is is what goes on it's a funny bit i just made it up with i guess attachments to jack mason and every other jewish comedian in my my ahead of me but yes that's what goes on down there it's a madhouse it's a madhouse the part of it the condo circuit it's show business it's real show business it's it's it's ending as we speak when i came here in 03 all i heard and i had a zillion gigs all i heard was ah you should have been here 30 years ago when you know blah blah blah well i wasn't i heard stories about it it was amazing and now it is it is like this development that i live in i live in over 55 community we've had a lot of vacancies here i guess the past two years and everyone that's moved in is not jewish and now they're you know now they're starting to i'd say about 30 30 of these people in a community of 250 are saying why do we spend why do we have this entertainment budget i see that we're having comedians and we're having they're from another culture and they just don't understand why they have to pay you know their maintenance their monthly maintenance why a segment of that goes for entertainment so more and more this may filter out you know they will then maybe they'll have two shows a year as opposed to seven you know to my listeners what florida is to new york because we have people hearing this show all over the world what is the new york metropolitan area connection to florida well first the connection of florida period is that there's no state income tax um real estate is very reasonable and you know it's a tropical climate once you hit south florida so it's really less traffic than congested parts of the country it's a great place to live and you've got millions of miles of beaches down here there's a lot a lot of pluses if you like to work out all that stuff so originally before air conditioning it was not that desirable but of course we're talking probably about 50 plus years of air conditioning now it's a great haven and of course people from new york uh have predominantly moved to south florida areas because again jews are clanish people new yorkers uh not you know non-jewish new yorkers are clanish people so there's pockets down here where italian americans live en masse like a pompano beach florida which is near fort lauderdale and of course palm beach florida where you know the country club waspy crowd goes there so everyone has found their little pockets down here but of course you know new york congestion traffic it has a lot of the elements that as you get older you just have that i can't deal with this anymore attitude you want a different way of life plus you don't want to shovel snow or get stuck in inclement weather so hence uh people coming here now you've got other areas of florida the west coast of florida you have people from the midwest ohio and michigan and you know again urban areas where they don't want to fight the fight the fight anymore as you get older a man loses his testosterone and you know enough of the banging your head against the wall and florida is a great retirement committee like i said cheap real estate and no state income tax so and you you could work all the time no i only can work interesting here for any comedians or show business people listening you the season as it is is only you know for the shows about december 21st to march 15th let's say and then a good three quarters of the new yorkers that live here go back east they go back home excuse me go back north and uh and then so the shows all end so there are some places that do very low budget shows during the summer but it's few and far between so it's a very intense thing in south florida during the winter you have some of the best shows in the united states i say it goes toe to toe with las vegas you can have clean homes you have tony orlando uh people who are names but were names a long time ago but still fantastic entertainer steve salomon who's got a current one manager the comedy that goes on down here rivals las vegas however the weird thing david is that every community here is private so no one who lives in the public you know lives like in just in a condo on the beach can ever see any of these shows because they are not a member of the country club or not a member of the condo gated community so that's the that's the um the irony it would so much entertainment in the winter but no one can see it unless they live in that particular community and how many people in the showroom some of the showrooms are 300 to 1100 wow they are some some of the theaters are so phenomenal i'll give you a case in point to some of the grand at like a century villages four century villages and they have uh they have entertainment or there's three century villages i'm blanking for a second but anyway they have stages that if you just dropped bruce springstein or frank sanatra onto the stage they wouldn't know where they were and they'd go hey this place is great that's how incredible they are and everybody in the audience is over the age of century village they can be um they can be uh they can be in their 90s they can be 95 there's a place down here called forest trace and my dear friend um jenny grossinger eddus she's the dog excuse me not jenny elaine eddus who is the daughter of jenny grossinger she was on the board of this forest trace getting the entertainment and letting the grossingers was grossingers was numero uno uh hotel in the catskill mountains during the heyday which would have been the late 40s through the 50s into the 60s into the 70s and produced some of the great i mean i wish i had the pr here i mean that you know the entertain everyone who was anyone the greatest of the greatest you know had their feet even woody allen when you read or read his interviews he would go to these hotels on summer staff and they would do a show because the audience was different or some of the audience was the same all summer they had to produce a show using all the staff the waiters and everything and woody allen would write a 25 minute show or longer every week then he would direct it they would have rehearsals all while these kids who were there were waiters lifeguards you know tennis instructors they all lived for the night to rehearse these shows and then they would perform these shows on saturday and that was that's what gave him you know all that how he was so profan mel brooks did this too this is why these people were grossingers like your granddaughter eddus no elaine eddus is the daughter of jenny grossinger and jenny grossinger i believe is the that was the you know they would probably that her mom was probably born let's say 19 oh something or other and then elaine came along is married to a doctor i believe so yes is he a psychiatrist well he's passed away but i believe so i believe your psychiatrist you can still practice no i think he passed away as i'm saying if you're a dead psychiatrist you can go a couple of years oh i i get yeah i guess as long as he is long as the clock the alarm goes at 50 minutes yes you know when to get rid of the patient and she actually lives down here she's such a sweet woman i wish i had known her all those years prior but i was not a cat skill comedian but yes um this show elaine eddus was booking the entertainment from a place called forest trace now forest trace we were talking about ages forest trace i had people in their late 90s and into their hundreds it wasn't what's called assisted living but it was just on the cusp of these were people who were still lucid enough and but were not living in assisted living and i and i i asked who's married the longest how many years do you think some of these people were married in the audience well it's a trick question and the answer is like three and four because these were people who all outlived their spouses there were no one that came there together and they had children i was talking to a 102 year old man who had an 83 year old daughter living in central village i'm going oh my god oh my god what is it come to where have i gone in life this is what am i being punished i know what i'm being punished why i'm being punished for everything but and they nod off you know half the room just goes down like a like a robot when you take pull the plug out and the other side comes up and then that side goes down it's like a wave and the other side do you plug the robot back into the wall and nothing gets accomplished you just i mean that as good as i am nothing gets accomplished there it's just you know it's nothing's accomplished well how do you measure a laugh you can't there see there are exceptions and i'm just giving you know i'm giving you the extreme of what it's like down here but no these condos i kill i kill i kill them i look at people i insult them i see them these things to them because they love they love me they know me and i'm like they're i'm like a pet you what's the word impetuous i'm like their impetuous kid i'm like eddie haskell they can't wait for me to say something really mean because they know it's almost a god bless him almost at a rickles level you know but but i i mean i'm not not as violent of things that i say but like you know but but but insulting nonetheless yes so it's i've got this little thing carved down another comic you know sarge you know who he is no he's a black guy who was adopted by like right out of the womb by jews so he's a jew you got to look him up he's very interesting he was in l.a didn't really accomplish much in l.a but he found his niche wait a second wait a second hang on for one second yeah okay as i understand the cat skills this is what my father's friends used to tell me right the the showstopper at grossingers was the african-american who came out and sang my yiddish mama probably but i know johnny yoon used to do that you remember him the korean guy so he used to do my yiddish mama and they say they fall down they fall down they think it's the funniest thing in the world they love it to hear somebody who isn't white singing my yiddish shamama so this you know what's funny down here at these condos is they have a the other type of ethnicity that works really well here are italian-americans because like sal richards is great and and he's he's comic and he sings and they love italian singers and they're angry angry so they love the pat cooper i call i call these comics i call them the huff and puffers because if you wrote down what they're saying as a writer and you're such a phenomenal writer you would not see anything intrinsically funny you just see and my wife that fat she's my kid he's another one that stupid moron a mother and i go where i'm not finding anything funny here but they go ring and they huff and they puff and the next thing you know the audience is splitting their sides i'm going i don't see the joke i see the audience bending over i see you know i see i see comedy on the script i see it on the page and i when i hear the huff and puffers i'm so jealous of them because they're not i sit over a joke i don't tell a joke for nine years until i think it's right and then it bombs and it's no good it was never good to begin with but these huff and puffs and i go to mcdonald's screaming i'm going where's that funny who's that idiot who's let me write it down who's that idiot that is music it's music you're paying it's essence of the lyrics and the audience is you know it's like it's like robber kline i he's my idol he's every one of these are generation idol and if i i meet him i've met him twice he's not the nicest guy in the world i gotta be honest with you i can't say i've had a nice time meeting him i've met a lot meaning but but i want to corner him and go here's the conundrum robber we all started because we idolized you but you're a false idol because there's nothing to copy you can't be he can't be copied he's like he was an actor who was able to do stand up who's a singer who's can write he has every tool you know in baseball there's a you know the tool player he's in 80 80 is the high high end of the graph he's a five tool comedian he can write he can sing he can act he can um he can uh he doesn't do traditional punchline he's amazing so all these comics like myself and all these other guys that are way inferior that he'll ever we watched that and went oh i can do this and you know what no i can't i'm doing this 43 years i can't do it he's one of a kind and yet he started all of us so it was this false thing because you can't be like him if i watched the guys on ed sullivan i used to watch those guys and go add their corny and i never wanted to be like them well that's what i became i want run to the mill funny but cornball and if i had known that this is what i would have my value early on i sh i wouldn't have done this you remember there's guys like eric gold you remember eric old you know he is a huge producer he started like as a comic and he became an agent and then he became this gigantic you know jim carrey the wayans brothers him and jimmy miller's uh jerry denis miller's brother jimmy so these guys recognized whatever they recognized and and you know they're so wealthy now i don't even know if they exist they're on another dimension right right so yeah so i don't know where we go we go off on this i'm just curious one final question about the condo circuit yeah sure it's only three or four months a year that's it yeah and then what do the old people do with that auditorium well they don't do anything you know i mean they have lectures they really don't they show movies in it um it's not that it's not used but it's not it's it they can't regenerate money so they're not going to have a show they may have a low budget show like i said maybe at century village they'll have one low budget show a week which is you know like a singer comes out and plays to tracks and it's a very good singer but there's no band so that is affordable or i'd like to say a comedian but there are no comedians that can tackle these audiences anymore and uh so and and and you have to be really good to even begin to tackle them so an inferior comedian doesn't even exist anymore so it's really like someone will come out and sing or someone will play the piano and you know and the audiences are only like a third filled because so many people go up north uh for the winter well you're in delray beach florida how far is that from miami 30 about 38 miles from miami so i would assume there's a community of comics that hangs out at wolfies is there a deli oh no that all closed and the community of comedians there are there's the jerry grant who was an agent here in 1950 and jerry is still around he's i think he's 88 years old and they have this called the lunch bunch and the guy's like vick arnell of that era vick is younger dick capri do you know that name just a single prie was the first night i did comedy dick capri it was still at the end of fields it looks great uh funny funny funny nice nice nice man uh freddy roman is here and uh this guy stewie stone who i don't know he just moved down here i know from the friars in new york but the and lani shore who's a jewish comedian but grew up in north carolina and toured with kenny rogers and dolly parton so he went another way uh with you know with his comedy and he lives down here and occasionally they get together um and yeah and will shriner is down here and will hangs out in richie minervini from the east side comedy club and he now books the borgauda he lives down here and uh sarge like i said lives down here and of course everybody's favorite peter fogle that's one mile from me i can't get away from him is it peter fogle did peter fogle did he get a degree in history is he a professor no okay i'm thinking i'm thinking of somebody else all right so for those of you who don't know who bruce murnoff is everybody in comedy especially in l.a. loves bruce murnoff oh thank you they do and they think you're the funniest guy in the world and you have had every opportunity i did i did i did i had a lot of opportunities every opportunity to hit it big because the you did the minute the minute you came on the scene yeah you were iconic people knew who you were what you were because of the way you look the way you talk your rhythms you are a naturally funny human being but i didn't have that at first here's the problem and my my my work ethic was terrible and uh any comedians who listen to the show it's all about work look at jerry seinfeld this is a man who is a robot he just whether whether he produces anything or not he sits and he writes for hours a day and a work ethic like you cannot believe and i believe he has a very marvelous career to show from it however me gifted naturally funny guy can crack up a dead body but i was too busy chasing women maybe smoking a little pot and doing everything but doing the work and uh expecting everything and interestingly i moved to la i wasn't good when i moved to la i was too too premature i went there because i had stars in my eyes with no nothing to show for it but because i had such a great look everybody came in to see me and i stunk and everyone pronounced me ice cold and when you get pronounced bad and ice cold in los angeles it may take you know eight or nine hundred years to get to come full circle and i just don't have that much time so uh yes i wrote that show that what was the now let me let me one of one of the happiest nights of my life was in las vegas with my son and todd glass and avi and hanging out with you uh after the show and another happiest night of my life was taking my father to see your one-man show about 20 years ago there was this phenomenon of comedians doing one-man shows yes rick reynolds rod becker jackie mason had maybe one of the best ones and that woman it's pat i can't i'm blanking on her name yeah she had one uh yes and you had everybody and his mother and you had a one-man show right about all my failures yes all your failures how you and my failures i i went my whole career you know going on the road and telling comics at a dunk and doughnuts or wherever we were about these terrible things that happened to me and i never knew they were gross stories meaning that heavy duty of an amazing story because i was just led to believe from all my teachers in acting school and everything they tell you you're going to have failure so i just assumed that my failures were just run-of-the-mill failures but i would tell people these stories and mouths would drop open people would go you've got to do this as a story so finally remember richard baker you know rich rick mason's partner rick richard baker and rick mason tim allen i mean john mulroney some of the great janine garafalo biggest names in comedy they're producer managers they told me you have to do this so i put it together i went to mark travis who had produced or helped direct and directed the bronx tale with chaz pomin terry i took his class and i put all these stories together and i came up with my show called other than my health i have nothing and today i don't feel so good and it was it where my act was always trying to please others this one man show i didn't give a hoot about anybody i just cared about uh being inside hip telling it and exposing these stars in ways that no one can believe but i couldn't let me interrupt these were all true stories they were all true stories there was a time when i saw borat and when i was watching borat i remember i remember turning i turned to my wife about 10 minutes in i go i cannot laugh this hard anymore my kids because we're killing me i think my guts were oh and all the way through all the i got i can't i'm not gonna be able i'm gonna get sick i can't he's killing me i saw your one man show three times yeah and i took my father and every time i went to see it i laughed harder and people who listen to this show know that i've said this that of all the one man shows you weren't trying to teach me anything you weren't trying to prove a point you were just telling us the truth about your career you had brushes with greatness the greatness johnny karson carol o'connor oh and stories i can't tell until these people pass away i gotta i gotta keep it on the queue johnny karson died and he was alive when you told that story about driving him home drunk right but that story that i can't tell is about somebody's wife and she passed away and it's not nice and when i say an icon it's like hardcore i'm even bigger than johnny karson i can't go there right now so um but you didn't you tell this great but it's such but it's in such bad light you know i caught i caught stars like having a bad day it's like being it's like it's like taking somebody to the beach and he accidentally walked them into a landmine you know i'll see you later and go i better not step boom i go over here bang and i just i went and i hit every i caught like carol o'connor on his worst day johnny karson on his worst day x who i can't talk about now in a bad situation and and um yeah yeah i was the story i remember and this is because we had talked about karson with who was it larry brown was on the show on tuesday and we were talking about getting on the karson show and jim mccauley who booked the karson show courting larry to come on and do five minutes and getting the set ready and we were trying to explain to the young audience what it meant to do karson in the 80s it was everything it was the difference between being an open miker and headlining vegas if he know it was it was life life or death it was it there was you know there wasn't letterman there wasn't anything that was a launching pad uh except for ed solovan and then karson inherited that throne and that was it and you tell this great story i'm not going to ask you to tell it but there's this great story that you tell in your show about the night johnny karson came in to the improv yeah yes and he was in the improv and into his cups and somehow he ended up saying you this is how i remember it it's been right but remember remember the multi-level on it it because it's involved my agent at the time and his son so this was two this was three car acts this was like three cars colliding on a corner while i'm crossing the street going hey that car's gonna hit that car's that truck's coming out and it's like three things all amalgamated because when i did that story was the stanney robinson the no bud robinson yes it's the bud so it's a bud robinson a bud freedman uh urban arthur's son adam arthur the drug addict and johnny karson and it was it was a collision you know and so when i want to tell a story you know you want to tell a story with the beginning and middle and end this has a beginning tangent middle another tangent and two tangents so it was very difficult to construct it because i had to tell it real because no one it's it's so unbelievable that it's believable so i had to bring in so it was a folly of horror all going on with karson remember i have to drive the guy home at the end of the night and he's with a girl and he's married and and and he's just been arrested you know five days earlier and you know remember do you remember when he got arrested for drunk driving this shows you how mothers against drunk driving how that has progressed since 1982 when he came on the show he got arrested i think on a sunday night and then he didn't go on the tonight show for a week i believe that's how it went and then when he came out the following monday to do his monologue do you remember how he came out on stage uh he came out in handcuffs with two la pd uh officers walking him out onto the stage and the audience the guy was arrested for drunk driving where you kill people and the audience is going hey and the cops you know turn them around and they undo the handcuffs and he does the part you know when you shake your wrists and when you rub your hands on the wrist and he waved goodbye to the cops and that and now this is like um you know and this is i'm in the middle of all this you know yeah yeah so he this was nineteen this was 1982 i believe yeah 82 he was at the height the height he had just beaten fred silverman fred silverman was the head of nbc and silverman said johnny has to go to work he's not working hard enough and johnny said yeah i quit it's either you or me and they got rid of fred silverman who was the golden right the golden boy yes the golden boy of tv and johnny made this amazing deal where he owned all the tonight shows and they gave him everything he was at the height in 82 so he came into the improv how did you get on stage that night i got on he came into the improv drunk i mean if you want to go through the story he would this was still during that bender period so this is before the hey oh with the handcuffs he was in a bad bad way oh good do i have inside stuff i cannot tell you because it's just but i've got deeper stuff but anyway he's drunk and he's never been to the improv he's been to the one in new york let me let me interrupt you for one second let me interrupt you for one second yeah letterman gave an interview you and i was surprised i saw an interview with letterman right after johnny died saying that johnny brought the boat to the hudson river and called dav he had been retired and he called dav he said after your show come by the hudson river we'll cruise around the island okay and dav says yes and it's very striking letterman who would not say a bad thing about johnny carson in the interview did not intimate this he said the clock was ticking because johnny started to drink and i was on the boat with johnny and his wife and i was watching the cups once once i knew this was letterman said once we get past two cups it's time to get off the boat because you don't want to be around johnny when he's drunk so i mean he was a legend i didn't know that and i'm like this is an idiot at the impromptu i'm 20 something years old and he goes to the bar and and first of all let me set set it up the people at the bar hollywood los angeles california improv you got people sitting in the restaurant they're having dinner whatever they're going to go into the show but the people at the bar the lifers actors out of work everything they come in have a drink it's a very kinship it's almost like a cheers type of situation so they're non-plus anybody comes in oh look over there robin williams nobody even moves their head just their eyeballs over there over there over there robin william nothing when johnny walked into that bar that even the non-plus people everyone listen to they stood on a saturday night people stood and gave him a stand here not in the showroom in the bar and then the rest people just got up from their chairs because they knew the gravitas of johnny karsten coming to a comedy club to discover a comedian who's going to change his life for the better hopefully so well and and and he walks through this maze of people applauding because he doesn't care he's drunk he's a drunkie poop he's not johnny karson he's a he's a stew bum and he goes to the bar and he gets three shots of jack daniel's eddie the bartender poured in three shots of jack eddie eddie eddie eddie yeah and that's why i can't ever get sued from the i never got sued because every i had witnesses i got seen this shot i got witnesses nobody can he's really happened to me so he drinks those shots and i'm like five feet from him because i want to be where i want to smell him i want to go he was really he was not a short guy i'm six three so all everybody's short to me but he was like six feet tall he was and he had a big broad shoulders he was an athlete you know and so he walks by goes into the showroom and it's like i i get on on saturday nights but i go on five minutes to two i that's always my spot back then you know and sometimes i'd go on after robin williams so i'd have like three people that were making out all three of them with each other and that would be my audience but i knew that that's accepted that's how it works and you were new you were new relatively yes and that and this is what happens so he goes into the showroom and i go man whoever's on stage they have no idea they're going to be it was paul provenza by the way and he did get the tonight show they're going to be seen by johnny karson and no sooner than i thought that thought bud freedman comes running up to me the owner of the improv and he goes brucey i just got a phone call two guys are going to be late one canceled you're on next and it was like oh i had no time i couldn't even get nervous because because you just had no time so bud runs on to the stage takes off paul provenza and brings me on either please welcome a young man who'll steal your hearts from my home state of connecticut bruce mark and i go on stage and i've you know i got my opening joke and it does great because the audience knows he's there it's like it's a wink wink everyone is going to help everyone it's like the brotherhood in action and i do my second joke it does better than my first and i do my third joke it's better than my second build and i do my fourth joke and somebody in the audience yells out stolen you stink get off oh my god i'm being heckled i look to see i i i'm panicked and i look to see and it's my agent's son this terrible laughing it's the worst thing that could possibly happen she's not even started yet has it stories just going she's there with a with like the coke sniffles and an empty beer bottles in his table and i go adam what are you doing she goes i don't know why my father handles right conversation in a full house which are the cars that's sitting there it's the worst thing that could happen and and he's going you stink i don't know why my father handles you and i and i couldn't and i get on that my voice went like this i couldn't talk and this fits in the sweat if i have bar of soap all i could have just lathered up it was and i just it what seemed you know hours but was probably about 40 seconds i was just a deer the blood comes running up and he just kind of pushes me off to the side and i hand him the microphone and i just walk off the stage now that's a bad story but that's just the beginning i completely forgot this i completely forgot this oh my god i haven't told this story in a long time anyway um your listeners i'll tell you what my friend you know bob gollum yeah i want to hear this story so as i remember it hang on video of the show i know hang on for a second i don't remember the being heckled by the agent's son oh this is how i this is i haven't seen this in 20 years as i remember it you don't drink i don't drink and you have a car well okay all right well first i run out to the street because i don't know what to do you this is like well death confines what to do i don't know what to do and and and i walk up and down melrose and then i go i gotta face reality you have to face this you can't run you're gonna you're gonna run out of roads eventually so i come back as i'm coming back into the improv they had thrown adam arthur out of the club as i'm walking back he's gonna get to his jeep and he gives me the finger i fall over so now i have the worst thing i've almost lost my left foot so i can't even react to that and i go into the club and as soon as i open up the front door to the club bud robinson not to be confused with bud freedman bud robinson is a very great man who handled doc severinson and other great comedians like will shrine or with rick buddell johnny dark he is best friends with johnny carson because he used to be his opening act when he was a dance team with his wife and he you know is just johnny's dearest friend so he comes running over to me goes bruce you're the only responsible person we know he's too drunk to drive home you're going to have to drive home so we've got bombing walking on melrose not knowing what to do almost getting my left foot amputated by this idiot the same guy who heckled me and now i'm giving the keys to johnny carson's car i gotta drive home oh wait a second hang on for one second so there's an opportunity for redemption you get in the car with johnny and he can smooth things up right exactly so now we fast forward i'm driving this this car this Mercedes and i'm looking into he's in the backseat however what we forget to tell is that in the front row of the show and i still remember whether these four girls or two girls from chicago they must have been like 18 and they were so hot well guess what he's in the backseat now and making out with johnny carson and i'm going this is he was just arrested so i'm going i'm on the san amonica i'm on the 405 i'm going eight miles an hour i don't want any problems i don't want anything i'm going 32 miles an hour and i keep looking in the rear view mirror because i took sandy shire to follow me in my car so that i have a ride home once i drop drop him off and every so often the girl stops making out with johnny and she sees my eyes in the rear view mirror and she gives him like a a little rib hold on a second i got to let this person in ken i'm on the i'm on a podcast are you coming by all right just beating and i'll beep you in how do you like that you get you get a phone call while i'm on the podcast so anyway so the girl jabs him in the ribs and goes johnny he's funny you ought to put him on your shell and i go johnny bruce smirnoff at your service and he leans forward and he goes let me tell you something you got no you got no timing you don't know what you're doing you stink and i go thank you very much and i'm gonna get your home as safely as possible so and he's back to making out with her so then we get to the house it's just so awful so bad he lived in ma he was he had a few homes this was his malibu house and he had like a i i look like 13 foot gate with a turret a turret who has a turret with a with a guy with a shotgun in the turret i guess you have to have that you know and two iron gates so i come with the car and they open up another guard comes down opens up the gate and like in the godfather remember they were the godfather too with the when deniro goes to kill the guy who killed his father they open up the gate to don whatever that guy's anyway don fido whatever the guy so i go i pull into his driveway he's got a big circular driveway i pull in and i get out of my car and and i go to open the door the backseat to get the two of them out but what happens is he's in a lock lockdown on this chick he's like dry humping her because he doesn't want her to get you know hinky and want to go home so he's applying the pressure meanwhile all the lights to his mansion come flooding on because his help has all been sleeping and they're realizing oh my god he's having a party so the lights come on and then i look my car comes in behind you know my johnny's car with sandy at the wheel and what's the most amazing thing is another car and another car and another about seven cars all these drunks and barflies that i told you before that hang out at the improv they all just figured hey party at karson's house police strangers walking around his property the staff are half dressed coming running out he's having a party he's having a party who's going to drink to the party party party and and he doesn't see any of this because he's dry humping her in the back of the car here you know so finally he gets off and he just gets out of the car and he sees his staff at attention he sees all these guys like hanging on their bumpers hey hey johnny hi johnny and he just looks at me because what are these people doing here i go ah here's what i know so far i guess he may have told that guy who in turn he's got a lot of here before i have you arrested and i go johnny there is good is gone and i got it and i got everybody out and that was that's my and then of course on monday i call irvin arthur the agent whose son had created all this mess and i told him what his son had did and he apologized he said i profusely apologize my son is a become a junkie he's addicted to drugs and he had a fight with me and i guess this was his way of getting back at all of my clients i so so apologize and he apologized profusely and a week later he dropped me as a client because every time he thought of me i reminded him of his drug addict son so that was the end of that i lost on about 19 different levels oh is that a bad story what a horrible horrible night and you look at him swear the whole time that's just a just a horrible thing but what i wanted to tell your listeners is bob gollum i have a video of this show i'm one of the great knights and we put it up on youtube and it's i i i forget how you find it but if you put my name bruce smirnoff and then you put one man's show i believe it will take you to it and you'll see these stories it's really funny you know it's amazing yeah enjoy it i've done this show a couple of producers here in florida felt that this would be it got me a deal pretty much close to a deal with cbs it was not a done deal and it got me in the front page of the los angeles sunday excuse me thursday calendar so i had a lot of gravitas from this but it didn't it nothing happened and then larry david of course came along and you know the rest is history he's phenomenal and his his pedigree is beyond beyond beyond yeah but this is completely different from larry david it's completely different it's very similar because my idea for a sitcom was based loosely on that you know all my comedian friends and get and having normal friends and always screwing up my i mean it reads like a blueprint so anyhow wrong place wrong time um well we have to wrap it up and you'll come back and this has been so much fun i think the johnny karson story should be recreated for film well it was i had that i have the script but there's no use to do it because larry david does everything you know what i'm saying is that you have somebody play johnny karson have it somebody play urin arthur's kid sure it was very it's very funny yes it's it's it's because it's on so many different levels it's it's three-dimensional chess it's coming at you you know not like i said a three-way accident you know yes i will say this about the youtube video yes there's no way it can capture it does it's really good it really it was so many people in the theater i had to put people on the stage so you actually see people sitting on the stage and i'm talking to them while i'm talking to the audience you know what i remember i don't want to give it away but i i i remember it opens with i think the triumph of the wills it was some nazi you know that's in the middle that's when i described the hardest gig you know the hardest gig which is when you do these jewish events around the country they always put a holocaust video on to suck money from the audience and then they bring a comedian on and this to everybody but i was the first comic to actually be able to articulate it and show it and demonstrate i didn't show it visually i showed it audio audibly audio whatever the word is yeah i reenacted it with a and i made that video of i made that audio tape of you know of the of the whole thing and that's that is yes on the video you can watch that so it's all so funny so before you go i'm going to make bruce murnoff laugh with a brief true story and the audience is just going to have to suffer through this okay i'm making you laugh suffer okay i'm at my dermatologists and i sign in this was about 10 years ago okay and cedar sign i beaverly hills yeah and i'm checking into my dermatologist and i see a list of names and about an hour before i see billy rebec hang on did i ever tell you this no but anything with dermatologists and billy rebec it's already you know it's a you know it's donald trump and a model story it's good it's gonna be funny you know so i and i said he's a very straight down the down the middle dermatologist i went to him a great guy remember dr um oh god anyway whatever so i said i noticed uh billy rebec is is here for for a mold check he said he was he's gone he left a long time ago i said really i would assume you need a hedge clipper yes to find you know before you can get to the moles you have to just do the entire hedge clipper billy rebec is cousin it period with a great sense of humor a brilliant writer but it's cousin it he's covered from head to to the end of his toenails he has hair on his second knuckle look at your hand men you have hair on your first knuckle very few have second he has like a moe howard haircut on his second knuckle he is he's a he's an ape and he he has every product that are known to mankind he has he has ass buff number six he has eye polish he has everything that estee lauder hasn't even invented they test things out on him he has asked that he has like seven deep and cologne when you go to his his condo he has cologne for the the last eight years just in one bottle and it's backed up by seven extras and he has 27 different kinds of cologne and he has estee lauder ass buff one ass buff two coloration number nine this that you know feet smell feet de stinker number 16 every possible thing he's got there isn't a cologne cosmetic thing he has masks on top of that he has masks to put on a hollowing mask he's one of the funniest characters in life and when you put him in me in a room together and we start insulting each other they say people would pay money to watch us go at it you know i i just given you a sample but then he attacks me and i'm very very very valuable asset too so the two of us ripping each other to shreds people that the tears coming out and it's very funny you should google billy rebeck everyone our id ack another one with an amazing uh career and uh billy rebeck it says see body hair cousin it cousin it's cousin how do people follow you how do people follow you and stay in touch with you uh you don't i mean i i i don't have a website my email is bruce vodka at yahoo.com if you want to ask me a question because i have nothing to do i love to kibitz with people you can certainly email me and i love to go back and forth do you tweet i tweet but i'm very political it will turn off a lot of people so don't don't go to my twitter just just i'm on facebook you can do my facebook where you go that'll turn a lot of people off to just email me you want a donald trump story before we go we don't have to i could talk to you forever okay here's before you do the donald trump story yes you have to be my florida correspondent for the show or anytime you have to cover florida you have to tell me what's going on maybe the entertainment scene in florida whatever you want whatever you are you are amazing you you know to call you a comedians comedian right is a disservice to you but whenever your name comes up we just start laughing whenever your name is mentioned you are so beloved and that one man's show it's just hands down nobody nobody says it was great but let me let me finish let me very quickly so we did the show down in florida for all these senior citizens and they all love me and i fill the theater 500 people after and i'm not making this up after about 15 minutes they all started to doze off they didn't enjoy these stories do you know why this show my show worked in new york i did it at psnbc studios and i did it of course in la it was the cats me out in new york and hollywood everywhere else it's gone it bombs it's one of the worst shows people have ever it's it's actually better than ambien that's how it should be advertised because no one believes that johnny karson was like this no one believes carol o'connor no one believes no one believes any of these stories so they and they and they and they feel as if i failed so much they're not they're pragmatic people who watch this show these normal people and they go well if you fail why don't you find something else to do they don't understand that your heart is in show business and you're going to make it no matter why they go look i used to sell pendants at yankee stadium do that well i went and sold suits i made a million dollars what's this guy why does he try to tell jokes so much when he stinks it's not going anywhere what's he saying johnny karson johnny karson doesn't drink i watched that show every night and i saw smoke but i saw a drink what did he say he's drinking he's this is a ripple i'm not coming back to himself that way and oh i think i'm gonna sleep then they sleep that was my show and failure nothing the failure i mean a complete failure i can't ever bring that show back i'm unless i did it in la but again you lose money doing it in le because you have to pay for the room anyway um what what was i gonna say i'll trump oh trump okay so jeffrey ross the great great jeffrey ross the gross master general was a dear friend of mine and did help me a lot also during the one-minute show he's responsible for me getting that front page calendar article on the la time so i am indebted to jeffrey forever and ever he calls me 2002 and i'm living in new york he goes uh trump donald trump just called me he wants me to do a gig at mara lago i need an opening act will you come i go yeah sure now all i knew about donald trump 2002 this is before the apprentice i just knew he was atlantic city and divorces i knew nothing about i just knew he was what he was you know a character so we get to leguardia airport and we're in the private terminal uh because we're going on his jet with him he's not there but judge jeanine is there from fox news and a guy named david pecker who owns the national inquirer and it's like the four of us were kidding around i'm showing judge jeanine my stretches that i learned in gym class and we're having the great trump comes with melania that just his girlfriend at the time we get on the plane and i figured because you and i've been around a lot of hollywood people that this conversation is going to be about 95 10 it's going to be him dominating and five percent maybe i'm going to get a word in and so i'm i'm prepared for it because i've been around these people before we get on the plane trump comes in last and jeff goes bruce donald this is bruce smirnoff a comedian and trump shakes my hand he goes bruce would you like to sit in a cockpit for takeoff and i just go i could throw myself on a control stick and blow up the plane i mean i'm in a and this is after 9 11 and i'm in i'm in a control room in a cockpit i'm on this is unbelievable it cured my fear of flying i because now i know what goes on in a it is so cool you don't hear the engine you don't hear anything in the cockpit this was a 7 27 the engines are tail mounted so you just it's like nothing and then just lift up so anyway i come back into the cabin trump go and jeff goes you know donald bruce has some amazing stories and he lived in hollywood and i can't really tell the way he asks me a question about every kind of it's underground and people know what happened but it's about sarah silver and because i'm i move on move on we don't yeah i know so anyway so trump and i and jeff we had the and melania but melania really would it was just very quiet to herself she was quiet the whole time and we're going back and forth with stories and melania just sits there and i think she does long division because at this time she was just a girlfriend i think she's just figured by the minute but you know how much am i going to make if i leave this but obviously it worked out for the best and um but trump was phenomenal obviously this leads to of me favoring him into to be able to say that i spent but it more a lot ago he went out of his way to hang out with jeff and i he would he talks he talked he's not the guy you would see ripping rand paul and ripping jeb bush he is partly that guy i guess that is the showman part of him but i got to tell you it was the greatest weekend like on the flight back again i sat in the cockpit for a takeoff but i turned to him as the plane was landing in leguardia and i said donald i got to be honest with you i feel like a plumber who won to spend the weekend with donald trump and it's all coming to an end and i don't like it and i just just cracked the guy up the whole of the whole weekend so yes and i know politically you're not a big fan but that is uh the president and that's the story yeah and uh that is a pretty amazing trump story when you think about it and he he basically is the closest i'm not trying to be cute here the closest this country has to don rickles in that don address the elephant in the room and so does donald trump yeah yeah i guess sure absolutely all right bruce burnoff thank you so much i needed this i had the greatest how long were we on we were on like an hour and 17 minutes wonderful thank you so much david and i remain at your side whatever you need i got millions of stories here we didn't even scratch the surface joining us once again is professor cory brett schneider who somehow has been conned into giving me a 250 000 legal education welcome back to the show thank you i there is a bill at the end oh i never said it was free some of our listeners actually read the lakumi case terrific i i am amazed i so i have to compliment the listeners i i asked them if you read the case let me know hit the contact button and i'll send you something i haven't figured out what i'm going to send them but this is very interesting the show i put you on at the end because it's your it's heavy it's smart it required this is this is the these are the vegetables and the the diehard listeners they they listen i love it great it is a new medium podcast thing it's been around for a long time but i realized that there's radio there's television and in the past i used to think that podcasting was the means but it's the end it is it is an actual art form that is not worth dumping i have so this is very valuable stuff yeah right cory brett sorry go ahead sir i was going to ask and uh how do you i mean is it now at the point where more listeners listen to the podcast and the radio show or is it still there is of the radio that's it's hard to measure the ratings because i'm on public radio in los angeles so it's always hard to measure it's not that's not exact the the podcast is is precise and it's creating a nightmare for advertisers not that we have advertisers on public radio well public radio does have advertisers just not pacific a spot yeah i would say advertising is such an affront to our senses that within five years anybody who isn't on a fixed income will not see advertising they will not watch television that has advertising on it if you're not on a if you're on a fixed income then you're going to have to put up with broadcast television right yeah and i mean just the rise of uh netflix and hulu and the kind of a i mean really i mean it's a cliche golden age of television but there is so much that is so great on premium premium you know for not a huge amount of money not all not a lot of money no advertising and it's changing the narrative literally the idea of a television show without commercials you know it's changing narrative it's changing the way we write because in the past it was i'm talking to professor kory bretschneider now we're going to disrupt everything we just talked about and you're going to have to put up with five minutes of commercials for antacids yeah and now we come back and we have to remind everybody podcasting and or netflix people are getting accustomed to deep thought right uninterrupted deep thought yeah i mean it's kind of i don't know i think of netflix the the kind of serials are are like gold fashion um you know in the 19th century when you'd get your magazine and you'd get this long-form chapter and then another chapter wasn't dickens done that way and the quality and the depth can just be so much more um but i i don't know i said i'm not a producer of this stuff as you are but as a viewer it's just been an incredible few years i was going to hesitate to bring it up but i one of my binge binge watching episodes i went back and watched uh early larry david and there you were you know uh in the baptism scene i was so excited to see you i mean what i wanted i just to set it up the larry comes upon uh baptism but thinks that somebody is drowning so jumps in to save them and it turns out to be uh a jewish man who's converting right to the marry but you i don't know i don't know i mean maybe you remember i imagine it's all improv and then the scene that i loved is that you and a couple of others pull him aside once everybody's drying off and everyone else is angry at him to say you know we're we're part of your people and we want you to know that you're a real hero but the best line of the whole thing is you just at the right moment you pause and you say i would really like to invite you speak at my daughter's bat mitzvah and i thought like wow that's why i talk to this guy every week i'm proud to know him it starts with one man that was that was so all my stuff is in storage in la one of the things i have is a screenshot of my credit on that episode uh it's david feldman dot dot dot angry jew that was my credit and i just made me so it made me so happy i uh used to be very close to jeff garland before he completely took off we were like best friends but then we talk occasionally but we were we spent a lot of time together and there was a time when i was more larry david than larry david was is that right you stand up was like that where you didn't solve no my personal life was my personal life was more larry david and this is important because we're talking to professor kory bretschneider who is a law professor constitutional law professor and i i'm you brought this up much of my life has been dealing with injustice that is about me and of no value to society just like larry david right yeah i don't know you seem to have all this activism going on i don't know maybe it's more recent but the roce and the uh pacifica and the ralph nader show that seems like outwardly focused these days as is larry david i mean larry david is best friends with bobby kennedy jr he's very involved in liberal causes but i think it starts with personal justice i think you spend a lot of time growing up being slighted looking for justice and then you realize this is narcissism i better channel it towards a larger picture otherwise this is sick yeah yeah anyway i have a theory about people not larry david maybe me uh barbers trice and rob reiner i i have a feeling that a lot of malignant narcissists become liberals to justify how horribly they treat other people that's not definitely not good that's something the right wing i guess says about people on the left but uh like the clinton's it's probably true on all sides that there's always some you know what mix of politics and personality but i don't think it's particular liberals one thing i guess that's happened in the country i could speak for myself is that it's just impossible any anymore i think to just look inside or inward given what's happened and since the election really since the campaign when he started saying all these hateful things at least the way i have seen it among not just among you know with myself but colleagues and friends it's just impossible to not do everything you can every day to speak out against what president trump then candidate uh trump has been saying and now doing and so i don't know it's a you know kind of academic i was happy for a long time you know to talk to my colleagues and to write scholarly articles and i feel like every day now that you know in a way it's almost irresponsible it's important to do that too but you it's just central to look outward and to speak to a general audience and to try to do something ultimately about what this president is uh trying to accomplish to stop them right well let's review what we're going to be talking about i did read the kennedy decision on the santeria church in hyalaya florida and you assign that to my listeners because you maintain it will be the precedent upon which the supreme court builds its decision on trumps second travel ban so we'll get to that momentarily i also want to talk to you about the first amendment which by the way is what the travel ban you say will be the decision will be based on the first amendment i want to talk about anculter the other part of the first amendment she's being denied the right to speak at berkeley i want to talk about the multiple executions in arkansas that they're trying to pull off and erin hernandez who killed himself in prison let's start off with erin hernandez because i covered this on my radio show about three years ago he had been placed in solitary confinement to protect him from the prison community and we talked about what 23 hours alone in a prison cell does to a man he ended up committing suicide as i understand it he was not in solitary at the time he was allowed to mingle with the community what is solitary confinement what does it do to a prisoner do other countries allow prisons to put their inmates in solitary confinement and what what amendment to the constitution most likely would forbid solitary confinement um the um is it a lot there i mean the reason why solitary has been so predominant and i think it's not just that it's an occasionally used punishment but it's now the way we design prisons so think of the super max for instance is designed around the principle of isolating people uh is that the courts have in the past regarded it as an administrative um uh uh measure rather than a punishment itself so that's one way that they've avoided uh handling the issue but more and more there's litigation around the country that says that the practice is cruel and unusual and so a violation of the eighth amendment now why is it cruel and unusual you know it's giving people a time out would be the innocuous way of talking about it but when you actually look at what the empirical research says about people in solitary there's a very high rate of mental illness that results from the isolation and being taken out of the general population and there's speculation about the reasons for this but one thought is it because a basic human need is human interaction and so without that there is a kind of psychological torture that goes on and um that's why you see such high rates of mental illness resulting from excessive use of solitary confinement I don't think Americans as we move into the social media internet age and this fake reality I think a lot of Americans don't realize that they're in solitary confinement and they don't have social interaction and so they don't really empathize with prisoners who are cut off from humanity I'm being serious here I'm not trying to be cute yeah I think well I mean I would say that there's an important difference I mean I see that and I think that part of what is cruel and unusual is the forced isolation and certainly that doesn't exist in people outside but the other real difference is that the isolation that people are experiencing in the general society at least comes with some social connection and that's the internet so they're on Facebook or they're on email and they're able to maintain the basic need for human ties that way if you're in pop prison and in solitary confinement except in very few instances there there really is no access to email or to Facebook and so it is true isolation there are cases where 20 plus years people are in solitary confinement and there's an amazing law professor named Jules LaBelle who I've had come speak in my class and who I'm fortunate to have gotten to know recently who has cases around the country saying that the psychological harm that comes from solitary confinement is so so pervasive that that the court should say that at least in the most egregious cases but ultimately in all cases that the punishment is a violation of the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment the problem is how do you identify a prisoner who's having a psychological breakdown when so many of our prisoners now are psychologically defective we kind of put the mentally ill now in our prison system yeah that's right I mean one thing is showing that they weren't mentally ill before they went into solitary confinement and so finding cases like that I think also it's not just an empirical question of showing that in these certain cases mental illness has resulted but a question of starting to get the courts and people generally in the population because it's not just a legal issue it's a political one too to see that part of what's cruel is just the fact of isolation you know you think of part of it is about being denied basic human contact but it's also I think a violation of the 8th amendment because it's a denial of what in the court's words in a case called chop versus dullest they called the right to have rights and in that case the court said that what prison is is not an exile you're not being sent to an island you still remain a citizen but on my view they don't say this but on my view if you're a citizen that means that you have to have basic rights of free speech basic rights to practice your religion basic rights of association and that requires human contact and if you don't have any human contact you're just put alone in a cell it really makes a mockery of the idea that you still have rights of citizenship or a right to have rights so I think it not just in cases where it causes mental illness but in all cases it's a violation of the 8th amendment and it's too bad for Trump because I have a feeling Aaron Hernandez was probably the only new england patriot willing to show up to the White House to be congratulated it could be yeah it might have been lucky to have them yeah well I think he and Trump have a lot in common although the difference is Hernandez has been convicted of murder and not Trump but uh that there's still time multiple Arkansas executions that seems to be they're trying to move a lot of men through death row in Arkansas they I'm laughing just because I'm in a bubble and it's ludicrous but these are real lives and it's not funny Arkansas originally tried to execute eight men in 11 days because the cocktail needs to be used before it expires uh the capital punishment in this country is on the decline I thought I thought it's not really that popular anymore it's mostly Texas yeah I mean unfortunately I think the even if there's a national trend against it the fact that the courts have ruled that it is constitutional means that in certain pockets it can be used and the problem with the punishment is that it's always used erratically not just nationally but within the state so prosecutors have a lot of discretion and asking for the death penalty or not and if you have a prosecutor is particularly ambitious unfortunately and trying to get votes you know that's an incentive for them to use it but the problem with the punishment has always been that it's not in I mean there's a deeper problem which is that it's wrong and in my view also unconstitutional under that same prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment but aside from that the sporadic nature of it I think has always been really the at least a core reason for why it should obviously be ruled unconstitutional the idea that we would allow the system of law to just depend on the luck of the draw of whether you get one of these kind of I said ambitious maybe a better way to put it is rogue prosecutors who's who's willing to use it you know that's just a matter of luck and there seems something just flat out wrong about that in the society governed by the rule of law let me ask you about prosecutors I have met guys I grew up with who became stock brokers and they will gladly recommend something to you knowing that there's a good chance you'll be wiped out financially I find them despicable I grew up with a prosecutor he became a prosecutor I find it hard to believe that he would put a guy behind bars for life knowing that he's probably innocent but my friend needs to put numbers on the board is that the the mindset of a prosecutor they're willing to live with a false prosecution I think it just depends I mean like any profession there are really decent people who go into that job for all the right reasons and then there are people who just get caught up in the ambition sometimes maybe it's seeking higher office or media and they do you know unfortunately in some cases things that they really shouldn't do it's almost like institutionalized evil in that you work for an organization where the prosecuting team our job is to put this guy behind bars to make a case against him his defense team their job is to keep them alive yeah so we won even if the dna eventually would exonerate him but we won and that's good for us that's what they think right there are some of them who there are some I think but there are others who have made the decision to be reasonable I mean they have a lot of discretion both in who they charge and the kind of whether they certainly whether they ask for the ultimate penalty of death and I think decent prosecutors are really careful about making those decisions I should say too this is not you know just a side quirky issue there's a book by a colleague of mine named John faff who argues that a huge part of the phenomenon of mass incarceration is attributable to prosecutorial discretion so that difference of whether or not you are one of these as I'm calling it ambitious or rogue prosecutors who's just overly aggressive or not that that he's arguing in this book that that's really what makes the difference in has made the difference in the rise of of incarceration and what that means is that there are more and more of what we're calling the the rogue prosecutors unfortunately and their expression in the wrong way with dna exonerating so many men on death row are there consequences for an overly aggressive prosecutor in the most extreme case I guess I'm trying to think certainly removal you know the case I guess that I have in mind of a rogue prosecutor is this prosecutor that was involved in the Duke accusations of rape on on the Duke campus in Durham and he certainly was removed from office I don't know the details of whether they brought charges but yes and the most you know if you know he was protect but excuse me for one second yeah the prosecutor who was removed went after some frat boys right frat boys right who had access to money and lawyers correct yeah so think of all the cases where that might have happened and we don't know that that's what happened that's that's a real worry I think nationally and that's a partly a result of a deep flaw in our system which is that your access to a lawyer depends on how wealthy you are that's a blunt and you know really sad fact you know technically everyone has a right to a lawyer and there's case law that says if you're accused of a crime you'll be provided an attorney if you can't afford it but I don't think anybody thinks that the quality of representation has nothing to do with the amount of money that you have yeah just I it happened about 10 years ago then we'll move on but it really exemplifies the injustice in this country as I remember it there was a group of white frat boys I think they played rugby for Duke they were La Crosse I'm sorry La Crosse La Crosse yeah and they were privileged and they hired an African American stripper who claimed she was raped and then it turned out that it was a false accusation I think she ended up dying I think oh wow I didn't know that I think so I think there was like a tragic shooting or something but she falsely allegedly falsely accused these guys of raping her their reputations were ruined as they should be because they hired a stripper to come to their frat house and they were La Crosse players at Duke they were privileged and arrogant and of all the cases in this country we're joking about that right I mean they were accused of a crime which they looks like they didn't commit so it looks like they didn't commit it but what I'm saying is of all the overly aggressive prosecutors in this country who deserve to be right punished the the only one you can come up with is the one who overly prosecuted white privileged boys falsely accused of rape very telling yeah I think that's right I mean I don't want to take away anything from the injustice that the accused suffered in in those cases but it also when we broaden out to think about the problem nationally it's just very unlikely that this is the only instance of such a thing and we just don't know about the others because of the lack of resources well Supreme Court Justice David Feldman says yeah better a few do innocent white La Crosse players go to prison I hope not Justice Feldman please reconsider that thought that way better a few better a few of them end up okay let's move to the first amendment and this is going to be fun because it involves Ann Coulter's right to speak at Berkeley that's one part of the first amendment freedom of speech and then there's the other part of the first amendment which is the establishment clause which will lead us into Trump's travel ban because you say that the Hialeah case which is also the first amendment about religious freedom let's talk about Ann Coulter here's my gut reaction with Ann Coulter speaking at Berkeley sure my daughter went to Berkeley there was this provocateur from Breitbart news Milo Yaponapolis or whatever his name is who ended up leaving Breitbart because he defended pedophilia here's my feeling about Berkeley and Ann Coulter and Jerry Seinfeld or you know one direction speaking and performing at Berkeley I don't want anybody speaking at Berkeley unless they're a professor my daughter went to Berkeley it's a privilege to go there Ann Coulter doesn't belong on that campus Bill Maher complained that he can't speak at Berkeley because he's anti-Muslim Milo Yaponapolis from Breitbart riots broke out and now Berkeley is saying they can't guarantee Ann Coulter's safety they're afraid that they're going to be riots and so they've canceled her speaking engagement my gut reaction to this is who cares what is she doing speaking at at Berkeley yeah she has a law degree but she's a provocateur she's not a real I'm usually so with you but on this one you're really disappointing me I mean the Berkeley the home of the free speech movement I think you know speaks to the I'm sorry you're you're breaking up here is that oh sorry sorry I'll start again okay is this better yes okay I was gonna say usually David you and I are seeing eye to eye but here I'm not with you I mean I just think you know going back to the history first of all of the free speech movement and it's central place in the 1960s at Berkeley but also to the importance of free speech on campus to me there's you know it's one of the topics that I care the most about and what's central first of all to distinguish is that what this free speech right that's involved in a lot of these cases and that threats of violence I think in pedon is not the right of me or the university to invite a speaker but it's the basic idea that students should be able to have access to the ideas that they want to have access to I mean these are young people whose ideas are forming and if they're not entitled to choose what to hear then I think that sort of denies them not just the fundamental right as students but the fundamental right that we enjoy as citizens and that's the ability to not just say whatever we want that's what most people focus on but I think as fundamental to the idea of free speech and this is a public school so the first amendment does is relevant and that's the right to hear whatever argument we want and you know what that includes the right to hear awful nasty arguments and if we want to invite or a student group wants to invite and most of these cases are about student groups inviting speakers somebody whose views are bad or even vile now they have the right to do that and if they're prohibited from doing it that's to me a real violation I'll add a caveat I mean because Milo is particularly a heinous case and he really and culture too actually but you know Milo just has I don't know it's arguably zero intellectual content and just kind of provocateur but they absolutely have a right to invite him I think but that doesn't mean that the university is not going to take a stand or shouldn't so the argument that I've developed in a book about free speech called when the state speaks what should it say and the argument that I'm going to make in a public lecture that I'm going to give in London in a few weeks with the free speech author and thinker Timothy Artangash sorry I just messed his name up Timothy Ash and the thinker Jeremy Waldron it's really going to be an amazing conference University College London what I'm going to say there is there is an absolute right to hear all ideas but they're also with that as an obligation of the university sometimes to criticize those ideas so if Milo were to come to Brown and to be invited by a student group I would absolutely support that group's right to have him and I think the university would be obligated and I certainly push for them to provide the appropriate security but I wouldn't walk into the event I'd be protesting outside and my hope would be that the university as a whole would both protect his right to be on campus and also to criticize the content of what he's saying and that's the to me the true meaning of the First Amendment that universities institutions and also the government the state can protect all viewpoints but also criticize those that challenge the fundamental principles of liberal democracy and the idea of equality and Nazis and members of the so-called right like Milo they have a right to say what they wish but we also have an obligation as institutions and government has an obligation to criticize those views well I have no right to be talking to you but I'm going to argue with you so I'm not arguing with you you do have a right that's what I'm saying well no and that's the point I'm making is my kids go off to college they're unformed who cares what they want it's what they need oh no they're not they're not six year olds you know it's this they are they're 18 years old once you're 18 you're a citizen they have the right to vote and so like that's another thing I wanted to talk to you about the reason we gave him right I mean that's the that's the other point you know just going back to that early earlier generation that they can go to war I mean they're be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice and so the idea that they wouldn't have the fundamental right to choose what viewpoints to be exposed to you know they're I'm going to stop you for one second okay forgive me because I have no right to but we gave 18 year olds the right to vote back in 72 because there was still a draft and when we and what one of the things we did was we got rid of the draft and then gave them the right to vote if you serve in our military you should be allowed to vote at 18 but you get rid of the draft and you give these kids the right to vote that's just that's just a putative putative citizenship they're not they're not citizens you know it's such an entitlement here here you're 18 now you get to vote but you don't have to serve our country they're not citizens I don't know I spend a lot of time with 18 year olds I think that when you compare many of them and you know I'm admittedly dealing with a kind of very high level thinking student in the college classes that I'm teaching but you know to compare them to you know some 60 year olds the idea that the 60 year old is always going to have the better argument just frankly isn't true I mean so it depends on the person but you know I think the thing about the draft going back to that point is that it was a principle right not just that some people were going to war and so we should give those people the right to vote but that if you're old enough to be drafted you certainly are old enough even to serve you're old enough to what exercise the vote and then with it I think this is what we're talking about a right that's equally fundamental and that's the right to have access and to hear all viewpoints and and they don't serve they are served they're drinking they have a right now to be served even though they're not old enough to drink that's all they do they just drink and party and think about sex we send them off to college they're too young their minds are not fully formed where do they get off thinking that they can have a social club and invite Ann Coulter or Bill Maher to come speak I don't want my kids exposed to anybody weren't you the executive producer of Bill Maher show I worked for Bill Maher and I would tell him to his face Bill Bill sir sir thank you so much Mr. Bill Maher could you yes maybe if I stand up to you a little you'll respect me no he doesn't belong on a college campus he's a he doesn't have a PhD I want you know how expensive it is to send a kid to college and the way they treat professors geez I guess I just have maybe I'm here the more 60s pedagogy person but I think what education is is not somebody standing up and saying in a pedantic way this is what you should believe yeah it's about asking questions it's being socratic and it's providing an atmosphere on campus where people are exposed to the greatest ideas but also free to choose to be exposed to the ones that aren't so great that's part of what it means to become a citizen is to exercise those choices now I don't think we do that because we're indifferent to what they choose and it'd be a disaster if a university somehow found itself with huge numbers of Milo supporters and that was the consequence of the free speech but my view is that we have faith that that won't happen and that's why we allow them to invite people like Milo because they will clearly see not only what's wrong with it but as John Stuart mill said to be able to give the arguments against it and to refute it one of the kind of classic moments that happened in one of these incidents where people were shouting down a speaker as somebody said you know please stop I want to hear what this argument is so I can respond to it and to me that's the sort of epitome of what we're talking about two questions on that two questions on that one is who was John Stuart mill and secondly is heckling protected under the first amendment uh John Stuart mill appeared regularly at catarising star it was part of the mill's brothers I believe yeah they would put him on at the end right yeah I think wasn't he one of the fact like a liberal from Britain he wrote the most important book ever that everyone every reader I know I keep giving assignments but that every listener really everyone has to read once and that's on liberty it's the most profound defense of free speech that exists I think or one of them the other one is actually from a brown professor Alexander Mikkeljohn called democracy and its relationship to self-government those two books are short but great explanations for why we need this right and who was mills who was mills there's a John Stuart mill was a 19th century no but mills with the s see right mills yeah who was he he brought in the 50s right yeah that's much later and I don't I don't know that he wrote about free speech totally I think he wrote about the military industrial complex I always confuse the two so he wrote mill wrote on liberty and he said what I'm saying to you which is that you trust that people people should be given free speech so that they could see what's wrong in bad ideas and that over time through deliberation and discussion the good ideas will win out and the bad ones will not and the conservatives have co-opted on liberty the same way and this is then we'll move on but then I have some insight that I'm going to give you that's very profound and deep and you're going to thank me for this I know it will be I'm quite serious Ann Coulter is claiming McCarthyism at Berkeley when she wrote a book defending yeah that's Joseph McCarthy Ann Coulter every cover of her book says New York Times bestseller right her books say that the New York Times is a bogus operation can't be trusted is not factual and yet she claims to have a New York Times best she trust the New York Times to count how many books she sold but everything else the New York Times does can't be trusted here's the point I'm making professor I am an example of the of why this country has gotten so stupid I could barely read the the the Supreme Court decision you assigned to me I'm a moron but I have this show and I get to talk with you and raise my voice and I I'm going to end up you know when this is ever gone well I was pretty good I held my own with and you I have to point this out to my listeners because if you want to understand why this country is so stupid I am talking to a very generous professor who has a PhD from Princeton and political science he has a law degree from Stanford he teaches at Brown he has a masters in philosophy from Cambridge I am very patient I'm not I am very you are very patient with me because you're a teacher and part of teaching is letting some idiot like me think he's smarter than he really is and that's what has happened to the media in America it's been taken over by half wits and I really do mean half wits like me who get to talk to somebody like you and then we finish up and go I'm pretty smart I should run for office well you know I think that there are problems certainly with the media I would like to see more intellectual content like the kind of long-form interviews that you do and Terry Gross and others and John Fugel saying but I don't know I'm I don't think Americans are stupid I think when you have these conversations with people the same way that you and I you can disagree you can deliberate you can see what's wrong and what the other is saying and have give and take if you just put the effort into it the problem is this frustration that we have in the country where people just yell and scream so quickly but you know all it takes is a little patience and I think when it comes to the cat capability of people that what democracy and these ideas of free speech that I'm talking about rest on is the idea that ultimately we all have the capability to engage in thought and to deliberate and it's not that hard and you know I have conversations all the time with people from all sorts of different walks of life and I don't find any difference in people's ability to do this if you just engage them in the right way so I'm an optimist about human capability to pass I am too but not in America I think this country has been taken over by idiots like me well we have a you know we had an election that wasn't good for my theory of capacity but I think it hopefully and I believe this is true that it's a brief blip that will be corrected I did want to say one other thing about the Ann Coulter controversy which is that ultimately this is important to me too to to the view that I'm trying to sketch for you ultimately often the people who are having their speech rights potentially violated and I do think that if she is unable to come to campus or more importantly a group is unable to invite her that they're prohibited from doing so that that is a violation of their speech rights but we don't want to confuse that with approval of Ann Coulter's ideas or Milo's quite the contrary I mean the Ku Klux Klan is the subject of many of the most important free speech cases in the United States including a case called Brandenburg another about Skokie, Illinois and they claim all the time that they are some great heroes of the First Amendment free speech clause and nothing could be further from the truth we protect them not for their reasons but for the reasons that they reject the reasons of liberal democracy and so if Ann Coulter is you know against the free speech as you know her tactics suggest that she might or as you know the Ku Klux Klan is certainly not a defender of constitutional values we protect them not because we care about what they're saying in the sense that we agree or affirm or even tolerate them but because we care about hearing the arguments for ourselves and ultimately being able to reject them that's why I think it's so important that if we're going to protect free speech in this unique way that we do in the United States we have the most protective law of free speech in the entire world and for good reason but it has to come also with this obligation to criticize not just you and I citizens but also institutions have to be able to criticize and the government I think too its role is to criticize hate speech and so when Donald Trump is quiet about some of the hate crimes that have gone on or when he excludes mentions of Jews from the statement about the Holocaust that's a betrayal of the duty of a president who has to both protect insurer and support the protection of all viewpoints but also criticize those that attack constitutional values like free speech and equality of their law before we get to the other part of the first amendment in the travel ban Berkeley is a state college it takes the money from the government so that's why the there's a first amendment issue if you're a private college you would then be allowed to say no and colter can't speak here because you're not really taking money from the government but you really are I mean don't all yeah that's what I was gonna say it's a more complicated question certainly there is state the first threshold question and asking whether the first amendment applies the free speech clause applies is whether there's state action or not and because Berkeley is a government institution that there is state action now in a private college there isn't state action so the first amendment doesn't apply in that way but there are other regulations and protections that might apply and there I guess there are ways these are technical questions but of trying to argue that free speech protections might apply to private colleges and universities although that that's a much more complicated question it's much more complicated and it's gonna lead into the the santeria case with hyalia and the travel ban so travel ban to donald trump I guess it was back in march try to place a 90-day ban on people from iran libya samalia sudan and yemen and a 120-day ban on refugees several circuit courts put holds on that travel ban and the justice department now is taking it to the supreme court right there were there were two bands and they were stopped around the country by various district courts and then the ninth circuit court of appeals took one of those cases and put a halt to it and donald trump that's where he famously responded he'll see you see you in court it's something to the supreme court I mean sorry to the ninth circuit kind of an odd thing to say to judges but what the administration decided to do is rather than just fight for the first ban they decided to rewrite it and so they changed a few things they got rid of a preference for christian refugees over muslim refugees that existed in the first ban because they saw that that was going to cause legal trouble they reduced the number of countries involved from seven to six and they tried to to just clear it of the more obvious forms of discrimination now they didn't and taint of animus towards towards muslims but they didn't help themselves because steven miller the president's advisor said at one point that it was essentially the same ban but they just were trying to change it around for technical legal reasons now the problem with that is that courts are pretty smart so if you're just trying to change the words around that doesn't really work so the question is still whether or not first of all the second ban in the first or essentially the same and more importantly whether or not the second ban in its current form still violates several clauses of the constitution including as you mentioned the free exercise and establishment clause and as importantly the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment so you assigned to our listeners the church of the lu kumi babalu i ink the the hyalia did you change your microphone again i just shifted a little bit i've lost you are you still there so well uh how am i now you sound good uh do you count to three please one two three okay just one not as good or nah it's not as good you were sounding better okay i might have knocked the mic something we're talking with uh professor cory brechneider hello hello yes hello much better does that sound good yeah not not really uh how about now yeah okay this is good yes so the church of the lu kumi babalu versus hyalia this was a you assigned this to our listeners there was a ruling by supreme court justice kennedy yes it was decided june 11th 1993 i read it and i definitely saw why it applies to the travel ban it was why don't you tell us what the case was um that well you know if it's core teaches david i'm going to ask you for the basic facts you want to do them that's what we how we usually do it as i understand it santeria is a religion that came to cuba with the slaves it involves animal sacrifice and was outlawed by the cubans because it combines catholicism with western african tradition i i don't know how to pronounce in syncretism or something it's a fusion of catholicism and african american slave religious rituals i have a feeling it was outlawed in cuba because the catholic church didn't approve of it and they used animal sacrifice as the the reason they were outlawing the religion then the santeria came to america hyalia and they opened up a church and i assume that anti santeria prejudice from the cuban community in hyalia prompted a city-wide ordinance banning animal sacrifice specifically for the santeria church in other words they had all these different clauses and ordinances that allowed kosher butchers they allowed grayhounds to be fed live rabbits as part of their training they had the zoning laws that protected butchers they specifically outlawed the santeria practice of slaughtering doves pigeons chicken for animal sacrifice even though those animals would usually be eaten afterwards right and i mean i'd say that was you know just great probably 95 did they mention the santeria in the legislation do you remember that that's the one kind of question that i was unclear in what you said you said they were targeting the santeria but how do we know that is it because they were singled out in the legislation or because of this other stuff that you said i don't know i don't know yeah i mean that's you you gave i think the both the facts and then the beginning of the legal argument and it was all right except they never mentioned the santeria instead what they do is they talk about sacrifice and that's going to be important in the case but you got the basic facts which is and then they and then they listen to the which i found surprising that the supreme court listened to actual meetings yeah recordings of the city council deciding this case yeah and they realized that just the the people who spoke up were specifically targeting the santeria church and that when the leader of the santeria church got up to speak he was booed and then the i as i understand it and again this is the first time i've ever done this right the the constitutional issue is a law from from precedent a government can pass a law that outlaws religious practices if the law benefits the secular community as a whole that that because of the first let's just i think let's just you've got the facts i mean in a kind of beautiful way i think frankly much better than i could have brought them out absolutely and so we've got the details of what happened so now let's let's go to the second thing remember we did this how to how to brief a case so we've done the first part the facts and that's as only a kind of emmy award-winning quite a good you know that's not the normal kind of you know student that gives the facts you you with the narrative that was beautiful so now what we'll do and i should run for office and be on the supreme court yeah and i would hire you as my lawyer based on that recitation i mean i think a jury's gonna listen to you rather than a lot of the people that i know who do this profession uh so you know we just want to be clear and getting a handle on the legal issues now so you gave the facts which are really important details too that you brought out that are going to be central to understanding what happened that this minority religion in the town of highly is practicing animal sacrifice in the town passes a lot outlawing specifically animal sacrifice and in the law it makes exemptions for all sorts of killing animals including kosher slaughter uh and the the question that we have to ask so what's the legal i mean we're talking about a potential constitutional violation so what's the potential constitutional violation or the way i put it when i explain the brief writing is can you ask a question about how the facts relate to some particular provision of the constitution and so you just want to do it in one question so does am i making sense here yes of course okay so do you want to do that like what's the constitutional issue just ask it as a question well the the i i think the constitutional issue right is and you got to ask about a provision of the constitution remember that's how we'll set it up well i guess it would be the establishment clause you cannot the government cannot establish a religion or forbid a religion right and so you remember what those two so one of the clauses is the is the establishment clause as you said and then the other one that's closely related you remember what that is what they say when it comes to verbiting a religion now i'm being very pedantic i know but you know i would assume i'm gonna pull this out of my you know what i would assume that the government cannot forbid a religious practice unless it that practice jeopardizes the secular state and that there is your like going a million i did bbc recent recently and the guy said to me i'm sorry but i'm afraid we're just getting ahead of ourselves too fast so we're getting too too ahead i mean the more basic point which you've already said so i'll just repeat it back to you is that the question that the court's gonna ask is whether the ordinance that's passed by the town banning animal sacrifice violates the free exercise clause of the first amendment now the free exercise clause is exactly what you just said it says that you can't prohibit the free exercise of religion you could i think importantly asked to about the establishment of religion they don't deal with that question in this case but the travel ban case certainly will so we have the facts and then the question that we're just going to ask about the facts is it's very simple right i mean all of this stuff to do it well it has to be simple and elegant and the elegant simple question is does this law passed by the town council of hyalia banning animal sacrifice violate the free exercise clause of the first amendment that's the setup and now the third thing the holding is what's the answer to that question remember what they said does it violate it or does it not so is the answer yes or no well on the face i think they say on the face is that what they it does just say yeah yes it does it does the answer is yes you don't need to do any of that you know caveat the answer is always going to be a simple yes or no and in this case absolutely the answer is yes so now that what we've done i mean that might seem overly formal but we've got three quarters of what we really need to do out we've got the facts we've got the constitutional question and then we've got the answer which is there is a violation so now we want to get into what you were starting to do uh quite well which is talk about why like how do they know that if they would have just said in the law we hate santeria or they're prohibited from exercising their religion that would be not even a case that we'd have to consider i mean that would be such an obviously unconstitutional law that i don't think any town council would be so stupid as to as to do it now they don't do that instead what they do is they try to craft the law about animal sacrifice in a way that does target the santeria this is what the court says without mentioning them now how do we know that how do we know that they're targeting that's what's banned right is intentional prohibition on the exercise of one's religion but how do we figure that out given that they're not so stupid as to mention the santeria and you've given all the answers one of the main things is they look at the what they said at the meeting what was their intent and what they said the meeting is that this is an abomination against the lord and a lot of the councilman just came out and said that they are for banning the santeria uh or something that approaches it um there was an important other thing uh do you remember what justice scalia said about sacrifice i don't know if you read the concurrence uh that came that scalia has a separate piece that he wrote yeah uh hang on uh i don't remember i read yes go ahead um he says uh that sacrifice is not a neutral term that it sort of reveals that we're trying to target the in the tax uh the santeria if they really cared about animal cruelty or um fires in public they would use neutral language but using sacrifice that tells us something that tells us that they're going after this religion so there are two crucial pieces of evidence one is the town meeting the statements and the other thing is uh this word uh sacrifice so now we've got the case i think right mm-hmm so now the huge question is what about the travel ban and i guess what hopefully let me let me get back to let me just get back to that because there was a point when i was reading kennedy's decision yeah reversing the lower courts and defending the santeria i was repulsed by the practice because sometimes they don't eat the the animals especially if they're sacrificing the animals after a death and i thought and then the question is and this is going to be really obvious to you but what is the difference between animal sacrifice and human sacrifice constitutionally yeah what what is the the the precept that you can then say no you cannot do human sacrifice because the constitution says what yeah i mean there are the court net doesn't usually have absolute rules about this so i think that the way the doctrine would work in that case is they would say that by the way that the way of explaining what happened in the case is that the court found there's intentional discrimination based on religion or another way to put it is that there's animus towards the santeria and that's what invalidates the law but i think there always could be some countervailing um well i don't know how the animal how the human sacrifice case well let's talk about peyote let's talk about the peyote case i i uh i thought your human sacrifice thing is actually a really good question so so do you mind if i just it's not a kind of weird one it's a really important kind of follow-up i think actually uh i think what i would say there is that there are laws against murder and those laws are sufficient to handle human sacrifice now if we passed a law banning human sacrifice that seems like you're sort of selecting out certain kinds of um murder based on a religious preference so i'm not sure that's constitutional and you don't need to do it that way you would just have laws against murder what the court's saying here is uh we're not going to allow for the intentional targeting of religion period and you know that that's why the case comes out the way that it that it does the other thing that i learned is that government law supersedes religious law that if the government passes a law and it and a religion can't follow it the government wins um that's a whole other area yeah right and and we'll revisit that it concerns the um it concerns the uh peyote issue that you raise what's happening this is a sort of now we're getting really deep into this yeah there had been an earlier way of thinking about religious freedom that said not only are you protected if you're targeted the way that the santeria are but you're protected if your religious beliefs are adversely affected and even though there might be a law that's perfectly fine uh like drug laws uh if you're uh um if you're a person that uses drugs for religious purposes the old doctrine was uh you might have a religious claim a free exercise claim to not have to follow the drug laws now in a case about peyote justice skolia came across that realization that if he had followed the old rule he was going to have to allow people to do drugs if the religion demanded it and he switched the rule he said you know what i'm not going to allow this idea that if you're just affected by a law in your religious belief then uh you opt out i'm going to require this much higher standard of showing that you have to be intentionally targeted but even skolia said even though he wasn't a great proponent of using uh the religion clause is an expansive way even he said the santeria are obviously targeted it wasn't a controversial case it's uh unanimous that everybody agrees this law is so bad it's obviously going after the santeria for exactly the reasons david that you laid out very carefully about granting exemptions for other kinds of slaughter for instance the comments at the meeting and then what i added about sacrifice that it's so obvious that it's intentional discrimination that on any interpretation of the clauses uh this is this is invalid now that's going to be important you know as we get to the next case yeah let's move on to the child yes i am and yes absolutely and and the other important thing i was surprised by how important words are how they cite absolutely mariam wepster that they're constantly defining words which terrifies me in this post-literate society if language breaks down so does justice so absolutely and uh which would also in our president could be especially worried well but then but the other yeah but then again making english the official language there is i can understand a legal reason for that now where you say hang on let's let's stand a thwart to the evolution of our language and say slow down because if language well i don't think the language of the law i mean if the meeting was carried out in spanish for instance we could have the exact same discussion but the point is i think the reason why language matters is that if you use language either in the content of your law and what's really important for the travel ban case because now you're really understanding the deep reason why it's clearly unconstitutional if you use it when you're crafting the law and you show that what your intent is is prejudice or discrimination then that law is invalid and that's why that case is unanimous because if anybody who does what you did and goes back and reads those transcripts or does what the court did and hears what happened at the meeting knows that they were going after the santeria and the idea that somehow is that men's rate by not mentioning it's men's rate it i think you would just call it a 10 i mean men's rate usually we talk about in the criminal context but yeah it's a it's a form of the it's the mental state that they're using the intent that they're using in crafting the law and the their intent is is animus it's hatred of the santeria or prejudice against them just as this is in the travel ban case so let's let's go to the travel ban by the way thank you and this is you're seeing it though you see the connection right yeah and it's it's it's even easier the travel ban case because it's the facts of lakumi is an easy case it's unanimous for all the reasons that you suggested those statements are so damning at the meeting and the word sacrifice is so damning that it just means that legislation that ordinance is never going to survive supreme court review now the travel ban is worse because there's only one person involved in crafting it in the end and that's trump and it's not hard to figure out what in his mind because he told us and he said he wants a muslim ban and then he tried to change it around and deny it but repeatedly even now the website talks about a trap a ban on muslim immigration and his advisors rudolf juliani told us he wanted a muslim ban he asked me to make it legal meeting a muslim ban the comments i mentioned from steven miller everybody told us the same as the town meeting that this thing is unconstitutional that's they gave us all the evidence that we need just like in lakumi for all the reasons that you suggested so it's not a clean slate the law is not measured solely on how it's written it's also measured by what led up to the writing of that law what you said when you ordered it to be written absolutely and if somebody asked you for a case citation to that idea what would you say i guess look look at me exactly and we have i have a brief that i uh helped organize with uh my friends and colleagues uh nelson tebbie and mike schwarzman who are two law professors one at brooklyn law school and one at uva and we have a lawyer uh josh matz and we have uh together initiated a professor's brief uh arguing just what we just said that uh under lakumi and under the animus doctrine uh this travel ban is clearly unconstitutional and it's not just us you know it's not just david and me and these three people i mentioned we now have um the most prominent uh many of the most prominent laurence tribe is signed on to it jeffree stone the former dean of the university of chicago law school it is a brief of over 40 uh constitutional law scholars uh who are agreeing that lakumi applies and that this uh is a clear instance of unconstitutional animus against muslims and the travel ban is unconstitutional under our current law of free exercise establishment and equal protection will you do this again next week i'd love to yeah i mean what what a thrill i mean i hope i wasn't too pedantic are you i'm gonna say something i'm gonna wrap this up to leave a thought for you what's the next assignment um why don't people read our brief now that you've read lakumi you can see what we did with it and um can we send it out to listeners you can if you look on the take care blog if you google take care uh you'll see it if you look in balkanization we're gonna have an op-ed out later uh we've posted it publicly so anybody anybody can read it and i'll i'll send you the link this is this is uh an amicus cure what what do they call these correct yeah uh amicus brief friend of the court friend of the court and then the ninth and fourth circuit courts of appeals are going to hear the travel ban case and they've asked people uh who have a scholarly interest or some interest in the case uh to to help them basically decide the case and so we've written um uh i should say josh drafted uh and we contributed the ideas to the brief about why lakumi applies and this is unconstitutional animus uh and um uh yeah check it out so before you go how do we find is there a title to this how do we what is the title the easiest way is there's a a blog called uh take care and i'll just get you the website and we have a link to it up there so that would be an easy way take care dot org it's called no it's actually sorry i'll say it again it's take care blog dot com take care blog dot com yeah and and the amicus cure a link to it yeah you'll link to that i'm going to say something and i have to admit i'm proud to say this and i'm bragging to you but there's a serious problem with this and that is when i get off the phone with you i'm going to go record the ralph nader radio show i'm going to be talking to ralph nader right there's something seriously wrong with our media that i get to talk to you and ralph nader there's i'm being i'm not this is not false humility there's something wrong i don't think so david i mean you're you're asking questions you're falling along and you're interviewing people who have studied this you know various issues uh in ralph nader's case you know one of the most influential people in american history on safety issues and and others who have expertise and you're drawing them out for a general crowd and that's a particular you know not a minor talent it's one of the most important things there is i think that uh the fact that you're doing that is a huge service and it's not an easy thing to do and it's something that uh you know we need more of well i can you listen you know that's the main skill i think you ask questions and you actually listen here's the danger and then i'll i i'm going to let you go you've been more than generous with your time the danger for somebody like me is your generous ralph nader is generous you begin to think you're smarter than you really are and that's how you end up with people like bill o'reilly or donald trump they mistake real bright people's politeness and civility and they transform that into a self-worth they don't deserve i think it's something different going on i think that trump has an ignorance and a hostility to knowledge i have never seen an openness that he has to learning about the most basic facts of our system i mean as i said last time i don't believe he knew how a bill became a law maybe until as recently as the destruction of his health care bill uh and you know it's a dispositional thing that some people think they're brilliant and they don't have to listen and they don't want to learn and then there are other people who know how to learn and who at some point somebody taught them that they went to a school they had a parent and they have an openness to knowledge and that thing is i think uh you know what makes democracy possible and what will make it thrive is people's capacity to do that but we've got to model it and teach it and it doesn't happen naturally and the narcissism that you get from somebody like trump is the opposite of that and that that's frightening to me i mean it right neil gorsuch is a horror show but he's still smarter than donald trump and i would i would assume trump has figured out a way when he's in neil gorsuch's company to think he's superior to neil gorsuch in some way right that could be i mean that's a scary thought but yeah he he just doesn't know you know what he's who he's talking to to him it's all politics i think courts he's used to dealing with them in a way that's purely instrumental he has no respect for the rule of law it's just another power instant if he didn't have to go to court i'm sure he'd prefer it if yet other techniques he could use for exercising power they'll use it when he can but not when it won't benefit him you know he he wants to sue people when they criticize him but he doesn't want to be sued when he incites allegedly incites violence so i think you know that he's got a i don't know a hostility i would say to to learning into the rule of law gorsuch a final thing having criticized him for the last four weeks i mean i should say i've never said that he's not smart he seems like a brilliant guy i think if he was on the show with us maybe one day we could get him to talk to us uh that we'd enjoy it you know he's a thoughtful person i i i'm being a pig i watched an old 60 minutes interview with clarence thomas blew me away blew me away we'll talk about that next time yeah professor cory brett schneider is a professor of political science at brown university he is an author and a journalist he appears in politico the new york times npr bbc and i thank you for your time what is the name of your book uh when the state speaks what should it say um and it's uh on amazon dot com and it's about uh free speech and hate speech and all these controversies around free speech that we've mentioned thank you there's a long discussion of lakumi okay and uh take blog take care blog dot com yep if you want to read the brief for next week we'll talk to you next week sir thank you okay my pleasure thank you great that's our show please friend me on facebook follow me on twitter share share this episode with everybody and please do all your amazon shopping via the david feldman show website check out pay what you want every month we're putting up about 10 new minutes of stand-up the album is called pay what you want download it and pay what you want to hear pay what you want i cannot stress this enough fill hendry show dot com fill hendry show dot com 30 000 hours it's uh you 30 000 hours of fill hendry from the show briz studios in downtown manhattan medicare for all and for all a good night