Iliza Shlesinger confirms her 2024 political run while mocking Joe Rogan’s "Texas" office decor, then critiques Dwayne Johnson’s cheat meals and LA’s chaotic traffic. Biden’s marijuana pardons spark praise for racial justice but skepticism over scheduling, while they expose corporate exploitation—like J&J’s cancer-linked baby powder—targeting vulnerable communities. Shlesinger rejects divisive rhetoric in comedy, defending nuanced equality, then contrasts TikTok’s curated content with its "fucking creepy" data policies and Iranian protests against morality police. Rogan’s evolutionary take on Kardashian appeal clashes with her feminist critique of self-worth tied to appearance, revealing how societal ideals distort health. Both warn social media’s bot-driven chaos risks unchecked influence, exposing the fragility of free speech in digital manipulation. [Automatically generated summary]
My book, All Things Aside, Absolutely Correct Opinions, Collection of Personal Essays, is out on October 11th, the same day as my Netflix special, Hot Forever.
The worst is, I will say, now that I'm a mother, my husband is a father, I've noticed the bites he takes of my food when I share with him are like big dad bites.
Like nothing will infuriate a little girl more than when your dad takes a bite of your food and it's like a moose hunk out of it.
And you're like, it was just for a little bite because dads have big jaws.
I hear that, but I'm saying, if you go to the top, I know this went recently because this is something that I bond with my old assistant over is looking at his cheat meals.
I think it's all the way at the top, or, you know, I don't know where it is now.
It's these pancakes that just don't look right.
Dwayne The Rock Johnson, I'm calling you out.
They got like peanut butter and it's like coconut.
Coconut to me is one of those like sugar substitute kind of things.
There's actually only, like, three of them, and you can't go because the line is so long.
So in your L.A. career, you will have eaten there maybe a little bit at the beginning, but you can't be bothered to wait in line with, like, the 4,000 teenagers in front of that high school where the one is on orange to, like, get your burger.
When you grow up in a city knowing like green means go, red means stop, yellow is maybe you go, adhering to the like civic laws versus like I'll just put my head down, open up Candy Crush and put my foot on the gas and just go.
People are just they're just walking whenever going whenever.
I think you have to carve out your community and you spend a lot of time and effort to find your little chunk of a hovel of a community.
And I used to joke that everyone says LA has too many people and I thought LA actually has the perfect amount of people because half of them moved to Austin and then a bunch of people died in the pandemic.
Especially as a comic, it's such a specific grind because, like, if you were going to play the Irvine Improv just for a quick gig, you have to leave at, like, one in the afternoon.
It's not technically a long drive.
And then somehow, over the decade, in the 17 years I've been doing comedy, The Five is always under construction.
You cannot get home from Orange.
And kudos to them for working on it at night, not being like, let's just post up during work hours while everyone's driving.
You cannot.
They put you on some weird freeway that involves like a conveyor belt and a subterranean mule car.
But someone, I was like, what if a celebrity comes here and they need something, and they're only running, like we had John Cleese, and he came, and he just waited.
I have talked to so many women who've been drugged at nightclubs.
Where someone gives them a drink and there's something in it and they just feel funny and either their friends rescue them or something horrible happens.
Not only is it creepy, it's something that I look back at the partying that I did.
Regular partying.
Never hot enough to do like yacht partying.
Regular partying.
And I can't believe that never happened.
And I look back to like a frat boy that I dated in college and like those parties and like just going out in L.A. and as intelligent as you might be the dumb choices you make in your 20s.
They probably have some really fucked up view of human beings and they- Or just like voting for pro-life legislation, like those kind of people, for sure.
And look, I think the thing that worries me the most about it is there are the people who believe in this for religious reasons.
They've drank that Kool-Aid.
But I do believe the people at the top that are administering this legislation, that are passing these bills, that are reaping the benefits of these things socioeconomically, they are saying it's for religious purposes.
You've got to wrap it in something digestible so they make it about religion, which people then take to their congregations and they dispense it.
But I don't think for the most part people believe it's a religious thing.
But then religious warriors take up that cause on behalf of people who will be profiteering off of it and who are doing it for a different reason, be it racial, be it social, be it economical.
And so I do think it's this thing that you think you're doing something good for your Lord and Savior, for your religion, but you're just carrying out the mission of other people.
That's also what's unfortunate, is that because this is such a polarizing issue, people become single-issue voters.
So any agenda you might have as a conservative that may not be a bad idea or may be a fiscally good idea, People don't want to hear it because you've planted your flag in something that we shouldn't have been arguing over.
So it's very, because you're a single issue voter now, our communities will suffer and anything conservative that one might have agreed with doesn't get heard.
That's a shame that we can't come together on stuff.
Well, there's definitely a weird divide of left and right because there's so much crossover ideas and there's so many people that believe in more of a centrist philosophy and it doesn't get represented politically.
You know, the politics of this country are represented by the far left and the far right in terms of like what people are afraid of.
When they think of the right, they're afraid of access to abortion, healthcare, gay rights.
That's another one that's really creepy, is that the same people that were calling for the ban on Roe v.
Wade are now calling for an appeal of same-sex marriage.
Antebellum, well, that's why, like, Lady Antebellum had to change the name to Lady A. Antebellum refers to a time in the South pre-slavery, glorifying those days, which I don't think the band meant for that.
Do you remember when the Dixie Chicks came out and said that they were embarrassed that George W. Bush was our president and then the fucking South went after them?
You know this was an opportunity for Men who hate women to decimate someone and women who uphold that sort of thinking of, you know, women should keep their mouths shut.
I was in a coffee shop in the middle of Texas not long ago, and I have a shirt on that says, apologize to the Dixie chicks.
It says the chicks, and that kind of obfuscates the message, but apologize to the chicks.
And there was a man sitting there.
We're in the middle of Texas at a coffee shop, like a local watering hole kind of coffee shop.
And you could tell, and he was probably in his 70s, nice Texas man, and he was like, this is our coffee shop, what does your shirt mean?
And I explained to him about the Dixie Chicks, how, given everything that's happened, they didn't deserve the hellfire that rained down on them for expressing an opinion.
And his opinion was, well, you know, you can't go around saying stuff about your government.
It's like, well, you can, actually.
It's called freedom of speech.
You guys fight for it every day.
And I simply said to him, you know, I can get mad at someone for their political opinion, but I strangely draw the line at threatening to kill a woman or rape her over that opinion.
And he stepped back and he was like, well, yeah, that's a lot.
So I think people don't realize, especially when a woman says something wrong, the types of threats that come down that you might brush off or a guy doesn't think about.
But if I get up and I'm like, I hate Joe Rogan, I hate his podcast, and you'll get men that are like, I hope you get raped, I hope you die.
And these experiences, and I actually talk about this in my new special, it's a lot funnier than I'm making it sound now, are not just online, they get carried out.
People shoot up schools because of their hatred of women.
But if a man came out and said, I'm embarrassed that George W. Bush is our president and he did it like that, he wouldn't have to think about that aspect.
I mean, it might not be rape, but people might say violent things about him.
You'll get people that, you know, but when you and I leave a building at night, you think, we've talked about this, you think about your walk a lot differently than I do.
And so that's why I'm shocked I have gotten through all those parties unscathed.
Like it's just a different way that you kind of walk through the world.
Less impunity.
And so I think that's what bothered me about the Dixie Chicks things was like she said something and it wasn't at a time where people were exercising free thought like they were because the ubiquity of the internet hadn't taken over.
If someone expresses an opinion, the worst human beings in the world are going to be the ones who express the hope that you get murdered or raped or, you know, like anything.
I hope your family gets run over by a truck.
It's just the worst kind of human beings.
And that is, with any disagreement on anything, the rational, logical thing to do, someone says, you know, I'm embarrassed that that's my president, is to say, Why you disagree or why you think that's not a good thing to say, but to hate the person and to wish harm on the person for expressing an opinion is just because you're a fucking idiot.
There are people who deserve to be canceled for doing terrible things over and over.
But nobody ever thinks they did anything wrong.
So then you get this other side that's like, oh, if a guy looks at a woman wrong, he's going to get canceled.
I used to think no one was getting canceled who didn't deserve it.
But the more we move into this cancel culture, the more I start to ask, like, if somebody does one thing wrong that really hurts no one or they write a joke or they say something or they hit on a woman, right?
And it's also navigating this newfound power that people have through the internet.
You know, what comes with this great power is great responsibility, but there's no responsibility to people that can just attack people online.
And they enjoy it, and they enjoy it from the anonymity of their own bubble and their tweeting or whatever they're doing.
You're absolutely right.
It's navigating this new power and navigating this new world that we live in where cancel culture type things that people look for them.
They're looking for a nail because they have a hammer.
If you give someone a big box of rocks and there's a window there, there's a very strong urge to throw a rock at that window.
And it's very rare that someone takes like this compassionate, charitable view of another human being and just goes, you know, people make mistakes and the most important thing is that we all try to do better.
I think people say that and then when it comes to whatever their agenda is, they forget about that.
And I understand rage and I understand I understand hurt.
But I don't think people understand context.
And I think because people...
You say hurt people hurt people.
I think people feel so powerless and so angry.
So you grab onto whatever you can grab onto.
And I think we just have to be careful...
In rallying those troops, you know, I think of the petulant internet masses, and I do talk about this in my book, I think of them as like zombies.
Like in every movie, it's always like, be quiet, be quiet, because you don't want the zombie to like feel your warmth or hear you.
And that's, you know, whatever you do, if you can just say nothing and sustain and maintain, if you truly did like nothing really wrong, they'll move on.
But if you've ever argued with someone in a comment section, you know that that attracts more of them.
Everybody has receipts on someone else and everybody has something that they wish they could do differently or take back.
And there's just no, we don't allow for context.
We don't allow for conversation.
And that's on the left and the right.
And it's just in general.
What if you had a fulfilling life?
Like it's one thing if somebody has multiple civil rights infractions and you're like, look, this person systemically has done awful things at their company.
But what if you had a fulfilling life and a goal and a passion and something else?
Would you spend your whole life trying to ruin other people?
I think it's this new power that exists in the world and this new ability to express themselves and to disseminate information that needs to be navigated.
I think it's going to take time.
You know, there's this is a wave it comes in and comes out and that's like like we're seeing with like me too There's like probably an overcorrection and it comes back and balances out and then you have like the amber herd situation people like What about her like some there's women out there that are just like men.
Yeah, there's crazy people on both sides of the aisle and I think that It's just this newfound ability to express Information that is just it's unprecedented There's never been a time in history where you can have these mobs of people that can just attack from their phone.
She's walking through a store, and she's got flip-flops on and a skirt, and she's just walking.
It's like a security camera, and then she stops, and she puts her hand over her butt, and then she walks a little further, and she stops again, and you can see her, like, clench her butt cheeks, and then she, like, looks around, and then shit falls out of her skirt onto the ground, and she moves away.
And these kids, these are, you got 15 TikTok followers, you live in the middle of nowhere, like, there's no one can come after you because you have no identity associated with your handle.
You know, you shouldn't, just because somebody decides to, like, post where you sleep, you shouldn't have to be, like, fucking cocked, armed, and ready.
So what they're getting money from is advertising clicks.
And believe it or not, a woman chasing down a guy who left a shitty tip will get you just as much clicks as some climate change accord where some consortium of scientists get together.
That's also why objective journalism is so important.
It's very difficult to find nowadays.
It's very hard because everything is biased from one perspective, whether it's a right wing perspective or a left wing perspective, and they flavor and shape and mold the narrative just to suit whatever they think their audience wants to hear.
Well, it requires a lot of work, and you can't do that about too many subjects, because you just don't have the time.
If you're a person that has an eight-hour-a-day job, and then you have a family, and hobbies, and friends, and, like, you don't have the time to be trying to figure out, like, why is fluoride in the water?
Why is it, like, you gotta shake that shit down, it'll take you forever.
Someone being idealistic, what is her being a con artist?
My whole point was that people have locked and loaded these opinions about people and everyone's awful and every woman is called a bitch when they run for politics.
Sarah Palin, because the types of men that call women bitches voted probably for her in the get-go.
LOL. High AF. Second, I'm calling on governors to pardon simple state marijuana possession offenses, just as no one should be in federal prison.
Look at the likes going up.
That's amazing.
No one should be in federal prison solely for possessing marijuana.
No one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason either.
Third, we classify marijuana at the same level as heroin and more serious than fentanyl.
It makes no sense.
I'm asking Secretary, I don't know how to say that name, Becerra, and the Attorney General to initiate the process of reviewing how marijuana is scheduled under federal law.
I'd also like to note that as federal and state regulations change, we still need important limitations on trafficking, marketing, and underage sales of marijuana.
Yes.
Sending people to jail for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives for conduct that is legal in many states.
There is a disproportionate amount of African American men, but African Americans, in jail for minor marijuana possession while women in Santa Barbara are like having cooking parties with it.
And people in, like, say, Los Angeles get very accused of living in a bubble.
And my whole thing is, it's 80% Mexican in L.A. It's pronounced abuble.
But it's very easy to live.
If you are a farmer in rural Nebraska and you have these conservative values and you don't live in like an urban area, you don't share the same streets that I do, of course your values are going to be different.
And that's okay.
That's what local elections are for.
And so I think it's very easy to be pro-life.
Especially if you're a man because like this doesn't really affect me or I'm a 60 year old like I'm not thinking about this I think it's very difficult I think the exercise in living in a society is thinking about other people and that's what taxes are for those go to schools I pay taxes for schools that my kids might never attend this is what you sign up for when you live in a society is maybe considering how to not hurt your neighbor and so that's why I was so pro mask because it's like this is how you don't hurt someone When we believe that those were, and I still do, the thing that helps, right?
And I think people tend to vote, I want the death penalty.
Sure, you don't know the fucking guy dying.
It's not your brother that's been falsely accused.
So I think the less experience you have with people who are less like you, the more likely you're just going to vote for your own self-interest.
People, they have a limited perspective based on what they've experienced.
And if you are in the middle of nowhere, in a rural place, and you have a very religious upbringing, and you think that people in Brooklyn or people in South Central Los Angeles should adhere to your values, not only is it not realistic, it's not informed.
I'm never about spreading my values as much as giving people options.
That's why it's pro-choice.
And I believe in choices in general.
And I understand the vaccine thing, which is also like I'm not in the streets telling people to do it.
It was my choice to get it.
So I just want people to have the choice.
And I want people to also have the choice to make decisions about their own health, meaning I don't want to be forced to get sick because you chose not to do something.
It's the same reason you can't go into a movie theater and yell fire.
Like, your choices shouldn't have to affect or harm other people.
And that's a very gray area, because where do you draw that boundary?
We need to know, like, what are the financial interests involved in making decisions, because especially when you're dealing with anything involving pharmaceutical companies or the government, it's mostly about money.
I mean, hydroxychloroquine, when that came out as like a cure-all, I remember looking this up because I was so proud of my journalism, but I remember the guy was Indian, who was like the head of the pharmaceutical company that was in charge of that.
And I Googled and I saw that he had had dinner with Donald Trump, like in March of the pandemic year.
And I was like, you know, someone shook someone's hand and was like, we'll sell this.
When you look into the history of the pharmaceutical companies and what they've done in terms of patenting medicine and demonizing medicines that can't be patented that are generic medicines, it's fucking creepy.
It's a terrifying thing to do to start to peel back those layers.
And I'm all for that education.
And that kind of goes back to what we were saying before about it is exhausting and really difficult to get objective opinions, to really find stuff out.
And this is for, I mean, there was this documentary on Netflix about, like, health and beauty business, and they talked about Johnson& Johnson baby powder, and how they, you know, my mom, we used that when I was little, and now it causes cervical cancer.
That's what they're saying.
I call my mom, and I go, hey, if you have Johnson& Johnson baby powder, don't use it.
She goes, no, it causes cancer.
I know that.
Like, it just became not, like, it was a thing that was a family company that was sold to everyone, and then when they found out it caused cancer, they started marketing it to poorer communities.
And then you even just have products that you think, like if you've got curly hair, which I do, which is a very malign thing, you find this product that's great for it, and then they go into all the information that's not being told to you, and it is a full-time job.
And then you're called a heretic if you come out against some of these things, and it's...
I applaud a lot of what you do on this podcast.
I know a lot of your guests are polarizing.
I know you don't always have the right info, but I do applaud the pursuit of that information because there's always so many levels and layers, particularly in government or products or anything.
These things that make our lives run, there's darker motives happening and you sound crazy if you say it.
You know, which is, I think, look, cynically, I look at this Biden decision about marijuana.
I say it's a voting issue.
They're trying to win the midterms, which are, you know, in a couple of weeks.
And that's how they're looking at it.
But I applaud the sentiment behind it and what it actually will do for people, which I think is great.
And if that's all it takes...
To get them to do that, to make it, incentivize them to do something that's the right thing, that it's going to, all they have to do is like, do it because they want to get the votes?
If you talk to any person who treats people with dementia and you show them what he used to be like versus what he's like now, there is clear evidence of cognitive decline.
And you are under scrutiny 24-7 and you're just living this bizarre world where in this bizarre world where you're in control of the economic future, the environmental future, the international treaties and laws and whether or not we invade countries and interventionalist foreign policy.
Like the fucking chaos involved in being the president.
Can't let the guy talk some shit and now watch this drive.
And whenever you have an autocrat, you know, whenever you have one guy that gets to stay in power for as long as he wants, which is essentially where Vladimir Putin is, a guy who poisons and kills his enemies.
If you don't want a person to express themselves then you don't believe in real freedom.
Because people should have the ability to express themselves incorrectly and make mistakes.
And the way to counter that is to express yourself correctly and make better points, make better arguments.
That's how we find out what's real and what's not real.
Where you can find the tyrants is who's fucking silencing people, who's stopping people from expressing themselves, who's stopping people from expressing opinions that they disagree with, that other people disagree with.
And that is also, it should be like criminally liable, right?
If you know, like if you're working for a company and that company tells you something and you know that for a fact and then you go out and spread information that is incorrect because it's in the greater interest of that company, it's criminal.
Well, once you're fortunate enough to be able to do that, the key is to not slide into dread just for financial gain because you're not even going to notice that money.
What you'll notice is your time being used in a way that you don't want.
And sometimes people, they can't see the forest for the trees and they just focus on money instead of focusing on just, I just want to avoid doing things that suck.
Because if I just decided that I have some fucking grandiose goal, like where is that going?
What if I achieve that?
Am I going to do another one and just keep pushing further and further?
I think that's madness.
I think you lose your fucking mind.
I think life is a temporary situation and you should enjoy as much of it as possible.
And I think that one of the ways that I find that I enjoy it as much as possible is if I do things that are intriguing, that are difficult and complex, and where they're challenging.
And so I overcome obstacles and I figure things out and I get better at stuff.
Whether it's communicating with people or whether it's doing stand-up or whatever you do.
from the beginning or that's become a thing i think you've built a life that really is around those things yeah like that's what this podcast is it's not like a show about like feelings and baking like this is interesting people maybe me as a guest excluded and interesting topics and the pursuit of that information yeah it's like what am i interested in
I mean, the only people I have on are people I either like, like you, or people that I think I want to talk to, because they have an interesting topic that they're pursuing, or some documentary, or a book they wrote, or something.
It's like, I only have people on that I'm interested in talking to.
I've had a lot of great interviews, but sometimes I'm being interviewed and I can tell they barely know who I am and I certainly don't want to be there and I'm under my keyboard.
I'm just like squeezing my thigh because I want to be like, what are we doing here?
Well, I mean, otherwise you would never been a comic.
I think it's way harder for a woman to be a comic.
Because first of all, there's a certain prejudice that a lot of men have in the audience.
They don't want to hear a woman talk.
They don't want to hear a woman on stage.
And it's also, there's certain subjects that some men in particular don't want to hear women express.
They don't want to hear them talk about politics.
They don't want to hear them talk about, they don't want to hear them giving advice or, you know, and then when it comes to like sex talk and, you know, and a lot of men have a really difficult time with women making fun of men in their act.
Well, I just wonder, I like to think the older I get, this special, the last special, this special, like, the stakes are too high.
You want to make a bunch of dick jokes, that's cool too.
But if you're going to say something impactful, like, you need to be ready to defend those things that you said, those statements, and you have to back them up.
First of all, they have to be funny, but back them up with intelligence.
And I think when you come from a place of only wanting to make people feel good, my jokes are not designed to hurt, those are easier to back up versus I said something mean just for the fun of it.
Do you ever look at the fucking user policy on TikTok and how invasive it is and how much it sucks your data and how much it actually, if you're on TikTok, your other computers that aren't even connected to TikTok, they have access to all that data?
Because I think it wants to show you because they know that people like this and I'm like, but I don't.
And Instagram's a very millennial app, and the curation of it and the way it looks, and TikTok is very Gen Z, and I enjoy TikTok, but there's something deeply dark.
The vibration of it is very low, if that makes any sense to you.
When you're on it, and I've said this before, I liken it to speed eating candy.
You're like, this is so delicious, I love this, I want more vanishing caloric density.
And then when you turn it off, you're like, I feel really awful, I feel sick.
The commodification of your own nostalgia marketed back to you by someone who never experienced it feels deeply sinister.
So like there will be accounts on there.
So I'm 39, right?
So like right now, the 90s and the 2000s are very in, right?
So you get these accounts that will be like, come along with me and remember Christmas break 2002. And they show you images that tap into your nostalgia.
And these are hyper ephemeral things and then they're gone.
And you get sad looking at it because the world feels so scary now.
But the person curating that didn't experience that.
They're just taking my memories and regurgitating them to me and monetizing them.
That's a lot of what the internet is right now is very blackmail.
It's getting very weird.
It's weird and weirder.
And if they ever institute a social credit score system, which is one of the most terrifying things that Are being discussed.
That's going to be very fucked.
Because then you're going to see incentivized behavior changes in people that are just because they're worried about losing access to their bank account or losing access to travel, which is what they have in China.
On the other side, when you talk about freedom, when people shit on America and they're like, oh, I hate when people talk about Nazi Germany or the Holocaust because it's people who are just using it as a pawn in an argument.
The fact that I'm allowed to sit here and say whatever the fuck I want and there's not secret police outside...
Well, that's the level of freedom that we have here that doesn't exist in Iran, for example.
You know, this woman who was killed for not having her headscarf on properly.
It has ignited this wave of protests all over the world and all through Iran where they're just really freaking out and recognizing, like, this has got to fucking change.
So her name was Masamini and they have this morality police there.
So her hijab was off by like an inch or two.
And they will come and take you even if you are properly dressed.
It's just this like downer police that comes and they beat her into a coma.
Another girl recently, I have goosebumps because I reposted a story about her, really pretty girl dancing on TikTok, murdered.
Like they just come and take you.
And I'm on TikTok and there's footage of this, of these people being arrested and beaten and killed and they're saying the government is turning off our internet.
Please be our voice.
And so then you start to think like as a woman, as an American, like how can I help this?
You can't like donate money.
They're literally saying please show the world because we can't.
And it's happening to girls, normal girls that could be one of your friends.
And it's so terrifying.
And that's what this uprising is.
Like, at a certain point, sometimes just, like, enough is enough.
And that's what they're doing.
And I've just done my part in trying to amplify that for them and sharing those videos, because I think a lot of people don't know that's happening.
We don't live in a world where the government, I mean, they control a lot, but, like, they're controlling your internet.
Like, they're not going to turn your internet off.
It was privatized.
And so that's what's happening with them.
And they're in the streets and there's footage of girls, like, pushing back against guards coming to their schools, trying to arrest them.
I think somebody said something, I don't know if this was right, that, like, 80% of the population in Iran is, like, Gen Z or something because of how many people get killed.
It's like, don't quote me on that.
But there's...
It's a crazy thing.
And this is not, I think it's very easy for people to look at the Middle East and think of it as the way that we portray it in movies.
But Iran was a normal, I mean, we have a lot of Jews and a lot of non-Jews in LA that are Persian that came there with tons of money, you know, after the ousting of the Shah in the 70s.
This was a place that had movie theaters and women wearing skirts and like it was normal, kind of like Afghanistan was at some point.
The way that these women are being treated now, this was not the way that it always was.
It's very scary when a country can decline into a religious dictatorship.
That a country that didn't used to be because it makes you worry like could that happen here like or any kind of dictatorship like one of I was having a conversation with a friend of mine We were talking about North Korea and I had young me Kim on young me Park rather on who?
Escape from North Korea.
This is a harrowing story.
I mean and she's she's a really incredible person and the way she Tells her story and what she went through right to get out and eventually get to America and And we were talking about it and I was like, you know what's fucked is like that is happening right now in 2022 with human beings in the world.
And that is not happening in America, but it could.
All we would need is a series of events to go horribly wrong, whether it's some kind of chaotic war, shutting off the power grid, some sort of a civil unrest, something...
Crazy.
Where some faction of government offered a solution and came in and cracked down on everybody and instituted very rigid guidelines on how you could behave and react.
And that's what they did in Korea.
They said that, in North Korea, they took away people's land and they said, we're going to make sure that you always have food and the way we're going to do this is to take away your land.
So they took away everybody's land and then they were fucked.
They had a—I've watched a couple documentaries on North Korea.
They had a government program, and the plant was called, like, Let's All Eat One Meal a Day, where everybody—like, they tried to brainwash people into thinking, like, this was the way to be.
And there was no grain and no rice, no food.
Everybody got one meal.
meal and when people would visit like foreign emissaries whatever they would put on these productions and sing songs about how bountiful their produce and grain was and it's all it's all like it's like a movie set it's all fake yeah and they will kill three generations of your family if you try to escape yeah yeah that's the thing That's the thing.
I think about all the time.
I get nervous about our country being headed for a civil war because of the disparity between the two sides.
And I think about that.
And I think about I get very upset.
Of course, I have a daughter.
But I think about I don't know that I have the financial resources to be OK if that broke out.
I don't know how to start a fire.
I don't know how to purify my own water.
I think about those kind of weird things because what do you do?
Well, that's the problem with not having American manufacturing.
You know, one of the companies I work with is Origin.
It's a company that's trying to bring back American manufacturing clothes and they make shoes and now they're making like hunting wear and they're trying to...
How much more would I have to pay for an iPhone if they made it in Ohio?
Will you pay people a reasonable living wage, give people health benefits, and let them live well?
But how much would it cost?
Would it cost twice as much?
Because I'd pay twice as much.
If they had an American version of these phones and a Chinese version of the phones, and the American version was 50% more or whatever, I'd fucking pay it.
I think as long as people in positions of power stand and make a lot of money, then they don't really care about a crumbling infrastructure.
If I am a CEO of a company and my job is to the shareholders, my mission is to them, and profit margins, I will take this to another country, and I won't care when this all burns because I'll be on a yacht to Mars.
But I would think that if a company came along that did offer an American-made solution where you don't have to feel gross about buying something that you know is made by people that are working for an insanely low amount of money with no benefits whatsoever, or a place like Foxconn where they make iPhones where they have fucking nets around the building because so many people have jumped off the building and committed suicide that they surround the building with nets.
They're so fucked and the working conditions are so horrific that they put nets around these buildings because so many people were jumping to their deaths.
I'm not a big, like, I just, it is all damaging for the planet, but you cannot, to blame one branch of that as if this is, they're operating independently.
Like, this is all just feeding it, and it's so hard to stand for anything, because at the end of the day, you know, like, oh, I hate capitalism.
It's like, oh, but I really want those cups overnight, so I'll use Amazon.
Right.
Every day you wake up and you just have to decide what part of the environment do you want to hurt.
And you can.
You're right.
You're sitting there from a phone and you're sitting there.
I talk about this in my book and you're sitting there.
Anything you stand for, you are ripped apart for because you didn't stand for something else based on when someone saw you.
So I'm sitting here and I'm like, we have to save the environment.
And then someone will be like, why are you talking about the environment when women in Iran are dying?
Why are you talking about Iran when over here, black children are dying?
Why are you talking about that?
Don't you care about trans lives?
Like, whatever you stand for, you're faulted because you didn't fix everything in the moment.
I was reading something that there's a lot of women who are taking some new, there's some like an injection that kills your appetite and they're doing it, what is it called?
My thing about the Kardashians is, this is my take, is human beings should have personal sovereignty.
And someone shouldn't influence you that much.
If that bothers you so much that they're materialistic and that they get their butts done, that's on you.
And the problem, though, is I'm saying this as a 55-year-old wealthy man.
And I'm not influenced by them.
But if I was a young girl and I looked to them as being the...
That's one of the things that really fucks with people on social media is that you're looking at other people as...
These are examples of what's ideal.
And then if your body doesn't match that, if your lifestyle doesn't match that, and then you have this horrible feeling...
That you're not valuable, you're not worthy.
And so the problem is that a lot of people look to these very wealthy people with all this plastic surgery is that that is the highest level of achievement because these are the most popular people, the most social media, and the most money, and it influences people in a negative way.
You know, if you're younger, that's not your fault that you are looking at that.
If you are older, and we'll say, like, if you're in your 30s, you have seen this family in particular, but just in general, you've seen social media grow, and you've seen this family grow, and you've seen all of the snake oil over all this time.
So for you to be surprised or let down at this point is really more an indictment on your intelligence.
Like, you think the family that would sell their own children for money, you think the family that sold you tummy tea and diarrhea pills, you think the family...
That empty pursuit of fame for no reason like it used to be that if someone and if you want if you were younger and you look to some Celebrity that was a singer Beyonce or whoever it was you're like god.
I wish I was like her right well, that's someone who's like putting out like This incredible work of art that affects millions of people.
They dance to it.
They sing to it.
Like, it's very inspirational and aspirational.
Like, God, that would be amazing to be like her.
She inspired me to get into music.
She inspired me to pursue my dreams.
But when the dreams are just like making money and like sticking your ass out and, you know, and just taking these doctored pictures.
I can be okay with that and I can be okay with, and I will say this.
And I feel like we talked about this on the podcast, but like if you are not real thin, if you have thighs, if you are, you know, and this is for a lot of women of color in particular, but even if you're just a white girl and you don't have Nordic model boy hips, these women sort of champion dressing but even if you're just a white girl and you don't have Nordic And when you don't see a reflection, I'm a white upper middle class woman and I still almost am like brought to tears when I put on jeans because my thighs are like a little big.
So they kind of made it okay.
And I can respect that.
But anything else, I'm just, I'm just appalled at them.
But I can respect making it okay if you have naturally the curvy body that they have surgery to get.
If you have a body like that, I can respect creating a place where as a girl you might feel okay about the body that you have.
And I talked about this in my stand-up forever ago.
Every girl looks at her body like, I just want to lose five pounds.
Even if you don't need to, like it's a thing.
And it has less to do with being attractive to a man and just being acceptable.
And most men, good guys, they don't think about women.
I always try to explain to women like the thing that what you're putting your body through and what you're putting yourself through mentally with thinking you're unacceptable.
Most men aren't looking at you like that.
You at your worst, your husband's probably still like, that looks really good.
Right?
Like, if your wife didn't shave her legs perfectly, are you going to leave the room?
No.
And I think this has to do with self-esteem and the way that we treat, that we educate women and the disinformation about their bodies, vaginas, thighs, hips, all that stuff that good men don't actually care about all that bullshit.
It's so odd because when you see the cover of Vogue or Vanity Fair and there's some girl with that gaunt face and they're walking and swishing with this little tiny frame body, because something's unattainable, sometimes it becomes very attractive to people that can't attain it.
For the longest time, up until quite recently, that is what was shown to you.
Those models, those designers show those models in pictures, in magazines.
Your body was wrong and that's what it should look like.
And clothing was made for those bodies.
And so you grow up and then all of a sudden all bodies all shapes are acceptable but we can't undo the brainwashing in the back of your brain of like your whole upbringing knowing that like because you didn't look like that your body was wrong.
And the ability to, like, have food and have animal meat and chew the fat actually comes from when you'd have your neighbors over, you would break out the fat and you would chew on it with your neighbors.
One of the characters, I want to say it was the prioress, who was this like very pious holy woman, but he goes into great length describing how expensive her outfit was.
And there's this connection like looking expensive, being close to godliness.
Like the better I look, like clearly I'm a good Christian.
Like look at how thin I am.
Look how small I've made myself.
Look at how much I've done this.
And you're actually just keeping yourself weaker.
You don't see men doing that as much.
So it all has to do with contrition, being small, and staying in line.
There's so much—I mean, we are—I mean, the first thing you often talk about with a woman is her body or her looks, and then we get into something else.
I have to think about that when I walk into a room or when I walk on stage in a way that a guy doesn't have to—and you can choose to not participate, but it's still scrutiny that you face.
Right.
And it all is connected to falling in line, making yourself small, and adhering to a standard.
So I think you looked at it as not a heretic or a dissident when you are outside of that, when you have a bigger body.
It's seen as outlandish.
Look at how angry people get at Lizzo.
Because she's a large woman who, like, dares to be large.
Versus being like, I'm so sorry, I will work on this.
I think it's what we were talking about earlier with social media.
It's this outrage that just people look at things to get upset by.
There's so many people that wake up in the morning, they grab their phone, they go, what am I pissed off at today?
And they just go scrolling through Instagram and scrolling through TikTok and scrolling through their newsfeed and they find something to get pissed about and then they post it and hope people will get upset with them.
With them, and I'll do you one better, not just get upset with them, they hope in taking you down, they can then have your light and replace you.
They're hoping to capitalize off of taking you down, which is why they've done it publicly.
If you get a podcaster that's like, I fucking hate Joe Rogan, he's hoping that all of your listeners will be like, yeah, fuck him, and then go over to his podcast.
They want to replace you, and devour you.
And so...
That's the danger of social media, is that you get these people who think their shit don't stink, and then they try to cancel you.
The people, the way they sound off, I always say at the end of the day, like, as a comic, you might say things that you make a mistake or whatever, but at least I had the guts.
To say it, put my face with it and stand there in front of people and say it.
I didn't fire it off from the fucking toilet behind an avatar of a dumpster.
Like, at least I had that and nobody ever comes up to you in person and says what they said online.
Well, I think maybe there's a way to find out if a person's a bot at some point in time.
Okay, listen to this.
Former FBI agent noted that bots are generally designed to accomplish a goal.
In Twitter's case, a key goal is to gain followers.
More followers mean that an account becomes more influential and could potentially be a security risk.
What's interesting is that there's means to get bots for Twitter with countless entities offering Twitter accounts, followers, likes, and retweets for a fee.
Some are even offered in the dark or deep web.
unidentified
This is also an explanation for someone who hasn't used the internet before.
With this experience in mind, Woods took his test further, and the results were pretty damning for Twitter's anti-bot measures.
He says, I began to wonder how easy it would be to create a Twitter account using automation.
Automation I'm not a programmer, but I research automation frameworks on YouTube and stack overflow turns out it's easy Taking my testing to the next level over a weekend.
I wrote a script that automatically creates Twitter accounts my rather Unsophisticated script was not blocked by any countermeasures I didn't try to change my IP address or user agent and Or do anything to conceal my activities.
If it's that easy for a person with limited skills, imagine how easy it is for an organization of highly skilled, motivated individuals.
Like, otherwise, this thing that he's talking about, how else would you stop that?
But then there's problems like, what if you tweeted anti-government stuff and you lived in a country where the, you know, the government was, you know, autocrat government and they cracked down on you and had you killed?
Because they could connect you to the post where you couldn't have an anonymous account.
Because anonymous whistleblowers are very important.