Oct. 23, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:07
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| My guest this week is Kelly Carlin, daughter of the legendary comedian George Carlin. | ||
| Kelly is an author and a speaker whose work connects many of the dots her father's life was all about. | ||
| I've known Kelly for about four years now after connecting with her on Twitter because of how much I admired her dad. | ||
| We've become great friends. | ||
| Kelly has welcomed me into her world and the comedy community she's part of here in LA. | ||
| I thought Kelly would be the perfect guest this week, not only because of her new book about growing up as a Carlin, but also because of all the issues her father's comedy was about that have become central themes of what we do here on this show. | ||
| George Carlin was a relentless defender of free speech, using words and language to push the limits of what society found acceptable at the time. | ||
| He railed against political correctness like no other comic before or anybody since. | ||
| He dissected the absurdities of life that ultimately bring us together rather than rip | ||
| us apart. | ||
| I can't tell you how often I'm watching some campaign nonsense or some ridiculous | ||
| politically correct crusade and think, "Man, I wish George Carlin was still alive to tackle | ||
| this." | ||
| Not only do I want you to see George Carlin in a new way by sitting down with Kelly, but | ||
| I also want to use our chat as a living, breathing example of something else that's going on | ||
| As I mentioned, Kelly and I met on Twitter. | ||
| All I was to her was another person tweeting at her and 140 characters who had some connection to her father like millions of other people. | ||
| But through social media, we met, we became friends, and now we share so much of our lives and our passions together. | ||
| To me, that's what's so cool about what's happening here with you guys. | ||
| The reaction to what we're doing has gotten to a whole new level. | ||
| I've been getting emails from literally all over the world, from Denmark to Saudi Arabia to Mexico. | ||
| We're connecting because of the same ideas that George believed in, which I believe in, and which you believe in. | ||
| By the way, that doesn't mean that we agree on everything. | ||
| Actually, in almost every email I get that's heaping praise on me, you guys manage to tell me something that we disagree on. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That's what this is all about, and it's precisely what the far right and the regressive left fear. | ||
| If the rest of us can wake up and realize that we can come together despite differences, then they can't control us. | ||
| It's really as simple as that. | ||
| The authoritarians that exist on both sides want control, and the best way to do that is to keep everyone hating on each other all the time. | ||
| For all the things that Milo Yiannopoulos and I disagreed on, this is one spot we had total agreement. | ||
| The Rise of the Cultural Libertarians is here, and it contains people from all over the cultural map, from Chris Rock to Bill Maher, from Maajid Nawaz to Sam Harris. | ||
| If George Carlin was still around, I think he would fit right in there, but would have also been sure to make fun of any group that would have accepted him as part of it. | ||
| The point of all this is that every week, actually every day that I've been doing this show, I see this movement getting stronger. | ||
| You guys are not only connecting with me, but with each other. | ||
| And now when I see the usual regressives spout off their nonsense, there's an army of people calling them out on it. | ||
| That is literally as important as anything that I do. | ||
| George Carlin's most famous routine was the seven dirty words you can't say on TV. | ||
| We live in a time that's getting dangerously close to the several dirty ideas that you can't challenge publicly. | ||
| Let's honor the trailblazers before us like George Carlin by relentlessly challenging and ruthlessly mocking those who would attempt to silence us. | ||
| Alright, let's do a show. | ||
| My guest this week is an author, a speaker, and a one-woman show-er. | ||
| That's something, right? | ||
| Her new book, A Carlin Home Companion, tells her journey growing up as the daughter of George and Brenda Carlin. | ||
| She's also my friend and throws a hell of a party. | ||
| Kelly Carlin, welcome to the show. | ||
| I'm so excited to be here. | ||
| This is so fabulous. | ||
| Doesn't this seem more mature than anything we've done together? | ||
| We are so grown up right now, it's kind of scaring me. | ||
| This is very grown up. | ||
| Before we start, you just pointed to our window here. | ||
| I was, I'm like, where are we looking out at? | ||
| So this picture, I know we're blowing the illusion of television, but that is a picture, it's not an actual window, that is the Upper West Side, that's 89th Street, facing North, and just a little bit past where this picture ends is actually, just in the last year, a street that is now named after your father. | ||
| This isn't where I was intending to start with, but let's start there. | ||
| Your dad now has a street. | ||
| Yes, he has officially a street at 121st and Amsterdam. | ||
| We wanted it to be between Broadway and Amsterdam, and that was the block he grew up on. | ||
| But there's also a church there, the church his mother attended, the church that had the school that he attended as a child. | ||
| He was kicked out of that church, right? | ||
| Or he was kicked out of the school? | ||
| Well, he was kicked out of the school and then he was allowed to come back to graduate for 8th grade, but he had to write the play in order to get back in, which they were great. | ||
| It was actually a very progressive school for a Catholic school. | ||
| But the irony is, is that once we wanted to name the street, the church, Also, not a huge fan of religion. | ||
| about it worried, well they claimed that they were worried about kids coming out | ||
| of school and looking up and seeing the name and then googling it and finding | ||
| out about the seven dirty words that was their concern. | ||
| Right, also not a huge fan of religion. I'm guessing they were more worried about the | ||
| religion is bullshit video that they would probably find on YouTube. | ||
| Video there must be 50 of them. | ||
| There is, probably is, yeah. | ||
| We're working on that. | ||
| We're trying to, you know, organize all of that. | ||
| But yeah, but you can go to 121st and Amsterdam on the other side of the street, and there is George Carlin Way. | ||
| Right, so just to be clear, so it's on the same street, but they just pushed it one block. | ||
| Yeah, they just put it across the street on Amsterdam, because I mean, it's—once again, it's just the thing. | ||
| Churches have these lines that they draw, and they're ridiculous. | ||
| But the good news is, was that when all this went down, was it got us so much press that it ended up being like a kind of a funny thing. | ||
| They actually got us more attention for the street sign than I think they probably would have wanted. | ||
| Although every comic in the world wanted to be there that day and you had a zillion. | ||
| Yeah, it was great. | ||
| It was an amazing day. | ||
| And Kevin Bartini, the comic, he's the one who initiated it and did it all. | ||
| But yeah, we had Colin Quinn and Dave Attell and just, you know, it was it was a great day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I love the fact that what I'm putting right here—we did this because I used to live on the Upper West Side. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| So it's a nice way to start. | ||
| I feel at home. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, as I said in my intro, one of the things that I love about having you here—and we've been doing this kind of stuff forever—but one of the reasons that I think it's particularly apropos now, beyond just your book, is that all of the things that your dad stood for, I think, are really coming to fruition right now. | ||
| There's something culturally— Again. | ||
| Again, right. | ||
| It's a cyclical thing. | ||
| Yeah, it's like this endless thing, but I feel like there's a moment now between religion and political correctness and free speech. | ||
| These things that he railed on more than anybody and did better than anybody, they're all coming back right now. | ||
| So before we get into that, let's do something a little bit, we'll give them a little hint from the book. | ||
| Give me something about your dad on the private side, because this is someone who talked about culture Not necessarily talked about himself. | ||
| Let's just do a little of that. | ||
| Yeah, he was one of those comics, which really didn't come to me until he died, really, but | ||
| that who really did focus on, I mean, he focused on, he talked about three things he focused | ||
| The little things that we all share, so that was the observational humor stuff and the refrigerator man and the airline announcements and things like that. | ||
| He focused on language, which is another thing that we all share as a culture. | ||
| And then he, like, would go after the big subjects. | ||
| Death, religion, children, things like that. | ||
| But he never, he mentioned me once in a routine in like 1971. | ||
| It was one of the earlier albums where I was very excited. | ||
| He was talking about euphemisms for shit. | ||
| You know, we call it number two and P is number one and how once I figured that out I made funny combinations up and things like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that was the only time it was ever talked about. | ||
| And for comics, you know, 99% of the time, their material is their family and their personal life. | ||
| So my dad was very different than that, and he wrote a memoir, but he didn't publish it until we published it after he died. | ||
| What do you think that was about? | ||
| Because he so got into the mind, he so got into the very bit of us that we all share, and yet that part he did—was that out of respect, maybe, to your mom or to your family? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I think his mind just didn't travel there. | ||
| His mind was out here. | ||
| And that's just the way his focus was. | ||
| And so—and it was kind of weird, because I would—growing up, I would see other comedians talking about their families. | ||
| And it did hit me a few times, especially in, like, teenage years. | ||
| Why doesn't he ever talk about us on, like, the Tonight Show? | ||
| I mean, I remember one time he went on the Tonight Show with Carson as the host, and Carson asked about his family, and he had these funny made-up sons that he talked about. | ||
| Dark Canyon was one of them, which, I mean, it was a great bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you feel? | ||
| Did you feel jealous? | ||
| No, I already felt a little invisible. | ||
| Therefore, I felt even a little more invisible at that time. | ||
| And yet, I think I'm happy about it because my life wasn't fodder for his comedy, whereas my poor dad, our life together has become fodder for my art. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Uh, which was a bone of contention for us, and I do talk about that in the book, and not so much as artists, but that there were some things that we had never talked about as a family that I really was willing to talk about on stage, like people like Spaulding Gray and uh... you know uh... sanderson lowe and said these other | ||
| solo artists did uh... you know they go and comedians yeah i mean i think a | ||
| lot of comedians are way more comfortable going on stage | ||
| talking about their life there than having to go home and having a serious | ||
| conversation with their loved ones. Sure, yeah, we'll get to the sad clown thing in a little bit. | ||
| But you do address that. | ||
| You do address that in your one-woman show that was sort of a lead-up to the book, that there's a sort of beautiful moment where you and your dad are talking, and he sort of—there was like a little bit of sense of betrayal or a sense that he was going to be exposed in a way that he hadn't done. | ||
| Yeah, and I think ultimately—I mean, what happened was I wrote a solo show, and I sent him the script, and inside the script I talked about having some feelings, some negative feelings, about when my mother was dying and he had to go on the road. | ||
| And it was a conversation my dad and I had never had, and we didn't have any real healthy conversation closure around it. | ||
| And looking back on it now, I think sending him that script was my way of saying, hey, I have these feelings. | ||
| But this was one of the themes I wanted to work on in the book was that here's this man who is the truth teller, like you said opening in the show. | ||
| I mean, this is the man who conquered everything and was fearless and would talk about all the big stuff that our culture does not want to talk about on stage. | ||
| And yet when it came to our family, we were very much the textbook dysfunctional, Alcoholic family that did a lot of walking on eggshells, didn't do a lot of intimate talking about the issues, and we all pretended that we were fine. | ||
| So the true all-American family. | ||
| Yeah, truly. | ||
| And that's like when people talk about my book and they're like, oh, you have such a unique life. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, kind of not. | ||
| I mean, I did. | ||
| But kind of like the all-American family, yeah. | ||
| All right, so I don't want to delve too deep into the book because I want people to buy the book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, of course. | |
| So that's an important piece of this. | ||
| But just one more thing on that. | ||
| Did you have a sense when you were growing up, now your dad, look, there were drug things that you talk about in the book and in the show. | ||
| He was arrested the night that Lenny Bruce was arrested, right? | ||
| Yeah, that was before I was born. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that was 1961. | ||
| But these types of things that were going on. | ||
| He was on the front lines, as they say. | ||
| How much of that, were you conscious, especially in your early years, that your dad really was this legend? | ||
| I mean, when there's the Mount Rushmore comedy, it's, you know, half the people say it's your dad, half the people say it's Pryor, and then maybe there's 1% that gets split amongst Lenny Bruce and a couple others. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, I think The legend kind of Mount Rushmore thing really happened more when I was in my 20s. | ||
| And I was at an English class at UCLA, and my professor says, you know, we're going to study compare and contrast essays today, and I have a perfect example of how you should go about this. | ||
| And he pushes the play button on a boom box, and my dad's baseball football routine comes out. | ||
| And I'm sitting there in this class of like 25 people looking around going, Um, is anyone else having this weird experience? | ||
| Right, are you going to play any shit from anyone else's dad, maybe? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's when you realize, oh, yeah, big dent in the culture has happened here. | ||
| So, you know, I think it was from that point on that I knew, like, legend. | ||
| But even before that, I knew that he was obviously famous and people worshipped him and all that kind of stuff, and was around for, you know, an arrest or two of his also. | ||
| So I knew he was definitely on the front lines of something. | ||
| So let's get into some of the themes that, as I said, have become the central themes of what I'm trying to do here. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because, you know, I say to you all the time, as I said in the intro, I'm watching the news constantly and I either text you sometimes or I'll call you and be like, God, I wish your dad was around because I can't do it that way. | ||
| I mean, certainly. | ||
| And I don't know anyone else that can skewer stuff in that way. | ||
| So let's just hit a couple of them. | ||
| So the religion one. | ||
| So you already mentioned a little bit about his history with religion. | ||
| Was he an atheist? | ||
| Did he describe himself in any specific way? | ||
| No, he did not use the term atheist. | ||
| He felt atheism was as dogmatic as any other ism. | ||
| Out there. | ||
| You know, lately, I've been introduced to what they call the humanist, you know, kind of community, which is something I relate to a lot more. | ||
| I think he would have felt better about that. | ||
| Sounds like they're not going to have as many meetings and armbands and things like that, which he used to talk about groups, because there's less Kool-Aid, I think. | ||
| Yeah, he felt any group, you know, any group of people, you get groupthink. | ||
| And then, where does the individual thinking, you know, happen in that situation? | ||
| So that always worried him. | ||
| I think he self-named himself mostly as an agnostic. | ||
| Obviously, he didn't believe in the man in the sky with the beard thing. | ||
| It's not like he was thinking that was a possibility. | ||
| But he had a deep sense of oneness with the universe. | ||
| He loved astronomy. | ||
| He loved that idea of looking up. | ||
| You know, that feeling you get when you look at them like, Jesus, we're just a speck here. | ||
| And yet there's something about that being a speck that... | ||
| expands us at the same time so there was something around that uh... he was a man who dropped acid in the sixties and had some transcendent experiences about that and it talked to me about uh... being uh... high and having an experience where he realized that he really was at one with everything including the old tennis shoe in the gutter and that he realized that if he was that everything was him and he was everything. | ||
| And from that moment on he said he felt safe because he knew that no matter what he encountered in life, | ||
| he was only encountering a version of himself. | ||
| So that's... | ||
| That's pretty spiritual stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you can put it in that box "spiritual" | ||
| and you could talk about it from a brain science way and say, "Okay, maybe there's things in the brain that | ||
| makes us feel that way" | ||
| or whatever it is. | ||
| But it is an experience that changes your worldview and changes how you encounter your life and other people. | ||
| And I think that did that for him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think a lot of his sort of, because when I think of it, I think of this sort of anti-religion, the rants that he would go on about the church and religion. | ||
| How much of it was just not even about religion specifically, but just about authoritarianism? | ||
| Was that really what it was about? | ||
| It wasn't about religion. | ||
| Well, I can't—I won't speak for him, and I don't really know at all what motivated him to do those bits. | ||
| I never was privy to that part of his process. | ||
| He would sit me down during the HBO taping and let me see it just the way everyone else saw it. | ||
| I never knew his process. | ||
| But, sure, I mean, I think if you looked at all of his— material and sifted through it and analyzed it, I think authoritarianism would be a huge aspect to it all, that anyone—I mean, he—my dad never made it through a single institution he encountered. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He got kicked out of everything—elementary school, junior high, high school, did not finish high school, ninth grade, dropout, then joined the Air Force early. | ||
| promoted and demoted. I've got a little piece of paper of his that has all the | ||
| listings of the promotions and the demotions that he had in the Air Force. | ||
| So, got kicked out of that and then ultimately, you know, became this | ||
| straight-suit, clean-cut comic and even that conservative form that he had to be | ||
| in in order to be a successful comic because his dream was to be in the | ||
| movies eventually. | ||
| That felt, you know, too restrictive and authoritarian for him. | ||
| And he rebelled against that, too, ultimately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was always looking—I mean, he talked about the line. | ||
| He always—you know, a comic's job is to find the line and to cross it. | ||
| And I think that's what that's about, is anyone telling you you can't do something, all right, let's cross it and really see what we can do on the other side of that. | ||
| Yeah, so let's just back up for a second because you mentioned that at one time your dad was this sort of, he wasn't conservative comic, but he was buttoned down, kind of, he was that generic, whatever that was, but then had a moment that it all changed. | ||
| Do you know what it was personally at that moment? | ||
| It was LSD. | ||
| So it was the drug. | ||
| I mean, here's the deal. | ||
| On the inside, he was already the other person. | ||
| He had been smoking weed since he was 14. | ||
| His politics were a little more conservative growing up. | ||
| His mom was a Republican. | ||
| A, you know, whatever they call it. | ||
| A social— None of it means anything anymore relative to how— But, you know, a fiscal—whatever. | ||
| Fiscal conservative, social— Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| A social liberal. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And when he met Jack Burns, his first thing was he was a comedy duo with Jack Burns. | ||
| Jack Burns was way They left progressive, and my dad was more moderate guy, and Jack took him and pulled him and taught him about everything. | ||
| And then, of course, Lenny Bruce blew his mind, too. | ||
| So on the inside, Dad was a radical. | ||
| He was hanging out with musicians in the village. | ||
| You know, he was one of them. | ||
| But he had to put on this exterior in order to build this career, because in his mind, he really did. | ||
| He had this Danny Kaye plan, and he wanted to be like Danny Kaye in the movies. | ||
| And he felt the way to do that was TV and these nightclubs. | ||
| I mean, really, there were no comedy clubs back then. | ||
| You were doing the Playboy Club or the Copacabana, and you were opening for, you know, God knows. | ||
| Four Seasons. | ||
| Yeah, who knows? | ||
| Yeah, I mean. | ||
| You were lucky it was a Four Seasons. | ||
| Inglebird Humperdinck, you know. | ||
| I mean, he opened for the Supremes in Las Vegas in '69. | ||
| You know, it's like, you know. | ||
| Which really, think how crazy that is. | ||
| You can say it, and we don't really absorb what that means, but your dad, even before his transformation, opening for the Supremes, it seemed so bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, and that was a great gig for him. | ||
| He was making a lot of money in that gig. | ||
| I think you tell a story where he actually got fired from that gig. | ||
| He got fired for that gig, yeah. | ||
| He was making more money than he ever had made, and he said the word, What was it? | ||
| Is it ass in that one or shit? | ||
| I think he said shit. | ||
| He got fired twice in Vegas. | ||
| Ass or shit. | ||
| Yeah, ass or shit. | ||
| And Red Fox is down the street doing Triple X stuff, of course. | ||
| So, you know, but this was the thing. | ||
| He realized he was entertaining the parents of the people that he was hanging out with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And here's like another part of his outsider status, too, was he was 30 in 1967. | ||
| So he was already too old for the hippies and all the kids that were going through that, because they were all early 20s. | ||
| But he wasn't relating to their parents either. | ||
| So he was this interesting bridge between those two generations, but related obviously much more to the younger generation. | ||
| Let's talk a little bit about about language, because we've been doing a ton on political correctness. | ||
| Your dad was not only the most unpolitically correct person, but hated it with a passion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| He really hated it and used words in a way to show us how silly we are being about things all the time. | ||
| And I think right now we're in this very bizarre place in our country where we're afraid of certain words, we're afraid of offending people. | ||
| You talked about the line before and pushing the limits of the line, jumping over the line. | ||
| What do you think he would make of what's going on in this country right now with words? | ||
| I think he would make what he's always made of it. | ||
| I mean, in the early 90s this was going on in colleges, too. | ||
| I was at UCLA and actually did a forum on political correctness and invited my dad to come and do that. | ||
| That was coming out of the Reagan era, you know, so there was a lot of that. | ||
| But if you really think about it, like political correctness, there's something about like polite society, like we're not allowed to talk about certain things, you know. | ||
| I think it kind of grows out of that. | ||
| But, you know, for him, he was always bothered by the fact that it comes from a place of people wanting Respect for tolerance, you know, of each other and our identities. | ||
| So it's sort of well-intentioned. | ||
| It's very well-intentioned. | ||
| And my dad grew up in Harlem. | ||
| He grew up in Harlem. | ||
| Irish, white Harlem, right next to black and Spanish Harlem. | ||
| Yes, he would have called it black Harlem. | ||
| And that doesn't make him racist. | ||
| It does not make him racist. | ||
| And so he very much identified with the black experience, the outsider experience. | ||
| And growing up, the N-word was never ever said in our house. | ||
| And my dad told me it is the one word. | ||
| I mean, I was allowed to say any of the words. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You could say all seven for TV. | ||
| Yes, but say them in the right places. | ||
| He didn't want me getting in trouble at school and other people's houses, but the N-word was one where that was Kelly, never, ever, ever. | ||
| So he got the whole idea of people wanting to define themselves and having their own identity. | ||
| That's a very important thing, and I think it's an important part of evolution of our species. | ||
| But when you do it by not tolerating other Speech and suppressing language and speech. | ||
| I don't I think he believed that that was not the route to go about this that you know using intolerance to increase tolerance. | ||
| It just doesn't fit, or something, you know? | ||
| And, you know, here's the thing about speech in our country. | ||
| I mean, if anyone's into the First Amendment, it's always— Oh, that old thing? | ||
| You know that thing. | ||
| It's always a balance between two forces. | ||
| You know, and so here we are where it's about freedom versus sensitivity. | ||
| Both things are important, really important, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
| Right, I would argue that freedom is a little more important than sensitivity, right? | ||
| Well, for you it is, for some other people it isn't, you know, but this is the great thing about a democracy is, and the way we work this stuff out is by having free speech and a marketplace of ideas. | ||
| So, therefore, if you're trying to control people's speech, then are you really having a marketplace of ideas? | ||
| And we're not talking about people bullying people and insult comics and comics who want to hurt feelings or, you know, the whole rape thing that went down. | ||
| I mean, there is obviously— Right, we're not talking about hate speech. | ||
| Right, we're not talking about hate speech, exactly. | ||
| But the thing is, you know, my dad did talk about is that stand-up comedy is a monologue. | ||
| It's not a conversation. | ||
| It's an art form that it's a monologue. | ||
| It was his bully pulpit. | ||
| He used to say, I'm here for me, and the audience is here for me. | ||
| He wasn't here for them. | ||
| He's not there to do a seminar. | ||
| Even though he was professorial, he was not there to change the world in some way. | ||
| He was there to get shit off of his chest. | ||
| And he did it in a certain way. | ||
| And so I would love to know his new take on all this college stuff and all this stuff going down, but I think it would be built on a lot of this stuff. | ||
| Right now with this whole thing we have on college campuses with social justice warriors and safe rooms and trigger warnings. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| These are things we've talked about. | ||
| You wrote an interesting piece about this on your Facebook page that was related to comedy and all of this and a little bit, it was sort of about your dad, but it jumped off because of Jerry Seinfeld making a comment. | ||
| Yeah, and Todd Glass had written a reply to a piece in the L.A. | ||
| Times, and he felt—you know, he was kind of on the other side of it, of respecting people's, you know, rights to define themselves more. | ||
| And, you know, and I just kind of—I'd finally, after, I think, you know, about a year and a half or two years of trying to think about all this, had pulled all my thoughts together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And some of it I've already shared here. | ||
| But the whole trigger warning thing, I mean, I really would have loved my dad to unpack Just the phrase, trigger warning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Just to help us unpack it a little bit. | ||
| And I can only imagine who he would have pissed off with that. | ||
| I'm sure it would have been the feminists. | ||
| And my dad was considered himself a feminist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you know. | ||
| But that was the irony, right? | ||
| So something like that. | ||
| He would have pissed off the feminists. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But he was very pro-woman, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everything he did was to empower women. | ||
| Whenever he would really talk about something Yeah, his humor, for the most part, I would say, is very pro-woman. | ||
| But, I mean, even when he talked about using the term rape, you know, can rape ever be funny? | ||
| And then he tells this joke about, you know, Daffy Duck fucking Elmer Fudd or something. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| It's a great image. | ||
| You can't help but laugh. | ||
| That's gay human duck rape. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That's pretty funny. | ||
| Now I've got the vegans. | ||
| Yeah, you've got every—oh, man. | ||
| And the gays. | ||
| We'll issue an apology. | ||
| All right, please. | ||
| Trigger warning on that joke right there, please. | ||
| Uh, so yeah, I would, yeah, I, I, yeah, I, I do, like you, I miss him too. | ||
| There are certain things that come up where I, where I do, I'm like, I wish Dad was here, and then I'm like, okay, so we're gonna have to figure this out on my own, like, or on our own, like, without Dad, how to walk through this, you know, and there's some comics out there who I think definitely help with this, absolutely. | ||
| Who do you think is helping? | ||
| I was gonna ask you that a little closer to the end, but as long as we're I think Bill Maher is. | ||
| I think Louis Black is. | ||
| I think Louis C.K. | ||
| is doing brilliant work. | ||
| I think Amy Schumer is doing great work. | ||
| Nora Dunn just went after her today because she's using nasty words to name her body parts and she thinks it's self-shaming. | ||
| So that's going to be an interesting conversation between the feminists, what's going on with that. | ||
| And, you know, and there's a ton of younger comics, too, that are doing great work. | ||
| Not that Amy Schumer isn't one of the younger ones. | ||
| She's only, what, is she 30 or something? | ||
| She's so young. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, there's good work going on out there. | ||
| Chris Rock, you know, always does great work. | ||
| So, you know, they're out there pushing the edge, pushing the line, you know, as they should be. | ||
| So, last thought on the free speech and the political correctness stuff. | ||
| Is this where we could really teach younger people? | ||
| And I hate to say that as if... Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's an arrogance in that, too. | ||
| I mean, I think generations come up and they've got their own worldview, they've got their own life experience, they're trying to define themselves. | ||
| But yes, I think they weren't around for the fights. | ||
| They weren't around for Lenny Bruce getting arrested. | ||
| They weren't around for my dad getting arrested. | ||
| They don't understand the luxury they have around free speech. | ||
| And this regressive left, I guess that's what we're calling them now. | ||
| I saw one of your pieces the other day. | ||
| That's what I'm calling them now. | ||
| And I had to look it up. | ||
| I'm like, what exactly does he mean by that? | ||
| But now I got it. | ||
| I understand it. | ||
| Well, it's these people that would be attacking your dad. | ||
| That's what they would be doing. | ||
| Yeah, and there's an authoritarianism around it. | ||
| There's a need to control everything in order for the world to be comfortable. | ||
| And hey, you know what? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| That generation is facing a planet that's dying. | ||
| An economy that doesn't look very good, politics that have stopped working—our democracy has stopped working. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I, too, would want to control things. | ||
| And so maybe if you can control people's language and create a sense of safety, I mean, maybe that's what this is about on a psychological level. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But yeah, I think it is our job to at least Bring some history up and educate them about the fights we've had in this country, and to understand what the purpose of free speech is. | ||
| And it's not like—and our government is no longer censoring it. | ||
| Yes, this is the irony. | ||
| It's now corporate America and these interest groups. | ||
| Did you ever think, or someone, so your father literally arrested because of exercising his free speech, right? | ||
| This is someone who lost gigs because of using pretty mundane curse words. | ||
| Do you think he could have ever imagined, if he would agree with what you just said, that you would fear the lack of free speech? | ||
| Not because the government is coming to your speech, but because we're doing it to ourselves. | ||
| Do you think he could have ever envisioned that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, he had a lot to say about business and corporations. | ||
| I mean, he really— Yeah, he hated all them. | ||
| They are the owners of this country and have been, you know, ever since— His greatest bid, I think. | ||
| —the industrial age began. | ||
| Was that bid in his last HBO special? | ||
| About the true owners of the country? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't think so. | |
| I think it was the second-to-last one. | ||
| Second-to-last. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, he would have a lot to say about that. | ||
| And he—I mean, it's not like, you know, 10 years ago, corporations weren't— I mean, advertising dollars shape everything on television. | ||
| I mean, now with the Internet, it's interesting because we have a lot more freedom, you know? | ||
| And I look at the bigger picture of it, and you think of the expansion of the freedom that the Internet's given us, so it's not strange that some other part of our culture wants to shut something down. | ||
| It is a balance like this all the time, whether it's in our own individual psyches or the collective psyches. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| And ultimately, you know, what I tell people, when people say, oh, your dad, I wish, you know, and I'm like, yes, I get it. | ||
| I'm going to try not to say it to you. | ||
| Yeah, but it's true. | ||
| But I remind people, I say, look, no matter what, we can remember this. | ||
| Dad said, When you're born, you get a ticket to the Freak Show. | ||
| And when you're born in America, you get a front row seat. | ||
| So, we're at the Freak Show. | ||
| And then he added later on another thing which I love, which is, and some of us get to sit on the side and take notes and talk about it, which is what we get to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, which is a really privileged position to be in. | ||
| But now everyone gets that privileged position because it's the Internet and there's comment sections going on, right? | ||
| They're pretty good to me. | ||
| They're pretty good to me, too. | ||
| Yeah, we've cultivated something nice here. | ||
| So, the political situation we have going on right now, this pathetic, really pathetic group of candidates, pretty much on all fronts, in my opinion, with Bernie being the one exception. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| What do you think he would make of this? | ||
| Now, he obviously was socially liberal, but he didn't identify as a Democrat, did he? | ||
| He didn't vote. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, he didn't vote at all? | ||
| But he was very progressive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He always chose people over property. | ||
| So, whatever candidate chose people over property, he would lean towards that. | ||
| Before he died, he was happy about Hillary. | ||
| Back in 2008, that was. | ||
| He was not around for the big Obama surge, and I know he would have been thrilled to have seen a black president. | ||
| I know he would have really been thrilled about that. | ||
| And I got to be in Washington in November picking up his Mark Twain Prize when Obama | ||
| flew over—my husband and I were on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Obama flew over | ||
| in the helicopter to go visit George Bush in the White House for the first time. | ||
| And all I could think about is, "I wish my dad was here right now." | ||
| It would have brought a tear to his eye, absolutely. | ||
| He was a very sentimental man in that way. | ||
| But yeah, and he saw it all as bullshit, as he said all the time. | ||
| He really had a detachment to it. | ||
| He didn't vote. | ||
| He hadn't voted since McGovern lost in 72. | ||
| I think that's when his heart really broke. | ||
| Did he struggle with that internally, that he wasn't voting, yet he was talking so much about the system? | ||
| But he also felt the system was so broken almost that it was sort of beyond repair. | ||
| His logic was that if you vote, you don't have the right to complain. | ||
| If you vote... | ||
| Wow, that's talking about flipping something on its head. | ||
| Yeah, that was his position. | ||
| Because then you're part of the problem. | ||
| Yes, completely. | ||
| That was his thing. | ||
| And he would—he'd said that a few times, and I, too, was like... But that was his stance. | ||
| So, and that's where he stood with that. | ||
| And, you know, he really did—he was able to compartmentalize and detach. | ||
| Like I said, at home, rooting for Hillary, happy that, you know, that she was, you know, shaking things up. | ||
| But on stage, he didn't—he would never talk about, you know, one way or the other. | ||
| I mean, like, Louis Black, you know his politics. | ||
| You know who he's voting for. | ||
| Bill Maher, he gives money. | ||
| He's tried to give money to Bernie on Friday. | ||
| He's like, "I want to give you money. | ||
| I can only give you $5,400. | ||
| You're not taking any Super PAC money." | ||
| You know, he'd probably give him another million dollars. | ||
| I mean, Bill Maher literally gave an Obama Super PAC He did. | ||
| And it was sort of brilliant what he said, because he was like, he's like, I know this sounds like I'm doing this for Obama, but I'm doing this for me, because I don't want the other guy to become president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that's what he was saying Friday night, too. | ||
| He was like, you know, if you don't like the fish, eat the chicken, people. | ||
| But do you think as a comic there's a risk in that, because then you've shown your cards too much, and that what your dad did in a way, by holding a little closer I think every comic has their own approach. | ||
| It's, you know, that we're all snowflakes. | ||
| Everyone's got their own approach to it in their own way. | ||
| My dad liked being not part of it all. | ||
| He liked not having no stake in it, so that he could emotionally detach from it. | ||
| I think that's how he personally protected himself from all of it, too. | ||
| I personally don't think that's a healthy way to go through life. | ||
| Love my dad dearly. | ||
| You know, my dad was like, I gave up on the species, I gave up on the planet, and I was in my late 30s, early 40s at the time, and I was like, YG, I hope to have 30 to 40 more years on the planet. | ||
| I'm still kind of involved in the species. | ||
| Right, you need a little, a little more. | ||
| And I get that, you know, evolution is slow, but I do believe in the evolution of consciousness, you know, so I try to do my little part. | ||
| My dad, he was never an activist. | ||
| He was never on the front lines, even in the Vietnam War and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| I mean, he had opinions about it, but he's not a man who got involved. | ||
| He, on stage, did his, you know, activism. | ||
| Yeah, and there's probably something to be said for that, that we all in life, and I'm not just talking about comics, but everybody sort of picks very little role about how they're going to go about things, and some people are going to, you know, have kids and try to teach them the right thing, and some people, like your dad, will have one child but then teach a generation. | ||
| Yeah, although he claimed he never Although, right. | ||
| It was not about changing minds. | ||
| You know, when I used to say, "Ugh, please, really, bullshit, Dad, like, come on." | ||
| Oh, he changed minds. | ||
| He was professorial. | ||
| I mean, that's what he did. | ||
| He, you know, he had a big stick and he'd come out and whack us all with it and go, | ||
| "Oh," we'd all go, "Oh, shit, you're right. | ||
| Oh, that's right." | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that really ultimately the beauty of comedy more than anything else? | ||
| That when I would watch those specials, from literally from being 12 years old to being 35, that I would watch them and go, God, this is the truth. | ||
| This is the truth. | ||
| And I don't know how any other comic where, I mean, even as his daughter, I would feel changed in some way by each of his shows. | ||
| There was something in me, some idea I had about the world had been stretched in a new way. | ||
| Not always a comfortable way, but something had been like, oh, a little mind expansion had gone on. | ||
| I don't know if there are other comics who do that. | ||
| I mean, I'm entertained by a lot of them. | ||
| Well, it does seem that something in comedy has changed where counterculture doesn't seem to be very cool anymore. | ||
| Your dad, part of the coolness was he was counterculture. | ||
| And right now, if you were counterculture, it really means you're sort of against the administration, so somehow you're against Obama. | ||
| And I think maybe because of all this political correctness stuff, There's a sense that that's not cool, so it's sort of like the death of comedy in a way. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think there's still a lot of independence in that. | ||
| I mean, comics have to always—are always the outsider, no matter what. | ||
| I mean, even if they vote and they give a million dollars, Bill Maher's still going to give Obama shit for shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, he's still got his positions, you know, and Louis Black, too, you know. | ||
| He was giving Bernie shit, Bill Maher, just the other day, as he was saying, I support you. | ||
| Yeah, you know, and I think that really is the independent thinking and spirit of comedy. | ||
| So I think that is, I really do think that's alive and well. | ||
| I mean, you know, I spoke about Amy Schumer earlier. | ||
| When I first saw Amy Schumer three or four years ago, she was on the Roseanne roast. | ||
| And I thought, oh, really? | ||
| Dick jokes, girl? | ||
| Like, you know, we fought so hard, you know, and you're telling dick jokes? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't get it. | ||
| I didn't get she was playing a persona that she's kind of pushing up against all of this stuff. | ||
| And she's doing it in her own way, too. | ||
| She's counterculture in some way, because she is taking—she's really—she's a huge feminist, and yet she's taking some of it to task at the same time. | ||
| And I like that. | ||
| She makes us a little uncomfortable around that stuff. | ||
| Well, we could talk about your dad and all this stuff forever, but I want to shift a little bit to sort of how we know each other for the past couple of years and some of the things that we talk about all the time. | ||
| So you have these parties every couple of weeks at your house where you bring basically What I would describe as sort of the wackiest mix of comedians and actors and writers and philosophers and what other professions are there. | ||
| I mean, behind the camera people, musicians, really this wild crew of people and it's always changing and coming and going. | ||
| And you call it the poly mind. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I first want you to explain what The Polly Mind means to you, but the reason I love it so much is because it's so become part of how I've treated this show, that I want my audience to be part of what we're talking about. | ||
| I want it to be a conversation. | ||
| So now explain what The Polly Mind is. | ||
| And most of the people that you've had at your parties, by the way, I've had on previous incarnations of my show. | ||
| I mean, you really opened up a zillion friends to me and the comedy community and all that. | ||
| Part of the—I mean, I love community. | ||
| I think being an only child, I was a loner and a bit lonely, so community has always been important to me. | ||
| And especially in the last 20 years, I've really felt that. | ||
| And part of what happened and how this came to be was, when my dad died, I became part of the comedy community, which I was not a part of before, and met Paul Provenza. | ||
| And Paul Provenza knows everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's part of that. | ||
| Like, him and my worlds kind of merged in this thing called the—what I call the polymind commune emerged. | ||
| And for me, the polymind is—comes from my roots of studying Carl Jung's psychology, the collective unconscious, that we have all these archetypes inside of us. | ||
| We have all these voices in our head, and they all have a right to have a voice. | ||
| You know, from the most staunch conservative voice in our head to the most liberal voice to the most immature to the most mature. | ||
| We all—everything gets a voice and gets a seat at the table at some point, because every voice ultimately is important. | ||
| Wait, so let me get this clear. | ||
| We're not supposed to shout down the voices we don't like? | ||
| And we're not supposed to call them bigots and racists and homophobes and sexists and all that stuff? | ||
| And I think the way, the reason we do that in public is because we have such intolerance for the voices inside of our heads. | ||
| Also, I think what is inner is outer. | ||
| I mean, that's part of what I do. | ||
| So part of, I just love that word. | ||
| And so I just came up with this word poly mind because I really feel like we all are Individually a poly mind, but community in itself is a poly mind, that we each have our own perspectives and our own way of seeing it, and we can agree on ten things, and then there's four things that we totally disagree on, and that's okay! | ||
| Thank God, right? | ||
| We love each other, yes! | ||
| Can you imagine if we agreed on everything? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| It would be terrible. | ||
| It would be boring, and there's no learning and expanding, and there's no, you know, there's no juice in life at all then, you know. So yeah, so this, so I | ||
| just, you know, playfully call it the poly mind commune, you know, because ultimately I'm a hippie, | ||
| you know. Right. The booze and the weed helps. Of course it does. That's a big part of what's | ||
| going on over here. And, but really it's become, what I love what happens in these things is that, like you | ||
| said, this cross pollination happens and And my favorite thing which happens when I—you know, I haven't had a lot of big parties lately. | ||
| I used to have a lot of big parties. | ||
| But in the big parties, maybe 60 people would be at my house. | ||
| And it always happens that two people will encounter each other in my kitchen who have | ||
| not seen each other in 15 years, who grew up together, something crazy like that. | ||
| And there's this reunited, reunited. | ||
| And then there's like suddenly they're collaborating on a thing. | ||
| Three months later I hear they're collaborating on a thing. | ||
| There's a lot of collaboration going on and that, I don't know, that just brings me such joy to know that I can create a space for that stuff to happen. | ||
| It is really fun. | ||
| Yeah, and I can give you a living, breathing example of that, as you know, because Roseanne and I became good friends and we've been working together and doing things. | ||
| One of the more interesting ones that happened at your place was, I guess it was probably about a year ago, I met Taylor Negron, who, for those that don't know him, was a Brilliant comic actor and stand-up really in the 80s, into the 90s. | ||
| Storyteller. | ||
| Brilliant, brilliant guy who I loved without knowing him and then I met him one night at the fire pit at your place and we were talking and you know I could tell like he thought I was funny that I got it kind of thing And we were talking, talking, and then I told him about my | ||
| show and he said he would do my show. | ||
| And then literally two months later, I found out he was dead. | ||
| And I assume he knew he was sick. | ||
| I don't know a lot about the story. | ||
| But those types of things are what's going on there. | ||
| And that's what's so magical about it. | ||
| Yeah. And people feel comfortable to be themselves there. | ||
| I mean, that's why Roseanne will come to my house. | ||
| And I don't—it's not like I have, as you know—there's not, like, all these A-list celebrities sitting around my fire pit. | ||
| It's not like that, actually. | ||
| But every once in a while, Roseanne will come by, and she feels comfortable there because no one's, like, gawking at her or whatever. | ||
| And—but it was like—I mean, the first time she came to my house, it was one of those moments, because even though I grow up being my dad's daughter and everything, These people are icons to me. | ||
| And I'll never forget the first night she was there, her and Rick Overton and Paul Provenza | ||
| were sitting around the fire pit, and I'm walking by with some friends, | ||
| and I'm like going, "Oh my God, "look what's going on in my backyard." | ||
| And meanwhile, you're the daughter of George Carlin. | ||
| Yeah, I have no concept of that. | ||
| That's just who I am, so yeah. | ||
| But, you know, and yet, this incredible thing starts to happen, and like I said, | ||
| people start collaborating, and it's just, it's beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't even really bring this up so that, for the purposes of name dropping | ||
| or something like that, as much as that there's something really interesting | ||
| when you can connect people that care about the same things. | ||
| And that's really what we're trying to do here. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think that's the hope of our species, is that, you know, we can have a safe space for conversation. | ||
| And, you know, one of the things about the Internet, which is fabulous because we met on Twitter and all of that, is great, but there doesn't feel like there's a lot of safe space. | ||
| You know, you have to really filter through a lot of anger and rage. | ||
| Lonely people who are trying to make a dent in the world and not do it in a nice way. | ||
| Not conducive to conversation or listening. | ||
| There's very little listening going on on the internet. | ||
| There's a lot of talking going on. | ||
| So yes, in our lives we are trying to create space where we can hear each other. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you mentioned the online thing and Twitter, because one of the things we talk about all the time is— I don't even have my phone. | ||
| This damn device! | ||
| The device! | ||
| I was going to go into my pocket, but fortunately I actually gave it to my producer before we started. | ||
| I don't have it on me. | ||
| This is a rare moment that I don't have my phone on me. | ||
| Are you breathing? | ||
| Are you OK? | ||
| I'm totally OK. | ||
| And we're here, right? | ||
| We're present. | ||
| We're here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We're having a conversation. | ||
| We're not like—it's not right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so the reason I think we talk about it all the time is because... We hate it! | ||
| We hate it and we love it! | ||
| I know! | ||
| And yet it brought us together. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And then at the same time... And we make a living using it because we find an audience and we connect with an audience with it. | ||
| I mean I found my voice. | ||
| On Twitter, I mean, I learned to write a joke because of Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, and the limit of Twitter itself. | ||
| The economy of words and all of that, which I think they're planning on changing, and I'm like, no! | ||
| Yeah, oh God, your dad would have loved Twitter, but I told you I'm not going to keep saying it. | ||
| Thank you to your dad for that. | ||
| But this device and this thing that we're in. | ||
| This horror. | ||
| To me, it's a net win. | ||
| At the end of the day, it's a net win. | ||
| It has connected so many people. | ||
| It's literally helped revolutions in Egypt. | ||
| And then on the other hand, I see people's attention spans are being shredded. | ||
| I've read stories about that neurons in people's brains are firing differently. | ||
| Every two seconds, if you're on a street corner meeting a friend where you might have to stand there | ||
| and look up at the sky, you're liking Instagram things and you're like, I don't even like this person. | ||
| Why am I clicking all of this stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I think for me what's really, I mean we've talked about this before, but even on a new level, just in the last month or so, I really am starting to get sick of the intrusiveness of it. | ||
| How dare it? | ||
| And I say it like it's some sort of autonomous thing and I haven't invited it in. | ||
| Yeah, it's not autonomous yet. | ||
| But it does kind of feel that way because it's the part of my brain, like I don't feel like I have control over that part of my brain. | ||
| So it does feel like, And I really feel like if you want to be a—the fear is that if you put it away, you're not going to be part of the culture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You feel like you're actually missing something. | ||
| You do feel like you're missing something. | ||
| And you know, you probably are. | ||
| But as you know, when you and I do our little retreats, our electronic retreats, and we turn off for a week or ten days, or sometimes a weekend, yeah, you don't really miss that much. | ||
| You know, that's the thing. | ||
| The world goes on. | ||
| So right before we launched the show in September, I got married the week before in Sonoma, and I've told you this, but I did 10 days off. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I did not look at my phone for 10 days. | ||
| I didn't look at email. | ||
| I didn't look at Twitter. | ||
| I posted one thing on YouTube for 30 seconds just to say, I'll be back. | ||
| Yeah, don't worry a lot. | ||
| If you've been worried about me, I don't think anyone is. | ||
| That's the other thing, too. | ||
| They didn't care. | ||
| No, no one cares. | ||
| I thought they cared. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But I actually, I genuinely felt my brain resetting. | ||
| I felt, I've described to you before as like, you know when you used to turn on an old desktop computer and there'd be some whirring and some bing bing? | ||
| I felt that. | ||
| I actually felt that in my head. | ||
| And then when I got back I was like, wow, everyone's just up to the same old shit. | ||
| Yeah, same old conversations, same old annoyances, same old bitching and moaning. | ||
| And yet we're both agreeing it's net good. | ||
| So that's the conundrum, right? | ||
| I think, so it really is, like everything else, it's neutral, so it can be used for good or evil, and like everything else, you have to be conscious about it. | ||
| You have to really decide what are you using this for in your life, and in your career, and how much of it You know, there may be an overall net good, but how much of it is a net negative in your life, in your personal life, and in your process, in your creative process? | ||
| You know, I've been finding lately that I'm doing much better away from it all because I'm going deep down to try to figure out what my next book is. | ||
| I can't do that when I'm online and I'm looking out into the world. | ||
| I have to go inside of myself to figure that stuff out and do some research and some things, | ||
| but I have to be very conscious about what I'm doing. | ||
| And that's my process, and I'm figuring that out. | ||
| And I think the longer we have this technology--I mean you have to think about it. | ||
| In 2008 was the first smartphone, the first iPhone came out. | ||
| That's only been seven years. | ||
| So as a species, it's nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| As a culture, that's nothing. | ||
| So we are starting to feel, you know, the pain of it and the problems with it. | ||
| And I think we're going to start making some real New decisions about it, too. | ||
| I'm guessing that. | ||
| I mean, I feel like I'm already doing that in my own personal life. | ||
| Yeah, and not only doing it in your personal life, but in your professional life. | ||
| So you do a podcast also where you talk a lot about sort of waking up and the spiritual journey that we're all on. | ||
| Yeah, consciousness and our journey. | ||
| And I think all of that's directly related to this stuff because When we're in it, people are fighting, people are giving you endless approval. | ||
| But to me, it's like the approval stuff, which is really nice. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| But like that, it's like, oh, well, I think I'm putting something good out there, so it's nice to be acknowledged. | ||
| I don't really dwell on it. | ||
| But then you get some negative stuff, and it can spin you out for a day. | ||
| And that's what I mean about this all being live. | ||
| This whole thing is actually alive. | ||
| And yet there's something like exciting about, you know, that if we were really to become a collective, a conscious collective mind on some level where we could really solve the really big problems that we need to solve, We need many voices to do that. | ||
| I mean, that's what democracy is about, this marketplace of ideas. | ||
| And so it invites that. | ||
| You know, there's this other level of connection that, you know—there's a Pakistani hip-hop artist, Adil Omar, who I met also on Twitter. | ||
| Fan of my dad, because he saw YouTube videos. | ||
| This kid is 20-something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In Pakistan. | ||
| Hip-hop artist. | ||
| He was just at my house a few nights ago. | ||
| That's amazing that he and I connected in the world on Twitter to begin with, once again, and now we're friends in real life. | ||
| There's hope for a species when we can do stuff like that. | ||
| We sat around the fire pit the other night and we really asked him, what's it like there? | ||
| What's really going on? | ||
| What's the thinking? | ||
| What is the Pakistani government really doing? | ||
| You know, all this stuff. | ||
| I got to have that conversation with someone because of this stuff. | ||
| But, you know, all of the trolling and all of the distraction and all of the clickbait. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Once again, it's like anything else. | ||
| You're either going to let the distraction distract you, because that's what they all want. | ||
| I mean, you know, they, whoever the fuck that is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But ultimately, keep us fighting with each other, and then we can't look at the real problems and try to solve them. | ||
| That's literally how, I don't know if you saw in the green room at the beginning, that's how I started the book. | ||
| Yeah, and so therefore, we're not really having the real conversations we should be having. | ||
| But dammit, we are, because you're here, you're doing this, there's a lot of real good conversation going on in the world now, but we have to be the grown-ups. | ||
| And say, no more clickbait, sorry. | ||
| I'm not doing it, you know, and the ones who are distracted by it, well, there's always going to be mob mentality. | ||
| It's part of the species, it's how we're wired. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what's so nice about doing something that I think people are responding to the way they are because there's so much crap. | ||
| So it's not like there's five things and they're finding something that they relate to. | ||
| There's a gajillion things and they're finding something that gives them a little sense of presence or a little sense of... | ||
| People are hungry for it. | ||
| And I think after this, you know, this internet explosion, we all had fun being distracted for the last seven to ten years. | ||
| It's all fun to be distracted. | ||
| But now it's also like, oh, it's the hottest year again. | ||
| Oh, it's crazy weather. | ||
| Oh, this shit's really going down. | ||
| Oh, there's no one going to fucking be swooping out of the sky and rescuing us. | ||
| Oh, maybe we do need to get our shit together. | ||
| Maybe we do need to just I mean, it doesn't have to be these serious, heaviest conversations all the time. | ||
| But where are the grownups? | ||
| I want to go hang out with the grown-ups, and yes, smoke some pot, and have a nice drink, and laugh, and be silly too, but yeah, I want to be hanging out with the people that are kind of trying to think straight about things. | ||
| Yeah, well that's what we're trying to build here. | ||
| I almost feel that that should be the ending of the show, but I'm going to give you one more, I'm going to give you one bonus question, which is what's next? | ||
| What's next? | ||
| What's next after all this? | ||
| Because I know how much of you you had to pour into this book. | ||
| I saw the copies before. | ||
| I saw the manuscript when it was just printed from your printer and all that. | ||
| And how much you had to put yourself into this and go into talking about things that are scary to talk about and expose not only your dad, but your mom. | ||
| And my whole life. | ||
| And your whole life in a way that people didn't know. | ||
| Especially because someone like your dad where he's held up to this thing and that you were showing him in a different light and all that stuff. | ||
| Where do you go? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think there's been kind of two me's the last ten years. | ||
| The one that's had this book in me and knew that it was unfinished business and that I had to That, in some ways, it was going to give me permission to have a bigger conversation in the world. | ||
| And on a personal level, it was unfinished business just around my psychological healing. | ||
| I mean, I am a person who studied psychology, and I do focus more on the inner life than the cultural life on some levels, although I'm pretty 50-50 these days. | ||
| So, really, I think my next thing is really pointing my mind Slightly more outwards, you know, that it'll always be interested in our personal process and how do we get from A to B and B to C and C to D. But I think they're really connected. | ||
| I think how we do this on the inside, the micro is connected to the macro and how we treat ourselves is ultimately how we treat each other and how we treat the planet. | ||
| And so I'm interested in connecting all of those dots. | ||
| I don't know exactly what it looks like right now. | ||
| I think I'm going to start up my podcast again. | ||
| I'm looking to create something at a little more elevated level around the podcast, maybe with video or something and finding a new format. | ||
| I've suddenly become the humanist girl. | ||
| I did a keynote speech at the American Humanist Association conference last summer. | ||
| You're speaking at the Reason Rally, right? | ||
| I'm speaking at the Reason Rally, and I've been hired to do another one in May in Vancouver, and I'm suddenly like, I'm the spiritual humanist girl! | ||
| You know, it's very interesting, but there's something about soul and meaning and the inner life that I think is important, and it's an important part of the conversation, and doesn't have to be thrown out just because we don't believe The whole church bullshit and religion bullshit. | ||
| There's still a way to find meaning in wonder. | ||
| I think wonder is a really important aspect. | ||
| If we could get reconnected to the wonder of being alive, we'd all appreciate people a little bit more. | ||
| We'd all stop yelling at each other from anonymous accounts online, I think. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, obviously it's not going to happen. | ||
| But I really believe so. | ||
| And I think we would really treat our planet a little better. | ||
| So I kind of want to be in the wonder business. | ||
| Whatever that means. | ||
| Alright, I did not know that the answer was going in that direction. | ||
| But it's been, you know, look, we've been on this adventure for a while and I look forward to seeing what's next. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| And you can follow Kelly and give her all your approval and disapproval and all of that good stuff on Twitter. | ||
| It's at Kelly underscore Carlin. | ||
| She's got the underscore. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I was a dork at the beginning of all this. | ||
| I didn't know what was going on. | ||
| Got the underscore. | ||
| Or you can check out her book, A Carlin Home Companion, which you can get pretty much anywhere books are sold. | ||
| And thanks for watching. | ||
| And now we can go get a drink and do the other stuff. |
Export Selection