Haha yeah. Funny story about his pacing: I last saw him speak at an event in Cambridge back in 2009 when he was giving an interview on American foreign policy

Haha yeah. Funny story about his pacing: I last saw him speak at an event in Cambridge back in 2009 when he was giving an interview on American foreign policy to a church of 500+ people. At one point he spoke a sentence to the effect of "...it was retarded by their efforts to disrupt..." However, as a speaker, he doesn't fill his pauses with "ummm" or "uhhh". Rather, he stops cold in the middle of a sentence until he has the right word and then proceeds again. So the sentence instead came out as "It was retarded ... (pause) ...by their efforts to disrupt the..." I was already nodding off a bit, so imagine my surprise at someone of Noam's seriousness seemingly resorting to calling something "retarded" like an immature teen. The confusion of it blindsided me and had me dumbfounded for what felt like a small eternity before he completed the sentence and I figured out what had just happened. It was a weird feeling. Like the momentary falling sensation when you're expecting one last stair step that isn't there. I'm confident that it was unintentional, but wittingly or not, it was probably the single funniest thing I ever heard come out of his mouth.