 The universe does not reward fear, it only rewards courage and faith. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you. You sad pathetic humps. Last night, Montana Republican Greg Gianforte won a congressional seat despite check that because he had been caught on tape beating up a reporter. It's 3 a.m. Friday, May 26, 2017. I'm David Feldman. We have a lot of show, so let's get right to it. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman. DavidFeldmanshow.com. Please friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter. Please do all your Amazon shopping via the David Feldman show website. Go to DavidFeldmanshow.com. You'll see Amazon banners. Click on those and then shop away. We got a small percentage of everything you purchase. On today's show, comedy legend, Jake Johansson. Jake's podcast is called Jake This. You can see him at Hilarities in Cleveland, June 15th through the 18th and the Pittsburgh Improv, June 22nd through the 25th. Jake is one of my oldest friends and one of the greatest comedians who's ever done it and one of the most original. Also on the show, everybody's favorite comedian, Jackie Cation, host of Dork Forest. She's at the comedy attic in Bloomington, Indiana tonight and tomorrow. Please go see Jackie Cation. Also, on the show, Jonathan Allen. He's the author of Shattered inside Hillary Clinton's doomed campaign. That's the Runaway New York Times bestselling account of last November's presidential election. Jonathan Allen is here. The author of Shattered. We talk about Anthony Wiener, his wife or soon to be ex-wife, Huma. How big a liability Bill was to the campaign. To the Clintons and still loyalty. And after all is said and done, why exactly did Hillary want to be president? Jonathan Allen, author of Shattered. Also, yesterday the fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Donald Trump's travel ban saying it violated the Constitution by specifically targeting Muslims. In their ruling, the court cited an amicus brief co-written by constitutional scholar Corey Brettschneider, author of When the State Speaks. Today, Professor Corey Brettschneider is back. He teaches constitutional law at Brown University. And today we talk about what it will take to impeach Donald Trump. And why the most important thing we can do as American citizens is not be cynical and stay outraged. Stay with me. This is the David Feldman radio network. Former Congressman Anthony Wiener last week pled guilty to a charge of distributing obscene material to a minor that carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. He is also now a registered sex offender. But a new report this week from Who What Why suggests Wiener may have been the victim of a political setup. How much did Anthony Wiener, sharing his laptop with Clinton aide Huma Abedin, shape the outcome of last November's presidential election? We are joined by Jonathan Allen, co-author of the bestselling book Shattered, Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. Thank you so much for being with us. It's my pleasure to be here, I think. Great. Are you tired of talking about Anthony Wiener? I know you've covered him extensively. Yeah, I've covered him extensively since he was a member of the House of Representatives. He is for reporters, somebody who was quick-witted and sometimes really thoughtful about policy issues and has, over the last five or six years, created an endless amount of copy. Some of it is sad to watch. There is a level of sort of personal destruction there that I have some sympathy for knowing him, but it is fascinating, obviously, to a lot of people, and certainly people who don't like Democrats or who hate Democrats, you know, watch it as they're on sort of shredding for a missed happy time. Right. I was at the Philadelphia Convention working with Trimethy and Sulcomic Dog, and I saw Anthony Wiener. He was wearing a purple shirt, checked pants, this fishing hat. He wanted to be noticed. I thought, well, this guy's just an exhibitionist. He just wants to be noticed. I have a theory about Huma. I want to ask you about Comey and the emails. By the way, let me say it's interesting you say that because then I wrote a sort of day-no-mott story for his departure from Congress after his first reveal that he was texting with women way back when, and I think the leader of that story was Anthony Wiener, exactly where he's always wanted to be in the spotlight. And he could have made a good, I thought, I thought being mayor of New York City would have been right for him. He had that kind of Ed Koch quality, except for the celibacy, but let me... Yeah, you might not pronounce it Koch. So here's my crazy theory about Huma. I think she was Hillary's favorite, not despite Anthony Wiener being her husband, but because Anthony Wiener was her husband. I don't want to get all house accards on you, but I honestly believe the Clintons needed Anthony Wiener near the White House to distract from Bill. That Anthony Wiener was a useful degenerate and that the Clintons are playing chess and there are six moves ahead and thought we need Anthony Wiener around us so Bill goes unnoticed. I disagree with you and I'll tell you why. The reason is that Huma Abedin has been with Hillary Clinton for her entire adult life, for Huma Abedin's entire adult life and was a White House intern, not the Monica Lewinsky style White House intern, but with the White House intern, you know, around that type of commentary that's Lewinsky and is much closer to the Clintons than her husband is. Okay, and do you want to take that call? I'm sorry. So the ADD crowd, phone calls ringing in the background. How bad was it for Huma to be sharing her laptop with Anthony Wiener? I mean, in a normal context, it's not that bad. I mean, my family has computers, my wife uses my laptop. Sometimes I use hers. I don't have classified information that I'm on my laptop, although after this campaign, who knows? So, you know, I mean, obviously, for a normal couple, I don't think it's unusual to share laptops. I think the unusual thing here was that Hillary Clinton had a private email server that had classified information on it and was emailing back and forth on non-classified systems with classified information. Now, it's important to know that just for a sort of substantive, substance check here, that you can't email classified emails from the classified system to the non-classified system. So, somebody has to accidentally or potentially intentionally put classified information into a non-classified email for it to transfer back and forth. And a lot of things are classified, like the existence of a drone program, for instance, is classified. So if you mentioned a drone program and an email between the Secretary of State and her aide, technically they're moving classified information, everybody knew we had a drone program. But some of the things were much more serious than that. I think what the FBI concluded is that there wasn't an effort here. There was no intent to make classified information vulnerable and that they couldn't show any intent to do that. The reason that she set up the server was to keep her email private. I think that's why you didn't see a prosecution. Two important things. One is there has to be intent to reveal classified information. So there was no intent, might have been sloping this, but you're pointing at that if it's really important, these documents never get transferred through ordinary email. That's what we learned, right? Right. It's complicated, but the government has a classified system and that has multiple levels and you can't email down. You can't email from the top level to the lower level. You can't email from a lower level to non-classified. But what you can do is you could create classified information, so to speak. You could take something that was classified. You personally could take something that was classified, email it to me on my Gmail, and suddenly we are trafficking and classified information. They weren't emailing her from the classified system. They were just emailing her from their regular State Department accounts, which are not classified. However, some of the information in those emails was classified. We're talking with John. I know it's confusing. No, it's not confusing. I think we all do things and if somebody is a snake in the grass looking to catch us, they can find something. I'm told that every American violates about three federal laws a day, so we can all be arrested for something. We're talking with Jonathan Allen. He's the co-author of the bestselling book Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton's DOOM campaign. Was Comey stuck between a rock and a hard place when he went before Congress and said the investigation is still going on at the 11th hour with Hillary? He was because he told them that it was over, and he said he would update them on any new information. You can see how from moment to moment, you can sort of see how his thinking goes and him trying to do the right thing in various places and obviously angering just about everybody. I think he was in a tough spot. Now, he chose the spotlight when Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Arizona right before the decision was being made and then essentially refused herself. He decided to step into that breach and not only say he was not going to recommend the prosecution, but then essentially read the indictment against Hillary Clinton, which is highly unusual for those who believe that Jim Comey is a big factor of this election. I think he's certainly a factor in the election, but you have to remember none of this happens unless she sets up a female server. So it is incomplete for her to say Jim Comey was a factor at the end of the election and not quite back to her own culpability. We're talking with Jonathan Allen, bestselling author, and he also moon lights as a clown of Chuck E. Cheese's. Where are you? That's low down on my resume. Did Comey think this is how I read it? I think Comey figured Hillary was going to win and he prides himself in being nonpartisan. He stood up to Gonzalez at Ashcroft's hospital bed. He wouldn't sign the fees of warrants. He's pretty objective. Was he polishing his image by standing up to Hillary because he thought she's going to be president? I'm going to have to investigate her. I better show that I'm objective and I'm not under her thumb. I mean, his friends have essentially said as much. I mean, that this is somebody who believed that she was going to be president of the United States and is going to have to look like he had done due diligence. And that he did do due diligence and that the FBI did do diligence and that it was important that the public know that. I think reporters followed the campaign in a similar way. They thought that she was going to be president. So they did a pretty hard vet of her. I think they tried at times to do as hard of a vet on Donald Trump and were not as successful at doing that vet. Although I would point out David Ferrick, although The Washington Post won Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Donald Trump's sort of fake charity and foundation that didn't actually give out its own money to anybody or gave out to very few of the people that they announced that it was giving money to. So there was certainly some scrutiny of him and his business ties and obviously his the allegations of sexual misconduct against him. But I think because reporters felt like she was going to win, they did the real full vet on her. We practically knew everything about Donald Trump before the election. But the only thing that stuck was the the two pay stuck. Everything else we just accepted. We knew he was dirty. How big a liability was Bill Clinton? At some point you must have figured she was going to be president. Bill Clinton meets with Loretta Lynch, the new attorney general on the tarmac. What did he say? Do we know what he said? And how stupid was that? Well, we didn't get anything more than what, you know, what was reported essentially at the time that they that they talked about their families and, you know, sort of nice soft stuff like that. But Bill Clinton is smart enough to know that just just making his presence known to the attorney general, whom he once hired as a federal prosecutor, you know, has an effect or could have an effect. And certainly smart enough to know that if it became public, it could be a problem. The response that we understand was sort of universal in the White House and in the Clinton campaign was WTF. You know, that's what people said. They're like, how could these people not understand that this could be a problem? How could Bill Reynolds be dumb enough to get up, you know, to go talk to Bill Clinton on a plane? How can Bill Clinton be dumb enough to do that? And yet, you know, this sort of sets Jim Comey in motion. Had she won, they'd be impeaching her right now. There's no question that she herself is her own liability because of the political climate. It would be difficult to impeach her without specific impeachable charges related to things that she had done in the presidency. So you sort of have to wait to find out if there's, you know, high crimes or misdemeanors with the Justice Department. Having said the email controversy was not prosecutable. I think it would be hard for Congress to impeach her on that. Certainly the House could impeach whoever they want because it only takes a majority vote to get those articles of impeachment passed, but to get two thirds of the Senate to remove a president from office is a pretty high bar. The only person Andrew Johnson came, one vote short of being removed from office. Bill Clinton obviously was not removed from office and Richard Nixon would have been removed from office, but facing that decided to resign. So it's a pretty high bar to actually get it done. It's interesting. We have Corey Brettschneider on the show today. He's a constitutional law professor at Brown University, author of When the State Speaks. He says on today's show that the only way to impeach is pretty much through the conflation of politics and a possible violation of the law, but politics is what moves an impeachment. That's why I walked away from that interview with Corey Brettschneider thinking that if Hillary were president, the politics are there to just destroy her, that she would be immediately crippled by a Republican House. And Bill Clinton, how big a liability do you think he would have been? You never know what Bill Clinton is going to do. So, you know, I think it potentially could have been a liability. I think on a policy level, he's probably an asset. I think on a political level in terms of persuading politicians to do things, I think he's probably an asset, but certainly his foundation activities and this sort of cloud of sexual misconduct around him is something that has to be considered in terms of the politics of that. I agree with the professor. I mean, impeachment removal from office is a political act and is not a legal act. There's no real definition of high crimes and misdemeanors. So, it's basically you've got two-thirds of the Senate willing to get rid of a president and a majority of the House, you know, the presidency is over. But those people don't want to be seen as acting purely on political, on a political basis. So, they need to have some real reason to do that. And I actually think that's why in large part the Clinton impeachment did not succeed in the Senate, that basically the Senate's decision was, you know, having sexual relations with an intern and even lying about it were not strong enough reasons for Democrats in the Senate to vote to get rid of him. I think that their constituency feel that way. I've always said that Donald Trump is pretty much safe unless he drops to 25 percent approval, because it's got to be at the point where Republicans feel like it's more dangerous to them to stand by him than to back away from him. And he's not at that point right now. How much did Bernie move Hillary Clinton to the left? Would she have been a progressive president? I think she would have been a progressive president for her, because I think she was always a little more progressive than her husband. I think that her, where she falls on the spectrum is close to him, but a little bit to the left of him. And I certainly think that she was reflective of a Democratic party that was moving to the left. And you could see that in her close attention to various Democratic constituencies, you know, when you're talking about going back on the sort of tough on crime, Bill Clinton days of the early nineties to now talking about getting rid of mass incarceration, maybe talking about LGBT issues. This is somebody who was campaigning far to the left of where her husband campaigned to the left of where she was in 2008. And I think Bernie Sanders did pull her to the left a little bit on some issues. But I would say this, I think she was always cognizant of, and perhaps in many ways to her detriment, cognizant of the plausibility of doing things that she promised on the campaign trail as president and tried not to get into a place where she was promising things that she didn't think she would be able to deliver on. What she probably has found by now after watching Barack Obama defeat her, after watching Bernie Sanders come close and watching Donald Trump defeat her is that it is a lot easier on the campaign trail to promise whatever you need to to win. And we've seen President Trump has done some things that are consistent with what he promised on the campaign trail and backed away from some of the others. Haven't we found that presidents Trump notwithstanding do keep or at least try to keep their promises that they make on the campaign trail? The candidate says, I believe in Medicare for all. They're going to try to implement that their first 100 days in office. Broadly presidents try to keep their promises and they will measure themselves against their promises, but oftentimes they will promise more than they know they can deliver. And at times we'll get to places where they're promising things that are pretty clearly more than they can deliver. But I think the aspiration matters to voters. I think it tells voters who they are, what they really believe in, or might not tell them exactly what priorities will be emphasized, but it does give the voter a sense when you're out there a little stronger of what your core values are. And I think that's been a problem for Secretary Clinton. She's somebody who would, you know, rather than saying I'm against the trans-persistent partnership, she would say I'm against the trans-persistent partnership, which by the way I negotiated. But here are the conditions under which I could accept it. And I think voters are looking for I'm against this or I'm for this. They want a clean break. They want something new. That's why up until recently we rarely had senators making it to the Oval Office. We wanted governors because they didn't have a paper trail. We wanted fresh eyes in the Oval Office. There's something unattractive about a candidate who's a victim of her own expertise. What do you think her core value was? My core value is Medicare for all. I believe that when you look at all the issues facing this country, we need Medicare for all. That is the thing that I would get up every morning and fight for. Why was she running? What did she stand for? What was her unifying theory that would bring her to the Oval Office? It's interesting. We talked about this in the book at length. Even her own campaign age had difficulty figuring out what was her one big idea. There were a million different things on which she had a position, but no one big unifying idea. No, it's the economy, stupid. No, America first. This was a candidate who I think struggled to tell the American people what she was going to do for them that was bigger than her. It was more about them than about her gaining power. That doesn't mean to say she doesn't believe in all of the things that she or most of the things that certainly that she proposed on the campaign trail, but just that she had trouble with that one big idea. In fact, one of her top aides said to me, my co-author Amy Barnes, I would have had a reason for running or I wouldn't have run. And what do you think that reason was in your gut? Yeah, I mean, I think it was that she believed she would be the best person to handle all of the various crises that you handle as president of the United States. I think she thought she would be a good president and which again is about her more than it's about other people or more than more than, you know, about more than delivering some particular policy and that's where people got lost and not everybody. I mean, obviously 65 million people voted for her. There were a lot of people who supported what she was about, but for what ended up being the swing constituency, the working class white voters in the Rust Belt, they wanted to hear a little bit more about how she was going to make their lives better in a pretty easy to grasp way and she failed on that score. Trump is a victim of leaking. You live off leaks. How much leaking would be going on in a Clinton Oval Office? I would assume a lot because I don't think she instills loyalty. What was one of the things that allowed us to do this book is that her campaign really didn't leak a lot during this particular election cycle. She put an emphasis on not having people that she thought would leak on having people who would when they ran up ideas up the flagpole and ran into resistance would not go to the press. And I think it's more the reasons she probably didn't correct for some of the errors is that she wasn't reading them on the front page of the nation's newspapers because her campaign was insisting all the time that everything was hunky-dory and going fine. What is the danger to a leader who isn't porous, somebody who is Nixonian, who doesn't allow the leaks? The danger is they operate in a bubble. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. You're saying that leaks actually help a president. I'm saying they can. I think that the ability to have things aired out a little more than they can't near enough circle, the ability to hear what some of your detractors from inside your own camp would say to a reporter about what your mission, I think it's important to get part of that. That doesn't mean that every week is good for a president or that if everything is leaking, it's good for a president. I think there's a balance, but I do think it's important to be able as a candidate to hear some ideas that people might not tell you to your face. A president like Obama just talks to Valerie Jarrett and assumes that everybody else is leaking. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the weeks, I mean, I think the Obama White House was very good at the sort of weak on offense, if you will. They were very good at constructing narratives and putting them out as sort of an offensive weapon. The way that they leaked your reporters is to tell them the story, they give them the backstory about what's going on, give them some inside details from inside a room and keep them pretty well said. And then there were leaks for the Obama didn't want, you know, his agencies would leak stories about what he was saying, you know, no to which by the way is normal that happens in the presidency. Usually the people leaking are the ones who lost the argument and they think they have a better idea and so they go talk to reporters about it so that it's a public hearing and if the president is wrong or the public isn't with the president there may be some pressure on him to listen again to the people that lost the argument. In 2008 Hillary lost to Obama. Is it partly because the people who work for Obama loved him and the people who work for the Clintons are there for transactional reasons? It's for their resume and they can make money and they can move on. Is that what separates the Clintons from the Obamas? Don't you think the only people who work for the Clintons are loyalists who know that there's a big paycheck coming their way and that the Clintons have something on them to keep them in line? I mean I think there's a mix. I think that that loyalty is huge in Clinton world and that there are a lot of people who are loyal because this is where the paycheck has come from or what they thought would come from in the future, a plumb white house job, etc. But I think there are also people who simply believe that they're style of politics who are essentially democratic centrists and pragmatists and transactional themselves. So I don't think that this is, you know, I don't think Clinton world is devoid of people who actually have a belief in Hillary Clinton or that Hillary Clinton would be the best president. At the same time I think that there is a stronger affinity for a Barack Obama or a Bernie Sanders who or even a George W Bush who goes out there and sort of says here are my values and here's my ideology and that that can be a much stronger pull when you identify with somebody that way. I think that can be something that's a lot more inspiring. We've been talking with Jonathan Allen. He's the co-author of the bestselling book Shattered Inside Hillary Clinton's Doom Campaign. Before you go, we've heard the hand wringing of the perpetual permanent campaign that the minute the president or a congressperson sets foot in their new office, they're running for reelection. I want to ask you if you're a liberal or ignorant or whatever you call the other side, but I want to get rid of Trump. Is the permanent campaign a virtue in that Congress, even though they're Republicans, have to pay attention to the polls and they have to get rid of Trump because he's dragging them down? Is that why Goldwater went in to the Oval Office and told Richard Nixon you got to go? Is it because of the permanent campaign? I mean, I think that, you know, the founding fathers wanted certainly the House of Representatives to be pretty close to the electorate, to win and lose based on the popular sentiment changes. Donald Trump's already campaigning for reelection. We've seen him, you know, relatively recently that was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, basically do a campaign rally. We are in a permanent campaign in the number of months of the year or the biennium, I guess, that are sort of reserved for politics versus policy have expanded. So it's almost always all politics now. But I think that's just a, you know, sort of a function of the way we operate. I don't think it's bad that members of Congress are attentive to politics. I mean, our system is set up with the idea that the people are right. Well, I, you know, I covered the campaign. I was on the trail with Trump, the encyclomic dog. Notice the gravitas? I was going to say, were you the executive producer or were you the gopher for the dog? I cleaned up after the dog and I walked away from this campaign thinking, go big or go home. If you're going to run for president, go big or go home. But the American people, we like to think we're always frightened. But when it comes to electing presidents, we're fearless. You know, Obama was a fearless choice. Even Trump was a fearless choice. It's a pretty brave electorate. Bernie was go big or go home and 2020 vision. But had the Democrats gone big and trusted the electorate and went with Bernie, I think he'd be president right now. I think the American people aren't as frightened as the Washington establishment bets on. I think you're right about that. You know, I think Hillary Clinton twice ran campaigns, once in a primary against Barack Obama and once against Donald Trump saying, you should be frightened about what this person intends to do. They don't know what they're doing. They're promising too much. And twice was rejected in that theory that she espoused. Yeah. Well, anyway, thank you. And by the way, at the same time, made her the status quo carrier with two elections. This is a country that is constantly reinventing itself. Well, thank you for your time. I hope you come back. Jonathan Allen is the co-author of the bestselling book, Shattered, Inside Hillary Clinton's Doom campaign. I know how busy you are. Thank you for your time. Check Joe Hansen joins us. He is no stranger to comedy fans. He's never been on the show before, but he's no stranger to my listeners. I've mentioned you a lot. Dennis Miller used to say to me every comic when they're starting out picks a guy who he uses as a yardstick, who he measures his career against. I made the mistake of measuring my career against you. Check Joe Hansen. This was a big mistake. We started together. We hung out in the open mics in San Francisco, and I would measure my career against you. That was a mistake. Well, this sounds like it could be flattering to me, so I hate to interrupt you. Well, let me introduce you. I'll tell you why it was a mistake. Check Joe Hansen has appeared. Oh, my God. Hang on. Let me steady. Let me get steady here. Check Joe Hansen has appeared on David Letterman. 45. 45 times. It was 46, Dave. I mean, I hate to interrupt you. It's all I've got. I need that. Let me give you. This is not an introduction. This is just to tell you what until my audience what an idiot I am to compete with you countless specials on HBO and Comedy Central. His podcast is Jake this and he will be at Hilarities in Cleveland, Ohio June 15th through the 18th. Go see Jake Joe Hansen if for no other reason to punish me. This is what you say on your website. This is so brilliant. This is amazing. The difference between watching stand up comedy on television and seeing it live is like the difference between watching a porno and actually having sex with a real person. You might enjoy them both, but one is a lot better. That is so brilliant. Oh, well, thank you, Dave. I think that it's true. And I'm surprised more people don't bring it up. But that tells you it's you and several other people who are visiting my website and I don't know. Thank you. That's nice of you. I think that it's apt. I think when you're watching stand up on TV, what you're doing really is you're watching and someone else watch a comedy show. I mean, you're watching it, but you're kind of watching them watch it. That's why you need to be able to hear them laugh and they don't show the audience as much now as they used to. But when you're at a comedy show, there's a much more of an immediacy to it. And it is actually happening to you because it's dangerous. Well, it's dangerous or it's just intimate. You're involved in it. When you watch it on TV, it doesn't feel vicarious. It feels like it's really happening to you. But believe me, I have people who come to comedy shows and tell me about exactly what I'm talking about on my website and what we're talking about right now. It's just as different. And you may not believe it if you're just hearing about it, but go see a great comedy show and, you know, whoever, somebody that you're really into. But when you're in the room with them, it's very, it's very much more immediate and intimate and intense. So my theory about you when we were starting out is that I was trying to make the people in front of me laugh. You were thinking of the bigger picture. Hmm. Well, I don't I that's funny because I always when I if if anybody wants my anyone wants my advice, I would I would advise someone who's auditioning for something. If you're going on a showcase and there's going to be scouts from Letterman or The Tonight Show or whatever HBO special in the audience, I would say do not think about those people at all. Just focus on making the audience in front of you laugh. So that's that's kind of what I'm always trying to think of. But you maybe maybe you're talking about subject matter as opposed to to just approach. Yeah, well, I have two thoughts about that. I put you up there with Larry Miller in that you're pretty pure with your material. I don't want to embarrass you, but you always had class. You never rolled around in the gutter on stage. You never worked filthy. I remember driving to L.A. with you and John Ross. I had a job at a radio station and you had heard some of the stuff that I was doing was a lot of flatulence jokes and the two of you and I never forgot this. You lectured me the same way Larry Miller lectured me about building equity with an audience and that you can't be smart and then stupid because it's schizophrenic. You have to work to the audience as better angels. How did you know that's so young and so early? Well, I don't remember being quite that philosophical, philosophical that's young, but I definitely felt as I yeah, it's hard for me to know now or remember now how I thought of it then so I can more talk just about how I feel now and I think now again, this is kind of in that category of who gives a shit about my advice. But I think that if you want to be a good comic, you need to really think about what is funny to you and what is the most efficient way of communicating that to the audience. And the alternative path is people think that there's some kind of reverse engineering method that you can use where you figure out what the audience, you figure out what you think the audience wants to hear and then you serve that up hot. And that may work for a while if you have some angle and are able to figure out what the audience wants, but eventually they're not you and you're not going to know what to say. So what if you what if you figure out what's funny to you, but it's so inappropriate, you can't do it? Well, I don't think of you as inappropriate, David. In fact, I wasn't talking about me. Sorry. But what if we're handing out compliments now? I mean, I feel like you've invented a thing that is almost impossible for anyone else to do because I don't even understand it sometimes when I'm watching you do it, where you'll do a joke that's sort of through the looking glass, but then satirical and, you know, the audience and I'm laughing, the audience is laughing, and I can't tell if they're laughing what I'm at what I'm laughing at. I don't know what your actual point of view is if this is a satire or if you really think that. And there's something about it that's so kind of hilarious and disorienting that I think it's incredible. Well, that's high praise coming from you. All I wanted to do was be the worst human being on stage that I possibly I'm being serious. My goal is to be the worst human being without cursing, without resorting to vulgarity, and without going into the gutter that that's, but I can't, you know, anyway, but thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, I figured I was so unlikable that I would just make myself so unlikable that some people would like me is back to you because I do have some questions and there is value to not being in the same room with you because it feels pure and I can ask these type of questions to you. Oh boy, the sense that I just it should we just let me I just want my imagination to have a chance to run wild with my my assumed respect. Am I going to be mad? Am I going to be violently aggressive? I don't know. No, I'm just curious. There's some questions I have about growing up. It seems to me that you have impeccable taste in comedy. You hung out with Ellen and Tom Kent. You hung out with the comics who weren't crass or vulgar. And this is how I rationalize this. I say you grew up in the Midwest and you have good wholesome values which you struggle with. But basically, you know, right from wrong. And your comedy comes from that. And you had disdain for vulgarity. Did that I think that's a fair statement about you. Well, I don't know that may be how it seemed to you. I would say that it from my perspective in those early days in San Francisco, you know, I was from the Midwest. I had just lived for five years in Iowa where I was going to college. And I didn't understand. I think a lot of people who aren't into comedy still don't understand the way comics can tease each other and say really mean things. And that's they like it. You know, I remember having girlfriends back in the day and even before I got married recently, well, 15 years ago, I got married. And they would say, how come your friends are so mean or how come you're so mean to them? And the thing is like, I'm not being mean to them. They like that. It's like dogs who are biting each other and rolling around on the floor. But I know that now, at the time when I first moved to San Francisco, that kind of way of interacting with other people, it just seemed mean to me. And so the people who were good at it, you know, and I would put you in that category, I just didn't understand. I couldn't tell like, do these guys like me or do they really not like me? I mean, I was very insecure about that. And so I avoided those situations because, I mean, the response is either to, I knew I wasn't the right answer to fight and to be mad. And I didn't think crying was going to be helpful. So I ended up, you know, maybe befriending some of the gentler. Right. Souls. Yes. That's absolutely correct. I gravitated towards the aggressive, hard drinking, mean spirited comedians. I mean, it's like a punch. The gut level laughs. Were you watching television at the time? Were you at the time in the 80s when we were starting out? When you were starting out, were you going home and watching television? Were you watching Letterman? Were you keeping an eye, for lack of a better word, on the marketplace? Were you looking at the marketplace? No, I've been watching Letterman when I was in college. He had a daytime show, so I was watching that. And I suppose we were all watching Letterman at night because it was like, ah, can you believe that this thing is on? And it only started, I think his nighttime show only started in the, like I started doing stand-up in 82. And I think his nighttime show came on in 84 or something like that. I didn't watch. I didn't watch. I really didn't. I was so relieved that I was no longer watching television. And I really didn't start watching television until I started writing for it. So you were watching, did you go to watch, what was it, the Circle in the Square or the, what was that theater and not San Bruno? Yeah, I think that was in Berkley or Oakland or someplace. But no, would you pay money to go see somebody like Howie Mandel or Billy Crystal? No, no, I never did that. I mean, when I was a, when I was in high school, I went to see Steve Martin. That counts. But I never, no, I'd never, and I, this isn't any kind of point of pride or anything, but I never paid to go see a comedy show. I never paid for it. I never paid for it. You went to see Steve Martin. How old were you? I would have been, I guess I must have been 17. Was that the first live show you ever went to? Probably live stand-up show. I didn't really even understand when I started doing stand-up comedy, it was, I came to San Francisco to do that because I had met another guy who was a comic book in Chicago, supposedly. And he had cut this article out of Newsweek or Time because his dream was to do comedy in San Francisco. He wanted to go where Robin Williams started, the Holy City Zoo. And so that's why I was going to do that. And I don't know what I thought, but I didn't realize that you could make a living, which in just working comedy clubs, you know, that, that not, you don't have to be hugely famous to not have a day job. And in fact, not only not have a day job, but to have, I've got a nice house near the beach. And, and it's all from, from doing stand-up. But I didn't know that that was an option at the time. I thought I was going to San Francisco, I was going to do whatever stand-up comedy was. I was going to go on stage and do something silly that would get me a TV show. And then I would become rich and famous like Robin Williams. Right. Now, I remember this. I remember being more successful than you early on. This is just what I tell myself. I remember taking the lousy gigs, playing Fremont and Hayward and Newark, not Jersey in California, and being told by Tom Sawyer, don't take these gigs. It's easy money. You'll regret it. You'll pick up bad habits, stay in the city, punch it out. My recollection was, and this isn't true, but this is how I remember it, coming back from Hayward in a zood suit, flashing wads of cash in front of your face going, look what I did. I made them. But no, but my recollection is early on I went for that cash and you did it. Yeah, I think more to me, I would remember it as you became more able to succeed in, you know, I could go on at the other cafe, which was one of the nicer, quieter, more well-behaved audience rooms and have a good set. But you had developed an ability, a skill, I think, to succeed and to engage and get laughs from an audience under many more circumstances and difficult circumstances. And so you got to do those more roady East Bay rocket room gigs. Before I did, I ended up doing them. But you know, and sometimes I would do all right at them. But I mean, I used to console myself after I got, I would say to other people, like the worst thing that can happen to you at the Sunshine Saloon is that they can want, they'll want you back. And yet, how did you know that? I guess you're born with those kind of values because I would say they want me back. Well, right. No, no, but you're right. And you were right. And Tom Sawyer used to say this, there were two types of, as I remember, San Francisco, there were three major clubs. There was the Holy City Zoo, the other cafe and COBS. And I'm going to say, I don't want to use a Hegel, there was a, the zoo was the opposite of the other. And COBS was was a synthesis of both COBS reflected Tom Sawyer's views of comedy. And I think to this day, I think he had the best taste in comedy. But the Holy City Zoo was rough and tumble. It wasn't easy. You had to punch it out. You could lose the audience at any time. The other cafe was in the hate. It was very gentle, very snobby. The owners were snobs. They liked their, they liked you and Paula Poundstone and Rob Schneider and Alan. They were very protective of their audience. They didn't want it crass and vulgar. And then, and then COBS combined those two. Tom took both types of comics, but they had to be great. You were an other cafe comic. I was a zoo comic. Is that fair? Well, yeah, that sounds, that sounds, yeah, I feel like that's a close, shorthand. Tom, Tom became a supporter of mine before I won the comedy competition in 1986. And so in 85, I think, or maybe even as early as 84, he had said, look, one of the things I'm going to try and do is have a somebody who I'm really nurturing to move forward. And so that's going to be you right now. I'm going to give you one week of hosting the show per month. So you'll have a week's worth here at COBS every month. And so he was, while I'm, yeah, I think sensibility wise, the other cafe right thing is right, but, but COBS and Tom have always, I mean, he's responsible for a lot of that early success I had development. And then, and then I worked, he made an exclusive deal with me just a year after winning the comedy competition. So from roughly from 89 until whatever a few years ago when he sold it, I was exclusive in San Francisco at COBS and up there often twice and for many years, three times a year. When do you think you figured out who you were on stage? Hmm. I think I had a little bit of a penny drop moments when just just around before the comedy competition, I won that in 86. And so I would say in that 85 time, 84, I kind of had this. I don't know about figuring out who I was, but I stopped trying to be somebody else and just sort of went with whatever I took the easy road and just was myself. I think that's the way it felt to me anyway. You did something. I remember my father told me about two comics. He told me about you and Dennis Miller. And he said, my father said, there's this guy he's seen you on Letterman. He's telling stories. He's the only guy who's up there building a house and hanging his jokes inside, but he's got this house. How did you know how to do that? Even Dennis Miller, when I worked for Dennis Miller, you know, he didn't build that first he gathered up all the furniture and artwork and said, let's build a house around this seems to me, you built the house first and then decorated it. I feel like I'm always trying to, you know, that's a tricky thing. It's like, I feel like if I could describe what it is I'm doing in an articulate brief way, that would have been helpful to me in terms of getting a sitcom or really getting anything. And that's that's another skill. I just, I feel like I can do it, but I don't always know the best way to talk about it. But to me, I'm talking about things that I think are funny. And a lot of times that starts off being a story about something that happened to me or something that I saw read about, but that it's me telling, trying to communicate that to someone else. And there's a there's a personal sort of awkwardness and searching for the right way to say it that goes along with the actual telling of the information that makes it funny. But I, you know, I'm not doing such a great job. No, I'm fascinated by this because I've wanted to ask you these questions for a long time. You had the courage not only to do what you wanted to do and what struck you as funny, you had the courage to stick to a process that every other comedian I know in our group didn't have the wherewithal to pull off. And that is not to lead with the laughs, not to lead with the jokes, to lead with the truth, to lead with what you wanted to say and get the laughs from the honesty. Yeah, you know, I did this. How did you know to do that? Instinct, I guess, right? It was more just trying to come from a place, you know, the only way that you can be sure that you're going to be 100% original is to try and be 100% yourself because there's not someone else like you. And that's when I was talking earlier about the way you do comedy. I feel like that's what you're doing also. So it's not really a calculation. And it's also not something that as much as, you know, for comedic purposes or emotional, your own personal emotional reason, you're not so different in that sense. You know, generally, you and I are doing that same thing. It just, I maybe figured out or was objective about it sooner than you were and you were more, you got there and then realized what you were doing. Well, I failed so much that it was just, there was so much failure going on and desperation. And there still is. Letterman, the first time you did Letterman was what year? 87. Five years in. Was it terrifying? I would assume five years in. Did you feel ready or did you feel it was too sudden? It was pretty scary. I mean, it's funny because you brought up Dennis Miller a couple of times and I really have to say thank you to him. I've said it a number of times and I know I've said it to him, but I really would like to just stop right now and say thank you to him on your show just because he and I worked together in Sacramento and he was obviously the headliner and I was the feature actor and that would have probably been in 85. And he was very supportive to me, said you got to come down to LA. Then I won the comedy competition in 86, but I had been down to LA before then and kind of been around. He helped me get in at the comedy magic club. He got Louis Anderson to sit next to Mitzi while I was on stage and say something nice about me at the comedy store. And then when I won the comedy competition and got management and, you know, they were saying you got to go to more, Robert Morton had seen me for Letterman out in San Francisco, but you know, I didn't have management and he was like, I like you, but you're not ready. When I was in, I was talking to Dennis who had, by that time he had gotten Saturday Night Live. He had let me stay in his house in LA when I came down here and took me around. Then he relocated to New York to do Saturday Night Live and was living in an apartment and on brand new on Saturday Night Live. He says come out here. Morty's got to see you out here. I slept on his floor in New York City while he was in that you know, boiler room of SNL at the beginning. He took time to support me there, let me stay in his place was encouraging of me. I mean, he was so helpful and then later when he had his own talk show, he had me on a couple of times. He's just, I think now people have an opinion about him because he's got this conservative thing going on, but he was just so helpful and kind to me early on. It was great. That is his reputation in that if he thought you were funny, he would go to the mat for you. He did. I went out to New York. I stayed at his place. Morty saw me. Robert Morton saw me again. My managers were also Letterman's managers, so that didn't hurt, but there's nobody's getting on that show unless Morty and Dave, you know, there's no Dave's not doing anything or his system isn't set up to let anyone in who is not going to be pleasing to Dave after it happens. So I passed all of that and I flew out to New York for my first appearance and you know, you fly to New York, you run your set the night before in a comedy club and have a conversation about the jokes and how it's going to go and it's okay tomorrow you come in. Sorry, I got to assume you completely tanked it the night before in the comedy clubs. Well, you sort of always do. You'd go on a catcherizing star, which at the time they had a band would go on. So the comic would perform and it's mostly comics going up and doing 20-minute sets. So the comic would perform. He'd say, thank you. The audience is clapping. The band would come on stage along with the host who would then do five minutes or 10 minutes and then introduce the next comic and the band would play while you walked on stage and then you had to stand on stage until the band got up and walked off stage and then you're just going to do five minutes and then say thank you and then the band's going to come back on. So there's a lot of freaking traffic and busyness going on and it's so it's really hard and you're showcasing your letterman set. So you're not coming out and going, hey, how's it going? Or what happened today in the news? You're coming out and doing your first joke and you're flipping the cards over and then you're saying thank you. So it was sort of set up to be a little bit of a dud the day before, but I had run that set so many times. That's why they have you run it so many times because being on national television is exciting and back then it was even more exciting. Not many people had cable TV and there was way more people watching the show. It was a big deal, a bigger deal than it is now just because now there's so people are watching stuff on their phones now. So you go out and you do that the night before and it would go, it was okay and then you go in and it's my first time and I'm cranked up and I'm excited and I can't believe I'm on this show hosted by this guy who he's older than us but he was just older than us. So he's really the hero that you can relate to because he's just ahead of you in the game. So I was very excited and I'm backstage and the guest before me is on and they come back and they say okay when he or she is finished then it's going to be you. So get ready and then when they went to commercial Morty came back and he said hey Jake we're sorry but we've run out of, there's not enough time left for you to do your whole set so we're just going to have the person who's out there now is going to talk for three minutes and then their band's going to play a song and that's going to be the, we'll have you back, you're bumped but I was only bumped until the next night. So I didn't have to, I didn't have to go back and ramp up everything I could and it was good because of my breath, I didn't couldn't calm down my breathing and I was kind of shaky and so I realized the next day look just get up, don't drink any coffee, just drink water all day, keep yourself calm and collected so that you know you don't need to worry about pumping yourself up for the show you know like you. You're already pumped yeah. Yeah you're going to be so jacked on adrenaline that you've got to focus on the opposite keeping yourself calm and so it was actually good to get bumped and so I came back the next night and you know they introduced you and you've run the set so many times you walk out there and you just flip the cards over you just do the jokes in the order that you do them and all you have to do you don't have to remember your whole set you just have to remember the first thing you're going to say and then it all comes out and then at the end you say thank you and the band plays and the next thing you know you're backstage and it's it's over. Did they let you use bullet points back then? No there wasn't any there wasn't any bullet points or cue cards. I don't remember the first thing in terms of time but I remember then almost every time after that they would go okay so usually you're going to do at the beginning it was six minutes but then it got down to four about by the end but they would say okay there's going to be a guy who gives you the one minute to go and a 30 second to go and it's like I just I was like okay they can do that but I'm going to do it's not like I'm going to drop my last joke because it takes longer on TV. I got to do the script. I'm going to do my jokes and then you're going to have to you're going to have to trust figure it out. I can't it always amazed me that they would go they're going to do some countdown thing. It's like look you know what I'm going to say and I'm going to say all that stuff. Did you have a friend with you the first time you do the letterman? Um I must have. I so many of the times I had a friend of mine that was we met because our girlfriends were friends in San Francisco and then he moved out to New York before I did letterman and I think he came to the first one and out of the 46 he was probably an attendance at the 35 of them. Wow. My friend Evan Elkin and so he I think he was probably at that first one but I don't remember for sure. All right so you're waiting to go on you're terrified. I doubt you can remember this was there any moment during your first letterman shot where you thought hey this is fun? Um no no it was it I I had I did it many times before I kind of realized like come out stand there for a second and look around soak it in it's going to seem like forever to you but it's just going to seem like two seconds and completely natural to the audience but let yourself absorb a little bit of what it's like to be out there. You know that's the advice that I give people when if I know somebody's getting married I always say look hey be sure and stop and just take a breath and look around and soak in the day shoot a little bit of of a movie for yourself that you can play back later because otherwise it just seems like some dream that you had you know. And enjoy the the wedding night because that's the last time you're getting late. See this is why I never made it Jake. So kind of jokes how many times in were you finally relaxed around Dave because there is this dichotomy you're trying to make the audience laugh but you more importantly you're trying to make Dave laugh. It's almost like you can not make the audience laugh but if you make Dave laugh you're fine. Did you ever get I'm going to assume this without getting too personal. This is what I assume I'm going to assume that to the very last shot you were never completely relaxed around Dave Letterman. I don't think anybody is. Well I mean people say look hey you've been on there 46 times Dave must like you and it's like yeah there's no question that Dave likes me likes my stand up. I mean he enjoyed having me on the show. I mean and I realized years ago that he liked me because oftentimes they would call up and go hey it's sweeps week and so we want to have you on because Dave really likes you or hey it's Dave's birthday. We want to have you on because it's Dave's birthday. And then you figure out that this is how famous that David Letterman is. He not only doesn't pay to go see comedy shows he sees comedians by having them on his show. So he's a fan of comedy and he has comics on that he likes and he is there watching and I think hoping to enjoy your performance and he said very many nice things to me afterwards you know hey great said or I've heard him laugh or re-say a punchline afterwards to me that he liked and but we were never hangout kind of guy. I never I never went up to the office and smoked a cigar or watched a basketball game or something. I feel like if I went out to a restaurant and I saw him at another table I would it would be all right but awkward over to say hello but I would keep it brief and make sure that he knew that I was going to keep it brief and just say look hi Dave I haven't seen you I really miss you it's great to see you I hope you're well you know right right that's one of the things I learned early on is that if people got to know me the idea if you're a civilian you think well if he gets to know you he's going to want you on more often the minute I started doing stand-up I realized I have zero charm my stand-up has to speak for itself because if anybody gets to know me they're not going to be they're not going to want to hire me and have me around and I think it's very wise I think the mistake you could have made is to have been too comfortable around David Letterman right well I think I think the people who he was friends with who were comics that he was having on the show he was already friends with them ahead of time and and they you know John Witherspoon and George Miller those guys Dave was friends with before he they were going on the show but he wasn't having them on the show and unless he thought they were funny I mean so I think yeah you if if he wanted to make friends or have me over something that would be fine but I don't think that's what gets you back on the show right I think and I think that that's one of the hazards of being successful when you have something like that that you know your peers want you know then you can everybody can start wondering if if you're hanging out with them because they want to get something if you're hanging out with them because they like you you know are more of your friends comedians or are more of your friends I hate to use the word civilians but it's so pretentious but do you know I think that's a that's a word that we comics use a lot but it seems weird when you let other when you when you let them you say it you know but do you gravitate because I found once the kids were born I moved away from I said this to Larry Brown Larry Brown and I talked every night bubbles I could not fall asleep unless I talked to Larry Bubbles Brown who continues to make me laugh really hard but the minute I had a child I realized Larry was not going to be the guy I could call it for in the morning to help me if something happened so I gravitated towards normal people did you how do you live your life do you do you like being around comedians or are you comfortable around people who do other things I definitely like comedians but it's it's they've got to be comedians that are geographically you know it's funny because I when you asked me to be on the show that I went and looked at some of your episodes to see why I should listen and see what what's going on on your show right now and so I listened to Greg Fitzsimmons who I am he lives in the neighborhood and our kids are close to the same age and so I hang out with Greg when he's around but he's pretty busy and he's on the road so we maybe we have dinner with them you know he and his wife and my wife and I have dinner once or twice a year and my maybe I see him one or two other times I would say my closest friend right now is a comic who's you know probably 16 17 years younger than me but he lives in the neighborhood and he's on my podcast quite often Nigel Lawrence and that's you know we have a similar sense of humor and he's available to hang out with when I have my free time during the day once my my wife goes to work and my daughter is at school that's when I can hang out I can't be going out for beers in the night evening time and I can't be driving across town to have an hour and a half lunch drive an hour to go have lunch for an hour to drive an hour back I can't be doing that so so the most of the people that then I live my life with besides Nigel or when our mutual friend John Ross lives nearby he had a wife that that had been made that we had been married the same amount of time and our daughters were born three months apart so the fact that we were best friends then our families could be best friends because of that match up but that's what happens when you when you get married now you're spending time with your wife and so when you want to have social time it unless you know you've got your night a week or every once in a while where you go out and be with your friends or your wife goes out and is with her friends but if I'm on the road two weekends a month then the two weekends I'm home you know my wife wants that to be us time so we're going to hang out with other couples and then once you have a kid well you the ideal other couple is a couple that's got a kid that can play with your kid so you know this is the problem with my 50th birthday my wife was like I want to have a 50th birthday party and I said like I don't want to have a 50th birthday party she goes why not I want to have a 40th birthday party I don't want to be 50 I said because it's because of the the people who come to your 50th birthday party you know when you're single you're hanging out with your friends and your friends on a scale of one to ten not one to ten objectively one to ten subjectively subjectively to you your friends that you hang out with when you're single are eight eights nines or tens not hanging out with any sevens because you can you're you're the person who's at casting this movie it's for you all right then you get married and you gotta hang out with uh you you're hanging out with your wife's friend who to her is a ten but to you is a seven and then she's married to some guy who's a fucking four and then once you've got a kid involved now you gotta have your wife as your kid as your kid's friend so your 50th birthday party is a fucking yard full of fives it's terrible so yeah yeah do you see what i'm saying you are normal though in that you're and i and so is john ross because we were you know we were best friends and hung out but you guys did normal things you went to baseball games you hung out you went to parties you played you're a normal guy you got married before either of john and i how normal was that and you had a kid you had two kids yeah but you know i what i did was i kind of i just retreated i just became more of a hermit the you know i was already a hermit and then once you have kids and a wife and responsibilities it gives you more reasons not to hang out well right you don't have as much free time i mean that's that's the other that's the other truth about our relationship is you know you've got you you're not in charge of a hundred percent of your time you're doing things with the other person which hopefully you all also enjoy but sometimes you're compromising or going to the thing that they want to do but whatever you're doing you you don't have that time to go hang out with your buddies anymore so you do compromise you do if somebody says i want to go see this movie even though it's a waste of your time you'll go see it because the person who gave you a child wants to go see that movie yeah except we don't go i i just i'm i'm sort of off going to movies now like i we went to the first guardians of the galaxy and i'd like to go see the second one because that was the first movie where my wife my daughter and i all had a great experience at the theater but i find oftentimes the movies are you know you're going because that's the night that you've got a babysitter and you can go and then you're picking the best thing that you can of the options that are available and then it's like uh god what's the point it's like you just you just blew by the time you paid for the movie and the dinner and the babysitter you blew a hundred bucks to go see something that's how i could have waited for this to come out on nothing ever and stayed at home i think of you early on uh and i i apologize for going back down to the 80s but i just have some preconceived notions about you that one of one of those notions is that you instantly said this is my life this is my structure this is how i'm going to live whereas somebody like me or john ross is constantly saying is this my life is this who i am is this my life i think early on you set up a schedule a vision of what your life is who you are and you compromise but you've kind of stuck to it over a long stretch of time yeah i've been blessed and cursed by being able to get work in comedy clubs for all those many years and then you know corporate things and every once in a while you get a pilot for a tv show or a little part in a movie and stuff but most of the time i've just been working on stage doing my show and i kind of focusing every august and september on filling the calendar up for the next year and i've been able to do that for all this time and so i hadn't really thought about it a little bit of it was always kind of a nail biter at that time of year and i think what does that even mean august i don't even know what that means august and september for the longest for the longest time comedy clubs would would be filling they would book their next year's calendar in august and september in other words by december of 2017 january through december of 2018 they would have mostly already on the books for the longest time that was the case and so that's how i that's how i was just geared was filling up my calendar as much as possible and then the spaces that were still open calling my manager agent and saying look i've still got these availabilities that i'd like to fill in my calendar and hustling and then going to do the gigs and then now social media and podcasts and all that other stuff you you've got so much more responsibility of promoting your own shows that yeah i kind of settled into that rhythm i don't know that i uh it was a it was as conscience conscious of a embracing of it as as you're kind of portraying it but i i have to be i can't i didn't even know this about being being that successful as a stand up where you actually see the year ahead of you that that's a great way to live if you can pull that off well it was great and and i would say only now am i now having to try and figure out how to do like i've got i've got the cleveland date that you mentioned the week after that i'm going to do pittsburgh and then then i've got this kind of fun theater show that i'm doing in um great barrington massachusetts but then i'm combining that with with a show in manchester by the sea and another one of my friends got this barn at his bed and breakfast in new hampshire so i'm going to do a show up there and so i'm trying to do these other shows to to still be able to engage with the crowd and write material and you know keep it real but uh but now it's now it's a little bit more of uh putting it together on the fly that way than it used to be and there's an excitement to that i feel like we're i feel like we're kind of coming to a point where there's so many great comics and there's so many great comedy clubs that um but there's i still feel like there there's there's new ways to go out and do shows to call there's a lot of comics now that are just doing shows and music clubs you know they're doing they're doing a tour where they're just in st louis for one night doing a show and then the next night they're going to be somewhere else you know stan hope that's how he's doing his tours now stan hope at one point would come to your house if you could guarantee an audience well i didn't know that but i've talked to some music musician friends of mine and they were talking about house house concerts and doing that and i would i would consider you know there's the creep factor that you got to try and watch out for now and i heard you talking to craig futzimmons about the whole like we're from this time before where you wouldn't put anything out there unless it was your polished best version of yourself and now now you you put a camera in the back of a comedy club and you tape yourself doing a bit you throw that up on youtube and the next thing you know you you're famous angela johnson she's famous from that nail salon bit that she does somebody she didn't even record it i talked to her somebody else recorded and put it up and it just blew her up so it's hard to know what to do to promote your show or where the best shows are and you know it's funny it's funny to me to still have people i'll go and do something on facebook i'll facebook live and people are nice they're like oh that's great when are you coming to philadelphia well can't you gotta jake you gotta come back to to indian apless or something and it's like hey why haven't i been to those places it's i'm not a whore but it's if as soon as the money do you make a phone call and you tell me you got a place and you can pay me you know or you could sell the tickets if it's a house party i suppose i might be open to that who are you measuring yourself against when you were starting out or did you not measure yourself against somebody else was it john ross i don't know about that i feel like i had a really when i won the comedy competition and then also you've already mentioned that three times jake yeah i got on age you did say that you wanted to talk about that so i just want to make sure that i i have actually i was teasing i have a question about the comedy competition so go ahead so i did that happened in 86 late 86 and then i also picked up my managers at that time because at the same time as that competition was going on they were casting the hbo 10th anniversary young comedian special so i got on that and then two years later i was on letterman so that was a big i kind of went from hustling and trying to get to fill up my calendar as a as a middle act in comedy clubs i got to be looked like a headline and i was working all over the place and i was in l.a. and i was trying to do a sitcom so that was a really fast kind of success and i don't know that i compared myself to anyone and i don't know really i remember that my agents and managers to me you know that's so funny you're like 27 years old and they're going what do you want to do with your career and i was like i don't know i don't know what can i do what are my choices you know and thinking well yeah it would be cool they at that time it was that you got to get your own sitcom it was before jerry had his show but you know it was rosanne was doing it you know that it was going on and i was thinking uh sit kind of want to be a sitcom what i thought i wanted to do then was i want to be tom hanks i want to you know he wasn't the famous dramatic movie star but he was doing comedies and he was doing other sort of kind of serious movies and it looked like really fun it's like hey if i get to pick if it's like what do i want to do i want to do i want to be that guy i want to be tom hanks who doesn't want to be tom hanks at that time being denzel washington was not one of your options but uh you know now who doesn't want to be denzel washington you know of course you want to be jamey fox look at what jamey fox has gotten to do but uh you know you can't measure your career by somebody like that you can just say that's an example of somebody who man they got to do a lot of cool shit did you but well right i know you've been generous with your time just give me five more minutes okay you sure okay uh this is what i remember you had buddy mora who was robin's manager and i thought there was somebody who could just open the door and tell me the truth just this is here the keys to the kingdom this is what you need to know is and that never happened for me is it fair to say that nobody can help you that you have to figure it out all by yourself yeah i think that that's true i mean you had roland's and joffy you had woody allen's managers you had the greatest managers who nurtured the greatest talent did you think once you were accepted into that fold well i left them because i was kind of mystified i didn't really understand what they were doing and whenever i would try and ask like hey what are you doing and how what's the next thing they would they were always very much about kind of hey trust us we're on it don't worry about it then when i left they were kind of like what do you what do you mean you're leaving and i said i felt like look i i don't understand what it is i went on letter one time they were his managers and letterman i remember this i i'll tell you what he said letterman said to me what buddy more what does he do on the air he said that yeah so um so i didn't really know what they were doing for me and i left relief i think possibly before they were able to do the most that they could for me but they were very old school management they were like we're in charge of that you just go out there and be with the funny they were great and i have and i and i've since i've talked to buddy and i went to his retirement party i have nothing but respect and and gratitude to him and and sometimes you know when you look back on your life i wonder look if i hadn't left them would things have been a little bit different i don't know but i think i needed to for me personally i needed to leave because i needed to find out what do they do what could someone else do what do i want to do and you know i've always made choices in my career based on what i thought was the coolest thing to do you know like i i and right or wrong i've said to my manager like hey maybe i should have when they came to me to offer me this hosting this thing or i had a chance to to do that whatever game show or talk show thing and and i said i wasn't interested in that i was going to do this maybe i should have taken that job and i should even though i didn't think it was going to be good or rewarding or creatively satisfying maybe i should have just done it and then gotten more famous so i could so i could be more successful now and she said well you you could have tried to do that but she said i know you you would have taken that job and then you wouldn't you would have been so miserable i would have told somebody to to go fuck themselves or something right you know i know that doesn't seem like the guy that i am but i feel like guy i operated from from a position of feeling like look i wanted to do what i wanted to do and whether it was right or wrong that's what i did and i have the had the career that i have had and it's been it's been great i mean it's it's very flattering david to hear you hear you say that that uh you know you made a mistake comparing yourself to me because when i look back on my career and when i think about what you know that moment when it's like what do you want to do with me saying like i want to be tom hanks you know that the the reality of where i am and where he is is is pretty radically different so in that sense you know i'm a massive failure but in another sense of like look i've had a really good time and i've had the respects of my peers and i still enjoy i still love what i'm doing i still love hearing my name and walking on stage and making people laugh and you know i may not be a genius at social media in terms of i don't have a hundred thousand followers but i find it very satisfying to go on do a little something on facebook or twitter and have people give me a little shout out compliment hello you know and and and i've you know you included the people that you get to hang out with as a stand-up comic are just some of the most fun people i mean if you're looking if you want to get into stand-up because you want to be famous and you want to be a star and you want to be rich you know good luck but if you want to get into stand-up because you want to have some great conversations and laugh and always have a phone full of numbers of people that you can call and and enjoy a conversation then stand-up is for you right well i mean last night at one in the morning i was talking to greek fit Simmons i got into a little trouble and we were i was it you know i i don't want to talk about it but i was in a little trouble for something i did and he kept saying you got a great story out of this this is so funny this is so funny you're in a little trouble dave huh you were in a little trouble a little trouble little yeah but it's a funny story that i can't share before you go the thing that we were talking about yeah yeah yeah yeah uh he gets me into trouble yeah okay well i don't know i have no idea what you're talking about okay i know i know you're good at heart but uh you know you're you you're yourself i if the joke is sitting there and it's bad taste i have to go for it i just can't help myself so you said you only wanted to do things that were cool and when you meant was fun things that interest you yeah i feel like i you know i wouldn't say that i've a hundred percent been true to that but i've i've made i've made choices that to me were about what i was most interested in doing and we're not always or that's been the criteria for making the choice and i've and i've i think it's cost me money and it may have cost me a little bit of fame to have done that but uh but it's but but i'm not miserable and i'm not broke right and you never found yourself in a situation where you were doing it solely for the paycheck oh there are those there are those moments there's always no matter how you do your life those gigs you know i was the thing when i when if you're doing a show and it's going uh not so great you just pat yourself with your right hand over your heart because that's where the check is but you never found yourself trapped in a job no it wasn't relentless it was always like oh i didn't see this coming but ha ha ha it's this happened again you know i i i did a show in peoria there's a funny club in peoria called the jukebox that's owned by a real character this guy dan and uh it's such a throwback and you know i don't know if you know that our friend john means dr gonzo is near there so i hadn't seen him for years and he came up and he has his own restaurant in his town so he came up to the late show on a saturday night and i haven't seen it this is only maybe five six years ago and uh but i haven't seen him in 15 20 years and he shows up so good to see him we're laughing and he stays for the show and it's literally 30 people and 20 of them are two separate bachelorette parties that are sort of in a competition with each other to see who can be the most drunk and disruptive and it was funny to me to be in that situation at this point in my career in front of john means it was just such a throwback to those early days so so from the outside of of you know if my wife or any friends were at the show they would think oh my god this is terrible and jake must feel desperate and suicidal after this night but to me it was just a such a funny fun story and moment to share afterwards you know when you say thank you and the bachelorettes they've had a great time they've had a great time i've probably i've been on for an hour and i've done maybe 13 minutes of material because most of it's been like what about you and then what's going to happen when you get married and you're drunk you know it's just been talking to them and after the show sitting down with gonzo and having a beer and laughing about it it was it was a great night dr gonzo what i have to have him on the show i remember he did something for me that was life all during i had just started stand up i moved to san francisco i gave him a ride home and he said come on into my apartment and i said okay and he you know he was dr gonzo people lined up around the block to see john it was he was the biggest thing in san francisco and i'm in dr gonzo's apartment and he took me into his office and he just walked me through the steps of getting booked he said this is a map this is my phone book you got to get a phone book you got to get names and addresses this is you got to get an eight by ten you got to mail them out to club owner he walked me through the entire process of getting yourself booked as a comedian it and i never forgot that i thought what a gender i remember calling my parents and telling them about this dr gonzo show me by the way before you go by the way about age and time you're you're a peer of mine we started exactly so i i don't think of you as a senior an elder statesman right oh yeah well that is the yeah go ahead but if larry and milt abel and john ross like john ross started maybe a year before we did do you still view john as an elder statesman i do even though he had a year under his belt i still see him as an upperclassman larry i did these shows with larry miller who i think is just one of the greats but he had an accident where he hurt himself yeah fell over and hit the back of his head and he wasn't able to perform his show up to his standards but he was still going out on tour and he needed someone else to go on and you know carry some of the time so i did these shows with with larry that were just so much fun and it's such a pleasure to hang out with him backstage and if you're listening to this and you have a chance to go see larry miller i don't know how often he performs now but please please do yourself a favor and go but i feel like larry was one of those guys that i worked with in the early 80s when i was the opener and he was the headliner elder statesman at that time but now when i'm hanging out with larry i think to he and i it seems like we're contemporaries and i feel like i was i was doing a show in um god heart heartford i think it was heartford connecticut and it was one of the funny bone improv things and the feature act was this really funny guy and you could really tell he was going places his name and he's been now he's been on letterman a bunch of times tommy johnnigan right so i'm hanging out with tommy we're laughing and you know the shows are going great mutual respect i really like tommy and i he's a contemporary that's what it feels like to me and that's what i think it felt like to him it's like hey we're two funny guys hanging out we share kind of a similar kind of appreciation for a certain kind of comedy and so he's telling me all these stories about his crazy mom and all the crazy things that she does and uh and like it's just so one point and we've been hanging out for a couple days i go tommy what how old is your mom she she's a year younger than i am so i still feel like uh all these if you're walking on stage and talking into a microphone after somebody introduces you at a comedy club i consider you a contemporary and that's sort of how i look at all of this stuff now so so john's a contemporary but tommy johnnigan's a contemporary and you know the next person i meet to contemporary you know i don't know if you know do you know miss pat is no well she's going places you should she's been on my podcast a couple of times but now she's she's got a book coming out and um she's been on harry connick's talk show now but she's great and so she's one of my new people who's just i've met her kind of at the just at the cusp of her exploding on the scene and uh that i feel like is one of the things about this job to me that i've i've enjoyed spending all this time in comedy clubs and and working on stage that's how i've earned you know guy like redford simons he's earned a lot of his money writing for shows and then also performing but back and forth and doing the thing but i've been mostly on stage and out there in the clubs in the world there's been such a pleasure to to to be able to call these people contemporaries and to see them before they had the success and then after they had the success you know to work with mitch headberg when he was my feature act and then go out and see him become this amazing amazing hero of a lot of comedians you know it's been great but but i consider it i consider people more contemporaries than than that kind of elder statesman or new kid on the block kind of a thing jake this you started i was going through your files i for some reason thought you start i knew i remember you telling me you were doing a podcast you started in 2011 right yes that right yeah that could be that could be true and in my mind you're a baby when it comes to podcasting but i've only been doing it like two years longer than you have but for some reason i'm thinking well i've been i'm compared to jake i've been doing this much longer but you've been at it for a long time what is jake this what do you do on jake this you know it's it's a lot of me talking to people who i know and i'm interested in and i haven't really tried to focus on the guest angle it's more just if you are a fan of mine or you enjoy listening to me talk and you'd like to listen to me talk to people who i'm interested in listening to then you'll like it but it's it can be all over the place you know i had kastaki akonomopolis was over the other day and he said i was listening to try and prepare to the pod for the podcast and i listened to this guy there's todd macomas who's a comedian but he's also he was a undercover police officer in india indiana and he has these great stories so there's another episode with him there's an episode with miss pat talking about selling crack when she was a teenage uh kid and then became a single mother at 13 years of age you know but then there's me there's a bunch of there's silly ones of me talking to my friend nigel who lives a few blocks away about nonsense so it's kind of all over the place i again i if you like it you like it yeah check out check out jake this to our listeners in cleveland june 15th to the 18th go see jake at hilarities and you're playing a bed and breakfast where that's that's to me that's the most exciting i swear to you when you describe that i went wow the week after cleveland i'm gonna be in um pittsburgh at the pittsburgh improv and then i'm just now looking to the the bed and breakfast is i'm hang on because i'm just i've got to open this document um while you're opening it when you describe that i thought a friend who owns a bed and breakfast and performing there to me would be so much fun to do so relaxing and no pressure and well he used to manage musicians and i met him down in new orleans and it's called the barn at the farm stand and it's in tamworth new hampshire wow and it go to my website check this dot com i think there's a link to the event bright site you know i'm going to hang out with him and we're going to do the show and uh it's i think there's only a hundred or so maybe 120 tickets but uh it's going to be a fun night that sounds fantastic thank you buddy all right dave thank you my pleasure anytime jackie kation joins this let me give you a proper introduction jackie kation is a comic she's a podcaster writer actor she claims to be a bottle washer but only for attention that's what you claim in your press but i've never seen you really bottle wash she has a brand new album it's called i am not the hero of this story just came out it was number one on itunes and amazon the first week of its release it's also critically acclaimed in the 11th year of her podcast the dork forest where she talks with people about what they love to do think about and collect she calls it all things dorky and she also has a new podcast on the nerdest network with lory kill martin it's called the jackie and lory's show welcome back jackie kation thank you david feldman so you're on skype outside your house where i recorded your podcast yes and uh and our iguana is climbing inexorably towards the the oh i wonder if he's gonna just don't don't just oh he is he's gonna we have um we're growing some zucchinis and he's decided to just eat the leaves but the great thing about zucchinis is that you plant one plant you get 900 zucchinis so i'm gonna let him do that uh one year we planted zucchinis and i planted six zucchini plants accidentally and i flired people at zucchinis um at the home depot so underneath there are windshield are you a garden do you garden i do i like i i do a vegetable garden my husband likes flowers he does flowers in the front yard and i do vegetables in the backyard we've already gotten because i live in los angeles we've already uh gotten a couple of tomatoes because we planted the first weekend of april it goes with baseball season boy you're just you're you're just normal and happy and healthy and everybody loves everybody loves you i am the golden retriever of stand-up comedy you know there's nobody who doesn't like me you know what your your service comic you really are you should wear one of those vests seriously i'm uh i've described myself as maria bamford service animal i uh i calm her down sometimes and we're traveling um she doesn't touch my hair i'm okay with that and uh so the uh yeah it's uh yeah it's it's uh it's a beautiful day here in los angeles i'm pretty excited about it and uh and i haven't talked to you in an age so thanks for so much for asking me to be on the show this is neat i am so excited to have you on the show because you were one of the first guests i had on the show you are right and we did our comedy central specials together and yeah are you fidgeting with something what are you doing there's some what is that there's what is that i don't i'm not doing anything oh i might be the wind sorry about that okay i'm passing wind in new york it can't possibly be reaching los angeles is this the butterfly effect that's what it's it can happen at any time the ripples uh i i i do think you are a service comic when i see you i calm down like i'm calming down right now when did you do your first podcast it would have been september of 2006 early early early early so early days of the state of the broadcasting world for sure yeah i'm going to ask you about that i find that very curious september of 2006 and it was the dork forest right right the door forest i did a joke it was based on the fact that i just i did this joke about who i was willing to hang out with because i was willing to hang out with almost anyone because i'm a big dork but how deep into the dork forest was i willing to go to find someone i wasn't willing to hang out with and um and it turns out it was the war reenactment guys but we didn't we didn't know that then we didn't know that then and uh and it turns out specifically it was the world war two reenactment guys because that's insane still people alive from that one let's wait till everybody's dead before you play the game and uh which side were they who were they the japanese the germans the americans they were they were um it was this episode it was actually an episode of the dork forest that i had to delete it was about a guy who went to different garage sales to get um world war two paraphernalia and he would only buy nazi paraphernalia and that he would only sell it to jews it was such a weird like line of demarcation i was like that you have reached the two dorky for me what is happening yeah and uh then we let it go let it uh was the only episode that uh that i i just deleted okay i think we're getting a little wind okay so i don't know what to do about that september of 2006 was the ipod yes there was an ipod so it was available as a podcast the iphone is 10 years old okay were you being distributed through itunes is that where most of your listeners came from entirely it was um it was a podcast through at in 2006 there was like you could do a podcast and it was just a phone in situation it was called blog talk radio and they still do it but they were early adopters of this thing where you could just sit on the phone like we're doing but the but the website would record it for you and then they would upload it to itunes what kind of response did you get when it first went up in 2006 uh pretty pretty light pretty light response it was well because here's the great thing about blog talk at the time is it had a live chat room that went with this it was essentially a conference call right mm-hmm it was a conference call that was being recorded and then um there was a live chat room during it so everybody would call in and then i i from my computer would connect people sort of like a radio station and then we'd all have this group conversation about what a second when i did it at your house i had a phone in right it went from phoning in to phoning in i would phone in and everyone would sit at my house and then yes we would all just sort of sit around in the living room with uh different extensions it was really dumb well so what year did i do your podcast that way that you must you had to have done it before i think 2009 or 2010 because then i switched over to a prerecorded situation where there was no more chat room and i would record it off of the board and then i would upload it to libson right because blog talk radio did took took care of the sort of the the hardware work or the software work of setting it to itunes and tagging it and getting a little website together they come to you or did you go to them i went to them because what i had heard was um other comics were doing prerecorded and i got reviewed by i think it was max fun um um saudi young america they had reviewed the dork for us those early years and had made fun of the sound quality so i was like hey if people who are listening to the show want to donate i will buy some equipment prerecord and learn how to edit and so that had to be 2009 2010 and so you had to have done it in like 2008 i guess so i guess so and have you learned how to edit yeah i can edit but i do um what happened about two episodes into it is that uh i had probably 500 listeners at that point maybe more maybe a thousand and uh that's a lot well it was it was a lot for for having but having for having done it for three or four years it was like that now it's now it's a lot better i mean it isn't like mark maren numbers or anything but it's um but it's respectable right probably i mean if i had my advice to anybody we don't need to talk about numbers but my advice to anybody who's thinking about doing a podcast is if you can get 500 people to listen to you that's yeah do it you know that's enough that's that is enough it genuinely is and so and the only reason i mentioned the actual numbers is because i'm a huge fan of transparency and people are like did it change your life no it only changed my life because it gave me an extra task to do every week that's yeah i mean it hasn't and it has i mean and the fans of the show when it was 500 and now that it's whatever it is for thousands it's those people are amazing they're just the nicest people because the we're sort of friends you know i mean they and but they're also same friends because they know that i don't know them they know me a lot better than i know them because of the podcast such but um yeah but libson like i had heard that like i think it was maren or pardo or other comics right we're going through this thing called libson.com and you pay them 20 bucks a month and they have they they make a little website for you they uploaded to itunes they make a an app for you and that was back when everybody had a different app for their podcast and i think there still is a door forced app but i don't think most of my listeners just listen to it through their own podcasting app or a stitcher or something like are you with libson yeah yeah it's always been on libson yeah yeah i did i did a panel at a radio show one time it was a radio convention and it was a panel about podcasting and everybody in the audience there were a bunch of people in the audience and the moderator who just wanted to talk about monetizing it and at the end of we were like we did it for an hour at like 52 minutes into this thing a woman stood up and asked a question and she said how do you get it on itunes and we all sat there just it realized we should have started at the beginning like when you explain what podcasting is you're like okay what you have to do is you have to record the thing and then you have to put it on a website and then the website if you pay them and it's and that and that's a real standardized you know 20 bucks a month kind of thing we'll do it let me ask you a question please sieve martin gave an interview with charlie rose which i recommend to everybody it must have been 10 years ago and steve said whenever i'm at a party somebody will walk up to me and say how do you make it as a stand-up right they always say how do you how do you get an agent how do you get a manager how do you get on the tonight show how do you get into movies he said nobody ever asks me how do you get good yeah he said if somebody asked me how to get good that i can explain because that's all i focus on is getting better he said being good at something means you don't have to ask at parties how do you get on the tonight show they'll come to you now my question about podcasting is this i think if you get good as a stand-up you will have justice because people will find you you know how to do it you you know what clubs to go to you know what doors if you can if you consistently make a room full of people laugh there will be work for you and if you give it that's what i was told right and if you give it even if you look at it in terms of sweeping one-year horizons where then you take account of how you're doing you can put up with all the frustration because you look back and you say well this is what i accomplished over a year and it's tangible and stand-up it's tangible you can point and it's undeniable the failure of the success is undeniable does the same apply to podcasting i think so i think it's a different it's a different piece of advice that i received how do you get good is in the world of podcasting it's a it's a different answer do you like it do you love to do it as opposed to stand-up comedy which is you have to get better to get work with podcasting you don't have to get better at it to continue to be able to put it out that's one of the great things about podcasts is that there is no nobody's paying almost no one is making any money on this right so you could continue to do it forever and be bad at it so the question you should ask yourself when you're doing a podcast is do you love to do it or why are you doing it why are you doing this right if like if your podcast is just you alone like bill burr talks to himself for an hour um he thoroughly enjoys that right you still like to do that four years later then keep doing it if you interview people and you still like to interview people do it why you know i mean i'm 11 this is the 11th year of the dork forest and i've gotten better at interviewing for sure i've gotten better at it and but i will say that and there's there's a small amount of money in it and there's a great deal but there's a great deal of self satisfaction like i get a lot of satisfaction i learn a lot i laugh because of the things that people love like i still love the premise of the show which is to ask people about what they love you know this week's episode is with a comic and a lot of them are comics my my guess just because i know a lot of comics but sometimes they aren't right and this week's episode is about a guy who loves uh to go out and try different chicken recipes let's learn let us let us discuss last week it was um a woman who teaches swim dance and and um square dancing and english country dancing as she gets paid for it but it's not a lot that's on her day job she does it for the love of it so that's her dorkton and then kastaki khanomopolis is coming out in a couple of weeks and he talked about texas hold them mm-hmm the the poker game right and then and then i just had a guy on who told me about jimmy hendrix and the the music ones are hilarious because i genuinely don't know who anyone is it is curious that people have this one thing they have like their sexual fetish and then they have their thing when there's free time to explore and it gets even deeper now with the internet like is everyone can have a niche it's why the white supremacists found each other it's very disappointing so i owe you an apology i owe you know yeah yeah i alienated my listeners i would say eight years ago early on wow with with an interview i did with you outside the irvine improv really yeah i i was rude to you and i apologized and i paid a price for it i got really it was the first batch of angry email that i got from my what are you what are you doing there what is that me yeah it sounds like you're filing your net what are you doing i was actually scratching my neck oh do it again do it again is that it is that the noise scratch i did my right foot is going up and down when you do that okay so you interviewed me and you were a jackass about it i wasn't a jackass as i recall obama had just been inaugurated we were doing a political fundraiser obama said we had to put away our childish things i agreed we had just survived we had just we well we didn't survive we were just getting through eight years of bush where i said everybody anesthetized themselves and didn't pay attention to what was really important and i said what's really important is what's going on in washington dc i asked you about your hobbies and i kind of lectured you and said you need to focus on more important things what you're focusing on is trivial that does seem a little jackassery seriously judgmental and judgmental and i and i paid a huge price for it so many people called me out for it i want to apologize tell you where i'm at and then i want to bring up what you told me before we started because you kind of you've circled back to politics and i want to ask you about that you're doing politics in your new album i'm not the hero of this story for the first time you're talking about politics on stage so i want to i don't want to take back my apology but i want to circle back to why you're talking about politics but first i am obsessed with the royal family in great britain and the united kingdom what helps me fall asleep is reading or watching documentaries about queen elizabeth prince philip and charles i'm not interested in diana i'm also interested go ahead harry and william harry and no no i'm interested in history filtered through the duke of winzer the abdication the war queen elizabeth and one of the things queen elizabeth said was we are relevant even though we have nothing to do with government there's more to a nation than what's happening in parliament and i thought wow that's very interesting i'm so obsessed with politics there are other things that people value besides government and politics and i thought of you and i thought of my interview with you and that's one of the reasons we reached out to talk to you okay because there are there's more to life than what's going on in washington dc you become a boring person if all you filter everything through is democrats versus republicans so i apologize apology accepted okay yes and again moving forward moving forward why have you gotten interested in politics all of a sudden why are you on stage now talking about politics for the first time well what happened to me was um my last album uh this will make it excellent horcrux my my ash has always been pretty socio-political as i've always thought of it as it as that anyway where i talk about um family and relationships and and and society and stuff and it usually has a b-plot is what i like to call sort of a socio-political angle where uh previous to this album my father once said to me do people know you're a big pink okami you ever get any guff about that in the in the clubs people ever and i said dad have you ever looked at me uh really because people look at me and they think to themselves what's she gonna do vote i'm terrified anyway so uh the uh this last album which i uh horcrux i recorded a little over three years ago this album i recorded in december six weeks after the election and i was genuinely in shock and i had my album i had 45 minutes of material that was going to be my album and then i wrote i could only write political jokes and i've never written anything so specifically political as the first 12 minutes of my current album and i've never done jokes that are that new on an album uh those those jokes some of them are literally a month old and i decided to record them and just because i genuinely thought that the world was going to end and i'm super erotistical and thought well if i'm killed i want these jokes to be on an album uh my self absorption is almost complete david feldman um so that's why i did the jokes and i have written since november 9 of 2016 i think two dick jokes and one new joke and it's an exciting time for me to final that are not political you know i have and it's kind of great because you know the thing about political jokes and topical jokes is that there's a lot of parallel thinking there's a lot of people who write the same jokes because we're all human and uh and so now i have on tape things that i jokes i told december 27 of 2016 so you can do your world war three joke forever but i wrote it back in july of 2016 political jokes that you wrote on november 9th do they hold up now a couple of them do actually it's uh essentially because they're still not political they're still not topical i write like i have a uh essentially there's a joke about the armenian genocide there's nothing funnier than the armenian genocide uh i and it is about the muslim registration act and my fear of registering people by religion and skin color and sticking them on trains and driving them into deserts and the reason that i care about that is because my grandmother was lived through the armenian genocide and then i tell the three stories that she told me when she as it when i was a child she told me that when the turk because the armenian genocide the turks mass curd a million and a half armenians they claim that it never happened they've taught their children and their grandchildren it never happened and what i always say about genocides uh don't take pictures because we can see exactly what you're doing there this was this was before world war one well it was uh 1915 and it started in the late 1800s so and i believe it was hitler said about the final solution for the jews was who remembers the armenians right and he was of course correct we got bad problem um but we're working on it we got batman in a movie called the promise they mean did you see that no it's a romantic action movie set during the armenian genocide with um the guy who played batman when was this i don't watch those christian christian bail it just came out about a month ago it came out uh april 20 24th is armenian martyr's day so it came out the week of april 24th of 2017 does the american government recognize the armenian genocide uh they do not donald trump did use the word genocide accidentally because he is donald trump uh and then he took it back and then the turks were allowed to beat up kurdish protesters in washington dc is there a gallows is there a gallows humor about the armenian genocide i know that when jews get very much when jews get together we make fun of the armenian genocide no uh you call that a genocide oh no when jews get together there's a gallows humor about the holocaust which i do on this show and i'm trying not to because nobody wants to hear it or it's not so funny anymore i i i i can't help myself right because that's how it's it's a knee-jerk reaction well i mean here's the thing when my when the turks came to take my grandmother out of when they came to empty their village um the general in charge of my my grandmother's village allowed them to bring their donkey my grandmother by the way 60 years later was like there was still bread in the oven 60 years later still worried about the bread i think it burned i think it burned uh so but the general said that my grandmother my grandmother's family could keep their donkey and my grandmother's grandmother was supposed to ride that donkey into the desert to die uh the village priest stole the donkey the armenian priest in charge of their village was going to ride that donkey into the desert to die and my grandmother was 16 and took a two by four and beat the priest off of the donkey and she told me that story when i was 19 why i told her i didn't want to go to i told her i didn't want to go to church anymore and she said i go to church and i did this to a priest so you're going to church why did she do that she wanted to die she wanted her grandmother to ride the donkey my grandmother's grandmother was supposed to ride that donkey that's why the that's why the general said that they could take it the priest didn't have his own damn donkey so he was like i'm going to ride the donkey and my grandmother took a two by four and beat the shit out of it why did the turks massacre the armenians there's a lot of speculation that because the armenians were very successful financially in the ottoman empire and they owned a lot of land they did a lot of banking it's the it's they were the jews essentially of the of the ottoman empire the reason uh less what more confusing why did the turks kill the curds and the assyrians they claimed it was a christianity because the armenians are christians and the assyrians are christians i don't know if the curds are christians but i think i think the curds are muslim i think muslim yeah i think so i don't know but um boy do the turks hate them so and armenia is a country now and i know it is and andrea martin does a benefit every year for the children of armenia and i know that conan went to armenia yeah it is somewhat impoverished it's fine the thing about uh soviet armenia it was soviet armenia and then it became its own country after the soviet union broke up and armenia has spent i did a benefit one time where i did not realize that it was a benefit for a very right wing part of the armenian community which is essentially you know those plant a tree in armenia i don't know if you guys it's mostly plant a tree in azerbaijan because the armenians and the azerbaijanis have a dispute over borders and well there are a lot of armenians living in azerbaijan sure there's probably a lot of azerbaijanis living in armenia but if you put them next to each other and a turk uh you tell me which one's which i mean i i think it's uh i'm a big fan of i mean we have enough problems right here on this in this country i i don't take part in the politics of other people's sovereignty right it's it's like when people start getting the their super pro israeli or their super pro palestinian and i'm like well that's interesting what does it have to do with uh where you're from in illinois right you know uh i understand that uh they dragged a gay kid behind a truck last week you're going to fix that what'd you fix that yeah and so kind of just there's a great thing that a wise man don rickles once said okay you say i'm israeli okay this is a don rickles line how are you my arab friend i'm israeli like that's better that will always be funny sadly always be funny it'll always be funny and he did it no matter what he would get how are you doing my japanese friend and the guy would say i'm chinese i'm chinese like that's better and it's basically what mortis all said you're in america unpack um oh god that's a great line yeah but yeah but but we carry this stuff with us for many reasons why do you think we carry it with us i think we're tribal and i think that we're herd animals and i think that we lead and can be led and i genuinely think that we're racist there's because of that because of those groupings that we've created for about 10 000 years is that we're and i'm racist but only because of blacks porto rican and mexicans interesting interesting i hate the only reason i'm the only reason i'm racist i have uh you know when when the election happened and i was very frightened right i was sort of paralyzed with fear and i got all my hope from my black and my brown friends i have a litany of friends that are in front of me in line when the killings start but my black and my brown friends and thank god they had to be there for me right to to ease this middle-aged white lady's heart um but to a person when i said hey i'm i'm scared but what's going to happen to a person all my friends were like yeah yeah we got screwed again that's all don't worry about it you just got to keep going you got to just get up every day and get in the way of bad behavior but also try to make sure that you're happy because uh they don't want you to be happy so make sure you're happy do the thing you want to do and i and i was like just keep going just get up and i swear to god one of my friends said jesus is this the first time you've been disappointed and i was like no and i got defensive and i was like jesse ventura uh ronald wiggin and then i realized this is the first time with nazis and clansmen you know and so yes and you know just a month or so ago i had sort of a an unlocking of a new level of racism that revealed to me that i do not view people as people sometimes i see them as like i think it was something about ambition and a young black man i am not the hero of this damn story but i literally the guy was talking about how he never took holidays off and i was like why wouldn't why wouldn't you take holidays off and it didn't occur to me that he has to work twice as hard i mean one of the reasons why full-on racists like white supremacists hate people of color so bad is that there are successful people of color right and they clearly or mexican right that had to work three times as hard as that white guy who was born on second and are more successful than him and that's what creates that sort of white supremacist attitude of one that shouldn't happen and you're like uh you're actually got that backwards so because it shouldn't happen ever that we should try to figure out how the level of playing field almost impossible but i understand that it's an admirable idea you know i mean it's like the idea of a democratic republic it's a group illusion that we have this democracy this representative republic and i think that we fail at it on a regular basis but the group illusion is worthwhile because it brings us forward civilization can you understand white supremacists if everybody's tribal if everybody's racist if everybody is a victim can you understand how white people also want in on that that they want to be victims yeah sure sure i get i get where it comes from because and i've because here's the thing if you are a straight white guy your life is it's not it's you're not sitting in a gravy boat no one's handing you 20s underneath the table every time you wake up it's your life is still hard and that is still a valid journey what you have to have is some sort of empathy and compassion and perspective to be able to see what and disadvantages you do not have right i mean that's all it is is check your privilege check your privilege that's what they say and but it's essentially you walk into a grocery store nobody assumes that you're going to steal something which is why i always steal stuff see you get away with it you're just you're over there passing for white and uh so uh the uh but that yeah and so i get why like until it is revealed to you that you are sexist or you are racist or you have privilege you don't see it because you're sitting in a fishbowl of your own water and that water isn't super clean it isn't there are it isn't boundaryless it isn't the greatest thing in the world but it is better than if you're sitting in a fishbowl in flint michigan right well as a i guess i'm not really white that's why i think right i'm jewish that's why i said passing for white yeah well i'm kind of i can pass if i check anyway with women for example bitches man that's what you want to say bitches no no the it starts with a a letter that comes after b oh crazy women crazy i was like stitches the eyes more of an s then and okay okay when i was starting out this is what i'm guilty of especially since one of my daughters is doing stand-up oh yeah yeah neat i was hoping she'd become a stripper i thought i was a much better abuse of father but when i was starting out this was conventional wisdom about female comics and this is what i'm confessing to not that i like it uh huh okay what do you think what do you think i'm girding my loins yes go on what do i think what do you think in the 80s white male comics sad about female comics but they're not funny what else did they say i didn't say that i didn't say that when i when i started doing stand-up comedy in 1984 i was told that there were a couple of rules about being a woman comic i was the only woman right here what year these 84 okay and um i was told my male comics who had been doing stand-up by the way months longer than me what the rules were to be a woman comic okay i could not discuss bodily functions uh nobody wanted to hear women swear nobody wanted all women talk about their periods um by the way one woman told a joke about her period and for 30 years granted i don't want to talk about my period or bodily functions but uh guys have been talking about what hand they jerk off with since cave days so and that's not a body function that's not stuff that comes out of their butt yes so it's all poop jokes and all come jokes with gentlemen of a certain kind of comedy so they had a lot of advice for me so i don't know what was the advice you were giving women comics in the 80s well i was told because as you know i was a woman back then right it does help uh two things one is about the bodily functions i want to ask you about that because i'm guilty of telling one of my daughters that not in not in stand-up but i told her that joking about bodily functions is unseemly yes and it is it's often funny i don't make it particularly funny but other people have whereas one of my sons this is what would happen they would the children would often come up to wherever i was working and one of my sons would clench both fists raise them in a victory stance and he'd go listen to this and then he would pass gas and everybody laughed everybody and then he would bow and we would all laugh and then i would do the obligatory okay don't knock it off but you know after we were all laughing right but but if my my daughter wasn't allowed to do that right so that's bad i i i it's taken me years to recognize that to recognize looking back i wish i had told my son not to do it right right so it was a double standard enormously so and people don't now is that a misdemeanor is that a felony is that a misdemeanor is it is it i mean i can sleep at night knowing and i still in my heart think i was right for telling my daughter that it's neither a misdemeanor than a felony it's more of ground cover it is it is the standardization there is no way to undo that except for at its most basic in the last 15 years or so women comics have talked about bodily functions more than ever in my life of doing stand up right and some of them are hilarious about it and some of them aren't many of them aren't because that's the way it is with stand up comedy 90 percent of it sucks and 10 percent of it is good and 1 percent of that 10 percent is amazing so but there's no well let me ask you about that about this would you say sweeping generalization here okay most most male comics do stand up because they want to get laid i've heard i've never i've never thought that that other people have told me that do you think that's true oh yeah oh yeah the that i know personally that had i not done stand up comedy no woman would be interested in me i i never would have married what about this question do you think that most men insert any job do it to get laid yes so maybe to be a man means to try to get laid as a sweeping generalization yes and i think women do things like when a woman shows up to work this is why i think men had so much trouble trying to understand clarence thomas versus anita hill and i'm i'm really having fun here because i think we're making a sweeping broad generalization that's true okay i think most men show up to work and they want to get laid because they think about sex all the time a woman shows up to work to do her job to make rent to pay her bills to make 70 cents on the dollar and the guy is off there going but what about getting laid now i can get laid anytime i want i'm a woman shut up i will say this is that what i i am we're of an age so i hear what you say and know there's part of me that genuinely believes that but what i have seen empirical evidence well more anecdotal of the last 15 years is that women might do stand-up comedy to get laid we also wish to get laid a lot right right and i'm putting up resistance to that right i think we might be wrong because this might be a generational who's wrong i think we are wrong that women want to get your statement that says that men do things to get laid women or men go to work to get laid women go to work to make money i think everybody does everything to get laid okay when did you just now okay so let's let's is important to me okay you did agree with me when i said men do everything to get laid women do things to make money or for reasons that are inexplicable but it's they're not thinking about sex all the time you kind of agreed with me on that right that's how i was raised and so i was like there's a big part of me that is that is that is agreed with you yes and after a killer set mm-hmm mm-hmm you don't delude yourself into saying all right line them up i could probably have my pick of any of these dudes in my not north dakota uh no well i never did it's true but i do know women who get laid after shows like road guys did in the nineties that i worked with okay and now there's a theory about that that was invented by men not women yes although i did speak to a professor who wrote a book called hooking up and she was on the fence about what men think about that there are many men who believe that women who are out there getting laid every night are doing it for reasons that are not conventionally pleasurable in other words they're doing it for reasons other than what we call sex what were those reasons that it may not be about pleasure it might be more about psychological battles that they want to overcome and win interesting because when i would get laid on the road and i didn't do it a lot um i mostly got drunk on the road that was my that was my go to of the of the dumb choices that i made and i do think that they were dumb for me anyway um but when i would get laid on the road i would do it entirely just to get laid for sexual reasons i literally romantically used to refer to it as getting a tune up very romantic i felt like a classy lady and uh and when you do get laid as a woman on the road or anywhere with strangers and that's what i was doing it's very hard to have an orgasm because you're poised for flight because you think that you're about to be killed at any moment right it's hard it's hard to think you there's always a moment when you're having sex with a stranger as a woman in my in my experience where you are thinking to yourself is this where he kills me it is awkward and making it very hard to have an orgasm because they call the orgasm the little death so yes that's why men that's let me mansplain to you if you could if you could just let me in on it and by the way mansplaining is when the guy i think that joke has already been done so the orgasm this is what men claim and that's why i said that they're getting laid for reasons other than pleasure but then you know there's you can have sex without an orgasm it's intimate it's emotional it's fun and i wouldn't for the life of me i think women are more complicated to me than they've ever been and i think they may even be more complicated to themselves than they've ever been i think that this this next generation of women that were that that i meet these women that i meet are so open to trying to figure out what the heck their purpose and point is in life because they see the advantages and this is serious is that see the advantages of being a man the advantages of being a man is is that you could have a lovely career and then in your 40s start having kids and um if you're a woman and you have four eggs left and they're marinating in extra chromosomes it is hard to do that and is that is that true that that it's hard to have kids when you get more there are more chromosomes if you wait i think so there's trouble there's there's trouble uh i have about four eggs left and uh there's i would recommend any of them become babies just because there's going to be an extra elbow there but um all right let me let me address that okay if i may please there are some men like me who say we don't want women to be like men we want women to carve out a brand new frontier and make men more like women like women are doing the heavy lifting there why are the women having to reinvent themselves and fix you what's happening well the the the blowback the pushback from charles sandberg and lean in is kind of an acceptance of male behavior that's what she was basically saying oh right right right she's like yeah if you want to win the the male game you have to be a man which is traditional old school feminism in the feminism i grew up with was you have to play men's games with men's rules then they'll accept you and you'll make it further but they're never gonna but they're never it's it's like bill cosby and oj well bad example what doesn't it doesn't work is what you're saying and i believe you are correct if i if i'm right right uh-huh i've straddled both generations women approach comedy differently than men do i think that's true and why change and so why change that well i don't think i don't think having women in the writings room changes the women's writing i think it changes the men's writing but it doesn't change the men's writing it changes it's like i don't i don't know if i'm actually answering your giving an opinion on your question but it's it's some people there are shows that look a plethora of white dude comics in stand-up comedy and they're like well these are the guys these are the squeaky wheels you know these are the guys that i know or i'm a white guy and i happen to know a lot of white guy comics they'll have funny isn't that something and you're like that is something that's great but half of your audience or even if it's only a third of your audience is black or a woman or some other race besides white guys so it's just offering it's a way to as a capitalistic moment it's a way to expand your business is to offer more women in the in as comics or you know you get yourself you know go out on a limb find a Filipino lady who's gay with a limp and uh and it's gonna psych out like three people in the world and they're gonna be psyched but they'll come back to your club and you'll you'll build more you'll make more money if you diversify that that that is an actual economic fact is that if you consult a more people you will make more money and if if if you have a writer's room where let's say the show is the americans by the way a show i've never seen sounds supposed to be amazing but and you and you have a lot of white men that are in there writing it and then you have some women and you have some uh you know a black guy comes in and a Mexican woman comes in whatever you had all these different perspectives the stories that because in those writers rooms to my knowledge you're actually mining your own life for stories and if it's a if it's an hour long drama or a sitcom and you have more perspectives that show could last longer that show could have more layers to it more depth and appeal to more people right and and that's why i'd want to mix up a writer's room i don't want any part of a writer's room here's my question to you david feldman you've been in a lot of writers rooms i've never wanted to be in a writer's room because i always picture this eight to 14 hour days sitting in a room without windows sweating telling fisting jokes until someone says something funny yeah but that's because i'm there i call them whiting rooms whiter's rooms the americans i watched a little of it it was excellent but there's a plot where the wife is sleeping with a black guy and the message from the show is that black people were more susceptible to the kgb especially black militants during the sixties of the seventies well there's an interesting plot point and so she's sleeping with a black militant who's a kgb agent that was kind of like a blood libel against mart luther king and jesse jackson that they were serving their their russian overlords kind of racist and was never really born out to be true right and i was at the writer's guild awards and the americans won and i was curious to see who would go up there and accept i don't think i saw any african-americans writing for that show so there is some again i've only seen a couple of episodes of the americans i didn't like that storyline where the african-american was more susceptible to the kgb because of the oppression of blacks in america found that offensive right and i didn't see any black writers which might have right which might have been something that they could have gotten some perspective on uh yeah then you have if then you have like why it's scenic speaking up at the daily show about john stewart doing that amus and andy voice and it got ugly and why it left yeah but the thing i mean good for why it i mean the problem is is that it has to that my racism is racism is more of that nature the john stewart nature where i have done something that is hurtful and thoughtless because i think that i'm an ally i think that i'm something right i think i'm above it all or you get me i'm me and you're like no no you i mean part of the job like like i was talking about how you have to uh like there are people in front of me in line there is i can only complain about our current situation laterally like i can complain to other white women i can complain to white guys who are behind me in line but everyone in front of me in line gets to complain to me and i get to shut up and be supportive and figure out how i can be of some use because if you are a latino handicapped woman who is bisexual your fear is is more imminent than my fear and and this isn't uh i suppose we're we're this is an entertainment program so i could tell you a joke uh the uh what i say that the purpose of straight white guys is to do what traditionally straight white guys have done decent straight white men have done for thousands of years which is to get in the way of bad behavior and to clean out their addicts so they can hide people and that is the joke right but that's the joke but it's also get on it you know i am i don't want to be a white lady meat shield but i will be a white lady meat shield but i also don't think that there is a 25 year old black man who wants me to stand in front of him he just doesn't want it to have to be a thing you know the word but so but you're saying that white men have a responsibility to speak up when they see something bad happening very much so as to white women as do i i had a bad situation about two months ago where i was at the grocery store and there was a an i i pushed an 80 year old man i am not proud of it i am it's not a good thing i don't recommend doing it i didn't push him down but here's what happened i'm walking out of welf's grocery store ten o'clock on a friday night in front of me is an 80 year old white guy not homeless not crazy looking wearing like khakis a belt a polo shirt carrying a loaf of french bread he's in front of me walking out the door and he starts yelling like above like shouting at the rent a cop guy the rent a cop is a black man he is starts calling him the n word telling him he's from Haiti telling him that he screwed monkeys and that's why there are aids and uh no they see that's it i i don't mind racism i hate stupid racism the Haitians did not screw the monkeys that happened in africa exactly and i'll tell you what the the rent a cop did by the way uh the black rent a cop laughed at him because it was probably the third time it had happened that day middle-aged white lady had some outrage i'm i'm playing the part of the middle-aged white lady uh ten years ago i would have probably just gone up to the rent a cop and go hey that guy's a dick what's going on how you doing uh which i'm told later by sane people that that's still the correct activity but instead i went up to the old white guy and started yelling at him and telling him it wasn't okay and telling him it wasn't cool and he had to stop it and i was swearing and i was upset and i wanted to be captured america and get his face and he and i said you had anything to say to me and he did not because i even to an 80 year old white guy i remind him of his mother you know and so he did not and at one point he said to me this is nothing to do with you this is none of your business and i said it is everything to do with me because this is america and i'm american and he said america and i turned into a country music song and pushed him and i pushed him and i didn't push him down but i pushed him and he bumped into a cart and he was an old frail dude but he kept walking and we just kind of yelled at each other to our cars but i thought he was something that i don't know that that helped i don't know what that did but i'll what a real hero doesn't do probably is sitting her car afterwards and cry and you know it did feel good pushing the guy no it did not it did not feel good it felt like okay so man or control okay but so i again sweeping generalization i'm gonna say that a man who pushed the old man is gonna have conflicted emotions about that one part of him is gonna feel good that he pushed a man okay the other part is gonna feel bad that man i shouldn't have pushed an 80 year old man but i did but i did push a man and he backed off and didn't push back so i won that ah that doesn't go on any of that yeah i did not have any of that i did not would you have shame would you have shame if a woman pushed you and you just walked away um probably but i'm a little agro um agro i'm aggressive i am a uh i'll tell you here's another great story of well before you get there before you get to that story can you relive moments that happened 30 40 years ago and feel like man if i had bulked up if i should i should have punched him yeah you really yeah there are times when i should have stood up when i did not yes i'm talking about physically yes and does it haunt you yes i was i've been sexually abused twice in public and i did not do anything about it i just let it happen you you what i didn't do anything about it i just let it happen you were sexually abused in public in public yes and it was once on a bus when i was about 17 16 or 17 and once on venice beach when i was getting massage from an old chinese dude and that guy i tipped him i'm still gonna be i'm still gonna be i'm mad about that so sexual so improper touching yeah the chinese guy had his fingers up my vagina while he was supposed to be massaging me and i just moved my leg to get him out and then he went away then he came back and i was like okay i'm done with this and then i just paid him and tipped him and left and why i used to do i used to do and why is and why is it i have like 10 jokes i want to make because it is horrifyingly funny that's why because it's i mean because we're comics what are you gonna do david felton it's i used to do a joke about how i was gonna um that what i should have said was that's where i keep my vagina uh you're gonna have to get away from me and then somebody said you should sell a t-shirt that says that's where i keep my vagina and i said i would rather not uh i would write that or the t-shirt that says that's where i keep my vagina with an arrow going to the left like i'm with stupid and um so none of that so if you mind if i pursue this for one second sure how much does your tip him no just a tip an inch i forgot i had a question about that um all right i my mom i got upset i was gonna i had a serious question about that but then i'm getting upset okay um do you think about it a lot do you feel like you should have reported him with the no i don't i don't think about it i don't think about until recently i genuinely just thought oh well that happens to everybody what are you gonna do and you got away so you win uh and there's a whole new generation of women who are like in the moment much more present and are able to say hey jerk off that isn't okay get some help you know and uh but it isn't a salt yeah yeah well very much so right it's against the law yeah it's an assault it's not it's not okay and yet there's this little part of me i'm gonna be honest with you okay uh i'm trying to think there be if i was this is how i think some men might think there's no question that it's in the salt it's a physical assault had pressed there's no question that had you pressed charges i don't think he would have ever gone to jail no no remember the comic who attacked the waitress in minneapolis a couple years ago no the the judge said uh well you were both drunk but he had pulled his penis out shoved it in her face and said come on just suck it until she screamed and the neighbors called 911 was it on videotape it was not yeah but he admitted he admitted to doing it in the police report he said that and he also said yeah i get a little aggressive when i when i get horny and i just i told her i said well you should be you should be happy i like you you're just a waitress i'm a comic and where did this happen where did this happen rape line ever house of comedy in minneapolis i was traveling through and minneapolis is my home club it's my hometown comedy wise so i heard all the stories and then where did a year later where did he do it i think it was at her apartment there had been a party and then everybody left it he wouldn't leave it's a classic yeah it's a classic date rapey kind of scene yeah but i mean the thing is is there's so many ways that you're like well you lived and you didn't have you didn't end up having to have sex so don't don't sweat it you know stuff happens and i was raised with that attitude and that attitude is of course incorrect because it is as you said a salt it's a salt right if someone did that to my 17 year old niece i would want to kill them mm-hmm that's no it's not okay gentlemen uh i was just talking to my brother today actually and he was talking about how one time when he was talking about consent with his sons his sons were 14 and 17 and my father was like 76 at the time and my dad is a lady's man and um what does that mean he's my dress is like a woman uh no it's uh it's a numbers game it's all a cold call to him he's working he's working the numbers but my father's is is what i like about my dad is that because he's a salesman i had to stop doing about 12 minutes of material because two people too too many came up to me and said your dad kind of sounds like trope and i said no no my father is not a creep and i know that because none of my brothers are creeps uh so but my brother is talking to his and every one of my family is in sales it's my father's an aluminum siding salesman my oldest brother is an evangelist and sells the meanest jesus my next oldest brother is a print salesman my third oldest brother is a commodities broker my fourth oldest brother is an econ professor and my sister is a financial advisor and you went to and you went to madison right yeah that's what i said to you now i remember oh because i have a degree in political science right and i was rude to you eight years ago i said why are you wasting a political science degree from madison wisconsin one of the great universities in the world talking to people about comics lark larking larking yes so boy do people get mad at me for saying that's because larkers are some serious people they make their own costumes so is your dad is he is he still married he's been married three times he got married the third time to spite my stepmother which may have been laugh and laugh and laugh um and then they were divorced very quickly after but my father's 80 and this is how he hits on women this is a cold call with my dad he goes to the grocery store he goes to the frozen food aisle gets a frozen dinner walks up to a woman in her late 20s early 30s because that's his cut off and uh and he says is this enough food for a single man that's the pickup line and i have always made fun of him and he's like what i got something else to do sometimes it works does it work does it work it has worked for him yes with 20 some things my father's very charming yes and um but so my brother and and his sons who are 14 and 17s are sitting around and everything is a sales analogy every lesson in my life has a sales analogy like picking up you know picking up women that was my father's it's a cold call it's a pitch and so my brother is talking to my nephew's about consent and my brother said you know no is non-negotiable there's no reason to force the sale you can't you know you might be able to convince them yes but there's no reason to do it just let it be no and then if it's yes she'll tell you tomorrow next week she'll let you know don't worry about it and then he said the weird thing about sex is that there will be more sex in your life than you could imagine right now it'll be fine and then my dad pipes up because he has to and he says women are like street cars there'd be another one by in 20 minutes that's a line from some girls oh my god classic stealing of lines with him because i i was like what is dad orville reddenbocker there's not there's not like street cars that's a line from a song mm-hmm which song uh some girl uh uh no no it's from the album some girls what's matter man i have to go check and see where my iguana is so tell me that story uh it's from uh yeah it's from the some girls album i find women are like street cars because halfway through i want to transfer oh my god all right i can't find my lizard well there he is he's just sitting underneath the iguana uh he's uh my my grana is sitting underneath the uh i find women are like street cars because i have to pay first to get off to arrive i just writing bad jokes that's all i i wish i could if i could just impersonate bill cosby that's all i would do i would talk like bill i have a question about bill cosby for you yes bill cosby at this time is currently to my knowledge not doing stand-up comedy because he cannot get booked because 52 women have said that he raped them while they were unconscious and um i think that he's still writing because he's a comic and a sociopath oh he's a complete sociopath but he can't get up and i want to know what are you what jokes i think he's writing you my wife isn't talking to me right now i'm sleeping on the couch that is i literally once a month i think about how and i i would you know how many albums have you put out this is my uh i i did one myself in the 90s where i burned it myself and sold them when i was on the road and if anybody ever finds those they should definitely rip it quickly before it disintegrates in front of their eyes uh this is the fourth one i've put out that's a professional quality real album how long does it take you to write an album i like to do an album every two and a half to three years because i want the jokes to be done are you constantly thinking about your next album no i had around two years into doing material i'll start thinking about doing an album because i'll usually at two years be happy with about a new half hour of material and how many when you record an album how many times do you record it i usually try to record it five times and then i try to do a thursday friday saturday five five audios and then i listen to all five hours i pick the main set right the set that i like the best and then if there's jokes where i said things better on other sets if it's possible i'll get the audio engineer to sub it sub it out it's essentially some people just like to do one and done right maria does that she records it once knock yourself out listen to that album i like the idea that it's sort of like a photoshop you know situation where i don't want you to photoshop away my flaws or the aging process but i do want it to look like i look on the best possible day right so the audio should sound like you've seen me sort of hit all the right beats where is your favorite city to record an album i only record in minneapolis i was going to say minneapolis i was going to the acme common club yeah that's my home club acme yeah louis louis louis lee the guy that supports my career more than anyone and that includes me he is more supportive i would say yeah i would say louis yeah yeah he he's he's a great he's one of the he's one of the good ones he's jeff he's he's he's the only guy who ever raised my rate without me asking yeah he's the kind of guy who i was like you know i'm working too much and he said raise your prices don't worry about it you'll work less you'll make just the same amount of money wow you record you recorded all your albums there minneapolis greatest audiences you know leno said that 30 years ago about minneapolis they're great audience because the winter does that to people granted stand-up comedy club audiences because you know how we're in this political situation that we are in um i have been doing political jokes and uh there the audiences are fine like last week i was in birmingham alabama and there was a mullet in the front row just a just a goof of a dude who was kind of glaring at me and um and he is um but he enjoyed the rest of the show he did not like my political stuff and glared at me and i don't know why he was so well lit but on the whole comedy audiences come to a comedy club they don't know where uh what they're seeing and uh because they don't youtube google what comic they've come to see right which is foolishness but it makes them much more agreeable you know they show up and they don't know if they're seeing jen kirkman or nick de pollo and they just all i know is that i had some drunk kid come up to me a couple of years ago and after the show and he said man i gotta tell you this thing and i said okay before you tell me this thing think to yourself is this going to be offensive and he said he genuinely paused and he goes maybe but i gotta tell you and i said all right don't part man he said when we showed up and i saw it was a woman comic i'm like man let's not stay and uh because usually i don't like women comics but you were really funny and i said usually i don't like drunken jackasses but you're amazing and uh uh he was but the thing is is so like if they see jen kirkman or they see nick de pollo those are two enormously different stand-up comedy shows but if you're super liberal and you see nick de pollo you will laugh because nick de pollo has funny jokes she named her super loves nick de pollo right if you are super conservative and you see jen kirkman you will laugh because they're good jokes there and that's all i mean that's why i like comedy club audiences is because they're so dumb they don't youtube google somebody but when they get there they accept they accept the consequences may i ask you about that for a second by the way does anybody do a joke where you say to a redneck with a mullet you know mullet is one dropped consonant away from mulla no because i don't know what a mullet is isn't a mullet like a iranian mullet oh like an imam or something yeah yeah mullet like mullet that super obscure have you thought about writing for um uh denis miller in the 80s anyway he had a mullet yes so and you're playing generic comedy clubs in other words where they're coming yeah that's what i'm talking about yeah so i'm talking about a comedy club that happens to be underneath a pet hospital in a in a strip mall yes i was just in widow peg there are people coming to see you yes more now than ever before things are and it's because of the podcast right yeah it's because of the podcast and it's because i get to open for famous people now and i get uh four new fans every time i open for bamford or brian reagan and um and people are like oh i remember that woman and then they come and see me do a long set this has been great we have to do this i can keep going i we have to yeah i got a pack so i pray i go where you going tomorrow i'm blooming to indiana tomorrow for the weekend comedy attic the comet let's plug that by the way yeah when's this gonna go up now it's going up friday at three a.m. excellent so saturday night i'll have two shows in bloomington indiana what's the name of the club the comedy attic mm-hmm and it's a great club it's uh blooming to indiana is sort of the the college town in indiana and um i love it it's it's full of i love doing a college town like madison or an arbor or austin or portland you know they come out for you and it's interesting about the podcast i pretty much limit my stand up to manhattan just because of work and i can't go on the road that much yeah uh but i've noticed even in manhattan people recognize me from the podcast that's awesome isn't it more so than any other thing that i've done yeah it's bizarre maria bamford you brought her around to my radio show but she wouldn't do it she wouldn't do it you brought her in one night and she hung out and she sat and watched but she i couldn't get her to participate the other story is that i brought her to san francisco i was headlining i always tell the story in the show she was my opening act and i was selling tickets like never before and my ego was getting really big until i noticed that they were all there to see maria the star is born i felt like chris christopherson and she was barbra stricen well this has been too it has not been too long it's been too long since you've been here it's been too short while you've been here jackie kation will be at the comedy cellar in bloomington indiana starting tonight go see her what did i say cellar oh right instead of comedy attic let's uh go upstairs don't go down yeah you're good i'm i don't even want to get into it but i'm coming to new york you go we gotta hang out wait when you come into new york uh i'll be there for a couple of days in august or a couple of days in september where are you going i'm opening for maria in i think august and i'm doing the cinder block comedy fest in brooklyn in september and you have a new podcast with lori kill martin called the jackie and lory show right if you don't want to listen to two middle-aged white guys talking about comedy tune into the jackie lory show we're two middle-aged white ladies uh it's not exactly a step forward it's more of a lateral move jackie's brand new album is i am not the hero of the story listen to the dork forest now going into its twelfth year congratulations come back thank you you're listening to the david feldman radio program you said pathetic hump time once again for fridays with quarry i don't know it just doesn't sound as good as tuesdays with quarry i thought about whether we should is it very important for the name to always do it on tuesday because it's a good joke i think it's funnier to do it on friday and complain but it doesn't doesn't work doesn't work professor quarry brechneider is a constitutional law professor when the state speaks is his book i started it last night a couple of my listeners actually purchased it the first chapter is about the first amendment and speech so i wanted to talk to you about that i wanted to talk to you about impeachment congressional immunity and does a candidate have immunity can a candidate for office body slam a reporter get arrested and not be able to campaign but first you were in england attending a first amendment conference how was that i was terrific i was hosted by a professor at university of london university college named jeff howard and it focused on all the issues that we're talking about free speech on campus the issue of incitement and how you deal with terrorism and issues of free speech and it was really a great great series of talks and discussion with a nice turnout too it's in a weird building really interesting building at the university of london that has the i think it's the stuffed body of germy bentham who's like in the first floor was germy bentham kind of like the precursor to communism no i think he was uh sort of it was an attempt in the 19th century to rationalize politics and to kind of get bias out and to try to base politics on empirical evidence he's the first was it utilitarian utilitarian yeah and that's sort of his contribution he's kind of a founder of economics and he thought basically you should you had a simple idea you should make policy to always make more pleasure and maximize pleasure and minimize pain and and he thought you could kind of do that with an empirical formula about about pleasure did he predate marks yes yes uh well i guess they were i have to look i think they were both 19th century and i think they were contemporaries they over overlapped in their in their dates and they had his stuffed body there yes yeah it's pretty odd on the first floor university college london i don't get that i think it's you know he taught there and he's you know they always want him to be close something like that that is that is very creepy yeah great conference yeah what was the most surprising thing that you learned during the conference there was a lot there was a terrific talk on free speech in india and how censorship works through a variety of different mechanisms including rush d was banned through basically the law of tariffs and importation sam and rush d the satanic verses exactly there was a fatwa on his head yeah because he i guess insulted the ayatollah in iran correct and he was banned i think under blasphemy laws in in india but they didn't do it by just outlawing the reading the book they did it by outlawing the importation of the book kind of like the dh laurence ban in the united states i don't know about that is that how they did it as well i think so uh-huh jeff howard who i mentioned gave a terrific talk about how to rethink free speech and kind of arguing for you know england has a much more restrictive law of free speech than we do and he was pushing in that direction why it is that maybe caring about advocacy of terrorism i mean this was before the events recently happened that it might be important to outlaw certain forms of advocacy of terrorism not just not to have the strict rules protecting it that that we have in the united states under the first amendment did you hear anything that spoke to you about the virtues of censorship was there anything where you said hmm maybe i should rethink it yeah well his talk i thought was pretty profound you know his point was and there was another talk like this that the speech has an effect that the marketplace of ideas just left to work freely in the way we were talking about last time just doesn't always work and you know i i'm still a defender of our jurors prudence but recent events show the power of that kind of uh that kind of argument i think i was given pause by by that argument and others like it a lot of times i go for the national lampoon let's shock for the sake of shocking you and you know it's you know i don't mean it yeah well that's what i was saying last time we spoke is you were defending i thought it was a very good discussion but you were defending these restrictions and i just started wondering how they would work given your profession and your willingness to floor the boundaries that they could easily i mean it's just something for you to think about that they could easily be turned certainly on comedians and and that case about hustler magazine that we talked about come out a different way under a different regime and that might have a you know career consequences for you yeah i got spooked i don't want to get into specifics but i had a sleepless night last night because somebody spooked me taking one of my lines out of context literally out of context certainly is a matter of censorship i think if you put restrictions on viewpoint or on content when it comes to comedy that there is a danger that you restrict you know good stuff coming out or comedy that's meant to enlighten rather than to harm now there is another example of that that really does push the boundaries and it's this comedian in france you know who is a racist and has this sort of racist salute and it really doesn't to me from what i have seen seem defensible or charlie ebdo actually in some of those cartoons i don't think that they're defensible what what the cartoons are doing and i know that they claim to be attacking religion generally but they tend to focus on islam in a way that makes me feel like skeptical about that claim but i don't think charlie ebdo or this comedian that you know has been subject to potential hate crimes prosecutions that you know they should be imprisoned basically i think that finding something offensive certainly isn't a good way to regulate and even if it goes beyond defense that it really attacks kind of core values of the quality under law not not in order to enlighten but in order to punch down that the right way to handle it isn't imprisonment it's that we have other techniques that we have to be able to use so yeah i'm you know in this conference i defended this rule on campus too complete protection for all viewpoints but also being vigilant even about certain kinds of really bad humor you know sometimes another joke in response might be the right response or sometimes criticism or don't laugh or don't laugh yeah i know some comedians think even that goes too far they're worried about pc culture and i've heard comedians saying they don't want to perform on campus and i could see the worry that that sort of condemnation of some humor can go too far but the kind of extremists in france those two examples that i gave show that you know you sometimes even humor is doesn't get a free pass i think we've got to be critical about it too and making jokes about a person who isn't famous i'm not going i'm not asking for this was week one yeah i know but making jokes about somebody who isn't famous is unacceptable even if you take to facebook or twitter so if you start attacking somebody on facebook and twitter who isn't famous they can then come after you for is it slander if it's written if you're like about them yeah i mean we were talking one of our sessions about that case involving hustler magazine and the cartoon depicting a preacher as a drunkard even though you know he wasn't and the question of whether or not that was grounds for suing under the libel laws or libel is written so i guess facebook could be potential libel case and there's protection in lying about public figures in a way there isn't about private figures are you a public figure if you take to facebook yes you know that's like the andy warhol question right i mean now we are all famous fifteen minutes maybe fifteen minutes a week or something so i don't know the other i haven't seen that in the courts it would be a fascinating question whether or not like a somebody with a thousand friends who post once a week and has thirty likes whether or not they're a public figure now some people on facebook have five friends and zero likes so i i think they wouldn't be but that that other case might be a good one i've noticed that there are people who are tried in the court of facebook opinion that there have been some accusations criminal charges against certain people they're probably true and it's to some degree people are going to the court of facebook opinion because they feel this individual won't be prosecuted in the courts how do you very shaming shame is that what you're thinking of like cases where somebody is shamed for being a sexual harasser yeah yeah huh it's interesting i mean you don't have due process in those cases it's not criminal punishment so the war you know the rights question isn't as severe as it is there so doing that does raise due process issues but on the other hand the consequences aren't as bad i i don't know i we'd have to talk about a specific case but i can imagine in an egregious instance where there was a worry about you know the danger that somebody posts then we might tell a group of friends that you might tell your facebook friends about that person i think that might be defensible and then you can imagine the other extreme where somebody who's really innocent is uh you know libeled and their reputation is destroyed by a kind of mob mentality so these you know these questions are always in the details i think right i'm surprised we're not saying more of that a case there doesn't seem to be a case yet going to the supreme court involving facebook and twitter and libel right there have been certainly some facebook cases i'm just trying to remember what the most recent one was yeah i'd have to look but that that could be something that i could look into for a night right i mean it just seems it seems that and i i always have this who cares attitude i always say where there's smoke there's fire if you if somebody's making an accusation there's probably some truth to it you probably did something that you shouldn't have done then i always go to better a few men go to prison then right then a couple of innocent guys walk free right the flip you got that balance wrong we put that around what's the original saying it's something like better than 10 guilty men go free than one innocent goes to prison and that's why we tilt our system of justice the presumption of innocence because i always said with clarence thomas yeah better a few men have their lives destroyed so that the rest of us learn how to behave right right i mean what's interesting about the question you're raising though is it isn't that question you know i'm i think that's right you want to design a system of criminal justice in a way that really has a very strong presumption of innocence and that takes away the very real possibility that people will be prosecuted for things they didn't do but now when it comes to criticism there's a little more leeway you know and uh it's not the same as imprisonment now that isn't a free pass john steward mill worried about punishments social punishments like shaming because he thought they could have the same kind of punitive impact of social isolation that criminal punishment would but it's certainly on a scale i think less awful than having your liberty deprived and there might be more leeway for you know not not exactly that 10 to 1 formula that we think of in criminal justice there's a special election yesterday in montana right and a republican candidate greg i don't know if i'm pronouncing this right greg g and forte they say he reportedly body slammed a reporter for the guardian ben jacob's but if you listen to the audio it's probably worse than a body slam it sounded as though he was punching the reporter can you arrest a candidate for high office a sitting congressman and why is it a bad idea what did our founding fathers think about arresting congress people and candidates maybe there's an argument to the contrary but i think that's an easy case that just because you hold an office it doesn't make you immune from the law so if you violate as this by listen to the audio to it seem like a clear assault basically allegedly i guess i don't know the full facts because i wasn't there but listening to the video i'm sorry the audio and if that was if it turns out that this was just a straightforward assault the fact that he's running for office doesn't immunize him in any way and you know there's no reason why he couldn't be criminally prosecuted and the same is true even if he was a sitting congressman there are some protections there's something called the speech and debate clause that protects uh at a pretty high level what's said in parliamentary debate for instance by sitting congress people but they're not in any way immunized and neither is the president by the way from criminal law my readings of the constitution my understanding is that our founding fathers had a fear that congressman could be arrested to keep them from speaking in the well of the senate or speaking in the house on a bill are there any protections against that there are two there's something called the speech and debate clause which immunizes the speech basically of members of congress from being subject to prosecution and if they're talking on a public matter for instance and it's like the discussion we're having earlier and they make a mistake i think that does immunize them in certain instances there's also this strange which this congressman maybe had read and misinterpreted the thinking applied to him this clause of the article one section six that says the senators and representatives shall in all cases accept trees in the felony and breach of the peace be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the at the senate sessions of their respective houses and in going to and from the same but the courts my understanding had have just narrowed that clause so that it actually doesn't immunize congressman from being arrested for say assault and certainly it doesn't immunize even in the plain language a candidate for office so there is this sort of worry i think about you know political arrest and prosecution but at least in our system now the rule of law takes precedence i don't know if there's anything left from that clause but certainly it doesn't immunize a congressman from being prosecuted for a crime a political arrest could be a president arresting a senator or a congressman which you can't do as president but you do have a justice department and an fbi can the fbi arrest somebody i mean if you yeah if you commit a crime you can be arrested now i mean what were they trying to get at i guess that you know think of the crime of sedition of speaking out against the president now under our current first amendment law you have a right to criticize the president but imagine some interpretation of the first amendment that allowed congressman to be arrested for criticizing a president i mean these are all hypothetical but i wonder if that would be a way of resurrecting the the clause but you know in normal criminal prosecution where there's not a any of these issues that are not at stake not there is there is no longer and not an immunity from from prosecution this congressperson a candidate for office sorry uh you know he's out of luck i think as far as the law law is concerned worst case scenario i'm the president of the united states i have a flunky as my attorney general i have a flunky as the head of the fbi the fbi could arrest people yeah i as president can't order somebody to be arrested but i can instruct secretly the fbi to arrest somebody right i mean you know the the whole issue in the current controversy over firing the fbi director is whether or not the president was acting in an improper way to in that case impede an investigation now a president should not under any circumstance be dictating to law enforcement who to arrest or not for political reasons that's not their prerogative it's supposed to be an independent decision now you know some people have focused on whether or not the president would have been breaking the law in impeding an investigation in the sense that he could be subject to criminal prosecution and i think that's a pretty interesting issue but the question of impeachment is not that the question is whether he was doing something that really impeded him from the kind of independence that he's obligated to as a as the president of the united states so even if his action towards combi wasn't a criminal violation it could have been the kind of high crimes and misdemeanors political crime you might call it that the founders were focused on this isn't a legal issue impeachment it's one that involves a political decision about the fitness for office and how severe a violation uh took place it's a political decision not a criminal decision it's not even a constitutional decision it's a decision that the house and the senate have been authorized by the constitution to make and there's a standard high crimes and misdemeanors but no that shouldn't be understood as you know the felony or some criminal violation it's a distinct distinct thing there's a terrific article by a colleague of mine named keith wittington in the washington post that discusses this and i highly recommend it okay and this is an expert on the history of impeachment and that's his argument that i fully endorse you know we shouldn't view the oath as just mandating uh obedience to the law in a narrow sense the oath obligates a president to the role and the constitutionally delegated role of president and he's violating that role if he tells uh the fbi director to stop investigating him i turn on msnbc and it's we got him today we got him yeah he's he's gone to prison and they're gonna give him a chair and uh that's how it's being presented to us is smoking gun we got him and what you're saying this is not going to be a criminal prosecution it's going to be a negotiation it's going to be the republicans deciding whether or not he's politically viable that's the only way he's going to be thrown out of office is the republicans have to decide before the midterms whether or not he's a political liability that's all this is it's the court it's the court of public opinion i'd say it's partly that that just realistically yes there is no impeachment without the republic some republicans not all of them by the way but just a small sliver of them to stand up and say this is unacceptable but what i don't think is right and i want to make sure that my views distinct from it is the idea that it's just politics in the sense of you know we hate this guy let's get rid of him i don't think that there is an obligation of the political branches to use a principle and the principle is it's defined by this phrase high crimes and misdemeanors but what it really means is something like what the 25th amendment says unable to carry out the constitution or unwilling or you know deliberately indifferent to the requirements of the constitution now the president is not supposed to be in the business of retaliating against political opponents or in this case impeding investigations against his own wrongdoing and if he's done that and that's an F but if it turns out then they're obligated i think to use impeachment in order to defend the constitution that's how it works so the fact that it's not a trial in a court of law doesn't mean that it's just up to the political branches to do what they want they also have constitutional obligations nobody should body slam a reporter right there are laws against this however you bring in the lawyers you bring in the police you play that audio tape to us Greg Gianforte the guy running for congress in montana who did this not allegedly you listen to the audio it's obvious but if it gets into a courtroom they're gonna say this reporter provoked me he threatened me and he won't go to prison there are things that should be and there are things that are and if i'm donald trump and steve bannon jared kushner i'm gonna say just fight fight fight fight fight they're not gonna impeach me there are things trump should be doing but he doesn't have to and if he just fights yeah there's no way to get rid of them maybe you know the republican party and i hope that this comes up again has a long tradition of caring about the constitution it's not too long ago that the tea party's main thing was you know careful reading or a strict reading of the constitution and i have to believe that there are some percentage of members of the house of representatives elected by the republican party who still care about the constitution and if that's right and i'm sure it is they've got to find the strength and the courage to stand up and say if and again it's an if the president was deliberately impeding an investigation of himself by firing the fbi the director then that's an impeachable offense that's their obligation and it's not about party it's about this other thing you know to go back to the serenade massacre which keeps coming up there there were you know republicans that stood up to nixon and partly i think elliot richardson for instance cared about the constitution but he also cared about the preservation of his party and maybe that's the other thing that that will get them to vote for impeachment eventually is that the republican party cannot survive if it's just the party of donald trump it is supposed to be also like the democrats a party of constitutional principle the more i listen to you the more i realize he ain't going anywhere i wish you were right everything you're saying is right you stand for the constitution i don't think the tea party ever stood for the constitution they were astroturf they were set up by the coke brothers just to challenge obama and the and the stimulus package i do another show with a guy called dan york in new england and listeners can find the recordings of them on my website quarry brechner dot com and you know it's i think it's fascinating because a lot of his listeners were tea party people and a lot of them were tempted to vote for trump and i think a good portion did but you'll hear on those tapes you know i just try to engage them on the level of the constitution if i talk to them as a brown professor or as a democrat we're not going to get anywhere and in fact that's how the conversations often begin is with them slamming dan for having this liberal bat brown professor on but if we just talk about as you and i often do too the constitution they sometimes can be won over you know because they i think there are some percentage of people including members of the house who really care about the foundational principles and are not just a trumpist you know nationalist he does not i should say i am absolutely convinced i don't think there's a question about it that he he does not care at all or know much about the united states constitution but i know there are some members of the house who do there are some members of the house who do but not enough to stand up for what's right i just don't i know that nixon was up against a democratic house there are circumstances that were different and you know you would have to win over some percentage of republicans but his look yeah there is the kind of real politic part of and his rating his approval ratings are tanking and the lower and lower they get and especially in districts where there are congresspeople republicans who are being threatened in the next midterm by democrats i think they've got a sort of thing to themselves both from a principled perspective the ideal that i'm talking about and also from a self-preservation perspective it might be time to jump ship by the way he's threatening some of these people with going after them if they oppose them i don't see how you know you could have dignity and not stand up to even the president if he talks to you that way so we just need a sliver of them and i you know assuming again that the investigation goes the way that it that it might which is that he was impeding this investigation and and then yeah they're obligated to stand up the fbi is an independent police organization but they're part of the executive branch right they're not part of the judicial branch right the fbi director does answer to the chief executive well he answers to the attorney general who is part of the executive branch but as you saw in the instance uh earlier on when the decision remember in the travel ban case was made by the acting attorney general to not defend it that was what she wanted to do what sally eights was saying at that time is that you know she doesn't work for the president in the sense that he can direct her to legally do what she's going to do she has an independent obligation to uphold the constitution and she wasn't going to defend something that was clearly unconstitutional now in this case it's a similar sort of issue the attorney general and the fbi director have an obligation to not use law enforcement for political purposes they don't do the bidding of the president he can't direct them to do something that's illegal for instance so are there are there specific are these norms are these specific laws i think they're norms they're largely not the impeachment norm people are arguing about this there's a question about whether he obstructed justice which is a legal question and a question of prosecution and that's one question but i guess what i would say is even though that is an issue here apart from that there is a question of what i would call constitutional norms and you don't you don't direct the fbi to do your political bidding and that's impeachable if you do it's impeachable but again i'm gonna be steve bannon right and i'm telling donald trump all you have to do is stand your ground the mistake that nixon made was he released the tapes he let them listen to the tapes stand your ground and nothing will happen well i mean that you know now we're now we're gonna have a big disagreement because if he would have done that that would have been a true constitutional crisis in fact when we talked earlier about obeying judicial orders the supreme court of the united states ordered nixon to hand over those tapes and the fact that he even paused for a moment he did turn them over but at there was a question during the proceedings whether he would and that was part of the first order part of the articles of impeachment the article the argument against them that i'm sorry i should say it was part of the argument against him for impeachment that he was threatening to undermine the judiciary by threatening to disobey judicial orders if trump really refused to obey the court's outright that is up there with the most impeachable things he's done it's certainly on my view cause for impeachment and why don't we decide that the supreme court has primacy over the executive branch isn't that a separation of powers issue that was decided in margaret marbury versus madison which is about judicial oversight and uh the ultimate being the ultimate enforcers of the constitution nixon famously said when the president does it it's not illegal he was wrong president can do all sorts of unconstitutional things and it's the role of the court to stop them if he does or her and uh that's a core maybe that core idea of our constitutional system so in marbury versus madison they say that the final decision rests with the supreme court in any conflict between the three branches of government the supreme court will always win out i think that's probably putting it too strong and there is an idea that jefferson had of what's called departmentalism that the president has also a role in thinking about the constitution and an obligation to enforce it but i think that marbury although it's a very interesting case in that it is really about the the court refusing to accept more power that it was granted by congress they strike down an act of congress expanding their power which is a sort of weird use but at the same time what's famous about the case is it's clearly a statement about the court's ultimate role as the interpreter of the constitution and later cases i think make clear that when the executive does something that directly conflicts with the constitution and it's in the area like for instance judicial proceedings in the example of the tape that the the court has to be listened to and has to be deferred to so no president can defy and i don't think any president ever has defied and we could look into that a direct judicial order that's an impeachable offense and if he did that either in the travel ban case or does that in the future then that is in my mind clear grounds for impeachment right there's the famous quote from andrew jackson right who yeah he never disobeyed a judicial order he's talking about this case involving the trail of tears uh that didn't involve the federal government he's commenting on it but he's not saying that i'm going to disobey a judicial order and he's certain and to my knowledge he never disobeyed a judicial order so when bannon and all these other people sort of try to use that as an example as a precedent for what trump might have done in the travel ban case or might do going forward i think they're just wrong on on the history the court doesn't have its own police they cannot as jackson said enforce their rulings right which is why they have i guess supremacy because they're the yeah they're the moral arbiters but it's also why it's so delicate you know that's why i'm kind of this is the kind of thing that only a constitutional lawyer maybe gets really emotional about but if you think about it what is it that makes the system work the courts do not control the military they do not control the budget and the way the congress does they they're not the commander in chief the way the president does it's a it's the norms of obeying judicial orders that's what keeps the constitutional system operating and if you have some i don't know i'll try to use a more measured term some some president who doesn't know the norms who doesn't understand the constitutional system and he does something which is unprecedented which is outright defying judicial orders that actually is such a big deal it threatens the collapse of the system and it's not something that i think we can allow i'm wondering about the levers of power that the executive branch has to act at the will of 38 percent of this country who want trump to drain the swamp punch reporters and i'm listening to you and i'm thinking well it sounds like the constitution does give the president all the all the buttons he needs to push for tyranny it's there oh yeah that's what's so scary he has been pushed back but if you think of how it's by courts and it's by advisors telling him he better listen and if there are people pushing him the other direction they haven't been listened to and the reason why all this matters so much in these first few months have really been a victory for constitutional democracy is because the and the founders like people think they're paranoid about it but now we know from this example that they're not that the executive is so powerful that he or she could topple the entire system they could become like a dictator or king and in fact if you look at you know constitutional regimes around the world that sometimes happens that a so-called president becomes a dictator and that's a real risk here it has been i mean it didn't go that way the wall street journal has sort of been criticizing people for being overly paranoid about the threat of dictatorship but the the fact is that we haven't gone in anywhere close to that direction because people have used the institutions and the aclu and others have sued the president and stopped them from doing what he wanted to do and it's a big big deal you know people might be bored of the details of the travel ban case we've been talking about it at length but that is a big deal not because of the just because of the issue but because of the separation of powers and the fact that the executive has stopped the president in that area talking to you i i realize i'm not helping by saying i don't see him being impeached i don't see republicans having the fire in their belly or the moral compass to throw him out of office listening to you i truly understand that we're at a point of conflation between politics and law it's where the two things come together and unless the people stand up for the rule of law we're gonna lose it i was beautifully put and you know what you're saying i guess echoes a lot of the sort of way that we're used to talking about politics in this country that you know what are the republicans going to do it's the horse race it's prediction and that's fine you know you have to do that i don't want to be naive and that's why i did that with you but we've also got to think about the principles and in this case the stakes are so high that i think impeachment absolutely has to be on the table in order to prevent the possible slide in the direction that has not happened but that there's no reason why if this president got more popular more successful and more emboldened why he wouldn't necessarily go in that direction and the wearing down of the public will is what people like steve bannon want in other words when i say to you trump firing comey is legal there's nothing we can do about it right i mean theoretically you could just keep insisting he's the president he can do that this executive branch i do think you know i have to we all not just me have to think more about this and learn more about the facts but there is a there are statutes that prevent as criminal statutes that prevent the obstruction of justice you can't go in i mean let me give you just an extreme example that's not an issue here you can't go in to the police officer that's investigating you and say if you keep looking into my case i'm going to come after you and your family and you know do crimes to you or um that was a weird phrase do crimes to you i like that right threaten you i can't you know you can't threaten somebody who's looking at you to arrest you or to investigate you and if the president did something like that then it doesn't matter that he's the president he can't do that it's just you can't obstruct criminal investigation now did that happen here it's not clear but even if it didn't what i'm saying is we have this other concern about upholding the constitution i'm a senator i'm a congressman on the floor of the senate i say something horrible about person who isn't a public figure can i be sued it's an interesting question like in the speech and debate clause imagine you're talking about somebody in congress on the floor of the house that's not a public figure and you libel them an interesting kind of inquiry would be whether or not you get more protection for that speech than you would under the normal first amendment rules and you might i think that's a good very interesting issue because i would run for senate just for the right yeah to go after howard whitaker oh okay there's a guy named howard whitaker who i would just like to slander and libel for the rest of my life it would be worth having to be a senator i said i should say as usual it's a hypothetical question i don't know howard and i don't know that you'd even get the protection right because the speech and debate clauses i think meant to protect speech about public matters and if you were just getting up on the floor of the senate libeling somebody who's a private figure that it is an interesting case but i'm not sure that you'd get more protection than you would under the right and the president can't sue a senator for saying horrible things about him you know i didn't want to say something about this body slam case that that sort of brings us back to our first topic which is the issue of you know something is going on in this country where people are acting in a way and saying things that are so beyond the norm i mean the idea that uh somebody running for office is involved allegedly in an assault and at least even if it's not an assault in a kind of act of violence with a reporter these videos of people saying racist things in stores and anti-islamic things part of the trump era is about the specific constitutional issues that we're talking about but in the book i mean which you brought up in the beginning one of the things i'm worried about is you know in a regime that's so protected by in a nation that's so protected by the first amendment and again i love the first amendment and the free speech protection of all viewpoints it could allow for the what i call a hateful society to evolve as a matter of norms that it would protect all sorts of views that could become what could lead a society to become against the basic ideas that are also in the constitution of equality of all underlaw and i worry that not just one story but all these add up to that kind of norm erosion and you know the government has to find other ways of fighting back we don't have the ability to just outlaw racist views in this country but if we're not going to outlaw them i think we need to find other ways of of pushing back against those that norm erosion and the really frightening thing about this g in forte when he issued his denial he referred to the guardian reporter as a liberal journalist oh wow can i sue a sitting president could i do a class action suit against donald trump if i find that the republicans just aren't performing their due diligence could you and i form a class action suit against a sitting president there were ongoing lawsuits about trump university for instance and that paula jones law case makes clear that they don't stop just because somebody gets the the presidency and the president is too busy argument or the president is above the law none of those arguments have ever been rightly accepted by courts and they shouldn't be so if there is a you know we have to think about what this lawsuit was if you're asking whether we could just sue the president for being bad at his job i'm not i'm not sure about that but certainly these other real cases involving fraud for instance uh the president is not immunized as a result of his office paula jones and trump university were were civil suits that predated their presidencies right i don't think we've ever had an example of a a sitting president sued for what he did while in office isn't it kind of accepted that you can only sue a president after he leaves office you can't know and in fact there is an ongoing suit that's extremely important that we haven't mentioned i don't think on this podcast but that we should spend time talking about involving the emoluments clause and what the emoluments clause says is that the president can't benefit from foreign governments and there's a domestic component to that too and what this lawsuit is worried about is that because the president is not has not really distanced himself enough from his own assets that things like his hotel in washington which are being visited by foreign governmental dignitaries are benefiting him in a way that violates this emoluments clause and this is a really serious lawsuit brought by some of the top constitutional lawyers in the country including uh lorenz tribe and my friend's effort teach out and you know that suit we have to keep a close eye on it it certainly does concern ongoing actions by a sitting president and you know i i think they've got a really good claim there again we've learned today that you can't be cynical they want you to be cynical and you have to speak up yeah can i just say something about that david the at that point i just thought was kind of for me anyway was profound because what you were doing is so common by so many of my friends and people who are on television and who are on radio is to just sort of say you know well we can't we we can't beat them or we can't do this because the political situation is such that it's not not achievable and i think that while it's important to be realistic we also have to talk about what's constitutionally required of us and then we have to demand that the republicans and maybe a sliver of them is all we need to their duty that's what's happening in these town meetings for instance and you could see them rethinking you know their absolute support for the president of the united states and there are ways through persuasion i think to get us out of that mentality of acquiescence if trump were realistic and the republicans were realistic trump wouldn't be president right if we were if we were realistic we wouldn't be giving tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent here's a thing that that is was not realistic a year ago that a reality tv show host with no experience in government who knows absolutely nothing about the basics of our constitutional system including as i argued before i think how a bill becomes a law is going to become president of the united states it's just seems not realistic and this guy imagined that it was realistic and he pushed the boundaries and changed them for the worse so we've got to start doing that too i think and you know using our imagination talking about things that don't seem immediately possible and imagining the future in a kind of broader way the supreme court doesn't have a town hall but they do take the temperature yeah certainly on gay marriage they take the temperature had there been just this outrage to gay marriage where it was unacceptable by a vast majority of americans is it obergefeld i i can't pronounce they would have ruled differently right um i i like that phrase take the temperature i think that they're aware of politics and some decisions are informed by it but their obligation is to not be partisan certainly and to be independent but you know i don't know the healthcare case is a good example the fact that roberts voted to uphold the mandate and to leave at least the basic structure of obama care in in time i have to believe that part of that was informed by a realization that had they struck down the entire piece of legislation that there would have been a backlash that would have really threatened the court's legitimacy so yeah the court has to be realistic about the fact that it has to keep its currently pretty high level of support and that it can do things to undermine its own legitimacy well this has been amazing once again let's talk about your bike trip okay was it through normandy burgundy shabby burgundy we started in uh in uh my french is non-existent but we after the london trip i met my wife in paris and we went down to burgundy and uh we uh rented bikes there and we had an amazing experience just biking around for a few days terrific did you do digital detox i thought of you because there was there were things happening and i thought he's gonna want to fly home in our email exchange you asked me if i could put my mic in the in the saddle back and i could think about it but were you able to let go how were you yeah yeah no we just we're not really on email or any of that stuff we just what's the be honest what's the longest period you went without email four hours and it feels horrible you check yeah and it's like somebody's putting sandpaper to your insides right yeah yeah i mean i you know thankfully was not like doing it at meals or anything like there was a guy we had like this kind of amazing meal in burgundy one of these just really beautiful french meals and there was a guy in the middle of this pretty nice restaurant taking phone calls so that i didn't want to be that guy he was doing it in spanish which was kind of you know he's a spanish guy but yeah and the french allowed that it was really uncomfortable they were clearly very bothered by it but the format it was a pretty formal restaurant and i think they were trying to figure out like does the formality keep us from criticizing him does it demand that we criticize him and there are only maybe 10 people in the restaurant but but they did not say anything they let him uh he also did a thing that i both was bothered by but thought was pretty funny which is it was a former abbey the restaurant and he kept playing on his iphone publicly for the restaurant gregorian chant so that was really odd so it was rude or funny dining in france is a religion it's sacred and rightfully so sitting down and having a meal together truly is a spiritual experience that the french get the italians get uh i'm surprised that they put up with that yeah i think this guy was deliberately trying to i don't know mock this that how solemn solemn it was and yeah it started talking but he was being really nice to them at the same time too he was sort of i don't know it was like this very interesting rebellion he was he was introducing himself to everybody wasn't a mean guy but he was mocking the formality of it definitely well we learned a lot today the thing i learned i'm just going to repeat it because this has been very valuable for me and the listeners the thing we learned today is you can't be cynical in order for a rule of law to sustain it's the role of the citizenry to hold not just our lawmakers but our judges we have to hold their feet to the fire we have to make them enforce not just the laws but the norms and what's acceptable we have to speak out and say this is acceptable this isn't acceptable the proto fascists want us to throw up our hands and say hey there's nothing we can do yeah well said and uh not really but i'll take the i'll take the compliment and i appreciated that exchange you know you kind of i mean in a way that's sort of trying to resist is the cynicism and you know you saw that and i really do appreciate what you just said one of the first people i interviewed on the show was the late tom hayden and for some reason they don't teach the port year on statement hmm if you get for us to talk about at some point yeah and he said to me you know you sound really smart when you're cynical but you're not smart and they want you to think you sound smart when you're being cynical they want you to be cynical and i never forgot that and that's beautiful yeah from an important person and you know when you watch television i just really i mean i just can't believe the degree to which people are doing this horse race thing and you know over the summer when when before i knew you but what i was doing a lot of this radio show what i loved about dan york and still love about him is that he just doesn't do that he doesn't just sit there and say who's up who's down it's such a banal boring and unscientific way of talking about politics politics is about aspiration and if you turn it into this lame horse race thing i think you just miss what it what it's supposed to be about and other people have figured it out by the way donald trump realizes that it's not about what's realistic it's about what you make possible and that's why he's unfortunately doing is gotten to the position that he's gotten to right and cynicism is intellectually lazy it is yeah it's a very lame way to you'll come back next week i didn't push you away i love it okay great thank you i've been pushing i have so many people in my life i've pushed away so not me no not at all i had a sleepless night i there were a couple of jokes that i've told just for the sake of shock and i'm thinking i i need to reign it in i and i did get my wake-up call about the first amendment i've been very glib about censorship but suddenly it applied to me and i i thought hmm well as i often said you know you are in a perilous business you could offend people but it's also the case that people are not going to listen to just you know academics talking in the abstract you need people to connect and humor is in our culture the number one way that people connect and you know so it's great this combination of comedy and yeah also extreme seriousness and you know dapps about issues so i really again appreciate it and i want to thank our listeners i would have done this regardless it's heavy lifting the structure of the show is such that i i put the heavy lifting on near the end i start off light and fluffy and fun i was pleasantly surprised by the vast number of listeners who enjoy this are asking me to put it on earlier there are a lot of great listeners who yeah and i've seen it on you on facebook and twitter and thanks for listening i appreciate it yeah well thank you for doing this and as my mother says every week you don't deserve them she's of two people she said you don't deserve obama and you don't deserve professor kory bretschneider author of when the state speaks okay i'm a huge fan of your mom thank you i'll talk to you next week see you that's our show please friend me on facebook follow me on twitter for only five dollars a month you can gain access to all our premium content by becoming a monthly subscriber we accept all major credit cards go to david feldman show dot com hit the go premium button if you're already a subscriber and you don't remember the password hit the contact button over david feldman show dot com and i will send you the password hit the contact button to say hello i answer all my emails sign up for my newsletter to all your amazon shopping via the david feldman show website our executive producer is alex brazil go see the great jake joe hanson at hilarity's in cleveland june 15th through the 18th or if you live in pittsburgh go see jake at the pittsburgh improv june 22nd through the 25th his podcast is jake this jackie kation will be at the comedy attic in bloomington indiana tonight and tomorrow go see jackie kation her podcast is dork forest special thanks to jonathan allen he's the author of shattered inside hillary clinton's doomed campaign professor kory bretschneider's book is called when the state speaks if you want to buy their books why not go to the david feldman show website hit the amazon banner and shop away doesn't cost you any more we get a small cut of everything you purchase on amazon want to thank all my friends who got me through this week you know who you are and i love you i love all my friends for giving me their support and giving me courage to all of you the universe does not reward fear it only rewards courage and faith from the show briz studios in downtown manhattan medicare for all are you freaking kidding me in the middle of finals this is the david feldman radio network