was defined by his job, and he was just fired by Fox News. Don't worry, his biggest defender, Donald Trump, just named him Secretary of a Woman's Interior. Bill O'Reilly was the biggest star at Fox News. Very tall, very white, and that gave Bill O'Reilly a sense of entitlement. He's a 67-year-old man. He's from a specific generation where if you were white and tall, moderately good-looking, things just had to fall into place for you. Very few guys would back down when it came to Bill O'Reilly. He was a towering presence, not because of his mind, but because of his actual physical stature. And on the Republican side of the ledger, tall is something people respect. So he was used to getting his way. He was a bully. As long as he surrounded himself with other bullies, he could thrive. One of my memories of Dennis Miller was being around when he met Bill O'Reilly. Now, Dennis is a much more talented mind than Bill O'Reilly. Dennis is a bully, though. He's a conservative Republican bully, and I literally saw Dennis cower not from Bill O'Reilly's intelligence or his wit just from his physical prowess. It takes a lot to intimidate Dennis Miller. You're not going to intimidate Dennis Miller with your mind. You're only going to intimidate Dennis Miller with your height, with your physical strength. And that's why Dennis tours the country with Bill O'Reilly. You know, Steve Martin and Marty Short have their two-man show. Bill O'Reilly and Dennis Miller have their two-man show. They tour the nation. It's not because Bill O'Reilly is smart. That's not why Dennis is impressed by Bill O'Reilly. It's because he's physically stronger. That's how Republicans measure another man, not by their wit, not by their education, not by their intellectual fortitude, by their money or by their size. Bill O'Reilly had money, and he was tall, and he got what he wanted as long as he was surrounded by other bullies who valued the same things Bill O'Reilly valued, which was physical strength and money and power. He couldn't thrive at CBS. They fired him over there because he just couldn't measure up. He wasn't smart enough. He wasn't a good enough reporter. And he couldn't thrive in a real news organization like the New York Times, which requires you to be a real reporter. So that's why Bill O'Reilly hated the New York Times. What makes Bill O'Reilly's fall so delicious is that Bill O'Reilly was finally fired after a New York Times investigation. The first week of April of this year revealed just how many women had claimed to be sexually harassed by Bill O'Reilly. You know, Bill O'Reilly and Fox, they threaten the lawsuit, but the Times has lawyers and they have real good reporters, and they said to Bill O'Reilly, they said to Fox at the beginning of April, bring it on, and Fox News, the Murdochs, decided instead to cut bait. They let Bill O'Reilly go. He was brought down by the New York Times. That is delicious. Immediately after getting fired, Bill O'Reilly said the charges against him are groundless. In that case, Bill, you should ask those five women. You paid $13 million to settle for your money back. I mean, that's a lot of money to pay women to be quiet about something that never happened. Now the day before Bill got fired, he was vacationing in Rome and had an audience with the Pope. Turns out to be the last audience he ever had with anybody. He got fired the next day, but you know, Bill got to stand in the VIP line in the Vatican, VIP, very important penis sticker into. I'm serious, not about VIP standing for very important penis sticker into. I made that up. I know it sounds real, but it's not. Sometimes you can't tell when I'm joking. Nobody is called a very important penis sticker into in the Vatican, but the Vatican does have a VIP line to meet the Pope because that's what Jesus would have wanted. The meek shall inherit the earth, but if they want to see the Pope, get to the back of the line because Bill O'Reilly from Fox News is here and he's a VIP. The Pope shook hands with O'Reilly and O'Reilly immediately said, hey, Pontiff, how much do you normally pay to keep your victim silent? If O'Reilly was nostalgic for Fox News, then the Vatican was probably the right place to be like the Vatican for years. Fox News was dominated by a man who had sworn off women, and I don't mean Shepard Smith. I'm talking about Roger Ailes, a morbidly obese, multi-chinned, fire hydrant of a man with no hair and no chance of a woman getting intimate with him unless he waived a job or money in front of her. Roger Ailes, a disgusting human being, had acquit Fox News last year because he had turned the organization, he had turned the news organization, such as it was a news organization, if you want to call it that, he turned it into a wild private game preserve where women dressed, spoke, and believed what he told them to. Along with that power came his sexual advances. I don't know how many women succumb to Roger Ailes' power, probably a few, but that's not sex, that's rape, because rape is about power as a sexual harassment, and any boss like Roger Ailes, who dangled money or work in front of a woman in exchange for what he thinks is sex, he's not getting sex. He's, for all intents and purposes, raping her. For all intents and purposes, Roger Ailes, like the Pope, was celibate, even though he may or may not have had erections and ejaculate, he was celibate. Most of the women rejected him, Gretchen Carlson said no, Megan Kelly said no, and the women who said yes, well, in the end, they were being raped. That's Fox News. We pretty much know where they've always stood when it comes to women on top of them. Ailes, by the way, also gave Rush Limbaugh his start in television. I would say those two made quite a pair, but a pair is only two. They made quite a fifteen. I do understand Roger Ailes. I do. This is someone who early on in life realized he was so ugly inside that there was simply no way to hide it from the world. Bruce Smyrnoff, who's on the show later, taught me a Yiddish expression, furbissin' apunam. Furbissin' apunam means an ugly face, but it doesn't mean just an ugly face, according to Bruce Smyrnoff. Furbissin' apunam means the ugliness comes from within, that you're so ugly inside that it shows on your face. Sartra said, as you age, you get the face you deserve. Roger Ailes has always been an ugly man because he's rotting inside, and there's nothing. Nothing he could do. No plastic surgeon, no weight loss plan, no wig maker could do anything to make Roger Ailes attractive to women because women know when a man is ugly inside. He was ugly. He was born ugly. And there's nothing he could do to make a woman find him attractive. And he knew that. So he became a hateful person. He became a Republican who very young, when he was very young working in television in 1967, met Richard Nixon. And the legend is that Roger Ailes helped Richard Nixon conquer television in 1968. A lot of you are too young to know this, but Richard Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960 because Kennedy knew how television worked. Nixon did not. In 1968, we're told Roger Ailes groomed Nixon, taught him how to appear on camera. That's the legend. And the legend continues that Nixon won in 1968, mostly because Roger Ailes taught Richard Nixon how to look good on television. The truth is, the election in 1968 was a nail biter. It was a squeaker. It was too close to call. It was tighter than Sean Spicer's butt cheeks after a press conference, walking up to Donald Trump and saying, how did I do? Roger Ailes had nothing to do with Richard Nixon getting elected president in 1968. The truth is, the only reason Nixon won was because Henry Kissinger, who was Nixon's secret foreign affairs advisor in 1968, Kissinger was at the Paris peace talks. He was working for Lyndon Johnson at the time. He was working for the Democrats. And he basically secretly assured the president of South Vietnam, too. He promised to that if two didn't make a peace deal before the presidential election, two would get a much better deal once Nixon became president. That offer is known as a twofer. I don't know what that meant, but the guy's name was two, president two. When he ran for president in Vietnam, he didn't have a vice president, and his slogan was, you get two for the price of one because his name was two. That was what Kissinger told two. And by the way, that's a violation of the Logan Act. It's against the law for decades. That was a rumor. But in the past couple of years, it's been verified to be true. George Will has said it's true. The Nixon Library says it's true. You can go to the Nixon Library in Yoruba, Linda, California. There is an oral history, and one of the tapes is from Tom Charles Houston. He worked in the Nixon White House. He worked on the Nixon campaign. Tom Charles Houston was a trusted advisor to Nixon, the Houston plan. I'll talk about that on another show. Tom Charles Houston said he conducted an investigation for Nixon and concluded that the reason Nixon won in 1968 is because of back channel negotiations conducted with South Vietnam, convincing them not to make a deal with North Vietnam because they'll get a better deal if Nixon is elected president. Ubert Humphrey was running against Nixon. Now Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson's vice president, and Johnson decided not to run for reelection because he had gotten himself bogged down in Vietnam. And the peace talks, the Paris peace talks, were taking place. They were between North Vietnam, who were the communists, and South Vietnam, the country. If you want to call it a country, it wasn't really a country, it was created by the French and the United States. We were supporting South Vietnam, even though it was really not a democratically elected country. Johnson wanted Humphrey to get elected president, of course, because he'd be vindicated. Humphrey was his vice president, and he had an October surprise that the Republican Party that Nixon anticipated, and that October surprise was to stop the bombing of North Vietnam. He just stopped bombing North Vietnam. Johnson claimed he was doing it to get the North Vietnamese to make a peace deal in Paris. But there was another reason he stopped the bombing. He halted the bombing to give a push to Humphrey, who needed the support from democratic voters who were opposed to the war. A lot of Democrats weren't going to vote for Humphrey. They were Bobby Kennedy supporters, Eugene McCarthy supporters. These were two senators, McCarthy and Kennedy in 68. They were running against the war, but because of assassination and powerful forces within the Democratic Party, Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, became the Democratic nominee. Johnson was helping him. He stopped the bombing, and a lot of liberals, according to the polls, were ready to vote for Humphrey. So sure enough, once the bombing halted, the race tightened up. The Gallup polls showed Nixon and Humphrey neck and neck. More liberals realized that the Democrats were committed to bringing an end to the war they started. Nixon, of course, feared a bombing halt. He feared a peace deal. He feared a peace deal before the election. If North Vietnam saw that the bombing had been halted, they'd cut a deal with South Vietnam, and it would be the end for Nixon's campaign. Because Nixon was running on a secret plan to defeat North Vietnam. Sound familiar? Yeah, Nixon said it would be irresponsible to tell you what his secret plan was before he got elected and then got to implement it. And in order to implement his secret plan, he had to be elected president. Nixon's plan to defeat the North Vietnamese was stunningly similar to Donald Trump's plan to defeat ISIS. No plan. But Henry Kissinger was advising President Johnson at the Paris peace talks. Kissinger, of course, was a Rockefeller Republican. He was a mole. He was spying on Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats secretly advising the Nixon campaign. He quietly warned Nixon that a truce was imminent, that the South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese were going to make a deal before the election. So Nixon, through a woman named Anna Chinalt, she was a liaison to the South Vietnam government, she and Kissinger told to the President of South Vietnam, don't sign a peace deal. Do not sign a truce, because once Nixon becomes president, the South Vietnamese will get a much better deal. To the President of South Vietnam didn't even show up to the peace talks after he was told that. So Kissinger and Nixon and Anna Chinalt prevented Johnson from getting a peace deal before the election and so handed Ubert Humphrey his defeat to Richard Nixon. All this has been confirmed by George Will and plenty of other Republicans, including the Nixon Library. Again, it was rumored for years. There are even unclassified tapes now of Lyndon Johnson talking about this in the Oval Office with Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. And the two of them are calling Nixon guilty of treason. It was treasonous. It's treasonous to negotiate secretly without your government approving it. So the reason Michael Flynn had to resign as National Security Advisor, he was apparently talking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions before Trump was president. That's what Republicans do. They violate the Logan Act. There are also rumors, and we've talked about this on the show before, that George Herbert Walker Bush and Baker, his best friend and Ronald Reagan's chief of staff before the election in 1980, they made a secret deal with the Iranians not to release the hostages until Reagan became president because they would get a much better deal if Reagan became president. And right in the middle of Ronald Reagan's inauguration, wouldn't you know it? The hostages were released. Then, a couple of years later, America sold arms for hostages to the Iranians, led to contrigate. I've talked about this on other shows. I'm not going to get into it, but we did find out for years there were rumors about Kissinger and Anna Chinot prolonging the Vietnam War so Nixon can get elected. I have no doubt that in a couple of years, we will discover that Baker and Bush kept the hostages in Iran. They negotiated with the Iranians not to release the hostages until after the election of 1980 because Ronald Reagan would sell them arms. We will eventually find that. We will find that out. Clark Clifford, the Secretary of Defense in LBJ, said Nixon was guilty of treason. Nixon beat Humphrey in 68 by just 1%. And Vietnam didn't end until five years and 23,000 American lives later. Nixon expanded the war illegally into Cambodia. He continued the secret war that the CIA was conducting in Laos, killing millions and millions of Indo-Chinese. The point I'm making is that Roger Ailes is a hideous man. He is a disgusting man. His ass hurts and his balls itch. And he had nothing to do with Richard Nixon winning in 1968. But they needed a myth. It's better to think that Nixon won in 68 because some troglodyte, some homunculus like Roger Ailes, tamed television for Richard Nixon. That sounds better than the real reason which is Kissinger and Anna Chinot made an overture to South Vietnam to keep the war going. The myth continued for Roger Ailes. He worked for Nixon, became a speechwriter, a communications consultant, made a ton of money, worked on Rush Limbaugh's TV project. And then about 20 years ago, he launched Fox News. I don't watch Fox News. I'm shown clips from it. I go to Media Matters. It's evil garbage because it looks and smells like real news. And occasionally, you'll see what appears to be real news like, you know, Chris Wallace, Fox News Sunday. And that is what made Bill O'Reilly so despicable and so dangerous. He was the slippery embodiment of Fox News. He had the veneer of fair and balanced. But underneath it all was a sense of entitlement and the seaving contempt for anything that wasn't white, heterosexual, male, and Christian. Bill O'Reilly, like Fox News, on the white face of it, they had the shiny veneer of a wait-and-see objectivity. That's what drove liberals crazy because they knew it wasn't true. They knew that Bill O'Reilly wasn't objective. They knew that Bill O'Reilly wasn't fair and balanced. O'Reilly convinced a lot of people that he was reasonable, whereas someone like Sean Hannity had the common decency to be honest and upfront about being a world-class, uneducated, opportunistic bastard parroting the talking points handed to him by his corporate paymasters. You can't hate Sean Hannity because you know upfront he's an a-hole. The problem with Bill O'Reilly is he presented himself as kind of a legitimate, reasonable, open-minded journalist. He was anything but. And while liberals, the men, we were all ringing our hands about Fox News. Women over there were being sexually harassed, assaulted by O'Reilly and Ailes. And because Fox News is a major profit center for the Murdoch family, and because O'Reilly was the network's biggest star, everyone looked the other way. They had to pay out huge cash settlements. Some of those cash settlements came out of O'Reilly's pocket, but Fox News had to also pay out settlements to women who were harassed by O'Reilly and Ailes. But the Murdoch family chalked up those huge settlements, those huge legal fees. They just chalked that up to the cost of doing business. It's pretty reprehensible. And Donald Trump defended O'Reilly up until the bitter end. And one of the Trump's sons, Eric, during the presidential campaign, said of sexual harassment that he would hope his sister, Ivanka, would be strong enough not to be harassed, as though getting harassed in the workplace is a sign of a woman's weakness. Then Eric excused himself and went off to kill some endangered elk. The next day, his father, Donald, was asked about Eric's insensitive comments. And Donald said, you know, on sexual harassment, I think it's got to be up to the individual. It also depends on what's available. There may be a better alternative than there may not. If there's not a better alternative, then you stay. But it could be there's a better alternative where you're taking care of better. Let's put a tic-tac in our mouth, and let's grab that sentence structure without asking an unpack what Donald Trump meant by that. What he's saying is if his daughter was being harassed, she should leave. But if he can't leave, well then you grin and bear it because you don't have an alternative. And what it really means is that Eric and his father, they don't care. And either does Ivanka, they just don't care because they can't imagine it happening to them or Ivanka because they just don't care. Many women have come forward to say Donald Trump sexually harassed them. He's threatened to sue them for saying that and now he's president. Meanwhile, guys like me have women on their show, and we constantly ask them, why are women so angry at men? That's why. That's why. We all knew about Bill Cosby for decades. Nobody said anything. Nobody stopped it. And we've known about Bill O'Reilly for years. I remember the Lufa story from 2004. He had an associate producer, Andrea Makris. TMZ reported this. Smoking Gun reported this. She complained of having to endure years of sexual harassment from O'Reilly who would call her on the phone. I'm laughing because it's just so grotesque. He would call Andrea Makris on the phone, according to Andrea Makris, according to the smoking gun. And O'Reilly would just start masturbating. While he would masturbate, he would describe sexual exploits he had in Thailand and talk about Lufas, which he sometimes called falafels, and vibrators. And, you know, all the things a conservative moralist like Bill O'Reilly should be discussing with somebody's daughter. Work is a very different experience for women than it is for men. When I was starting to work to make my own way, my father gave me some good advice. He said, bus station restrooms are where you make a quick buck, but the real money is at a train station. That's where you'll meet a classier clientele. And advice like that still rings true today. Then he said, there are three things to look for in any job. One is money, two is glory, and three is fun. Money, glory, and fun. He said, if you get two out of three, then you should stay at the job. And for me, a white male, that was pretty great advice. You know, I've had some pretty horrible jobs. I still take horrible jobs. But let's think about the white entitlement behind a father telling his son that a job offers three things, money, glory, and fun. It's great advice to a white son. But what about the women who work for, say, Fox News? What about all the women who for years just kept their heads down and did the job only for money? No glory, no fun. My father said, you needed two out of three to want to stay at a job. A job had to offer two out of three money, glory, fun. A job had to have two of those. You think women were told that? You think the women at Fox News who stayed and got sexually harassed were looking for glory or fun? They were there for the money and they weren't even being paid what they're worth. Up until recently, I couldn't understand the arrogance, how entitled it is to think that a job has something to offer other than money. The idea that a job offers glory and fun and you need two out of those three to stay at a job so arrogant, so entitled, so white. The notion that you would have a right to quit a job if it wasn't fun or there was no glory. So arrogant, so entitled, so white. The worst job I ever had was pumping gas. Not at the Shell station in Sausalito, California, when I moved to San Francisco to do stand-up and needed a job before I could earn a living as a comic. What I mean by pumping gas, and by the way, you might want to hit the fast forward button right here because I think you all know where I'm going with this pumping gas line of reasoning. So you just hit the fast forward button. Just hold on to it for about three seconds. If you stick around, it comes back to Jeanine Garofalo who was on Tuesday's show. For those of you who didn't hit the fast forward button, I had a job pumping gas for Mr. Methane. Actually, I was pumping gas into Mr. Methane or Mr. Methane is how he pronounced it. Mr. Methane, he was a novelty act from Britain or Australia. He entertains people by singing through something other than his mouth. And my job was to stand backstage and pump him with gas so he could hit those notes. Okay, that's not a true story, but here is a true story about Mr. Methane. And stick with me here because it involves Jeanine Garofalo who was on the show Tuesday and work. 1996, just for laughs, Montreal Comedy Festival. It's one of the galas packed house. I'm on the bill and I got to share a dressing room that night with Jonathan Winters and Gilbert Gottfried. Also on the bill was Jeanine Garofalo and Mr. Methane. Mr. Methane, I go up early, then Gilbert, then Mr. Methane. And let me assure you, if Gilbert and I didn't stink up the room, Mr. Methane most certainly did. It might have been the single most disgusting thing I've ever witnessed on a stage with the possible exception of Jim Belushi starring in the vagina monologues. Mr. Methane closes act by shoving sparklers up his butt and ass-chirping these stars and stripes forever. It was incredible. There wasn't a dry eye in the house and it wasn't because of the patriotism. Our eyes were not watering out of a love for America. We were in Canada and Mr. Methane was on stage. I had heard a lot about Mr. Methane and I couldn't wait to see him, especially since I didn't have to follow him. But guess who had to go on right after Mr. Methane? Jeanine Garofalo. I love Jeanine. I've always wished her well. I have tremendous, tremendous respect for her. But like any comic, I can enjoy a nice crash and burn, especially when it's not the comic's fault. Jeanine didn't do anything. She just went out to perform at a gala in front of 3,500 people. Little did she know she had a follow, Mr. Methane. Because it's a comedy show and the people who booked just for laughs thought it would be really funny on paper. On paper they thought it was very funny. Let's make Jeanine Garofalo, the voice of a generation, go on after the voice of the generation. Food being degenerated. How funny is that to make Jeanine go on after Mr. Methane in front of 4,500 people, right? The only problem with having Jeanine Garofalo go on after Mr. Methane in front of 4,500 people is that Jeanine Garofalo has to then go on after Mr. Methane in front of 4,500 people. Jeanine went on. Let's just say as usual, Methane was as usual the precursor to what she dropped on the stage that night. Usually Methane precedes what Jeanine dropped on that stage. It was horrible, but it wasn't her fault. There was nothing she could do. In comedy they say you should be able to follow anybody. For some reason Jeanine had trouble with her jokes and stories and bits because she had trouble going on after a guy who places a microphone down the back of his pants and ass belches the theme to the love boat. I guess you could say Jeanine was having a bad night and it was also hard for the audience to hear Jeanine because for some reason she forgot to put her mouth close enough to the microphone. I wonder what that was about. Why was Jeanine so reluctant to get her lips close to the microphone? I mean she had been doing comedy for a long time. Certainly she had her microphone technique down by then, but for some reason Mr. Methane handed her his microphone and she just didn't talk into it. Anyway, Jeanine bombed and then Jonathan Winters went on after Jeanine to close the show. As I remember Jonathan Winters, you know he didn't have a rough time. By then the audience had gotten the taste of Mr. Methane out of their mouths and he got pretty much a lukewarm reception and the show ended and afterwards we were all mingling backstage and I said really loud so Jeanine could hear. I said what were they thinking? How unfair for Jonathan Winters to have to follow Jeanine Garofalo? Why would they put Jonathan Winters in that kind of situation? Why should Jonathan Winters have to follow Jeanine Garofalo? Even Mr. Methane laughed and the only way to follow Mr. Methane is with a lit torch so you can set the place on fire and collect the insurance money. Jeanine was a great sport that night. She did her job. She followed Mr. Methane. She didn't do well but she knows that you have to live with what you're dealt and she was dealt it and she also smelt it. She didn't have any glory that night obviously but there was money and she made it fun. She got two out of three. She got money and she had fun, no glory. She made bombing fun because following Mr. Methane and bombing can be fun just because it's so horrible and she knew it was horrible and she knew and she still knows that horrible is funny. You know she got all three. She got glory too. She got fun, money and glory. I did eventually get a job pumping gas in Sausalito right outside of San Francisco at a shell station. I was making money barely. There was certainly no glory, none. So what about fun? My father said, ah that's up to you. I said it's impossible to have fun pumping gas and my father said funny people have fun, have fun but I couldn't have fun because my feet were killing me. The job sucked and eventually I quit and I still to this day feel like I failed. My dad said I failed because I quit that job without figuring out how to have fun. He said all I needed was an attitude adjustment or a hungry family to feed. That was a different time. This was back in the 80s. Back then your father told you to suck it up especially if you were Mackenzie Phillips. I'm the child of the greatest generation. My parents survived World War II, McCarthyism, the threat of nuclear annihilation. They wanted life to be good for us. They didn't want us to suffer the way they did but they also didn't want their kids, the greatest generation's kids, to think that life is a cakewalk because life is not a cakewalk. Walking on a cake that doesn't sound particularly appetizing. Maybe it shouldn't be like a cake crawl. You're on all fours crawling through cake and lapping it up until you get to the other side. That would be satisfying. That would denote a life that's easy being on all fours in a cake crawling through it while your mistress banks your naughty bottom because a cakewalk, I mean, you know how dirty people's shoes are? Sure, you could take your shoes off but feet are even more disgusting. I rather lick a person's shoes than the mistress's feet. I rather have my mistress make me lick her shoes than her feet because I think shoes are ultimately cleaner. The point I'm making is cakewalk. Who's going to eat cake after someone's stuck their filthy sweaty feet inside of it? Maybe Chris Christie would. My parents, the greatest generation, didn't want us to think that life is too easy. It's a cliche about millennials but it sure seems like after eight years of Obama a lot of millennials, a lot of young people, even their parents, even people my age have begun to think life is supposed to be easy and I really don't know how eight years of Obama, how eight years of Obama left people with the impression that life should be a cakewalk especially because right after Obama took office we were in two wars. We were suffering from the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression and things never really got better under Obama. Sure, we're finally on the road to economic recovery sort of and then Trump became president but you know Afghanistan and Iraq are winding down and Obama did talk about putting an end to America's perpetual cycle of war and I think had Hillary been allowed to assume office in January we could be moving towards the type of prosperity that progressives usually usher in but the eight years under Obama that was low economic growth. Where did anybody get the idea that life was supposed to be easy, that we were entitled to stuff, to happiness? Eight years under Obama that should have been the time for all of us to reevaluate what life is supposed to be. How did we come out of the Obama years with this sense that we're all entitled to something? What did we do to deserve anything? What did we sacrifice? There's no draft. There were no tax increases. Where did any of us get the idea that life is supposed to be easy? I don't want to make sweeping generalizations about millennials or baby boomers because none of them are true and if they seem true circumstances usually alter your perception of a generation in a split second but you know circumstances history doesn't seem to be changing us too much. The twenties had the flappers and then that all came to an end with the Great Depression. Generations rise to the occasion. Events make generations great. Our generations, the baby boomers, the millennials, we just don't seem to learn and change. We just think life is supposed to be easy. You know the economy crashed in 2008. Nobody changed. If anything we got softer. We ended up with more of a sense of entitlement. After 9-11 we didn't bring back the draft. We never asked anyone to do anything other than shop after the economic collapse of 2008. What sacrifices as a nation were we asked to make? You know what we were asked to do? We were asked to sacrifice our memory. We were asked to forget. That's not Obama's fault. After he got elected president we were all supposed to just get on with our lives and try not to focus on the people getting left behind. We were given cheap credit again, cheap money and we were subtly told to spend money we don't have but don't put it on your credit card but if you're going to put it on your credit card we're going to keep rates low so you know you might as well put it on your credit card but don't but it's okay if you want to but don't but remember to buy stuff. Those are the Obama years. Don't look back and failure to look back means not just forgetting history it also means failure to look for the people who are left behind and that's why baby boomers, millennials have such a sense of entitlement because everyone we see is doing okay because the ones who aren't doing okay they go away. They are the disappeared, the non-people who have been tricked into believing their economic failure is their fault society didn't fail them they failed themselves and they deserve what they got which is invisibility. They live on the streets under the bridges and their grandmother's basements we don't see them because we don't look back we don't see who isn't making it yet so many of us are not making it but if you don't make it in America you self disappear there's so much shame associated with poverty in America so much shame associated with not being able to find work that the poor the disenfranchised they police themselves they stop thinking of themselves as human you're not entitled to anything so you just hide and so the only people we see other than the homeless guy sleeping on the heating grate the only people we see are the frantic 99 percent one paycheck away from economic disaster one ailment away from bankruptcy people chugging along secretly hoping that they're not next there are no jobs in America there is no opportunity but Americans act they shop they talk they eat like everything is fine because once it's no longer fine for them they just disappear we don't see them again and all that's left are the 99 percenters one paycheck away from disappearing while the richest one percent suck up the money like their senator Lindsey Graham and it's fleet week it's really time to stop feeling you're entitled to anything what you're entitled to is squat that's part of the manipulation the sense of entitlement what you think you're entitled to is a lie it doesn't exist we're being convinced that we deserve a vacation a new car an expensive meal we don't deserve anything but we're told we do with whose money they tell us we're entitled to this even though nobody has any money because if America if the 99 percent faced up to reality and admitted to themselves that you're only entitled to what you earned you wouldn't buy things you don't need especially on credit more importantly if the 99 percent faced reality they would demand unions and livable wages you're only entitled to the fruits of your labor but the fruits of your labor in america are enjoyed by the people who control capital and the people who control capital the money they're hoarding all the fruits and replacing our jobs with automation or people overseas there's no work in america there's no money the only thing you the 99 percent are entitled to the only thing you're entitled to is engaging in class warfare and taking back from the richest one percent what they have been robbing from you and you're not going to accomplish any of that by eyeing goose down comforters at bed bath and beyond so stop shopping stop eyeing the toys that only the leisure class has the time and money to play with start figuring out how to take back what the one percent has stolen from you take back your work your money and your dignity 99 percent of americans have no financial future and yet this entire country all 99 percent of us are still convinced they're entitled to be happy entitled to be relaxed we're entitled to feel good about ourselves nobody has a good job yet we're all entitled to keep spending money to buy what we all think we're entitled to this is not a virtuous economy it's anything but there was a time when the more the middle class spent the more it came back to them and higher profits for the companies and that meant higher wages now we spend on credit and it just gets sucked up by the richest one percent and they they return the favor by taking their profits and shipping our jobs overseas or replacing us with machines it's not a virtuous economy so stop thinking you're entitled to anything other than political strength through unions and tighter government control of corporations that's all you're entitled to and you have to fight for it you're not entitled to it you're not entitled to anything entitlement is a word that in america it's it's a nauseating word it's an ugly word it's sickening and it's used as a truncheon on the head of the 99 percent by the richest one percent who the one percent are actually entitled to feel entitled because they have the money yes they're despicable but you can only feel entitled if you're actually entitled but even the richest one percent because they live in america they know their shame in entitlement especially if it's your kids who never worked a day on their lives who are the ones who are feeling entitled it's embarrassing it's repulsive it feels unamerican so the richest one percent they throw the word entitlement at the middle class and at the poor and they call medicaid medicare and social security and food stamps entitlements when malvaney trump's budget director talks about the budget he speaks of medicaid and medicare social security and food stamps as entitlements as though guaranteeing our children enough food so they don't starve as though guaranteeing our grandparents have enough medicine so they don't die as though that has created an entitled leisure class of sloths as americans were nauseated by the idea that anyone would have a sense of entitlement which is why republicans who want to get rid of medicare food stamp social security that's why they call them entitlements because they know that it shames the people who need it calling these things entitlements is designed to make the people who need social security food stamps medicare medicaid feel whiny and weak privileged and soft like the children of the richest one percent by calling them entitlements that's how you convince the 99 percent to vote against their own self interests we blame ourselves in america we blame ourselves instead of our oppressors this is displacement we're angry at ourselves instead of the people who put us in this place it's an epidemic in america we are constantly blaming the wrong people for our misery look around you look at your look at your friends look at your co-workers have you noticed that for some reason everyone is miserable and it's your fault it's your fault because our misery results in anger and in america that anger is displaced north korea tests a nuclear weapon so we drop the mother of all bombs on afghanistan that's what we do in america we displace our anger you can't admit to yourself that you're mad at your boss or your mother or your father so you're mad at me i'm getting pretty sick of everyone in my life i'm tired of the displacement i'm tired of hearing how unhappy you are i'm tired of being blamed for your unhappiness you're unhappy yes because you don't have a job or you don't have money or you don't have somebody who loves you you're angry because you don't have time for anything you can't lose weight you can't work out you're not famous i'm sick of hearing about it it's not my fault you live in a toxic nation blame your country blame your government stop blaming me for your unhappiness and start blaming the richest one percent who control washington dc who drop bombs on innocent people in the middle east who tell us we don't have money to feed the 20 percent of children in america who are food insecure we don't have enough money for universal health insurance they tell us we're in a constant state of war the police are killing unarmed black men i didn't cause this and by the way you shouldn't be happy you should be miserable if you realize that you're living in a sick country with no concern for others it might make you give up on happiness or you might stop blaming me for your unhappiness you might realize nobody in this country is entitled to happiness the only thing you're entitled to is unions medicare for all livable wages a clean environment no more bombs being dropped on people who didn't do anything to us equal rights for all our people that's what you're entitled to but you have to fight for that i don't care if nobody loves you this is a hateful country that lives on red meat and guns how could you possibly know what love is you want love go to norway you've been screwed over america stop blaming david feldman blame the corporations and the richest one percent to own congress i didn't do it i didn't create this loveless society where people turn their backs on everybody and forget the disappeared i didn't create america where sex emotional connection and caring for each other is transactional that's america and we're way too easy on the people who are oppressing us we're way too easy on ourselves we give the wrong people a pass especially ourselves instead of lashing out at david feldman try taking responsibility for your own unhappiness try taking responsibility for spending a lifetime of buying into the lie and wanting the wrong things spending your money on the wrong things eating the wrong food believing the wrong facts that's why you're miserable don't blame me shadow stevens the voiceover guy he's an actor very cool dude big on transcendental meditation so much smarter than he lets on when i was living in los angeles he would stop by my radio show we both share a love for elo he showed me a vanity project he's been working on he took the silent movie the thief of bagdad and put elo music to it and it's fantastic and i had never seen the thief of bagdad before and it's considered one of the greatest movies of all time and set to the music of jeff lin and elo it's incredible many things have stuck with me from that movie but what i remember most is the opening of the thief of bagdad up in the sky and the stars are written the words happiness must be earned happiness must be earned i am so sick of people who think they're entitled to happiness because they're alive happiness is earned by getting along with other people by learning to forgive by learning to say i'm sorry i'm wrong and i love you all the pain in this world is caused by other people and all the happiness too all the pain in this world is caused by other people as is all the happiness if you can't deal with other people your life is hell and in the united states our lives are hell because nobody looks back nobody sacrifices for others everyone thinks they're entitled to happiness and if something is causing you unhappiness it can't be because you didn't earn it it has to be somebody else's fault because i'm entitled to be right all the time i'm entitled to happiness it's gotten to the point that in america you're entitled to your own facts your own internal narrative there's a shrink or fox news or alex jones or rachel maddo who will tell you exactly what you need to be told so it's not your fault nobody in america has to deal with the truth about anything especially themselves i am tired and disgusted by americans who refuse to own up for some reason under the obama administration we've become a country of people who who need encouragement who demand encouragement who demand a pat on the back we need to be told we're good and virtuous and deserving why what have you done what do you deserve what good has america done in this world in the past eight years in the past 17 years what good has america done i can remember thinking back in 2008 when obama was running that we didn't deserve obama he's our dessert back then we were doing some really horrible things to ourselves and other country and i felt it was time to elect a scold somebody like bernie sanders who would whip us into shape yes obama is the greatest president of my lifetime but that's not saying much and we didn't deserve him we didn't earn him he was the trophy we all got just for showing up on election day and as much as i love obama we're paying a huge price for him because we elected him and we postponed that gut check that necessary look into the abyss the darkness that moment when we had to say especially in 2008 how did we end up fighting two disastrous wars turning our back on our veterans destroying our economy and our constitution but obama got elected and nobody made us take responsibility and we silently suffered jobs disappeared our savings disappeared our homes disappeared but that was somebody else's fault not ours and that's true if you lost your job your home your savings it wasn't your fault it was our fault wasn't your fault it was our fault collectively it was our fault we as a nation turned our backs on each other when reagan became president we turned our backs on each other and we turned our backs on reality and we allowed george herbert walker bush bill clinton george w bush to sell us a load of horseshit about tax cuts and deregulation the free market tomahawk missiles and it all sounded so good hey what's on the tv put it on my credit card if you know somebody who's broke homeless drunk who has lost who has disappeared that's not that person's fault it's our fault trump trump is your fault we let this happen it is our collective guilt that donald trump was elected president i am so sick of these whiny liberals oh donald trump stole the election you didn't vote ass you didn't show up we need as a nation to look into the abyss and summon up collective guilt not individual guilt collective guilt after world war two america tried to decide how to rebuild germany and they decided against the idea of collective guilt for the holocaust america decided the german people should not be held responsible for hitler because that would be unfair plus we needed some of their war criminals to help us build nuclear weapons and go to the moon we came up with this idea of selective guilt that was the narrative we went with the narrative was the nazis hijacked german democracy and the german people were victims they weren't guilty and we in america also don't believe in collective guilt just individual guilt and that guilt is directed only towards the people we have no use for two million people behind bars but there's no room for a wall street executive because we have use for a wall street executive in america just like germany after world war two we have selective guilt if you're poor black out of work then you're guilty if you're white and have money then hey we all make mistakes we're a christian nation that believes in forgiveness i think it's time for collective guilt stop blaming trump for trump this is your fault it's my fault it happened on our watch but we're a nation that refuses to take responsibility nobody owns up nobody has to own up or sacrifice in america when a drone accidentally kills 12 innocent people in syria our pentagon just chalks it up to the fog of war because you know during war mistakes are made but there's no fog of war with drones some kid is sitting in a bunker nevada working a joystick he has enough computer power on his side to beat gary kasparov bobby fisher and every chess was in history all at the same time that's how much computer power he's got there's no fog of war there was no danger but nobody takes responsibility for 12 innocent people being killed by a drone strike it's unfair to make anybody in america responsible for a drone strike that kills 12 people it's unfair it's unfair to make a drone pilot take responsibility because bad things happen during war but it's not a war because congress doesn't want to declare war because they don't want the responsibility and it would be unfair to ask them to declare war because only the president knows when we should be at war and the president only goes to war when he doesn't want to take responsibility for the mistakes he's made on the domestic front this entire country has become a shell game of avoiding responsibility we talked tough we just executed some guy in arkansas late last night we like to bomb people overseas but when we're at fault not our responsibility and jesus says we should forgive this entire country is full of everyone you're all foolish nobody's responsible everyone's a victim everyone gets a trophy and everyone gets to be a victim now because everyone is entitled i've been told i have ptsd from some experience i had living in new york back in the 80s ptsd was a condition once reserved for men who came back from war but you know why should guys who serve in iraq and vietnam only get to be the ones who enjoy ptsd david feldman saw something on the subway during the 80s it involved a knife raw steak two homeless men and a woman's left breast and he still hasn't gotten over that he he has ptsd and we should give him a parade a hero's welcome for for being able to deal with what he saw on the subway there's an entire cottage industry of shrinks life coaches who tell you you're right and the rest of the world is wrong that's america no more grades no more sat's that's not fair to make college applicants take sat's i know the sat's are culturally biased i agree with but no college admissions tests no more grades really life isn't pass fail and i know grades can be devastating to one's development and it's a form of social control i get all that but this idea that nobody gets graded or tested it's creating a generation of americans who are never forced to take stock of themselves part of life is being told you failed and getting back up and convincing yourself that you didn't fail and proving people wrong where is the incentive to do better if you're already special and this is what america is it's who everybody in my life is we're just a bunch of underprivileged overprivileged weaklings who refuse to understand why they can't find the job they want why they don't have the money they want the love they want the country they want because all of us were raised to believe that in america all you have to do is want something bad enough and you'll get it no you have to work for it this whole i want my own television show i want to be rich i want to be happy watch the thief of bagdad happiness has to be earned who cares what you want nobody gets what they want you're not supposed to get what you want want is ignorance you can only want something if you don't know what is required to get that thing you want if you knew but getting what you want requires you would decide it's not worth it life is coming to terms with what you ended up with you end up with a job you end up with a family or a spouse a lover kids a mistress a family a house whatever and you make it work not because you want to but because you have to because life is a series of obligations it's a series of commandments that you obey because obligations are what you owe other people and by fulfilling those obligations by being honest keeping your promises that you make to other people you make other people happy and they want to be around you so you're happy life is a job life is an obligation what are you worth to other people and what do you need what are you entitled to earn and what are you entitled to own and the minute you stop thinking about what you're entitled to own what you're entitled to earn the minute you start worrying about the 99 percent what other people really need to earn to own to live on then you'll stop wasting money gambling drinking smoking pot eating crap and buying something because the pretty woman on tv told you you needed it when you respect money and worry about the people who need money like children our teachers our military families then you'll have all the money you're entitled to as well as the glory and fun you're entitled to as well america you're not entitled to i'm a progressive liberal i believe in medicare for all i believe in universal education if you want to go to school forever it should be free i believe in free food free housing but i also believe americans waste money they waste time they waste food and most importantly they waste people we take people for granted in this country we waste them we just wasted a prisoner in arkansas late last night we just wasted 12 innocent civilians in syria we waste people in america relationships are disposable because you can always find a new one on the internet we don't respect each other we turn our back on each other we compete instead of cooperate because we're not in this together there's no common sacrifice we've been convinced we're entitled to something that we don't have to earn and we couldn't care less about the people who really need our help i'm sickened by everyone i come into contact with you all have untreated mental illness and you refuse to take responsibility for your misery it's always someone else's fault ex-husband's fault your ex-wife's fault it's your mother's fault it's your father's fault isis putin trump my first great teacher knock it off do your job do your job life is a job just do your job coming up my hero phil henry mark thompson joins us you are one of my i don't want to say oldest friends but we've been we've known each other a long time we we have and you are an esteemed broadcaster an award-winning oh that's true an award-winning television and radio personality but not only that you've created and sold some of america's favorite television shows including the bachelor right that is true and that's true who wants to marry a millionaire and you were the voice of fox and abc and and yeah american idols probably my best biggest brand that i was the board so but i hear you i hear you all the time on true tv narrating reality crime shows and you're a busy busy man yeah uh david i'm quite impressed with myself and after that introduction i'm even more impressed with myself and for years you are the weatherman on fox news in la and kfi you host on kfi and do the news on kfi and today's guest is phil henry now i am not as articulate as you all i am is terrified of talking to phil henry and one of the things that occurred to me is we have listeners all over the world who may not know how important phil henry is could you articulate the importance of phil henry please first it astounds me that you have listeners all across the world i'm a regular listener to your show and the length of your show alone discourages me from coming back week after week but somehow i do but i uh i will tell you that your your you get the most terrific guests in your conversations are so awesome i really love your show and today will be no different if you've got phil henry coming up because phil henry to me is one of the true inventive geniuses of the broadcast medium and i know they we use the word genius a lot in these you know this kind of the culture that uh overhypes everything but this guy created a whole universe of uh within the genre within within the universe of radio his own universe of characters of uh of re of different realities and everyone was appreciating it on a different level and here's what i mean by that phil henry came on like a traditional talk show host you'd listen and it sounded like a talk radio show like exist in every market in america and then as he began to bring experts on on different subjects something began to hit he he himself was doing the voice of the various experts that we would have come on and he would even do the voice of callers sometimes so you have him playing the host him playing the voice of the expert and playing the voice of the callers but that's what just that it would be genius and and insane but it was even better because the whole thing played right down the middle to begin and he would start with an expert sounding quite informed on sounding quite uh sane on a subject and then slowly henry geniusly and this really was the art of it he would just tweak it over a little bit so the expert would say something that was like hmm that's an odd thing for someone to say and then he would crank it over a little bit more and you go wait a minute that kind of just say that and by the time you're 20 minutes into an hour you're thinking this is crazy who is this person who he's talking to and other callers are then calling going who are you how can you say these things i mean and henry and his quote guest uh they they and even henry as a host began to reprimand the quote guest and again the guest is henry okay he's playing a character it was absolutely genius and by the way these guests in this world was populated by regular regularly appearing uh members of his sort of cast of crazies so we'd have the the guy who's the the head of his neighborhood watch he'd have the the woman who is uh a community leader and and her husband as they drive to wherever i mean it it all sounded so real uh and and it was that reality and it was the the the creating a texture to all of those recurring characters that i think made phil henry an absolute genius absolutely you cannot overstate the genius of phil henry bobby duly i think was the name of the exactly bobby duly bobby duly was this woman who lived in i don't remember the name of the housing development but i can remember driving with my kids and not telling them what was going on and all bobby duly was saying is she was complaining about a neighbor who wasn't putting the christmas lights up properly and you know he's black but that's okay and you know we i spoke to him about the christmas lights and we went over to his house his wife is black and you know that's okay and it's all that's all he did for about 10 minutes is describe this conflict she he was doing the voice of bobby duly and he just kept planting the stink bomb of you know my neighbors are black but that's okay and within 15 minutes the phones lit up and it was katie bar the door yeah people are calling saying don't you realize you're talking to a racist phil somebody's a racist and they go well that's a that's a big allegation to level um uh and they go what are you talking about a big allegation this woman is an island island island racist and and so uh so you're right i mean and you're right to point to that he gave also his characters usual quirky quality sometimes like one of his characters that might have been bobby duly who uh who as the callers making a point will just sit around the line and go mm-hmm and it becomes this this way of nudging the caller back and to the audience it's a wink wink that's what i also think is genius about bill hendry there are a number of times where the audience who's kept to it is getting the wink wink from hendry but constantly there were new people coming into the mix who had no awareness of the fact that the whole thing was completely phony right and he told the listeners at the end of every hour that these are fake calls that he's doing all the voices as i understood it he was on kfi which is the station you're on and that's a big station in the most listen to talk at the most listen to talk station the most listen to talk station in america is kfi as i understood it he went on kfi and then they would syndicate the show to backwater affiliates to get the callers so you know what would get right well you had all those callers from north carolina or yeah yeah yeah he was on like a five watt station in bump feces idaho and they'd hear this yeah you have people calling in going uh hey phil i'm sorry to interrupt but i don't think i don't think this person's from real man i think they're putting you on and and he would say well you know again that's how can you say something like that i mean they you know i'm you know well phil i just can't believe somebody's like saying some of this kind of stuff so you have a you have people constantly swimming through his pond who had no sense that it was a an alternative reality completely of his creation what would you like me to ask him i know that tim bedore went to the pailey center to watch phil hendry do a live taping of his show and it was sold at this must have been 15 years ago and tim said did you go with tim no i would have loved to go down to that i've only seen him do a show on various profiles that of him like they you know what i mean like a somebody that a news profile of him or something like that how seamlessly he moved from voices it was it was beyond anything you can imagine the way you would listen to him and know well he's doing all these voices how is he doing this and tim said he went to see him at the pailey center and still couldn't figure it out is there anything you'd like me to ask phil hendry well there are a few things that are remarkable about him and one of them is that even if you accept this cool premise which is that i'm going to be the host and i'm going to create these phony experts and i'm going to have them on the line you still have to carry it off as you say seamlessly and the other thing is like a writer you have to come up with this every day on a on a show that's multiple hours so the reservoir of ideas you need has to be pretty deep i was very impressed with that but what i really would be curious about is actually a a question just because i like you you're listening on k5 then i listen to him on the other station that he was on when he was in los angeles and uh and i try to turn everybody i knew on day i feel like i was an early adopter on him you were what i would but what i was curious about is what happened to him why he left one station went to another i mean i guess my question is sort of about the business how can you be as great a genius as phil henry is and not just write your ticket or did he just write his ticket in other words i am curious what happened with him from a career standpoint because it is constantly interesting to me it's like it's in it never ceases to be amazing that people of that genius can write a ticket it would seem to me of whatever they want and i'm always curious what they decide to do and how and what course that career took i know he's done voices for family guy i think he's done voices for the simpsons i'm not sure about that but in other words for other animated fair i know he's done a lot of those voices maybe decided to go in that direction so what he did with that uh that great palette that he had i'd be really curious to know and and what decisions were made and why mm-hmm okay i think apatow i think apatow worked with him on something exactly exactly i mean there you go i also think you know i also think that radio has just become insufferable to anybody who's trying to do something original that's a yeah there's tremendous pressure tremendous pressure in radio to you know right to to to follow a certain course and i don't know i think it's a very um i think it's a brilliant medium because you connect to the audience in a way that you don't and so that's why i love podcasting you know i think that you connect to the audience your audience comes back week after week and um i and that's the hope anyway and then you connect with them in a in a different sort of way there's a comfort level that's radio has that same thing but now i think it's being you know largely ruled by sort of a corporate structure that prevents any kind of real innovation your podcast is the edge the edge it's an edge dash show dot com the edge with mark Thompson yeah it was a bad name we first came up with the name the edge because we were building a different kind of beast it was supposed to be originally a show that was going to show you how you could have the edge and travel and blah blah blah then we abandoned all of that but somehow we kept the name the edge and there are a million podcasts call the edge so it's the worst name but we're stuck with it so it's the edge with mark comps if you look for the edge 300 shows will come up but there's fortunately only one that's the edge of mark domeson and who's on this week uh this week and the show i think drops uh right away this week there is you have to understand our show we i i think it's not so dissimilar from your model that you have great guests uh we have great guests too but sometimes we veer toward things that are just kind of interesting conversations and this week we talk to a guy who gave up a successful criminal law practice come an uber driver in las vegas and you have to hear his story it's really cool so i mean and you might think it's twisted and weird or whatever but how you can let go of a successful world 13 years i think you practice law in in in that world and then gave it all up to go to las vegas to drive for uber uh you have to hear it that's in the middle of a lot of other stuff i also talk about going to see steve martin and martin short who you know uh we talk uh how was that show i hear uh martin short and steve martin do a show together i understand that very few people show up to see it and it's a real honor let me tell you i first of all love steve martin and martin short of course i know you do too and you have written for both and i paid top dollar to sit in the first three rows and i'm and i'm so glad i did and then of course i uh message the only guy i know who has written for both steve martin and martin short who knows them and that's you and i say hey i'm here and it would mean so much just to be able to get like a you know go backstage get a quick 30 second hi marty nice show thank you so much you know this is my girlfriend and i get no traction from you on that nothing on that i said no i said no i said if you if you're backstage as i know they have like a vip thing where you can do a meet and greet i said i said mentioned my name and they'd go oh my how about you mentioned my name is happy backstage i mean i couldn't believe that you i mean i'm thinking oh well david i literally met martin short at the david feldman podcast and he complimented me on a kelsey grammar impression i was doing for a sketch that david had written and i'm thinking oh this is gonna be easy this is a chip shot this is a layup for david and nothing nothing nothing and so i end up cursing you like all your other friends angry that you have let me down at this one moment it's such a little favor thank you for letting me we live the bilis rage i was in so the show was good did you go backstage the show was brilliant the show was brilliant it is funny it's funny it's music and then it's more funny and martin short is he's got that you know grab the mic kind of charisma of a Broadway actor steve martin is sort of a more studied but also brilliant a comedian and performer but and so they make a kind of good uh yin and yang and then steve martin has this grammy or winning award-winning bluegrass uh a group that he is touring with i have their album i'm telling you everything about this show is right for me i already have the steve martin album i like bluegrass music i love martin short and i know the guy who writes material for them and still i couldn't get back today david you're dead to me line up line up for that yeah that uh well and and the show i love you david i love you too i love your podcast i really do i love the edge i i love you thank you and i miss you and i when i get to la i hope to see you and hang out and i miss the sketches we did all the comedy you know somebody's curating all the comedy we did it's unbelievable what we were doing back in LA it's amazing the people who are writing the stuff and performing it and it's all sitting there on my website waiting to be cured well the early people should know the early incarnations of the david feldman show were a lot about sketch comedy and uh i remember just as a listener laughing so hard used to listen in the gym so hard that i had to get off the exercise but i was gonna hurt myself and that's not an exaggeration i mean multiple times so it was genius it was great now i think the show's still rich and terrific it's just gone in a different direction but i i i love enjoy and enjoy your show i mean listening each and every week so i'm a regular listener by the way i have a lot of new listeners they don't know who you are in terms of the you're the voice of the show oh that's right you use my voice let's hear you're listening to the david feldman radio show you sad pathetic hump i can remember the night david feldman radio network i can remember the night you came over my son was there we're in my home office my wife bribed you with veggie vegan ziti that's right because i'm vegan and i have it was delicious yeah and my son and i were watching and you were in my office and you went you're listening to the david feldman radio show you sad pathetic hump and you can we had to do like five takes because we kept laughing at that well first i thought you really want me to say that and you and you're not it yeah yeah and who would know it's still being used 10 years later it's still being used well it wasn't 10 years ago uh we have to maybe we maybe we should come up with a new tag line hey it's working for you go with it yeah all right i love you i miss you i'll see you soon and next time i'm phil henry that's a great thank you and next time you're going to go see steve martin and marty short you should have called me and told me i could have set you up backstage you could have had dinner with them hung out you know you're a you're a you're a total low life that was your moment you'll never have it again that was your moment i love you all right david thank you let me back see you all right bye bye this is the david feldman radio network i'm going to start recording right now and let me ask you how's how's the reception from my end am i clear you sound perfect you sound perfect great so my goal is to have you in my life so i we're rolling by the way let's do it honey okay i want you i need you in my life yeah how can we do this how can we make this happen you know and you know and still not piss off any more relatives all right let me introduce you to my listeners i can't even say i i i can't even believe i'm saying to phil henry let me introduce you to my to my listeners but i have to because we have listeners all over the world and i i want to make a proper introduction and you're going to have to suffer through this sir i apologize you're just going to take it like a man all right well i'm driving for coffee so no yeah all right folks this is heaven for me phil henry is on the show he is one of the most important comedic minds of any generation and here's what you need to do go to phil henry show dot com and sign up for his monthly pass i think it's like eight bucks he'll tell us in a second i'm not sure maybe it's eight bucks a month i'm telling you this is the deal of a lifetime i just signed up for it someone has gone and archived all of phil henry's radio shows i signed up for it last night i can kick myself i didn't know you could do this and i i started listening to some old episodes of the phil henry show last night there are 30 000 hours of phil henry with no commercials this cannot be good this is not good for somebody like me this is i am i have an addictive personality i barely slept last night let me tell you how important phil henry is my son my oldest son is in germany right now he just graduated from college and he is off studying carl marx and speaking german in berlin living the life and we facetimed and he said why are there dark sir he said why do you have dark circles under your eyes i said because phil henry is on the show and i was up all last night listening to his archives and my 23 year old son when i told him that i was about to talk to phil henry i might as well have said to him somebody has combined gnome chomsky and barack obama and i'm about to speak to this mutant of gnome chomsky and barack obama and robin williams he could not believe it and he just graduated from college my kids grew up listening to phil henry in los angeles we timed errands so we could listen to phil henry i have bootleg tapes of phil henry in storage when my wife threw me out of the house i have tapes of phil henry and it turns out i don't need them because i just signed up for the phil henry show dot com and phil how you doing good they are better i guess i already i guess i know how you're doing you're tired you get dark circles you're in trouble here's what i want to do because we've never met and we've never talked i want to gush a little and get people to sign up for phil henry show dot com if you don't mind can we do that that's a beautiful thing i do i would appreciate that very much thank you yeah so i may cover i make i may cover some ground with you that is banal stuff you've already been through and i apologize for it but some people just have no idea how brilliant you are so who curated the 30 000 hours how did you do that well uh most of the people who don't know how brilliant i am are radio executives but anyway i am no actually that stuff came to us in a big lump of material from clear channel um passing the ownership of the material job so what we did then is i had a pretty uh and basically all we had to do was migrate the material from their platform over to ours make sure that in 2000 and 10 years we have gradually we've refined the media gone from mp3s to video as well we've uh had three or four different designs to the website so we've improved as we go one of the things i've learned about websites is it's always constantly you know the technology's changed and then we add to it with uh the current little power-long podcast that i do today which is very different from on the radio show because we're not on the radio anymore so it's just basically a straight character presentation the great thing about your the great thing about your website is you introduce all the characters and you explain where they come from and and how they evolved where bobby duly came from and bell and these voices just they like my son that was a that was an idea that my present uh web guy shane morten had he said let's do pictures of these people because really it's about you and them and let's have them in sort of a carousel of characters and and because they're just as real um so that's how that's how bad that's how bad it's gotten but uh i talked to them off the air so i uh that was a great idea and that's only about a month or so old because the new designer of our site if you became a member of the last night but i think better to say you're entering the website that's only a month old it's so yeah yeah i like it i like the um it's and the other thing is and i don't get too technical but i don't think anybody's tried this before man i don't think anybody has a radio repository or an audio comment comedy repository that's so large i really would say because most radio guys toss a two minute bit in there to say here's our show today and uh you know we we interviewed so-and-so and then the rest of it is just whatever so i thought for a while there we're gonna have to hire somebody like the new york public library to know how to actually move it and uh just a lot of people but we did find some people that do it and so there it is and uh we're always fixing stuff and correcting stuff and you know i had a guy today on twitter hey man i signed up for a bsp what what happened to episode six oh nine rejuvenates your bell gets the shit kicked out of you know so i like what the hell are you talking about man it's the most important thing going so i get on the horn to my web people i go what happened to episode six oh nine the dude can't find oh yeah the clays that the code is wrong man that didn't show up because the code's wrong for the old site the new site we just directed the code to you and i is a technical fix to a listener or to anybody that loves us your work of my work david they they're you you know you're stealing from them so i also well let me tell you about phil henry show dot com because i have these bootleg tapes i have the reverend hooking homosexuals genitalia up to a car car battery oh my god curing homosexuality and i would play this to all my friends over the years and it always held up but i had no idea if your stuff would what the shelf life was it's right funnier now than the first time i heard it i think you're the only radio personality ever in the history of the medium unless you go back to like jack benny because he still holds up your stuff your stuff holds up and i cannot believe that you can go to phil henry show dot com pay i don't know eight bucks i don't know what it is i i don't care it was one of the flight i think it's nine bucks or something like that yeah nine bucks i i cannot believe that for nine bucks a month i have access to 30 000 hours commercial free let me explain to the listeners what you invented how profound it was and why people like jud apatow seth mcfarlin rick overton worship you these people i mean you're you're operating at a level there's there's comedy and then there's phil henry one of the things you you stumbled upon something that is phenomenal you do a regular talk show you sound like a normal human being and then you would have a guest on the show who would be the descendant of plantation owners and he would insist that if we're going to give reparations to african-americans the slave owners the children of the descendants of slave owners are entitled to reparations because of all the lost labor and you would treat us income the lost income and you would but nobody knew other than the listeners on the in the big markets in los angeles we were in on the joke we knew that you were the voice of the descendant of the slave holders but we also knew that your show was being syndicated to backwater towns and that's well you know i gotta i gotta interrupt you there though because the really the people that uh we got that we hooked on the line we're from a lot of them were from la and from uh the bigger cities really you know big cities have all kinds of people yeah and uh i remember i remember sales guy kf5 said to me when i first walked in the end of their sales meeting there he said well you might have been successful in places like minneapolis but and within two weeks you know he gave i proved him wrong because we were not syndicated right away we were um local until 1999 and that's when we became national so these were oh wow yeah all kinds of people and i mean and i'll fix people who were who would openly admit to me david now look i'm a member of mensa so don't even mess i said a quote would start you know i have a degree in psychology and everything so you you know you can just forget your little funny game you know well you're you still want to say to the guy is that right great well you're talking to a made-up voice sir it's not really a psychiatrist from you know which yeah you la any large city is just there's just more of everybody including kind of the dummies including sort of the dummies and and maybe not quite as unsophisticated in terms of of city life and that kind of thing but when it comes to media especially the way we were you it was reaching its penultimate moment at allenberg you know called it the campfire you know america's campfire uh until it had to be that's what we did that but i interrupted you but i wanted to kind of yeah that i was i was always well i had heard somebody told me that lori metcalfe the great actress from steppenwolf and yeah and from roseanne that that she was one of the fake callers early on is that true no no i would say that uh no she was never on the show that way but lori was uh a friend from sort of almost from the minute i got the la she uh uh got in touch with me and and really enjoyed the show and i had good fortune to hang out with her glenn headley was another one who was uh there and um from the eagles from the eagles uh glenn not no glenn headley i'm not talking about that one i'm talking about the redheaded the beautiful redheaded actress who was in dick tracy uh and uh things you get to do and then you know you know glenn headley redhead um and then jeff uh rush shaper you know guys like that oh wow which was a perk you know i didn't i had no idea i mean i i had no idea that that was i grew up in los angeles but i when i came here my whole feeling was this is going to be cool to be on the air in my hometown because i know where things are that was the big perk for me i know where this freeway is and this town is i had no i wasn't prepared for the the hollywood thing um which was born and raised here and i was kind of a i think when it came to that but being being seduced by people who yeah who would say things well you you have done a lot of acting jobs you're in future rama and you've been in movies that jud apatow directed and you're you were in a sitcom you played a a teacher on a sitcom right i see yeah teat and it was called teachers right i've even um but i never really thought about um anything like that until i got here and be realized that the radio world was a very limited thing there was a ceiling that was bumping up against um that had to affiliate the show that sounds like a no they don't want to do that too much work like that they really want to turn key operation and uh kind of like a talk show was really just a comedy show and it and it should have been on its own almost format like personality talk as opposed to a news talk so it was like selling t-shirts it was like selling really good tie dye t-shirts in a Cadillac showroom you know or maybe it's the other way around maybe i was selling Cadillac's that tie dye t-shirt people would come in and say oh wow that's a really cool Cadillac you got there we want to buy one well no because i came in here to get a t-shirt you know so what what happened instead was good people like yourself david and other people found us piecemeal and that's why the website works because now it's a place to go to and say okay here is where we can go and we understand it and is the library of of that act you know and we don't have to sit there and wade through all of the noise of a talk radio station which is pretty daunting you know there are two people who paralyzed me in my car one was howard i would sit and listen to howard but i have grew howard there comes a point when you start getting laid and you you know you go all right all right i'm done with howard hey david david guys do you mind if i order some coffee i would love to hear let's listen we're listening i'm at the starbucks yeah i'm at the starbucks drive in drive through okay and go ahead but when you hear me say something and i want to hear you order coffee this is can i get two cups for vente latte with non-fat milk yes okay thank you that's it thank you all right so to my listeners who have never heard of you and this is really important i'm listening to that wondering is that really the voice of the girl behind the cash register because that's your show that's one of the things you've done is where you trick the listener into thinking that the other voices you hear are real yeah yeah uh yeah that's that's you know i loved radio since the day i was born i think and i really fell in love with it across country trip to canada with my parents to see my cousins and my aunt my uncle my parents moved to california in the late 40s from toronto but during that trip and it seemed like i would be the only one to wake other than my dad as he was driving across the desert he had the radio on and i would hear these stations fade in and fade out i would hear these lone voices providing this amazing entertainment there's music he's talking about the weather he's talking about the city he's in he sounded first was like a nice guy and i thought man i didn't i don't think i thought then i want to do that for a living but i sure as hell thought this is a really cool thing that this guy is doing you know and so i think from that point forward i was always thinking of ways to further manipulate it further manipulate it i mean isn't that what it's about well no matter what our heart is how can we where can we go with it you know until it got to the point where satire i loved humor so much theorize it was the next logical step um not just to do it but to blow it up a little bit thank you just because you look because you love it not because you hate it you love it right although i have to tell you i i don't love talk radio i i i hate talk radio but i don't i don't hate radio mm-hmm well you hate what it's become because i think in this country they're afraid of radio radio is pre-literate radio is the most dangerous thing around it gets in your head and it can convince you to do horrible things in rwanda they couldn't have had the genocide in rwanda with that radio it was wow yeah that they told there was a morning shock shock no uh the generals would get on the radio not the television because they'd get in the head of the hutus and tell them to start massacring the tutsis or whatever they were called i don't mean to be glib oh my god you i had i had no idea and that's why i i mean i realized you know that's why there's so much corporate control in america because of radio because if people are allowed to say what they want to say we could have a real democracy here i was listening to you last night after 9 11 i said let me just see what happened but how he handled 9 11 uh yeah tegg bell who owns the tegg the steakhouse and yeah he that's brilliant yeah and he is a real entrepreneur as you always say he was the one who was the first it was the first i guess to put aluminum foil around a bit right right aluminum foil and also uh i believe he was the first one to have an actual serrated steak knife just butter knife you know i remember i i remember taking my kids to the colburn music school and we're driving you know that's expensive stuff to take your kid to music school and ted bell was on and you ted bell steakhouse was being people were protesting because you didn't want ted bell didn't want handicap people sitting in the front bank it's i don't know if you remember this but you would come in the uh in the uh in the uh what do we call that in a restaurant the uh it's not it yeah but you would you had some kind of thing with the make a wish foundation or disabled people it was a special hour where they could come and eat but then afterwards you threw them out because they were on they were on appetizing and you're trying to move steaks there and people criticize you for we moved that around we did the same thing uh david at a laker game in other words he he had these tickets and and they were right next to jack mickelson and he gave me you know bill i'd like you to you know just bring on i'd like to take a couple of your listeners uh well we have a charity that we were oh yeah okay let's help out of the charity kids and it turned out to be like bald kids with uh you know cat chemotherapy and suddenly ted's like freak freak out he's sitting with bald kids and he's and he's also sitting with bless their little hearts to developmentally disabled kids so some of the kids are not watching the game they're looking up in the air and they're staring at and they take the hotdog out of the bun you know i can't i can't i should let it do it man well they're licking the window and putting the baloney on it and it just doesn't work you know i can't do it man i can't do it and there's nothing worse and you know what when we when we prep that because you you you you learn you learn what the visceral areas are um you know you can talk about things that are topical but you need to also be they have to be visceral they have to be emotional like i can talk about mowing the lawn everybody knows about mowing the lawn but who cares but if i talk about children if i talk about immigrants if i talk about veterans we you know there are areas animals um and it's certainly children that are disabled and then throw in just throw in the fact that you're that you're going back on a promise you made now you know and you just got and you that's you go there because you go how do we pull call i know how we're gonna pull calls we gotta go we gotta go there and i know how to get us there but we have to go there you know um i remember that this is one of the most vivid memories of raising children so colburn school kids in the back seat three kids in the back seat expensive piano lessons dance lessons we're driving down to colburn school and this is going on where ted bell is kicking handicap people out of the stakehouse because you know he's trying to sell steak and people lose their appetite when they see them and i parked the car and the radio and i'm just i have my hands on the steering wheel and nobody's saying anything and you know it's like four o'clock the classes start yeah and it's now yeah you know and daddy and i go now i think we have to hear this and they were like a half hour late for their lessons and we come home and my how are the lessons well there we were late a half hour phil henry and my wife to her credit said yeah well yeah it was like this was more important that my kids hear this it was oh man yeah i you know you bring that up because that's called time spent listening and radio that's a that's like gold when you have people sitting in a car to hear the end of a bit or day to that's that's gold and and in la archmute time in los angeles is somewhere in the neighborhood hour so if you can get a tsl from a radio listener of even 10 minutes a day times five you know so that's almost an hour a week that's an amazing tsl in new york is shorter because people are on subways new york tsl if you can get somebody for five minutes a day and believe it or not the average the listener howard is probably a lot longer than that but average radio listener in new york is probably only hearing their radio for maybe five 10 minutes every two days something like that when you say that to me or any listener says to me i stayed in my car you're like now you give that to a sales guy and he should be able to take that now you crippled us what happened to my what happened to my guys i don't have any idea but you know oh you you you you crippled us i have memories because we were originally from san francisco and we would drive up the 101 and the five and somebody would sit in the front seat frantically searching for phil henry that we would be constantly looking for you and it was all the difference it was all the difference the trip was if we could get you then the trip was okay and if we couldn't find you we were we had to talk to one another it really sucked yeah did you find after 9 11 i was shocked by ted bell and he was complaining about the 300 people dying on 9 11 sometimes it was 30 000 he was getting the numbers wrong the numbers are all wrong the numbers are all wrong he was complaining that because he's rich he should be able to have his limo driver pick up his luggage at the at the carousel it was as sacrilegious as you could get after 9 11 and at the same time harmless what kind of trouble was there or was there any there wasn't any substantial the trouble you get with bits like that is it's tasteless well there's an argument to be made there is it or is it not you know where you're going to get into trouble is if you in danger i did one that i really i regret i had one day our general manager david holcomb on a character that i did saying that he had anthrax because he accidentally sniffed this powder that is funny and it's also not too dangerous because anthrax in the powder is sort of static it's in an envelope it's sitting someplace you have to go to it or find it but i i really messed up a week later i went on and said he had tuberculosis i i bailed on that bit within about 10 minutes because i just i didn't feel right about it because the next day talk about that that's a panic thing and you don't want to do that and that was a mistake so but i would say i would say that was the only one of those that we made you're in a bubble and yet you're not you know i'm a stand-up comic i know how i'm doing if i've crossed a line right by the booze and you know when you're doing radio it's the calls but the calls aren't an accurate barometer of the audience the calls are the lunatics who have the time to actually call you that's exactly right that's exactly right and that's something that you really had to educate the entire business to back when we started doing our because we knew that callers represent only about two percent of the audience or maybe one and then the callers that get through on our show represent it even smaller version of that representative they're there on the stage with me they're performers they're just not aware of it you know the real audience yeah yeah that's like when i was a kid when i was a kid and the real audience was not active either you know when i was a kid my father listened to the radio all the time but i said him one day when i got older and i was in the business i said dad do you ever written a fan letter to a guy what you know why would i do that you know well dad if you oh yeah i'm gonna replace you know sure well that's that's really the typical radio list and they don't really reach out and get some through a commute and not unless we knew the bit itself the material itself was going to reverberate into the larger audience in a negative way one one bit the one thing that happened in la in those days david you might remember there were windows automobile windows getting shattered by rocks from slingshots out on the freeway people were getting their windows shattered from passing cars using slingshots it's only took place over a period of a week it happened at night and i just bit where i had a gangbanger yeah well you know i'm good i'm i'm looking for my merit badge right now in slingshot but later i'll miss you well this little girl calls during the commercial break and my producer says tonight for her work and i want to know if she's okay and i said honey i told her what really what happens happened to her she went from this very serious concerned voice to hysterical laughter within five seconds you know you know uh that but that kind of stuff will bother me and i'll i'll definitely break the fourth wall to let people know but beyond that i don't care like i'll give you an example david where some people invite it they invite the insult do you an example i was talking about a i have a character named harvey wireman he's an old he's an ex marine uh attorney he's sort of based on effley bailey you know he went to jag school the marines made him an attorney now he's a was in seipan and ww2 so don't you make your bullshit you know and he's talking about this billboard this workout billboard i saw this woman she was a piece of ass up there i want to go into this madness a guy calls a guy calls and he wants to blow harvey i don't know what the premise was something that really offended this mom this guy says he says she must have a piece of ass calling it now no way that's you that's you yeah but but when i see the audience instinctively knows it's okay what phil just did there because that guy was asking for it you know he was asking for it in real it gives you a certain satisfaction to my daughter she don't oh well to reduce it down to its essence it's not to be insulting it's kind of like a ventriloquist routine where you're you're indemnified you say these horrible things and then blame your dummies but it's much more sophisticated than that well but you know the thing is the the audience like going to a play the audience will not hold the actor responsible for the horrible things the actor is saying it's the same thing if i was just doing a straight talk show and i was talking like that as you will not probably get fired but because it's coming through a character and everybody knows what it's really you know here or they get the fact well he's making a larger point about this that or something else who knows you know but i always felt that if you had to have a certain a higher level of intelligence to kind of get our show um because of what we were doing mechanically and also what we were doing uh in terms of content it was a real our point of view tended i tend to be a liberal and turned me into one of those non-alive and democratic thing off you know i want to kill everything so i i could use my liberal sensibility to kind of mess with people say things like you know bobby duly's a character you know phil we have our homeowners association these american flags you know these american flags they fuck they violate our homeowners association what do you mean they violate they're too large you know they gotta put smaller flags up there i know that my father has a friend who was at iwo iwo we might or whatever that was and they put a flag iwo g might yeah the first flag they put it but iwo we might remember driving down the 101 with my family and bobby was complaining about these new neighbors they're black but that's okay and that was your refrain threat the entire thing they're black but that's okay exactly exactly yeah you know there's something very psychopathic about that man you don't trust that woman at all you know i had her i had a bit probably one of the more controversial ones but people you know liked it was steve and i're going to europe this summer and we're going to go visit uh ashwit uh yeah it's really interesting have you heard about it yes i have heard about it you know i go bobby you realize that millions of people killed there uh-huh yeah and we're gonna go see that you know there's you know like she she's not quite getting it here man you know if you get talking about and after that we're gonna go to the black forest for a box lunch you know she's like that i always love that kids you know uh david i grew up and bobby is um my mother you know i grew up with sort of a psychopathic mother you know that was my mom she and that whole thing that i did with bobby when people would talk i do this thing uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh i'm saying mom the other thing like that uh-huh uh-huh yeah it's kind of like your mother well you're telling her that you just not won the nobel prize she's looking to see if your pants are right you know and if you got the right socks on and shoes are right all this shit the great yeah that that's that that's my mom the great thing that i as i was listening to you last night when i should have been sleeping it's music there is music there is the slow build it's symphonic and you know exactly where you are on the clock when you want you know when to accelerate it near the end you have to get people angry and screaming and it is it's it really is you're a maestro because you begin to provoke and say things and get the people really angry to the point where it completely breaks down where people are screaming at each other and it is the worst and it's bizarre and get bizarre too the guy out you know the next thing you know the guy's talking about traveling extra dimensionally or something you know where where are you talking about now uh this guy chasing i've got korean war veteran character i do them well he bona fide i'll tell you something and he had another another veteran called up hey buddy how you doing yeah i'm fine some guy in dc you know what you know we used to do to a guy and they're talking about a third person there another character i'm doing we used to take a guy like that we didn't do that man that you know that's now uh oh come on sure you did i don't want to that's an area yeah the the i guess this is an unfair question because i don't want to peel back the curtain too much how much preparation and how much of a staff do you have do you talk it out with anybody how much of this is an unfair question but well i mean look the curtain's been peeled back for many years and i'm gonna be very honest with you people sometimes then we must have a lot of people and actually no i worked with a producer writer for a few years and i had some really good ones but i found that i am better at it i'm better at knowing exactly what the topic is i know exactly how i want to write it i don't i never did to have and i had some good ones but i never had one that was quite as as i was so i wound up really with a bare staff i it was me and i also produced engineer and we had a phone screener toward the end when we had that thing pumping on all cylinders and i would say 2005 was the year it was really smoking that's what we had and it worked great i know exactly you know everything kind of came together and know exactly what kind of topics you know one of the big mistakes we make and talk radio is you grab newspaper and you look at the headline the only reason why they have a headline there man is because they have to have a headline there may be nothing going on but they gotta put up some stupid thing like water bond issue passes wow everybody's talking about the water bond issue then huh no nobody gives a shit man but they gotta put something there um so you gotta that's that those are the days when you're gonna kind of sit there and and almost what's the country talk about talking about i was driving to work one night it was late january four o'clock in the afternoon nothing going on man i think the superbowl had already been played it was that dead time of year and i just sat in my car for a few minutes before i went inside i said it came to me people are talking about their jobs right now they're talking about their jobs how much they hate them how much they drive and work and that's i went upstairs with that as a colonel of what i was going to do on the show and it was a great hour i don't i forget what we did with it but if you look at the headline that day it probably would have been some bullshit about who knows what man some bill that congress was passing or something the president you know threw up uh maybe maybe bush choked on a fucking carrot or something i don't know but and in terms of in terms of prep work you if you don't mind my asking you is it conceivable some of these shows you just show up at the studio and are totally unprepared with just the germany no no uh uh that that can happen um but a couple of things have to be happening to make that happen on the air w cco in minneapolis i went up i went downstairs for a cigarette it was the last news break of the night it's one o'clock in the morning i get off the air too so i got an hour and i don't like what i got planned and all of a sudden popped into my head maybe it was something we've been talking about uh unrelated during the hour something popped into my head and in that five-minute period i formulated exactly what the opening reckoned me up and that here's that i did that show on radio to be two or three times so you have to you've got to work you know um like everything else in this world you have to uh this was a day you remember just that did tracking in gary owens laughing yes of course yeah yeah gary used to say gary used to say for every hour you're on the air that's how many hours you should prep so if you do a three hour show you should prep for three hours and i did that religiously for many years after all it was gary owens i found out that well that worked for gary owens yeah it didn't work for phil henry because i would spend three hours worrying about shit man and we used to do that you know how do i find that uh how how do you know if you if the show is good or bad how do you measure your the quality i have this i if i'm entertained i have to route they all just kind of one after the other i'm sure that we had hours and even whole shows um toward the end of my run on live radio where i had a whole lot of people that kind of knew who i was and kind of got what this thing was but maybe i was being serious maybe i wasn't so they're very cautious it wasn't as freewheeling as it could be and so i you know i would sense that it's very funny even though you know it seemed like it maybe was working um i have to laugh if i'm cracking myself up and i don't mean that to say gee aren't i a genius if i'm laughing then i gotta say well by god i i must have hit that the i must have hit the bullseye tonight because i don't know where and when did you find that confidence the confidence to to laugh to know that it was good if i left that is that you're the final judge jury and executioner oh yeah after i would say you know uh david i spent 17 years as a disc jockey kind of morning show host kind of a guy and you know those shows you know you're you're going in and you're doing you're trying to be funny and you even have a joke service and you and then you sit down with the program director it tells you how much you suck that morning and you go home and you're just you're wondering why am i doing it and your entire life is based on does the boss like me does the boss like me and if you get fired enough times and in radio we that's what we say you know there's people that two kinds of people either the ones that get fired or the ones that um haven't been fired yet but you get fired enough times and you either do one of two things you get your ship together and figure out how to really do this thing or you get out of the business and do something else you know and i fortunately i was the former i said well no wait just a second here man i like doing this and i know i'm good at it what what i'm just gonna i'm gonna take the governor off and i'm not going to edit as much and i'm just going to go for it man no matter what happens and that's when you say care who laughs i don't care if i get a big audience or a little audience if i'm speaking my truth and you know if i'm if i'm if i'm doing exactly what i've always wanted to do and then i'm then i'm a success you know i mean i heard an interview with ryan denny he was an actor driving a cab in new york he said i was making fifty dollars a week driving a cab and i was doing this equity waiver theater and i thought i was a success they said why it's just because i was i was happy i i i couldn't have been more happy he wasn't a movie star he wasn't even a big theater star he was making 50 bucks a week and and uh working for free and equity waiver you gotta really dig it you gotta enjoy it uh it's just you know like and if i shake my head some days and i go god damn it man why haven't i won a marconi award you know uh say it's because these want to be like uh dr frankensteiner there's just a whole lot of other considerations out there that aren't quite making it down to my level yet but uh i know i'm doing good stuff and i have good guys like you and lori and whoever i've met through the years but i think are funnier than hell and the biggest award that i could get would be a guy like you david calling me up and saying we'd be on my podcast or john apetow saying you want to be in a in my movie or i mean that's that i i could never in my wildest dreams have thought that that well you are operating and you've been very generous with your time and i know you have to get your show ready i wanted to ask you two more questions about intellectual stamina because you have stamina i'm always curious where you get that stamina from how you're able to do it day in day out without burning out oh well you gotta make a living you know um it's as simple as that you know and now i own i now i own a business you know so if i was just working for a radio station i'd probably quit take a month off go here go there maybe something like that but i own this business now and keep the dollars coming in and you know that's like i always use dear people who own rest stronts you know you're there you're mopping the floor and you're cooking the food and you're doing everything well it's true and um with this little business that we have we have not only the show has to be produced but we have to make sure that technically we're right we do fulfillment we sell merchandise we are in touch with our advertisers we are in touch with our subscribers we're you know it is never a minute of the day that i'm not thinking about my my on a cruise this week i would love to be with her but i can't do it you know so right well i think it's just you gotta do it look you have kids man you don't say well how do you do it david i got kids i gotta take care of you know i got a family i gotta take care of you know so you find a way let me tell my listeners that they have to go to philhandryshow.com and sign up eight nine bucks a month 30 000 hours have been archived i promise you you will end up quitting your job leaving your wife sitting in your car immobile you'll be paralyzed by this man's genius you know david letterman said of robin williams when robin came on the scene in los angeles all the comics realized that there was robin williams and then this other type of comedy that people were doing that the rest of us were on the ground and robin was in the stratosphere and then robin would go off and do movies and then the you know the comics could pretend they were funny and then robin would return to remind the comics that yes we're just mere mortals the same holds true for philhandry this is true and i hope my listeners will go sign up for philhandryshow.com and start listening to this you're operating at a completely different level of comedy and i started listening to you last night the archives and i you know my bootlegs of you hold up i because i've listened you know i play them for people but the stuff i was listening to last night funnier the second time it not only does it hold up not only does it hold up it's at another level of artistry and thank god that they have been archived and curated you've done whoever did that for you has done such an amazing job to go through the years and they tell you who the characters are and what the premise is and i'm pretty much gonna go get off the phone with you and go listen to some more to some more stuff this has been this is an honor and a little terrifying you must know though that anybody who does comedy in los angeles knows what you are right you you must know that i really i well i got a lot of friends i've made a lot of friends in the stand-up comedy business jennifer coolidge who i think is hysterically funny and i met her one day at a napoleon dynamite voice session she was the playing character and she walked in she looked at me she goes oh you're the guy they all think is funny huh and so there's that i get that reaction right now again fortunately generally the women now i wouldn't say that it helped because i was doing once a month if i'd known you david i would have uh would have asked you but i was doing once a month of uh so hungry and friends over the hollywood improv and fortunately i could call up about four people and and say would you please we come up on stage with me and they would and uh i doubt what you guys do i cannot do i wish i could i can't i can't write jokes i can't stand there my timing sucks the audience gets to me too much uh i can i can stand in front of a camera i could go on stage into a play but stand-up comedy uh takes so much courage and i'm not just saying that that uh after the year was up doing that at the hollywood improv and i said you want to you want to do some more i said i can't i i don't think so because i don't think i'm any good at it well it's it's it's it's it's it's not even stand-up for the most part is just this rigidity this repeating the same bits over and over and honing them your mind is what you're working so fast and you're so prolific you why would you bother with stand-up comedy your mind is so anyway i can't even begin to thank you for the joy that you brought my family and continue to bring my family and my listeners go to phil henry show dot com watch his live show that he does every day and go through those archives you will no commercials you will be you won't be able to move you'll be crippled thank you so much phil phil henry thank you so much thank you david thank you brother what's great great time thank you bruce smirnoff joins us from delray beach florida hello mr smirnoff david it's been a long time hasn't it it's been about eight years something like that yeah we were we last saw each other in las vegas todd glass was opening for david spade and then we all up with obby leberman we all went up into the todd suite and we left our asses off with my son my young son was with us that's right oh and i kept asking is it okay for me to swear or you know why that's right and you said it was okay that's right how about this show is it okay to do we keep this g rated or was the length let's keep it g okay let's keep it g ready that was one of that goes to show i gotta go that's it that was one of the happiest days of my life i was i yes and i i concur because i had moved to florida in o3 and i love living here and but what i miss the most about los angeles are the show business people because it's a laughathon at any moment and here it's anything but most of the people here even people my age i'm 60 now but and i have friends that are like 55 to 65 they're all on prozac they i i don't know if you're listeners no well when you're on prozac i'm not but evidently your lows aren't so low but your highs aren't so high so i'm around these people like you're a comic and you know and you know when you're funny and i know when i'm funny and yet when i'm with all my friends down here it's just like you know it's just like that i see things the funniest things in the world and they just stare at me it's not and they like me because they think i'm funny but they just don't laugh because of the medication so that's unfortunately a lot of people down here like the very few people laugh like you and i and all the you know all the comics when we're together in a room you are still working as a stand-up you're still doing cruise ships it's amazing here i'll give you a litany in los angeles i left in o one early o one because i had really exhausted everything i did that one man show that we'll talk about a little later i almost got something to happen on one of the networks and then they just said it ain't happening and then i figured i would i saved money to make what's called a digital i was going to make a digital film digital film was just like burgeoning then so i went to school to learn it digital filmmaking and i got the money to make it wrote the script and then larry david's show came out and of course it was so close and and larry david's show is you know one of the greatest things ever and once i saw that and then they renewed it didn't he get renewed i think for like eight years after like the first episode and i just said that's it i mean you know it's like they've been trying to send me a message and message has been received took 23 years to get the antenna up and the message yes i have interpreted it and i'll be leaving on the next train and that was it so i went to need for like two years and went to brooklyn i was living in brooklyn i went to bayridge brooklyn do you know that i know of it it's like mafia vill and i went there because i was friends with richard jenny and his family and they lived in they live in a nice area of bayridge and they showed me the area it was very safe it wasn't in that artsy fartsy area which is now you know 12 years later you can't even buy anything for a trillion dollars you know we're all the yuppies have moved all the hip kids in near the actually the hasidic area and williamsburg and um that section of brooklyn so i was i was living in like mafia usa and it was great because i didn't have to lock you didn't have to lock your doors this is no one is going to come near you i was walking to the bus stop one day because you take mass transit and my neighbor's kid who i didn't know he but i saw him come out of like a couple of buildings down he must have been really high and he oh that's right he had a um he was walking to the bus and he rolled his sock down and he had a juicy fruit gum thing and in the juicy fruit gum thing was a joint and he pulled out the joint to smoke it but was but what was also in the juicy fruit thing was a rolled up $100 bill and it was 50 feet behind him and i picked up the $100 bill and i'm going i'm in i got a hundred dollars this kid's so high i got a hundred dollars and i go what if somebody saw me i'm in mafia this is like this is cement shoes this is no fooling around this is these are the real people and i ran and and i played this all out in my head and i ran after this like idiot 13 year old kid and i went you drop this like you know like you know call the mafia on the phone and go don't kill him you know he's got a pass he's okay for like a month right so that's where i was living and i was living you know like do you remember i was living on Beverly and Weatherly which is basically Beverly Hills and i moved to like Brooklyn and i would go i was so happy to be in New York and i'd go into shop owners and go hi i'm your new neighbor and they're like yeah well well you move here from i go i moved here from Beverly Hills California and then they would just have this look on their face like are you out of your blanket my you stupid i love it in Brooklyn and they no one would talk to me because i was walking around with like this giant smile on my face just to be away from Los Angeles so i go to the gym and uh i work out like in the afternoons and there's all these like 20 year olds 20 somethings at the gym and they're all you know just like out of the movies tough guys the whole thing and i walk up and go hi can i work in get away i'll kick your ass get away i'm sorry i'm sorry so wherever i went i was like i was like a pinball you know just bouncing off the bumpers wherever i i didn't fit in so one night i'm on a danger fields and i look in the front row and all those knuckleheads from the gym are in front row and i'm killing and their mouths are touching the floor you know and i'm brought on stage is one of Andrew Dice Clay's opening i opened for him like about i don't know two weeks but i i'm allowed to wear that moniker and these guys from that day on i would go to the gym they cleared people away what does he want he wants to do bench get off the bench he's going on he's from Dice he knows Dice he's getting on the bench and so it was just crazy but and uh i left because i really couldn't hand i took a couple of winters and i couldn't handle it so and the other thing was i did move to new york to wash show business out of my system not to wash stand up but to wash that gotta make it gotta make it who's who can i call where can i go who's gonna see me who can i network because i was addicted like everyone is like you have to be to be in this business and i just felt that was an ugly side of me and i just wanted to put it away and i was able to put it to rest in new york i was getting one nighters i was really in at the comedy clubs god bless lucian do you remember lucian from the comics of course of course it was so nice to me he welcomed me with open arms i you know it was just like being on at the comedy store and the laugh actor i left there on you know prime time great spots and i went to new york prime time great spots at two or three clubs there and the one nighters but then that last comic standing show started and jay is like my buddy jay's done so many wonderful things for me and nobody called me to audition for it and i caught myself so much more he was the host yeah the first year producer and i'm like jay didn't call me i'm not getting no one's calling me from there and i caught myself with that old hollywood feeling go why why not me why is it this guy why isn't it me why isn't it me i should be it should be and it's ugly and i really passed that you know i mean it was like i was like 46 years old as all these guys will tell you there comes a day where if you're not going to break through you got to wash this out of your hair so to get back at myself i moved to florida also because of the weather i mean i needed one other pushing thing so i moved down to get back to yourself not back at yourself uh okay either way no i did it as a punishment but yes you could say to get back to myself i wanted to wash this out of my system so i came down here and i wanted i i wanted to go into business i was left a very nice inheritance i'm very very lucky to my parents but i wanted to like learn about a business and get involved i want to do like a coin operated laundry i want to go into business with you well i'm a comedian i want to no one would you know and i've got the capital let's open up a coin opera let's open up a yogurt no one no one wanted to get involved with me and now meanwhile i'm here and i've been here before like in the late 90s early 2000s opening for stars at these condos which are huge here and so once these agents knew that i was here they started throwing me gigs and that's not a problem um that was great because the gigs pay a lot down here compared to what they pay in new york and of course what they pay in la which is pretty much nothing and i had to readjust my act because i had dirty material and i had like sick jokes like you have to have when you're on in contemporary comedy club but you know these are like like your grandparents your parents and or your grandparents you're saying that you can't tell sick jokes to an audience that's the audience is already sick so there's no they're sick physically but you can't tell sick mentally jokes right you know and like i had the joke you know my grandmother had lu garrick's disease and alzheimer's disease she swore she had a hundred home runs but she never remembered when and you know i shouldn't do that joke because grandma's no longer with us we traded her to cleveland you know you can't do it because like one third of these people either have it or gonna get it the husband's got it the wife's got it and they'll you lose the audience and the audiences are home what's the word homogeneous means the exact same right yes hetero means different so the audiences here are heterogeneous it's all jews they're all from northeast many are all from brooklyn so it's not a good scientific uh cross section but it is what it is it's phenomenal so they all react exactly the same to a joke so if you do a joke they don't like to go can you hear that that noise you know making that sound and they and and like it sounds like crickets you can get a whole room so you have to learn and i so i i learned and it took me about three years from o three to o six to get really good and in the meantime most of the comedians down here were men there were guys if you get some of these books about the old time miami guys guys it never broke through but were really funny and there was a big circuit here sammy shore for example was a big miami act in the sixties and seventies he then broke through with elvis and then with the comedy store he never had to come back here but there are guys like that and these guys were all now in their eighties and i was like 45 46 years old so i was getting all their work and i was doing great and i then segwayed on to cruise ships which i don't do the mass market ones because i had to become such a fuddy duddy on stage with clean and and not doing offensive humor that now i'm really like a comedian for senior citizens and there are these lines these luxury cruise lines that are just that they're very elderly people very wealthy very upscale and so in a nutshell i'm sorry to be so i have some questions about this but but in a nutshell i went from trying to get out of show business and to open like a coin operated laundry or a yogurt stand now i make more money than i've ever made in my life i can work like i i can work probably about 20 plus years excuse me 20 plus weeks on these ships which is another thing you'll drive you insane but yes you can i think osama bin laden must have worked on a cruise ship for he was because if you see that picture of him from 1972 with his family they're all hit in front of that vokes wagon van he's wearing like psychedelic clothing they may have sent him on like carnival and then the rest is history right could have happened but can i ask you a couple questions about this i'm gonna finish though i want to finish and then i do the condominiums down here and they so it's this amazing career that i've come like a big shot down here but nobody knows it that's it all right ask me your question there is a condo circuit yes there is in florida and as i understand it they have showrooms that a lot of elderly people retire to florida and one of the selling points is the condo has a state-of-the-art auditorium for lectures and shows and is that how it works down there 100 correct they have again this goes to that homogeneous thing these are predominantly jewish now over the years there's there's italian americans some irish americans and some people of just the other that are moving into these condos but when they were set up in the in the late 60s mid 70s it was strictly a lot of them were union people like teachers unions they all went into one development so it was so it was so exact and as you know jews love live entertainment other than other ethnic groups way more so and it goes back to living in the stettles in the pale of settlement in the 1800s where you lived away from all the other people and you had to entertain yourself and a guy would get up with a fiddle hence fiddler on the roof and someone would get up and sing and someone would get up and tell stories funny humor stories or do like imitations of you know people in the town or in the village and hence the stand-up comedian this is what i've read and been told i i'm not a hundred percent on this but this makes a lot of sense so it was in the jewish culture and it carried on of course through the cat skills and vaudeville and the whole deal so yes but there was also the italian alps right they yes first started there yeah yeah but i'm saying with jews it might be 90 percent their love of of of entertainment but when you then when you it drops off to the other ethnics i'd say the italians are way up there but not as not as much as you see the jews don't drink so they compensate the not drinking with the entertainment and that's why you're laughing this is what i've had to learn like a country club take country club x in new jersey you know 25 miles from new york like edge what i think it's called that whatever a big jewish country club that will call that x and then we'll have y which is the non- jewish country club y never has shows x has like 10 shows a year now why is that because people who join a country club have what's called a minimum you've got to pay two thousand dollars out of pocket every year to eat in the restaurant or to drink in the you know in the restaurant at the country club the non- jewish people have no problem meeting their minimums because they drink so their drinks are expensive they drink drink drink drink and the next thing you know the minimum is done a jew doesn't drink so a jew goes and goes i'm on a diet i'll just have soup and they start to hold nonsense and by the end of the year they still owe $1995 so they go this is a predicament because i got to give money for nothing so then they call agent q agent q puts a show into into country club x and they eat up their food minimum and then what happens is a jewish person calls up people that their friends with it don't belong to the country club because they got to burn off the the thing so come to our show you'll come as my guests and you'll take me to your place so you'll take me out to dinner in reciprocity and this is how it happens it's all done to burn off food minimums and the gentiles meanwhile go you know not only have i spent my two thousand dollars i spent an extra thousand and they're just as happy they're happier than the jews but this is what goes on it's a funny bit i just made it up with i guess attachments to jack mason and every other jewish comedian in my my ahead of me but yes that's what goes on down there it's a madhouse it's a madhouse the part of it the condo circuit it's show business it's real show business it's it's it's ending as we speak when i came here in 03 all i heard and i had a zillion gigs all i heard was ah you should have been here 30 years ago when you know blah blah blah well i wasn't i heard stories about it it was amazing and now it is it is like this development that i live in i live in over 55 community we've had a lot of vacancies here i guess the past two years and everyone that's moved in is not jewish and now they're you know now they're starting to i'd say about 30 30 of these people in a community of 250 are saying why do we spend why do we have this entertainment budget i see that we're having comedians and we're having they're from another culture and they just don't understand why they have to pay you know their maintenance their monthly maintenance why a segment of that goes for entertainment so more and more this may filter out you know they will then maybe they'll have two shows a year as opposed to seven you know to my listeners what florida is to new york because we have people hearing this show all over the world what is the new york metropolitan area connection to florida well first the connection of florida period is that there's no state income tax um real estate is very reasonable and you know it's a tropical climate once you hit south florida so it's really less traffic than congested parts of the country it's a great place to live and you've got millions of miles of beaches down here there's a lot a lot of pluses if you like to work out all that stuff so originally before air conditioning it was not that desirable but of course we're talking probably about 50 plus years of air conditioning now it's a great haven and of course people from new york uh have predominantly moved to south florida areas because again jews are clanish people new yorkers uh not you know non-jewish new yorkers are clanish people so there's pockets down here where italian americans live en masse like a pompano beach florida which is near fort lauderdale and of course palm beach florida where you know the country club waspy crowd goes there so everyone has found their little pockets down here but of course you know new york congestion traffic it has a lot of the elements that as you get older you just have that i can't deal with this anymore attitude you want a different way of life plus you don't want to shovel snow or get stuck in inclement weather so hence uh people coming here now you've got other areas of florida the west coast of florida you have people from the midwest ohio and michigan and you know again urban areas where they don't want to fight the fight the fight anymore as you get older a man loses his testosterone and you know enough of the banging your head against the wall and florida is a great retirement committee like i said cheap real estate and no state income tax so and you you could work all the time no i only can work interesting here for any comedians or show business people listening you the season as it is is only you know for the shows about december 21st to march 15th let's say and then a good three quarters of the new yorkers that live here go back east they go back home excuse me go back north and uh and then so the shows all end so there are some places that do very low budget shows during the summer but it's few and far between so it's a very intense thing in south florida during the winter you have some of the best shows in the united states i say it goes toe to toe with las vegas you can have clean homes you have tony orlando uh people who are names but were names a long time ago but still fantastic entertainer steve salomon who's got a current one manager the comedy that goes on down here rivals las vegas however the weird thing david is that every community here is private so no one who lives in the public you know lives like in just in a condo on the beach can ever see any of these shows because they are not a member of the country club or not a member of the condo gated community so that's the that's the um the irony it would so much entertainment in the winter but no one can see it unless they live in that particular community and how many people in the showroom some of the showrooms are 300 to 1100 wow they are some some of the theaters are so phenomenal i'll give you a case in point to some of the grand at like a century villages four century villages and they have uh they have entertainment or there's three century villages i'm blanking for a second but anyway they have stages that if you just dropped bruce springstein or frank sanatra onto the stage they wouldn't know where they were and they'd go hey this place is great that's how incredible they are and everybody in the audience is over the age of century village they can be um they can be uh they can be in their 90s they can be 95 there's a place down here called forest trace and my dear friend um jenny grossinger eddus she's the dog excuse me not jenny elaine eddus who is the daughter of jenny grossinger she was on the board of this forest trace getting the entertainment and letting the grossingers was grossingers was numero uno uh hotel in the catskill mountains during the heyday which would have been the late 40s through the 50s into the 60s into the 70s and produced some of the great i mean i wish i had the pr here i mean that you know the entertain everyone who was anyone the greatest of the greatest you know had their feet even woody allen when you read or read his interviews he would go to these hotels on summer staff and they would do a show because the audience was different or some of the audience was the same all summer they had to produce a show using all the staff the waiters and everything and woody allen would write a 25 minute show or longer every week then he would direct it they would have rehearsals all while these kids who were there were waiters lifeguards you know tennis instructors they all lived for the night to rehearse these shows and then they would perform these shows on saturday and that was that's what gave him you know all that how he was so profan mel brooks did this too this is why these people were grossingers like your granddaughter eddus no elaine eddus is the daughter of jenny grossinger and jenny grossinger i believe is the that was the you know they would probably that her mom was probably born let's say 19 oh something or other and then elaine came along is married to a doctor i believe so yes is he a psychiatrist well he's passed away but i believe so i believe your psychiatrist you can still practice no i think he passed away as i'm saying if you're a dead psychiatrist you can go a couple of years oh i i get yeah i guess as long as he is long as the clock the alarm goes at 50 minutes yes you know when to get rid of the patient and she actually lives down here she's such a sweet woman i wish i had known her all those years prior but i was not a cat skill comedian but yes um this show elaine eddus was booking the entertainment from a place called forest trace now forest trace we were talking about ages forest trace i had people in their late 90s and into their hundreds it wasn't what's called assisted living but it was just on the cusp of these were people who were still lucid enough and but were not living in assisted living and i and i i asked who's married the longest how many years do you think some of these people were married in the audience well it's a trick question and the answer is like three and four because these were people who all outlived their spouses there were no one that came there together and they had children i was talking to a 102 year old man who had an 83 year old daughter living in central village i'm going oh my god oh my god what is it come to where have i gone in life this is what am i being punished i know what i'm being punished why i'm being punished for everything but and they nod off you know half the room just goes down like a like a robot when you take pull the plug out and the other side comes up and then that side goes down it's like a wave and the other side do you plug the robot back into the wall and nothing gets accomplished you just i mean that as good as i am nothing gets accomplished there it's just you know it's nothing's accomplished well how do you measure a laugh you can't there see there are exceptions and i'm just giving you know i'm giving you the extreme of what it's like down here but no these condos i kill i kill i kill them i look at people i insult them i see them these things to them because they love they love me they know me and i'm like they're i'm like a pet you what's the word impetuous i'm like their impetuous kid i'm like eddie haskell they can't wait for me to say something really mean because they know it's almost a god bless him almost at a rickles level you know but but i i mean i'm not not as violent of things that i say but like you know but but but insulting nonetheless yes so it's i've got this little thing carved down another comic you know sarge you know who he is no he's a black guy who was adopted by like right out of the womb by jews so he's a jew you got to look him up he's very interesting he was in l.a didn't really accomplish much in l.a but he found his niche wait a second wait a second hang on for one second yeah okay as i understand the cat skills this is what my father's friends used to tell me right the the showstopper at grossingers was the african-american who came out and sang my yiddish mama probably but i know johnny yoon used to do that you remember him the korean guy so he used to do my yiddish mama and they say they fall down they fall down they think it's the funniest thing in the world they love it to hear somebody who isn't white singing my yiddish shamama so this you know what's funny down here at these condos is they have a the other type of ethnicity that works really well here are italian-americans because like sal richards is great and and he's he's comic and he sings and they love italian singers and they're angry angry so they love the pat cooper i call i call these comics i call them the huff and puffers because if you wrote down what they're saying as a writer and you're such a phenomenal writer you would not see anything intrinsically funny you just see and my wife that fat she's my kid he's another one that stupid moron a mother and i go where i'm not finding anything funny here but they go ring and they huff and they puff and the next thing you know the audience is splitting their sides i'm going i don't see the joke i see the audience bending over i see you know i see i see comedy on the script i see it on the page and i when i hear the huff and puffers i'm so jealous of them because they're not i sit over a joke i don't tell a joke for nine years until i think it's right and then it bombs and it's no good it was never good to begin with but these huff and puffs and i go to mcdonald's screaming i'm going where's that funny who's that idiot who's let me write it down who's that idiot that is music it's music you're paying it's essence of the lyrics and the audience is you know it's like it's like robber kline i he's my idol he's every one of these are generation idol and if i i meet him i've met him twice he's not the nicest guy in the world i gotta be honest with you i can't say i've had a nice time meeting him i've met a lot meaning but but i want to corner him and go here's the conundrum robber we all started because we idolized you but you're a false idol because there's nothing to copy you can't be he can't be copied he's like he was an actor who was able to do stand up who's a singer who's can write he has every tool you know in baseball there's a you know the tool player he's in 80 80 is the high high end of the graph he's a five tool comedian he can write he can sing he can act he can um he can uh he doesn't do traditional punchline he's amazing so all these comics like myself and all these other guys that are way inferior that he'll ever we watched that and went oh i can do this and you know what no i can't i'm doing this 43 years i can't do it he's one of a kind and yet he started all of us so it was this false thing because you can't be like him if i watched the guys on ed sullivan i used to watch those guys and go add their corny and i never wanted to be like them well that's what i became i want run to the mill funny but cornball and if i had known that this is what i would have my value early on i sh i wouldn't have done this you remember there's guys like eric gold you remember eric old you know he is a huge producer he started like as a comic and he became an agent and then he became this gigantic you know jim carrey the wayans brothers him and jimmy miller's uh jerry denis miller's brother jimmy so these guys recognized whatever they recognized and and you know they're so wealthy now i don't even know if they exist they're on another dimension right right so yeah so i don't know where we go we go off on this i'm just curious one final question about the condo circuit yeah sure it's only three or four months a year that's it yeah and then what do the old people do with that auditorium well they don't do anything you know i mean they have lectures they really don't they show movies in it um it's not that it's not used but it's not it's it they can't regenerate money so they're not going to have a show they may have a low budget show like i said maybe at century village they'll have one low budget show a week which is you know like a singer comes out and plays to tracks and it's a very good singer but there's no band so that is affordable or i'd like to say a comedian but there are no comedians that can tackle these audiences anymore and uh so and and and you have to be really good to even begin to tackle them so an inferior comedian doesn't even exist anymore so it's really like someone will come out and sing or someone will play the piano and you know and the audiences are only like a third filled because so many people go up north uh for the winter well you're in delray beach florida how far is that from miami 30 about 38 miles from miami so i would assume there's a community of comics that hangs out at wolfies is there a deli oh no that all closed and the community of comedians there are there's the jerry grant who was an agent here in 1950 and jerry is still around he's i think he's 88 years old and they have this called the lunch bunch and the guy's like vick arnell of that era vick is younger dick capri do you know that name just a single prie was the first night i did comedy dick capri it was still at the end of fields it looks great uh funny funny funny nice nice nice man uh freddy roman is here and uh this guy stewie stone who i don't know he just moved down here i know from the friars in new york but the and lani shore who's a jewish comedian but grew up in north carolina and toured with kenny rogers and dolly parton so he went another way uh with you know with his comedy and he lives down here and occasionally they get together um and yeah and will shriner is down here and will hangs out in richie minervini from the east side comedy club and he now books the borgauda he lives down here and uh sarge like i said lives down here and of course everybody's favorite peter fogle that's one mile from me i can't get away from him is it peter fogle did peter fogle did he get a degree in history is he a professor no okay i'm thinking i'm thinking of somebody else all right so for those of you who don't know who bruce murnoff is everybody in comedy especially in l.a. loves bruce murnoff oh thank you they do and they think you're the funniest guy in the world and you have had every opportunity i did i did i did i had a lot of opportunities every opportunity to hit it big because the you did the minute the minute you came on the scene yeah you were iconic people knew who you were what you were because of the way you look the way you talk your rhythms you are a naturally funny human being but i didn't have that at first here's the problem and my my my work ethic was terrible and uh any comedians who listen to the show it's all about work look at jerry seinfeld this is a man who is a robot he just whether whether he produces anything or not he sits and he writes for hours a day and a work ethic like you cannot believe and i believe he has a very marvelous career to show from it however me gifted naturally funny guy can crack up a dead body but i was too busy chasing women maybe smoking a little pot and doing everything but doing the work and uh expecting everything and interestingly i moved to la i wasn't good when i moved to la i was too too premature i went there because i had stars in my eyes with no nothing to show for it but because i had such a great look everybody came in to see me and i stunk and everyone pronounced me ice cold and when you get pronounced bad and ice cold in los angeles it may take you know eight or nine hundred years to get to come full circle and i just don't have that much time so uh yes i wrote that show that what was the now let me let me one of one of the happiest nights of my life was in las vegas with my son and todd glass and avi and hanging out with you uh after the show and another happiest night of my life was taking my father to see your one-man show about 20 years ago there was this phenomenon of comedians doing one-man shows yes rick reynolds rod becker jackie mason had maybe one of the best ones and that woman it's pat i can't i'm blanking on her name yeah she had one uh yes and you had everybody and his mother and you had a one-man show right about all my failures yes all your failures how you and my failures i i went my whole career you know going on the road and telling comics at a dunk and doughnuts or wherever we were about these terrible things that happened to me and i never knew they were gross stories meaning that heavy duty of an amazing story because i was just led to believe from all my teachers in acting school and everything they tell you you're going to have failure so i just assumed that my failures were just run-of-the-mill failures but i would tell people these stories and mouths would drop open people would go you've got to do this as a story so finally remember richard baker you know rich rick mason's partner rick richard baker and rick mason tim allen i mean john mulroney some of the great janine garafalo biggest names in comedy they're producer managers they told me you have to do this so i put it together i went to mark travis who had produced or helped direct and directed the bronx tale with chaz pomin terry i took his class and i put all these stories together and i came up with my show called other than my health i have nothing and today i don't feel so good and it was it where my act was always trying to please others this one man show i didn't give a hoot about anybody i just cared about uh being inside hip telling it and exposing these stars in ways that no one can believe but i couldn't let me interrupt these were all true stories they were all true stories there was a time when i saw borat and when i was watching borat i remember i remember turning i turned to my wife about 10 minutes in i go i cannot laugh this hard anymore my kids because we're killing me i think my guts were oh and all the way through all the i got i can't i'm not gonna be able i'm gonna get sick i can't he's killing me i saw your one man show three times yeah and i took my father and every time i went to see it i laughed harder and people who listen to this show know that i've said this that of all the one man shows you weren't trying to teach me anything you weren't trying to prove a point you were just telling us the truth about your career you had brushes with greatness the greatness johnny karson carol o'connor oh and stories i can't tell until these people pass away i gotta i gotta keep it on the queue johnny karson died and he was alive when you told that story about driving him home drunk right but that story that i can't tell is about somebody's wife and she passed away and it's not nice and when i say an icon it's like hardcore i'm even bigger than johnny karson i can't go there right now so um but you didn't you tell this great but it's such but it's in such bad light you know i caught i caught stars like having a bad day it's like being it's like it's like taking somebody to the beach and he accidentally walked them into a landmine you know i'll see you later and go i better not step boom i go over here bang and i just i went and i hit every i caught like carol o'connor on his worst day johnny karson on his worst day x who i can't talk about now in a bad situation and and um yeah yeah i was the story i remember and this is because we had talked about karson with who was it larry brown was on the show on tuesday and we were talking about getting on the karson show and jim mccauley who booked the karson show courting larry to come on and do five minutes and getting the set ready and we were trying to explain to the young audience what it meant to do karson in the 80s it was everything it was the difference between being an open miker and headlining vegas if he know it was it was life life or death it was it there was you know there wasn't letterman there wasn't anything that was a launching pad uh except for ed solovan and then karson inherited that throne and that was it and you tell this great story i'm not going to ask you to tell it but there's this great story that you tell in your show about the night johnny karson came in to the improv yeah yes and he was in the improv and into his cups and somehow he ended up saying you this is how i remember it it's been right but remember remember the multi-level on it it because it's involved my agent at the time and his son so this was two this was three car acts this was like three cars colliding on a corner while i'm crossing the street going hey that car's gonna hit that car's that truck's coming out and it's like three things all amalgamated because when i did that story was the stanney robinson the no bud robinson yes it's the bud so it's a bud robinson a bud freedman uh urban arthur's son adam arthur the drug addict and johnny karson and it was it was a collision you know and so when i want to tell a story you know you want to tell a story with the beginning and middle and end this has a beginning tangent middle another tangent and two tangents so it was very difficult to construct it because i had to tell it real because no one it's it's so unbelievable that it's believable so i had to bring in so it was a folly of horror all going on with karson remember i have to drive the guy home at the end of the night and he's with a girl and he's married and and and he's just been arrested you know five days earlier and you know remember do you remember when he got arrested for drunk driving this shows you how mothers against drunk driving how that has progressed since 1982 when he came on the show he got arrested i think on a sunday night and then he didn't go on the tonight show for a week i believe that's how it went and then when he came out the following monday to do his monologue do you remember how he came out on stage uh he came out in handcuffs with two la pd uh officers walking him out onto the stage and the audience the guy was arrested for drunk driving where you kill people and the audience is going hey and the cops you know turn them around and they undo the handcuffs and he does the part you know when you shake your wrists and when you rub your hands on the wrist and he waved goodbye to the cops and that and now this is like um you know and this is i'm in the middle of all this you know yeah yeah so he this was nineteen this was 1982 i believe yeah 82 he was at the height the height he had just beaten fred silverman fred silverman was the head of nbc and silverman said johnny has to go to work he's not working hard enough and johnny said yeah i quit it's either you or me and they got rid of fred silverman who was the golden right the golden boy yes the golden boy of tv and johnny made this amazing deal where he owned all the tonight shows and they gave him everything he was at the height in 82 so he came into the improv how did you get on stage that night i got on he came into the improv drunk i mean if you want to go through the story he would this was still during that bender period so this is before the hey oh with the handcuffs he was in a bad bad way oh good do i have inside stuff i cannot tell you because it's just but i've got deeper stuff but anyway he's drunk and he's never been to the improv he's been to the one in new york let me let me interrupt you for one second let me interrupt you for one second yeah letterman gave an interview you and i was surprised i saw an interview with letterman right after johnny died saying that johnny brought the boat to the hudson river and called dav he had been retired and he called dav he said after your show come by the hudson river we'll cruise around the island okay and dav says yes and it's very striking letterman who would not say a bad thing about johnny carson in the interview did not intimate this he said the clock was ticking because johnny started to drink and i was on the boat with johnny and his wife and i was watching the cups once once i knew this was letterman said once we get past two cups it's time to get off the boat because you don't want to be around johnny when he's drunk so i mean he was a legend i didn't know that and i'm like this is an idiot at the impromptu i'm 20 something years old and he goes to the bar and and first of all let me set set it up the people at the bar hollywood los angeles california improv you got people sitting in the restaurant they're having dinner whatever they're going to go into the show but the people at the bar the lifers actors out of work everything they come in have a drink it's a very kinship it's almost like a cheers type of situation so they're non-plus anybody comes in oh look over there robin williams nobody even moves their head just their eyeballs over there over there over there robin william nothing when johnny walked into that bar that even the non-plus people everyone listen to they stood on a saturday night people stood and gave him a stand here not in the showroom in the bar and then the rest people just got up from their chairs because they knew the gravitas of johnny karsten coming to a comedy club to discover a comedian who's going to change his life for the better hopefully so well and and and he walks through this maze of people applauding because he doesn't care he's drunk he's a drunkie poop he's not johnny karson he's a he's a stew bum and he goes to the bar and he gets three shots of jack daniel's eddie the bartender poured in three shots of jack eddie eddie eddie eddie yeah and that's why i can't ever get sued from the i never got sued because every i had witnesses i got seen this shot i got witnesses nobody can he's really happened to me so he drinks those shots and i'm like five feet from him because i want to be where i want to smell him i want to go he was really he was not a short guy i'm six three so all everybody's short to me but he was like six feet tall he was and he had a big broad shoulders he was an athlete you know and so he walks by goes into the showroom and it's like i i get on on saturday nights but i go on five minutes to two i that's always my spot back then you know and sometimes i'd go on after robin williams so i'd have like three people that were making out all three of them with each other and that would be my audience but i knew that that's accepted that's how it works and you were new you were new relatively yes and that and this is what happens so he goes into the showroom and i go man whoever's on stage they have no idea they're going to be it was paul provenza by the way and he did get the tonight show they're going to be seen by johnny karson and no sooner than i thought that thought bud freedman comes running up to me the owner of the improv and he goes brucey i just got a phone call two guys are going to be late one canceled you're on next and it was like oh i had no time i couldn't even get nervous because because you just had no time so bud runs on to the stage takes off paul provenza and brings me on either please welcome a young man who'll steal your hearts from my home state of connecticut bruce mark and i go on stage and i've you know i got my opening joke and it does great because the audience knows he's there it's like it's a wink wink everyone is going to help everyone it's like the brotherhood in action and i do my second joke it does better than my first and i do my third joke it's better than my second build and i do my fourth joke and somebody in the audience yells out stolen you stink get off oh my god i'm being heckled i look to see i i i'm panicked and i look to see and it's my agent's son this terrible laughing it's the worst thing that could possibly happen she's not even started yet has it stories just going she's there with a with like the coke sniffles and an empty beer bottles in his table and i go adam what are you doing she goes i don't know why my father handles right conversation in a full house which are the cars that's sitting there it's the worst thing that could happen and and he's going you stink i don't know why my father handles you and i and i couldn't and i get on that my voice went like this i couldn't talk and this fits in the sweat if i have bar of soap all i could have just lathered up it was and i just it what seemed you know hours but was probably about 40 seconds i was just a deer the blood comes running up and he just kind of pushes me off to the side and i hand him the microphone and i just walk off the stage now that's a bad story but that's just the beginning i completely forgot this i completely forgot this oh my god i haven't told this story in a long time anyway um your listeners i'll tell you what my friend you know bob gollum yeah i want to hear this story so as i remember it hang on video of the show i know hang on for a second i don't remember the being heckled by the agent's son oh this is how i this is i haven't seen this in 20 years as i remember it you don't drink i don't drink and you have a car well okay all right well first i run out to the street because i don't know what to do you this is like well death confines what to do i don't know what to do and and and i walk up and down melrose and then i go i gotta face reality you have to face this you can't run you're gonna you're gonna run out of roads eventually so i come back as i'm coming back into the improv they had thrown adam arthur out of the club as i'm walking back he's gonna get to his jeep and he gives me the finger i fall over so now i have the worst thing i've almost lost my left foot so i can't even react to that and i go into the club and as soon as i open up the front door to the club bud robinson not to be confused with bud freedman bud robinson is a very great man who handled doc severinson and other great comedians like will shrine or with rick buddell johnny dark he is best friends with johnny carson because he used to be his opening act when he was a dance team with his wife and he you know is just johnny's dearest friend so he comes running over to me goes bruce you're the only responsible person we know he's too drunk to drive home you're going to have to drive home so we've got bombing walking on melrose not knowing what to do almost getting my left foot amputated by this idiot the same guy who heckled me and now i'm giving the keys to johnny carson's car i gotta drive home oh wait a second hang on for one second so there's an opportunity for redemption you get in the car with johnny and he can smooth things up right exactly so now we fast forward i'm driving this this car this Mercedes and i'm looking into he's in the backseat however what we forget to tell is that in the front row of the show and i still remember whether these four girls or two girls from chicago they must have been like 18 and they were so hot well guess what he's in the backseat now and making out with johnny carson and i'm going this is he was just arrested so i'm going i'm on the san amonica i'm on the 405 i'm going eight miles an hour i don't want any problems i don't want anything i'm going 32 miles an hour and i keep looking in the rear view mirror because i took sandy shire to follow me in my car so that i have a ride home once i drop drop him off and every so often the girl stops making out with johnny and she sees my eyes in the rear view mirror and she gives him like a a little rib hold on a second i got to let this person in ken i'm on the i'm on a podcast are you coming by all right just beating and i'll beep you in how do you like that you get you get a phone call while i'm on the podcast so anyway so the girl jabs him in the ribs and goes johnny he's funny you ought to put him on your shell and i go johnny bruce smirnoff at your service and he leans forward and he goes let me tell you something you got no you got no timing you don't know what you're doing you stink and i go thank you very much and i'm gonna get your home as safely as possible so and he's back to making out with her so then we get to the house it's just so awful so bad he lived in ma he was he had a few homes this was his malibu house and he had like a i i look like 13 foot gate with a turret a turret who has a turret with a with a guy with a shotgun in the turret i guess you have to have that you know and two iron gates so i come with the car and they open up another guard comes down opens up the gate and like in the godfather remember they were the godfather too with the when deniro goes to kill the guy who killed his father they open up the gate to don whatever that guy's anyway don fido whatever the guy so i go i pull into his driveway he's got a big circular driveway i pull in and i get out of my car and and i go to open the door the backseat to get the two of them out but what happens is he's in a lock lockdown on this chick he's like dry humping her because he doesn't want her to get you know hinky and want to go home so he's applying the pressure meanwhile all the lights to his mansion come flooding on because his help has all been sleeping and they're realizing oh my god he's having a party so the lights come on and then i look my car comes in behind you know my johnny's car with sandy at the wheel and what's the most amazing thing is another car and another car and another about seven cars all these drunks and barflies that i told you before that hang out at the improv they all just figured hey party at karson's house police strangers walking around his property the staff are half dressed coming running out he's having a party he's having a party who's going to drink to the party party party and and he doesn't see any of this because he's dry humping her in the back of the car here you know so finally he gets off and he just gets out of the car and he sees his staff at attention he sees all these guys like hanging on their bumpers hey hey johnny hi johnny and he just looks at me because what are these people doing here i go ah here's what i know so far i guess he may have told that guy who in turn he's got a lot of here before i have you arrested and i go johnny there is good is gone and i got it and i got everybody out and that was that's my and then of course on monday i call irvin arthur the agent whose son had created all this mess and i told him what his son had did and he apologized he said i profusely apologize my son is a become a junkie he's addicted to drugs and he had a fight with me and i guess this was his way of getting back at all of my clients i so so apologize and he apologized profusely and a week later he dropped me as a client because every time he thought of me i reminded him of his drug addict son so that was the end of that i lost on about 19 different levels oh is that a bad story what a horrible horrible night and you look at him swear the whole time that's just a just a horrible thing but what i wanted to tell your listeners is bob gollum i have a video of this show i'm one of the great knights and we put it up on youtube and it's i i i forget how you find it but if you put my name bruce smirnoff and then you put one man's show i believe it will take you to it and you'll see these stories it's really funny you know it's amazing yeah enjoy it i've done this show a couple of producers here in florida felt that this would be it got me a deal pretty much close to a deal with cbs it was not a done deal and it got me in the front page of the los angeles sunday excuse me thursday calendar so i had a lot of gravitas from this but it didn't it nothing happened and then larry david of course came along and you know the rest is history he's phenomenal and his his pedigree is beyond beyond beyond yeah but this is completely different from larry david it's completely different it's very similar because my idea for a sitcom was based loosely on that you know all my comedian friends and get and having normal friends and always screwing up my i mean it reads like a blueprint so anyhow wrong place wrong time um well we have to wrap it up and you'll come back and this has been so much fun i think the johnny karson story should be recreated for film well it was i had that i have the script but there's no use to do it because larry david does everything you know what i'm saying is that you have somebody play johnny karson have it somebody play urin arthur's kid sure it was very it's very funny yes it's it's it's because it's on so many different levels it's it's three-dimensional chess it's coming at you you know not like i said a three-way accident you know yes i will say this about the youtube video yes there's no way it can capture it does it's really good it really it was so many people in the theater i had to put people on the stage so you actually see people sitting on the stage and i'm talking to them while i'm talking to the audience you know what i remember i don't want to give it away but i i i remember it opens with i think the triumph of the wills it was some nazi you know that's in the middle that's when i described the hardest gig you know the hardest gig which is when you do these jewish events around the country they always put a holocaust video on to suck money from the audience and then they bring a comedian on and this to everybody but i was the first comic to actually be able to articulate it and show it and demonstrate i didn't show it visually i showed it audio audibly audio whatever the word is yeah i reenacted it with a and i made that video of i made that audio tape of you know of the of the whole thing and that's that is yes on the video you can watch that so it's all so funny so before you go i'm going to make bruce murnoff laugh with a brief true story and the audience is just going to have to suffer through this okay i'm making you laugh suffer okay i'm at my dermatologists and i sign in this was about 10 years ago okay and cedar sign i beaverly hills yeah and i'm checking into my dermatologist and i see a list of names and about an hour before i see billy rebec hang on did i ever tell you this no but anything with dermatologists and billy rebec it's already you know it's a you know it's donald trump and a model story it's good it's gonna be funny you know so i and i said he's a very straight down the down the middle dermatologist i went to him a great guy remember dr um oh god anyway whatever so i said i noticed uh billy rebec is is here for for a mold check he said he was he's gone he left a long time ago i said really i would assume you need a hedge clipper yes to find you know before you can get to the moles you have to just do the entire hedge clipper billy rebec is cousin it period with a great sense of humor a brilliant writer but it's cousin it he's covered from head to to the end of his toenails he has hair on his second knuckle look at your hand men you have hair on your first knuckle very few have second he has like a moe howard haircut on his second knuckle he is he's a he's an ape and he he has every product that are known to mankind he has he has ass buff number six he has eye polish he has everything that estee lauder hasn't even invented they test things out on him he has asked that he has like seven deep and cologne when you go to his his condo he has cologne for the the last eight years just in one bottle and it's backed up by seven extras and he has 27 different kinds of cologne and he has estee lauder ass buff one ass buff two coloration number nine this that you know feet smell feet de stinker number 16 every possible thing he's got there isn't a cologne cosmetic thing he has masks on top of that he has masks to put on a hollowing mask he's one of the funniest characters in life and when you put him in me in a room together and we start insulting each other they say people would pay money to watch us go at it you know i i just given you a sample but then he attacks me and i'm very very very valuable asset too so the two of us ripping each other to shreds people that the tears coming out and it's very funny you should google billy rebeck everyone our id ack another one with an amazing uh career and uh billy rebeck it says see body hair cousin it cousin it's cousin how do people follow you how do people follow you and stay in touch with you uh you don't i mean i i i don't have a website my email is bruce vodka at yahoo.com if you want to ask me a question because i have nothing to do i love to kibitz with people you can certainly email me and i love to go back and forth do you tweet i tweet but i'm very political it will turn off a lot of people so don't don't go to my twitter just just i'm on facebook you can do my facebook where you go that'll turn a lot of people off to just email me you want a donald trump story before we go we don't have to i could talk to you forever okay here's before you do the donald trump story yes you have to be my florida correspondent for the show or anytime you have to cover florida you have to tell me what's going on maybe the entertainment scene in florida whatever you want whatever you are you are amazing you you know to call you a comedians comedian right is a disservice to you but whenever your name comes up we just start laughing whenever your name is mentioned you are so beloved and that one man's show it's just hands down nobody nobody says it was great but let me let me finish let me very quickly so we did the show down in florida for all these senior citizens and they all love me and i fill the theater 500 people after and i'm not making this up after about 15 minutes they all started to doze off they didn't enjoy these stories do you know why this show my show worked in new york i did it at psnbc studios and i did it of course in la it was the cats me out in new york and hollywood everywhere else it's gone it bombs it's one of the worst shows people have ever it's it's actually better than ambien that's how it should be advertised because no one believes that johnny karson was like this no one believes carol o'connor no one believes no one believes any of these stories so they and they and they and they feel as if i failed so much they're not they're pragmatic people who watch this show these normal people and they go well if you fail why don't you find something else to do they don't understand that your heart is in show business and you're going to make it no matter why they go look i used to sell pendants at yankee stadium do that well i went and sold suits i made a million dollars what's this guy why does he try to tell jokes so much when he stinks it's not going anywhere what's he saying johnny karson johnny karson doesn't drink i watched that show every night and i saw smoke but i saw a drink what did he say he's drinking he's this is a ripple i'm not coming back to himself that way and oh i think i'm gonna sleep then they sleep that was my show and failure nothing the failure i mean a complete failure i can't ever bring that show back i'm unless i did it in la but again you lose money doing it in le because you have to pay for the room anyway um what what was i gonna say i'll trump oh trump okay so jeffrey ross the great great jeffrey ross the gross master general was a dear friend of mine and did help me a lot also during the one-minute show he's responsible for me getting that front page calendar article on the la time so i am indebted to jeffrey forever and ever he calls me 2002 and i'm living in new york he goes uh trump donald trump just called me he wants me to do a gig at mara lago i need an opening act will you come i go yeah sure now all i knew about donald trump 2002 this is before the apprentice i just knew he was atlantic city and divorces i knew nothing about i just knew he was what he was you know a character so we get to leguardia airport and we're in the private terminal uh because we're going on his jet with him he's not there but judge jeanine is there from fox news and a guy named david pecker who owns the national inquirer and it's like the four of us were kidding around i'm showing judge jeanine my stretches that i learned in gym class and we're having the great trump comes with melania that just his girlfriend at the time we get on the plane and i figured because you and i've been around a lot of hollywood people that this conversation is going to be about 95 10 it's going to be him dominating and five percent maybe i'm going to get a word in and so i'm i'm prepared for it because i've been around these people before we get on the plane trump comes in last and jeff goes bruce donald this is bruce smirnoff a comedian and trump shakes my hand he goes bruce would you like to sit in a cockpit for takeoff and i just go i could throw myself on a control stick and blow up the plane i mean i'm in a and this is after 9 11 and i'm in i'm in a control room in a cockpit i'm on this is unbelievable it cured my fear of flying i because now i know what goes on in a it is so cool you don't hear the engine you don't hear anything in the cockpit this was a 7 27 the engines are tail mounted so you just it's like nothing and then just lift up so anyway i come back into the cabin trump go and jeff goes you know donald bruce has some amazing stories and he lived in hollywood and i can't really tell the way he asks me a question about every kind of it's underground and people know what happened but it's about sarah silver and because i'm i move on move on we don't yeah i know so anyway so trump and i and jeff we had the and melania but melania really would it was just very quiet to herself she was quiet the whole time and we're going back and forth with stories and melania just sits there and i think she does long division because at this time she was just a girlfriend i think she's just figured by the minute but you know how much am i going to make if i leave this but obviously it worked out for the best and um but trump was phenomenal obviously this leads to of me favoring him into to be able to say that i spent but it more a lot ago he went out of his way to hang out with jeff and i he would he talks he talked he's not the guy you would see ripping rand paul and ripping jeb bush he is partly that guy i guess that is the showman part of him but i got to tell you it was the greatest weekend like on the flight back again i sat in the cockpit for a takeoff but i turned to him as the plane was landing in leguardia and i said donald i got to be honest with you i feel like a plumber who won to spend the weekend with donald trump and it's all coming to an end and i don't like it and i just just cracked the guy up the whole of the whole weekend so yes and i know politically you're not a big fan but that is uh the president and that's the story yeah and uh that is a pretty amazing trump story when you think about it and he he basically is the closest i'm not trying to be cute here the closest this country has to don rickles in that don address the elephant in the room and so does donald trump yeah yeah i guess sure absolutely all right bruce burnoff thank you so much i needed this i had the greatest how long were we on we were on like an hour and 17 minutes wonderful thank you so much david and i remain at your side whatever you need i got millions of stories here we didn't even scratch the surface joining us once again is professor cory brett schneider who somehow has been conned into giving me a 250 000 legal education welcome back to the show thank you i there is a bill at the end oh i never said it was free some of our listeners actually read the lakumi case terrific i i am amazed i so i have to compliment the listeners i i asked them if you read the case let me know hit the contact button and i'll send you something i haven't figured out what i'm going to send them but this is very interesting the show i put you on at the end because it's your it's heavy it's smart it required this is this is the these are the vegetables and the the diehard listeners they they listen i love it great it is a new medium podcast thing it's been around for a long time but i realized that there's radio there's television and in the past i used to think that podcasting was the means but it's the end it is it is an actual art form that is not worth dumping i have so this is very valuable stuff yeah right cory brett sorry go ahead sir i was going to ask and uh how do you i mean is it now at the point where more listeners listen to the podcast and the radio show or is it still there is of the radio that's it's hard to measure the ratings because i'm on public radio in los angeles so it's always hard to measure it's not that's not exact the the podcast is is precise and it's creating a nightmare for advertisers not that we have advertisers on public radio well public radio does have advertisers just not pacific a spot yeah i would say advertising is such an affront to our senses that within five years anybody who isn't on a fixed income will not see advertising they will not watch television that has advertising on it if you're not on a if you're on a fixed income then you're going to have to put up with broadcast television right yeah and i mean just the rise of uh netflix and hulu and the kind of a i mean really i mean it's a cliche golden age of television but there is so much that is so great on premium premium you know for not a huge amount of money not all not a lot of money no advertising and it's changing the narrative literally the idea of a television show without commercials you know it's changing narrative it's changing the way we write because in the past it was i'm talking to professor kory bretschneider now we're going to disrupt everything we just talked about and you're going to have to put up with five minutes of commercials for antacids yeah and now we come back and we have to remind everybody podcasting and or netflix people are getting accustomed to deep thought right uninterrupted deep thought yeah i mean it's kind of i don't know i think of netflix the the kind of serials are are like gold fashion um you know in the 19th century when you'd get your magazine and you'd get this long-form chapter and then another chapter wasn't dickens done that way and the quality and the depth can just be so much more um but i i don't know i said i'm not a producer of this stuff as you are but as a viewer it's just been an incredible few years i was going to hesitate to bring it up but i one of my binge binge watching episodes i went back and watched uh early larry david and there you were you know uh in the baptism scene i was so excited to see you i mean what i wanted i just to set it up the larry comes upon uh baptism but thinks that somebody is drowning so jumps in to save them and it turns out to be uh a jewish man who's converting right to the marry but you i don't know i don't know i mean maybe you remember i imagine it's all improv and then the scene that i loved is that you and a couple of others pull him aside once everybody's drying off and everyone else is angry at him to say you know we're we're part of your people and we want you to know that you're a real hero but the best line of the whole thing is you just at the right moment you pause and you say i would really like to invite you speak at my daughter's bat mitzvah and i thought like wow that's why i talk to this guy every week i'm proud to know him it starts with one man that was that was so all my stuff is in storage in la one of the things i have is a screenshot of my credit on that episode uh it's david feldman dot dot dot angry jew that was my credit and i just made me so it made me so happy i uh used to be very close to jeff garland before he completely took off we were like best friends but then we talk occasionally but we were we spent a lot of time together and there was a time when i was more larry david than larry david was is that right you stand up was like that where you didn't solve no my personal life was my personal life was more larry david and this is important because we're talking to professor kory bretschneider who is a law professor constitutional law professor and i i'm you brought this up much of my life has been dealing with injustice that is about me and of no value to society just like larry david right yeah i don't know you seem to have all this activism going on i don't know maybe it's more recent but the roce and the uh pacifica and the ralph nader show that seems like outwardly focused these days as is larry david i mean larry david is best friends with bobby kennedy jr he's very involved in liberal causes but i think it starts with personal justice i think you spend a lot of time growing up being slighted looking for justice and then you realize this is narcissism i better channel it towards a larger picture otherwise this is sick yeah yeah anyway i have a theory about people not larry david maybe me uh barbers trice and rob reiner i i have a feeling that a lot of malignant narcissists become liberals to justify how horribly they treat other people that's not definitely not good that's something the right wing i guess says about people on the left but uh like the clinton's it's probably true on all sides that there's always some you know what mix of politics and personality but i don't think it's particular liberals one thing i guess that's happened in the country i could speak for myself is that it's just impossible any anymore i think to just look inside or inward given what's happened and since the election really since the campaign when he started saying all these hateful things at least the way i have seen it among not just among you know with myself but colleagues and friends it's just impossible to not do everything you can every day to speak out against what president trump then candidate uh trump has been saying and now doing and so i don't know it's a you know kind of academic i was happy for a long time you know to talk to my colleagues and to write scholarly articles and i feel like every day now that you know in a way it's almost irresponsible it's important to do that too but you it's just central to look outward and to speak to a general audience and to try to do something ultimately about what this president is uh trying to accomplish to stop them right well let's review what we're going to be talking about i did read the kennedy decision on the santeria church in hyalaya florida and you assign that to my listeners because you maintain it will be the precedent upon which the supreme court builds its decision on trumps second travel ban so we'll get to that momentarily i also want to talk to you about the first amendment which by the way is what the travel ban you say will be the decision will be based on the first amendment i want to talk about anculter the other part of the first amendment she's being denied the right to speak at berkeley i want to talk about the multiple executions in arkansas that they're trying to pull off and erin hernandez who killed himself in prison let's start off with erin hernandez because i covered this on my radio show about three years ago he had been placed in solitary confinement to protect him from the prison community and we talked about what 23 hours alone in a prison cell does to a man he ended up committing suicide as i understand it he was not in solitary at the time he was allowed to mingle with the community what is solitary confinement what does it do to a prisoner do other countries allow prisons to put their inmates in solitary confinement and what what amendment to the constitution most likely would forbid solitary confinement um the um is it a lot there i mean the reason why solitary has been so predominant and i think it's not just that it's an occasionally used punishment but it's now the way we design prisons so think of the super max for instance is designed around the principle of isolating people uh is that the courts have in the past regarded it as an administrative um uh uh measure rather than a punishment itself so that's one way that they've avoided uh handling the issue but more and more there's litigation around the country that says that the practice is cruel and unusual and so a violation of the eighth amendment now why is it cruel and unusual you know it's giving people a time out would be the innocuous way of talking about it but when you actually look at what the empirical research says about people in solitary there's a very high rate of mental illness that results from the isolation and being taken out of the general population and there's speculation about the reasons for this but one thought is it because a basic human need is human interaction and so without that there is a kind of psychological torture that goes on and um that's why you see such high rates of mental illness resulting from excessive use of solitary confinement I don't think Americans as we move into the social media internet age and this fake reality I think a lot of Americans don't realize that they're in solitary confinement and they don't have social interaction and so they don't really empathize with prisoners who are cut off from humanity I'm being serious here I'm not trying to be cute yeah I think well I mean I would say that there's an important difference I mean I see that and I think that part of what is cruel and unusual is the forced isolation and certainly that doesn't exist in people outside but the other real difference is that the isolation that people are experiencing in the general society at least comes with some social connection and that's the internet so they're on Facebook or they're on email and they're able to maintain the basic need for human ties that way if you're in pop prison and in solitary confinement except in very few instances there there really is no access to email or to Facebook and so it is true isolation there are cases where 20 plus years people are in solitary confinement and there's an amazing law professor named Jules LaBelle who I've had come speak in my class and who I'm fortunate to have gotten to know recently who has cases around the country saying that the psychological harm that comes from solitary confinement is so so pervasive that that the court should say that at least in the most egregious cases but ultimately in all cases that the punishment is a violation of the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment the problem is how do you identify a prisoner who's having a psychological breakdown when so many of our prisoners now are psychologically defective we kind of put the mentally ill now in our prison system yeah that's right I mean one thing is showing that they weren't mentally ill before they went into solitary confinement and so finding cases like that I think also it's not just an empirical question of showing that in these certain cases mental illness has resulted but a question of starting to get the courts and people generally in the population because it's not just a legal issue it's a political one too to see that part of what's cruel is just the fact of isolation you know you think of part of it is about being denied basic human contact but it's also I think a violation of the 8th amendment because it's a denial of what in the court's words in a case called chop versus dullest they called the right to have rights and in that case the court said that what prison is is not an exile you're not being sent to an island you still remain a citizen but on my view they don't say this but on my view if you're a citizen that means that you have to have basic rights of free speech basic rights to practice your religion basic rights of association and that requires human contact and if you don't have any human contact you're just put alone in a cell it really makes a mockery of the idea that you still have rights of citizenship or a right to have rights so I think it not just in cases where it causes mental illness but in all cases it's a violation of the 8th amendment and it's too bad for Trump because I have a feeling Aaron Hernandez was probably the only new england patriot willing to show up to the White House to be congratulated it could be yeah it might have been lucky to have them yeah well I think he and Trump have a lot in common although the difference is Hernandez has been convicted of murder and not Trump but uh that there's still time multiple Arkansas executions that seems to be they're trying to move a lot of men through death row in Arkansas they I'm laughing just because I'm in a bubble and it's ludicrous but these are real lives and it's not funny Arkansas originally tried to execute eight men in 11 days because the cocktail needs to be used before it expires uh the capital punishment in this country is on the decline I thought I thought it's not really that popular anymore it's mostly Texas yeah I mean unfortunately I think the even if there's a national trend against it the fact that the courts have ruled that it is constitutional means that in certain pockets it can be used and the problem with the punishment is that it's always used erratically not just nationally but within the state so prosecutors have a lot of discretion and asking for the death penalty or not and if you have a prosecutor is particularly ambitious unfortunately and trying to get votes you know that's an incentive for them to use it but the problem with the punishment has always been that it's not in I mean there's a deeper problem which is that it's wrong and in my view also unconstitutional under that same prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment but aside from that the sporadic nature of it I think has always been really the at least a core reason for why it should obviously be ruled unconstitutional the idea that we would allow the system of law to just depend on the luck of the draw of whether you get one of these kind of I said ambitious maybe a better way to put it is rogue prosecutors who's who's willing to use it you know that's just a matter of luck and there seems something just flat out wrong about that in the society governed by the rule of law let me ask you about prosecutors I have met guys I grew up with who became stock brokers and they will gladly recommend something to you knowing that there's a good chance you'll be wiped out financially I find them despicable I grew up with a prosecutor he became a prosecutor I find it hard to believe that he would put a guy behind bars for life knowing that he's probably innocent but my friend needs to put numbers on the board is that the the mindset of a prosecutor they're willing to live with a false prosecution I think it just depends I mean like any profession there are really decent people who go into that job for all the right reasons and then there are people who just get caught up in the ambition sometimes maybe it's seeking higher office or media and they do you know unfortunately in some cases things that they really shouldn't do it's almost like institutionalized evil in that you work for an organization where the prosecuting team our job is to put this guy behind bars to make a case against him his defense team their job is to keep them alive yeah so we won even if the dna eventually would exonerate him but we won and that's good for us that's what they think right there are some of them who there are some I think but there are others who have made the decision to be reasonable I mean they have a lot of discretion both in who they charge and the kind of whether they certainly whether they ask for the ultimate penalty of death and I think decent prosecutors are really careful about making those decisions I should say too this is not you know just a side quirky issue there's a book by a colleague of mine named John faff who argues that a huge part of the phenomenon of mass incarceration is attributable to prosecutorial discretion so that difference of whether or not you are one of these as I'm calling it ambitious or rogue prosecutors who's just overly aggressive or not that that he's arguing in this book that that's really what makes the difference in has made the difference in the rise of of incarceration and what that means is that there are more and more of what we're calling the the rogue prosecutors unfortunately and their expression in the wrong way with dna exonerating so many men on death row are there consequences for an overly aggressive prosecutor in the most extreme case I guess I'm trying to think certainly removal you know the case I guess that I have in mind of a rogue prosecutor is this prosecutor that was involved in the Duke accusations of rape on on the Duke campus in Durham and he certainly was removed from office I don't know the details of whether they brought charges but yes and the most you know if you know he was protect but excuse me for one second yeah the prosecutor who was removed went after some frat boys right frat boys right who had access to money and lawyers correct yeah so think of all the cases where that might have happened and we don't know that that's what happened that's that's a real worry I think nationally and that's a partly a result of a deep flaw in our system which is that your access to a lawyer depends on how wealthy you are that's a blunt and you know really sad fact you know technically everyone has a right to a lawyer and there's case law that says if you're accused of a crime you'll be provided an attorney if you can't afford it but I don't think anybody thinks that the quality of representation has nothing to do with the amount of money that you have yeah just I it happened about 10 years ago then we'll move on but it really exemplifies the injustice in this country as I remember it there was a group of white frat boys I think they played rugby for Duke they were La Crosse I'm sorry La Crosse La Crosse yeah and they were privileged and they hired an African American stripper who claimed she was raped and then it turned out that it was a false accusation I think she ended up dying I think oh wow I didn't know that I think so I think there was like a tragic shooting or something but she falsely allegedly falsely accused these guys of raping her their reputations were ruined as they should be because they hired a stripper to come to their frat house and they were La Crosse players at Duke they were privileged and arrogant and of all the cases in this country we're joking about that right I mean they were accused of a crime which they looks like they didn't commit so it looks like they didn't commit it but what I'm saying is of all the overly aggressive prosecutors in this country who deserve to be right punished the the only one you can come up with is the one who overly prosecuted white privileged boys falsely accused of rape very telling yeah I think that's right I mean I don't want to take away anything from the injustice that the accused suffered in in those cases but it also when we broaden out to think about the problem nationally it's just very unlikely that this is the only instance of such a thing and we just don't know about the others because of the lack of resources well Supreme Court Justice David Feldman says yeah better a few do innocent white La Crosse players go to prison I hope not Justice Feldman please reconsider that thought that way better a few better a few of them end up okay let's move to the first amendment and this is going to be fun because it involves Ann Coulter's right to speak at Berkeley that's one part of the first amendment freedom of speech and then there's the other part of the first amendment which is the establishment clause which will lead us into Trump's travel ban because you say that the Hialeah case which is also the first amendment about religious freedom let's talk about Ann Coulter here's my gut reaction with Ann Coulter speaking at Berkeley sure my daughter went to Berkeley there was this provocateur from Breitbart news Milo Yaponapolis or whatever his name is who ended up leaving Breitbart because he defended pedophilia here's my feeling about Berkeley and Ann Coulter and Jerry Seinfeld or you know one direction speaking and performing at Berkeley I don't want anybody speaking at Berkeley unless they're a professor my daughter went to Berkeley it's a privilege to go there Ann Coulter doesn't belong on that campus Bill Maher complained that he can't speak at Berkeley because he's anti-Muslim Milo Yaponapolis from Breitbart riots broke out and now Berkeley is saying they can't guarantee Ann Coulter's safety they're afraid that they're going to be riots and so they've canceled her speaking engagement my gut reaction to this is who cares what is she doing speaking at at Berkeley yeah she has a law degree but she's a provocateur she's not a real I'm usually so with you but on this one you're really disappointing me I mean the Berkeley the home of the free speech movement I think you know speaks to the I'm sorry you're you're breaking up here is that oh sorry sorry I'll start again okay is this better yes okay I was gonna say usually David you and I are seeing eye to eye but here I'm not with you I mean I just think you know going back to the history first of all of the free speech movement and it's central place in the 1960s at Berkeley but also to the importance of free speech on campus to me there's you know it's one of the topics that I care the most about and what's central first of all to distinguish is that what this free speech right that's involved in a lot of these cases and that threats of violence I think in pedon is not the right of me or the university to invite a speaker but it's the basic idea that students should be able to have access to the ideas that they want to have access to I mean these are young people whose ideas are forming and if they're not entitled to choose what to hear then I think that sort of denies them not just the fundamental right as students but the fundamental right that we enjoy as citizens and that's the ability to not just say whatever we want that's what most people focus on but I think as fundamental to the idea of free speech and this is a public school so the first amendment does is relevant and that's the right to hear whatever argument we want and you know what that includes the right to hear awful nasty arguments and if we want to invite or a student group wants to invite and most of these cases are about student groups inviting speakers somebody whose views are bad or even vile now they have the right to do that and if they're prohibited from doing it that's to me a real violation I'll add a caveat I mean because Milo is particularly a heinous case and he really and culture too actually but you know Milo just has I don't know it's arguably zero intellectual content and just kind of provocateur but they absolutely have a right to invite him I think but that doesn't mean that the university is not going to take a stand or shouldn't so the argument that I've developed in a book about free speech called when the state speaks what should it say and the argument that I'm going to make in a public lecture that I'm going to give in London in a few weeks with the free speech author and thinker Timothy Artangash sorry I just messed his name up Timothy Ash and the thinker Jeremy Waldron it's really going to be an amazing conference University College London what I'm going to say there is there is an absolute right to hear all ideas but they're also with that as an obligation of the university sometimes to criticize those ideas so if Milo were to come to Brown and to be invited by a student group I would absolutely support that group's right to have him and I think the university would be obligated and I certainly push for them to provide the appropriate security but I wouldn't walk into the event I'd be protesting outside and my hope would be that the university as a whole would both protect his right to be on campus and also to criticize the content of what he's saying and that's the to me the true meaning of the First Amendment that universities institutions and also the government the state can protect all viewpoints but also criticize those that challenge the fundamental principles of liberal democracy and the idea of equality and Nazis and members of the so-called right like Milo they have a right to say what they wish but we also have an obligation as institutions and government has an obligation to criticize those views well I have no right to be talking to you but I'm going to argue with you so I'm not arguing with you you do have a right that's what I'm saying well no and that's the point I'm making is my kids go off to college they're unformed who cares what they want it's what they need oh no they're not they're not six year olds you know it's this they are they're 18 years old once you're 18 you're a citizen they have the right to vote and so like that's another thing I wanted to talk to you about the reason we gave him right I mean that's the that's the other point you know just going back to that early earlier generation that they can go to war I mean they're be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice and so the idea that they wouldn't have the fundamental right to choose what viewpoints to be exposed to you know they're I'm going to stop you for one second okay forgive me because I have no right to but we gave 18 year olds the right to vote back in 72 because there was still a draft and when we and what one of the things we did was we got rid of the draft and then gave them the right to vote if you serve in our military you should be allowed to vote at 18 but you get rid of the draft and you give these kids the right to vote that's just that's just a putative putative citizenship they're not they're not citizens you know it's such an entitlement here here you're 18 now you get to vote but you don't have to serve our country they're not citizens I don't know I spend a lot of time with 18 year olds I think that when you compare many of them and you know I'm admittedly dealing with a kind of very high level thinking student in the college classes that I'm teaching but you know to compare them to you know some 60 year olds the idea that the 60 year old is always going to have the better argument just frankly isn't true I mean so it depends on the person but you know I think the thing about the draft going back to that point is that it was a principle right not just that some people were going to war and so we should give those people the right to vote but that if you're old enough to be drafted you certainly are old enough even to serve you're old enough to what exercise the vote and then with it I think this is what we're talking about a right that's equally fundamental and that's the right to have access and to hear all viewpoints and and they don't serve they are served they're drinking they have a right now to be served even though they're not old enough to drink that's all they do they just drink and party and think about sex we send them off to college they're too young their minds are not fully formed where do they get off thinking that they can have a social club and invite Ann Coulter or Bill Maher to come speak I don't want my kids exposed to anybody weren't you the executive producer of Bill Maher show I worked for Bill Maher and I would tell him to his face Bill Bill sir sir thank you so much Mr. Bill Maher could you yes maybe if I stand up to you a little you'll respect me no he doesn't belong on a college campus he's a he doesn't have a PhD I want you know how expensive it is to send a kid to college and the way they treat professors geez I guess I just have maybe I'm here the more 60s pedagogy person but I think what education is is not somebody standing up and saying in a pedantic way this is what you should believe yeah it's about asking questions it's being socratic and it's providing an atmosphere on campus where people are exposed to the greatest ideas but also free to choose to be exposed to the ones that aren't so great that's part of what it means to become a citizen is to exercise those choices now I don't think we do that because we're indifferent to what they choose and it'd be a disaster if a university somehow found itself with huge numbers of Milo supporters and that was the consequence of the free speech but my view is that we have faith that that won't happen and that's why we allow them to invite people like Milo because they will clearly see not only what's wrong with it but as John Stuart mill said to be able to give the arguments against it and to refute it one of the kind of classic moments that happened in one of these incidents where people were shouting down a speaker as somebody said you know please stop I want to hear what this argument is so I can respond to it and to me that's the sort of epitome of what we're talking about two questions on that two questions on that one is who was John Stuart mill and secondly is heckling protected under the first amendment uh John Stuart mill appeared regularly at catarising star it was part of the mill's brothers I believe yeah they would put him on at the end right yeah I think wasn't he one of the fact like a liberal from Britain he wrote the most important book ever that everyone every reader I know I keep giving assignments but that every listener really everyone has to read once and that's on liberty it's the most profound defense of free speech that exists I think or one of them the other one is actually from a brown professor Alexander Mikkeljohn called democracy and its relationship to self-government those two books are short but great explanations for why we need this right and who was mills who was mills there's a John Stuart mill was a 19th century no but mills with the s see right mills yeah who was he he brought in the 50s right yeah that's much later and I don't I don't know that he wrote about free speech totally I think he wrote about the military industrial complex I always confuse the two so he wrote mill wrote on liberty and he said what I'm saying to you which is that you trust that people people should be given free speech so that they could see what's wrong in bad ideas and that over time through deliberation and discussion the good ideas will win out and the bad ones will not and the conservatives have co-opted on liberty the same way and this is then we'll move on but then I have some insight that I'm going to give you that's very profound and deep and you're going to thank me for this I know it will be I'm quite serious Ann Coulter is claiming McCarthyism at Berkeley when she wrote a book defending yeah that's Joseph McCarthy Ann Coulter every cover of her book says New York Times bestseller right her books say that the New York Times is a bogus operation can't be trusted is not factual and yet she claims to have a New York Times best she trust the New York Times to count how many books she sold but everything else the New York Times does can't be trusted here's the point I'm making professor I am an example of the of why this country has gotten so stupid I could barely read the the the Supreme Court decision you assigned to me I'm a moron but I have this show and I get to talk with you and raise my voice and I I'm going to end up you know when this is ever gone well I was pretty good I held my own with and you I have to point this out to my listeners because if you want to understand why this country is so stupid I am talking to a very generous professor who has a PhD from Princeton and political science he has a law degree from Stanford he teaches at Brown he has a masters in philosophy from Cambridge I am very patient I'm not I am very you are very patient with me because you're a teacher and part of teaching is letting some idiot like me think he's smarter than he really is and that's what has happened to the media in America it's been taken over by half wits and I really do mean half wits like me who get to talk to somebody like you and then we finish up and go I'm pretty smart I should run for office well you know I think that there are problems certainly with the media I would like to see more intellectual content like the kind of long-form interviews that you do and Terry Gross and others and John Fugel saying but I don't know I'm I don't think Americans are stupid I think when you have these conversations with people the same way that you and I you can disagree you can deliberate you can see what's wrong and what the other is saying and have give and take if you just put the effort into it the problem is this frustration that we have in the country where people just yell and scream so quickly but you know all it takes is a little patience and I think when it comes to the cat capability of people that what democracy and these ideas of free speech that I'm talking about rest on is the idea that ultimately we all have the capability to engage in thought and to deliberate and it's not that hard and you know I have conversations all the time with people from all sorts of different walks of life and I don't find any difference in people's ability to do this if you just engage them in the right way so I'm an optimist about human capability to pass I am too but not in America I think this country has been taken over by idiots like me well we have a you know we had an election that wasn't good for my theory of capacity but I think it hopefully and I believe this is true that it's a brief blip that will be corrected I did want to say one other thing about the Ann Coulter controversy which is that ultimately this is important to me too to to the view that I'm trying to sketch for you ultimately often the people who are having their speech rights potentially violated and I do think that if she is unable to come to campus or more importantly a group is unable to invite her that they're prohibited from doing so that that is a violation of their speech rights but we don't want to confuse that with approval of Ann Coulter's ideas or Milo's quite the contrary I mean the Ku Klux Klan is the subject of many of the most important free speech cases in the United States including a case called Brandenburg another about Skokie, Illinois and they claim all the time that they are some great heroes of the First Amendment free speech clause and nothing could be further from the truth we protect them not for their reasons but for the reasons that they reject the reasons of liberal democracy and so if Ann Coulter is you know against the free speech as you know her tactics suggest that she might or as you know the Ku Klux Klan is certainly not a defender of constitutional values we protect them not because we care about what they're saying in the sense that we agree or affirm or even tolerate them but because we care about hearing the arguments for ourselves and ultimately being able to reject them that's why I think it's so important that if we're going to protect free speech in this unique way that we do in the United States we have the most protective law of free speech in the entire world and for good reason but it has to come also with this obligation to criticize not just you and I citizens but also institutions have to be able to criticize and the government I think too its role is to criticize hate speech and so when Donald Trump is quiet about some of the hate crimes that have gone on or when he excludes mentions of Jews from the statement about the Holocaust that's a betrayal of the duty of a president who has to both protect insurer and support the protection of all viewpoints but also criticize those that attack constitutional values like free speech and equality of their law before we get to the other part of the first amendment in the travel ban Berkeley is a state college it takes the money from the government so that's why the there's a first amendment issue if you're a private college you would then be allowed to say no and colter can't speak here because you're not really taking money from the government but you really are I mean don't all yeah that's what I was gonna say it's a more complicated question certainly there is state the first threshold question and asking whether the first amendment applies the free speech clause applies is whether there's state action or not and because Berkeley is a government institution that there is state action now in a private college there isn't state action so the first amendment doesn't apply in that way but there are other regulations and protections that might apply and there I guess there are ways these are technical questions but of trying to argue that free speech protections might apply to private colleges and universities although that that's a much more complicated question it's much more complicated and it's gonna lead into the the santeria case with hyalia and the travel ban so travel ban to donald trump I guess it was back in march try to place a 90-day ban on people from iran libya samalia sudan and yemen and a 120-day ban on refugees several circuit courts put holds on that travel ban and the justice department now is taking it to the supreme court right there were there were two bands and they were stopped around the country by various district courts and then the ninth circuit court of appeals took one of those cases and put a halt to it and donald trump that's where he famously responded he'll see you see you in court it's something to the supreme court I mean sorry to the ninth circuit kind of an odd thing to say to judges but what the administration decided to do is rather than just fight for the first ban they decided to rewrite it and so they changed a few things they got rid of a preference for christian refugees over muslim refugees that existed in the first ban because they saw that that was going to cause legal trouble they reduced the number of countries involved from seven to six and they tried to to just clear it of the more obvious forms of discrimination now they didn't and taint of animus towards towards muslims but they didn't help themselves because steven miller the president's advisor said at one point that it was essentially the same ban but they just were trying to change it around for technical legal reasons now the problem with that is that courts are pretty smart so if you're just trying to change the words around that doesn't really work so the question is still whether or not first of all the second ban in the first or essentially the same and more importantly whether or not the second ban in its current form still violates several clauses of the constitution including as you mentioned the free exercise and establishment clause and as importantly the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment so you assigned to our listeners the church of the lu kumi babalu i ink the the hyalia did you change your microphone again i just shifted a little bit i've lost you are you still there so well uh how am i now you sound good uh do you count to three please one two three okay just one not as good or nah it's not as good you were sounding better okay i might have knocked the mic something we're talking with uh professor cory brechneider hello hello yes hello much better does that sound good yeah not not really uh how about now yeah okay this is good yes so the church of the lu kumi babalu versus hyalia this was a you assigned this to our listeners there was a ruling by supreme court justice kennedy yes it was decided june 11th 1993 i read it and i definitely saw why it applies to the travel ban it was why don't you tell us what the case was um that well you know if it's core teaches david i'm going to ask you for the basic facts you want to do them that's what we how we usually do it as i understand it santeria is a religion that came to cuba with the slaves it involves animal sacrifice and was outlawed by the cubans because it combines catholicism with western african tradition i i don't know how to pronounce in syncretism or something it's a fusion of catholicism and african american slave religious rituals i have a feeling it was outlawed in cuba because the catholic church didn't approve of it and they used animal sacrifice as the the reason they were outlawing the religion then the santeria came to america hyalia and they opened up a church and i assume that anti santeria prejudice from the cuban community in hyalia prompted a city-wide ordinance banning animal sacrifice specifically for the santeria church in other words they had all these different clauses and ordinances that allowed kosher butchers they allowed grayhounds to be fed live rabbits as part of their training they had the zoning laws that protected butchers they specifically outlawed the santeria practice of slaughtering doves pigeons chicken for animal sacrifice even though those animals would usually be eaten afterwards right and i mean i'd say that was you know just great probably 95 did they mention the santeria in the legislation do you remember that that's the one kind of question that i was unclear in what you said you said they were targeting the santeria but how do we know that is it because they were singled out in the legislation or because of this other stuff that you said i don't know i don't know yeah i mean that's you you gave i think the both the facts and then the beginning of the legal argument and it was all right except they never mentioned the santeria instead what they do is they talk about sacrifice and that's going to be important in the case but you got the basic facts which is and then they and then they listen to the which i found surprising that the supreme court listened to actual meetings yeah recordings of the city council deciding this case yeah and they realized that just the the people who spoke up were specifically targeting the santeria church and that when the leader of the santeria church got up to speak he was booed and then the i as i understand it and again this is the first time i've ever done this right the the constitutional issue is a law from from precedent a government can pass a law that outlaws religious practices if the law benefits the secular community as a whole that that because of the first let's just i think let's just you've got the facts i mean in a kind of beautiful way i think frankly much better than i could have brought them out absolutely and so we've got the details of what happened so now let's let's go to the second thing remember we did this how to how to brief a case so we've done the first part the facts and that's as only a kind of emmy award-winning quite a good you know that's not the normal kind of you know student that gives the facts you you with the narrative that was beautiful so now what we'll do and i should run for office and be on the supreme court yeah and i would hire you as my lawyer based on that recitation i mean i think a jury's gonna listen to you rather than a lot of the people that i know who do this profession uh so you know we just want to be clear and getting a handle on the legal issues now so you gave the facts which are really important details too that you brought out that are going to be central to understanding what happened that this minority religion in the town of highly is practicing animal sacrifice in the town passes a lot outlawing specifically animal sacrifice and in the law it makes exemptions for all sorts of killing animals including kosher slaughter uh and the the question that we have to ask so what's the legal i mean we're talking about a potential constitutional violation so what's the potential constitutional violation or the way i put it when i explain the brief writing is can you ask a question about how the facts relate to some particular provision of the constitution and so you just want to do it in one question so does am i making sense here yes of course okay so do you want to do that like what's the constitutional issue just ask it as a question well the the i i think the constitutional issue right is and you got to ask about a provision of the constitution remember that's how we'll set it up well i guess it would be the establishment clause you cannot the government cannot establish a religion or forbid a religion right and so you remember what those two so one of the clauses is the is the establishment clause as you said and then the other one that's closely related you remember what that is what they say when it comes to verbiting a religion now i'm being very pedantic i know but you know i would assume i'm gonna pull this out of my you know what i would assume that the government cannot forbid a religious practice unless it that practice jeopardizes the secular state and that there is your like going a million i did bbc recent recently and the guy said to me i'm sorry but i'm afraid we're just getting ahead of ourselves too fast so we're getting too too ahead i mean the more basic point which you've already said so i'll just repeat it back to you is that the question that the court's gonna ask is whether the ordinance that's passed by the town banning animal sacrifice violates the free exercise clause of the first amendment now the free exercise clause is exactly what you just said it says that you can't prohibit the free exercise of religion you could i think importantly asked to about the establishment of religion they don't deal with that question in this case but the travel ban case certainly will so we have the facts and then the question that we're just going to ask about the facts is it's very simple right i mean all of this stuff to do it well it has to be simple and elegant and the elegant simple question is does this law passed by the town council of hyalia banning animal sacrifice violate the free exercise clause of the first amendment that's the setup and now the third thing the holding is what's the answer to that question remember what they said does it violate it or does it not so is the answer yes or no well on the face i think they say on the face is that what they it does just say yeah yes it does it does the answer is yes you don't need to do any of that you know caveat the answer is always going to be a simple yes or no and in this case absolutely the answer is yes so now that what we've done i mean that might seem overly formal but we've got three quarters of what we really need to do out we've got the facts we've got the constitutional question and then we've got the answer which is there is a violation so now we want to get into what you were starting to do uh quite well which is talk about why like how do they know that if they would have just said in the law we hate santeria or they're prohibited from exercising their religion that would be not even a case that we'd have to consider i mean that would be such an obviously unconstitutional law that i don't think any town council would be so stupid as to as to do it now they don't do that instead what they do is they try to craft the law about animal sacrifice in a way that does target the santeria this is what the court says without mentioning them now how do we know that how do we know that they're targeting that's what's banned right is intentional prohibition on the exercise of one's religion but how do we figure that out given that they're not so stupid as to mention the santeria and you've given all the answers one of the main things is they look at the what they said at the meeting what was their intent and what they said the meeting is that this is an abomination against the lord and a lot of the councilman just came out and said that they are for banning the santeria uh or something that approaches it um there was an important other thing uh do you remember what justice scalia said about sacrifice i don't know if you read the concurrence uh that came that scalia has a separate piece that he wrote yeah uh hang on uh i don't remember i read yes go ahead um he says uh that sacrifice is not a neutral term that it sort of reveals that we're trying to target the in the tax uh the santeria if they really cared about animal cruelty or um fires in public they would use neutral language but using sacrifice that tells us something that tells us that they're going after this religion so there are two crucial pieces of evidence one is the town meeting the statements and the other thing is uh this word uh sacrifice so now we've got the case i think right mm-hmm so now the huge question is what about the travel ban and i guess what hopefully let me let me get back to let me just get back to that because there was a point when i was reading kennedy's decision yeah reversing the lower courts and defending the santeria i was repulsed by the practice because sometimes they don't eat the the animals especially if they're sacrificing the animals after a death and i thought and then the question is and this is going to be really obvious to you but what is the difference between animal sacrifice and human sacrifice constitutionally yeah what what is the the the precept that you can then say no you cannot do human sacrifice because the constitution says what yeah i mean there are the court net doesn't usually have absolute rules about this so i think that the way the doctrine would work in that case is they would say that by the way that the way of explaining what happened in the case is that the court found there's intentional discrimination based on religion or another way to put it is that there's animus towards the santeria and that's what invalidates the law but i think there always could be some countervailing um well i don't know how the animal how the human sacrifice case well let's talk about peyote let's talk about the peyote case i i uh i thought your human sacrifice thing is actually a really good question so so do you mind if i just it's not a kind of weird one it's a really important kind of follow-up i think actually uh i think what i would say there is that there are laws against murder and those laws are sufficient to handle human sacrifice now if we passed a law banning human sacrifice that seems like you're sort of selecting out certain kinds of um murder based on a religious preference so i'm not sure that's constitutional and you don't need to do it that way you would just have laws against murder what the court's saying here is uh we're not going to allow for the intentional targeting of religion period and you know that that's why the case comes out the way that it that it does the other thing that i learned is that government law supersedes religious law that if the government passes a law and it and a religion can't follow it the government wins um that's a whole other area yeah right and and we'll revisit that it concerns the um it concerns the uh peyote issue that you raise what's happening this is a sort of now we're getting really deep into this yeah there had been an earlier way of thinking about religious freedom that said not only are you protected if you're targeted the way that the santeria are but you're protected if your religious beliefs are adversely affected and even though there might be a law that's perfectly fine uh like drug laws uh if you're uh um if you're a person that uses drugs for religious purposes the old doctrine was uh you might have a religious claim a free exercise claim to not have to follow the drug laws now in a case about peyote justice skolia came across that realization that if he had followed the old rule he was going to have to allow people to do drugs if the religion demanded it and he switched the rule he said you know what i'm not going to allow this idea that if you're just affected by a law in your religious belief then uh you opt out i'm going to require this much higher standard of showing that you have to be intentionally targeted but even skolia said even though he wasn't a great proponent of using uh the religion clause is an expansive way even he said the santeria are obviously targeted it wasn't a controversial case it's uh unanimous that everybody agrees this law is so bad it's obviously going after the santeria for exactly the reasons david that you laid out very carefully about granting exemptions for other kinds of slaughter for instance the comments at the meeting and then what i added about sacrifice that it's so obvious that it's intentional discrimination that on any interpretation of the clauses uh this is this is invalid now that's going to be important you know as we get to the next case yeah let's move on to the child yes i am and yes absolutely and and the other important thing i was surprised by how important words are how they cite absolutely mariam wepster that they're constantly defining words which terrifies me in this post-literate society if language breaks down so does justice so absolutely and uh which would also in our president could be especially worried well but then but the other yeah but then again making english the official language there is i can understand a legal reason for that now where you say hang on let's let's stand a thwart to the evolution of our language and say slow down because if language well i don't think the language of the law i mean if the meeting was carried out in spanish for instance we could have the exact same discussion but the point is i think the reason why language matters is that if you use language either in the content of your law and what's really important for the travel ban case because now you're really understanding the deep reason why it's clearly unconstitutional if you use it when you're crafting the law and you show that what your intent is is prejudice or discrimination then that law is invalid and that's why that case is unanimous because if anybody who does what you did and goes back and reads those transcripts or does what the court did and hears what happened at the meeting knows that they were going after the santeria and the idea that somehow is that men's rate by not mentioning it's men's rate it i think you would just call it a 10 i mean men's rate usually we talk about in the criminal context but yeah it's a it's a form of the it's the mental state that they're using the intent that they're using in crafting the law and the their intent is is animus it's hatred of the santeria or prejudice against them just as this is in the travel ban case so let's let's go to the travel ban by the way thank you and this is you're seeing it though you see the connection right yeah and it's it's it's even easier the travel ban case because it's the facts of lakumi is an easy case it's unanimous for all the reasons that you suggested those statements are so damning at the meeting and the word sacrifice is so damning that it just means that legislation that ordinance is never going to survive supreme court review now the travel ban is worse because there's only one person involved in crafting it in the end and that's trump and it's not hard to figure out what in his mind because he told us and he said he wants a muslim ban and then he tried to change it around and deny it but repeatedly even now the website talks about a trap a ban on muslim immigration and his advisors rudolf juliani told us he wanted a muslim ban he asked me to make it legal meeting a muslim ban the comments i mentioned from steven miller everybody told us the same as the town meeting that this thing is unconstitutional that's they gave us all the evidence that we need just like in lakumi for all the reasons that you suggested so it's not a clean slate the law is not measured solely on how it's written it's also measured by what led up to the writing of that law what you said when you ordered it to be written absolutely and if somebody asked you for a case citation to that idea what would you say i guess look look at me exactly and we have i have a brief that i uh helped organize with uh my friends and colleagues uh nelson tebbie and mike schwarzman who are two law professors one at brooklyn law school and one at uva and we have a lawyer uh josh matz and we have uh together initiated a professor's brief uh arguing just what we just said that uh under lakumi and under the animus doctrine uh this travel ban is clearly unconstitutional and it's not just us you know it's not just david and me and these three people i mentioned we now have um the most prominent uh many of the most prominent laurence tribe is signed on to it jeffree stone the former dean of the university of chicago law school it is a brief of over 40 uh constitutional law scholars uh who are agreeing that lakumi applies and that this uh is a clear instance of unconstitutional animus against muslims and the travel ban is unconstitutional under our current law of free exercise establishment and equal protection will you do this again next week i'd love to yeah i mean what what a thrill i mean i hope i wasn't too pedantic are you i'm gonna say something i'm gonna wrap this up to leave a thought for you what's the next assignment um why don't people read our brief now that you've read lakumi you can see what we did with it and um can we send it out to listeners you can if you look on the take care blog if you google take care uh you'll see it if you look in balkanization we're gonna have an op-ed out later uh we've posted it publicly so anybody anybody can read it and i'll i'll send you the link this is this is uh an amicus cure what what do they call these correct yeah uh amicus brief friend of the court friend of the court and then the ninth and fourth circuit courts of appeals are going to hear the travel ban case and they've asked people uh who have a scholarly interest or some interest in the case uh to to help them basically decide the case and so we've written um uh i should say josh drafted uh and we contributed the ideas to the brief about why lakumi applies and this is unconstitutional animus uh and um uh yeah check it out so before you go how do we find is there a title to this how do we what is the title the easiest way is there's a a blog called uh take care and i'll just get you the website and we have a link to it up there so that would be an easy way take care dot org it's called no it's actually sorry i'll say it again it's take care blog dot com take care blog dot com yeah and and the amicus cure a link to it yeah you'll link to that i'm going to say something and i have to admit i'm proud to say this and i'm bragging to you but there's a serious problem with this and that is when i get off the phone with you i'm going to go record the ralph nader radio show i'm going to be talking to ralph nader right there's something seriously wrong with our media that i get to talk to you and ralph nader there's i'm being i'm not this is not false humility there's something wrong i don't think so david i mean you're you're asking questions you're falling along and you're interviewing people who have studied this you know various issues uh in ralph nader's case you know one of the most influential people in american history on safety issues and and others who have expertise and you're drawing them out for a general crowd and that's a particular you know not a minor talent it's one of the most important things there is i think that uh the fact that you're doing that is a huge service and it's not an easy thing to do and it's something that uh you know we need more of well i can you listen you know that's the main skill i think you ask questions and you actually listen here's the danger and then i'll i i'm going to let you go you've been more than generous with your time the danger for somebody like me is your generous ralph nader is generous you begin to think you're smarter than you really are and that's how you end up with people like bill o'reilly or donald trump they mistake real bright people's politeness and civility and they transform that into a self-worth they don't deserve i think it's something different going on i think that trump has an ignorance and a hostility to knowledge i have never seen an openness that he has to learning about the most basic facts of our system i mean as i said last time i don't believe he knew how a bill became a law maybe until as recently as the destruction of his health care bill uh and you know it's a dispositional thing that some people think they're brilliant and they don't have to listen and they don't want to learn and then there are other people who know how to learn and who at some point somebody taught them that they went to a school they had a parent and they have an openness to knowledge and that thing is i think uh you know what makes democracy possible and what will make it thrive is people's capacity to do that but we've got to model it and teach it and it doesn't happen naturally and the narcissism that you get from somebody like trump is the opposite of that and that that's frightening to me i mean it right neil gorsuch is a horror show but he's still smarter than donald trump and i would i would assume trump has figured out a way when he's in neil gorsuch's company to think he's superior to neil gorsuch in some way right that could be i mean that's a scary thought but yeah he he just doesn't know you know what he's who he's talking to to him it's all politics i think courts he's used to dealing with them in a way that's purely instrumental he has no respect for the rule of law it's just another power instant if he didn't have to go to court i'm sure he'd prefer it if yet other techniques he could use for exercising power they'll use it when he can but not when it won't benefit him you know he he wants to sue people when they criticize him but he doesn't want to be sued when he incites allegedly incites violence so i think you know that he's got a i don't know a hostility i would say to to learning into the rule of law gorsuch a final thing having criticized him for the last four weeks i mean i should say i've never said that he's not smart he seems like a brilliant guy i think if he was on the show with us maybe one day we could get him to talk to us uh that we'd enjoy it you know he's a thoughtful person i i i'm being a pig i watched an old 60 minutes interview with clarence thomas blew me away blew me away we'll talk about that next time yeah professor cory brett schneider is a professor of political science at brown university he is an author and a journalist he appears in politico the new york times npr bbc and i thank you for your time what is the name of your book uh when the state speaks what should it say um and it's uh on amazon dot com and it's about uh free speech and hate speech and all these controversies around free speech that we've mentioned thank you there's a long discussion of lakumi okay and uh take blog take care blog dot com yep if you want to read the brief for next week we'll talk to you next week sir thank you okay my pleasure thank you great that's our show please friend me on facebook follow me on twitter share share this episode with everybody and please do all your amazon shopping via the david feldman show website check out pay what you want every month we're putting up about 10 new minutes of stand-up the album is called pay what you want download it and pay what you want to hear pay what you want i cannot stress this enough fill hendry show dot com fill hendry show dot com 30 000 hours it's uh you 30 000 hours of fill hendry from the show briz studios in downtown manhattan medicare for all and for all a good night