00:00:16.720It really, it sounds like a golden girl.
00:00:25.080I was watching so much Seinfeld over the last week,
00:00:29.180And I feel like because he's not funny, a lot of his quote unquote comedy is just like instructing people to laugh based on the pitch of his voice.
00:00:39.060Exactly. I mean, it's it's handholding your way to a laugh.
00:00:43.100It's kind of like when there are sitcoms that have laugh tracks, for example.
00:00:47.680Although I do love Seinfeld and I'm sure we'll be talking about this at some point.
00:00:52.080It is a great show. The man Jerry Seinfeld, though, is not so great.
00:00:57.200Jerry Seinfeld is worth $1.1 billion. He is the richest comedian in the world.
00:01:05.040I'm already annoyed. I'm already annoyed because you know who the richest comedian in the world
00:01:08.580should be? Meg Stalter. Honestly. Jerry Seinfeld is the richest comedian in the world because1.00
00:01:14.800for 10 years of his life, three decades ago, he played a semi-fictionalized version of himself
00:01:20.940in the sitcom Seinfeld, which was written by someone funnier than him who also has better
00:01:26.780politics, but let me not get ahead of myself. If you were sentient in America in the 90s,
00:01:33.280Jerry Seinfeld was basically a pillar of culture. He was a pillar of home life. Seinfeld was
00:01:41.060routinely the most watched show in the United States, and its series finale in 1998 drew 76
00:01:48.060million viewers, or a quarter of the US population at the time. In that final season of Seinfeld,
00:01:55.400Jerry was making $1 million per episode, which is $2 million today, adjusted for inflation.
00:02:03.920I was born the year Seinfeld ended. And by the time I could watch TV, we kind of moved on from
00:02:11.180Seinfeld. I mean, a lot of people haven't. I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with that.
00:02:14.440But like in my house, we just we didn't have Seinfeld playing. I wasn't really a big Seinfeld
00:02:17.560guy. But nevertheless, Jerry has always been a supremely famous person in my head. And I think
00:02:24.460because of that, I've always assumed that he's been working on a lot of things that I just don't
00:02:30.200watch because of like my taste preferences or whatever, but he hasn't. The most notable thing
00:02:35.720that Jerry Seinfeld has done since Seinfeld is voice act as Barry in the B movie, which to be
00:02:41.700clear is notable. There's a lot of things to criticize Jerry Seinfeld for, but for me, B movie
00:02:47.100will not be one of them except for its promotional tour. We'll get to that. Nevertheless, the
00:02:52.040magnitude of Jerry Seinfeld's 1990s celebrity is unfortunately for him no match for the person
00:02:59.580that he has become. Always has been? I don't know. Today, we're going to look at the evidence
00:03:05.460and let you decide. And to do that, welcome back, my dear friend, Emma Vigeland.
00:03:11.020Always great to be with you, Matt Bernstein, my lovely, lovely friend.
00:03:15.980Emma, this episode is entirely a product of your texting me saying that we should do a Jerry Seinfeld episode. I know that he has been pissing you off lately. And the further I dug into the archives, we're in for a ride today.
00:03:31.760I'm a huge fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Larry Davids, and we will be talking about him as well. But Seinfeld just went viral recently. I'm a huge Knicks fan and he was at the game. And when I think we're about to play this, but he was asked about Palestine and of course decides to be an absolute genocidal freak asshole.
00:03:53.820And he has been that way for quite a while.1.00
00:05:12.140That is the position of pretty much everybody who still calls themselves a Zionist. But the fact that this immensely wealthy man took the time to laugh in this guy's face as a genocide is being committed to say that Palestine doesn't exist, an explicitly genocidal statement in and of itself. It's just like, keep walking, dude, but you can't because you're a fanatic.
00:05:34.600I've known Jerry Seinfeld is a Zionist. He and his wife, Jessica, have been doing Israel advocacy for a long time. But even with that in mind, this was kind of a shock to the system for me. The three words, Palestine doesn't exist. And I think you're right that this is basically the mainstream Zionist belief at this point because movement has become so nakedly far right and genocidal.
00:06:03.040However, I do think it's worth unpacking for a second here. We get about zero minutes into
00:06:10.960like Seinfeld's life chronology and I'm like, let's start unpacking. Sorry, this is a leftist
00:06:15.940podcast. You know, back in the day when I think liberal Zionism was still considered by many to
00:06:22.420be a tenable ideology, you had kind of like the two-state solution people. Think about Kamala's
00:06:28.6602024 campaign run and what her party line was at the point, which was like, you know, we want
00:06:35.320safety and security for Israelis and safety and security for Palestinians. And I think there's a
00:06:40.920point that Jerry Seinfeld would have, you know, said that I mean, he supported Kamala. Yeah. And
00:06:45.940Joe Biden. And, you know, he's he's always kind of been an anti-Trump guy. Don't know if that's
00:06:50.280still the case. But that perspective seems to really have collapsed. Right. And I think that
00:06:55.960anybody who hasn't gotten off the liberal Zionist train at this point right now is complicit in this0.56
00:07:02.800viewpoint that is based in erasure. And it's also not theoretical erasure. I think if you were saying
00:07:09.420this prior to the genocide, of course, when liberal Zionism was a little bit more digestible
00:07:14.040for people and was a fairly mainstream opinion, it would be one thing. But for us to be two and a
00:07:20.380half years into the act of genocide of the Palestinian people to add to that chorus and to
00:07:28.060add to the bloodshed by contributing to the perception of erasure and saying that an entire
00:07:35.460people doesn't exist as they're being exterminated. I mean, what else can you call that except to be
00:07:41.700almost psychopathic? And this is also I mean, you have a lot of these like liberal Zionist figures0.95
00:07:47.200in the Democratic Party still being like, I mean, even, and love to Bernie Sanders,0.83
00:07:51.700but he still does this sometimes where he'll be like, oh, this is Netanyahu's far right
00:07:56.440government of Israel. And they'll kind of pin these like outwardly genocidal ideologies on
00:08:00.940Netanyahu, on Ben Gavir, on Smotrich. But here's Jerry Seinfeld saying something as genocidal as
00:08:09.360Ben Gavir tweets on a random Tuesday. Right. I do not think that we should be catering
00:08:15.580the Democratic Party to the whims of these individuals. Just go vote for Republicans if
00:08:20.900this is your pet issue. But the reality is, is that the party has no future and we don't have
00:08:26.320the ability to fight fascism. If we can't stand up against genocide, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has said
00:08:31.980so eloquently in that we also the party has become so narrowed, given this is such an aside,
00:08:39.020I won't get into it, but the active pursuing of affluent suburbanites in the coalition that has
00:08:45.340been a strategy of the Democrats since 2016. That's why they're always going after the mythical
00:08:50.140Republican that's leaving the party for them. They have narrowed the party and a lot of working
00:08:55.660class voters have left, narrowing it further just to appease wealthy Zionist donors and make sure0.81
00:09:02.260that guys like Jerry Seinfeld feel like they can still be woke and enjoy Barack Obama's like0.61
00:09:09.840Netflix series and stuff like that. Give me a break. They should not be in the party. They're
00:09:14.780not welcome here they are contributing to fascism because they are neutering the only opposition
00:09:20.560party that is exists in the country right now whether we like it or not i also just think a
00:09:25.820lot of people would hear those words palestine doesn't exist and it's like whoa that's really
00:09:30.620extreme like that's very extreme like i said within the discourse in israel i don't think it
00:09:36.900is. I think it's the mainstream. But Jerry Seinfeld, what you have to infer from him saying
00:09:44.700this to some random guy on the street, knowing that he's being recorded, is that he's surrounded
00:09:49.500by this. He is surrounded by this rhetoric all day. He has a $40 million home in the Hamptons
00:09:56.440with his wife, Jessica, as well as a home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where they are0.56
00:10:01.500integral in these very high society sort of upper echelon Zionist, specifically Zionists often
00:10:10.220engage with lots of Zionist activism communities. But to me, it's so revealing as to how some of
00:10:16.320these social groups operate. The fact that he's saying that openly means that he has said very
00:10:21.980similar things, if not worse things, many times over in private. That should not be surprising to
00:10:28.240us however i i do think that it is worth it lingering on this for a second to just think
00:10:33.500about what it means when you say palestine doesn't exist right now as you have the greater israel
00:10:39.140project underway in practice not just the genocide in gaza but the constant settler attacks and
00:10:46.800violence in the west bank that is actionable erasure as well he's essentially saying that
00:10:52.300all of the even land that Palestinians have and have been forced into, the smaller and smaller
00:10:59.040parcels as more stolen from them, that even that doesn't belong to them. What happens if they choose0.69
00:11:05.720not to leave? The answer is that they die. And the idea that Jerry Seinfeld, with all of his wealth
00:11:12.740and influence and power, still finds a way to justify his viewpoint of extermination from a
00:11:20.000place of victimhood is a level of psychosis that is I think a combination of wealth of having so
00:11:28.360much wealth which you know I've said this before I think on your show like it doesn't matter if you
00:11:32.420have to be a sociopath to become a billionaire or a billionaire makes you a sociopath regardless
00:11:37.880that amount of wealth removes you from shared humanity so there's that piece of it that informs0.61
00:11:43.860his rabid Zionism. But there's also the kind of cult like devotion to an ethno state that is as
00:11:53.100racist as segregationists were in the South that did not want to mix with black people. It's that
00:12:00.360ideology right now. But it's one that is kind of like has a national security infrastructure here
00:12:05.780in the United States, but also groups of very wealthy private donors that help further that
00:12:11.460project. Should we talk about how Jerry Seinfeld became Jerry Seinfeld? Let's. This isn't going to
00:12:17.960be like a super, super biographical episode about the entirety of Jerry Seinfeld's life and work
00:12:23.680because he's been around for a while and he's done a lot of things in the public eye and it
00:12:28.920would be very difficult to cover all of them in the detail that some of you might desire. So I
00:12:35.480want to focus on a few things thematically throughout the episode to show how I think
00:12:41.120Jerry Seinfeld has just become so divorced from reality and the human condition to the point where
00:12:47.660it becomes very hard to stay in the good graces of people no matter how famous or beloved he once
00:12:52.640was. Jerry Seinfeld was born in Brooklyn in 1954 to a nice Jewish family. His dad was a sign painter
00:13:30.180Yes. I was wondering when I was seeing some of the more extreme pro-Israel stuff that Jerry Seinfeld has been saying, I was like, where did this come from? But that's kind of a dumb question for me to ask because I grew up, you know, in a synagogue with like the maps of Israel on the wall and you label the different parts and you know where Tel Aviv is.
00:13:54.280And, you know, they, of course, indoctrinate in Jewish American life for you to feel like Israel is your second home.
00:14:00.440And I could have only imagined that that was probably like times a thousand in Jerry Seinfeld's house, given that like his dad was a Jew who like fought in World War Two.0.84
00:14:08.520And they were probably like, Jerry, like you're going to spend you're a child and you're going to spend a summer in Israel because like, you know, you could have died in the Holocaust.
00:14:15.300And this is where you're going to go to like not die in the next Holocaust or something.0.62
00:14:19.520Yeah. And I can understand that perspective.
00:14:22.440you you gotta wonder what the formative experience was for jerry though on that on that kibbutz uh
00:14:29.100maybe you know he he got his first bj on that trip or something and that's why he's a zionist
00:14:35.020to this day i mean never no one ever knows how uh these formative memories come to be
00:14:40.200do you know the next time that he would return to israel no promoting the b movie
00:14:45.720it was literally jerry seinfeld went when he was 16 went his whole life without returning to
00:14:52.160israel and then in like 2007 he was promoting the b movie i was going to say this till later but i
00:14:58.080can't help myself if you scroll down in the outline and i'm going to throw this image on
00:15:01.300the screen there's images of him doing press for the b movie in israel oh you see where the b movie
00:15:08.960is in hebrew oh it's very bizarre it's very bizarre oh my gosh i mean as if they couldn't
00:15:19.660get the picture with b movie being the title we've got to make sure this is in hebrew in israel
00:15:25.640it's kind of self-explanatory it's very strange also i was looking into whether or not he went
00:15:34.480on like a truly like international tour to promote the b movie and he didn't i think he did like a
00:15:40.480stop in australia and a stop in israel as one does anyway jerry goes to college he goes to
00:15:48.220New York State School. He returns back to New York City where he tries his hand at open mic
00:15:53.400nights. This is in like the latter half of the 70s. And then his first kind of breakthrough gig
00:15:58.020was he was a recurring guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and also had a recurring guest
00:16:04.400spot on Letterman. I don't know if you're familiar with any of this. I'm not. I'm I start in the
00:16:09.080sitcom days. Well, so then comes the sitcom in 1988. Seinfeld and Larry David get together to
00:16:16.020create the sitcom that would become Seinfeld, which stars Jerry Seinfeld as a fictionalized
00:16:21.800version of himself alongside his three friends played by, of course, Julia Louis-Dreyfus,
00:16:28.000Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards as they gallivant around New York City. Larry David was
00:16:34.600the head writer of Seinfeld and the showrunner for the first seven seasons out of the total nine
00:16:41.120seasons. Notably, Jerry Seinfeld only has writing credits on a total of 17 out of the 180 episodes
00:16:49.880of Seinfeld. Just saying. Just saying. All right, Emma, talk about Seinfeld because this is way more
00:16:57.040part of your life than mine. Yeah, I mean, I love Seinfeld, of course. Everybody loves Seinfeld. I
00:17:03.180love Curb Your Enthusiasm more. I think that it's unscripted nature is more fun. And Larry
00:17:10.680is even more himself. And it's more Larry, less pressure to fit into kind of a sitcom format.
00:17:17.680And frankly, Jerry Seinfeld in Seinfeld is the least interesting part of the show and the least
00:17:24.760interesting cast member. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is phenomenal and hot as hell in that show.
00:17:31.500she's just killing it she's hilarious and remains hot by the way god i mean and not only hot but0.99
00:17:38.860booked not everyone can say the same and by the way julia louis dreyfus grew up really rich too
00:17:44.440so she it's not like jerry is wealthy now so he doesn't need to work but she never needed to work
00:17:50.980she just did it for the love of the game and that's why we stan her um but jason alexander
00:17:55.500is great as the kind of larry style character of course of george and michael richards despite of
00:18:01.660course uh his deep racism it's you know kramer's a really hilarious character but jerry is the
00:18:07.500weakest part of the show and i think that you can see how it really was larry's brilliance that
00:18:14.100carried the show one in just how phenomenal curb your enthusiasm is and two how the show had a
00:18:21.620notable decline after larry was like i'm out and how all of the stuff that jerry has done since
00:18:28.060then sans b movie putting respect on its name is not good feel free to sound off in the comments
00:18:35.500if you disagree but i was consuming so much jerry seinfeld in the last week and a half because i was
00:18:41.380like i need a reasonably good handle on this to talk about it on a podcast and i was like my god
00:18:47.640this is like pulling teeth you know he makes a lot of money as a stand-up because he has enormous
00:18:54.460name recognition yes his stand-up to me though is the kind of toothless funhouse mirror version
00:19:01.740of what larry does which is like it's observational humor i guess but there's no teeth to it i mean
00:19:08.580curb takes risks curb can be offensive curb can uh touch topics that might piss some people off
00:19:16.640But what Jerry's standup is about is about appealing to everybody at all times. And I guess good comedy does that to a degree. And I'm not not here to police comedy, right? Just because I'm a podcaster, even though I guess that's the Joe Rogan experience model. But like, you know, it's so anodyne that I find the standup to be kind of boring. And I feel like without the edge that Larry provides, you can kind of see that get exposed.
00:19:44.380I also think what you just said about Jerry Seinfeld's name recognition in relation to how much money he makes off of touring is so, so significant because I think in Jerry Seinfeld's mind, he is one of the most profitable touring comedians today because he's so funny.
00:20:01.500but it is because he is a nostalgia act and what people are coming to see is like effectively like
00:20:10.180a meet and greet type of thing spend time in the same room as the guy that you loved in the 90s
00:20:15.420i watched a lot of seinfeld preparing for this i enjoyed it i enjoyed it i blocked out all the
00:20:20.460stuff i know about jerry seinfeld now and i enjoyed it and then i started watching basically
00:20:25.360everything he's done since seinfeld except for b movie and i was like oh this sucks but you know
00:20:31.220that you're listening and watching Seinfeld. So I guess that enhances the experience a little bit,
00:20:37.420but not enough to make me laugh. Right. And dude, your last name is literally the title of the
00:20:43.380sitcom. It doesn't get more name recognition than that. There is one episode of Seinfeld that I found
00:20:50.460fascinating and kind of instructive. It's called The Cigar Store Indian. This is commonly named as
00:20:57.140one of the most offensive episodes of Seinfeld, and it is. But the plot revolves around Seinfeld
00:21:07.560trying to woo this young woman who he wants to be his girlfriend. Not that young. She's an adult
00:21:13.380woman. Not always the case. It's a fictionalized version of him. It's not exactly him. The real0.99
00:21:19.040life guy is going after teens. Yeah, it's fictional. It's fictionalized. He goes for
00:21:23.440adults in this right right right but she is native american she's of native american heritage which
00:21:29.800he does not realize and he he basically shows up with this big wooden offensive statue of a native
00:21:39.100american you know he does all these like racist anti-native thing like he's mocking and of course
00:21:45.260calling them indians the whole time and then the sort of episode plays out and he just can't stop
00:21:50.540saying offensive things towards all groups of people and it's kind of like people are so
00:21:54.300sensitive these days uh-huh yes and i find it fascinating because that is the the position of
00:22:00.220like everyone's so woke you can't even say anything anymore is a position that jerry
00:22:04.100seinfeld would take up unironically later in his life the way that larry writes i think both jerry0.99
00:22:09.940to less of an extent definitely george but but jerry often is that they're the asshole in the0.98
00:22:15.420situation. It is very interesting that he would unironically be so anti-woke later in life. But0.95
00:22:22.660what is not shocking to me is that Seinfeld, even in the fictionalized version of the show,
00:22:29.700is insensitive to people who have been colonized. The other thing I want to mention about Seinfeld
00:22:36.460before we get into the teenager of it all is just how much goddamn money he continues to make0.90
00:22:45.060from this show, which by the way, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that he's making0.96
00:22:50.280all this money from. But like, I think artists today should continue to make royalties in a way
00:22:54.100that they are often robbed of in the streaming model. But I do think it has changed the way that
00:23:01.440he engages or disengages with the world around him. I mean, he makes so, so, so, so, so, so much
00:23:09.620money and has been so rich for so long. So he was adjusted for inflation, making like $2 million
00:23:15.220an episode in the final season alone. That's one of the nine seasons. But also, I have to fact
00:23:21.800check this, but I believe he continues to make around $100 million a year today off of just
00:23:27.620like residuals from the show. Editing Matt here, it's actually reportedly between $40 and $60
00:23:33.360million a year, depending on what source you look at. Gosh, it's honestly criminal what streaming
00:23:40.060has done to actors in this country. And look, I know Seinfeld residuals for that kind of show,
00:23:45.540it's going to far exceed anything. But we've really missed the mark on paying these actors
00:23:50.760that are entertaining us, you know, with big tech trying to get around that kind of thing.
00:23:55.760i would like to take a quick break from the show to give a shout out to our friends at nord vpn
00:24:04.180for sponsoring this episode i recently did something very exciting i was in a documentary
00:24:11.860about elon musk for the bbc it is called the elon musk show i believe the episode that i'm in is
00:24:19.420called The Next Chapter. Now, I was very excited to watch this, and it did just come out on the
00:24:25.720BBC. But here's the thing with the BBC. You need to be in the UK to watch BBC iPlayer. But do you
00:24:33.800really? Not if you have NordVPN. NordVPN is this amazing tool with lots of amazing features. And
00:24:40.820one of them, perhaps my favorite, is that you can access the internet as if you were from anywhere.
00:24:47.880So if there's a show you want to watch, really any content that is geo-restricted, using NordVPN will allow you to essentially identify as part of the region that has the content you're trying to access.
00:39:48.980because i almost stopped it before yeah first of all he lists all of the things what they could
00:39:56.420have said which he fundamentally understands are legitimate yes he's got to or maybe he he doesn't
00:40:02.660think there are legitimate critiques i think they're obviously legitimate critiques and my
00:40:08.200favorite is him feeling exonerated by the tabloids you know the tabloids that famously love women and
00:40:14.380girls the tabloids you know remember how kind they were to britney spears and lindsey lohan
00:40:20.840and like any woman that was struggling and in the 90s god they were even more feminist0.96
00:40:26.240is the playboy writer in you picking up on my fucking sarcasm yes uh no i mean it's it's it's0.95
00:40:35.480insane it made me mad it made me mad it's insane he's like all these people around me they could0.99
00:40:41.380have said i was taking advantage of her they could have said she doesn't know what's going on
00:40:44.900they could have said her parents are upset which reportedly her parents were very upset and yeah
00:40:50.380none of this seems to bother him because people magazine wrote a relatively kind article which
00:40:56.180of course they did because you know people magazine famously morally neutral entity when he
00:41:02.340jokes about the babysitting money thing and the pizza yeah can i just read that again can i read
00:41:06.720again the great thing says jerry seinfeld is you can go out on a date and pick up a little
00:41:13.020babysitting money on the side what he's saying there is that this is his girlfriend and the
00:41:19.520girlfriend's parents are paying him a babysitting wage to take care of her can we all this is why
00:41:24.840jerry seinfeld cannot get me into a legal issue for calling him a pedophile because he's admitting
00:41:31.400it right here right anyway let's continue playboy says what have your friends said about this
00:41:36.700It's really strange. The reactions ran the absolute gamut from horrified to just busting buttons with pride that they know me. Guys I hadn't heard from in years called to say, congratulations, good for you. Women I know wouldn't even call me back. My assistant punched me. She saw me and literally punched me. She was so mad. It was reviled by women in their 30s and by Jay Leno.
00:42:15.680No, he wouldn't never do anything like that. But my mother was thrilled because Shoshana is Jewish
00:42:21.200and Syrian. My mother's Syrian and all my aunts and uncles on the Syrian side, this is what they
00:42:26.100expect they figure 15 16 is the right age for a woman for me because that's the way they do it
00:42:32.520in syria they're going 18 she's a little over the hill but if you like her my women friends some of
00:42:38.580them were really hostile about it they didn't like it first of all they think i look for this
00:42:43.300like this was an ambition of mine but the fact is i don't meet that many women i like period
00:42:48.260so when i like someone i don't care about her race creed or national origin if i like her0.61
00:42:53.560I don't care. I don't discriminate. If she's 18, if she's intelligent, that's fine.
00:42:59.600When I like someone, I don't care about her race, creed, or national origin. Well, those
00:43:05.020seem like fundamentally different things in a situation of dating than age. His framing of
00:43:11.020someone who wouldn't date a child as like, oh, well, do you also judge your partners based on
00:43:15.800race? Jerry, fuck you. Right. That's an immutable characteristic. Age is quite literally the1.00
00:43:23.080opposite because you grow up and you grow out of being a child and you grow into being an adult
00:43:27.960you're always going to have your same race creed and national origin you know for the most part
00:43:34.140also did you notice how he decides to be kind of racist towards syrian people there in that0.66
00:43:38.860response yeah yeah of course and that's a preview for the future and he feels safe clearly in this
00:43:46.040playboy environment he knows he can be a little bit of a dog and talk about this relationship in
00:43:52.080this manner. But he ends saying there, if she's 18, if she's intelligent, that's fine. She was
00:43:59.140not 18. So you're lying through your teeth. It's like, what do these two people even have
00:44:04.580to talk about? She's like studying for finals and he's one of the most famous people in the world.
00:44:10.020Exactly. Disgusting. They go on to date for four years. Shoshana graduates from high school0.99
00:44:16.760and she initially goes to George Washington University for a year, which is in Washington,
00:44:21.360D.C., but she transferred to UCLA to be closer to Jerry Seinfeld. The relationship ended in 1997
00:44:29.700when she was 21 and he was 43, partially due to constant press scrutiny. There are videos
00:44:37.500that tabloids shot of Shoshana like over, you know, over fences and stuff of her like lounging
00:44:44.160by a pool in a bikini and talking about her body. Reflecting on the relationship and how their
00:44:49.100lives, quote, weren't dovetailing, Jerry said in the 1998 interview with Vanity Fair,
00:44:55.040Seinfeld has a general idea. Think dolphin, a great body and a nice disposition of what he's
00:45:00.800looking for in a wife. I don't want my wife to work, he insists. I've had enough career for both0.99
00:45:07.080of us. The wife needs to be fun loving. Let's drive cross country. Let's go to Corfu. Let's1.00
00:45:13.260have fun. He takes another sip. People aren't as fun loving as you think. They have all kinds of
00:45:18.600other things they have to do. Lonstein and Seinfeld no longer speak. She has moved back
00:45:23.620to New York, where she is often photographed at club or restaurant openings identified as
00:45:27.820Seinfeld's ex-girlfriend. Seinfeld, meanwhile, appears to be married to the show. He leaves
00:45:32.500parties early if he goes at all. I mean, you can hear it in there what he's looking for in a wife.
00:45:40.940First of all, it's very dehumanizing to that's not the part that's in quotes, but the article
00:45:46.540seems to indicate that he said that he wants his wife to look like a dolphin or be like a dolphin
00:45:51.160okay as an animal and he doesn't want his wife to work because he wants to have kind of control and
00:45:56.520dominion over her which is much easier to have also when you're dating a child that's the power
00:46:01.940dynamic that we're talking about there where you're able to essentially groom her the idea that
00:46:07.440this girl transferred colleges to be closer to him and that this man who was 40 at the time allowed
00:46:15.560for a girl to uproot her life just to be closer to him says everything about his like inability
00:46:23.060to treat her with humanity. I can't even imagine what that must have felt like after they broke up
00:46:29.520for a girl who probably had this like extremely, you know, traumatizing and also transformational
00:46:35.600relationship. And the power imbalance was that pronounced. And he wants a wife who doesn't work.
00:46:41.760That is what really stood out to me here. Because if you want to be with a woman who doesn't work, why find a woman at all? Why not find a child who's in school who can't work? And then, oh, look, the moment she becomes an adult and is like, Jerry, I want a career. Well, now our lives aren't dovetailing so well together.0.97
00:47:01.980it's like yeah obviously because you want a child and i do find it interesting that who he's married
00:47:08.340to now jessica seinfeld is i mean we can define work she's a philanthropist meaning that they0.97
00:47:19.180play with money so throwing galas and board seats and zionism yes that whole that is part of her
00:47:28.080philanthropy. Oh, yes. I mean, how philanthropic is it to support the government that's slaughtering
00:47:33.320children? Shoshana seems to have been an entrepreneurial young woman. She went on to
00:47:41.220build her a fashion line called Shoshana. I don't know if you're familiar with it,
00:47:46.960but it seems to have done well. Good for her. It's like dresses and swimwear. And I don't know,
00:47:52.120it's sold at places. Matt, we already covered how little I know about fashion or anything like that
00:47:56.880in the last episode okay not to make like this like a shoshana lonstein episode uh my heart goes0.96
00:48:03.020out to her but she yeah she goes on to form this brand she came from a wealthy family in the upper
00:48:08.120east side and continues to now have her own wealthy family in the upper east side she married
00:48:12.880a different wealthier man when she got older fascinatingly you know how this this 1998 piece
00:48:19.640says that she stays referred to as Seinfeld's ex-girlfriend yeah Shoshana Lonstein uh who's
00:48:27.260now Shoshana Lonstein Gruss she has a townhouse on the Upper East Side with her family okay also
00:48:34.400good for her uh you know well I mean oh no oh no I think I know what's coming in 2015 20 years
00:48:43.980after her relationship with Seinfeld ends.
00:48:47.580One million dollars of jewelry is robbed from her home in New York City.
00:48:53.300Can you read what the New York Post headline about it said?0.93
00:48:56.420Thieves steal one million dollars in jewels from Jerry Seinfeld's ex-girlfriend.0.95
00:49:02.000This is a woman who is now 40 years old.
01:02:28.400Dave Rubin posted that video two years ago, and then he reposted the exact same video
01:02:33.880with the same commentary and the same thumbnail and the same title three weeks ago just because
01:02:39.520it's like graduation season again and i i think he dave rubin you know listen content creation
01:02:45.160is a grind and i think he was like well it's commencement season again so i'm just gonna
01:02:49.300throw out the same triggered woke students thing as two years ago but the speech is two years old0.51
01:02:54.180yeah kind of lazy lazy job dave oh uh dave is infamously like a really really lazy guy even
01:03:01.080when he was at TYT, he didn't want to work hard. So this is something that everybody knows about
01:03:05.060him. You're right on the money. Ben Shapiro posted, Jerry Seinfeld gets emotional while
01:03:11.040discussing his trip to Israel. We'll get back to that. But speaking of that Jerry Seinfeld
01:03:17.640Duke commencement speech from 2024, his message to students was clear. Privilege is not a bad
01:03:25.500thing. Quote, we are embarrassed of things we should be proud of, and proud of things we should
01:03:32.080be embarrassed about. Privilege is a word that has taken quite a beating lately. Privilege today
01:03:38.160seems to be the worst thing you can have. I would like to take a moment to defend it.
01:03:45.160Again, a lot of you are thinking, I can't believe they invited this guy.
01:03:49.180Too late. I say, use your privilege. I grew up a Jewish boy from New York. That is a privilege if you want to be a comedian.
01:04:02.660Thanks. You went to Duke. That is an unbelievable privilege. I now have an honorary doctorate, a humane letters degree from Duke University.
01:04:14.060And if I can figure out a way to use that, I will.
01:05:09.400i meet all these people who go to harvard and they are so bashful about being from harvard don't be
01:05:15.260ashamed own it and it's like okay first of all in real life no one's ashamed of coming from duke
01:05:22.440like no no one's ashamed of having gone to duke that's not a real thing no and jerry seinfeld
01:05:28.900i think is very clearly airing some personal grievances here about how he feels like oh you
01:05:35.920can't just be like a rich, straight white guy in society anymore without having to acknowledge
01:05:40.360that you started on third base kind of thing. And it reminded me a lot of how very recently
01:05:46.120Erica Kirk, who is doing a lot. Yeah. Told a group of young white college students, quote,
01:05:53.080don't let anyone disenfranchise you just because you're a young white male.
01:05:57.180Yes. Also, disenfranchise is a real actual thing. And that has never happened in the history of
01:06:03.200this country except you know before it was changed for just white men to be able to vote it was only
01:06:08.800land-owning white men so um yes but but that's an aside this is a hallmark of conservative media
01:06:16.620you'll see this a lot don't let any doubt creep in don't let any empathy creep in you see this
01:06:23.760on fox news all the time because they'll disparage their opponents or say how you know weak they are
01:06:29.900and ineffectual they are for having empathy for others they will emphasize this a lot because of
01:06:36.020course inevitably conservatives are going to maybe run into like hmm i don't know is it cool that0.71
01:06:42.060we're like warehousing immigrants like this and that we're abusing don't no no this is for the0.84
01:06:47.020greater good don't let any doubt creep in and your you know non-binary granddaughter is the one1.00
01:06:53.400who's completely insane that's a very conservative construction of like how you view the world0.69
01:06:59.760And it's also not shocking, I think, as we're going to get to his Zionism, that he believes that there are hierarchies in this way and that he is a supremacist about his place in life, in addition to, of course, a religious and ethnic supremacist.
01:07:16.200Absolutely. The most famous example, before we get to the Zionism, of his sort of really flailing amidst the winds of change culturally is when he went in 2024 on the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast and said this.
01:07:32.660nothing really affects comedy people always need it they need it so badly and they don't get it0.82
01:07:41.040it used to be you would go home at the end of the day most people would go
01:07:44.900oh cheers is on oh mash is on oh mary tyler moore is on all the family's on you just expect it
01:07:52.020there'll be some funny stuff we can watch on tv tonight well guess what where is it this is the
01:07:56.800result of the extreme left and pc crap and people worrying so much about offending other people
01:08:03.400when you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands committees groups here's our
01:08:10.920thought about this joke well that's the end of your comedy they move the gates like in skiing
01:08:15.920culture the gates are moving your job is to be agile and clever enough that wherever they put
01:08:22.160the gates i'm gonna make the gate i'm not sure if you saw the pop tart movie that came out no
01:08:30.160don't spoil it oh that's coming up because it's coming but i think this was on the press tour for
01:08:37.280that it was you know how edgy the pop tart movie was all right fine well if we're here yes that
01:08:46.420that wasn't that was one of my one of my many dazzling reveals for the listener thank you for
01:08:51.200breaking it it was it was a good breaking i'm sorry i'm sorry no no no i'm saying you genuinely
01:08:55.600that was that was good this complaint about how comedy can't be edgy anymore was part of the press
01:09:01.940tour for one of his the only things that he has made in the 30 years since seinfeld aired which
01:09:10.380was a movie called unfrosted it was a direct to netflix comedy starring obviously himself and
01:09:19.800amy schumer and melissa mccarthy but we're gonna leave her out of this
01:09:22.860we have to about the creation of pop tarts which was called by the chicago sun times quote
01:09:33.080one of the decade's worst movies yeah it's it's like it i i get annoyed with the like
01:09:39.820wokeness guild comedy critique even from like you know people who do actually make like edgy
01:09:45.860comedy but also like i want to know in jerry seinfeld's mind what comedy he was making that
01:09:52.860you couldn't make anymore observational airplane humor is just you can't do it anymore i'm not sure
01:09:59.080if you're aware of this matt bernstein but it's just way too offensive to talk about how the seats0.58
01:10:04.160are so small yeah it's i mean it is so offensive because it isn't fucking funny i'm glad we can't
01:10:09.400doing yeah i mean there are so many like great comedies out right now um on streaming but also
01:10:16.660even movies i think about one of the maybe the funniest movie of the past five years was bottoms
01:10:20.960and like that had edge to it but it also was like inclusive and lgbtq friendly and and he's just
01:10:28.660lazy and it's just like that you're an old man ranting about cheers and mary tyler moore wow
01:10:35.320things were better back when you were a kid what a revolutionary thought that no one has ever had
01:10:40.320no one's ever experienced nostalgia but he's decided to make it like a whole political ideology
01:10:45.060because he probably is not hitting either 100% rate with some of his comedy and it is like
01:10:52.120driving him up a wall I came across this clip that I think really well represents comedy that
01:10:58.220probably wouldn't make it anymore that Jerry Seinfeld seems to think is missing from the
01:11:04.520comedic ecosystem and it comes from uh hbo's talking funny with jerry seinfeld chris rock
01:11:12.540ricky gervais and of course jerry seinfeld's close personal friend louis ck i laugh at the
01:11:19.420dumbest things i laugh at the years and years ago i saw a comic in some horrible club bombing with0.98
01:11:26.140guitar and he's saying uh sitting on a cock because i'm gay and that's still yeah i will0.98
01:11:33.660i'm in the shower sitting and i just i can't laughing ironically it's the funniest thing i0.99
01:11:37.900ever heard ironically no that no yeah what he's saying is because he's gay he has to sit on some0.98
01:11:44.300cock and it happens to fit beautifully over the template yeah well it's like the last thing otis0.98
01:11:50.940redding thought he was setting up yeah exactly he thought no he was i'm gonna help some guy0.99
01:11:58.220say still a lame gay joke yeah by writing this anderson cooper's gonna beat our ass is he sitting0.99
01:12:03.980on the car is he just sort of sitting on the car yeah because he's gay or is he really sitting on1.00
01:12:08.140the ball he's sitting on the balls but the cock is up right up but if you said sitting on some0.99
01:12:13.100balls because the car attached to them is inside of me because i'm gay does not otis redding didn't1.00
01:12:17.660I was going to be laughing and they can't make it scan.0.84
01:15:30.820to like work on a kibbutz aka like foment a physical and emotional relationship to the land
01:15:39.300that he does not live on and does not belong to him hey he may have an apartment in tel aviv he
01:15:45.160may have an apartment in tel aviv okay he may have a second home oh well at this point i wouldn't be0.96
01:15:48.920shocked he probably bought one of the fucking gwyneth paltrow apartments already probably put0.86
01:15:52.860it down as his down payment but you know he he returned to israel to promote the b movie uh he0.98
01:15:59.620went a couple times over the 2010s to perform his quote-unquote comedy. And then in December of
01:16:05.7002023, two and a half months after October 7th, and into the ensuing genocide, and at which point,
01:16:13.860might I add, Israel had already murdered over 20,000 Palestinians. Jerry and his wife, Jessica,
01:16:21.200take a trip to Israel. His wife, Jessica, who, by the way, there's just not enough time today.
01:16:26.740but jerry met jessica like the week that she returned home from her honeymoon with the man
01:16:35.200that she had just married messy messica messica it's really a whole other thing and actually on
01:16:42.500principle i don't talk about like the morality of people cheating because i don't i don't it's not
01:16:48.360my business and i don't it's just this is a let's keep it to the politics i i hear you i'm i'm in
01:16:52.880agreement but in any case jerry and his wife jessica take a trip to israel in december 2023
01:16:57.860he visits the uh the site of the october 7th attacks he does a number of photo ops with
01:17:07.080idf soldiers have you seen these i'm gonna throw them on the screen really the happiest he's looked
01:17:13.140since he was uh i guess at the height of his career now it's he gets to experience new heights
01:17:20.260to travel with a bunch of guys and pose with a bunch of guys that are going to kill children.
01:17:25.460He really does. Like he comes across as sort of perpetually miserable in most of his interviews0.90
01:17:29.920these days. Yes. And it is jarring how happy he looks to be standing with these soldiers.
01:17:35.640Could you speak to that, though? Because I do think there is it's all part of the psychology
01:17:40.360of what Israel wants from Zionists, which is this like fervent nationalism. It's very Nazi-like to me.0.88
01:17:47.040Well, yeah. And fervent nationalism can become a drug in and of itself. I mean, we see parts of it in the Trump movement, although I don't think it's fully accurate to describe it just as a nationalist movement. Obviously, Zionism is explicitly so.
01:18:03.660But like, you know, the fact that he didn't really go to Israel that much and went after October 7th just to kind of experience the high of the nationalism says how cult-like it is in its construction.0.75
01:18:17.220It's about experiencing something that is shared amongst you and your community.0.63
01:18:23.540And that is what can be so tantalizing and addictive about Zionism because it's a shared purpose.0.64
01:18:29.920But once it becomes abundantly clear what that purpose is, anybody who has a conscience turns away from that kind of ideology. But Jerry ran right to it. And I think that that just says everything about his morals.0.95
01:18:45.660I also think often about the double standard, of course, that exists in American media with
01:18:54.000relation to supporting Israel versus Palestine. Because to give people like a really honest
01:19:00.000comparison here, Jerry Seinfeld doing these like fists up photo shoots with IDF soldiers,
01:19:06.860it is the equivalent of like if Hassan Piker went and did a photo shoot with Hamas fighters.
01:19:13.300I mean, I mean, the difference would be that Hamas is not as immoral and dangerous as the state of Israel, in my humble opinion. But but yeah, no, of course not. Of course, it's it's completely hypocritical.
01:19:26.700And Hassan wouldn't, I mean, he wouldn't be able to leave his house.0.90
01:23:15.640And yet this is what got him the experience of going to Israel and the collective experience of being in a state that was murdering innocent people just miles away.
01:23:29.820I think, you know, you kind of see how weak minded he is there.
01:23:34.180his inability to have any doubt or challenging thought creep into his mind that's the through
01:23:42.160line with his relationship with women and with with his fixation on girls who are more powerless
01:23:48.540in conversations with him and in a relationship with him never having any doubt creep in and him
01:23:55.880being able to have a controlled environment for his feelings he probably had such an emotional
01:24:01.920reaction to israel because the nationalism was probably so empowering for him because you don't
01:24:09.300have to think about palestinians no doubt has to creep into your mind nothing has to challenge you
01:24:14.740the girl doesn't challenge you your relationship with your jewish identity doesn't need to be
01:24:20.880challenged you can just get high off the drug of nationalism while you're there and i also like i
01:24:28.200would imagine that when he goes there, being Jerry Seinfeld, being the richest comedian on the
01:24:33.460planet, that he's treated like royalty. And yet he's so moved by that as if he doesn't understand
01:24:40.040the propaganda value that he's providing. It's amazing. I guess when you're that rich and that
01:24:45.580famous for that long, you kind of are an emotional child to a degree.
01:24:51.080And he has actually spoken about that, calling back to the B-movie press tour.
01:24:55.760strings of words that i just never thought there was one good thing that came out of that b-movie
01:25:02.400press tour and that he is in a great episode of 30 rock called seinfeld vision which was a part
01:25:08.160of that promotion and i gotta say he can perform okay when other people who are funny are writing
01:25:14.140for him yeah yeah yeah yeah but he did say in one interview that he had like not really thought
01:25:22.040that much about what he means to the Jewish people, for example, until he went to Israel
01:25:30.640after Seinfeld had concluded to promote the B-movie, at which point he was extremely famous.
01:25:38.040And he's like, I saw the way that they looked at me and the way that they treated me. And I
01:25:42.060realized that I meant something to these people. There we go. We solved it. This is the smallest
01:25:46.960man on the planet who is addicted to validation that like if it doesn't come in every format he0.91
01:25:55.040breaks down and so like when you have nationalism and zionism which basically also it reinforces
01:26:01.320your supremacist belief in yourself um and that you're basically a god and that this is some sort
01:26:07.340of holy war yeah yeah for somebody like that whose you know fame has passed him by at this point he's
01:26:13.360just sitting on a pile of money. Of course, that's going to make that guy cry.
01:26:17.400I thought this clip of him crying was so, uh, was so, so interesting because like you said,
01:26:22.540he's, he's famously, he's aloof. He's a dick. He's like increasingly, I think taken on this1.00
01:26:27.160really like tough guy, like not afraid to call balls and strikes kind of thing in this very
01:26:32.180interview with Barry Weiss. He, uh, he, he like calls for a return to like sort of strong man
01:26:38.000masculinity. And yet this makes him cry. And this made me think of a concept that Amy Sodaro coined
01:26:45.340called prosthetic trauma that Naomi Klein has written about in the context of Israel and how
01:26:53.580in the wake of October 7th, while Israel continues to genocide Palestinians, now South Lebanon,
01:27:01.980that they've made these like art installations
01:27:05.640and like interactive, immersive exhibitions
01:27:59.400oh oh absolutely does that make sense so the way i explain it makes sense it completely makes sense
01:28:04.580with those tours of like the nova festival if you're able to kind of experience that trauma
01:28:12.120or a display of it then that's a way to kind of indoctrinate you into the cult-like mindset of0.99
01:28:19.340zionism as well it's a shared trauma it's a shared experience and it is a myth that zionists can tell
01:28:27.060themselves. That is a moral underpinning for their thought negating belief system that pushes1.00
01:28:34.560aside all empathy and all humanization for Palestinians. So it can act as a method of0.82
01:28:41.780indoctrination. And Jerry was more than happy to be indoctrinated. And I think this idea of
01:28:49.040prosthetic trauma is so good. I want to unpack it further in future episodes. I hope maybe even with
01:28:54.840Naomi Klein. She ever comes back to talk to me? No, she did message me. And she was like,
01:28:58.940you did such a great job with our episode. I was like, God, what an amazing human being.
01:29:05.200There's a lot of parallels that we can draw between October 7th and 9-11. And 9-11,
01:29:12.580similarly, was this moment that was exploited by bad faith nationalist actors to put this
01:29:19.960nationalist and oftentimes racist fervor into the American population and why ever since 9-11,
01:29:27.060especially around the each year memorial of 9-11, you have a lot of people, especially Muslim and
01:29:32.720Arab Americans talking about like, hey, yes, let's like talk about this awful thing that happened
01:29:39.300in New York City, but also let's not use this to further our own racism. The prosthetic trauma
01:29:48.240is what like a George Bush wanted every especially white American to feel in the wake of 9-11. It's
01:29:55.860like you know you may not have actually experienced this but actually yes you did and let's do you
01:30:02.840know all of the museums and let's do all of the documentaries and let's and I'm not saying in and
01:30:08.000of itself museums and documentaries about a tragedy is a bad thing but if they are exploiting
01:30:13.180people's pain to further more pain for other people and violence and destruction and genocide,
01:30:20.240then it is a bad thing. And we have to recalibrate how we're thinking about these things. And that's
01:30:24.400what Israel has done with October 7th. Absolutely. And people should look up Netanyahu's quotes about0.96
01:30:29.240in his immediate reaction to 9-11. If you want to know how Israel felt about 9-11,
01:30:34.460they were quite excited that the United States would get even more involved in the Middle East.
01:30:38.740and Netanyahu had to walk back some of his excitement about that kind of thing.
01:30:43.680But it is a way to, if you're constantly only reinforcing the humanity of the victims
01:30:49.880of a terror attack like that, which is definitionally blowback for foreign policy
01:30:55.720in the Middle East, both on October 7th and what happened on 9-11,
01:31:00.000if you remove that context and you only humanize one side,
01:31:03.080When you're trying to garner public support for a war, say, in Iraq that had nothing to do with 9-11, that is a very powerful way to get people to have some sort of collective trauma and only empathize with one side without analyzing systemically why this may have happened.
01:31:20.800They hate us for our freedom. It serves the same role as Zionists basically saying that Hamas is the equivalent of Hitler and that they're going by Mein Kampf.
01:31:30.580And while Jerry Seinfeld is really biting into that emotional propaganda and literally crying with Barry Weiss, college students, like I said, across the U.S. are peacefully camping out on their university's lawns for days and weeks at a time in protest of their tuition money being invested in companies that enable the IDF's genocide on Gaza.
01:31:54.440As people may recall, this severely angered Zionists across the country, and two such Zionists were Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld.
01:32:04.400Jessica Seinfeld was so angry about these protests.0.66
01:32:10.060So Jessica posts on her Instagram story, it's a screenshot of a GoFundMe that just says UCLA rally.