Comedian and stand-up comic Ricky Gervais joins Jemele to discuss how he became the first Indian-American to ever write for SNL, how he got his start in comedy, and what it means to be gay in the 21st century. He also talks about how he came to be a standup comic, and why he thinks being gay is a bad thing. And he explains why he doesn t think being gay should be considered a "choice" in comedy. Plus, he tells the story of how he went from being the first Asian-American writer on SNL to writing for one of the most famous shows of all time, Saturday Night Live. And, of course, he talks about his new book, which is out now! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with the latest comedy news and subscribe to our newest episodes of and wherever you get your favourite podchips. Subscribe to our new episodes of Late Night with Jemele and Jemele! Learn more about your ad choices. Like, comment and tell a friend about what they're listening to this podcast! If they're cool with it, we'll be giving you a shoutout in next week's episode! Thank you for listening and spreading the word out to your friends about this episode of , and we'll send you a review! Cheers everywhere else on the internet about it! XOXOXOXOYOJemele is a podcast by Jemele is listening to it on Podchorex and we're watching it on the podchoreXO! and you can be reached at bit.ee/jemele.co.ee on Insta: Thanks for listening, too! Thanks, Jemele, and I'll be listening out for all the love and support is so much love and appreciation and support and support, and you're listening out there! - Thank you, Jeezy, JEANDSOME! Jeebus - Jemele? xOJee - Jeeves JELEXOJEEZYXOZYEZYIZYZY & JUICY XOYZOZOJEZOYE
00:00:51.000But I'm saying from how we handled things perspective...
00:00:56.000Things seem, I'm like a fine human being.
00:00:58.000You seem like a fine, like most human beings are fine and we were raised quite, I don't want to say differently, but a little better in my perspective than like what's happening now.
00:01:08.000Like what is being corrected is strange to me.
00:01:11.000To people that don't know the story, let's fill them in on your story and how we got together.
00:01:19.000So a few months ago, I got this group called the Asian American Alliance at Columbia University hit me up saying, hey, you know, we're big fans of your work.
00:01:28.000I was the first Indian to ever write for SNL. And so that was a story in the Asian American Indian community.
00:01:34.000And so they hit me up in, like, May or June.
00:04:28.000And then I say, you're exactly who I expected to be as a crowd.
00:04:32.000And then I say, the only person that chooses...
00:04:35.000This is also what was in print is that the offensive part to me, what I think is offensive, is the next part where I say the only person that chooses whether or not to be gay on a daily basis is Mike Pence, right?
00:07:24.000The tech people, they're coming up with lies.
00:07:26.000Yeah, I mean, I understand why she lied because she's trying to save face and not to embarrass me or whatever, but I'm like, I'm not going to believe that shit that all three of you came out to be like, the tech has to go.
00:07:37.000And then I go, is it because the tech has to leave or because I'm saying some things that made people uncomfortable?
00:07:45.000And one of the other girls goes, we think there's a distinction between being uncomfortable and being disrespectful.
00:07:53.000And I'm like, don't use your big words on me.
00:07:59.000But in my brain, I'm like, what are you talking about?
00:08:04.000I don't think I've been disrespectful at all.
00:08:06.000And there are some people who are like, what the fuck is going on?
00:08:09.000Majority of people are like, what the fuck is going on?
00:08:11.000But there's a pocket of the crowd where the three Asian American Alliance leaders and the rest of the crew was waiting.
00:08:20.000And I think some of them cheer when there's a distinction between disrespectful and being uncomfortable.
00:08:24.000I'm like, I haven't been disrespectful in the slightest.
00:08:57.000And then at this point, I'm like, instead of explaining that the joke is quite progressive...
00:09:02.000I'm like, I literally got that joke from an audience member at Stand Up New York in like 2011. Like, I remember the conversation distinctly because it was such like one of these sort of, oh shit, that's a good bit moments.
00:09:20.000So I was on stage, and I used to live in Hell's Kitchen in New York, and there's like a gay black constituency that would always make fun of me when I was leaving my apartment.
00:09:30.000But like ribbing me, you know what I mean?
00:09:32.000And so, like, I'm trying to talk about that on stage at Stand Up New York, doing, like, a check spot or whatever, and I'm talking to the crowd, and then there's a gay black guy that, like, heckled me.
00:09:42.000And I start talking to him, and then at some point, I'm like, this is how you know being gay can't be a choice, right?
00:09:47.000And he starts dying, and we have, like, a good rapport.
00:09:53.000And so I tell them that, and they're like, no, you know, there's been a change, you have to go, and I'm like, effectively, I'm like, you're wrong for doing what you're doing right now.
00:11:34.000Because I'm trying to film every hour that I do.
00:11:37.000And I go to them, and I'm like, what the fuck?
00:11:40.000If you watch a YouTube clip, I'm like, on stage, I look at them, I go to them, and then some of the members from the Alliance try to talk to me.
00:11:50.000Like, we're so sorry that that happened.
00:11:53.000That's not all of us, or we don't know what just happened.
00:11:56.000In my head, I'm thinking, so much for the Alliance part of this whole thing, right?
00:14:39.000And I'm just like, in my head, like, mad, listening to, like, Drake, just like, I gotta let enemies...
00:14:45.000I'm just like, fucking everything that...
00:14:48.000I think is wrong that we hear as like a narrative of like kids are soft all this kind of shit is playing like yes that's what it is like and I'm thankful that my crew was there because I'm venting to them because if they weren't there I'd be on some other shit.
00:15:04.000But as I'm checking my Instagram, because I'm like, this is definitely going to be a fucking story on Instagram at the very least.
00:16:14.000And being in this cycle has confirmed my belief that it's all fucking nonsense.
00:16:19.000But she effectively says, I hope you learned your lesson of respecting what you were hired to do and respecting strong young women and check your fucking ego.
00:16:34.000I was like, it took all of me not to just be like, just eviscerate.
00:16:39.000Because I'm like, I'm good with, I'm not good at a lot of things, but I can eviscerate somebody in an Instagram DM. And so I didn't say shit to her besides thank you for your support.
00:16:49.000But all these people are messaging me like, yo, we're so sorry that fucking happened.
00:16:53.000And I'm like, alright, I'm not totally fucked with all these kids.
00:16:58.000And I go to this show at UCB East and I'm taping an hour.
00:17:02.000So I can't even process what just happened because my instinct is to just talk about this immediately.
00:17:08.000But I can't because I have to tape this hour.
00:17:12.000And so I get off stage, and the hour goes well, and as I'm leaving UCB East, three kids that were at the show at Columbia had come down from Columbia and followed me to UCB East, and they came up to me and apologized in person.
00:17:27.000They're like, we're so sorry that happened.
00:17:40.000Maybe it's just the people that have the fucking bullhorn that get to just say whatever the fuck they want and silence people that are, like, the minority, but they're, like, the vocal minority.
00:17:49.000Whereas, like, all these people that are, like, actually on my squad are not as vocal as they can be.
00:17:55.000They're more, like, quiet and apologizing in person.
00:22:53.000So I was just a couple years older than them.
00:22:55.000And so it was fun for me to talk to them about what life is like when you actually have to pay your own bills and you're out free.
00:23:04.000And some guy goes, you know, like I was doing the question thing, and some guy goes, I go, you know, I lift his hand up, he goes, tell a joke.
00:24:13.000It's like people now and maybe forever have always heard shit and they immediately think this means if I'm thinking something bad about this, that means that someone is saying something bad.
00:24:24.000It's not even that they're thinking bad about it.
00:24:25.000They've decided this is a taboo subject.
00:24:27.000Even if you're not even saying anything negative about it.
00:24:29.000Like say if you do a joke about interracial relationships.
00:25:15.000It's young people that are also flexing, right?
00:25:18.000They're free from the control of their parents.
00:25:20.000And I find that you're dealing with that more in, like...
00:25:25.000Rich or upper-middle-class families because I think they're more hands-on with their kids and more controlling and those kids get free they want to exert their own freedom and when they get free their parents they want to Establish they're different and that they have their own mind their own and then we're part of the new generation and the new generation is not going to tolerate racism cis hetero Activity and they just decide that they're gonna fucking put their foot down but It's a pattern that repeats itself over and over and over again.
00:25:55.000It's just today they have social media.
00:28:25.000I really believe that this is just a symptom of growing up.
00:28:28.000And you're just giving these people the power to express themselves where there's no mature, wiser person that's around them that says, hold on, let's look at the context of what he's doing.
00:28:38.000Let's examine what he's doing and then you're going to apologize to him because this is clearly a fucking joke.
00:29:53.000My friend started a hashtag challenge, which I hope no one picks up, the Nimesh challenge, where if I'm on stage somewhere, you just come on stage and rip the mic out of my head.
00:31:03.000If I didn't need the cash and I was like, Jerry, if I was whatever, the two and a half weeks that I've spent reading the news and answering emails and getting back into the shit of just like,
00:33:12.000It's also like what he said about the instant you see a comic from, even if they're in England or South Africa, you immediately have that kinship.
00:33:27.000I mean, I like some of the interviews that he does, but Chris and Jerry have a moment where they're talking about going to a party and seeing each other, and Chris comes up to Jerry and just goes, Comedian!
00:34:16.000Boston, New York, L.A. But I've been to L.A. I've been, I mean, if you wanted to look at it on paper, although I always consider myself a Boston comic, I'm more of an L.A. comic than anything.
00:34:26.000I've been out here since 94. Oh, shit.
00:34:28.000I was thinking about it the other day.
00:35:43.000I have, over the last three or four years, actually five, since I did my Comedy Central special in 2014, I decided to change my process right before that, because I decided that I needed to do more specials,
00:36:00.000because I went from, I did one in 2009 that I really liked, then I did one in 2012 that I half-assed.
00:36:08.000Because I wasn't at the store anymore, and I wasn't doing weekly sets.
00:36:13.000So then I realized, okay, there's a very distinct process in terms of the work that you have to do.
00:36:18.000First of all, you have to go up a lot.
00:36:20.000You have to go up at least three or four days a week, and I would like to go multiple times a night, and I'd like to go to different environments.
00:36:45.000And George Carlin had an interesting method that I think I'm starting to adopt, because I've been doing it a lot lately, even though it's subconscious, where I write out concepts sober, and then I fire up.
00:36:56.000Then I spark up a joint, and then I go over it again when I'm high.
00:38:30.000But then there's this other bit that I'm working on as well that's a little bit older about the dude from the missionary that got shot up by the arrows by the uncontacted tribe.
00:39:16.000Like sitting in front of a computer or a notebook and writing.
00:39:19.000Most comedians like to just have a bit and they work it out on stage and they know how it worked and they improve it the next set.
00:39:25.000And especially if you're doing the New York City trip where you're doing the cellar and then you're doing the stand and then you're doing all these different sets all around town and you're doing little short 10 minute sets here and there.
00:39:36.000It's easy to just kind of keep working on it.
00:40:00.000Maybe eight months ago, I was of the brain where I was like, I'll write a note, I'll write a bullet point or whatever, and I'll try to work it out.
00:40:07.000And then I'll write something that I think is interesting as a joke.
00:40:11.000But I saw, you know, opening for Aziz, working with Hassan, like working with people that are like crushing it.
00:40:18.000Their process is like, they're maniacs.
00:40:22.000Like you, where it's just like, yes, I have a codified process.
00:40:25.000This is exactly how I'm going to do it.
00:40:27.000This is what's worked for like 10, 15 years, however long I've been doing it.
00:40:31.000And once I saw like that process, I'm like, oh, these motherfuckers, I think I work hard, but these guys work fucking crazy hard.
00:40:38.000And it's like sort of emulate that process of like, I got to set aside at least 20, 30 minutes a day where I'm like literally right.
00:40:44.000Even if it's the same thing over and over, it's just like, Yeah.
00:43:10.000Yeah, and tickets are expensive, and they had to work to get those tickets, and a lot of people are doing jobs they fucking hate, and cutting back on other things to have enough money to go out and have a few drinks.
00:43:22.000But there's also a lot of people that try to skirt that responsibility because the pressure of that responsibility is kind of overwhelming.
00:43:28.000You think about it, it makes you nervous, and you just start, you fuck off, and you half-ass it.
00:43:37.000It's like there's a lot of people that study all year long, and there's a lot of people that half-ass it up until the last minute, and then they just try to shove it all in all at once.
00:43:44.000It's a weird kind of confidence that you need or delusional.
00:43:57.000But the times where I've fucking sat and been like, this is the bit I gotta do.
00:44:01.000I gotta make sure I hit it to the point where I'll just bring the notebook on stage and just be like, okay, I gotta make sure this goes the way I want it to go.
00:44:07.000This is an old expression, how you do anything is how you do everything.
00:44:11.000Or how you do everything is how you do anything.
00:44:30.000Human beings are like, I think people are hardwired to work.
00:44:34.000But it's also very easy to just not do that and believe that it'll be fine or fuck this up.
00:44:41.000It's a pressure alleviator because you put these expectations on yourself of success and there's a lot of pressure involved in meeting those expectations.
00:44:50.000And one of the best pressure relievers is just fucking up so you lower your own personal expectations.
00:44:56.000People drinking, doing all that kind of shit.
00:45:14.000The psychological mindfuck that goes on when you're attempting to do anything, whether it's stand-up comedy, or I guess it would probably be the same with almost any art form.
00:45:25.000Especially open-ended art form where you don't have a boss who's telling you, hey, you know, Namesh, you gotta get this fucking project in at 3 o'clock.
00:46:11.000Some people, I'm like, I know they have the work ethic to do whatever the fuck.
00:46:14.000If my friends were super successful in most other endeavors, like that they do, like finance or doctors or whatever, apply the same work ethic to comedy, they might be successful if they're funny.
00:46:26.000But a lot of people think they're funny and then just forget that fucking, the work part, where it's just like, yo, fuck, this is slave shit.
00:46:52.000It's a weird gig, and you have to be a self-starter, because if you're not the type of person that knows how to motivate yourself and get out of bed and get things done, you'll just fucking lay around until three in the afternoon, then you'll go eat a sub and have a cup of coffee, and then, ah, my set's in two hours, I think I'm gonna take a nap.
00:49:34.000You're like trying to figure out, oh, I got a bunch of fucking insane shit in my brain, and this is how I think it, and I got to figure out how I'm going to say it.
00:49:41.000That's not necessarily how everyone else would say it, but this is how I feel about it, and I'm going to say it that way.
00:49:46.000And then you have to take into account the economy of words.
00:50:02.000You have to figure out a way to introduce it in a way that's unique and captivating and entertaining, but also quick enough to get into their brain before they figure out where you're going.
00:50:12.000Because the worst thing is when you see a guy on stage and you're like, oh, I know where this is going.
00:50:58.000It's like you hit these punchlines and the whole audience laughs and roars and they're having a good time and it's one of the greatest feelings in life.
00:51:08.000It's because you know but you don't know until it comes out of your mouth and you're like, oh, look what I did there.
00:51:16.000Well, it's also you're making people feel good.
00:51:20.000You go to the improv last night, there's 190 people in that room, and you're looking out into the audience, and all these people are having a great time.
00:51:27.000They're laughing and having so much fun.
00:52:04.000That this person, like, please welcome Jamie Vernon.
00:52:07.000He goes up on the stage, gets up there, hey everybody, and it's an exchange.
00:52:12.000It's a unique contract where you're like, okay, I'm going to give this person who has a microphone 10 minutes of my time, my precious time, and in that 10 minutes, you've got to make me feel better about my life.
00:52:25.000That's nothing, or escape my life, or whatever it is people are seeking.
00:53:09.000But if you could buy something over-the-counter and it was a laughter drug, we could just take a pill and everything would be hilarious and funny.
00:53:35.000When you see girls getting upset and guys laughing.
00:53:39.000Even last night, you could see the couples, and I told a joke, and I could see what girl is looking at what guy versus what guy is just laughing it up.
00:53:58.000One night she got mad at me because I closed the door too loud because she was sleeping and I was drunk and I came home and I just accidentally closed the door and I was like that's how you like the bit is I say you know there's two ways to close the door as a man there's a regular way just close it like you've been taught your whole life and then there's another way if you live with your girlfriend you come home late she's sleeping you got to turn the doorknob push it into the frame and then release it so it doesn't make a noise or your relationship might end and you see guys just go and girls going we told you That's how you gotta do
00:54:28.000I'm just like, that, to me, is like the best, where it's like, I know everything that these motherfuckers are going through in this fucking moment.
00:54:35.000And they're gonna go home and talk about, see, I told you that the door shit was too loud.
00:54:55.000I think whatever you're doing, whatever it is, if you're a person who enjoys creating things, it's one of the most rewarding feelings of building something that wasn't there before, and then all of a sudden it's there, and you made it.
00:57:04.000I did talking about Columbia one night at the cellar, and he went up after me and immediately goes, I don't know why they're writing Nemesh up now.
00:57:20.000But he did a joke about how checking Twitter is like opening up an empty refrigerator and hoping that there's something new in there, and there never is.
00:57:31.000You just go, fuck, let me check again.
00:57:45.000This instantaneous gratification thing that you're getting off of some weird dopamine hit by touching that device and getting information to pop up, but it's not satisfying.
00:59:08.000But what's interesting, even in the hunting world, a lot of people are, like, Instagramming while they're hunting, and they're doing Insta stories while they're out there in the forest.
01:00:57.000And my real fear is that this is one stage of a complete connection to electronics and to each other that's unhealthy and unproductive and unavoidable.
01:01:11.000Because I don't think that we're going to end with...
01:01:13.000Social media like Twitter and Instagram where it's like you just press a button get it it's gonna be Completely connected to your brain.
01:01:21.000Yeah, we're gonna have that fairly soon I feel like within the next 10 years that's gonna be a normal thing that you could just pull up information Instantaneously it's almost like the the phone the other the watch thing feels almost like wearing a digital watch No, this is a regular watch.
01:01:36.000This is my dad's rotto from like 1980 something Since they make such cool digital watches now, a lot of them look like that.
01:05:32.000What they were searching for is what they were trying to find out how is it that these Russian bots are able to disseminate propaganda so readily and so easily and so efficiently.
01:06:37.000You need people that really, truly understand what the complications are, what the ramifications are, and what they could have done to prevent these things.
01:06:48.000I think that what happened with Facebook and what's happening with Twitter and a lot of these other things is no one anticipated the impact culturally they were going to have.
01:06:57.000I was talking about this the other day with Sam Jay, maybe a few months ago, about how it's the democratization of information and how easy it is to pretend you know what you're talking about.
01:07:23.000You just gotta put like a weird fucking eagle on your website and it's like, this is the fucking news now.
01:07:28.000You don't even have to have a website.
01:07:29.000All you have to have is a popular Twitter account.
01:07:31.000There's a lot of people out there that have popular Twitter accounts and when you go to their Twitter account and there's quite a few people that I follow that I don't follow.
01:07:39.000What that means is I bookmark their page so they don't even know that I follow them because they're fucking insane.
01:07:45.000I don't want them sending me DMs and I'll go and read their stuff and they are on there all day.
01:10:02.000Because everything's got to be black and white.
01:10:05.000Especially with a lot of this younger generation where it's like, if something's not black and white, it goes fucking awry for them.
01:10:11.000They want it to be black and white so they'll create a false narrative where it is black and white.
01:10:15.000That's one thing you see a lot today where people pretend that someone is something and they do this reductionist thing where they boil it down to one thing.
01:10:59.000But what I was saying is, with this alt-right shit, everyone wants to put somebody in their own agenda.
01:11:06.000This reductionist shit of just like, this is how I feel about it, and look at the points that make me seem smart and correct about this.
01:11:13.000Yeah, and they're trying to do that online in front of everybody instead of like this internal examination of their actual feelings and how they really think about things and whether or not they make sense or whether or not it's objective.
01:11:24.000Instead of that, they're broadcasting this in this sort of weird way that's at least...
01:12:03.000What bothered me was someone hit me up saying, you haven't spoke out against the white supremacists and people that are harassing this group and this blogger that's going off.
01:12:16.000I'm like, first, of course I do not support any white supremacists or anybody fucking going after these kids for whatever reason.
01:14:28.000There's some things that you should be way more upset about.
01:14:31.000How about Hastert, the guy who's the Speaker of the House, who went to jail for fucking kids, and he molested a bunch of kids, and he only got 15 months.
01:14:44.000But meanwhile, everybody's ranting and railing about Louis C.K. Not that this diminishes what Louis C.K. did, but I'm saying there's some real horrors in the world.
01:14:53.000And to choose to concentrate on a comedian who asked women, can I jerk off in front of you?
01:15:44.000You know what's crazy is that we've been harping on this younger generation, but I've said some shit at Cellar and VU. Very anti-Trump shit.
01:15:55.000And people have been like, like one night at VU, the sellers, one of their other clubs, I said, I forget what I said about Trump.
01:16:02.000I basically fat shame him because I think he's a fat piece of shit.
01:16:05.000But like, I said that in more articulate, in a joke form.
01:16:09.000And some guy got up and was like, fuck this.
01:19:04.000People find whatever team it is, whether it's progressive or conservative, and they just decide this is my identity, and they cloak themselves in it, and then they defend it.
01:19:15.000And someone like yourself is saying jokes that...
01:20:25.000And then I was like, it was still dead, because up until that point, everyone is sort of like, it's more just like pushing the narrative that everyone's kind of soft.
01:20:34.000Thursday morning, like five days after it happened, I got a text from Lenny Marcus at like 8 o'clock in the morning saying, Hey man, you're trending on Yahoo!
01:21:15.000Yeah, just to be like, what are you doing?
01:21:16.000For the two years that I was unemployed and living at home and going to the city every night, because I'm from Jersey, so I would go to the city every night to do stand-up.
01:21:24.000They were like, what the fuck is, what are you doing with your life?
01:21:28.000And so even up until, they didn't come see me until seven years in.
01:22:04.000Yeah, this would be a positive thing that happens.
01:22:08.000I'm going through some shit now just from like fucking my own hoisted by my own petard situation, like reading the news and all this kind of shit.
01:22:34.000I mean, they also know that I haven't—it's also very apparent in every article that was, like, printed or whatever that most people are on my side, so to speak.
01:22:44.000And I'm 100% confident I did nothing wrong as a human being or a comic, you know?
01:24:49.000But overall, over the course of time, you're going to absorb that information, and hopefully those kids are going to grow and mature.
01:24:58.000I mean, I have friends that were like, Completely progressive, weirdo, crazy, off the charts.
01:25:06.000Like activists ten years ago, and now they're like way, way mellow, and they're just like, what was wrong with me?
01:25:13.000I was virtue signaling, I was trying too hard, and they realized like a lot of what they were doing was just wasting energy, and it was just a lot of angst, and a lot of just trying to affect change in order to make themselves feel better.
01:25:27.000You know, I mean, trying to push buttons in order to validate their existence.
01:25:32.000That's what a lot of that specific incident felt like.
01:25:35.000It was either like, no, we have an opportunity to assert our sort of rightness, however wrong it is, here.
01:26:04.000Because they feel like that evil needs to be combated at every turn because we didn't before, and we let this guy get into office, and now here he is, and the Mueller probe, and all this fucking craziness.
01:26:14.000When Obama was president, shit felt a lot cooler.
01:27:07.000I think a lot of what we're seeing, especially with this particular thing, is the thing where it's like you don't have control in any other facet of your life necessarily, so you're going to try to exert it in a way that you think is positive when,
01:27:23.000in fact, you're doing the opposite of what your liberal sensibilities are.
01:28:54.000It's like, yo, just fucking take a minute, take a second to relax.
01:28:58.000And what I was trying to get at is that what utopia have you read about that's ever been real?
01:29:05.000Every book we read in high school, college, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, or Animal Farm, The Giver, which we read in fucking middle school.
01:29:14.000That's all a utopia, but there's fucking killing babies.
01:29:19.000It's all a fucking false utopia kind of situation.
01:29:22.000There is hate speech in the world, and you don't want it on your platform.
01:29:27.000But you've got to decide what is hate speech, when is it really hate speech, and when is it just ignorance.
01:29:32.000And sometimes the best way to combat bad speech is to let that speech play out and let good speech overwhelm it with logic and reason and a better argument.
01:29:43.000That's really what freedom of speech is supposed to be all about, that we work all this out.
01:29:47.000As soon as you start censoring voices and telling people that you're not going to allow them to talk, Boy, you create this atmosphere where you can start to choose what you're going to allow through and what you're not going to allow through.
01:30:01.000And then you're going to start censoring things that are far more subtle.
01:30:04.000You're going to start censoring things that don't seem reasonable.
01:30:08.000But you've decided that it's already okay to censor.
01:30:32.000And that's like the podcast pay form thing, or you can pay for shit with Patreon?
01:30:36.000Well, yeah, you can pay for things, but it's not necessarily just for podcasts, but people do use it for podcasts, but they use it for many things.
01:34:22.000But that's what I'm getting from this.
01:34:24.000So Patreon decided to remove him because of that.
01:34:27.000And there's many people that feel like that's not exactly why they did it, that they were looking for an excuse, and it's really because of his anti-liberal bias.
01:34:40.000A lot of people are disgusted by the idea that Patreon is now censoring voices and deciding who should or should not be able to receive donations from their fans based on their own personal political biases.
01:35:00.000And it's an interesting thing that's popped up because people like Sam Harris, who is very left, I mean, he gets accused of being all right, which is kind of hilarious, but he's very progressive and, you know, he's a public intellectual and he's decided that this is a moment where he is going to pull his Patreon account down because he doesn't like the way they are choosing to censor people.
01:35:26.000And de-platform people based entirely on something that has nothing to do with anything he's done on their platform and has something to do with something that was out there on another channel.
01:35:38.000So it's one of those weird little battleground situations.
01:35:42.000But do you think that Patreon's a private enterprise, right?
01:37:33.000I was trying to look up the ones exactly, but I know, for instance, on Twitch in the last year, they've changed things on the terms of service that kind of what you do broadly affects what you do on anyone's account.
01:37:44.000The problem with that, what you're just saying right now, is the guy who's the CEO of Patreon actually went on Dave Rubin's show, The Rubin Report, and said that they're only concerned with things that happen on Patreon.
01:38:06.000Like, I see their point with this particular thing that this guy said.
01:38:13.000I see how they find that offensive, and if that becomes a thing that he does more than once, and becomes a thing that he uses that all the time, and uses that kind of language in that context a lot,
01:38:28.000it's like, hmm, this is not, it's clunky.
01:39:17.000But the way to combat that, I don't...
01:39:22.000When you start censoring people and taking away their ability to make a living by expressing themselves, I just don't think that's the way to go.
01:39:31.000Because you're just going to receive backlash.
01:41:11.000So the right way when it comes to these things is let the people who contribute To his Patreon, decide that they don't like what he's doing, so they're no longer going to subscribe.
01:41:23.000That's the correct use of the platform.
01:41:25.000The platform exists because people who are fans are able to contribute.
01:41:30.000I say, Nimesh, I really like what you do.
01:41:32.000I'm going to send you $100 every month.
01:41:34.000And if someone wants to do that, they can do that.
01:41:37.000And there's a lot of people that do do that.
01:41:38.000When you say something that makes them offended, that makes them realize you're sloppy with your words, that makes them feel like you're a fool...
01:41:46.000They go, you know what, I'm not sending that fucking guy money anymore.
01:41:49.000Yeah, let the marketplace talk in that sense.
01:41:51.000If he lost 30% of his market because of that, and then a bunch of blogs are written about how stupid what he said was, that's the correct response.
01:42:02.000But the problem with pulling out is, then guys like Sam Harris are pulling out, and they've lost somewhere around 20% of all their Patreon accounts because of this.
01:42:13.000And by the way, a backlash that's primarily coming from people who don't agree with what that guy said, but do agree that it's a very slippery slope to start censoring people.
01:43:25.000He's like a hate speech guy, isn't he?
01:43:27.000He's like fucking inciting violence and whatever.
01:43:30.000He definitely did incite violence in that he wanted these Proud Boys to fight against Antifa.
01:43:40.000And he felt like the Antifa people were thugs, and that they showed up at conservative events, and they threatened violence, and then he wanted the Proud Boys to fight them.
01:43:48.000I actually had him on my podcast long before any of this shit went down, when I didn't even know what the fuck the Proud Boys was, and I was asking him.
01:43:55.000I knew him as the co-founder of Vice, and I knew him as...
01:44:00.000What I would basically say is he was essentially...
01:44:22.000He said he's dressing like Michael Douglas from Falling Down.
01:44:25.000He's a guy who would trick people into coming in and talking with him on his YouTube channel, and they thought that he was liberal or progressive, and then he would, you know, he would basically talk them into a corner.
01:44:42.000Yeah, he was doing a lot of that, and some of it was very clever that he was doing on his YouTube channel.
01:44:47.000Then he got into this whole Proud Boys thing, and there's a video, you can watch the bizarre origins of the Proud Boys from a podcast that I did with Anthony Cumia from Opie and Anthony, and he explains how the Proud Boys initially were just a joke.
01:45:04.000It was literally a joke, and they did it to make fun of a guy that was one of their interns.
01:45:20.000They all of a sudden, it got away from them, and they became an organization where you could just join.
01:45:27.000So all these people joined, and then they act as a proud boy, and they were beating people up, and all this other crazy shit, and he's on the outside.
01:46:44.000And the joke was that the problem is not the actual people with good ethics and morals that don't want animals to suffer.
01:46:51.000The problem is you let a bunch of people with no identity join your gang.
01:46:56.000And then they become a part of this plant-based gang.
01:46:58.000This is the same thing with the Proud Boys.
01:47:00.000I think some of them probably went into it thinking it was a goof.
01:47:03.000And they were going to go there, and they thought these Antifa assholes, these 90-pound dorks swinging bike locks at people and calling everybody a Nazi and a fascist and trying to shut down every single conservative speech that was at any sort of university.
01:50:16.000Dude, I'm telling you, when I was at the show, it was like, a story would be hot Monday morning, and then Tuesday morning, it's like, what happened?
01:50:28.000That's one of the more interesting things about this whole Trump story, especially the Mueller probe, is that there's been so many of those quick stories that have just piled up.
01:50:38.000You remember that family where the son died in Iraq?
01:52:47.000Jeff is also, as racist as he is, is a man of high ethical standards when it comes to, like, I'm not going to fucking do, I may hate minorities, but I respect the law.
01:53:03.000There wasn't a really good explanation of it.
01:53:05.000It was just one of those things, like, he had a, I think he had a debate with Baked Alaska, and then the next day he was gone with no real explanation of why.