#371 ā What the Hell Is Happeningļ¼
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Summary
Bill Maher is the host of Real Time on HBO and host of his own podcast, Club Random. He s also the author of a new book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You, which we discuss at the beginning of this conversation. Then we turn to the aftermath of October 7th, the cowardice and confusion of many celebrities, the gender apartheid, the failures of the Biden campaign, the differences between the left and right politically, Megyn Kelly, loss of confidence in the media, our expectations for the 2024 election, the security concerns of some old-school Republicans, the prospect of a second Trump term, totalitarian regimes, and how they fall, functioning under medical uncertainty, and other topics. And now I bring you Bill Maher, who probably needs no introduction. Bill has been on the show for the last 21 years, and he s hosted for the past 21 years on his podcast, Politically Incorrect, which he created and hosted on ABC before Real Time. And now he s going to stop doing stand-up comedy after 31 years. And he s not going to do standup anymore. And that s a good thing, because that s what he does well, right? except when he s drinking a lot of Stevia. And it s a lot, which isn t so good, apparently, because he says it s not so good. . Sam Harris is a writer and editor at The New York Times Magazine. She s a regular contributor, and she s a writer at The Weekly Standard. She also writes for the New York Magazine and The New Republic. She's a regular at The Cut. She has a blog, which you should check out. And she's a good friend of Bill s. If you like what she s doing, then you should listen to this podcast, because it s good, because she s funny and smart and good at it. And she s also good at making sense of things. and she also writes a book, too, which she also does a podcast, which is really good at being funny, which I think you should go listen to, too. She also does an awful lot of other stuff, so you should do that, you should really listen to that, but you should also listen to the audio version of her book, which will make you feel like you re listening to it on your drive home from your car. You can find her on Insta: .
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be
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scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one.
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We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
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of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
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Today I'm speaking with my friend Bill Maher about the state of our world. Bill probably
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needs no introduction. He is the host of Real Time on HBO, and he has his own podcast, Club
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Random. Before Real Time, which he's hosted for the last 21 years, Bill created and hosted
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Politically Incorrect on ABC. And he's the author of a new book, What This Comedian Said Will
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Shock You, which we discuss at the beginning of this conversation. Then we turn to the aftermath
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of October 7th, the cowardice and confusion of many celebrities, gender apartheid, the failures
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of the Biden campaign, Bill's relationship to his audience, the differences between the left and
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right politically, Megyn Kelly, loss of confidence in the media, our expectations for the 2024 election,
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the security concerns of some old-school Republicans, the prospect of a second Trump term,
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totalitarian regimes, and how they fall, functioning under medical uncertainty,
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Bill's plan to stop doing stand-up, maybe, his experience of fame, Jerry Seinfeld,
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and other topics. Anyway, this was fun, and now I bring you Bill Maher.
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All right, let's just hit the ground running. Well, I can edit, so you can't possibly. I know,
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but I don't want you to have to. I'm just getting soda, but I just don't want you to have to hear
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that on your beautiful podcast. Okay, I think. What are you drinking, Bill Maher? This is just a
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little roofie for you, so things go well after the show. No, this is something, it's like, it replaces
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diet soda. It's the healthiest version. Huh, what is it? It's poured into sparkling water. Some chemist
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made it, and he's convinced me it's real. Right. And I think it's stevia, or what's the...
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There was a little in there, yeah, but I was drinking stevia soda, but he says there's a lot
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of chemicals still in there. Right, right. You know, so he's playing the odds. Well, you seem to
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be winning so far. Well, you know, let's not even go there. No, we're gonna go there. We gotta talk
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about... Well, first, I will remind, I will have introduced you properly, obviously, in the
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housekeeping, but I will remind people that you have a new book, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You,
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which is really fantastic, because... So, I'm listening to it as an audiobook, and you read the
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audio, and it's based on your, you know, 20 years of your end-of-show editorials, which you... It must
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have been fun to actually go back and look at how times have changed. No, it was grueling, actually.
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Well, because I don't... I'm not a person who does well watching myself. I never watch my own show. I
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should. It would be much more professional to look at yourself, but I figured, well, I've been on 31 years.
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Maybe it would make it worse. You know, maybe I would see something and get self-conscious,
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and it seems to be working, and, you know. So...
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But you didn't go back and watch. You must have just looked at the transcripts.
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Of course. And look, those are my babies. I mean, that's what I work hardest on in the show.
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It's what I love doing the most. I would give up anything else in show business before I gave up
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that. And look, they are good. I mean, but look, over 20 years, they're not all going to be 100 out
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of 100, and some stuff ages badly. Not terribly badly. Not like I have very different political
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opinions. That was part of why I did this, to see if I did. But just, they're stale. You know,
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they're making fun of John Boehner. It's not funny anymore, and half the country doesn't know who I'm
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talking about. So there was a lot of work bringing them up to date. But it was a labor of love. And
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people have been telling me for a very long time, I should do this. You know, this would make a good
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book. Well, you took the time to write them in the first place. So it's really... I mean, they're
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very well-crafted little essays. Thank you. Yeah, and they're funny. I mean, everyone who reads this
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says, I'm LOL-ing on every page, which is rare for a book, I think. But as I read over the book
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itself, after I finished it, I was like, yeah, people... And of course, they were originally done
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as editorials on a television show where I was getting big LOLs. Yeah, I mean, that's something
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I noticed in listening to it as an audiobook, because you're... You know, the original form was
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for you to read it in front of an audience. And I'm hearing where all the laughs would be,
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and the... But there's no... Obviously, there's no audience in the audiobook. There's no laugh track in
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the audiobook, which... I mean, you could... You know, had you sweetened it, you would have had to put in
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endless pauses, because the velocity of the laughs is like... It's like every four seconds,
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there's a button, and it's really... Yeah, and my prime directive in doing these,
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well, there was a few. One was, don't be earnest. I talk about that in the introduction. Don't be
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earnest, which to me is when commentators talk about a subject as if it's more important to them
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personally than the starving people in Sudan. You know what I'm talking about? And also...
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Put in the laughs. It can't just be, and you, sir, are bad. You gotta leaven it. And as long as the
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laughs are always in service of the point, and they don't go too far away, then it works for me.
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And that's always what I've followed. And I think... Yeah, I think you see it reflected in the book.
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So we're talking on the... I would call it a set. It's not quite a set. This is actually your
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guest house. Bunker. But we're on your Club Random set. Thank you. Yes, thank you for coming
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over. I mean... Yeah, no, it's great. Well, it's super easy to do it this way. As you know, I do all
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my podcasts remotely, but... It must be nice to have a little human contact, huh, Sam? It is good,
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yeah. Those of us, like myself, who listen to you religiously, everyone, we do see you kind of as the
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voice of God. And I know you do that in your meditation even more, but that voice, I must say,
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I'm very flattered to be here because, like I say, I listen every week, and it's almost always some
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egghead like you with advanced college degrees. I feel like I'm really slumming up your podcast as
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a mere bachelor of arts degree and a comedian and, you know... As we have seen, the eggheads are being
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miseducated at this point. The new batch of eggheads are going to be quite something.
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Not the ones you have on, though. They're always good people. Except that Rory guy.
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Oh, that was interesting. Yeah. Well, he is an incredibly impressive person, but he's
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quite miseducated on this particular point. Really?
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Yeah. I mean, it's really... Well... Isn't that a kind of drum in life that we all think about all
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the time? How can someone be so smart on one thing and not get it so much on another? And they're
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thinking about us the same way about certain issues. Yeah. Well, we should talk about this because
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a lot of this relates of late to what's happened post-October 7th, and just we see this great
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fracturing of public opinion. But strangely, I've noticed that many people in your line of work,
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people in Hollywood, even some very famous people who agree with us about how the moral
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landscape looks, are terrified to say anything. And the people on the other side are not terrified.
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There are A-list celebrities who are not terrified to be mistaken for Hamas supporters,
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But can you explain, how is it, if the Jews control Hollywood, how is it that it is so terrifying
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to state the obvious? There's a difference between a death cult and a group of people,
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however, ineptly, is attempting to defend itself against a death cult?
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Well, I will answer your question. But did I interrupt your introduction? Did we never get to
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like where you were... Did I cut you off for something that you...
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If people... No, I'll do a separate housekeeping. But if people notice that the acoustics are
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different here, we're in your house. I'm not in my studio.
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I see. You're on the lam from the people who love Gaza.
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Okay. Well, I mean, there's so much to this answer, as I think we both agree, the mouth
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of the river, is what I've always called it, of the insanity that flows down from the left
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side of the spectrum is colleges, universities. Somehow they became huge asshole factories.
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And they teach, I guess, post-modernism. Have you ever read that book, or maybe you had
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Have you read it? Do you have an opinion of it? It's sort of, if people don't know,
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it's sort of a dissection of where this kind of crazy, what we think of, and I think we're,
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you know, old school liberals, basically, but what we think of as the nuttiness on the
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left, the origins of it. And it goes, it's very detailed and arcane. I don't think we
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can reproduce it here, but it's basically started in the 70s in France, ideas about post-modernism
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that found their way into American universities. And just the term post-modernism, I always felt
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was crazy because don't you want to be modern? What's after modern? Nutty.
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But this sort of encapsulates the answer to your question is, how could the people who
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control Hollywood be on the side that's against the Jews? Because everything, once you go past
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modern, you're sort of back at your own ass again with your head up it.
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Yeah. It's funny, you unwittingly, in mentioning that particular book, you have encapsulated really
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the totality of our problem at the moment because one of the authors of that book, James Lindsay,
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kind of spiraled off into Trumpistan and conspiristan and got very, very weird. And,
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you know, James, I hear your pain, but he got very, very weird. Helen, his co-author, did not.
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But it's not to say they're wrong about what they wrote in that book at all. It's just that once
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you get sufficiently entranced by the horror on the left or the horror on the right, you get sort
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of radicalized or self-radicalized or radicalized by your audience. And you just, very few of us have
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been able to keep both extremes in view and in proportion. I mean, they're not that, I mean,
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this is something you point out in your book. At equal extremes from reason, they're equally extreme.
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They're still very different and we have to respond to them differently.
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Yes. I did not know that about Mr. Lindsay. And again, this is the issue that I'm always
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dealing with. And I think quite a few of us are, how do you get your mind around that problem of
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this person seems so smart on these things and we can sit and talk for an hour. And I will talk to
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anybody here. I've talked to the far sides and always came away friendly with everybody because
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we're not dwelling on the politics. And when it gets to that moment where it's a political,
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I mean, I had the, who was the guy? Dana White.
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You know, he's far right. He's a Trumper. We had a great time. You just have to. There's no other way
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this country can heal. You have to get over that thing in your head that says, oh, well, you know,
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four out of five of these compartments didn't flood, but the fifth one, that can't be enough
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You know, in the Titanic, there was nine compartments. The guy, Victor Garber comes out and says,
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only four of them had flooded. We'd be fine. But the fifth one did and now we're going down.
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And I feel like that's our minds. It's compartments and a couple of them and almost
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everybody will be flooded. I feel like you and I and Andrew Sullivan and, you know, Barry Weiss and
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this, there is a group of us, but I do feel like we're sort of standing like this, you know, with our
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backs to each other because there's only so few of us and the hordes are coming from all around us,
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from both sides. So we have to get into that phalanx of the Roman soldiers.
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Yeah, that's a good image. Yeah. So back to Hollywood for a moment. Why is it that these
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celebrities are terrified to state the obvious in the aftermath of October 7th? And so many are not
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terrified to get on what is quite obviously the wrong side of it. I mean, to be clear, there are
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people who signed letters castigating Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7th before Israel
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did anything in response. Like, how is it that that was moral high ground that they thought they
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could stake out? And we literally have Jewish celebrities, who I won't name, who won't go on
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your podcast or my podcast or Rogan's podcast and talk about anything here because they're afraid
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Well, the short answer is celebrities are stupid. No, I exaggerate slightly.
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Well, actually, let me just add to this. No, you're not quite exaggerating because
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a Harris poll just came out, a Harvard Harris poll came out, and they're actually completely out of
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touch with public opinion in the country. 75% of Americans want the IDF to go into RAFA. 75%.
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Sam, let me say this in a nicer way. And I do mean this more sincerely than my insulting comment.
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People in the arts perceive truth differently. They get at truth differently, poetically,
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metaphorically. They're not stupid in general. There are some, yes. But they just, it's not an
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information-based talent that they have. It's emotional. It's about feeling. That's why they're so big on
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your truth and, you know, your felt truth, whatever phrases they're using for just,
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this is what I want to believe, so I'm going to. The world is not a completely rational place. I think
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you and I think we can get at truth better through rationality, but it's just not how the people in the
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arts, they're more emotionally linked. That's what works for them with the audience. It's just who they
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are. And for many reasons, that's why we love them more. I mean, we idolize them and adore them.
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To the point of swelling their heads where they go crazy because they're so adored. That happens a
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lot in show business. We don't have that effect on people, you and I. But we're more, I think,
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sane about perceiving truth. So they don't know the history of the Middle East. All they know is,
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well, the kids are doing it, so it must be hip, so you don't want to lose the young audience.
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So let's just get with them. They didn't do enough research to realize that it's not even most kids,
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but it's the ones who are on the news, and it gets on their phone. And of course, there's also
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tremendous peer pressure out here. I mean, the people who are the far, far leftist, I mean,
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they really control the debate. You do not want to get on their wrong side. They control the media.
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They control the gossip. So you better be exactly, like when we had the strike last year,
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you better be exactly on that page and not have any questions about the strike.
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And I had questions. Many people did, but very afraid to speak. It's not that different with
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political issues either, I think. You better get in line and believe that and parrot that,
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or else you are ostracized in this town. And that certainly has happened to actual conservatives,
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and they complained about it. And I don't blame them for complaining about it. Bruce Willis
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complained about it. People who were just Republican, just believed in smaller government
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and the old Republican stuff, which is not against the law and is sometimes correct,
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but it got to the point where it was people like you and me, who aren't even Barry Weiss. I mean,
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we're not even, we're not, we don't think of ourselves as conservatives, and we're not.
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We name almost any liberal issue, and we're like, yes, of course, we were there a long time ago.
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A long time ago, we were there on, you know, racism and gay rights and pot, whatever it is.
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No, I'm left on every issue, except I'm right of John Bolton on jihadism. That's the one thing.
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Me too. Well, that's the ultimate blind spot for them, because again, they don't know things.
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So it's just, it's really as simple as, well, the kids are doing it. And also, it's about brown
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people and white people, because they think Israelis are all white, which they're of course not.
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But to them, it's the browner, poorer people and the whiter, richer people. And I think we know who
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the bad guy in this story is. You know, it's really that simple. They really can only perceive
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things simply like black and white is the perfect metaphor for them. And that's why, you know,
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people of color all over the world can get away with anything. I mean, North Korea starves its
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people. You know, China puts the Uyghurs in concentration camps. A couple of African countries
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talk openly these days about marching gays into stadiums and killing them for the crime of being
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gay. I mean, it's just comical. The lengths that they will go to, to not see crimes if they're not
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committed by colonizers or, you know, the patriarchy.
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But it's even the U.N. It's even, it's like Amal Clooney bringing an arrest warrant against
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Netanyahu and Sinoir as though they're equivalent characters.
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Really, Sam, you missed The View that day? What, were you sick?
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No, I actually, in anticipation of this conversation, I've been following a little
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bit of your press. I watched you with Megyn Kelly. I watched you in a few places.
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Well, you know, first of all, I was very glad to be there. I hadn't been there in a long time.
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I'm friends, really good friends with Joy and Whoopi for years. The other ones I did not
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know. They were new to the show. But, you know, it's a show that makes news. And it's well-watched
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and well-received. And it's in the zeitgeist. So I really wanted to go there and reconnect with
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my friends. And also, look, I'm not going to lie, they walked right into the feminist trap
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because, you know, they started in on, I forget how it's up, but Gaza. Again, you're
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right. You're always the bad guy if you're the defending Israel because you're not upset
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about the women and children being killed. Yes, I am very upset about it. I don't think
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that's good either, women and children being killed anywhere in the world. My question to
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them is always, first, do you think Hamas should be destroyed? And people almost always
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say yes. I don't know how much they really know about Hamas, but I think they kind of
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Well, I'm not up to the trap part yet. Okay, so first I lay out the war thing, which is,
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yes, it's a fascist dictatorship and it's a terrorist army. Both those things describe
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Hamas. And they are despised by their own people. And they have vowed to wipe out Israel
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many times and have tried many times and quite openly say they will keep trying to do that.
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Does that group need to be destroyed? And they say, yes. Then we're just talking about how
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to do it. And you're saying, you know better than... Look, I don't know if they're using
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too many bombs. And you don't either, whoever I'm talking to. You just don't.
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What I do know is that the history of Israel, I trust them more than any other nation to at
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least try to be humane. They've had remarkable patience.
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Well, just for... Even if they were a nation of psychopaths for pure self-interest, given
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what happens to them on the world stage every time they kill kids, it's in their interest
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to be more scrupulous than any other fighting force to minimize collateral damage. There's
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just no upside for them as a nation to be indiscriminate with their bombs. So the fact
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that they have this additional problem is that they're fighting a terrorist army that is using
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its own civilian population as human shields. That has implications.
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I've heard you speak eloquently on that, the moral equivalence, ridiculous part of that
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scenario. Okay. So, but this wasn't my feminist trap was, all right, here you are defending and I'm
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the bad guy because I'm for Israel and you're for the Palestinians. And then I just always say,
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if you had to live in Gaza for even one day, and I don't mean during the war, of course,
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that's a nightmare, but just under normal Gaza, you would run screaming and begging to live in Tel
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Aviv where people share the values that you prize. And if you're looking for a cause, how about women?
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Because this is a show hosted by women and mostly women are in the audience.
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And so now you're in my feminist state, you can't argue with this.
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But all you have to do is describe, like in most Muslim majority countries, including certainly Gaza,
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like what women go through. For these people who are so obsessed with this word apartheid
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and thinking that Israel is an apartheid state, which it is not, there's a real apartheid in the
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world, a gender apartheid. I mean, where one half of the population, not black and white,
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just male and female, is treated completely different with no equal rights in speech or how
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you can dress or reproductive rights or education opportunities, certainly freedom from sexual
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violence and sexual harassment. I mean, I could go down the list. I guess I did to some degree.
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That isn't the issue of the day. That's going to be my next editorial.
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Just throw, like, I know you're looking for a cause, kids, which is great. I think that's a
00:22:50.420
great impulse. How about this one? Because it's really big.
00:22:53.880
The moral confusion is so complete, however, because the hijab became the symbol of female
00:23:00.820
empowerment for the Women's March. You have a shepherd fairy poster of a woman, a gorgeous woman in a
00:23:05.540
job, just excluding the male gaze with this religious symbol, which is, in fact, the mechanism
00:23:13.740
of enshrining this gender apartheid in Muslim-majority countries. And you have women who are
00:23:19.320
struggling to get out from under that, and the moment they show their hair in Iran, they're thrown
00:23:23.680
in prison and raped and tortured and killed sometimes.
00:23:26.140
Again, the image I have of you sticking your head out so far, thinking you're so progressive,
00:23:32.820
but actually it being back around under your ass is, again, another example.
00:23:40.400
Yeah. All right. So back to you and what you're up to here. How do you think of your own audience
00:23:47.320
at this point? I mean, you've got two very different gigs. You're just talking on both platforms,
00:23:54.340
but you have your HBO show and you've got Club Random. I mean, obviously they couldn't be more
00:24:00.160
different in terms of just the execution. I mean, it's just, you must love doing this right here.
00:24:05.880
I love them both. And that's why, I mean, this moment in my life is great because I feel like
00:24:12.060
it is more complete with Club Random because now these are the two sides of me. I mean, suit and tie,
00:24:19.120
and certainly not stodgy. I mean, I think people see real time as a pretty hip show with that's
00:24:25.300
pretty freewheeling. I was shocked when they let me put it on CNN. I mean, when they asked me to,
00:24:30.800
and I said, well, what about all the language in the, you know, we don't care.
00:24:35.040
So are they airing, I haven't actually watched it on CNN. Are they airing all
00:24:41.400
No, they had to, we cut out one segment because they have to put in commercials,
00:24:49.100
That now you can say fuck on CNN and nobody cares.
00:24:54.020
Is that one good thing that Trump did to the universe?
00:24:57.400
Yeah, but it is amazing the way that happens sometimes where you don't realize where the
00:25:04.200
river has flowed to until something indicates and then you go, oh, wow, you can say fuck on CNN
00:25:11.280
and nobody cares. That's where the country is. That is different from even 10 years or certainly
00:25:17.440
20. And when I first did the Tonight Show, you couldn't say ass on TV. So we've come a long way,
00:25:24.920
baby. But I love this because it's exactly who I am when I'm off working and we're just sitting
00:25:33.520
around and I'm always stoned for it. That makes a big difference. And there's no agenda. My show,
00:25:39.880
I have an agenda. I look at that show real time as a show that catches people up on the news
00:25:44.960
who don't have time to follow it every day. Or maybe they do and they just like an analysis of
00:25:50.260
it. There's both sides of that. But a lot of people watch it to get the news. It's like,
00:25:55.820
oh, this is what happened this week. So I have a clear agenda and I work many,
00:26:00.620
many hours to make it just right. It's like football players versus baseball. Once a week,
00:26:05.120
you really want to get it right. But this is just, you know, it can be anything. And most of
00:26:10.340
the people here are not political people. And that's great because I don't always want to talk
00:26:14.400
about politics. It's a bit of a busman's holiday for me. Yeah. I think real time got better when you
00:26:21.800
went to just two people on the panel. Totally. It was too crowded. Too crowded. I could not agree
00:26:27.180
more. I forgot what forced that. Did it just happen by accident? Okay, it was the pandemic.
00:26:31.580
The pandemic did us a lot of good. Got us a better audience also because we had to
00:26:36.280
socially distance. And so the crowd was like only a third of the size and they were awesome. And
00:26:43.440
I was like, hmm, why don't we just keep, I'd rather have these people. And, you know, we just,
00:26:50.260
for a while there was people who, I don't know why they persisted in coming to a show they must
00:26:54.820
have known was going to be somewhat upsetting to them or to me because they were a very far left
00:27:00.980
woke crowd. And I've never been there. But there was years when I was fighting with my own audience,
00:27:09.140
you know, saying stuff that was like perceived in any way as not being towing the woke line. And
00:27:16.240
I was, you know, I have pictures on my wall of me doing this, giving the finger to the crowd.
00:27:21.100
And I would be, you know, and a lot of people said they liked that. It was kind of interesting.
00:27:26.060
And I could see how that is interesting. It's certainly not what you see in other talk shows,
00:27:30.420
the talk show host saying, fuck you to your own audience. But they would just annoy me with their
00:27:36.560
lack of open-mindedness. You have some of these great moments where you,
00:27:41.480
sometimes you'll tell a joke and it won't land and you'll look with contempt at your audience.
00:27:46.460
Like, okay, I'll wait. I'll wait for the laugh. Like you're going to fucking laugh at that.
00:27:50.560
Yeah. But now the audience has been awesome and they, they're my people. There are people,
00:27:58.880
they, they laugh at both sides and they don't hold it against you. They definitely cheer stuff
00:28:05.240
that's anti-Trump and stuff. I think they're where we are basically, which is, you know,
00:28:09.280
give us back old school Republicans, give us back a party that we might even consider voting for,
00:28:15.280
not these nuts and get, also get rid of the far woke nonsense on the left. By the way,
00:28:21.800
on the view, they were saying, I should not use the word woke. And I was wondering,
00:28:26.220
I was going to ask you about this. It is a word that triggers people. And it is a word that like
00:28:32.880
a lot of people, including a lot of African-American people, I understand it has a special meaning of
00:28:39.160
its original meaning, which I think we all think was great to be alert to injustice.
00:28:43.460
And then it migrated to a very different place, much the way the word violence,
00:28:47.780
for example, has migrated. It used to mean, oh, I know what violence is. It's physical and it
00:28:52.840
hurts. And, and now it's just like anything I don't like.
00:28:56.000
Yeah. Except, except for clitorectomies and suicide bombing, that's not violence. That's just
00:29:02.100
Right. But, so I, I, I would love to find some other word and get people to use it for woke.
00:29:09.800
I don't know. Well, I, I'm sort of out of touch with the original roots of it. I mean, I, I,
00:29:14.260
when I started hearing woke everywhere, it was already contaminated with a fair amount of moral
00:29:20.380
No, it was, it was an old school term from decades ago. And it was certainly understandable why black
00:29:27.120
folks in this country would need to, for their own survival, stay woke. And it's, it's a shame
00:29:34.120
because it is a great word with a great history, but yeah, I mean, there's, it was a hostile takeover.
00:29:40.080
So in thinking about your audience, the point you're making about going against the audience
00:29:45.520
and that not being conventional, that's especially true out in my world. I mean, many of us talk about
00:29:51.700
a phenomenon that we call audience capture, where, you know, if you're, you have a podcast and it's
00:29:56.620
really all of alternative media, so podcasts or newsletters, it relates to what we talked about
00:30:01.960
earlier, where people get radicalized by their own audience because they begin to cater to the
00:30:06.980
signal in their audience that is driving clicks or driving subscription. You know, that my audience
00:30:12.920
wants to hear just more and more about how Trump is awful. And then you just see how that person or
00:30:18.800
that, that, that channel becomes, um, on the one hand, boring, but not, not to the fanatics,
00:30:25.020
but also just less than scrupulous in how they call balls and strikes because they're just now they're
00:30:32.860
on team, whatever it is. Well, I think the best example of that is certain people have gone over to
00:30:38.220
MSNBC, you know, who were well, like Nicole Wallace. And I like her very much done, done my show. And I
00:30:48.080
see her, I think she's great. She's very pro and very smart, but she was hired, I think, as I'm sure
00:30:56.520
she was, she was a Bush spokesperson. So she was hired as the conservative, but I think this is probably
00:31:02.600
when Trump was, well, maybe it was before that, but anyway, it was like, okay to have a conservative
00:31:08.440
if they were like anti-Trump. I mean, David, not David Brooks, Brett Stevens also said, I think,
00:31:14.440
um, or indicated to me once that, you know, he's invited on that network, but usually it's only
00:31:21.000
limited to certain never Trumpers. Yeah. A certain area that is not going to upset the MSNBC audience.
00:31:28.060
Right. Like you have a conservative on, but he's agreeing with us on the doctrine that we've all
00:31:33.680
agreed on. Yeah. And a lot of that doctrine I agree with too. It's just, I just object to like
00:31:38.760
forcing it. But anyway, so like, I think somebody like that, they go over to MSNBC as a guest,
00:31:46.680
you know, on the show a lot and they do well. And, but again, they're, they were a conservative,
00:31:52.540
they were Bush administration person. Then they get hired, you know, now you're there every
00:31:58.000
day, the only people you talk to and, and sudden and, and slowly you go right from just a conservative,
00:32:05.380
but a never Trumper to a full on liberal. That, that's a little creepy to me.
00:32:10.940
I've noticed this. Well, I've noticed this much more in the other direction. You have people
00:32:14.620
just like us, or they used to be just like us who began to react to the craziness on the left.
00:32:22.340
And, and there's, there's something that I think, you tell me if it's true for you,
00:32:26.260
there's something more annoying about the extremism on the left and on the right.
00:32:31.020
Correct. Viscerally, yes. The right is more intellectual. I know in my mind,
00:32:40.840
It's more obnoxious. It's, first of all, it's embarrassing because it's sort of our team,
00:32:47.340
more than my team for sure. And I think yours. So it's like, you're embarrassing us on that,
00:32:53.960
Well, you're, you're also destroying institutions that I really care about.
00:32:57.020
I don't care about Liberty University. It was already destroyed, but the New York Times.
00:33:03.300
And Harvard. And like, like I care about these institutions.
00:33:07.560
So you, do you think of your audience as just a unified population? I mean,
00:33:11.780
the audience for Club Random is the same as the show or?
00:33:14.460
No, they're, I mean, it's all over the map and standup. I mean, I can say, I mean,
00:33:18.720
it's good in the sense that it's a very wide range. It's some younger, middle, I mean,
00:33:25.080
Gen X, a lot of those, but millennials too. And the TV show gets a younger number,
00:33:31.100
you know, median number than the late night shows. And it's politically all over the map too. Not,
00:33:38.400
of course, a lot of woke anymore. I think I lost that audience. I think they walked out the door
00:33:43.840
and it's okay. The super far left, I'm not, the people who are giving purity tests, I am not the
00:33:50.640
one to be passing a purity test and that's okay. I don't miss them. And I replaced them with, I think,
00:33:55.980
many more people in the middle. Right. And also, I definitely, yes, it's true, hear from more
00:34:01.480
conservatives, but never really the hard right asshole conservatives. It's more like the guys on the
00:34:08.840
Who used to think I was a huge liberal asshole and now think, oh, okay, at least he has the guts
00:34:15.680
to call out where the left went crazy. And maybe they think they, in their mind, maybe they think
00:34:21.860
they saw the crazy on the left before I did. I would contend, and one reason I went through all
00:34:27.220
those editorials is to find out if, actually, no, the left did get crazier. I don't think I missed
00:34:34.000
something in 2012 under Obama. I think he was pretty sane. And I don't think Gen Z had come
00:34:40.260
along yet. And I don't think you could, you could point to a lot of specific things that were not
00:34:47.140
where they are today, including, of course, marching with terrorists, stuff like that.
00:34:52.940
So I think you and I had a pretty similar experience over the last 10 years in purging our audience of
00:34:59.360
the two extremes, discovering that the far left hated us suddenly because we were, we weren't woke
00:35:05.300
and, and, and, and then also discovering that because we had made sense when aimed left and
00:35:13.140
certainly made sense on, you know, the collision between Western culture and jihadism, all that we,
00:35:19.360
we, we had a lot of far right proto-Trumpist fans who suddenly were blindsided by the fact that we
00:35:25.580
didn't recognize Trump's brilliance. Exactly. I've had that. Yes. I've had to face that
00:35:31.980
disappointment in people's eyes also. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, again, what I mean about how can you
00:35:37.720
think this, this, this, this, and not this. Right. And, and we just have to, you know, get past that
00:35:45.000
because I, I would love to know what your prediction is for, let's say the month of January,
00:35:51.920
January 2025. Yeah. How do you, how do you see that month? I mean, I have a birthday that month,
00:35:57.320
happens to be inauguration day. It's going to be, it could be a big month. It could be,
00:36:01.220
you might be, we might be having your birthday in a bunker somewhere. Luckily we have one. Yeah.
00:36:08.080
I mean, it is amazing that we're here and that the democratic party had years to watch this
00:36:16.060
slow moving catastrophe. Right. And they couldn't figure out how to still can't put anyone else in
00:36:22.560
position other than Biden. I mean, I mean, who, who appears to be, I mean, this is, it's hard to know
00:36:29.400
because you don't see that much of him, but it wouldn't be surprising if week by week, certainly
00:36:35.020
month by month, he's just getting obviously worse as a candidate. That's happening now. Yeah,
00:36:41.560
no, I know. I mean, like, like, I, I feel like, I mean, I'm hearing rumors that it's just, well,
00:36:45.460
they're, they're shielding him from the cameras. It's only going one way. Yeah, no, it's not,
00:36:49.920
there's no way he's going to get more pep in his step. No, it's a shame, you know, politically,
00:36:55.300
he's a disaster policy wise, not a disaster at all. No, although he, the way in which he's tried
00:37:02.900
to split the difference on, on Israel has been quite stupid politically. But it could have been worse.
00:37:09.380
Yeah, it could have been. In the beginning, he was great. And then he, well, his biggest failure
00:37:14.600
to me, when they look back on it, I think, is that he did not have the stamina, maybe it was
00:37:22.560
strength, maybe that's an age thing, I don't know, to fight with his own far left. He needs a sister
00:37:29.820
soldier moment. Exactly. So does she, Kamala Harris, because people are looking at her as the likely
00:37:35.860
person to finish the term. And they're not going to do it. And she needs to stiff arm the far left.
00:37:41.580
She can barely manage the script as they write it, let alone have the guts to, you know, or whatever
00:37:49.260
it takes to, she may really. You don't think she can just put on the old prosecutor hat and be kind
00:37:55.340
of law and order in a way that would reassure the middle of the country? For whatever reason,
00:37:59.840
and I liked her, still like her as a person. But for whatever reason, it's almost like someone who
00:38:07.260
does well in the comedy clubs, and then they get on the big stage, and it's, they just don't do well
00:38:14.100
on The Tonight Show, and the career's over. Like, she got on the big stage, and for some reason,
00:38:19.980
just part of it is the perception, and then maybe it fed on itself, but does not look confident.
00:38:25.720
Confidence, and I just think it's a mental block kind of a thing, because yes, that would be great
00:38:31.820
if she could, with confidence, go out there. I mean, you know who could do it, because he's got
00:38:36.600
that kind of confidence, is Gavin Newsom. I don't think he's going to do it, but he could switch on
00:38:41.940
a dime, because he's just a great debater who's very confident in what he's saying, no matter what
00:38:49.060
Because he can tap dance that way, he does seem like he lacks a core of real conviction. I mean,
00:38:56.180
he's a kind of a weather vane politically. I mean, he's...
00:38:59.560
I don't see it that way. I see him as way too far ideologically captured by the left.
00:39:05.500
Well, yeah, that's where the weather, that's where the wind has been blowing, and he's just stuck.
00:39:09.760
He's the governor of California. I mean, he was out front on, you know, a couple of those issues,
00:39:15.420
like gay marriage and stuff, when very few people...
00:39:19.540
Yeah, so I think he's shown that. I'm not against a guy who's a great politician. I mean, Clinton...
00:39:25.680
Haven't you seen those bad ads, the political ads against Newsom that are just so easily cut
00:39:30.640
by everyone on social media, where they just show him walking and talking about the California way,
00:39:35.020
intercut with just homelessness and tent cities?
00:39:38.040
Whatever's true in California might be beside the point. The optics for the rest of the country is that
00:39:43.460
California is a failed state that's just filled with fentanyl addicts and sex crimes, you know,
00:39:49.880
and drag queen story hour, and you've got Gavin presiding over all of it. I don't know how he
00:39:55.520
No. Well, I mean, I thought he would be a great replacement for Biden, as many people did,
00:40:02.600
and I still think he could pull it off, but the polling is very bad on him.
00:40:08.940
Yes. Somebody sent it to me because I was saying that. I think he'd be good.
00:40:13.660
Yes. And it's basically, it's California. It's what you're exactly talking about. He is tied
00:40:19.780
to this image that we're a hippie commune who've lost our mind, and, you know, Portland. Oh,
00:40:29.400
That's close enough. We get tarred with that as well.
00:40:34.240
Yeah. Portland's even worse than San Francisco as far as, like, going. Didn't they have the
00:40:41.100
Who could have thought that crime might go up when you kick the cops out?
00:40:47.760
And, again, like, I know there are people, and you must know this, that are listening to this
00:40:52.120
right now, like, hate listening because they're the two biggest smug assholes in the world are
00:40:58.520
sitting there talking like they know what the fuck is up, and then people on both sides will be
00:41:08.560
Well, we've got a lot to apologize for real more.
00:41:12.340
Yeah. I mean, I think the middle, in part, what has happened is that with social media,
00:41:17.760
we have built this hallucination machine where the extremes seem to take up much more of the
00:41:25.120
real bandwidth of the world than, in fact, they do, and to represent much more of a public
00:41:30.160
opinion than they do, you've got, like, 8% on each tail that is just incredibly loud,
00:41:36.500
and, you know, some of them have bot armies, then we've got outside actors like China and
00:41:41.800
Russia stoking, you know, that schism in our society.
00:41:45.980
But the schism is there, but still there's this vast middle of the country that understands
00:41:51.980
that you don't want to be, you know, giving double mastectomies to 12-year-old girls, and
00:41:57.780
that a coup, when you're trying to transfer power, is not a good thing in America, and
00:42:04.080
they don't want either of those extreme, and they don't want apologies for either of those
00:42:10.260
I mean, how is it that in the Republican Party, the party line is, January 6th was nothing?
00:42:18.200
Like, I mean, I understand that there's footage of cops, in many cases, terrified cops, letting
00:42:24.280
people into the building, because on the other side of the building, people are getting stabbed
00:42:30.160
But how is it that you, however much you want to diminish the significance of the violence
00:42:36.660
on that day, how is it that you can claim that nothing was actually in jeopardy when you have
00:42:43.600
a sitting president trying to ignore the results of an election, and the only bulwark against
00:42:50.480
him really actually trying to hold on to power is Mike Pence and a few other people having
00:42:56.580
their consciences still tethered to the Constitution rather than the personality cult?
00:43:02.420
Well, I'm going to answer that by saying I was on Megyn Kelly also, this week in New York,
00:43:08.540
and I was surprised, you know, I like her, and they were friends, and I always stayed with her.