Can you believe that Nancy Pelosi paid people to attack the Capitol on Jan 6 in order to make Republicans look bad? Actually, I mean, Jan 6 was the most peaceful gathering of a million patriots in history. Wait, hold on: Jan 6 was an antifa operative to act as cover for the fact that the election was, indeed, stolen.
Do any of these stories sound familiar? Now imagine hearing them all, and dozens more like them, all in the same day, and you’ll get a glimpse of what Daily Show correspondent and host of the podcast, Fingers the Conspiracy, Jordan Klepper, endures on a regular basis. Today Jordan joins us to talk about the cursed world of conspiracies that he’s witnessed, up close and in person, with the people who spread them, what it was like to be at the Capitol on Jan 6, and the bewildering intersection of comedy and politics.
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So we're going to get into that very soon with Jordan.
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Conspiracy Theory 139, Comedy in the Magiverse with Jordan Klepper.
you.
Can you believe that Nancy Pelosi paid people to attack the Capitol on January 6th in order to make Republicans look bad?
Actually, I mean, January 6th was the most peaceful gathering of a million patriots in history.
Wait, hold on.
January 6th was an Antifa operative to act as a cover for the fact that the election was stolen.
Do any of these stories sound familiar?
Now imagine hearing them all, and dozens more like them, all in the same day, and you'll get a glimpse of what Daily Show correspondent and host of the podcast Fingers the Conspiracy, Jordan Klepper, endures on a regular basis.
Today, Jordan joins us to talk about the cursed world of conspiracies that he's witnessed up close and in person, with the people who spread them, What it was like to be at the Capitol on January 6th and the bewildering intersection of comedy and politics.
All right, Jordan, we're going to get into the wild world of conspiracies that you cover for The Daily Show and on your podcast, Fingers the Conspiracy.
Of course, I'm really grateful you're here.
I got to talk to you a little over a year ago on The Daily Show about anti-vaxxers in Southern California, which was a lot of fun.
How was the fame?
Have you gotten over the fame and the adoration being a part of what these pieces get you?
No, I'm still getting stopped in the street all of the time.
On a serious level, when we bought our townhouse, the woman who runs the townhouse co-op had seen our segment, and she's a huge fan of yours.
So that was one sighting in the wild, which was very fun.
And it actually helped through the co-op process, in and of itself, is a bureaucracy that's a certain level of hell, from my understanding.
So the fact that even a daily show appearance can get you through the difficult co-op process, that makes me warm inside.
I know, I really appreciate it.
We have a shrine to you in our co-op actually, but I don't want to get that intimate yet.
We'll get into that.
So we're also going to talk about your thoughts about comedy's role in politics.
We've personally noticed some comedians who use their craft as a shield for criticism, and we think you might have some great insights to offer.
But first, I'm a fan of origin stories, and I want a little background about how you have arrived to where you are in your career.
So you went to college on a full science scholarship, but ended up majoring in math and theater.
So why did you choose acting and comedy and improv over pursuing the sciences?
Well, I ended up getting a math major, which paid for college, which was wonderful.
I was a smart kid at math, but when I got to college, I realized I wasn't that smart.
High school math smart, not college math smart.
But I also knew right at the top that math was something I was good at, not something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
In fact, they could really only give me two paths to take for any math major.
It was become a teacher or become an actuarial scientist.
And that was really exciting.
They like literally brought in an actuarial scientist to be like, guys, you thought it's just about being a teacher.
No, you can study when people are going to die.
And I'm saying that with an excitement that this man didn't have.
This man came in and he was drab and he was the sexiest thing the math department could bring in.
I knew at the time I was in search of something else.
And quite frankly, I took my first acting class in college, and I got on the improv team in college.
And as somebody who was a very structured kid, did well in school, and knew you had to check all these boxes, that world sort of blew my mind.
It was all about curiosity.
It was about following how you felt, what you thought, asking questions, in all very compelling ways.
Also, people would reward you with laughter, so you felt like a stud on a campus of 1,200 people.
I knew when I left college, I didn't want to become a mathematician.
I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do beyond that, but I loved this comedy thing, I loved this improv thing, and about two and a half hours down the road was Chicago, which was the mecca of this improv world.
So, I got in the car and I headed right to Chicago.
See, the first play I was in was a Sam Shepard play in front of a few hundred people where I had to strip down to my boxer shorts.
And so I didn't act after that.
I think that turned me off of acting.
My first play was Marat Saad, and there was a humping scene that I had to be a part of.
I think that's what they do in college.
And this is why people get into theater to begin with.
It's like, we do a play, kids are like, I don't know, but you get to hump in a controlled environment, perhaps mild nudity.
Like, sign me up.
I think the QAnon people would be very interested in that part of your background, Jordan, actually.
You're probably right.
I think if, honestly, Murat Saad should be reevaluated, definitely by the QAnon community.
I think most of the theatrical community is getting away scot-free just because there's not that much interesting in deep-cut theater pieces.
And if there were, the QAnon world could pick them all apart.
They've all been trampling in weird, semi-nude, pedophilic worlds for decades.
Come on, go to college, QAnon.
There's so much more to explore.
So, speaking of math though, you majored specifically in Gematria, correct?
Yes, exactly.
I knew I would use it somewhere in the future.
I just didn't know it would be 20 years later talking to people about the Commander-in-Chief.
But really, given your educational background, math, and then the sciences, what are the most anti-science theories that you heard when you were out on the trip?
There's not a lot of science being bandied about, at least the kind that I was taught in college.
You know, the vaccine world was definitely one in which anti-science crept to the forefront and went against anything we were taught in a college environment.
This is fascinating.
The experts of our society, they were in some ways the gatekeepers of medicine, were not challenged up until somewhat recently, at least in my own spheres.
And so math teaches you one thing, and that is logic.
And so it was very much a way in which I approached the world through very logical manners.
And then fast forward to what I do on The Daily Show and out in the Trump universe, and logic works at a totally different decibel or frequency.
And so it was sort of compiling the logistical mind that I had back in college with the comedy mind to try to figure out a way to work through the mogul mind.
Now, your time in Chicago, you were in two famous improv troupes, Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.
I'm not sure you knew at the time you'd be improvising with MAGA rally goers during those years, but it probably helped a lot.
And that's where we want to talk a bit about your improv training.
How did that help in your role when you started covering all these rallies?
Improv is a huge part of who I am and what I do.
Again, I spent almost a decade in Chicago and about that much time in New York as well in all of those scenes.
And improv teaches you, first and foremost, listen.
Listen to body language, listen to words, listen all the way in the end.
You're crafting scenes based on the things that your partner brings to the table.
Yes, and is the philosophical thesis behind all improv, which essentially is a brainstorming thesis of, like, continue to build.
Your job is not to bring your own ideas.
Your job is to build off of ideas with somebody else.
When I got the job at The Daily Show, which is a very specific job, they send you out into the field.
You have to be somebody who can be on camera and talk to Jon Stewart in the studio, but you also have to be a person who goes out in the field and collects information and comedy and points of view from nothing.
And so that's a very improvisational skill that they're looking for.
And at that point, the Daily Show was hiring sort of about half people from the stand-up world and half people from the improv world.
And so the ancestors that I had in the Daily Show world were the same ones at Second City.
Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, these were all Second City folks.
In fact, Dan Baccaral was a Daily Show correspondent.
He was also my coach back in the day in Chicago, and I talked to him before even auditioning there.
So the world of improv was very important in the world of the Daily Show because you had to go out and you had to improvise scenes with other people who didn't know they were in scenes.
And the role of a correspondent has sort of evolved.
And so when I'm now in the MAGA universe, it's kind of a far cry from what I was doing in the Jon Stewart days.
But I'm still using those skill sets, which is essentially One, drop any assumptions you have walking out the door because you have to listen to what those people are bringing.
And two, stay in that moment so you can contextualize and build off of it.
And perhaps, you know, you're overlaying what journalists, good journalists are doing when they're out in the road as well.
But very functionally, my role as improviser is not, I'm not thinking in terms of or how I can craft it in that way, but I am,
I've spent 20 years trying to listen super hard and to try to get at the basis of what a person
is actually trying to say, and then to craft something out of it, and that's essentially
what I'm doing out at these MAGA events.
You know, in a way, you really hit on the question that I was going to ask, which is that
the gung-ho rally-goers, the conspiracy theorists themselves, they are also improvising in a way,
because they have to answer any question however they can.
They have to bullshit, if necessary.
They can never say, I don't know how to answer that.
Because, like, in terms of their own performance, that would be stage death.
So, does it feel like you're working scenes with the interviewees that way, even though they don't know?
And what about the ethics of that?
How does that feel?
Yeah, you know what?
Yeah, and I wonder what the genre of these scenes are.
In many ways, it feels like a science fiction scene that we're improvising.
I'm just waiting for the alien ship to land.
Right.
You know, you actually stumbled on something that I think is sort of fascinating.
It's something that I perhaps get to do or do do that journalists don't.
The basis of improv, like we said, is yes.
It's saying yes, which unlocks so many things.
In an improv scene, it unlocks your partner's ideas.
You take that to a MAGA rally, And essentially my attitude towards these people as well is not to begin with confrontation, because that's when people, they put up their walls and they don't reveal.
It's often to begin with yes, which is a magical world that opens up all sorts of insights into what a person is thinking, that you validate the thing that they brought to the table and you want to hear more.
And I think, like, oftentimes that's not what they get when they are approaching journalists.
They enter into it with a combative stance.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't run into people who enter into it with a combative stance.
I walk into a lot of people.
But I would say the more revealing pieces or people that I talk to, it happens in a world where they feel very open to share.
And perhaps I have the leeway to give them the rope to continue to share.
That's what does feel improvisational of, like, You are holding on to something right now.
In the old days, it used to be a belief you didn't want to put on TV, something that was contradictory, hypocritical, or perhaps even offensive.
But it's something core to who you are.
If I can create a space where you feel comfortable enough to share that, that is so revealing of your own point of view.
And if I can find a way to put comedy around it, then it's something that then we can utilize to highlight this thing that was there.
But I think that comes from creating a space that improv actually feeds into that other disciplines don't.
Well, you used a really important word there, which is rope, which I think implies, you know, you are giving the interviewee rope, and they're going to take it and run with it.
They might hang themselves with it.
They might tie themselves up in knots.
And so I wanted to also ask, because they're not necessarily sure that this is happening, what about shaming MAGA supporters?
Do you think it can backfire?
Do you think there's cultural and political blowback from that sometimes?
Well, it's interesting because I do think what we put on air, it's drastically different than what was happening, again, in the Jon Stewart era.
In the Jon Stewart era, there used to be, if you went out and you talked to somebody and they said something perhaps racist and it went on air, you had an understanding that they would be embarrassed by that.
That the reality that we all lived in was that this faux pas was something that could cause shame to that person.
We don't live in that world right now, in fact.
The things that we see as faux pas, or perhaps a lot of people would see as faux pas or offensive, I would argue, is the people that I interview with don't have that perspective on these pieces.
And so, in many ways, I think the bar for perhaps shaming these folks that I'm talking to is incredibly high, because I don't think there's a sense of embarrassment or gotcha that occurs anymore at a lot of these rallies.
But it also speaks to a larger question, which is that one of like, what is the role of the things that you put out there in television?
And what are the effects that they have?
You know, we we approach this very seriously.
We are a comedy show.
And I know we're going to talk even more about what does that mean when you approach something with the perhaps mask or title of comedy?
For us, it means it's a tool that we use to articulate the bullshit that we see.
And we we go about it in perhaps ways that are More often than not, I try to reveal.
It feels more like an anthropological event than it does a comedic one, more often than not.
But I do bring my own biases and frustrations out into the field.
And if I think there is BS that is out there that can be exposed, because I do think this BS is very Negative connotations that affect so many other people, then I will push harder and I don't mind using some of those other tools to make that larger point.
Yeah.
And what you do, it just strikes me as so unique in terms of that intersection of comedy, being out in the field.
It's a form of journalism.
You're improv-ing in the moment off of what you're getting from people in order to Expose a layer that wouldn't otherwise be available.
And I feel like comedy has this unique place in our culture, right?
I mean, clearly the right to publicly make fun of kings and popes and presidents with impunity is an indicator of a certain level of freedom.
And then there's the stand-up legacy, which I know is different than what you do, of people like Moms Mabley and Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, who variously broke taboos by pointing out Usually conservative hypocrisy around sex and race and religion, even language itself.
We think of the famous George Carlin bit.
Do you personally resonate with that irreverent lineage and see The Daily Show and the other work you've been doing as part of that progressive social commentary?
I will say the stuff that I always connected with, again coming from the improv and sketch world, like the satirists that spoke most to me come from the Nichols and May, the Second City, even the Monty Python.
I think the British satirists, the Chris Morris, I think they perhaps are using tools that were more resonant.
For me, but I do think The Daily Show is in line with all of those things.
It is using politics and calling out the kings and the queens when they don't have any clothes.
By all means, I think that was what drew me as a fan to The Daily Show to begin with is that they were able to Engage with this mass culture and at the time also like this governing class that felt like they were untouchable and Jon Stewart was somebody who knew how to Find the bullshit call it out make it funny make it accessible show that the Emperor didn't have clothes And that's I think what immediately drew me to it again fan first and then the ability to work with him
You know, I've always found that to be the most rewarding and perhaps the most fulfilling type of comedy there is, if you can get that good satire.
Because it has a point and it has, I don't want to say it has a mission, but it does.
It has a point of view that it's not just about getting the laughs, that it's about pointing people towards something that can either enlighten or articulate a frustration they already have.
One thing we've noticed on our beat is how often these influencers and figures will comment on how oppressive America is.
And they're often people who enjoy the privileges of, say, comedy that other cultures can't even afford to attempt.
But we know it exists elsewhere.
I'm thinking of Larry Charles recently did a series called The Dangerous World of Comedy that's on Netflix, where he covers comedians working in Iran, Russia, China, and the dangers that they face.
You've traveled a bit for your show.
I think we're going to talk about Hungry in a little bit as well.
Did you happen to notice how these sorts of interactions and even comedy or improv works in other cultures?
I haven't done a ton of comedy abroad.
I've done some in Austria, I've gone to Hungary, which is a very different place.
But again, even my trip to Hungary came with certain safety precautions that we had to have going over there because there was fear and reports that a government, at least for journalists, had been following journalists, aware of the things that they said, hassling them in certain ways.
We thought that we were perhaps under the radar as a comedy.
I don't think they gave too many shits about Jordan Klepper from The Daily Show coming over there.
And I think in the end I was right.
But there was a sensitivity to, oh these things that you say as they, this is more of a culture, Hungary specifically.
It's one in which it likes to be seen as a traditional democracy, but you see these democratic norms being hacked away, and the government exerts its influence in very specific conniving ways.
They don't like comedy poking fun at stuff.
That was the first example of being aware of where those boundaries are in other cultures.
I do think it should be underlined that in America we still can do this.
I think the woke conversation warps some of... I think it is a warped conversation just in general, I think.
And it is weird where the left and the right starts to fall on this.
I think there's very few comedians who are truly Canceled.
I think accountability is often a better term to be used within there.
You can still say most of these things you care about in this country, and I think that is a great part of this country.
I think the weight of the things you say, I think that gets distilled more and more, and then perhaps there's less, less weight, and that's what people are responding to, that they have less effect, as opposed to being completely silenced.
But I do think we are very lucky in America that we are able to have these conversations and can bring comedy to it.
It's now more so the spaces that are being controlled by other people that is the focal point of these conversations.
Yeah, I mean, we think of countries like Hungary, certainly Turkey, Iran, you know, where we know that people are often punished very harshly for saying things that are forbidden or that upset the fearless leader who maybe is afraid of comedy.
In this vein, there seems to be a libertarian gene.
that a lot of comics have, that in previous decades, led to making fun of restrictive, conservative, and
religious social conventions in the name of freedom to do and say what you like.
And sometimes that intersected with progressive politics.
But sometimes it's just more generally transgressive.
And so that can be an interesting thing to disentangle, right?
So nowadays, as you were just referring to, that edgy, rebellious style often draws criticism from the left.
And that seems like it's a fairly new thing, right?
Maybe in the last 10 years.
So comics like, as we know, Chappelle and Bill Maher, even Jerry Seinfeld, have said that the left is becoming too uptight and too censorious around comedy.
But it does seem like this is maybe just a healthy corrective to punching down for a cheap laugh in the name of free speech, right?
Yeah, I think it's I do think it is complicated.
I think these conversations are good to have.
And I do think I am I am all about poking holes in the BS that the left has.
I think it's easy for the left perhaps to stand on progressive values and not understand outside perception.
And so comedians, I'm glad there are conversations happening in that, but more often than not, I do find them to be somewhat disingenuous.
I think overall, I heard it oversimplified once as, punching up is satire, punching down is fascism.
And I think...
I think it's an oversimplification, but I do think it all has to do with context and who your point of view is.
And that's where sometimes I hear progressive comedians talking about taking swings at the trans community, and that to me doesn't seem like any new interesting conversations.
In fact, it more feels like regressive 80s comedy.
What we're arguing right now is what is offensive, what is not.
I also think this feels like what is stuck in the past.
Do we still think gay people creep you out and the trans community is strange?
Well, I used to watch those stand-up comedy routines back in the 80s, and so if people have an issue with that now, yes, maybe it's because of the woke culture, or maybe it's because you haven't evolved to have a modern conversation.
Yeah.
That's where my head is more often than not.
But the great comedians, because context is everything, the great comedians can handle that and can play with anxieties that are here now.
And there are new revelations in modern society that are tough for some Americans to wrap their heads around.
And if you can play in that world and articulate that world, Great!
And again, context is everything.
And what's amazing right now is you have the ability to put a mic in front of your face and add the context to it.
And so, I think there are really interesting conversations happening.
I think there are people who are pushing the boundaries and should.
But it's always about who, in the end, are you going after?
And that, to me, is the ultimate thing you look at when you look at whether or not this is satire or whether or not this is just cheap.
Yeah.
Jordan, is there a rule of thumb for understanding when you're punching down or not?
When I do it, it's not.
So that's my rule of thumb.
Alright.
I mean, I think it's those with power in the world of MAGA and the world of Trump watching the news and watching the person in the highest position in the land wreaking policies over people who couldn't defend themselves.
Policies that were unkind to those who could use a hand.
I think there's no better time to pull out your comedy sword than to push back against that.
So hopefully you're having those conversations of what is it that pisses you off?
You don't know, I will say, in the universe where I go out and talk to people as well, it gets muddier, because more often than not, the things that I hear in the field, what frustrates me is, in the Trump world, those were the things that were actually dictating policy for Donald Trump.
He listened to the masses, saw what got them gymmed up most, and then used that to enact policy.
And so, for me, there was something about I feel bad for some of these people that I'm talking to have been fed crappy misinformation, but at the same time, they're also creating policy that are affecting my neighbors, affecting myself.
Right.
And also, I don't think it helps anybody to hide this information or this understanding of what people are talking about in the middle of America and places that you might not be, so that you understand this is where people are angry.
This is what misinformation gets you.
What can you do about it?
Yeah, I mean, on that same tip of sort of the spectrum of where people are coming from with their comedy, it has seemed that leaning into politics from a comedic perspective mostly has come from the left for a long time.
But as with the wellness domain that we cover, the pandemic really seemed to flip that.
And some comics went into more right-wing conspiracism.
So Russell Brand, we've covered a few times on the podcast, he's the obvious example.
But, you know, he's been joined by the number one podcaster Joe Rogan, who has this whole sort of comedic set of satellites around him.
When we criticize the facts that these folks get wrong, what we find often on social media is we'll get their defenders saying, you've missed the point.
They're just entertainers.
It's meant to be funny.
Do they have a point?
Hey, context is everything there.
You probably didn't miss the point, although maybe you guys did.
I don't know.
You guys, you know, you're a little uptight.
Laugh a bit, guys.
Julian, come on.
Don't you get it?
Have a brew, smoke a cigar, get the joke.
It's easy to say they're a comedian and then cross your fingers and hope that it absolves all accountability.
Right.
That's bullshit nowadays.
What is a comedian nowadays?
Everybody, I could listen to a thousand hours of Joe Rogan's podcast.
You're a broadcaster at this point, not a comedian.
A comedian used to be somebody who said something in a club to 50 people in a room and that never got out of that.
Now you're talking to 18 million people twice a week.
You're broadcasting.
Okay, well, you're a comedian who's broadcasting?
Great, I'll take that context as well.
That doesn't absolve you from the things you say.
Perhaps it should let a little bit of context to them so that we listen with a, not even a kinder ear, but an ear towards these conversations might look to push certain boundaries in the aim of comedy, in the aim of a and its most genuine way of offending to inspire more
critical thought. Perhaps that's an overly generous take on it
all. But I do think we're beyond the place where you can hide
behind comedian as just a way to absolve you from the things you
say. And again, this is where that cancel culture thing always pisses me off. I think it's completely warped in
that people get canceled for the things they say in front of
cameras, in front of microphones. Like, we are choosing to put microphones in front of our faces to say
the things that we think and care about. We have to have
responsibility for the things that come out of our mouths.
We set up these microphones.
We clicked publish and put it out into the world.
We are a society that should be able to understand and have conversations around that.
But you shouldn't act all butthurt when somebody uses the things you say as things that represent who you are.
And in the new media sphere, getting canceled is actually a way of graduating to a bigger audience.
Yeah, and I do think, and that's from a cynical perspective, is there's a lane there.
There was a story this week that came out about Crowder, I believe.
Steven Crowder was getting in a fight with Tucker Carlson's company.
Ben Shapiro's.
Ben Shapiro's company, that's right.
Ben Shapiro's company offered him $50 million, and he said no, and it was this spat.
But I think what underlined it, I was like, he's turning down $50 million contracts Dear God, I gotta get into conservative comedy!
Yeah, on YouTube.
On YouTube!
You can make $50 million.
You can not only make $50 million, you can snub your nose at getting offered $50 million.
So there's a lane there, and there are people capitalizing on this idea of being offensive.
So that's where it's like, oh, what's happening right now?
Are they becoming conservative?
No, they're becoming capitalists.
And I think, and then guess who has power?
Capitalists.
And guess who should poke fun of them?
The satirist comedians who aren't getting $50 million.
Call out that bullshit because you're not a comedian anymore, you're an empire.
And you're an empire who's trying to get people's ears and eyes to make more money to sell me gambling apps or vitamins that don't work.
And so, so that, that's The new bullshit.
Sold by new faces and new pitchmen, but don't let them fool you when they say they're hiding behind just a comedian.
Yeah, Derek, we need the applause track here.
Speaking of broadcasting, you have two current broadcasts yourself.
You have one with John Kasich.
You have Fingers the Conspiracy, which is, of course, a play on Fingers the Pulse from The Daily Show.
We were going to call this episode Fingers Jordan Klepper, but we figured that went up.
But given what you've accomplished on all the various projects, what is your favorite conspiracy?
Oh, I like a good, I like a good body based conspiracy.
A body double conspiracy is a classic.
I think the Hillary double, I love a good Hillary double.
There's a, there's an Eminem is dead and there's an Eminem clone conspiracy right now that I think is, is real.
Tamar Hamlin right now?
That's, that's a wild one.
In fact, I'm going to go out into the field and talk to folks about that one coming up because Because that blows my mind.
But it's almost such a beautiful distillation of, we create this world that we want to see, where you're seeing a human being, not acting like the human being that you want to see.
And instead of grappling with the fact that we contain multitudes, you create a new scientific metaverse that says, there is another person here.
And so those, those always tickle me.
So give it up for Hillary.
And a good JFK Jr.
one is always a trip I don't mind going down.
Yeah.
You covered that on the podcast.
Another one, though, that really jumped out at me was your 9-11 truth or episode.
I was in New York on 9-11.
I was in the Trade Center the hour it happened.
It's a very, it's kind of one that really gets me more than other ones, given the proximity of where I lived at the time and everything that happened.
And you talked to the loose change inspiration and marketer, Corey Rowe, who is old friends with the writer.
He said a lot of insightful things on your podcast, but elsewhere I found that he stated that they intentionally left errors in the film so that viewers could do their own research.
He literally said, we left them in, people know where Wikipedia is, they can go find it themselves if they want to know the truth.
Isn't doing your own research a big part of the problem here to begin with?
I think you're spot on.
And I think when we discredit whoever we see as experts in any kind of a field, then we are left just to do our own research.
That podcast was a really eye-opening and frankly a difficult one We wanted to look at 9-11 conspiracies, and Corey Rowe, Corey Rowe created the Loose Change documentary, and myself and the producers that I work with in prepping that one, too, had big conversations about this.
Like, we want to have conversations, and I'm sure you guys do as well, around, like, what is behind these conspiracies?
What makes them so sticky?
Why are people drawn to them?
Corey Rowe is fascinating because he was, in many ways, right at the beginning of these 9-11 truther conspiracies.
And then when you listen to him talk, he's not some right-wing nutbag.
He's a libertarian.
He has gripes with the American government as somebody who served and had issues overseas and was told lies.
And so you understand where some of this distrust comes from and this frustration comes from.
And we kept talking about, like, well, how much is this us relitigating what he said about 9-11?
Because he's evolved somewhat on his points of view on the 9-11 birther conspiracies, but not completely.
And how much can we take from listening to somebody like this kind of articulate where they were at and show where they are now?
And I think that one really kind of expanded my mind as to what the traditional conspiracy mindset is.
I'm still grappling with this idea of how you hold distrust for institutions and faith in institutions in the same space, because I think, you know, it's where it's like, no!
And that's where you find yourself as a progressive, arguing like, no, just trust the government blindly!
Come on, everybody!
And you're like, wait a minute.
Well, no!
Healthy skepticism is good.
Do your own research.
Well, no, no, don't.
I mean, do your own research, yes, but like, Really do.
Beyond just Wikipedia.
Just go to those sources that you care about.
Like the New York Times or Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos.
No, don't go!
Shit, where do you go?
It's hard, right?
You want to empower people to be able to follow, do their research, trust their sources, and what have you.
But at some point, it's an exhausting thing to ask an audience.
And so, you're left in a funny place where you have to grapple with how to decipher all of this information.
We spend a lot of time on the podcast investigating this exact crisis in trust and we've got a chapter in our book coming up called Conspiritualists Are Not Wrong because they're not.
We wouldn't have a show if people were throwing things into the internet that were completely implausible or that didn't carry some sort of thread of truth.
People have their reasons for distrust and they're reasonable and we have to grapple with them.
So, yeah, I hear you.
That's a very, very irritating place to be in.
But I had a comedy doc format question, which is, in watching the MAGA in Hungary spot you did, I was really impressed with the job of balancing out the Orban cranks with this ragtag opposition coalition working kind of hopelessly against state-run propaganda, but, you know, without any expectation of winning, but because it's the right thing to do.
But I'm watching you interview the investigative journalist in the sidewalk cafe.
This is where you smash your phone.
Or I'm watching you sitting on that park bench overlooking Budapest.
It's very beautiful.
You're sitting with the MEP talking about the coalition she's helping to form.
You're talking to that anti-fascist activist in the bar.
And I know that your team and you are putting all of this time and effort into setting up that shot, setting up that meeting, figuring out, you know, how the tech is going to go.
And for each of those conversations, you must be talking with that person for an hour or more.
Am I right about that?
For those in particular, yeah, well, it depends.
Between 20 minutes to maybe an hour, like you're kind of describing when we go to certain places, especially if you go to a rally or an event that is for one particular candidate, you're just talking to people who are there and are passionate about that.
We wanted to get points of view from people who supported other candidates and what have you, and people who were in government at the time.
And so those are like traditional sit-downs.
And if they're in government, usually we sit, I think that was maybe a 30 minute interview, some of the people in bars, we like welcome people who were vocal online to like come by and to talk to us about it.
So they're a little bit, they're more extended than say a man on the street.
Well, you said earlier that there's a difference between the finished product and what actually happens in the street.
And this is what I wanted to point to is that the finished product is comedy that jumps from like 45 second beat to 45 second beat.
And so, I'm wondering, when you see the final beat, or a final cut, and you remember these conversations, is that disorienting?
Because I imagine that you're capturing all kinds of nuance and gray area, and some of that gets included, but some of it gets left behind.
I imagine that you feel like you're forming a bit of a relationship with the interviewees, and that might not make it in.
So, the actual trip doesn't feel like a montage, right?
Yeah, Matthew, you are in my head.
You are in there, sir.
That's a great question, because it is true.
It's incredibly true.
Especially in a piece like our Hungary special, we had to cut entire conversations of people we talked to, who I had wonderful conversations, eye-opening.
Like you said, a lot of gray area to that story.
And it's the fights that we have.
Because we come back with all of this footage, and then we have to make a 22-minute special that goes on Comedy Central.
And the real function of that too is, and I hate to be so glib, but I do think for media literacy, it's like, well, and jokes are important there.
So things that you can land with a point.
Hungry was even more difficult because our audience doesn't know a thing about this.
So you have to both teach them about it and then enough so that you can find humor in a part there.
And so we had to boil all these stories down.
And part of that is the job.
Boil it down so they can understand.
But it becomes really frustrating because you want to tell them this bigger story or why this is happening, and it all makes the cutting room floor.
I think I've been a little obsessed with the Neil Postman book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I think is written 30 freaking years ago, but it's everything.
It's the Marshall McLuhan.
I feel like people have been talking about this again recently, which is like the medium is the message.
And it's so freaking true is we constantly have to reassess like what these biases in formats are.
And what I do has a ton of them.
Guess what travels online?
People love to watch me talk to people at rallies, and those people at rallies say wild and crazy things.
They do.
They say wild and insane things, and you'd be surprised by how easy it is to find these people.
I'm not doing a ton of fishing, but understand that, like, that is the medium that we're looking for there.
And then when we're doing a Hungary special, we're also having to boil this down into 22 minutes
that are like, you'd hope this was, and John used to talk about this in old Daily Show days,
this was like an entrance into, if you are fascinated by Hungary and you care about this,
that you then read that Atlantic article that has a much better medium,
that you then listen to a podcast, which is a far superior medium for gray area and thought.
And I think that is, hell, that's part of the reasons in doing some of these podcasts,
It's part of the reasons in moving outside of the stuff we do,
because the medium is only getting smaller.
The Daily Show is only wanting shorter and shorter TikTok moments, which is hard to explain the nuances of Hungarian politics to a 14-year-old in St.
Louis.
Well, here's maybe a personal question, which is, is there a part of you as you move into these interviews that you're doing that unfold over an hour, and that you have to leave behind, and where you build rapport with people that you actually care about?
Because it's really clear in that hungry spot that you're rooting for the opposition candidate.
You're actually trying to lend them some kind of support.
You're trying to get their voices out.
Is there a part of you that wants to do more of that because that is moving into a kind of journalism
that you might be attracted to?
For sure. I think I had a show a few years ago called Klepper, which was a six-part,
30-minute doc series.
And that was kind of indulging in those frustrations that I had with The Daily Show, which was like, let's focus on one topic and give more space.
Right.
Even with one topic and more space, you run up into this, which you're always going to run up with in any kind of doc filmmaking.
But creatively, as I get more compelled by these stories, and the more time you spend with these people, and you want to have these nuanced conversations, It does push you in wanting to discover ways to tell that.
Although I would point out, I don't think TV is the medium for it.
I think you're on one of them right now.
I think the best conversations I hear about, like, if you want to know about this topic, you want to know about conspirituality, don't watch the four minute piece that I did with Derek.
One, because he tanks it.
He's just not good on camera.
But like, you guys are going to dive into it.
You're going to have those conversations, and you can really grapple with it.
And I'm like, this is a medium that is asking for long-form attention, deep thought, and conversation.
Television no longer asks that from people.
We almost need to cut the barrage that it's going to be there.
Yeah, so speaking of the superior platform that you've joined us on, uh... I mean, it pays dick, though.
It pays shit.
I mean, until you get the financial thing working.
Again, remember that capitalism thing we were talking about?
That's what I'm looking for.
Give me that one that pays, and then that's where I go.
That's the perfect medium for me.
It's the one that pays the most.
Yeah, you're a shill for big pharma, just like us.
You shill harder.
Yeah, and so in terms of the fact that you're podcasting, I wanted to mention, you know, we talked about Russell Brand briefly, and he recently hosted Matt Taibbi and then Barry Weiss, who were sort of handpicked and anointed by the great god Elon Musk to reveal the Twitter files to all of us.
And central to this whole story was the much-hyped proposition that we're going to get, you know, earth-shattering news about Hunter Biden's laptop.
And I know that you've covered this on the show.
What's your verdict at this point on the importance of that story?
It's the number one.
It affects my life every day.
Are you kidding?
I got up this morning and I couldn't make coffee because of Hunter Biden's laptop.
You were checking it, actually.
You were scrolling through his Finder.
You were like, yeah.
Adding files.
Yeah, adding files to it.
Constantly adding files to it.
I dropped my kid off at school, but there standing in line in front of me was Hunter Biden's laptop, so we couldn't get into school either.
It's just, it's all-encompassing.
You know, I have the luxury of naivete, and so part of when I did the podcast on Hunter Biden's laptop was like, here's the deal.
I know about Hunter Biden's laptop, like that much, the littlest amount.
I know right-wingers have been yelling at me, and I've tuned it out, but I know I need to dive into it and have a little bit of a deeper conversation about what is there.
That's a totally compelling story.
Again, the part of me that is like, I hate how tied up into international businesses family members attached to governmental employees are.
It's fucking awful.
And if we could have a bunch of committees looking into that fairly, yes, I completely support it.
What I hate more, though, is the way that this is just weaponized to attack a guy because It's just politics.
And so, yeah, that laptop, I think there should be more investigations into what is there.
There's some frustrating things to learn about it.
I still haven't seen any connection between that laptop and actions taken by Joe Biden in a way that cause alarm.
It does seem like Hunter Biden Was living off his dad's name in a shady way, in a way that I didn't like what Jared and Ivanka did, who were in the administration, it should be pointed out, and walked away with $2 billion afterwards, also should be pointed out.
But overall, another great example of something that is sexy.
It doesn't feel like it's going to be that smoking gun that the right wants it to be.
It is something that consistently frustrates me about American politics, and I wish we could look at that with clear eyes.
Jordan, we have one last question for you, but not as the improv artist, not as the stand-up, not as the aspiring journalist, but as clinical psychologist.
Derek?
What is the Jordan Klepper prescription for a way out of all of this?
A way out of all of this.
I mean, suicide?
Is that what you're asking for?
No, out of the conspiracies.
You've seen the susceptibility.
We have to go to the disclaimers.
We have to go to the disclaimers.
I know that, like you said earlier, there's this constant yes, but you also push back
sometimes when people are too absurd and you will slip in amazingly.
I have to say one thing to the audience here is that I watched you for so long before I had the pleasure of talking with you, and I was always like, wow, their editors are just So quick.
And then when you talk, when you're in that mode, you are that quick.
Like you roll off of my last syllable during our entire interview.
I didn't get an hour.
I got 20 minutes, but that's me being shitty on TV.
So there's that.
But do you have any optimism?
Do you have any hope given what you do?
It's a very hard place to be in and comedy does lighten things up.
But is there a way that you feel that we can actually progress right now from what you've seen on the trail?
I will say this, I'm not genuinely overly optimistic about this.
I do think the mediums with which we're having our conversations don't benefit our society and don't benefit depth of thought, and that worries me.
As a clinical psychologist, if I'm going to give a prescription as to, like, what you can do to be less susceptible and less of an asshole, I think I have a, my expertise on that would give you, here are three practical things you can do.
One, read a book.
Live inside somebody else's head.
Gain empathy and understand there are different ways to view the world.
Two, travel.
Get outside, meet other people who don't look like you, even if that's just one community over, even if that's just to a coffee shop you don't go.
Interact with some human being that you don't normally interact with.
And three, concede something.
Huh.
Anything.
A little bit.
We hold on to our own truths because they are our identity.
But I think it is important, the first way in which to make a friend, to make a connection, is to show vulnerability.
Failure is the quickest way to show vulnerability.
And I think if you can concede that something that that other person has said, perhaps is more true than you have given it credit for, Or more true to you than you give it credit for, then you are already heading in a better direction.
Do those three things and you got a fighting chance.
You know, if you add nine more things to that, you can have Jordan Klepper's nine rules to life.
And I think it'll be a top seller.
I think so.
Nine more to the three things.
Yeah, but you, nine more to the three things.
Yeah, you're talking to a math major.
Math major here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Twelve commandments.
And then you would cut, yeah, but don't sell them all twelve.
Hold on to the further three, which is an addendum that you can pay extra for.
I get it.
Yeah.
Bonus material.
That was awesome.
Jordan, especially concede something.
That's really great.
And I can understand how, how actually that comes from one of your first answers, which is in improv, the first rule is to listen.
And I think listening is a form of conceding to the other person's reality.
I think that's 100% true.
Listening, I like that.
Listening is a way of conforming to another person's, conceding to another person's reality.
I like that a lot.
I can't say I'm an expert on those things, far from it, but I did do a podcast with John Kasich, and we had a lot of conversations, many just on the phone, and I realized, we don't agree on a lot of stuff, but I remember the moments where I was drawn closer to him and vice versa, and it was that.
When you get on the phone, you're like, ah, you're totally wrong.
You're right, I was looking at that wrong.
You're like, oh fuck.
Now I care about you, and now I understand that we're engaging with this in a healthy way.
What else did you have to say about the economy?
Yeah, alright, I guess I see where you're coming from there.
Not as a monster, but as somebody who I see as a human who has a point of view different than mine.
