The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table

Latest Episodes:

Evan Barker on Trump, the Left and the Politics of Contempt Aug 20, 2026

Show notes

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by Evan Barker, writer and author of the book, Nothing Left.

Previously, she worked in Democratic politics, primarily as a fundraiser for progressive politicians and organizations.

They discuss she left progressive politics, why she voted for Trump in 2024, and what she believes Democrats have misunderstood about the working class.

www.evanbarker.net

X: @Evanwch

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Evan Barker joins Live From The Table

04:00 — Why Trump connected with working-class voters

07:30 — “They have contempt for the working class”

10:30 — The Left, race and identity

15:00 — Religion, the Ten Commandments and the culture war

19:00 — Why the Left pushed voters toward Trump

21:00 — Why Democrats are losing trust

24:00 — Israel, antisemitism and the progressive left

27:00 — Mamdani, Jews and the politics of representation

31:00 — Feeling politically homeless after 2024

34:00 — What should—and shouldn't—be taught to children

49:00 — Antisemitism and the argument over Israel

52:00 — Plagiarism, journalism and double standards

"I Wouldn't Even Talk to a Jew": Inside the Mind of Lucas Gage - Former Antisemite Aug 14, 2026

Show notes

Lucas Gage (www.Lucasgage.com X.com/lucasgagex) spent 14 years as one of the loudest antisemites on the internet - a Marine who came home from Iraq, read Mein Kampf, and became a true believer. Then he walked away.What did he believed, and why? What snapped him out of it? And what does it tell us about Tucker, Candace, Fuentes and the rest? Are they believers, grifters, or a bit of both? 0:00 The rise and fall of a viral antisemite 7:18 What radicalized him: Iraq, Mein Kampf, and the ADL 16:35 Tucker, Candace, Fuentes: dog whistles or grifters? 23:15 "Afraid to give my name" - and why Jews succeed anyway 36:54 9/11, October 7, and Charlie Kirk: the conspiracy machine 48:07 Patriotism and the "dual loyalty" smear 57:40 Should America stay majority white? The final debate SS

Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper & the Nazi Question | Waiting for Evan Barker Aug 13, 2026

Show notes

Noam Dworman and Periel Aschenbrand sit down expecting to interview Evan Barker—but when she doesn't arrive, they discuss Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper, antisemitism, Germany, immigration, media and why Evan Barker never made it. Chapters 00:00 Waiting for Evan Barker 02:15 Tucker Carlson, Daryl Cooper & extremism 08:35 Germany, antisemitism & lessons from Europe 19:30 Noam on ideology, immigration & prejudice 32:20 Listener emails & why the podcast matters 44:40 Evan Barker finally checks in 49:00 All is forgiven & rescheduling the interview

Will Guidara Ran the World's #1 Restaurant – What Can He Teach the Comedy Cellar? Jul 25, 2026

Show notes

0:00 "You picked the wrong guy" – the audiobook story 3:12 "You own [Comedy Cellar], one of New York's treasures" 7:28 The customer who will never tip again 15:41 Motivating a team after you've won: finite vs. infinite games 23:23 Noam doesn't like fine dining 39:55 Handling Google reviews & hunting down critics Noam sits down with Will Guidara — author of the New York Times bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality, former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park (named the best restaurant in the world under his leadership), and co-producer of The Bear — for a conversation between two obsessives who refuse to run their businesses as businesses. They compare notes on why the money has to be a byproduct, how to answer a customer who swears he'll never tip again, keeping a team motivated after you've won, why fine dining lost its way, tracking down anonymous Google reviewers, and why Will walked away from the top restaurant on earth to be a better dad.

I'm Terrified of Cancer. So I Called My Childhood Friend Kenan Onel, Cancer Geneticist. Jul 23, 2026

Show notes

0:00 The friend he hasn't seen since sixth grade 5:16 Angelina Jolie, BRCA, and the 20% nobody tells women about 18:23 What a cancer cell actually is - and why tumors evolve 26:31 How cancer actually kills you, and what a seizure is 32:14 The last cigarette: why he can't take the test every week 46:27 The best medicine in the world, and who can't get to it 1:03:23 Telling a family there's nothing left Noam hadn't seen Kenan Onel since high school in Ardsley, where Onel graduated first in the class and Noam, by his own account, drifted somewhere well below. Fifty years later Onel runs genetics and genomics at Roswell Park - the only comprehensive cancer center in all of western New York - and Noam has one thing he wants to ask him about. He's afraid of cancer. His grandfather died of it. His father died of it. He's taken the Grail blood test, it came back clean, and he wants to know why he can't just take it every week. What follows is part reunion and part interrogation. Onel explains what a cancer cell actually is, why tumors evolve like finches in the Galapagos, and what is physically happening to someone during a seizure. He explains how cancer kills - the mechanism, organ by organ. And he tells Noam that the test he's counting on just failed its biggest trial in the UK, which sets off the real argument of the hour: whether a guideline written for a population means anything at all to the one person sitting in the chair. Then, near the end, Noam asks how you tell a family there's nothing left to offer. The answer is the best thing in the episode. Also: the 20% of women who are high-risk and have never been told, the doctor who warned Noam that Pellegrino was bad for his son's bones, a scan booked by 4pm the next afternoon, and one entire podcast without mentioning Israel. Dr. Kenan Onel is Chief of the Division of Genetics and Genomics and Director of the Center for Precision Oncology and Cancer Prevention at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. Live from the Table is the official podcast of the world-famous Comedy Cellar.

"An Agenda Dressed Up in Violins?" - Debating Peter Beinart on the Right of Return and Other Matters Jul 16, 2026

Show notes

CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro - four nice things about Peter Beinart 4:50 Will God punish Israel? Jeremiah, tradition, and belief 13:20 The critical-mass hypothetical: a 49% Hasidic America 22:03 Quebec, Czechoslovakia, South Africa - why not divorce? 41:35 The right of return: "You can cherry-pick anything" 54:24 1948: They were closer to the Holocaust than we are to COVID 63:40 Day one of a one-state solution: the list 79:53 "An agenda dressed up in violins" Claude Says: Peter Beinart - editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, New York Times opinion writer, and author of "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza" - joins Noam Dworman and Dan Naturman for an honest, occasionally heated conversation about the questions underneath the Israel-Palestine debate. Does Jewish tradition teach that Israel's survival depends on its ethics - and does Beinart, an observant Jew, mean that literally? Is there such a thing as demographic critical mass? Why is secession the answer everywhere from Quebec to Czechoslovakia, but one shared state the answer here? Is the Palestinian right of return a sacred principle, a practical question, or - as Noam puts it - "an agenda dressed up in violins"? Plus: South Africa and Mandela, Iran, the Olmert-Abbas offers, what Benny Morris actually wrote about 1948, Robert Jackson's "suicide pact," and what day one of a one-state solution would look like for a gay couple in Tel Aviv. Two people who disagree about almost everything - except the settlements - actually talk to each other. Peter's book: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza https://bit.ly/4ygbHH8 Peter's Substack: The Beinart Notebook https://peterbeinart.substack.com/

AI Is Self-Evolving, and Nobody Understands It - Bioweapons, China Race, Sentience | Robert Wright Jul 10, 2026

Show notes

Description Written By Fable/Max: Robert Wright interviewed Geoffrey Hinton in 1983 and, by his own account, got the story 180 degrees wrong. Forty years later Hinton is the "Godfather of AI," two of the three godfathers are frightened of their own creation, and Wright has written The God Test to figure out what he missed and what's coming. We talk about how these machines evolved rather than being programmed - nobody fully understands them, including the people who build them - why "fancy autocomplete" was always wrong, the best case (an AI caught a radiologist's error in his cancer MRI), the worst case (a bioweapon that incubates silently for six weeks), why racing China to superintelligence may cause the war it's meant to prevent, and whether unplugging a machine could ever be murder. Plus an experiment of my own: I put a legal dispute in front of the AI and handed the laptop to the other side. 0:00 Intro - Robert Wright and The God Test 2:13 A 27-ton computer and a buried headline 4:11 Interviewing the Godfather of AI in 1983 - and missing it 10:15 Not programmed - evolved 17:27 The "fancy autocomplete" myth 24:17 Dukakis, Reagan, and how minds file words 35:49 Best case: medicine, education, and an MRI story 42:38 Worst case: bioweapons, jailbreaks, designer babies 48:51 An AI that believes what the Ayatollah believes 50:30 The China race - overdone and dangerous? 57:33 Nazis, the Hamas charter, and bombing over AI 59:46 Authoritarianism through the back door 1:03:35 Sociopaths, the ship of Theseus, and machine morality 1:14:34 Is it sentient? Should you be nice to it? 1:21:54 AI as judge: my legal experiment 1:26:20 The God Test

Israel’s Gloomy Future? Occupation, Isolation, and Survival - Daniel Sobelman Jul 03, 2026

Show notes

A conversation about the future of Israel and world Jewry. Can Israel protect itself without becoming a global pariah? Did Hamas gamble that even losing the war could pull Israel into isolation? Noam and Sobelman discuss occupation, unilateral withdrawal, the settler movement, Jewish vulnerability abroad, and the difficult tradeoffs now shaping Israel’s future. 00:00 Intro: Daniel Sobelman returns 03:47 Israel after October 7: a new era for Jews and Israel 08:58 Sobelman: October 7 as a nuclear-level shock 11:48 Why Israel was blamed before it responded 15:50 Hamas’s strategy: provoke a war and isolate Israel 22:35 Occupation, moral corrosion, and the West Bank dilemma 32:23 Could Israeli initiative restore its global standing? 34:03 Settlers, politics, and the failed path of unilateral withdrawal 41:29 Israel as both Jewish safety net and source of Jewish vulnerability 52:02 Resistance vs normalization: the future of the Middle East Daniel Sobelman is a professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Read his book, "Axis of Resistance" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9L7QQNN?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

The Truth About Iran That Nobody in the West Wants to Hear with Kian Tajbakhsh Jun 27, 2026

Show notes

Was the MOU a good idea? Noam says yes, the Professor says no. The Table is joined by Kian Tajbakhsh. They discuss his years as a political prisoner in Iran, the psychology of the Iranian regime, why he believes Iran's leaders genuinely seek Israel's destruction and what the West continues to misunderstand about the Middle East. He also weighs in on Trump, the latest U.S.-Iran developments and the future of the region.

Kian Tajbakhsh is Visiting Professor of International Relations at NYU and Fellow at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. An Iranian-American scholar of Middle East geopolitics and Iranian politics, he previously worked as a democracy and human rights advocate inside Iran. He spent nearly 13 months in Tehran’s Evin Prison, including 8 months in solitary confinement in a high-security IRGC wing, followed by 6 years under house arrest as a political prisoner, before being released as part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. He is the author of Creating Local Democracy in Iran (Cambridge University Press 2022). His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Project Syndicate, and his analysis has been featured on NBC, CNN, BBC, CBC, and NPR. He writes and comments frequently on Iranian politics, regional geopolitics, and democratic reform; author of The Iran Crisis Notebook on Substack.

www.kiantajbakhsh.net

kian.substack.com

CHAPTERS

02:20 Arrested by Iran & Life in Solitary Confinement

16:20 House Arrest and Release

20:30 October 7 and America's Blind Spot

23:00 Why Iran Wants to Destroy Israel

35:50 Trump, Iran, and the New Middle East Strategy

49:20 Was Trump's Deal a Mistake?

Epstein, Civil Liberties and the New Public Shaming with Ankush Khardori Jun 19, 2026

Show notes

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by Ankush Khardori. They discuss the Epstein files, Kathy Ruemmler, civil liberties, public shaming and whether the release of Epstein-related documents has generated more heat than facts. They also discuss cancel culture, online mobs, Anthony Weiner, anti-Semitism, and the broader consequences of judging people through leaked communications.

Ankush Khardori is a legal analyst and former federal prosecutor. He has been the legal affairs columnist for Politico and New York Magazine and has contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, TIME and many more. Khardori regularly provides legal commentary and analysis on television, radio, and podcasts -- including CNN, MS NOW, the BBC, and NPR.

CHAPTERS

04:40 How Ankush Got the Kathy Ruemmler Story
08:00 The Epstein Files and Civil Liberties Debate
12:00 What the Document Releases Actually Revealed
22:30 Kathy Ruemmler, Bill Gates, and Jeffrey Epstein
29:00 The Human Cost of Public Accusations
42:40 The Cornell Student Anti-Semitism Controversy
48:40 Internet Mobs, Cancellation, and Public Shaming

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