 On today's show, GOP strategist Mike Murphy, one of the original Never Trumpsters, tells us how we ended up this way. Comedian and comedy writer Kevin Cadaoka on the early days of the San Francisco comedy scene. How much sex are college kids really having? We talk with Lisa Wade, author of American Hookup, the new culture of sex on campus. The film critic Michael Snyder stops by to help us fill out our Oscar ballot so we can win a little scratch in the office pool. And then my favorite subject, Love and Dogs, with Amy Sutherland, author of Rescuing Penny Jane, One Shelter Volunteer, Countless Dogs and the Quest to Find Them All Homes. It's 3 a.m. Friday, February 23rd, 2017. We have a lot of show. Let's get right to it. Donald Trump this week promised to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms, unquote. How are you going to do that, Donald, by resigning? The executive orders continue to come out of the Oval Office. Not since Sheriff Bull Connor hosed down John Lewis and Martin Luther King on the Pettus Bridge. Have I seen a fire hose of hatred being directed at the American people? This week, Donald Trump issued another executive order. This time giving ICE, which is an arm of the INS, which is an arm of Homeland Security. He issued an executive order giving ICE the power to round up the 11 million undocumented workers in this country and simply send them back. Barack Obama deported more undocumented workers than any president in the history of this country. That is true. Donald Trump is setting up an arm of the INS that is nothing short of a secret police force that is following children, demanding papers. If you're in this country and you don't have the papers and you have a whiff of a criminal record, like shoplifting or running a stop sign, you are being kicked out of this country. You are being separated from your family. He has given Homeland Security, he has given ICE the power to be judge, jury and executioner. If you work for ICE, you can look at somebody and see a tattoo and if you decide that tattoo is gang related, you're gone. You're shipped out of the country. No legal recourse. Mexicans do the work Americans aren't willing to do. I believe the people who work for ICE do the work human beings aren't willing to do. Shame on everybody who works for ICE. They're terrorizing Mexicans. They're accidentally rounding up the wrong people. They can't afford lawyers. Hey, thank you for taking care of our children, preparing our food, nursing our parents, but now take your kids and your parents and get out of our country. If you're feeling lousy America, this is why. You may not know why you're feeling sick inside, but this is why. Because I'm sure Homeland Security is going to follow the letter of the law and not deport the wrong families, right? Because if there's one word to describe the people running Homeland Security, it's competence. What is being done in our name with our tax dollars to mothers and children right now is sinful. Donald Trump, ICE and Homeland Security, they are scapegoating the unseen and the most vulnerable and that is the definition of cowardice. I blame Trump, but I also blame the people who follow his orders. There are much better ways to address the plight of undocumented workers. So if you work for ICE, it's unacceptable to say, I was just doing my job. When your job has turned evil, you must quit. You must stop. If you're married to somebody who works for ICE, you must withhold sex. This is immoral and wrong, and it does not represent American values. It's getting buried. If you watch the Sunday shows, if you watch the news, very little coverage of the undocumented workers who come to this country for work. Who's hiring them? How come ICE never arrests the millionaire, the billionaire who built an agribusiness on the backs of undocumented workers? How can they never lock up the executives who facilitate jobs for undocumented workers? I know that there are not that many jobs out there, but if you work for ICE, you need to quit. That is easier than just doing what you're told. Because we have reached that point in American history when the path of least resistance is actual resistance. We got a lot of show that I want to get to. But another executive order came down from Mount Olympass, Trump on Wednesday, reversed President Obama's protections for transgender students that had allowed them to use bathrooms of their choosing. Now, to her credit, DeVos, the Education Secretary, wanted to keep that executive order under Obama in place. But it was our new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who insisted that Trump reverse that executive order. The thing you have to understand about this administration, there are no moderates. Ivanka, Jared Kushner, they have no sway over this administration. This is fascism. When you're a fascist, there's no middle ground. So stop expecting decency from Republicans in Washington. This is not who they are. Stop expecting McConnell and Paul Ryan to step up and moderate Donald Trump. Let me just propose this. Maybe McConnell, maybe Ryan. Maybe there are decent people in the Republican Party. But if Vladimir Putin had stuff on Hillary, if he had stuff on Donald Trump, and is able to control Donald Trump, I mean, that is the narrative that we're getting from the press right now and from the Democrats. That there's a reason Donald Trump refuses to attack Putin. There's a reason Donald Trump is attacking NATO instead of Putin. Putin doesn't want NATO nipping at his heels. We're being told that Putin has something on Donald Trump, that he's being blackmailed by Putin. If that's true, and I like to believe it is, because I need an explanation for what's going on in this world. So my explanation is that Donald Trump married Ivana, the first wife. She was from Czechoslovakia, which was under the Soviet sphere of influence. When they met, I believe that Ivana, the first wife, is a Soviet-era handler who worked for the KGB, had to answer to Vladimir Putin. And then when Donald divorced, or he married Marla Maples, and then Melania, who is from Slovenia, a former Iron Curtain nation under the iron fist of the KGB, I believe that Melania is a handler, a mole, and she is the brains behind Donald. And Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric, it's the Americans, basically. That's what I'm saying. That's what I like to believe. The point I'm making is don't expect anybody in the Republican Party to step up and temper the malevolence of Donald Trump, either because they're just as evil as Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin, the wealthiest man in the world, also has stuff on them. That is probably true. The part about Vladimir Putin having stuff on Paul Ryan and McConnell, Howie Klein, who does the show all the time, has stuff on McConnell. He claims that Senate Majority Leader McConnell did some stuff in the Army that, well, let's just say, that's what Howie Klein told me. The new executive order is an attack on transgender people. Since Trump has decided to persecute transgender people, I think everyone should boycott any designer doing business with Melania or Ivanka. These boycotts are working. There's an article in the New York Times this week saying that a lot of corporate CEOs during the Super Bowl, it was evident that a lot of corporations now are subtly and not so subtly speaking out in support of immigration and transgender and gay rights because the message has been heard. Consumers will punish you if you're on the side of Trump. I mentioned earlier, the CEO of Uber is no longer on the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House because of pressure from consumers. Most of the people who support Trump have votes, but no money. Now, if this country is run by corporations, the Democrats need to turn into the skid. They won't count our votes here in America, but they count our money. Every penny you spend says something, and the CEOs are paying attention. By forcing the CEOs to put their cards on the table and tell us where they stand on Trump, we are herding the right wing. There's a Twitter feed called Sleeping Giants whose sole intent is to put Breitbart News out of business. I've brought this up on the show before I urge you all to follow Sleeping Giants on Twitter. What they do is they take screenshots of all the advertisers on Breitbart News and then shame them into no longer running ads on Breitbart News. I don't know how much of an effect that's going to have on Breitbart News since I assume most of their money comes from the rich industrialists like the Koch brothers. A lot of these organizations are supported by the same people who fund these right wing sham think tanks like the AEI American Heritage Institute, the Cato Institute, American Heritage. These are think tanks that were set up after the Powell letter of 1971. Lewis Powell, before he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, he wrote a famous letter on behalf of the United States Chamber of Commerce saying that the conservatives have to take on the Brookings Institute and academia, and we have to create our own pro-business conservative think tanks. And that letter spawned the rise of American Enterprise Institute and Heritage and magazines like The Weekly Standard, which were funded by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers. You have a guy like Bill Crystal who writes for The Weekly Standard. He founded The Weekly Standard. It's a neocon magazine singing the praises of the free market as does the national review. The national review, Bill Buckley's rag, will sing the praises of Hayek and Milton Friedman and the free market and yet in the free market place of ideas, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, could never survive without the patronage of the plutocrats for whom they carry water. And the same goes for Breitbart. I don't think you can put Breitbart out of business by getting rid of their advertising. I'm pretty sure most of the salaries are paid by the plutocrats whose water they carry. And I'm going to talk about Breitbart because they lost an editor this week. Milo Yappanapalappalus had a step down because some tapes were leaked revealing that he was a proponent of child molestation. He quit. He said these tapes were selectively edited, which I find kind of delicious, considering that Breitbart did that all the time. There was, I think her name was Sherrod. She was an agriculture official under Obama. And the Breitbart people selectively edited a speech she was giving to say that the agriculture department should favor black farmers over white farmers. It was completely edited out of context. She sued Breitbart. They settled out of court. She was fired, though. Barack Obama offered her job back. But by then it was too late and she had had it. But she was the victim of selective editing. Milo was not. Milo was caught on tape saying that he learned sexual techniques from the priest who molested him. And he said that it is not molestation if a 13-year-old boy is entering puberty. Having sex with a 13-year-old boy is not molestation. That was revealed. And all of you know this already. CPAC, which is going on this week in Washington, D.C., rescinded their offer for him to speak. Simon and Schuster said this is a bridge too far. We do not want to publish your book. He gets to keep the $200,000 advance. But suddenly Simon and Schuster told Milo that we don't want you. And Breitbart News. He resigned from Breitbart News. Bill Maher had Milo on the show a week ago last Friday. There were a lot of things that Milo said that were left uncorrected. I have a huge quarrel with live television. The best use of television is front-line 60-minutes documentaries because it's not live. I find little value to live television. I have never tuned in to meet the press, which is done live, and heard an actual gotcha question where the person being interviewed said, well, you got me. I'm a liar. It's never happened. The problem with live television is they can't stop tape and check whether or not something you just said is a lie or not. Now Bill Maher does a live show. There's Google. When somebody says something incendiary that's hurtful, there's somebody on that staff who can Google it and feed them some stats and correct it. Or you can come back the next week and correct some statements that were made by your guests. I never see that on Bill Maher. I never see it on Meet the Press. I never see it on the Sunday shows. I see it in the New York Times. They have an entire page of corrections. Newspapers correct themselves. How is it possible that local news never makes a mistake? How is it possible that in all the years I've watched Meet the Press or Face the Nation or George Stephanopoulos or CNN, they've never once corrected themselves? Does that mean they never make mistakes? They never once at the end of a show correct themselves. And Bill Maher had Milo on last Friday. Before I get to that, 50% of transgender people attempt suicide. This is according to the Department of Justice. Up to 38% of trans people are harassed by local police. This is according to our Department of Justice. 15% of transgender people say that they've been physically abused by police officers. 7% say they've been sexually assaulted by law enforcement officers. Nearly a quarter of transgender people say they have been physically attacked by doctors and nurses. 50% of transgender people have experienced sexual violence according to the Department of Justice. Jeff Sessions, company. According to the Department of Justice, 50% of transgender people experience sexual violence. Is there any value to making fun of transgender people given how vulnerable and weak they are? So on real time last week, Bill Maher, and I do love Bill Maher, I think he is the bravest person on television, but I hold him to a much higher standard. He booked Milo, who is banned from Twitter because he launched his army of followers to terrorize the comic Leslie Jones, who's on SNL. I won't repeat what Milo said about Leslie Jones on Bill's show. I won't repeat the comments that were directed at Leslie Jones on Twitter that got Milo kicked off. I will say the fact that Leslie Jones didn't self-harm or have a nervous breakdown speaks volumes to how strong she is. On Bill's show Friday, Milo attacked Leslie Jones. Bill didn't stand up for Leslie Jones, a comedian. And then Milo went on to attack transgender people. On Bill's show, Milo said that transgender people are more likely to molest a child than any other group. This is a lie. It's not true. Milo didn't refute it. Bill complains about alternative facts. Well, he let an alternative fact be planted into the ether. And that's incredibly dangerous. It's bad enough that 50% of transgender people have experienced sexual violence. But to be called a child molester by Milo, there was some authority there for a flamboyantly gay man to call transgender people child molesters. It implies that maybe he knows something that we don't. It's incredibly dangerous to be considered a child molester. They are considered the most detestable people in the world. We all know that if you're in prison, the child molesters are more likely to get killed than the killers. Being labeled a child molester has serious ramifications. So when Bill Maher left Milo's statement uncorrected, he planted the seed that transgender people are molesters. He planted the seed to make it all right to beat up, or possibly worse, murder a transgender person. That's the danger of live television. That's the danger of having people like Milo on your show. Things are happening really fast and you don't have time to correct everything. Well, as I mentioned earlier, Milo was scheduled to speak at CPAC, but his speech was canceled because of these tapes about child molestation. Interesting, there is an obsession in the alt-right with child molestation. That's the way they like to make false accusations against people, accusing them of being child molesters. Pizzagate, for example. I won't even talk about what they did to Mr. Berg from Super Deluxe, but look that up. They roll. They accuse people of being child molesters. The same way people who are closeted gays beat up homosexuals, as Milo has now proven. So Simon and Schuster canceled the book contract, then Milo was forced to quit Breitbart News, and sure enough, on Tuesday or Wednesday in the New York Times, it's Koff, who we've had on the show, did an interview with Bill Maher, and Bill Maher took credit for all this. He claimed that had he not put Milo on his show last Friday, Milo would still be employed by Breitbart, he'd still be writing his book for Simon and Schuster, and he'd still be speaking at CPAC. Let's be clear, Bill, you didn't leak, you didn't discuss Milo's views on child molestation. You let Milo speak a blood libel against transgender people. You let Milo call transgender people child molesters. Milo went down because of the leaked tapes where he espoused the virtues of pedorasty. So this is really beneath you, Bill Maher, to take credit for the downfall of Milo. You gave him a platform and you were wrong, and you had nothing to do with his demise. Movement conservatives leaked the tapes to keep him away from CPAC this week. All you accomplished by putting Milo on your show was plant the seed for future attacks on transgender people. There are plenty of platforms for hate speech, and that's what Milo practices. That's what Breitbart practices. We don't need hate speech on AM Radio where it flourishes. We don't need hate speech on HBO. We don't need it at Berkeley. We don't need it at Simon and Schuster. We don't need it at CPAC. We all know what hate speech is. I am nauseated by the odor of sanctimony emitted by the false prophets of First Amendment rights. One of the reasons Bill had Milo, Milo on his show is he shared something with Milo. Both of them cannot speak at Berkeley, as though that's an affront to the First Amendment. Why should Bill Maher be speaking at Berkeley? Do you know how expensive it is to go to Berkeley? Why should Milo be speaking at Berkeley? Does Bill Maher have a PhD? Does Milo have a PhD? Were they willing to do it for free? Was Bill Maher going to speak at Berkeley for free? If Berkeley has the money to spend on Milo and Bill Maher, why don't they have the money to pay their adjunct professors? If Bill was speaking there for free, I stand corrected, but I doubt he was. And even if he was speaking for free, he doesn't belong on a college campus. You can see Bill on HBO, you can go see him in San Francisco. My daughter went to Berkeley. Bill doesn't have a PhD. Anybody who comes on my daughter's campus better have a PhD. Everybody's championing is defending Bill for having Milo on. We should discuss everything. Everything should be discussed. All right, why don't you do a show tonight about child molestation? Milo was on a podcast and he said some interesting things, Bill, about child molestation. He talked about a priest who molested him and how the priest taught him some sexual techniques. He said that if you have sex with a 13-year-old boy who is sexually aware that it's not child molestation. Let's explore that. Why suppress speech, Bill Maher? Shouldn't we hear what Milo has to say about child molestation? Don't suppress his speech because sunshine is the great disinfectant and all that, right? Why to platform on HBO for millions, for millions of people to hear Milo's views on child molestation? Sure, a small percentage will agree with him and be encouraged to act on their beastly urges, but the vast majority will see him for what he is. And that's the whole point of a free and open debate on important issues like child molestation or, the week before, Nazism. White supremacy. Teach us, Bill. I keep forgetting. Is white nationalism wrong? Is child molestation wrong? Is bullying Leslie Jones wrong? I keep forgetting. We don't know. Help us. Because with all the immigrants being rounded up by ICE, all the frightened Muslim and Hispanic kids in America, with it now being open-season on Blacks, women, Jews, and transgender people, we need to spend more time relitigating Nazism or child molestation because so many of us don't know if it's wrong to be a white nationalist. Bill, teach us. We don't know if child molestation is wrong and the only way we can discover whether or not it's wrong is by having somebody like Milo on the show and maybe show pictures so we can decide if child molestation is wrong. Because sunshine is the great disinfectant and it's all about freedom of speech and the First Amendment. I may not agree with what you have to say, but I'll fight for your right and all that. Because in times like these, right now, we need to exercise our right to free speech, not by giving voice to investigative journalists like Jeremy Scahill who canceled or Ralph Nader who was available, who was in Los Angeles or professors and authors. Right now, Bill Maher, at this point in our history, what we need foremost is a spirited debate about whether or not Nazis are wrong or whether or not child molestation is wrong because we just don't know where to stand on that one. Thank you for using your forum to educate us on white nationalism last week, Bill. Thank you. That was perfect use of your stage time. Joe Pine would be so proud of you. The bottom line and the reason that I got really upset about this is I have tremendous respect for Bill Maher. But Milo used his power to abuse Leslie Jones, a comedian. She's one of us. Bill Maher should be using his power to destroy Milo. Leslie Jones is a comedian. Milo is your enemy, you know, solidarity and all that, remember? You got ICE coming for the Hispanics, the INS harassing Muslims. The police are shooting unarmed black men. Jewish cemeteries are being overturned. Mexicans are hiding. People who are Arab and who are of the Islamic faith are terrified. And you give time to a white nationalist and let him spread lies. No, I think you need to devote the rest of your season to discussing white nationalism and child molestation because so many of us can't remember. We can't remember. We can't remember if child molestation and Nazism is wrong because it's free speech, right? And the First Amendment and people need to see things to determine whether or not it's wrong. Why don't you have a man come on your show and spread his butt cheeks and take a massive dump into another man's mouth? And then why doesn't your panel discuss whether or not that's repulsive? I mean, why suppress speech? People need to see a man taking a dump inside another man's mouth before they can decide whether or not it's disgusting. Because with what's going on in America, Bill, right now, we need you to mainstream gay Nazis, pedophiles, and coprophilia. Because that's what free speech is all about. Look, in a free country, you're free to say hateful things. But I'm also free not to invite you on my television show or speak on my campus. Hate speech is protected, but so is the right to keep it off my show and out of my daughter's college. My father and Bill Maher's father settled this debate over Nazis in 1945. There's no need for further discussion. Putting a Nazi, like Milo on your television show, is intellectual pornography. It's lazy. The only reason Bill booked a gay Nazi is because it's perverse. It accomplished nothing other than getting people's attention. The guest spread a lie about transgender people. He said they molest children and nobody corrected that blood libel. So now when a transgender person gets beaten up because that statement was left uncorrected, Bill Maher can take solace in the fact that he didn't suppress a Nazi's speech. All the intellectuals who need to be listened to and Bill Maher books this guy, that Bill is the real suppression of speech. Wasting time with a Nazi when you fail to book all the authors and professors with something worthy to say? No, Bill. Last Friday you suppressed speech. Jeremy Scahill canceled. Wouldn't we have been better off to hear from Jeremy Scahill? What smarter person remains unheard because you went for the gay Nazi? I hold you to a much higher standard. You're the bravest one on TV. Booking a Nazi is the height of cowardice. Next time you blame the media for giving Donald Trump $2 billion worth of free advertising, let's remember that you normalized a Nazi. And he went down not because of you, but because of tapes that had nothing to do with you. Little dangerous to provide a platform for people who incite violence, especially cagey people from Breitbart News or Ann Coulter who do it in a way where they can fall back and say, I was being funny. Ann Coulter proved at the Rob Lowe Roast, she's not funny. She's not a comedian. She means what she says. You don't give voice to degenerate fascists. We got a lot of show. Let's get right to it. Mike Murphy is a GOP strategist. He is one of the original Never Trumpers, an NBC analyst and a senior fellow at Harvard Belfer Center. A host of the Radio Free GOP podcast and friend of Dana Goulds. He joins us today from Los Angeles. Hello, Mike Murphy. Hello. Thank you for having me, David. Here's the problem I have with my listeners. I have cultivated people who think the way I do. And we are rabid progressive liberals who think that Donald Trump is a mortal threat to the planet. And we don't want to hear from anybody else because we feel that they've been given enough time on mainstream channels to vent their corporatist beliefs. Dana Goulds said I should have you on because you're part of the left-right alliance, as Ralph Nader would say. Is that a fair statement? Well, I'm trying to avoid any meetings with Ralph. But I'm at an anti-Trump Republican because I don't think he's conservative and I think he lacks the character of the president. So I opposed him during the election. And you can see what my mighty power did. He ran right over any of us in the Republican Party who didn't like him, became the nominee, bit unnaturally because he's not really a conservative. And now he's president. So part of me believes in probably the romantic fiction that the presidency elevates people. And maybe he'll get better. But so far, he's been bumpy to be kind to him. So yeah, there's a lot about Trump I don't like. That, I guess, puts me and others who think like I do in the party in the same position of opposing him, though ideologically for different reasons on the character dimension, probably for the same reason. You and I are on opposite ends of the spectrum. You are a political consultant. You ran Jeb Bush's political action committee right to rise. You had hundreds of millions of dollars to get Jeb elected president. He had money, but no energy, according to Donald Trump. What we lacked was a grievance message, which is something that Jeb is just to his great credit and capable of having. This was a year where the Republican primary voters wanted a hammer and saw everything as a nail. So it's a free country. You know, they get to operate that way. But what we were selling wasn't what the primary was looking for. So I, you know, I'm glum about it because I think Jeb would have been a great president. But I'm going to sit back, rent Ishtar, watch it over and over again, and at least be proud that we, we refunded about 14 million bucks to our donors because we ran a pretty tight ship with the money. And when we figured that we just did not have what the primary voters were looking for, it was, you know, we shouldn't waste it though. All these donors still call me up saying, I've never gotten a refund from Plagal Camp in ever my life. I can't believe it. But I would have rather spent all the money and won. It's funny you bring up Ishtar. I have a poster of Ishtar in my office because it reminds me that the plans of great minds often end up falling into the dust heap of history. Although Ishtar is a pretty good movie. It's pretty funny. It's actually not that bad. That's the irony of it. But I've got a movie poster here for the Tiffany talking chimps, which reminds me of the commerce of show business every single day. What's it like being a Nazi? No. Great uniforms. A lot of goddamn saluting though. I'll tell you. It's murder on the bursitis. Yeah, I'll tell you. Absolutely. And no rest periods. Always a goddamn invasion. That's the only reason my people hated the Nazis. My bursitis, I can't lift my arm. So this is my fear. This is how I sleep at night. My theory is the no offense, okay? Because I want you to come back. We have mutual friends. You work with Dennis Miller and Dana Gould and you are a never-trumper. But my theory about people in your corner, you're like Charlie Sykes, the Iowa talk show host who was a consumer. Wisconsin and a hero too, just in our side. Oh, on our side, he was from Iowa. That's a different set of facts from Wisconsin. Did you say Wisconsin? Yeah, he was a big deal on talk radio there. Where Trump lost the primary, by the way, and he was part of that equation. It's one of the rare, victorious moments in the Never-Trump movement. And David Brooks. I'm going to lump you in with Charlie Sykes and David Brooks. You know that the Republican Party has gone off the rails. You've known that for years. But you also know that if you come over to the Democratic Party, you'll be lost in the crowd. So you compromise your moral compass to stay in a political wing where you can still swim. I've just mixed so many metaphors. But you understand what I'm saying. A political wing where you can still swim. I'll tell you why I don't agree with that construction. Which is, on one hand, if I look at this to torture some metaphors of my own, like I have to pick the which bubbling pot of oil to dive into, I see the left as having its own bubbling pile of oil. I don't think the biggest problem in the world is that if I want to get a free PhD in yoga, I should make Wall Street pay for it. So I'm never going to fit in with the Bernie Sanders campaign. I think Bernie lacks any malice at all. I think he's a patriot who wants to improve the country. But I think my Labrador has a better understanding of basic economics than Bernie does. So I'm an uncomfortable socialist. I'm not going there. So I would rather fight even a losing civil war in my party in the fullness of the battlefield and stay a conservative. I think Trump is going to be a short-term phenomena, the horrible one, but a short-term one. Because in the end, he doesn't believe anything. And I don't think you can sustain that in American politics. You've got to pick your side and fight fair and believe in it. And over time, you're going to win some and lose some. So I think Trump is a temporary black swan aberration. And I want to stay on my side fighting to do better than Trump. Is it fair to say that you believe in personal responsibility and you don't believe that people should be on welfare, but you also recognize that there are times in a person's life when they do need welfare that there is a moral hazard to government bailing out banks and businesses. But there are times when the government does have to step in and bail out a bank and a business. You're not rigid in your economic ideology. Oh, no, no. I believe in the free market, but I'm not against welfare. I think the best definition of welfare is unemployment insurance and then it actually in Germany of all places. And it's a good idea, and we were a little late coming to it in the U.S. So I'm all for public assistance programs, but I want the outcome to incentivize work and education not necessarily to pay people not to do anything and lose self-esteem. But yeah, of course I'm for that. I do believe the state has some, there's such a thing as a public interest which is bigger than the individual interest. So occasionally the state has to act. I was for some of the stuff that the popular swing of the party doesn't like about bailing out big banks because I don't want a systemic failure. I don't want to start using stone coin money to try to buy things from guys with burning oil cans. I get enough about economics to understand government has some purposes. And for an FDA because I don't really want to trust complete free capitalism to pick the pharmaceuticals that I buy. So yes, there's definitely a rule for government. The fact is the biggest problem conservatives have often is reconciling they're suspicious of government and the ability to use it as a policy tool. A purist would not acknowledge that Adam Smith and the wealth of nations spoke of the virtue of regulation that Hayek and the road to serfdom talked about regulation that Ein Rand went on social security. This notion that the free market is the solution to all our problems is not part of movement conservatism, right? Well, it's not part of traditional conservatism. There's this populist kind of revolt against all institutions now that I don't even believe by any means is the majority view of the Republican Party but there are people who believe it in the Republican Party. And it's stupid, you know, just the world doesn't work that way. But I think these things come in symmetry. There's plenty of room on the loony left that kind of lines up with the loony right. You know, just dumb policy ideas that are make believe and magical. The reality is there's got to be government. There has to be and there has to be, you know, as the party that loves the free market, we should be for, we should protect it. It's our church. So we have to watch oligarch, I'm going to mispronounce it, but basically oligarch capitalism where everything becomes so big, it's monopolistic and there is no free market. You know, we sometimes have a blind side to that on the conservative side and we should actually be more vigilant than anybody protecting it because we believe it. And we should make it work. You worked on John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. Actually, no. I was the knucklehead who helped him lose in 2000, the Straight Talk Express. Okay. In 2008, I just admit Romney's campaign for governor and I thought it was a conflict to work for either of them. So I took myself out of it. They're both friends of mine. Right. You were caught off, Mike, saying that the Palin pick was quote unquote cynical. Yeah, I said it appeared to be cynical. I was a big public critic of Sarah Palin from the minute it started. And there were some people, according to Game Change, the Halpern book, there was Double Down. And what was the book before Double Down? Was it Game Change? I think so. It's all a blur to me. But yeah, I think the first one was Game Change and then Double Down. Okay. So in Game Change, there were some McCain operatives who could not vote for him because of Sarah Palin. Who is worse, Palin or Trump? Trump. Why? Palin's stupid. Trump is a demagogue. You know, Trump is clever enough to be more dangerous. Palin's just hapless. I mean, they both have demagogic tendencies, but I think Trump is worse. How dangerous is it to have a stupid person in the Oval Office? My contention is that the special interests who put Trump into the Oval Office are kind of like the same special interests who put George W. Bush and they would have had Palin in the Oval Office and would have been perfectly content with an idiot in the Oval Office so long as they could get what they wanted done. See, I don't think the special interests did put Trump in the office. Whoever the special interests are, that's a tricky phrase because in some ways everybody thinks they're in a special interest because they have an interest. So if I'm in a union, no, that's not a special interest. That's mine. I think Trump was a black swan that, if you identify like business interests, they were not at all happy about Trump because Trump's against free trade. Trump's for a lot of things that they think is against their gospel of economic growth. So I don't know. I think your original question on the stupid thing, the presidency has a lot of training wheels on it, but I think the biggest problem is we don't move forward. We blow opportunities, a huge opportunity cost to get stuff done that can help everybody. Instead, I'm sure he's right now demanding to see the aliens from Roswell and stuff like that rather than running the table around the world. But we're the big thing and when we screw up, it brings instability and instability can create crises and crises can create wars where people get killed. So there's a risk factor that's much bigger with a stupid person than a smart one. Every morning I wake up and I say, how in the world did Donald Trump end up sitting behind Barack Obama's desk? There has to be an explanation. The same way when the Twin Towers came down, there had to be a unifying theory to explain all this. It just can't be a random act. It had to be some grand collusion between the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia and Israel and whatever. The Russian connection, I believe, because I want to believe the worst about Donald Trump, I believe the special interest that installed Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin, who's the wealthiest man in the world and he's a former KGB guy. So my unifying theory, my explanation for this monstrosity is Putin. How much of this scandal is us just reaching to find an explanation for how this guy got into the Oval Office? Well, I disagree with the first part. I'm not a big unified field guy. I'm more of a chaos guy. But your second point I think on Putin, there is some reaching because people need a gospel of what the hell happened and Putin becomes a convenient one. I think in reality, the Russians, it is now pretty well acknowledged, were screwing with our election. But I think they were more interested in chaos and hurting Hillary Clinton, who they thought was going to win, too. Then a particular plan to put Trump in the White House. I think they just wanted to divide our country, get us back on our heels so they could continue to expand their sphere of influence. They wanted to stabilize us. And I think they liked Trump more than they liked Hillary. And we still don't know why, because he won't release his tax returns. He could be in a hawk to Russian banks. But I think this is one of these things where the gang that couldn't shoot straight at the beginning kind of grew into the surprising how come a Trump winning. And I think that Kremlin was as surprised as anybody. Hell, on election night, Trump was surprised. He never thought he'd win. So it's, you know, I'm just not a unified field theory guy, but it makes it easier to understand because you've got a villain and a conspiracy and a rationalizes the outcome. You look at the actual numbers of the election. Trump was surprised on election day. And in fact, his staff, Kellyanne and the rest of them, were allegedly calling around reporters all afternoon explaining why they lost and blaming each other. And the returns come in. So it was a kind of a black swan deal where in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three states the Republicans have not carried in a presidential race since the 80s, narrowly, particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin case, tripped over for Trump. And that did the electoral college win. In raw numbers, she did about the margin that George W. Bush did over John Kerry. Pretty big margin, nearly 3 million votes. So this thing, it's also interesting just about the numbers because they're important, they're facts and all this, is Trump did not do as well as Mitt Romney in a lot of Republican areas. For example, in Orange County, the classic Republican, you know, formerly Republican mega county here in California, Romney carried Orange County by about 75,000 votes. Trump lost it by about the same. So how did Trump win then? Well, he spiked in a few interesting places like Wilkesburg, Pennsylvania, Luzern County, 300,000 people. Barack Obama won it by 4,000. Reagan won it by 8,000. Trump won it by over 25,000. So where he did well, he did really well. And that tended to be without being a cliche about it, kind of blue collar pissed off the world is changing America where there's even some overlap without burning it. And that was how he picked the lock and it was a bit of a black swan. The legitimacy won under our rules. But it will be hard to see this thing repeat. It was a very weird outcome. When you were running Bush's pack, when did you start taking Trump seriously? We saw him at the beginning. Our view was that the primary electorate, because you know, we'd call him up on polls and talk to him. So we kind of knew what they were looking for and about half to 60% of the primary were interested in a grievance candidate who would blow things up. And we thought that would be Ted Cruz. We thought he was in the position to get that vote. And we were competing with Kasek and Rubio and for a while, Walker and Christie among the other more regular Republican half. So it was like a bracket system. We thought, all right, we got to get through our guys and then face off against Cruz and maybe Trump, but initially Trump had about 23% of the vote and everybody else was like, not too weird, too orange TV guy. And then Trump started growing and he managed to grab all, just decimate on that grievance side of the party where he was over time, what they were looking for. And there was an element of race to it too, unfortunately. And then over on our regular Republican side, there were still enough people who thought somebody who had nothing to do with Washington would be better and they were attracted to Trump. One of the things that, you know, I was working for the super PAC, so I couldn't talk to Jeff, but I know that this drove Jeff crazy during the election because nobody hates Washington DC more than Jeff. You know, he was a guy who went down, built his life in Florida where they didn't know anybody, had been governor, not like federal power, yet he was perceived because of his last name and his brother and the family as being like Mr. Washington. And that was not what you wanted to be this year. So, you know, we were watching Trump, but we, and this was our big stupid move, we didn't think he was the main threat. We thought we had to consolidate our side of the Cruz. Well, Trump turned out to be a threat on the Cruz side of the party, that half of the vote and he got a third of the vote on our side and we could never get enough guys out. Kasich wouldn't leave, Rubio, Christie, you know, it was just too divided and we just, even in our own little plunder dome there, we couldn't, we couldn't get enough of an overwhelming advantage to be able to square off well. When would you have been allowed to talk to Jeb? You had the right to rise political action committee, so you're not allowed to have any communication whatsoever with Jim. You know, it was funny, we did one donor event and God, I kind of remember where a lot of travel in this business might have been Texas or I think it was in Dallas and I was speaking to a bunch of donors who had given to both Jeb's side and our side, which is legal and then Jeb was going to appear later. I had to like clear the building, you know. I mean, we were very strict about it. We were just looser and I remember Jeb and I saw each other in the hallway and we walked up and like hugged and you know, but we had 50 reporters standing there watching to see if either of us said a syllable and you know, so we did this kind of weird you know, kind of hug and like you know, double bow and then I went running down the fire escape being screamed at by reporters. You know, did you whisper in his ear? Ridiculous. Our politics have become a parody of J.P. Bush's political strategy and he's been trying to to organize some of this stuff but I couldn't talk to him till after the campaign and he was no longer a candidate. The difference between Bush and Trump is Bush has more class but Trump is articulating what Jeb believed but in an in elegant way. I think he represented himself as a compassionate conservative and a gentle man and he put a pretty face to what I considered some pretty ugly ideas and I think Jeb put a rational face to some irrational ideas when it comes to economics and how to fix Washington. That's what I think and I don't think there's that much of a difference between the content. It's the style. The difference between Trump and Bush was style as opposed to content. Is that a fair statement? I disagree with it because the big, you know, the tone was totally different but if you look at the issues that divided the primary Trump had this kind of punishing view on immigration. Jeb had the opposite. He talked about a path to legal status which was very unpopular but he was for it, you know, act of love which he was constantly criticized for. Jeb's internationalist Trump is an isolationist questioning things like NATO that's kept the peace for 70 years. Jeb is a free trader. Trump is not. He's a productionist. So I think on just about every major economic issue, they're very different people and that was part of the real fault line in the party and what surprised a lot of us is that we have traditionally been an internationalist party and free traders is Trump's protectionist bent. That's new in the Republican Party and it's troubling to many of us who think that would be an economic poison pill for the country. That would hurt the very people Trump's talking about helping in my hometown of Detroit. Right. That's a fair statement. I don't think he would be rounding up and deporting all these undocumented workers. They're far worse than anything Obama did and Obama was pretty bad but this is you know, this is just horrible. ICE now has the power to deport an undocumented worker if there's a tattoo that looks suspiciously gang-like. It's pretty frightening. Where did Jeb stand on the Trans-Pacific Partnership? He supported it. Right. As Hillary did until her pollster caught her in an elevator the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a great thing. People, it drives me crazy as people say on iTunes you can go to Radio Free GOP I have an interview with Bob Solak all about international trade policy. The reality is it was a way to kind of economically buttress against the Chinese with the South Koreans and the Japanese. It was a geopolitical treaty but people perceived on the left and right and gave away trade deal which is ridiculous. It was not perfect but it was in our interest and of course I'll post it. Okay, I'm against the TPP but that is a difference between Jeb and Trump and the other things you mentioned about immigration what about the Keystone Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipelines where would Jeb where would he expect? You know, I'm 90% sure directly to the campaign I probably have to quadruple check this but I'm pretty sure he was for it. He was for the Keystone XL Pipeline? I'm pretty sure. I think probably Google still has the old campaign website and the search index and you can find out but I'm pretty sure. And Trump has revived the pipeline as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline is it fair to say that Jeb like George W and his father was an oil guy who would have eased up the Obama regulations on fracking and drilling and even coal waste? Jeb, I don't think he was an oil guy he's worked in commercial real estate but Jeb believes that American energy is a good thing and fracking if it's properly regulated is a way to have energy independence which is good for our country. In fact it's a good split because I'm due for lunch and I'm not taking a break. It's getting good. Hang on. Your guy promised me we'd be done at 12.25 because I'm enjoying it too but I've got to get across town and I ain't walking. But I did enjoy this David. You'll come back? I will. This is very interesting. There's one that I could tell you but you've got to go. Mike Murphy is a GOP strategist check him out at Radio Free GOP Podcast. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. No thank you it was fun. Bye bye. Lisa Wade is an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College she is currently on leave and living in New Orleans the place she calls home. Her latest book American Hookup is about the emergence and character of the culture of sex that dominates college campuses today. She joins us today from New Orleans. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. Is there an orgy on our college campuses and what happens if you don't want to participate? If you want to be a virgin how do you contend with this orgiastic scene out of Caligula? As I understand it when you go off to college it's like a scene from Caligula. What happens if you don't want to participate? I'm not going to say that orgies never happen on college campuses but they certainly aren't happening all the time. A third of students won't participate they will report exactly zero hookups at the end of their four years of college. Students who are in the top 10% of hooking up, they're hooking up the most. Their average number of hookups started 10 in four years. And when you take everyone together the average number of hookups is eight. I don't think that would be as Caligula-esque even if all eight of those included intercourse but only 40% of them do. So there's definitely not. When you say there are eight hookups over a four year period is that the number you gave? On average, yes. Is that eight separate people you're having sex with or eight sex acts? Eight different encounters with four different people. So half of hookups are with someone they hooked up with before. And you said they're not necessarily engaging in sex when they hook up? Often they're not. About a third of the time when you ask students what they did in their last hookup they just made out with them and groped a bit. So sometimes it's just making out on a dance floor. 40% of the time it includes intercourse. 40% of the time it includes intercourse. And often that's the second time they hooked up with someone. So it may not even be the first time it might be the second or third time they hooked up with the same person. And these numbers are based on the census that's conducted by the Department of Commerce, right? It is a survey called the online college social life survey that surveyed over 24,000 students at 21 different institutions. How do we know they're telling the truth? They can be pretty sure they're telling the truth. Their memories might be a little fuzzy about things. They may downplay or upplay what they did. But when we look at how students respond to surveys in general and in particular surveys about sexuality most of the time they're telling something that's pretty close to the truth. Alright, because is it by phone that they're answering the survey or are they filling out a questionnaire? It's online, yeah. So they're not being observed and it's anonymous. It's anonymous. Okay. We really don't know that much about sex and I suspect we're going to continue not to know about sex. People lie to themselves about money and they lie to themselves about sex so I think the only way to tell if somebody is speaking the truth is by attaching a body cam. That's my suggestion. We should be able to go. Okay, I sound like a pervert. Alright, that's not that much sex. Right? On average, one new sexual partner a year if you measure it by intercourse. So no, I don't think it's definitely not that in itself is not worth the kind of moral panic that we have developed around sex in college. But like everybody else, they're obsessed with sex. Yes, absolutely. And they're thinking about it and talking about it and gossiping and living on top of one another and pressuring each other to have sex go back to the dorm and discuss it. Tell me about Tinder. My fantasy is that sex for young people has been commodified. Sex is taken for granted. Sex is just something you do the same way you eat. Please tell me that. Apparently in college that's not true. I wanted to believe that young kids now just take sex for granted and have it every night. I think Tinder has exported the hookup culture script to the wider culture. So students live in a hookup culture if they live on campus in the sense that this notion that they should be having casual sex is dominant and swirling around them and the parties and the outfits and the conversations swirling around them and so they live in a hookup culture and in a hookup culture the hookup script which is this idea that we should be commodifying one another objectifying one another using them for our own sexual pleasure that script is dominant in a hookup culture and what Tinder has done is it's exported that script out into the rest of the country where it may not be dominant but now it's very available. It's very available do women on Tinder feel pressured to have sex with a guy because they're aware that that's what maybe I should ask a different question. Okay. When you go on Tinder are you looking for an emotional connection? Are these kids looking for an emotional connection or is it hormones? Oh, well hormones are very emotional. Let's not make a false binary there. What do you mean by that? Well hormones are part of our emotional system our bodies are just bags of chemistry we are full of all kinds of emotions all the time part of which are related to what's going on with our hormones so this notion that a study student or otherwise is capable of having sex that is void of any emotion other than lust is it's not very possible for most people most of the time so yeah students are having all kinds of emotions when they have sexual encounters just like the rest of us are and in 50% of the cases when they are hooking up they're hoping something romantic comes out of it even though usually nothing does. You say the women are both looking for something romantic or just the women are looking for something romantic? Oh absolutely both surveys have found that 73% of men and 70% of women really wish they could find a girlfriend or boyfriend and these are college students absolutely. You're saying that when a guy in college goes out for the night he's thinking about a emotional connection with a beautiful woman I'm asking he is he is probably hoping to have a good sexy time maybe with another woman and he might hope that at some point one of these sexy good times turns into something more Okay and you don't think that a guy a 19 year old boy goes out hoping to meet a woman who will have sex with him once without any consequences? Some of them want that and some women want that too Okay Yeah but certainly and a lot of men are happy to take that like if that's their consolation prize that's pretty good but it's simply not true that there is like all men are just looking for casual sex and they never talk to the person again and all women are looking for something different than that the data just doesn't support that and in the book you talk about a man a boy, I maintain that if you're 19 20, 20 when you're really a boy who was disappointed after sex because the woman wanted it to be casual and he was confused by that Sure Men are human beings too they have all the same needs and desires as every other human being so sometimes they like people How much of this hookup culture is about status as opposed to pleasure about something to report back to your friends about peer pressure? Well it's a lot about status and I want to point out that the hookup culture is telling students is ideal telling students they should feel and do is different than what students really are feeling and doing so I want to point out that the cultural rules and expectations are not necessarily reflective of what students are really experiencing the cultural rules are yes that you are trying to go out and have sexual contact with someone that your friends will think is a catch so a score so it's very much about status and the students that are considered low status are you might say sexual hot potatoes right nobody wants to have anything to do with them and that can be very painful for a lot of students so status is a huge driver pleasure is you know my students talk a lot about desire a lot less about pleasure itself On college campuses where you have speech code and lookism I mean there's such a thing as lookism doesn't the hookup culture go against the grain of the politically correct movement on our college campuses the objectifying of each other shouldn't the hookup culture be frowned upon hookup culture has embraced a particular stereotypical masculine approach to sexuality the paradox is that on the one hand that might be looked down upon by people who are on the left or consider themselves progressive this stereotypical male sexuality but on the other hand we have for better or worse embraced the idea in this country that women's liberation is contingent on women being able to do what stereotypical men do and so the paradox is that it feels sort of aggressive and at the same time it feels like liberation for a lot of young women I was hoping when women became liberated that women should be free to be more like women because I'm well that's what feminists are hoping too and we got the idea that women should be allowed to be more like men but feminists couldn't convince America that men should have the right to be more like women and that is a big part of the problem on college campuses is that we have both men and women trying to enact a sexuality that reflects half of the human experience and nobody is sort of standing up for the now stigmatized feminine ideas about what sexuality has the potential to be I guess I'm filtering this through my own personal prism I was a virgin when I went off to college I drank and I eventually lost my virginity by being able to read signals from the women I was with I quickly got married never cheated now I'm divorced women control sex and must control sex that they're the ones who determine whether or not there's going to be anything that's the only way you can have sex is that a fair statement women control their bodies so they control but there will be sex that evening that's axiomatic right? women control their bodies and men control their bodies and so both people I think it is fair to say control whether or not sex happens that evening your premise is that all men all the time with every single female body would say yes and I don't think that's necessarily true for many different reasons I had Dr. Melvin Connor on he's the author of Women After All Sex Evolution and the End of Male Supremacy Dr. Connor is I don't know I guess he's in the 70s now he went to Harvard Medical School and while he was attending Harvard Medical School he decided to also get a PhD in Anthropology very brilliant man and he went on to invent the paleo diet Dr. Melvin Connor and he wrote this book Women After All Sex Evolution the End of Male Supremacy he told me that women don't enjoy casual sex that biologically women can't have sex the way men can that they rarely have orgasms after a one night stand and that they're sleeping with men for reasons other than pleasure subconsciously seeking out the most powerful sperm and in his book he talks about the end of male supremacy and he's saying that women of course this is a man telling a woman how to have sex which I always love I love men writing books about women and their urges and their needs he said that biologically women should not be out there thinking that by having sex with men the way men have sex with women that they're liberated I think that's a fair statement well I mean those ideas are out of touch with the most recent research on biology and evolution and fitness it's just simply not we can no longer defend this notion that men have a single sexual strategy that involves spraying sperm on anyone who will approach them and women are only served by having sex with one person at a time and then also nailing him down to her side so that he can never stray the new research and I'm talking specifically about biologists and evolutionary biologists it just does not hold up either the truth is that women report enjoying casual sex less so than men but it's because the way in which casual sex is organized is to benefit men there was an interesting study that was done in the 80s where they men and women on campus students on campus were randomly approached by an attractive person of the other sex and propositions would you like to have sex tonight and a huge percentage of the men said well yes I would and exactly zero of the women said why yes I would but this study was redone recently and they manipulated it in such a way that the man propositioning the woman would be assured to be nice to her and also sexually skilled and in that in that study a much larger percentage of women said yes so when women are given a guarantee that the sexual encounter is going to be pleasant for them they are much more interested in casual sex than they are otherwise and unfortunately in hookup culture and in much of America that guarantee is not present and so a lot of women would rather not do it at all than get into something that they're not going to enjoy or might even be traumatic right I'm a little older than you so I was around for the invention of the clitoral orgasm and this didn't exist until I went off to college I was lucky enough that they invented the clitoral orgasm before that the only thing men and women had was the vaginal orgasm and women did not enjoy sex from the vaginal the vaginal orgasm doesn't is that kind of non-existent right some women about a quarter of women will have orgasms from penile vaginal sex alone but that's still a clitoral orgasm and that the orgasm is located that's the organ that produces orgasm for women it's just that she's getting indirect stimulation from that activity so you really need to be skilled in the clitoris in order to give a woman an orgasm yeah sure but it's not that complicated and yet and yet I would assume in America we don't talk about sex you see it I mean you have pornography I never saw porn title clitoral stimulation you know it's just not something I would assume I would assume most young men I don't know have to be taught right sure I mean a while back where I asked I gave students what I called a clitoris I gave them a test how much do you know about the clitoris were the men even able to find the test the men actually did just as well on the test as women did both men and women earned on average a D on this exam so it's true we're not doing a good job of educating but women don't know I'm being serious women don't know that they have a clitoris that study found that they are not accessing it as a source of information about itself it's true they are avoiding that source of information but it also suggests that men are busy looking for information because most or all of them would have had access to a clitoris at all only quite recently they were just as much as women so they're working on it excuse me for one second if I had a clitoris which was one of my favorite Peter Paul and Mary songs if I had a clitoris I would know everything about my clitoris I would have a rib removed there'd be no fingerprints on my index finger it'd be rubbed down so much I mean how can a woman I'm being serious how can a woman not know about her clitoris it's a testament to how fearful we make women of their own bodies and their own pleasure it's true it's a stunning finding hmm you're saying that if women are given kindness and a man who can find the clitoris they would enjoy one night stands the same way men would I mean certainly a lot more than they do now would you agree that more women are looking for something more than sex when they're having sex than men are the data actually suggests the opposite so like in the study I just mentioned 73% of men and 70% of women are looking for a relationship another study found that 70% of men 67% of women so they wish they had more opportunities to find a long term committed partner the data just does not support the idea that women are more interested in that than men now it does support the idea that when women encounter hookup culture they dislike it more than men so most men I studied yeah about 15% of students men and women alike really really love hookup culture the rest of students are ambivalent about it at best but whereas men are often disappointed or frustrated women are often disgusted or traumatized but it has to do with the fact that hookup culture is organized to advantage men more so than women not because they are inherently incapable of enjoying casual sex Dr. Connor in his book said that women are subconsciously seeking out powerful sperm do we know if men are attracted to women because of their powerful eggs is there an evolutionary mandate for men to seek out women who can bear them strong babies I think that the amazing thing about human beings is that we are deeply and biologically flexible we are evolutionarily designed to be able to fit into whatever cultural reality we encounter when you look across cultures and across time what is perhaps the most striking thing about human is that we come in all kinds of cultures with all kinds of things that we value diverging imperative incredibly different standards of beauty and expectations and ways of organizing our sexual and romantic and familial lives we are flexible and so at any time I hear anyone say that men are all one way and are inflexibly that way that just seems like an unimaginative idea of humanity that does not match with any of the data we have on what people are really like this culture play in what I'm sexually attracted to if you're gay I'm told you're born that way I've been told that Pornhub has done studies Pornhub is a porn site and they say that men's fetishes pretty much stay the same if you're into blondes who are in their 20s you can be offered 20 other subcategories and you'll keep coming back for blondes who are in their 20s because that's what you're attracted to you're kind of born that way how much of a role does culture play in determining your sexuality can you be a into red heads and then suddenly because of the culture become a homosexual let me ask you this it's quite a leap quite a leap by the way how biologically adaptive would it be for human men to be so rigid in their sexual attractiveness that they could only find 20 year old blondes sexually attractive I mean what does that mean that if they're born in India that they will not be able to have children because they can't find any 20 year old blonde girls to have sex with I mean that the idea that women are sexually rigid if we're going to believe this notion of biological drive to reproduce the fact that they would say no to everything except a 20 year old blonde is absolutely absurd but that's what they're finding but that's what they're finding on Pornhub and I trust when it comes to scientific studies Pornhub is the gold standard of science they say that the idea behind this is that somehow whatever is biological is immutable and that whatever is cultural is mutable that we can change our cultural feelings that we can't change our biology but our biology is changeable it's changeable all the time so for example something like an adrenaline rush is a very rapid biological fluctuation even sexual desire the experience of being turned on and then reaching climax and then being not turned on that is an incredible biological change that happens very very fast our bodies are very mutable and I think culturally our bodies learn to viscerally respond to whatever our culture tells us is attractive so it is no surprise that you mention a 20 year old blonde as an example there but that doesn't mean that just because we've internalized a particular desire even at a visceral level that doesn't mean that can't be changed or that that won't change when you suddenly fall in love with a 40 year old brunette and the next thing you know every 40 year old brunette you look at is very sexy to you these things are changeable even when they're biological okay that's interesting how much of a role does you play in this type of culture if these college kids are worried about money healthcare and social status that's rooted in money isn't sex on campus doomed to be mostly about power I would say on an American campus wouldn't you say that most women and men each other partially by their looks but looks are a power determinant wouldn't you say in America there's a lot of a subconscious power game going on unlike other industrialized nations because there's no safety net well your average college student is not going to get married until over 10 years after graduation women are not choosing hookup partners based on whether or not they would help them survive when they're old or be able to pay for raising children power is still at play there's very much a status game happening on college campuses but it is mostly about looks and popularity but not about these ideas of who can support me or make my children the most beautiful but isn't popularity often based on financial power well wealth certainly plays a part in it and so does social standing on campus so as one of one of the students in the study said when it comes to hooking up frat stars and athletes are the only people that count but those are people that have a lot of social power on college campuses not necessarily money but for example athletes have a lot of cashier but fraternity men they often control the party experience so being able to attract the attention of fraternity men means getting into the best parties and when you're in the best parties getting access to the best alcohol so there's a lot of power on college campuses that is related to money and that you're more likely to be in a frat if you're wealthy but it's really about social status in a very specific and narrow context if you're a member of a frat chances are you don't come from money but you're willing to fast-track into the corporate culture which on a college campus gives off an air of financial supremacy gives off an air of power even though you may not have the money you're saying look at me you know I'm playing by the rules and in 10 years I'm gonna be a very wealthy man have sex with me the frats the frats I mean I think you're stretching a little bit I think the easiest answer the most obvious and most proximate answer is that they have a lot of social power and popularity and that's why women are choosing to choosing them instead of other men they're not looking to get married that's not what most of them are doing I've had some 18 year old 19 year old sons I love them they're morons they can't think properly they have no concept of risk they go off to college and they're expected to be men when they're just little boys who don't know how to do anything and suddenly they're running a frat house and drinking even though they're not allowed to how is this a good idea in any way you're not gonna study who came up with this idea of 18 year old boys leaving home to drink and chase women and think that they're gonna get an education it's impossible a frat bunch of guys sitting around you're not getting an education right well I'll tell you who came up with the idea and it was 18 year old boys who came up with the idea they came up with the idea specifically in 1825 and college presidents at the time were horrified they thought that absolutely nothing good could come of young men meeting together in secret and designing their own agenda so in your book do you say that it was a rebellion against the ministers who controlled the college campuses but by the frats came about they were supposed to be part of the enlightenment a rebellion against religion well colleges in the colonial era were mostly yes middle class men becoming ministers and professors or ministers and college was not about partying it was very dry very rigidly controlled and then wealthy families started sending their funds to college in the mid 1700s so they could get a diploma that made it seem reasonable that they were hoarding wealth and power and those young men were not amenable to subordination or boredom and so yes there was 100 years of riots on college campuses that I mean militias had to be brought in to tamp them down and they were only sometimes successful and college presidents resorted to expelling students who rioted sometimes up to 50% of the student body at a time and rioting for their right to party rioting for their right to party because they wanted different curriculum or they thought the food was bad or they didn't want the people to take their muskets away I mean like rioting for all kinds of freedom from the the rigidity and boredom of higher education at the time and what role did the frats play in this well so at the time during this period it was there were no social fraternities as we know them today until these expulsions started and when the expulsions started college presidents agreed on themselves not to accept someone who'd been expelled from another school to try to make this punishment very severe and all college presidents at the time agreed to do this except for one the president of union college and connected in New York I took in all of the students that had been expelled from the other schools and that and it is no coincidence is where the first social fraternity was formed and what is the first social fraternity oh gosh I don't remember the name of it okay I should do better that's right fraternities are a recipe for rape the college campuses need to crack down on alcohol and pot zero tolerance for alcohol and pot because this is what men say when women aren't around or a lot of men say this that college kids frat boys are playing with fire when they get a girl drunk and then have sex with her this is the whole enchilada here as far as I'm concerned this is the most dangerous piece of the American hook up seen on campus when men talk to each other about what's going on on our campuses they all say a girl can have two drinks and then the next day decide whether or not it was consensual sex is that true and if it is true that's a serious problem that men should address assuming a woman has some sort of motivation for wanting to reframe a sexual encounter as sexual assault after the fact and I don't honestly know what that motivation would be women are no longer embarrassed about being sexual they do not they are actually seeking out sexual encounters with their peers being a virgin is what's embarrassing having casual sex is idealized it's prioritized, it's privileged it's seen as an amazing accomplishment even for women so I don't know what the motivation would be I do know that the experience of naming someone as having assaulted a person is miserable and terrible so they are now going to go through a very uncomfortable and unpleasant experience having named someone who had assaulted them I just don't see what women are getting out of rape accusations that aren't true it's just, it's absurd to think this is happening at any substantial rate on college campuses I do think men are at risk of becoming perpetrators of sexual assault because we tell men that their sexuality should be one that is so aggressive and nestles up so close to the line of assault that men are often falling over it and finding themselves actually doing acts that are criminal and so I think that men are very much at risk of becoming someone who is who has assaulted a woman but I do not see what motivation women would have for bringing such an accusation unless she really believed it happened unless she really believed it happened do you think, again I'm getting on dangerous water here but you don't think it's possible that a woman is angry at a guy and decides to get even with him by making a false accusation that never happens decides to get even with him by going through an adjudication process in which she is scorned and by her peers and disbelieved and forced to recount a story that may or may not be like, no women get mad at men all the time but it's like they're punishing themselves by actually making such an accusation they then, it's not like they just go on with their lives and this person has to suffer the consequences of being named there's a whole process that begins that she is wrapped up in that is very unpleasant and often socially ostracizing especially if the person is someone who is well liked on campus then she is now the pariah no, this is a very unpleasant experience and it is definitely not worth it to quote unquote get even my concern about women idealizing one night stands is that young men aren't trained properly there are a lot of guys who think once you're inside a woman and she says stop you don't have to stop and I've heard that from men who I thought I respected so it's pretty dangerous to have an idealized view of what night stands given how dangerous American men are right? shouldn't, shouldn't men are men are dangerous we need to be teaching young people how to have healthy sexual relationships of all kinds and I think that includes teaching young people how to have healthy one night stands that are safe and consensual we have advocated our responsibility as a country for doing this and so they are on their own trying to figure it out and they're doing it with lots of of errors so I think that we absolutely need to be teaching young men and women how to casually engage with one another sexually in a way that is safe for everyone and they do that in Europe they do it in Europe they're beginning to do it on college campuses but it's kind of been laughed at where they do little sketches during freshman orientation where they have a man and a woman sitting on a bed explaining what constitutes assault and what doesn't and there's nervous laughter and people put it down you don't make a value judgment about the idealism of these one night stands on college campuses I kind of do I'm a father I have daughters am I wrong to say this tell me if I'm wrong we can feel whatever we feel about one night stands but one night stands have been happening in all of human history in all kinds of context they're not going to go away I'm wrong on everything I really do what I'm told you just make a list of tell me what to believe and I believe it if I think your heart is in the right place and you're a progressive who voted for Barack Obama and I do what I'm told am I wrong for thinking this this is kind of important to me let me tell you what I think I think that if I send my daughter to college where there's alcohol and frats and the idealization of one night stands I don't approve of that because I know how dumb and dangerous American men are and you're probably not gonna come out of that experience unscathed and I probably believe that most of these women whom you've interviewed were scathed am I wrong if I had a daughter first of all I think parents have the right to teach their children whatever values they want to transmit to them so that's up to parents they want to encourage their children to do what kind of sexuality they think is moral and good and safe but that said I also would want every young person going into college to know without a shadow of a doubt that they deserve to be treated with kindness and respect no matter what kind of sexual encounter they decide to engage in the problem is that we tell our daughters that you should be in monogamous community relationships with men because that's where you're going to be cared for and treated well and then when they choose not to do that and they get treated badly women don't know that that's wrong and so we need to be we can transmit whatever values we want to them but we also need to be telling them that whatever they do choose to do if someone treats them cruelly then that is that then they have the right to hold that person accountable for that and does the hookup does the hookup culture instill that in women hookup culture tells young people that committed relationships are the site for care and casual encounters are the site for carelessness and that means that they're not being careful but also that they are not supposed to care about one another and so once you have decided that not being caring but being caring is off script then it opens up a lot of room for really bad behavior that then young people don't know is bad so you're not yet right you're very slippery here and I like this because you're not making a value judgment you're saying that the hookup culture maintains that it's care versus carelessness care is a long-term commitment but hookup is carelessness so you're not making a value judgment but you're pretty much saying that there's something seriously wrong with this hookup culture because carelessness is wrong right? what I'm saying is that the hookup culture is toxic but that hooking up in itself is not inherently bad but in hookup culture the way in which we tell students to hookup is problematic so we could have a culture that was both caring and casual but we don't and that's one of the things I would like to see on college campuses is to see hookups be a site for respect and care we got around to the most important piece here in the hookup culture what are the odds that one of the two or five involved in the encounter one on one what are the odds that half of that encounter is going to be sad the next day specific data statistical data points on that I think that most students excited about what happened the day before and then also lots of other mixed emotions a lot of what students feel is ambivalence and it can be strong ambivalence I really liked it and yet something about it didn't feel good it feels great and sometimes it doesn't regret is definitely some of the emotions that they feel it's attractive enough that students are still interested in doing it but usually their feelings about it are mixed so some of the beliefs from the Victorian era are not rooted in oppression and neuroses but in maybe some rational response to human behavior right I'm not sure which beliefs you're referring to well the idea being approved and demanding that you be proper and you court with your clothes on and that sex should be special there's a reason people for millennium were raised that way for health reasons emotional health and physical health right well you're conflating the Victorian era with millennia and I think that's going a bit far but I think the important thing to remember is that people are different from one another there's an incredible variety in what people want sexually and what people are comfortable with and what makes them happy and then even within an individual person sometimes we want one thing and another time we want something else and maybe it has to do with our mood or maybe it has to do with whether we're 20 or 40 years old or whether we just got out of a relationship or not so what people want is just it's hard to predict and the way to make everybody as safe and happy as possible is to give people options all of which are positive right now on college campuses what we have is one option hooking up hooking up and the culture of hook up culture is not very positive for most students doesn't it basically get down to who's had sex and who hasn't in terms of how you view the hook up culture doesn't morality basically get down to whether or not you had sex this week well remember that most students are not very sexually active at all most students did not have sex this week I clutch my pearls when I'm not having sex and suddenly I don't want anybody else to have sex suddenly I'm going and then when you find who cares then it's who cares life is short Lisa Wade is an associate professor of sociology at Occidental College her latest book is American Hook Up and I hope you all go out and buy it thank you so much Lisa thank you so much for all your interesting questions thank you and now the book that joins us from Los Angeles Kevin is a great stand up comic you may have seen him on premium blend he's also an amazing an amazing comedy writer his work as a comedy writer has been seen on Matt TV totally bias with Kamau Belle America's funniest home videos newsreaders what what are you laughing at stuff how all over the map it is it's just funny and most importantly we started together yeah we did have you done this show have you been on the show I have never done your show you've never you've never done my show no how long has it been going on I know you've been going out for a while since 2009 I can't believe I haven't had you on my show and I'm embarrassed to tell you why I want you on the show in a second every time I see I'm happy to hey it's Kevin you came to my wedding where did we meet I bet you I don't know I'm trying to remember where it was I feel like you I've met you when you were hosting I mean this is years ago you were hosting an open mic I think and I was probably one of the comics on the list I mean I met you as a teenager I started young but I was like 19 yeah you used to come on stage and eat cereal do you remember that I did all sorts of weird things yeah yeah I was doing something like that and you were going to the University of San Diego if memory serves I went yeah I went to San Diego State for a year probably like maybe a couple years after I started doing open mics and yeah I met you by then I know this is like 1983 82 what year no it's like 86 85 you know I've been 86 86 to 87 or something like that I wasn't I was in San Diego and then yeah I was at that point I think is when I kind of decided I really wanted to push stand up mm-hmm because I just wasn't really happy and I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do and and I had already done a couple years of my you know when I started it was not a career thing you know I never intended that it as a goal it was just sort of for fun I would watch shows man up you know I wanted to do it and try it then I just got more serious about it when I was in college I decided like you know I'm gonna really try to push this so the San Francisco comedy scene in the 80s was very tender and tender in a way we were special we were raw but we were nurtured yeah I think so I mean I feel like I don't know I mean that was when I started it was just I felt like I was still getting a little bit of the residue of the previous five years when it was just really like being a rock star there I think you're a comic and then it just became a little more commercialized I think it were by the time I started getting going I mean I remember at one point and this might have been around 19 and early 90s or something like that I felt like there was like 11 clubs that you could work that was within an hour and a half radius of San Francisco and make money yeah I mean you know like within an hour and a half you could go yeah I mean there was so many clubs and there's like four in the city and there was a bunch in the East Bay and there's a couple like in San Jose area and you know they're just scattered all over but yeah Sacramento so yeah there's a lot did you think that was good that there was that much work to be had or did you kind of get scared by it I remember being frightened and I think most of the comics were frightened by it because it was like velvet handcuff yeah no I well you know I you're looking at it from a different angle than I was so for me especially as someone I was just opening shows when that was a thing because I feel like that's not even a thing anymore where you could travel as an MC or an opener mm-hmm you know that doesn't exist anymore I think in comedy today you can't make a living with an opener traveling but so for me it was great I was able to get work at all these places and do one-nighters or two night gigs and then your club work and I didn't have to go that far right a lot of it I could drive so for me it was great but yeah I think overall it was probably too much what was your your greatest night doing stand-up in San Francisco oh wow you know that's it that's a tough one I think it's just working with everybody I don't think I don't know if anything just really pops in my mind you know obviously the first week you'd work every time of a couple of the club you know because then you work so hard to get to that point where you want to get booked mm-hmm so I think anytime I worked a first week at any of the places where it be you know whether it was punchline or cobs those are you know big weeks I remember getting you know like you know even just hosting booking being booked to host the open mic at the whores of the zoo was like exciting right I mean I do yeah I remember opening up for somebody somebody saw me an open mic and paid me $25 I think to just do some time in front of them and it was just a musician at the hotel Utah I think it still exists mm-hmm I don't know you didn't in San Francisco so South of Market you know just did like 10 minutes 15 minutes and I was very raw but the guy paid me $25 and I just remember being so excited by that you know where did you think it was gonna lead like a year into it when you were doing it full time what did you think was gonna come of it you know at the time okay when I was starting full-time so I quit my I mean I quit my day job before I graduated mm-hmm I graduated kind of late it took me a while to get out of school because even while I was going to college I was still doing gigs so I was taking up a lot of my time I kind of I don't know at that point I think I was just focused on okay let's just try to get more work and you know move up a ladder and you know until I could eventually headline mm-hmm and so that was sort of my goal and I think for the first you know first couple of years you know it was difficult it was really it wasn't easy to move up a ladder that quickly I mean certain people did and then just shot past me and and you know and most of it rightfully so because they were really talented or had that special thing but you know after a while I realized that you know I have to go beyond that I think beyond what I want to do with this and making the transition to writing was that difficult was very difficult for me because I was my own man when I was a stand-up and then suddenly I was one of five or six and trying to please one boss and it was quite an adjustment for me was it an adjustment for you yes and in the beginning it was and just understanding the way the whole thing works the politics behind it and you know one thing I loved it I don't know if I mean a lot of just not the word for it but I appreciated about stand-up is that I really felt like when we were doing stand-up or in just the business side of things as well everything seemed a little more transparent like I was able to see the inner working can figure out okay this is what I got to say or this is something I shouldn't say or or whatever you know it's just common sense and I feel like as soon as they entered the TV writing world there's just so much secrecy and there's so much that goes on and I I'm always kind of like baffled by like like how does this work how do people do this and and you know everybody is more hush-hush about how things are done it may not be a meritocracy yes because in corporate America the cream doesn't necessarily rise the top the team player the non-threatening mind sometimes rises to the top in stand-up as Jerry Seinfeld says there's justice if you really work at it you can be known for being great at what do you do exactly yeah yeah it takes it's it's you know it's not to say that the people that do get things don't deserve it obviously you know but yeah it's a totally different thing it runs so differently than stand-up so yeah it was that part of it was a little difficult trying to transition but you know we were I felt for me like I felt like I was being compensated better in writing yes sleeping you sleep in the same bed every night exactly I mean I was on the road for a while and and I just remember at certain points I like I did I just thought to myself like I can't do this I was just good pirate I was getting tired of it and I had other other interest I enjoyed writing mm-hmm so I mean as far as like I knew I was pretty good at writing jokes and that kind of thing so I wanted to get better at that I would take it sort of as an offense though like what I was that when I was doing stand-up that there's these people you know people were that in management representation that would kind of encourage me to give up stand-up and do more writing and at that time since I was just kind of getting my feet wet on the road and I was you know working it kind of bugged me a little bit because I felt like you know I want to do this and they were trying to scare me off of it yeah they could have been right maybe I could have been you know farther along my writing career now if I left it earlier but I think I had to stay on it and do it and just see how it played out I'm embarrassed to tell you why I thought of you because I've known you all these years this shouldn't be the reason I'm having you on the show but I was reading about the Japanese internment and writing some stuff about Donald Trump and I thought Kevin is Japanese I wonder what his take is on all this because you grew up in California you know about the internment so I'm going to apologize first not for the internment that I had nothing to do my parents were able to buy really cheap land in the valley I've never been strawberry farming California so I never discussed it with you I honestly you know I never knew what your father went through and now that they're gearing up to round up everybody I want to ask you what's in store for us I know about the Nazi internments I don't know how we do it American style in all seriousness let me ask you some questions if you don't mind because you agreed I spoke to you before and you said yes you would discuss this and you're gonna come back with more details and we'll only spend 10 minutes on the subject and then you'll come back with more detailed answers but I have a couple of questions because people need to know this about American history so do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions okay okay timer yes what do I win me saying thank you and the ability to say no I don't want to come back your father was he in an internment camp yeah so my family all were internment like all my older relatives definitely yes my yeah let me ask you a couple of quick questions your father was an internment camp what your mother was an internment camp yes did they meet in the internment camp or after no they met afterwards unfortunately I couldn't tell you my mother passed away when I was very young okay and where did where was your father a lot of history about her where was your father born he was born in Hayward but he grew up in like Niles and Centerville which he probably like Fremont now right so he wasn't born in Japan no where were you going in Hayward California yeah okay and where were his parents born his parents were born in Japan his parents were born in Japan where was your mother born I'm pretty sure she was born man I know it was she was born in the Bay Area I don't know Sanford near San Francisco and where were her parents born I believe they were they were from Japan as well okay and so when did your grandparents come to America try to remember all these days yeah I know I bet they're roughly what about what year would you say I think they did the 19 I want to say like oh three or something like that 19 oh my my grandparents actually came over around the turn of the century they started a actually a restaurant in San Francisco but they were chased off I think someone burned down the restaurant and so they ended up moving to the East Bay and getting a strawberry farm in the yeah Centerville Nile area I can't remember which city they had two farms again I jump around but they yeah in that area they started getting into farming that was your father's parents or your mother's that was my father's your father's parents December 7th 1941 Pearl Harbor never heard of it yeah and when did the internment of the Japanese start I believe in February of 42 it was in the it's called the executive order it was like nine man this is see this is where that's okay sorry I'm just curious and that was an executive order from Franklin Delano Roosevelt they didn't round up the Germans right there were some executive order I think 9 0 6 6 or something like that they rounded up you know the Japanese on the West Coast state there were some Germans and Italians that were rounded up but I mean compared it was just minute compared to the amount of Japanese around it up there was like something like 60% out of the people around it up were out of the Japanese around it up that 60% I think were American think something like that American citizens yeah both your parents were in an internment camp and they were American citizens they were born in America which means they're American citizens right how many years were they in the internment camps I would say three and a half to four years roughly was it was it like a prison or did they make it something like a village what what were the conditions yeah no the conditions were horrible I mean the first place that my father went to it was it was they they had everybody they shipped everybody off to tank for and which is a racetrack or maybe at the time I can't remember if he was even running as a racetrack at that point but they went there so you know they were living in horse stalls so were they rounded up or did people come and knock on their door and say come with us how was it there were actually posters that were posted everywhere and if you look online you can even find those posters of the executive order and it's pretty creepy too because I you know I have a copy of one somewhere and just it's weird because it's you know it's a very weird just supposed to telling you that they're gonna they're gonna pick you up and there was a meeting point and every area had a certain drop off point or pick a point I mean where you like you had to all the families had to meet you're only allowed to bring I think like one suitcase worth worth of things and that kind of stuff there is a lot of limitations of what you could bring and they just the buses came and just picked everybody up and drove them out to various places did they separate families you know I'm not certain you know all the details I'm sure I'm sure they were I mean I'm sure that there were families that were separated as far as I know my my father's family was not so could you work in an internment camp how did you survive they had jobs they were given I mean there were duties and after a while once things got going you know I'm not sure how organized it was when they were all rounded up from what I know anyway my dad talks about it he used to say how you know that they slowly built these places into like riddle like you're saying almost like villages and eventually people were you know jobs were given and every you know block had a leader that took care of that you know arrange things and you know like a sort of like almost a government that was there with you know for the community within the camp you know there's baseball games and things like that too I mean but that was after a while obviously in the beginning I mean it was just you know nightmare so they had to kind of just just do what they can to kind of make it seem like they weren't there what do you mean a nightmare well I mean you know you're rounded up you're living in a horse you know they had to sell things quickly they didn't know where they were going or what was going to happen but I mean they had to sell things quickly you're told them that you were gonna be moving they're gonna pick you up in them okay imagine this is imagine the scenario it's okay you're it's December 7th this has just happened now rumors start flying like what's gonna happen to you know your Japanese are like what's gonna happen now like how people in Iraq is and then you know an executive order comes out in February that says well we're gonna put you in a camp in an internment camp now you got it now you have to decide okay you own a farm or you know what do you do who's gonna take care of the farm so and you know there's a lot of questions like what's gonna happen to us so what can we bring there was a you know there was this chaos I'm sure within the community could you still own a farm while you were in an internment camp could you still run it you have to find somebody that would be willing to run it for you otherwise the farmer just in the farm you know you have to harvest and depending you know there's strawberry farmers and so if you owned a home I would I would assume if you owned a home what I assume if you I mean if you own the home then maybe you know it would be okay unless you know you have you I mean I'm not really sure I mean there's taxes and stuff like that have to be paid on a house too so I don't know how that would work or a mortgage and if you're not and if you're not making any money now right yeah yeah obviously so and then you know who's gonna take care of all the stuff I don't know if they could you know that building you know that kind of things like I don't know how that would there were Japanese men and women who had jobs in California high-paying jobs and they were rounded up and forced to give up those jobs yeah I mean if you were not you know if you I mean if you were in the area and you were Japanese yeah you had to you had to go so you know there's nothing you do about it really I had heard that Fred McMurray and Bob Hope and Bing were the ones who bought up all the farms from the Japanese who had a cell because of the internment have you ever heard that I have heard that well I haven't heard about the I had kind of heard about Bob Hope and Gene Autry I had heard as well so I you know I I'm not you know you look for that information and I haven't seen it you know obviously they're no want they want anybody to know about that but yeah I don't know how I don't know if that's anything like that has been officially and have there been reparations or an apology yeah there are reparations like that occurred so you know a long ago like in the 80s we were able to get some money back they would it took a long time for it to be to be taken care of did everybody get the same amount or were you able to say hey look I lost a farm I lost a business I'm excited to every every survivor of an internment camp I think we're given like $10,000 I believe that was the amount but by the time that I was done and by the time everything was parceled out like I don't think I don't know how many percentage of those people were alive haven't your father yeah young enough so he was able to get you know he was alive just for the reparations but and how does that affect how does that affect your father and you when you think about America and is it just an ugly chapter in our history or is it just something that is always in the back of your mind or is that too personal a question well it's always in the back of your mind the back of my mind I mean especially I mean I because it's I think for me it always just means that you know anything could be taken away at any point so there always is that sort of in and I'm just talking and I'm talking about just in life in general you know I can always I always sort of have that in me so it's not really a great thing to have but I think that's always sort of a thing that stays with you you know because I saw it happen to my you know to my family so you know to my older relatives so it's been glossed over in American history it was just a mistake we made and we're embarrassed and we move on that's the narrative in this country it was pretty horrible yeah I mean the thing that I think if anything would really was kind of sad for a long time was that yeah I was just buried I mean the whole thing was to sort of buried it by our country you know you know when I was growing up in high school it was I don't even recall it even being mentioned in the history books mm-hmm when I was in my high school now there might be a couple of pages or something I don't know how much detail they go into it I mean even to this day I meet people all the time friends of mine and it comes up in a conversation they're kind of shocked they can't they didn't know that it happened I mean they knew it didn't happen but I don't think people really know all the details and they don't know how like reaching it was on the West Coast and you know I don't think they know that like no if you you know if this was 1942 right now you wouldn't be talking to me I wouldn't be here I'd be in camp right now like I don't think they just realized how you know how big of a deal it was that always kind of surprises me when they know a little you know find out more details so it's a lot of details yeah there's a lot of yeah and there's a hidden trauma that you're aware of that I wouldn't be do you have a gallows humor about it I know the Jews have a gallows humor when it comes to the concentration camps is there a gallows humor about the internment camps I mean you know I'm a comic you know obviously I will have you know you know that I might have a little bit of that humor but overall I don't I don't think I don't know there's like I mean it's also a very different culture and you know I think I feel like with comedy you know is a Jewish culture and Japanese culture so I feel like it's how so different so um I think well humor is just the bigger part of Jewish culture I feel would you agree then I'm more than I think Japanese culture I don't know I used to think that Jews kind of invented but I it's that's not true you know at least with stand-up it's just simply not true well I I mean I feel like you know it for me it's a you know I feel like it's a very it's a very sensitive topic within the community so it's like you know you know even if I were to make a little joke and sometimes I'll make a joke here and there it's very tame but you know just bringing it out just sort of like I think of folks sort of like you know like it's a very it's a very dark chapter so I think it was the one you know you know I don't know if they necessarily want to hear anything resembling humor you would have your making one of the right targets right there's a quiet there's a quiet sadness to this as opposed to the Jews who insist that there be a Holocaust museum on every block in every city in America how much do we memorialize the internment camps yeah I mean that's that's I think that's sort of true I feel like with Japanese culture we want to make sure that people know about it but I think it's not something that you know that's kind of you know I just feel like a lot of you know I'm just going about my my like my father my father he talked about it but very rarely and if he did talk about it it generally was just talking about the daily life aspect of it there he never had any bitterness or anger that was you know spilling out of them all the time you know he never did it's really odd I mean I can't believe in some ways now like it I look back and you know he would talk about it just not in a in a very bitter or angry way most of the Japanese were living on the West Coast there were few very few Japanese living on the East Coast right yeah I mean so if yeah and so yeah and so it to be here I mean there there were you know some people were talking about oh we could maybe move and drive away and we'll try to move to another state but you know considering what it was going on in the country at that time they were scared to do that they were actually so you know they didn't know like you know it could be worse to be you know all of a sudden you're in a different state you know you don't have any friends you don't know any people now World War II is going on you know and you know they just didn't know if that would that would just be you know just a frying pan and into the fire you know my father who you met at my wedding fought in the he fought in the Pacific Theater he was a chorus boy in the Pacific Theater and he said to me and I remember he said this a couple of times my dad was progressive liberal very he didn't come out against the Vietnam War until Martin Luther King spoke out against it I remember I said to him when when did you know the Vietnam War was wrong he said when Martin Luther King spoke out and he said to me before I went to the Pacific I had never seen a Japanese person I was raised in the Bronx and they trained us to hate the Japanese and I remember his eyes just kind of bulged knees he said as we were getting ready to go to the Pacific that's what was instilled in us an absolute hatred for the Japanese because we had to go and kill them you can be trained to hate anybody you know and I see this happening now in America there is a leader who is surrounded by hateful hateful evil people you know Stephen Bannon the Breitbart news they are training Americans to hate Muslims we did a yeah we had Mazdur Barani on and there's a Pew study that shows 56% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam how can that be how can that be yeah I mean it's I think it's just you know it's just that weird thing of where they they people with especially with religion I think you see radicals and they just think the radicals are everybody yet they won't look at their maybe their own radicals of their own religion and not think of it the same way you know more people have died from white Christian terrorists on this country than by the handful of Islamic terrorists who got their hands on a gun here in America that's the truth since 9-11 you're more likely to die from a white Christian militia guy with a gun than you are with a Muslim with a gun that's a fact yeah I mean and I think what they I think the thing is that they don't when that person has that is doing that I don't think they think of that for yeah they just don't think of that person as doing the same thing I think they just associate like no you know that that person's crazy or whatever you know so yeah I think that is sort of the thing that has to be fixed or adjusted the way the way we look at those things yeah I moved from New York to California to reinvent myself that's what California is all about reinventing yourself and that's what America is all about reinventing yourself being who you wanted to be all along the problem with that is we reinvent history we gloss over our past and we don't acknowledge what we've done and unless we do that we're going to keep on doing it that's the problem and we glossed over the internment of the Japanese we don't teach it the way we should we're capable very much of doing it again and in many ways with 2.2 million people behind bars we're doing that to black people we're interning black men one out of three black men have spent time in a jail cell one out of three and when we say that they're 2.3 million prisoners that's at any given time over the course of a year we will have locked up 11 million Americans 11 million Americans are locked up each year at any given time there about 2.3 million Americans behind bars and we pass laws to in turn certain groups we passed opium laws to in turn the Chinese we passed marijuana laws to in turn Mexican Americans and blacks and cocaine and crack laws to in turn black people so we've been doing this we will continue to do it until we have calm rational discussions about what we're doing to each other we're you know we're not nice to each other here in America we're not no I mean I like to believe that somehow we can get over this somehow yeah you know I really do think that I think I think you are you know if sometimes I'll get depressed about these these kind of things that then I start taking of like look if you really look in America and what we are and how many people are here and how many different kinds of people are here it's kind of amazing that we just kind of function anyway yeah like I like I like we never do ourselves we have to give ourselves credit sometimes as you know as as much as we want to look on all the depressing things we have to sometimes remember like okay hey we have functioned for a long time this way you know obviously we can we can do this you know all right I remember I asked warrants yeah I'm sorry go ahead now you go ahead yeah I was just saying you know we it we you know because we have function like this we we we can it's not ridiculous to think that we can you know get over this and we can somehow make it work I'll never forget I was driving with Warren Thomas to a gig the great Warren Thomas I asked him if you're black how can you still love America and he said because we built this place I never forgot that that's kind of interesting hey Kevin I a little disappointed when I called to talk about the internment camps I thought you're gonna make them funny well I'm gonna apologize for this being your first time on the show you came to my wedding I've known you my entire comedy life to call you to talk about this and have it be your first time on my show is is an oversight and I don't know why you haven't been on the show I have no idea well you know if you have like if you're doing a topic like baby autopsy yeah give me a call hey this is a very serious topic and that's why we're gonna call Kevin hey how do people follow you on Twitter they just follow my name just very easy to start Kevin Katoca can you spell Kevin for me yeah yeah yeah it's a but it's kevin thank you sir you're a very you're a very funny man and when are you gonna be back in New York I like to go visit there soon I'll make a trip out there soon I need to go out there so good thank you sir all right thank you talk to you soon Amy Sutherland is the author of Rescuing Penny Jane one shelter volunteer countless dogs and the quest to find them all homes she also writes the bibliophiles column for the Boston Globe she joins us via Skype in Boston is that where you are today that's correct I heard birds tweeting in the background I have to you know so I volunteer at the animal rescue league in Boston and I have two finches that were rescued from a Finch fighting ring and yes you heard me right where do they do that well it's they had never seen this before and it was it's a Brazilian cultural thing and Boston has a very big Brazilian community and and they they busted two of these fighting rings in one fall and then it hasn't to my knowledge happened again so they would fight these finches the male finches are really territorial so they would put them in a cage really close proximity and they would fly at each other until one of them would sort of you know be just exhausted I always wanted birds so when well a whole bunch of birds came in out of that bust and so I got my two crazy birds that's the one who's singing is the male his name is Renny and there's a female and there's a female and as in the bird kingdom the you know the the females don't sing or don't have it's not that she doesn't sing she doesn't have like such a powerful beautiful song she's sort of quiet and do they fight to females fight no it was a male thing so they only had females as a way to keep breeding the birds or for a reason for them to fight no they would just fight over space so they just would you know they just the two males don't like being that close together yeah all right your book is really beautiful it's called rescuing Penny Jane one shelter volunteer countless dogs and the quest to find them all homes I discovered you in the New York Times in the modern love column they excerpted a piece from the book and the writing was just so beautiful well thank you I want to get to that in a second let's go over the difficult stuff you work you still work at a shelter you volunteer every Saturday what shelter do you volunteer at I volunteer at the animal rescue league of Boston which if people are familiar with Boston it's tucked right in the south end right sort of by these you know kind of hip trendy restaurants right smack in the middle of the city where we you know we walk all our shelter pups all down these kind of beautiful streets past Brownstones and all that and it's it is as a shelter volunteer experience it's not like many others because it's so urban you write that most shelters were built for cleanliness and safety but the overall well-being of the animals comes in the distant third yeah that's because a lot of shelters in this country were built especially municipal and county shelters that were built in an era where they were just being overwhelmed by the number of animals coming in and they really didn't expect to adopt most of these animals and they largely never kept them more than say a week so they were built for just as short-term holding and luckily I mean that's changed so now we do keep these animals and we try to get them adopted for as long as we can in a lot of cases but those these facilities weren't designed for animals to be in for dogs for weeks months in some cases it's just a very hard environment so some people are trying to rethink that but it's been kind of a slow evolution you write that as one shelter leader put it to me it's not a question of if a shelter dog will deteriorate it's when the dog will deteriorate you are a matchmaker you match humans with dogs the shelters it seems make the dogs unappealing less likely how less desirable to be adopted right well what can happen is is that especially with the younger dogs who you know are still very energetic and they still need some socializing and you know they're still coming up in the world is that they they you know they're not getting any of that in this shelter kennel even with the you know like our shelter where we do have a lot of volunteers to get these dogs out you know it's still they still are spending most their day you know like 21 22 hours in a kennel so they get really hyper and the more hyper they get the harder they are to adopt and the harder they are to adopt the longer they stay there and the crazier you know it's just becomes a vicious cycle so it makes them crazy the way prison makes you crazy right well especially if you look you know if you think about like prison and then putting maybe 13 year olds in there you know it's sort of like these are these are animals that need to need to move around and to have some stimulation in their day and instead they're sort of can end up being cooped up and then it's also just a it's a noisy environment it can feel like a kind of chaotic environment from the dog's point of view so it's hard yeah you write that it's stressful because they're in a cage by themselves but they're social animals they smell other dogs they hear other dogs but they can't play with them they can't wrestle with them so it's very stressful yeah it's always you know when I mean I've been doing this for years now but one of the most exciting things I always do when I'm volunteering with shelter dogs is when I go into their kennel and then lead them out past all the other kennels now many times that's totally nothing happens but you know they're so keyed up to come out that you know they end up growling at each other or jumping at each other just because you know they're they're so overexcited so and then at our shelter just to make life a little more exciting once I get them past the dogs I go through a door and there's a whole bunch of rabbit cages a lot of them then go you know see a rabbit and lunge at the rabbit and then I got to get my then I have to get them past the cats and we've had a cat or two reach out of their kennel and try to swipe at the dogs as they go by so it's never a dull moment ever rich venzino is the former director of the san francisco spca and I guess he created the no kill movement for shelter animals when did he develop this idea and where are we rich was the director there in the 1970s and he was really inspired to think this way by a dog who came into the shelter named Sido a 12 year old a shelter might have been a shelter mix and Sido's owner had killed herself and when the police in the corner went to her building they contacted the shelter at the san francisco spca and asked them to come get the dog so they got the dog and then the next day they heard from this woman's a state lawyer and she was coming to get the dog she told them to put her down as was dictated by the former owner's will so rich was having none of this he he took her to court I'm giving you the short version I just I can't imagine anybody putting in their will if I'm gone my dog will be so devastated you might as well kill the dog as well well this actually still goes on in places depending on state by state whether it's allowed or not have they asked the dog whether or not the dog can go on with that the master clear clearly not because I think the dog would say yeah I can I love you but I'll be okay yeah but that was why she did it she wasn't a mean person per se but that's why she had done it so anyhow rich fought this took it to court made it very public rich was a very he was a maverick director he loved he believed almost in being sued he liked being sued because then it would bring media attention and the media attention would put the spotlight on homeless animals and he's just a I really admire him for a lot of reasons but he's just a real fearless person so at the end of this story through all they won the court case and Saito got to live and and rich adopted her but what made him think what inspired him to think about the no kill movement because of her was of the public outpouring for her she was a dog who was 12 who at the time was considered way too old to be adopted and most shelters would have put her down but but what had happened with this public outpouring is that showed him that people wanted these dogs to make it and if they wanted this 12 year old dog to make it that it was worth fighting for all of them and and that's what he did that's what he spent his career doing and he set up a foster program he was originally you write he was originally going to set up a little city for dogs where they could live happy ever after well in the 1990s i might have been 97 rich went to work for matty's fund which is a endowed the endowment comes from a billionaire who had a schnauzer named matty and it was founded as a way to create new solutions innovative solutions to the homeless animal conundrum and as part of that rich decided that he would build the emerald city of shelters and he was going to show he was going to basically see like what what shelter would work by just throwing everything at these animals they're going to have aromatherapy they were going to have these incredible diets i mean it's a place that you and i david we might apply to state ourselves so but halfway through that process after he bought the land and paid for the drawings and all that he came to realize that what the central problem was is the shelter model and that putting all those animals in an institutional setting even in its best can you know pause in its best possible manner was still not a good situation and that the animals would still be stressed out and have a problem so he he scotch that plan and he decided that what he would do is then sort of sing the um he would convince people that the using foster homes was the way to go so there is no emerald city there is no emerald city but they're not killing shelter animals in san francisco well that's that's true and not so san francisco is a no kill city but in the shelter world to be no kill means that you have 90% of your animals essentially leave the building alive so animals can still be put down for medical reasons when they are beyond saving or it's just inhumane to let them continue in the medical condition they are in or if the behavior issues of a dog are dubbed dangerous right san francisco i think last i checked had one of the highest save rates and it's above 90% so it really is to me the the city on the hill it's the model city it's not that they don't have room i mean we always have room to improve right as long as there are dogs in the shelter and cats too so but they they've been the national leaders on this front and the no kill movement is spreading is it getting more successful it is spreading so there's over 200 no kill cities in the country right now the biggest one last i checked was austin texas and to say that a city's no kill it means that the whole city meaning all the organizations in that city are having 90% of their animals leave their organizations alive so people have found that this is the way that no kill works the best because if you have an organization in a city go no kill and another organization not such as like the city facility what can happen is is that the the animals that would be going into that no kill shelter sometimes get pushed to the other shelter right right so what do you do do you is does it have to be a city ordinance um i think i think sometimes they're just city their proclamations sometimes it's the alliance of organizations within the city basically come up with this and then dub themselves you know to make the city no kill by each of them being no kill and this is you know it's really interesting like in austin so there's a city facility in city and county facilities what people don't understand is that every animal that shows up in a city in order county funded shelter they have to take that animal they have to take them and this is how these shelters become overcrowded and sometimes have to maybe put down animals for space so in austin the private non-profit austin pets alive it's going to the city shelter every day to pull dogs out of that shelter because that's it's going to have to take those kinds of partnerships to really find all the dogs that need homes homes to my listeners who live in a city that doesn't have a no kill movement what do you recommend how do you get started how do you get started that's a good question i mean i guess i would say is to get involved with your local organization and then find out you know why they aren't no kill or why you know the other thing is this is sometimes it just takes having an organization move that direction first it's not something you know some some organizations have done it overnight others have just worked their way towards it that's what's going on in la currently with the city shelters they had a terrible what's called live release rate even 10 years ago and i think they're getting close to 70 to 80 possibly leaving their city shelters alive so is there is there a website is there an organization that can give you tips on how to infiltrate a shelter and make it a no kill zone i don't know for a fact but if you ask me that question the the website the probably the first website i would go to is best friend's animal society because they are the huge champions of the no kill movement and they put up stories of model programs from around the country on their website the other maddie's fund does too so i would say either of those two organizations would be great to get information from before we get to penny jane and i want to hear about walter joe your two dogs there are a lot of people who are stressed out and upset about donald trump and the the rise of the radical right we didn't ask for this they've just kind of seized power how does working in a shelter help you in a time like this to do volunteer work for animals how does that inform the rest of our society for me personally it's like a politics free zone because for the you know largely helping animals is a non-partisan pursuit right people from both sides of the argument are engaged and and it's also let me interrupt you would you say that republicans would be less friendly towards the idea of a no kill shelter i would think they would be i think they mock not to put you in an awkward position but i think republicans kind of mock vegetarians and vegans and animal lovers i don't i don't know i really don't know because i think that my experience with volunteering in a shelter is that it's a wide range of people from all different walks of life coming together i mean you might be right in a sort of platform kind of way but you know one of the things i like about volunteering and helping animals is also just the wide range of people that i volunteer with and i mean i think anybody can have a real love for animals and if anybody's against the no kill movement it it could be partially just out of a misunderstanding of it yeah um i think hanging out with dogs as much as possible cats well that's a different conversation your book isn't about cats cats are controversial we all love cats i think we're more amused by cats than you know we're actually you can break cats up but there there's some cats who are democrats and some better republicans but for the most part i find cats to be republican dogs on the other hand dogs are progressive liberals even the vicious ones well i think go ahead i'm sorry and i think hanging out with dogs instills in humans especially kids the importance of nurturing taking care of the planet and they remind us how to love right dogs remind us what love is do dogs really love are they capable of love or is it something else well i mean people debate this all the time right i mean i think if nothing else it's you can my belief is is that that dogs really experience attachment and they really experience bonding now whether that's another word for love i don't know maybe but they they they not only experience it they are i would say driven to have that in their life and gratitude well i in my experience dogs this is a huge generalization but when dogs have what they need in life they tend to be pretty happy go lucky creatures and i think that's part of what we like about them you know they seem like inherently optimists and you know like they're just sort of sucking the marrow out of life and that can be really contagious i mean i got to tell you when i go to the shelter when i take these dogs out to lock them i mean they you know sometimes i'm having to manage a dog that doesn't like other dogs or a dog that's so whipped up it's going to jump on me but largely these dogs are so happy and you know people always ask me like don't you get bummed out by this one of the big reasons i don't get bummed out is it's just really fun to spend time with these dogs they're happy when they're with me the reason i reached out to you other than it's a great topic you really are a great writer this is what you wrote and and you wrote watching people fall in love so completely with dogs i began to see how humans long to give their hearts away and then later you talk about matching the right people with probably the wrong dog but they love them they love them anyway and you write i return to the canals to help more people toss their hearts away so i'm divorced and you know i that really just struck me about giving your heart away what do you mean about giving your heart away well i think you know as i wrote in that piece i i write about how i've learned to think of love as that you have an inherent quantity in you and it's it's wanting to come out right but were you know human relationships are fraught often what do you mean by giving the heart away well i mean by just letting just loving something genuinely and without fear so you're saying you're saying because this just struck me it was so beautiful and i know you're a poet i've looked i did some research on you you're a journalist but you're also a poet i began to see how humans long to give their hearts away how humans long to give their hearts away i return to the canals to help more people toss their hearts away to me what you were saying is that dogs and humans give their hearts to other people and say do with it what you will exactly exactly i mean i have a story you know so i have i had a friend whose partner had died and then his dog died in the same year so about four years or more later he showed up at the shelter one day and i don't think he realized i was there but so he he actually was ready to meet dogs and so he told me what kind of dog he wanted he wanted a younger dog because he wanted he didn't want to have death happen anytime soon since he'd had so much so i was showing him around and the dog that i he wanted to see was somebody else had that dog was looking at them right then so i said let's let's go meet this other dog who i this is a dog i really loved and she was older and i said let's just get her out and play with her and we took her out and we took her upstairs and within about 10 minutes my friend was rolling around on the floor with this 12 year old dog he told me he didn't want and he just like gone his heart was gone and um so you know it wasn't quite what he's you know we don't always we don't always need what we want right and she was what he needed so you know and a story she went home with him and she lives around the corner from me now mm-hmm when you say to giving your heart away it's an act of courage yes you that that one of the things i think all of us are wrestling with now especially because of trump is cowardice versus courage and i think all of us are afraid and we're taking a measure of our courage the universe does not reward cowardice not really no mm-hmm and failing to give your heart to somebody is cowardice well you know in my thinking you know i've had my heart broken a number of times as a shelter volunteer but i just feel like you know what's the point of having one if i don't give it away the human condition is a broken heart is disappointment it's nostalgia it's loss dogs have that mm-hmm dogs experience loss oh yeah completely it's a it can be heart breaking sometimes when these dogs are given up by owners we had a i think it was an outstation is that what the huge white dog is come in and he wouldn't go back in the the kennels yeah he just kept laying down and that you know you could say it was the shelter that freaked him out but i think it was leaving his owner probably and some of these dogs sometimes when i take them out and they're desperate to get outside i i just sometimes have this awful feeling that they're wondering if their owners out there waiting for them yeah this is what you write i wanted to help people that you're talking about being a matchmaker in a shelter yeah i wanted to help people do what they so obviously needed to do love wholeheartedly with reckless abandon i'd always thought of love as a response you're talking about a couple this couple and other show me that it's an innate feeling something we were born with and need to express you know i've heard the term reckless abandon used with sex with love sorry i got equate the two i can't i can't separate the two uh so no more fruity and slips anyway okay so mommy one of the things mommy that i was you talk about reckless abandon you cannot love with that reckless abandon dogs love with reckless abandon if you plot it out on paper and plan for love and how you're gonna love somebody it's gonna fail you you just have to throw yourself completely into it fearlessly right reckless abandon yeah right and you know i also think like uh i think dogs can help you learn how to do that because you can do that with them and they and they'll do it back mm-hmm i mean i've had shelter dogs that have sort of glommed on to me because they don't have any you know they've seen me on a regular basis but and they just want to they want to have that attachment so badly so they're ready you know dogs are willing to do it on even a temporary basis you know you can by watching them and how sort of bold and brave they are with their affections you know learn how to do that yourself i'm going to take exception to this you wrote many of us have more love inside of them than we know what to do with but are too bottled up which is where dogs can come in with them we can let our love flow freely without fear of being judged or rejected that's not true i've had lots of dogs who wanted nothing to do with me who judged me who would look at me across the room and say what a loser were these your were these your pet dogs so yeah yeah really yeah was this when you were married yeah okay were they more attached to your wife oh yeah yeah okay well you can go into somebody's home you can go into somebody's home and the the the dog will look at you and say eugh new for rich so boozy well i i in my experience what i think the dogs are thinking is like does that person look like they're asking questions like does that person look like fun does that person look like he'll be nice to me you know is that person freaking me out so i suppose you know those are judgments but i think they're more sort of baseline judgments than than things about status right right yeah well there is that need that dogs have they need to know who's in charge they're constantly taking the measure of you to determine if you're the boss or not yeah i'm sort of i'm i'm iffy about that whole way of thinking i don't tend to subscribe to that i think that dogs what dogs relate to is consistency from somebody and from communication that they that they have an idea of what you want from them and vice versa that's one of the reasons i think at least some kind of training is so crucial for uh people with their pets and i don't mean that you have to go to you know like the the academy in your city but the thing about training is is for me is it it opens a line what you're doing is opening a line of communication between the two of you so you can tell the dog what you want and the dog understands what you want mm-hmm so you don't believe that dogs are paying attention to status they're trying to ascertain which humans which other dogs in the house are high status and which ones are low status i think dogs are more opportunist than that i think they're thinking like like can you know like with walter joe all right penny jane is like the most easygoing dog about other dogs so walter joe can stick his nose in her food bowl and take her food and that's not a status move that's that he knows that she'll let her do that help she will let him do that hmm we had a dog on you i had a show her my tax returns every year if i had a bad year mm-hmm she was in charge who's what who's walter joe so walter joe is my other dog and he is uh i adopted he was what we call in the biz a failed foster i was i was fostering him for the shelter and i was fostering him largely to see if he could come out of his fear and become a pet dog he was a really freaked out dog right it turned out that he was able to come out of his fear and be a pet dog so we actually did you know send him back to the shelter to be to be put up for adoption but the second he went back into the shelter he be he became non he just sort of fell apart again so when that happened we just you know we adopted him and brought him back home now is walter joe is joe the surname or a middle name because i have very strong opinions i'm giving dogs surnames i i think it's a form of abuse i hope joe is a middle but i hope it's a middle name yeah it's a middle name so we have a tradition of that with our dogs and we walter came with his name walter so when he became our dog we we made it into walter joe junior so there's no last name i'm not sure i approve of the junior either i just don't think dogs should have surnames i just well the thing is about junior is that it makes like the best nickname in the world you know we say what have you seen junior where's junior and you know penny jane's got her middle name and my first dog's name was dixie lou so you know he's got to entertain yourself so those are great names you worked at the shelter and you eventually became a matchmaker that's dangerous stuff i've noticed that when we went to shelters i recently went with my sister to look at a dog the people at the shelter were pretty reluctant to give us the dog they were really concerned about our mental stability well this is so this is something uh the trend in the shelter world which is just kind of catching on is what's called open adoptions and that means that the shelter people give owners the benefit of the doubt as far as adopting a dog but i'm this is just just beginning to make inroads this way of thinking and and a lot of shelters still are very very cautious in particular about who they will let adopt dogs we we are in an open adoption facility so i basically assume that you're gonna be okay with this dog unless you tell me something really outlandish so the only thing that i really do is i try to make you want to match dogs with the right energy level with people you know and so that if somebody really likes it like sit around the house and watch tv all day you know border collie's not going to be the right dog so that that's the only those are the sort of central concerns i have and how long the animal is going to be by itself during the day some animals can take that some of our dogs can totally take that but some of them totally cannot do the dog signal whether or not it's going to be a good matching um do the dogs tell you whether or not they want to go home with a certain couple i i think the only time let me think about that when the the what can be tricky sometimes is with our fearful dogs because or our shy dogs is calm shy because they won't be very extroverted towards people and they might be a little standoffish and the other problem can be if they are shy but they know me they'll glom on to me instead of the people who are interested in them so i have to come up with all kinds of tricks to because people want to you know most people want a dog that's you know gonna be affectionate and these shy dogs will become affectionate but they're just shy at first you write about this couple that fell in love with the dog that made absolutely no sense for them it was a will to beast and they had a one bedroom apartment but they took it home anyway right i i love that couple so they came in and they told me that okay they didn't a lot of people think that they should get a dog that fits the size of their house or apartment and that that isn't totally true but so anyhow they wanted they had a small place and what i didn't get i didn't have room to to say in the times piece is that one of the of the the two guys in this couple one of them was huge he was this big big tall guy and he was you know he kind of looked like a big unmade bed where the other guy was like very neat and he was sort of the one who talked the most and stuff but when i looked at this big tall guy who looked like an unmade bed is when i thought it's when i mentioned the kind of big will to be sized fluffy nutty looking dog i said you know we don't have any small dogs but you might want to try this guy and the reason i mentioned this really big dog is because he was a really actually a very chill dog he just wanted to look around all day so they spent at least an hour or more saying that they should leave but just then standing in front of his kennel and talking to him and talking to him and talking to him so finally i just mean i just said come on you know let's have you meet this dog and he was not it's just like you know what i said we don't always need what we want i mean that was the perfect example of that he was the right personality for him but he was not what they had pictured before they came in so that's what i a lot of times i got to think about when people come to look at dogs the greatest joy i've had with dogs is bringing one into the house and watching it change over the years we had one yeah one dog who was abused he couldn't trust anybody and then watching the house become his watching him just sigh then bark to protect the home and just be relaxed and with one one of the dogs i'm thinking about it took about two years for him to realize nothing bad was going to happen to him and he finally said oh okay different life i'm locked into this now and it's very satisfying i can remember watching tv and all of a sudden i'd hear you know that's that sigh and i went oh he's just totally he's just chilling right you experienced a change working at the shelter that at first your faith in your fellow man withered the more time you spent with dogs you write the more my love for my fellow man withered but then something changed right right well i had in a you know i i started realize that you know what we were talking about earlier is how hard the shelter is on the dogs and that the real cure for them was not you know it's also it's important to walk them and get them out and play with them and all train them but the real fundamental thing is to get them out of the shelter as fast as we can so when i realized that i thought well then i got to help with adoptions that's that's the way to get you know to truly help them so i i went onto the adoption floor to help i thought the dogs and i ended up having having to be such a heartwarming experience doing that matching people and dogs and seeing the dogs go home and talking to the people about them that it really started just dramatically improved my opinion about people which was good because in this if you're a shelter volunteer if you work in the shelter world it's it's pretty easy to get a dark dark view mm-hmm i think human beings as an frank wrote are basically good they're influenced by their environment the same way the dogs are then you when you put a dog in a shelter that's filled with nothing but concrete and yapping dogs and you can't sleep and you're anxious you can bite and lash out at the world americans same thing if you don't give americans a safety net if you poison the environment with toxins and toxic people like donald trump they're gonna turn on each other humans are basically good but they have to be taught to be good and be reminded that they're good which is why everybody should get a dog and show up on the weekends for your local protest against the republicans amy sutherland is the author of rescuing penny jane one shelter volunteer countless dogs and the quest to find them all homes it's a great book that is sold where all great books are sold or amazon or amazon thank you so much for taking time to be with us oh thank you for having me it's been a great conversation right thank you the 2017 oscars are this sunday joining us from hollywood is our resident film critic michael snyder hello michael snyder well hi david felvin i'm sitting here on the veranda it may be february but it's sunny and i'm having a you know an afternoon martini i don't know what you're listening to this but uh i'm preparing myself for the circus the extravaganza the block traffic the local hysteria that is the oscars how's the weather like i said sunny and lovely flooding up north but but beautiful today did it flood in la no um san jose apparently there was some flooding very very rainy i was up north for a while and uh then came back here and it's been a series of storms but we have a break in the action now maybe god is a movie fan maybe maybe he's preparing for this coming sunday i don't know is it a dry martini or because of the storms a wet one it's a wet one no but it's been really lovely here the past two days one of those glorious spring days that only happens in la in february are you really drinking a martini no i'm having coffee man i don't drink hard liquor oh i'm gonna ask you who's gonna win and who should win and we'll go over we won't do original score or sound mixing or stuff like that for best documentary the nominees are 13th oj made in america life animated i am not your negro fire at sea who do you think should win well i believe in watching these things the the movie that most affected me and was most powerful for me was probably i am not your negro although it is from the writings of james baldwin it addresses race in america and his experiences with african-american leaders including medgar evers malcom x and of course martin luther king so it's a very poignant film dealing with their deaths and also dealing with the impact on american society white black and otherwise and it's done in a very expert and engaging way but there is such an obsession i think with the oj simpson story and oj made in america is such a detailed exhaustive last word on the subject one would hope that i think that might be your winner so what do you think what do you think should win i think i am not your negro should win although fire at sea is very powerful life animated which is about an autistic kid who is empowered by his love of disney characters and disney films that's also wonderful and avid du verney who's sort of a favorite in uh... l.a. circles in hollywood circles her documentary 13th again addressing african-american issues is also powerful it's kind of uh... it's a very uh... black lives do matter in the documentary feature uh... category this year let's get that way and james baldwin is the one baldwin brother who never became an actor he's the black gay baldwin brother yes he's he's that one okay so there are clips from him of him on like dick cavities there's some amazing stuff with baldwin on it but it's basically more his writings translated into visuals discussing um the most contentious of subjects race relations in america so who is going to win who should win i think oj made in america is going to win and i wish i am not your negro did okay and i could be wrong let's go to best foreign language film oh the nominees are land oh mine a man called ove the salesman tana and tony erdman this is a tough one and uh the tony erdman which is a very strange and wonderful and unique german comedy about an older man facing retirement and fear of uselessness who begins basically stalking his daughter in another character that he creates uh is uh it's been getting great reviews and it's a very strange and wonderful film but it gets to be a bit much the salesman on the other hand which is about a uh a uh a rainy and uh a tyron-based actor and his wife who are performing a version in uh i guess uh persian of uh death of a salesman and confronted with various issues including an assault on the wife has an inside track in so far as oscar voters may be very angry that the director of the movie has been uh basically kept out of america to this point because of uh the uh donald trump anti-immigrant uh eat it and so they're probably there's going to be a big vote in favor of the salesman which is a wonderful film by the way a man called ove is a very strange and interesting scandinavian film uh about a very cantankerous man who develops a certain measure of warmth over time with his new neighbors but for me the most effective and potent of all of these films is land of mind which is a a message movie that involves a very true and very horrific circumstance at the end of world war two denmark had to deal with the problem of all of the minds that the german army had planted on the shores of denmark on their beaches and so they tasked young german POWs to by hand dig these things up with some horrific results many lost lives and limb and this movie is all about that relationship between um a danish officer who uh basically has a chance for vengeance by putting these guys out there and the morality of doing this after the war when they should probably be shipped home uh land of mind really blew me away it's one of my favorite films of last year so i will in defense in defense of the danish they had asked the nazi POWs what do you love and they said mine furor okay so hey hang on for one second let me bask in the glory of that that's a stretch did you did you really actually recently win an award for uh for writing i'm going to get you were writing for a foul mouth dog puppet but is that true uh i might have won uh writer's guild award on sunday yes oh mazel tov man thank you but uh that was not your best work just now um in the uh in the realm of the far language film it could go to the salesman it would be just i don't see tony or tony urdman's too freaky for the voters to have been able to get behind but i wish why is tony urdman freaky it's just a bizarre film the character uh and the performance uh of the the older man is remarkable but it becomes a draining circumstance you begin to feel like the daughter uh almost being stalked by this character it's a it's a long film too so i think oscar voters may you know balk at that okay and you know we'll see and tana uh tana i did not see to be honest with him to be fair okay the nominees for best foreign language film our land of mind a man called ove the salesman tana tony urdman who's gonna win i think the salesman is going to win and i kind of hope land of mind does okay and remember let's let's do a quick caveat a little disclaimer i hate all award ceremonies in the arts all award shows i don't like the idea of pitting artists against one another when the public and the experts meaning the critics without patting myself on the back there are the judges of the quality and you know turning this stuff into a competition never sits well with me it's the oscar's the emi's the grammy self congratulatory wank fest um on tv as we see talent paraded across the screen and people faking enthusiasm when they lose and you know i don't buy into it but that said let's proceed i have an idea for a movie very quickly and then we'll get to best animated feature i was reading about the very first oscar's held in the roosevelt hotel they were invented by louis b mayor because he was trying to fight the craftspeople from unionizing and this was designed the award ceremonies was designed to vanquish solidarity to divide and conquer have everybody competing against one another but it was also the dawn of sound and they gave a special award to the jazz singer that year because it was the first talkie and the only talkie and they also had the the first and last award for best titles all the nominees were from silent films and there was somebody who got an award for best title design and then everybody who showed up at the very first oscar didn't come back for the second because talkies we always talk about how quickly things are moving with technology look how fast that happened in hollywood the transition from talkies to sound in one year people who worked in silent movies were done i think that would make has there been a movie made about the very first oscar i don't believe so but wouldn't that make a great wouldn't that make a great remake of the movie the oscar would be crazy you know i can't believe this back then in the early days of oscar i won for best font that's right it was a strange gothic font but those placards between scenes they were award winning i can't imagine the the whole idea of best title cards but there you go it would make an interesting movie i also recommend people see the movie the oscar which is up there with beyond the valley of the dolls uh steven boyd stars in the oscar i think so so funny for all the wrong reasons but it holds up hey hey steven boyd was the chanting tatum of his day i'm not kidding man um which is more what's more enjoyable beyond the valley of the dolls showgirls or the oscar i'm gonna say the oscar i think beyond the valley of the dolls goes ebert uh roger ebert who basically wrote the script on that when bonkers on it and i just think the characters are so beautifully forged showgirls on the other hand does have a lot of life bodies so if you're interested in life bodies and seeing kyle mcloch when in the worst performance of his career or maybe performing uh the worst script he was ever handed either showgirls works but but the oscar has its own special hilarity i can't get through showgirls and everybody tells me it's the absolute best for worst now you know if you like the genie gershon it's a classic but i would just assume watch her with the miss tilly in bound now there's a movie to enjoy uh and again i will reiterate beyond the valley of the dolls to me is the most fun of those three joey pants is joey pantson bound yeah yeah absolutely good movie joey panthe liano and uh and uh the wonderful the wonderful jennifer tilly i have the good fortune to have spent a little time with uh due to a mutual friend of ours mark thompson um and she is an absolute dream and uh a lot of fun and she's in that film with genie gershon and it is a treat so if you if you want to have a little softcore fun um i would recommend you watch bound and if you want to just laugh beyond the valley of the dolls is terrific right great camp somebody out there should write a movie about the very first oscars right hey come on you're an award-winning writer i'm a decent writer i've won an award right that i came up with an idea for a Broadway musical we're deep in the show now so i'll name drop i was having dinner with nathan lane and yes i'm bragging and we're talking about beyond the valley of the dolls and i said somebody should option beyond the valley of the dolls and turn that into a musical that would make a an amazing musical right yeah i would be fantastic i can't imagine you agree with me nathan lane is nearly a horror though i just can't god you got a great memory best animated feature the nominees for best animated feature are kubo and the two strings i hope i'm pronouncing this right yeah the red turtle i'm joking moana moana moana my life is a zucchini the red turtle and zootopia wow um you know all of these films have their merits they're pretty fantastic it's a great and wonderful selection this year kubo and the two strings is the work of the same people that have done a few things with the henry selic in the past i believe it's a mythic hero's journey story with the asian flavor to it and it's gorgeous although it's a little dark and so presenting it in 3d with those 3d glasses filtering the image kind of diminished the film for me when i saw it but it's a wonderful film moana is part of the disney renaissance with some good songs and a polynesian princess as its central figure and also the rock my life is a zucchini broke my heart it's about an orphan kid dealing with life in a rather friendly orphanage but having a tough time fitting in and finding the companionship and love that he always lacked as a neglected child that's i believe swiss french and to tell you three tears on the snyder cryometer if i watch my life as a zucchini and in fact the the original french swiss title is my life as a courgette it's his nickname zucchini or in in the french courgette the red turtle is a lovely fable about a shipwrecked guy and his relationship to a turtle and eventually a mate that he finds on this island it's the work of a i believe a maybe french or belgian animator in conjunction with studio ghibli ghibli out of japan hayami izaki's company the people that have brought you things like spirited away and finally disney has two wonderful films in the selection zootopia which is a great um it's a parable parable about race relations but it's also funny animals living in a strange anthropomorphic fashion in their various neighborhoods different species trying to get along and also a little crime film where as a young bunny a female bunny wants to be part of the police force which is basically dominated by big brutish animals like oxen and she hooks up with sort of a tattletail fox and you know that's that's her tipster and they basically try to solve political corruption in this i think that's going to win it would merit a victory but in my heart of hearts i thought my life as a zucchini was the most moving and effective of all of these films okay so the nominees for best animated feature film are kubo and the two strings moana my life as a zucchini the red turtle and zootopia who should win i wish in my dream world that my life as a zucchini would win or tie with zootopia because i really love zootopia and i hope and think that's going to win zootopia by the way how do you usually do i we do this once a year and i never go back and find out if you were able to predict who should have won well i want to find out if you were right about who should have won yeah i wish we could figure that one out gosh how do you it's a conundrum how do you usually do i'm sitting with people and watching the oscars and we have little ballots and stuff i'm generally one or two number one or two and 20 people 20 people to get the actual winners unfortunately i am subjected to this and there's usually some kind of prize that people get at the various parties and gatherings i go to on oscar night but you know there it's a modest situation i got some replica oscar a couple years ago because i nailed it baby sometimes i get them all let's go to really well let's go to best adapted screenplay the nominees are moonlight which won the writer's guild award lion hidden figures fences and arrival okay let me let me think this one out because you know i have my own druthers as usual and um i know who's going to win you do sure well i but what are you like kreskin is it kreskin does the seer chris will i can't imagine i would assume fences is gonna win well it is adapted from a very very famous august wilson play that did very very well but um and that would make the most sense but moonlight has such an inside track right now because of its subject matter let's be frank about this it's about a young gay african-american in terrible circumstances who has to pull himself out of the the muck and mire of a life of abuse to kind of live a life just true to to himself and it's a very moving film and there's excitement in lion because it's also basically a true story and the screenplay is based on a biographical book about a you know he must have been a four or five year old kid in poverty in india who finds himself inadvertently getting on a train and ending up hundreds of kilometers away from home and eventually being adopted by a an australian family living a middle-class life in australia and yearning to find his roots and it has a great deal of power as well you can't say no to hidden figures either because hidden figures is a is also an inspiring story of three african-american mathematicians who actually helped the space program helped get john glenn into space and eventually get a man on the moon even though they had been marginalized when they first were part of dassa and suffering from you know the segregation of their workspace and colored only bathrooms and such you know there are real um potent stories here and you know you may be right but let's also remember that adapting something from another source means bringing something new to the table and fence is pretty much sticks to the play even though it's opened up a little bit by being shot on location um i would actually say that if if i had my druthers i think hidden figures would win and i got a feeling um moonlight will win okay so moonlight's going to win but hidden figures should be winning that's interesting i haven't yet seen hidden figures some people didn't like it well you know it's like a tv movie but it's such a great story and i think it's something that needs to be told best original screenplay the nominees are heller high water la la land the lobster manchester by the sea 20th century women well let's toss the lobster out for starters because um it's a very naughty dark comedy and a satire about some sort of future dystopia where people are basically um they're wed they meet and they're wed ostensibly for life you know like lobsters and if it doesn't work out they're basically shunted away and some people do not want to be a part of this society and so they end up you know on the run and it's fitfully funny certainly dark beautifully performed but it's just too weird to win the award and i didn't think it necessarily nailed it the other four movies are all you know pretty solid stuff and the least of them in my mind is la la land in terms of screenplay all the love given this thing to me is sort of knee jerk you know hollywood loves itself and so anything that's about hollywood that treats it with some degree of warmth seriousness whimsy shot in beautiful cinematography is oh boy it's it's a bauble man and it just to me making this musical la la land and all the praise that people have been giving it to me it's like the talking dog it's not how well the dog talks it's the fact that the dog talks at all that's amazing so this isn't that this is a great musical but holy crap they made a musical in 2016 anyway it does have its merits but as far as i'm concerned 20th century women which has gotten a short shrift in a lot of ways is a better screenplay it's about a woman who in the 70s is basically a single mom trying to raise her child and keep their life together by turning their home into a boarding house for a couple other people and it's her familial relationship with all these people and Annette Benning really sells it it's pretty wonderful but ultimately Manchester by the sea uh the heartbreak of Manchester by the sea an uncle who has basically detached himself from his family in a new england town and moved to boston where his janitor is forced to become the guardian of his nephew when the uncle's brother dies and it is deep and powerful and and sad and totally human and hella high water is an ass kicking ass kicking film noir set in the modern west and so you know that's right in my wheelhouse as well basically hella high water at Manchester by the sea are my two favorites Manchester by the sea should win and it may win but i wouldn't break my uh i wouldn't be heartbroken if hella high water took the uh took the award what do i think really will win we're looking at a potential la la land sweep although Manchester by the sea i i'm gonna roll with that that's where it's going to get its best uh you know chance to win so you think Manchester by the sea is going to win yes all right like and i'm happy about that and i'm maybe and you think it should win i think it should win yeah before we go to best director i want to talk about the politics of the oscars because kasey aflech had a settle i believe two sexual harassment lawsuits and came out of that unscathed while the director of birth of a nation was acquitted of rape the woman who made the accusation ended up committing suicide but because the director of birth of a nation is african-american many people felt that he didn't get a fair shake and kasey aflech because he's white he kind of skated on the sexual harassment accusations which were born out he settled at a court could this because they have changed the oscars this year there was a big people forget but last year's oscars were all white except for chris rock and this year they responded they started aging out members of the academy and replace them with younger members of the academy who are of color this is going to be a different academy oscars so white oscars so white guess what they phased out chris rock and put in jimmy kimmel again host is so white i'm going to hashtag host so white see what happens but they the i think there are about five thousand people who get to vote most of them were older and white and now they've cleaned house a little bit not much but they they've certainly changed the demographic makeup do you think there might be a backlash or a black lash to manchester by the sea because kasey afleck skated on the sexual harassment charges which he settled out of court on whereas the director of birth of a nation he's not up for anything that movie just got buried so did you think it was a good movie i thought it was an okay movie it was pretty much by the numbers telling a story like that in a movie like twelve years of slave was so much more potent and so much more expertly directed by by all standards um i think one of the problems we the people had with the birth of a nation situation is the director who also started and you know did the writing or some of the writing was actually involved in a rape case and the woman did take her own life but he was acquitted he may have been acquitted but the the the death in that situation and the our word are very very powerful markers and in this movie there is um there are sexual assaults and i think that a lot of people may have really blanched at that whereas in the case of kasey afleck you know privileged guy you know as aggressive toward women nobody actually gets raped or we have no evidence of such and so you know there's that but we also have a situation whereby as good a film as it is there is still may be a bit of a taint there nonetheless nonetheless they show a taint in this movie you and your lingo you and your argo you and your slang my friend argo you you take i know you've tainted our little of teta-teta here but there you go i won't mention ben afleck's recent movie which was absolutely horrible it was terrible and hey by the way um if i may you're gonna get afleck and you're gonna get matt daemon with the jimmy kimmel as your host so get ready for it anyway the reason i brought up the politics and the demographics of oscar is i notice mel Gibson is nominated for best director and i wonder if that's because the demographics of the academy changed this year i can't imagine the original gangsters of the oscar nominate nominating process giving mel Gibson any slack for his anti-semitism but i guess if you bring in people who are liberal the same way you have people who are conservative they hate jews and ultra liberals also all right have a problem with anti-semitism do you think it with how good was hacksaw ridge it was good it was well directed it was solid but to me it was sort of a a b movie on steroids you know it was it was a good war movie and he's a solid director but um his work is not anywhere near as exceptional as that of some of these other guys who are far more accomplished directors he's a solid meat and potatoes director i don't want to liken him to clenice wood but hey i just did you know those guys um and think about this for a second if they've opened the voting process to more minorities why would they be in favor of mel Gibson since he's obviously not the most liberal and kind-hearted of people well he said he said to his russian girlfriend i hope you get raped by a pack of n words right so i don't think that's a good point i don't think that suggests that they're going to embrace mel Gibson i would think that liberals do not like mel Gibson and ultra liberals are not really hollywood voters they're more like limousine liberals i think the new members of the academy either forgot all that or don't mind his history of anti-semitism that's just my jewish paranoia speaking and pointing out that anti-semitism exists on both ends of the spectrum it's a perennial it's for everybody i think i have heard that the ghost of louis b mayer left a sacrificial lamb on mel's bed one night just to you know bloody sacrificial lamb i could be wrong about that okay the nominees for best director but i'm just a little paranoid the anti-semitism is up and i shorted it i should have bet on anti-semitism this year shit it's i could have made a fortune it's gone up and some a little overly sensitive denise denise villanuve is directly these are the nominees villanueva denise vi okay best director this is where it gets good denise what how's it pronounced denise villanuve for arrival hacksaw ridge the director's name is mel gibson i always wonder it his father is an anti-semite if you hate jews why would you call your son mel mel gibson for hacksaw ridge damien chazelle for la la land kenith lonergin for manchester by the sea and barry jenkins for moonlight yeah i see damien chazelle getting the award for la la land because it's very splashy and pretty and beautifully edited and beautifully directed any coax decent performances out of a couple that didn't have the world's greatest chemistry in my book that being ryan gosling and emma stone as the two quote unquote romantic leads kenith lonergin got amazing performances out of his actors and basically did a did a fantastic job directing a powerful script and the same goes for barry jenkins and moonlight so those are my three main ones i love the rival by the way some people who didn't like it so be it but i thought it was a pretty beautiful film but it's a little on the stately side and doesn't have the sort of snap that these other films have even though manchester by the sea is a dark drama it really has a bite to it i'm thinking that chazelle is going to win and for la la land for la la land oh and i don't know it was the most um i would say it was the most showman-like direction of the three that i singled out i would hope manchester by the sea would win and i i wouldn't be upset if moonlight got the award because you know it but it's the first time out for jenkins i tend to think that the the academy would be more inclined to award chazelle or lonergin the truth is the change in demographics in the academy voters could provide barry jenkins at inside jump because of the subject matter of moonlight and do you think you granted a good job playing barry jenkins in florins foster jenkins Hugh grant played somebody else but he was pretty charming and adorable simon simon hellberg was uh was fantastic in a supporting role in florins we'll get to that we'll get we'll get we'll get to that so okay so for best director you're going to give it to you think kenneth lonergin should win for manchester by the sea but you get but you think if you're gonna if you're a betting man damien chazelle for la la land exactly best supporting actress the nominees are viola davis for fences niomi harris for moonlight nicole kidman for lion octavia spencer for hidden figures and michelle williams for manchester by the sea uh former winner octavia spencer uh is wonderful but it's sort of a thankless role viola davis is actually a lead actress so to me this was kind of baloney nicole kidman is like you haven't seen her before and she's wonderful in lion but it's not very showy the only harris plays a very troubled woman in moonlight uh and michelle williams um we talked about the snider cryometer about my life is a zucchini michelle williams got four tears on the snider cryometer that scene that scene when she's with her child and she runs into kasey afleck the the last scene they have together i literally uh felt the the tears springing out of my eyes i am not joking i am not trying to be a wimp here um it's a very very brief time on screen in manchester by the sea but michelle williams gives the performance of a lifetime in it and people who liked her in my week with maryland what are you crazy that wasn't maryland monroe this was fantastic but i do believe that niomi harris british actress who's done a lot of cool things including playing the new miss money penny in the bond films with uh with our hero uh the the most recent of the james bond superstars uh she is so good in moonlight you know the daniel craig may make eyes at her but in this movie moonlight she comes into her own fantastic performance i think she's gonna win but i i think michelle williams should win because it was just jaw-droppingly good michelle williams should win oh hang on i did this wrong because i'm gonna bet i'm betting oh stop i am i'm gonna go into your web of gambling hysteria i'm going to a party an oscar party and i'm gonna use your your determinants here so you you say niomi harris is gonna win yes but you think michelle williams should win should win yes all right best supporting actor the nominees are maha shawali for moonlight jeff bridges for hell or high water lucas hedges for manchester by the sea dev patel for lion michael shannon for nocturnal animals uh michael shannon is one of my favorite actors and half lead actor half character actor nocturnal animals as lovely as it was you know beautifully directed by tom ford is not was not a great script in my book and as good as he is i don't think that has enough oomph to have any impact dev patel uh is a wonderful young actor we've seen him do a lot of different things lately including obviously starring in slumdog millionaire but also as a supporting actor on tv's the newsroom he can do a lot and he's wonderful in lion but it's not it wasn't that challenging a role lucas hedges young actor manchester by the sea my favorite film of the year amongst all these if we don't talk about the ones that fell through the cracks and he plays the angry nephew that uncle casey afleck has to deal with after the kid's father dies he's good in this and and does a good job but the two that are most likely in my book to win are maha shawali for moonlight a small role but with major impact and jeff bridges for heller high water who is actually on screen considerably more than her shawali is there's a lot of money on her shawali and in fact i love the the coverage and the acknowledgement he's getting he's been a hardworking actor in television and film for the past six seven eight years and he also has to in fact the longest first name of any renowned actor i've ever come across it has been shortened to maher shawali i cannot even easily pronounce his full first name which was used by the way when he was on the uh... wonderful sci-fi show the forty four hundred the titles would come up and his name would stretch across the screen they couldn't even get the ailean they could barely get it as far forty four hundred characters in it it does he's a wonderful actor he's also one of the uh... lights in the netflix's the cage show is hidden figures he's the guy i think that's going to win but i think jeff bridges should win really i would yeah but you could you could flip them maybe jeff bridges will win and maher shawali well you have to make a choice oh good lord hollywood loves its long time heroes um i will say because uh i'm gonna go with maher shawali is going to win and jeff bridges should win best actress the nominees are isabel huppert for l rooth i'm sorry hooper isabel hooper isabel hooper for l rooth nega for loving natalie portman for jackie emma stone for la la land and maryl streep for florence foster jenkins well it's a hilarious performance by maryl streep and pointed but that was just sort of like a rubber stand hey we're going to put her in there that's not a very good film you know um i mean it was entertaining let's let's step back a second it was entertaining but it's not a great film and it's merrill streep being merrill streep emma stone is very good in la la land and has a wonderful scene during an audition where she does one of these half-ass songs that are inferior to everything but the song city of stars in this libretto but she's very good in it but you know she doesn't have the she's not you know she's not ethyl merman she's not syd charise she's not all Audrey Hepburn natalie portman and jackie gives a great performance but um i think that people are probably going to say hey we've seen the story before eh isabel hooper she's a foreigner if she was to win this it would be a major upset it's a fantastic performance but it's nothing beyond what she normally does i'm not going to call her as rubber stamped a nominee is merrill streep because this is a foreign film with subtitles admittedly um it's a movie uh that's been directed by a very beloved um international director paul verhoeven and uh it's subject matter a woman who is raped and ends up becoming complicitous with her uh assault her with her with her attacker uh is certainly some tough stuff to me the best performance of the five of these was probably ruth negga in loving and she has a she has an actual outside chance of winning this one because everybody else should cancel one another out but i fear emma stone will win even though ruth negga should so you're saying that ruth negga should win for loving right and emma stone might win for la la land right and natalie portman gives a great performance and is well loved in hollywood circles but i think that you know it's something very low key about her performance well who do you think is going to win because i'm putting money on this oh you cannot do this to me i'm not going to be responsible for your bankruptcy um who's gonna win i'm going to say emma stone is going to win because the too many la la land enthusiasts out there i i hope i hope ruth negga for best actor the nominees are casey aflec for manchester by the sea andrew garfield for hacksaw rich ryan gossling for la la land vego mortensen for captain fantastic and denzel washington for fences denzel washington does a role i believe he actually did on broadway i'm not really certain about that so don't quote me but he did he did it he did it i don't know if it was on broadway but he definitely did it in the theater yeah and i believe he won a tony for it as well he's great in this thing but you know it's something he's done before ryan gossling learned to play the piano like a jazz musician for la la land kudos ryan gossling yeah you know he's good in this thing and there is this like landslide that could happen for la la land bigel mortensen i think gave he and casey aflec gave to my mind the best performances of these five actors and andrew garfield i think is just going to get lost in the shuffle you know it's a solid work from him hacksaw rich was a good like i said it's almost a b movie but so well done for what it was a war movie i think he's kind of fallen by the wayside so to me bigel mortensen as good as it was not enough kind of momentum for him to win the award so then it comes down to washington aflec or gossling um you may be right about casey aflec basically soiling the nest a little bit because of his sexual harassment suits um i kind of wish that he would win but i have a feeling that because of the sexual harassment suits no please don't suggest that but i have a feeling that gosslings going to win and i hope not but in a perfect world casey aflec would win despite his ugly personal life issues and uh you know denzel has won before there's also this other thing like who's won before does that help you win again right right okay they're going to play us off if we don't hurry up so you're saying casey aflec should win and ryan gossling will win and ryan gossling will win and finally best motion picture the nominees are arrival fences hacksaw ridge heller high water hidden figures la la land lion manchester by the sea and moonlight uh moonlight is the first film heller high water is a film wire hidden figures is like a tv movie hacksaw ridge is your basic war film fences is an adaptation of a very loquacious script arrival with science fiction lion is you know kind of a groovy it's almost like a disney biopic with the exotic color so it comes down to la la land and manchester by the sea manchester by the sea should win la la land will win manchester by the sea should win but la la land will win michael snider is our resident critic he joins us via skype in hollywood we'll talk to you soon sir thank you thank you thanks for listening rescuing penny jane one shelter volunteer countless dogs on the quest to find them all homes is published by harper american hookup the new culture of sex on campus is published by w w norton thanks to mike murphy and of course dana ghoul for helping me get mike murphy kevin kata oka and michael snider will be back i hope real soon please visit me over at david feldman show dot com and while you're over there copy and paste the link to this show to this very episode and spread it around via facebook twitter copy and paste the link of this show and email it to all your friends are you listening to it on itunes on your phone whatever way you're listening to it we also have a youtube channel check out my youtube channel it's just audio copy and paste and share this with everybody you know if you laugh today if you learned if i got you angry if i made you happy return the favor simply by sharing this knowledge share this information share this on stumble upon dig reddit we're trying to figure out reddit the best way to thank me and the people who put this show together and the people who are on it is just by spreading the word share this with everybody do all your amazon shopping via the david feldman show website we got a small percentage it doesn't cost you any more gain access to our premium content by becoming a monthly subscriber for as little as five dollars a month you can support this show we take all major credit cards for more information go to david feldman show dot com we're not running ads on the show that was a mistake so we're just doing this through donations and through amazon if you shop on amazon we get a small percentage of what you purchase talk to me hit the contact button on my website i answer all your emails turn off your tv start reading hold your politicians accountable i truly believe this will be america's finest moment from the show briz studios in downtown manhattan that'll do it for us on today's show gop strategist mike murphy one of the original never trumpsters tells us how we ended up this way comedian and comedy writer kevin kata oka on the early days of the san francisco comedy scene how much sex are college kids really having we talk with lisa wade author of american hookup the new culture of sex on campus resident film critic michael snider stops by to help us fill out our oscar ballot so we can win a little scratch in the office pool and then my favorite subject love and dogs with amy southerland author of rescuing penny jane one shelter volunteer countless dogs and the quest to find them all homes it's three a.m. friday february 23rd 2017 we have a lot of show let's get right to it thanks for listening rescuing penny jane one shelter volunteer countless dogs and the quest to find them all homes is published by harper american hookup the new culture of sex on campus is published by w.w. norton thanks to mike murphy and of course dana ghoul for helping me get mike murphy kevin kata oka and michael snider will be back i hope real soon please visit me over at david feldman show dot com and while you're over there copy and paste the link to this show to this very episode and spread it around via facebook twitter copy and paste the link of this show and email it to all your friends are you listening to it on itunes on your phone whatever way you're listening to it we also have a youtube channel check out my youtube channel it's just audio copy and paste and share this with everybody you know if you laugh today if you learned if i got you angry if i made you happy return the favor simply by sharing this knowledge share this information share this on stumble upon dig reddit we're trying to figure out reddit the best way to thank me and the people who put this show together and the people who are on it is just by spreading the word share this with everybody do all your amazon shopping via the david feldman show website we got a small percentage it doesn't cost you any more gain access to our premium content by becoming a monthly subscriber for as little as five dollars a month you can support this show we take all major credit cards for more information go to david feldman show dot com we're not running ads on this show that was a mistake so we're just doing this through donations and through amazon if you shop on amazon we get a small percentage of what you purchase talk to me hit the contact button on my website i answer all your emails turn off your tv start reading hold your politicians accountable i truly believe this will be america's finest moment from the show briz studios in downtown manhattan that'll do it for us