July 22, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:05:25
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
(upbeat music) | |
| (upbeat music) | ||
| I'm doing something a little different with the direct message this week. | ||
| I'm actually in the suburbs of DC at the moment. | ||
| You can probably hear the cicadas in the background. | ||
| I wanted to do a direct message about the RNC and everything that's going on in Cleveland right now, but then last night, you all have heard this already, Milo Yiannopoulos was officially banned for all time for the rest of human existence. | ||
| He was banned on Twitter. | ||
| You know, he had lost his blue verification check a while back. | ||
| Obviously, Milo and I, we've become sort of comrades. | ||
| We're friends. | ||
| We don't agree on everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've brought him on the show twice and we've done a couple other things where we've had a healthy exchange of ideas. | |
| We've gone to UCLA together where we were protesting for exercising our right to free speech. | ||
| I've gone out of my way to show some of the differences that I have with Milo. | ||
| For example, I always make the distinction between the doctrine of Islam and the various people that are of Muslim faith who practice their faith completely differently. | ||
| Some totally nominally, and some that are violent jihadists. | ||
| All the different things that are in there, right? | ||
| Now, Milo was banned from Twitter, and there is a free speech issue here. | ||
| And as you guys know, I'm all about free speech. | ||
| And the free exchange of ideas. | ||
| So first off, this is not a First Amendment issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The First Amendment of the United States means the government can't come for your free speech. | |
| I've said many times before, at the moment, in 2016 in America, I'm not that afraid that the government's coming for my free speech. | ||
| I think we're taking it from ourselves, and I think this is a good example of it. | ||
| You know, Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat and the rest of these things, they've become almost too powerful And their ability to control speech. | ||
| Because these are now the roadways, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
These are the super highways for us to communicate with each other. | |
| beyond our ability to pick up the phone and call a friend and talk to people on the street | ||
| and scream from town square, our ability to communicate with literally thousands | ||
| and thousands and in Milo's case, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people | ||
| on these platforms, it's hugely powerful and there is something that's happening right now | ||
| where it's not necessarily about the government but it's about companies. | ||
| Now look, they're a private company, they're publicly traded, right? | ||
| But they are allowed to instill their own terms of service which they did and if they say he violated them, | ||
| then yes, they can ban him. | ||
| So I'm not saying Twitter can't do what they did, I'm not saying the government is involved in this in any | ||
| way I'm just talking about the principles | ||
| of the free exchange of ideas and free speech. | ||
| These things are under threat right now. | ||
| Look, obviously, look, forget the nitty gritty details of what happened in the last day or so. | ||
| I'm not even fully aware of what happened. | ||
| There's a lot of tweets. | ||
| I can't follow everybody's tweets every second to see exactly what happened. | ||
| But the point is that Milo is a provocateur. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He intentionally shitposts and gets people riled up. | |
| And look, some people respond to that and some people respond to something a little more nuanced, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like I might do and get into an idea a little bit differently. | |
| But the point is, you know, on Twitter there are all kinds of Nazis. | ||
| Look at the responses that Ben Shapiro, Milo, who has fought with Ben Shapiro all the time, and I was trying to moderate a debate with them. | ||
| I hope it's still gonna happen. | ||
| Ben Shapiro, who is an Orthodox Jew, posts anything on Twitter, he gets a zillion Nazis photoshopping his head in ovens and horrific picturing him in Auschwitz, all kinds of horrible stuff. | ||
| Muslim people get all kinds of horrible imagery shown to them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gay people, people yell, I get fag and Jew fag and blah blah blah all the time. | |
| Look, this is their exercising their free speech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If these people are not calling directly for violence or acting on violence. | |
| As far as I know, Milo has never called to harm anybody. | ||
| He has never directly called for violence in any way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a provocateur sharing his thoughts. | |
| And we have to understand the difference between just words and actions. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, just somebody sitting in their basement sharing a Nazi meme, and Milo saying this or that, even if it's directed at a person saying, well, I don't like what you're doing to the girl in Ghostbusters, or I didn't like the movie, or whatever it is, and then he can't control whether his people say mean things to her, but that's what the mute button's for, and that's what the block button's for. | ||
| The point is we have to figure out how to have a healthy exchange of ideas and realize that not everything that happens in that online world is transferred directly into the real world. | ||
| If real people started using, if people started, if a Nazi party appeared and started saying we're gonna kill all Jews, we're gonna kill all Muslims, all of this stuff, then you have a problem, a direct call for violence. | ||
| But right now that's not where we're at and there's an issue here, so there's a couple issues here, but to me the primary issue is the power that these social media companies have. | ||
| And we can't pretend that they don't have a political agenda, right? | ||
| These are all pretty left organizations. | ||
| So of course, they're really not gonna like a guy like Milo 'cause it's easy always to attack stodgy old conservatives | ||
| and Republicans. | ||
| Milo represents something different. | ||
| He's young and cool and gay and British and blonde and has this huge groundswell of support. | ||
| By the way, his support is from conservatives and liberals and all sorts of other things. | ||
| I know that because when I went to UCLA with him, I had liberals in the audience. | ||
| Kids. | ||
| College kids from UCLA saying that they Don't agree with anything he says, but they were there to defend his right to free speech. | ||
| So this strikes me a little bit of what Obi-Wan said to Darth Vader, you know, if you strike me down, I'll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. | ||
| By striking him down here and banning him from Twitter, they're probably making this movement that much stronger. | ||
| Anyway, it's complex, and there's a lot of things here. | ||
| I would love to talk to someone from Facebook about this, because they've banned a couple people just in the last week. | ||
| They banned my friend Faisal and my friend Melissa, both who've been on the show. | ||
| They've been reinstated since. | ||
| I would love to talk to Jack from Twitter. | ||
| I'd love to talk to any of these tech people, so they're welcome to come on the show. | ||
| I'm not trying to inflame anything any further. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I genuinely want to have this conversation. | |
| And by the way, right now you can go on Twitter and you can check Ayatollah Khomeini's Twitter account. | ||
| He regularly calls for another Holocaust. | ||
| You can see what's going on with the President of Turkey, who right now is in the midst of literally just disassembling democracy there. | ||
| and arresting protesters and sacking judges and not letting people leave the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They have no problem with him being on there. So there's just there's an inconsistency in the way | |
| they apply these rules. There's just a lot of stuff here. | ||
| Let's try to have a mature discussion about it. And my guest this week. So as I said, we normally | ||
| do this from the studio in Los Angeles. | ||
| I'm in DC right now. | ||
| My guest this week is Michael Ian Black. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Comedian, actor, writer, great guy. | |
| He is big in fighting the trolls and we have a really interesting discussion about fighting trolls and Twitter Nazis. | ||
| We talk about Milo. | ||
| Now we shot this last week so everything that you're gonna see is Is not about what happened yesterday and today we shot it last week, but it's a great discussion about these very issues So the timing is perfect and I appreciate it and I'll be back in studio soon enough And as always thank you guys for your support. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we go. | |
| (upbeat music) | ||
| (upbeat music) | ||
| My guest this week is a comedian, an author, an actor, and a Twitter Nazi hunter. | ||
| Michael Ian Black, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Which one of those would you say you mostly are? | ||
| Is it Twitter Nazi hunter or comedian? | ||
| Probably Twitter Nazi hunter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because I'm not particularly funny these days on Twitter. | ||
| I'm just annoying. | ||
| You are fighting the Nazis constantly on Twitter. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And my policy with the Nazis is Congratulations, you guys came up with a meme and you're alone in your basement. | ||
| But you like engaging these people. | ||
| Or I don't know if you like it, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you do engage these people. | ||
| I think it's valuable and important to engage these people. | ||
| Because I think it's worth the larger public knowing that they're out there, knowing that there is this Sub-sub-culture. | ||
| I don't even know how large it is. | ||
| I'm assuming it's very small. | ||
| Yeah, it's like sub-sub-sub-sub. | ||
| Yeah, but they're very vocal and my sense is there are... | ||
| More sympathizers than actual participants, and so I feel sort of duty-bound to hold them up as idiots so that those who may be inclined to sympathize go, oh wait, they're idiots. | ||
| Yeah, they're always anonymous too, right? | ||
| Always anonymous. | ||
| Are you ever fighting a Nazi that's like, hi, I'm a Nazi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| This is my real picture. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It's always either some prepubescent Japanese anime avatar? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Or some repurposed, like, Hitler Youth avatar? | ||
| Right. What do you make of the Japanese anime thing related to that? | ||
| Because I don't think there's any connections between Japanese anime and Hitler. | ||
| No, not between Japanese anime and Hitler, but there's absolutely some kind of connection between | ||
| Uh... | ||
| those who would move towards that ideology and fetishizing prepubescent Japanese girls, | ||
| there's absolutely a connection there. | ||
| I'll leave it to brighter minds than mine to try to tie those two things together, but | ||
| that absolutely exists. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're just exposing them, and now it's for the social scientists to figure out that. | ||
| Are you ever afraid that sometimes that by fighting with them, that it's almost like | ||
| elevating their relevance? | ||
| Well, first of all, I don't fight with them. | ||
| Not fighting with them, but by exposing them and arguing or whatever you want to call it. | ||
| Well, I think there's absolutely a case to be made for that, but I think it's more important From my point of view, to show that they're there and to just say, look, this is who we're living among. | ||
| And in the context of the current political climate, I think it's important to let people know that these people exist and that Given the right circumstances, more of them could pop up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now I take it you're not against, you wouldn't be for banning them, right? | ||
| You're exposing them, but you would let them do their thing. | ||
| You do what you do. | ||
| That's why we have a First Amendment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Good. | ||
| No, and I don't report them. | ||
| I don't do any of that shit. | ||
| I just show them. | ||
| I used to be funny. | ||
| I am not funny on Twitter. | ||
| I'm just annoying. | ||
| I used to be funny. | ||
| I was. | ||
| I am not funny on Twitter. | ||
| I'm just annoying. | ||
| Yeah, so I feel that since I've been doing this, I mean, I did stand up in 12 years in New York | ||
| and a couple years out here. | ||
| I used to be funny. | ||
| I was. | ||
| I mean, I can get you some letters to show you later. | ||
| I was funny at one time, but now I'm talking about all this serious stuff all the | ||
| time And I like to try to pepper some comedy in there when I can. | ||
| But the world just feels particularly crazy right now, doesn't it? | ||
| Which should be ideal for comedy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I'm not good at making light of things that I find deadly serious. | ||
| I'm just not good at it. | ||
| I mean, there's great political comedians out there, and I'm not one of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can talk about my own life, I think, in a funny way. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I mean, there's people better able to talk about Trump and be hilarious than me. | ||
| Yeah, so we'll get to Trump in a second. | ||
| So, I always think of you more so as, or until the last year or so, I always thought of you more as like social commentary, all the I love the 80s stuff, all that stuff in a lot of the movies you've been in. | ||
| Sort of more like personal social commentary. | ||
| Did you ever think you were gonna be more in the political sphere? | ||
| 'Cause that's sort of where I put you now. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't really consider myself in the political sphere now. | ||
| I mean, the last thing the world needs is another jerk-off comedian spouting off about politics. | ||
| I don't aspire to be that person. | ||
| But if I can set aside being a comedian and just be a citizen who's interested in this stuff, | ||
| that's sort of how I view myself. | ||
| I mean, I definitely am not, I'm not an activist. | ||
| I'm not marching. | ||
| I take no action. | ||
| I do nothing other than I have this Twitter platform, and that's how I express myself politically. | ||
| Yeah, you do tweet while flying first class. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Because that's the first time we had any face-to-face interaction. | ||
| I was going to, you know, coach. | ||
| You were going way in the back. | ||
| And you sort of dismissively waved in a very— Because it was embarrassing for both of us. | ||
| As a first class—I've only flown first class once, and it was on a little plane from Detroit to New York, so it was like eight people, and first class was just that I was in the first seat. | ||
| It wasn't anything special. | ||
| But as a first class flyer, do you feel that we shouldn't be allowed to look at you? | ||
| I always feel like when I'm walking through, I shouldn't be allowed to look. | ||
| You're misunderstanding part— Maybe the main joy of first class, we're seated first, so that the people walking back are forced to look at us already ensconced in our blanket, already ordering our beverage of choice, maybe already asleep, maybe getting massaged from the chair, like there's all kinds of things that it's important | ||
| For the business model of the airlines and for my own self-esteem that you see walking back to steerage that I have that you do not. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's interesting because I always thought there should be one-way glass so that you could gawk at us, but that we wouldn't be able- I have no desire to see you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't exist for me. | ||
| Complete irrelevant. | ||
| But I very much exist for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You're thinking about those fuckers in first class while you're crammed in your sardine little seat. | ||
| Stewing for the duration of your flight. | ||
| On that JetBlue flight, though, JetBlue lets you get your own soda, you know, you can go up to like a thing, and I was almost going to peek around the curtain and just like nudge you. | ||
| They would have escorted you out. | ||
| And I know you would have called people. | ||
| They would have landed us in Salt Lake City or something. | ||
| It would have been a disaster. | ||
| It would have been a disaster. | ||
| I'm glad you didn't do that. | ||
| I'm glad you had the foresight to know better than to do that, because you would have been escorted out immediately. | ||
| Yeah, well, speaking of social faux pas, let's move over to Trump, because you have written a children's book about Trump. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you must love Trump, I assume. | ||
| If you wrote a children's, everyone loves children's books. | ||
| Here's my problem. | ||
| Despise Trump wrote a book about Trump, a sort of... | ||
| kind of a children's book, a parody of a children's book, but it is a children's book at the same time. | ||
| So I am exploiting the Trump brand as much as an actual Trump and making money off the Trump brand. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| So you're using a Trumpian tactic on Trump. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Where did the idea to make it a children's book come from? | ||
| I was at a bookstore and I saw a book about Hillary Clinton, a sort of children's book, a rags-to-riches story about Hillary Clinton, an inspirational tale directed, I think, at young girls, and it made me Chuckle a bit to think about what that would be like if you were to write about Trump, because he's not an inspirational figure in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| He's just a toad. | ||
| And so, I just thought, well, let me try to do that. | ||
| Yeah, so if he's a toad, is that why they're using, you know that toad thing? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Where did that come from? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Pepe or Kiki? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know where that comes from. | ||
| He's a toad with Trump hair. | ||
| But there's a lot of toads. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On that part of the internet. | ||
| What's with the toads? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We don't know? | ||
| We have no idea? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It took me long enough to figure out what the three parentheses meant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wait, so the two... No, it's three. | ||
| The two mean you're Jewish? | ||
| The three. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I see. | ||
| Oh, because there was some list or something that was exposed where they tried to expose people that were Jewish or something like that? | ||
| Well, that came later. | ||
| The three parentheses is meant to indicate an echo. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's like the Jewish echo. | ||
| I'm not sure quite what that means, but that's what the three parentheses are meant to indicate. | ||
| Is that just like a nagging mother? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Something worse. | ||
| Oh, I think it's far worse than that. | ||
| And then there was an app. | ||
| That just identified Jews for you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Yeah, so what do you make of just the general climate right now? | ||
| Because to me, I've been off until this show, or we did one more, we relaunched last week, | ||
| and for the three weeks that I took off, so to speak, it seems like the world, well, the | ||
| No, I was paying attention. | ||
| I just didn't have a show to talk about it. | ||
| And it seems like the world went even more crazy. | ||
| Don't you think the last month seems like particularly nuts? | ||
| You know, sort of starting probably with the Pulse shooting and then... I'm past the point of being surprised that anything is happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It all feels of a piece to me. | ||
| And I feel like I can kind of grasp the outlines of what that piece is. | ||
| Which is, to me, the larger story is sort of what is fueling all of this. | ||
| And I think there's, look, I'm not particularly savvy about this, I'm just probably regurgitating what I've read, but it really does feel like we're at a moment where the foundations of capitalism are crumpling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody knows what to do. | ||
| So is that the scary part? | ||
| That nobody knows what to do? | ||
| Because I agree. | ||
| It feels like something that there's like a real shift happening right now. | ||
| And it's almost like we have no leaders. | ||
| Even if you love Trump, and if you have loved Clinton, and Obama's on the way out, but even if you love him, that we don't have leaders who talk to us in an honest way. | ||
| And that that's part of the problem. | ||
| Like, we're all walking around like, Could somebody—like, I feel like everyone's looking around—could somebody help here? | ||
| Is there anyone we could look to, for a little honesty? | ||
| Well, first of all, I don't think Trump understands the problem better than, let's say, the average citizen. | ||
| He knows how to exploit it, but I don't think he understands it. | ||
| But I agree with you that there is not— No sort of global leader has stepped forward in an articulate, non-condescending way to say, this is what we're going through. | ||
| And here's where I think we need to move. | ||
| It would be great if somebody would do that. | ||
| I'd love for Hillary Clinton to spend an hour just talking into the camera and saying, this is where I think we are, this is why I think we're here, this is where I think we need to go. | ||
| In a very mature, non-alarmist way. | ||
| Are you a Hillary supporter? | ||
| I mean, I think I have the enthusiasm for Hillary that a lot of people have, which is... | ||
| I could just picture the gif right there. | ||
| I said, are you a Hillary supporter? | ||
| Because that's what everyone does. | ||
| No one's like, there's very, very, I know there's a couple, but everyone's supporting Hillary. | ||
| My friends that have been Democrats their whole life and family members. | ||
| Are you supporting Hillary? | ||
| Well, but there's good reason for that. | ||
| It was easy to gin up that enthusiasm for Obama because, as he himself said, he was a blank slate. | ||
| Hillary has a 25, 30-year record, and it's very easy to cherry-pick what you like and cherry-pick what you don't like and say she's a villain, say she's a hero. | ||
| She's a flawed human being, as we all are. | ||
| We know what her flaws are. | ||
| So it's like, you know, it's like getting back together with an old girlfriend or something. | ||
| You're like, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I still love her. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I know she's going to be a pain in the ass, but goddammit, I still love her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's kind of what it's like. | ||
| So is that a little, that's kind of a dangerous thought, though, because Obama came in with the blank slate, and whether you like him or not, the idea that we'd only be okay with blank slate people is sort of... Well, that's the appeal of Trump right now. | ||
| Even though his slate actually is full of stuff, again, whether you like it or not. | ||
| Well, it's full of contradictory stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he, you know, one hand erases what the other hand wrote. | ||
| He can be whatever you want him to be, as long as he's a racist, because that's ultimately what people want from him. | ||
| So what do you make of the people? | ||
| And I get this part. | ||
| Here's my part of Trump that I do actually get. | ||
| Forget all the policies for a second, but I do get the part about... It's easy to forget the policies because they're right. | ||
| All over the place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I've even had his—I've had ardent Trump supporters sit here, like Milo Yiannopoulos, sit here and basically tell me it's not about the policies, it's about this one thing that I'm going to tell you. | ||
| And I at least get this part, which is that this is a cultural election this time. | ||
| It has almost nothing to do with policy, but the one thing that he's getting with people—and I've seen this when I've been to colleges and liberals are coming up to me and saying this—that he's cracking this political correctness thing. | ||
| Now, the irony of that is I don't think he's going to be some major free speech beacon because he talks about suing reporters all the time. | ||
| But I do get the level of people are feeling very repressed right now, like they can't say anything and they're always screamed at and called racist and all that stuff. | ||
| But I don't think you're with me on that? | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| I think when Milo talks about political correctness, That term, political correctness, has come to mean, I think in those circles, nativism, racism, xenophobia, and what have you. | ||
| When you say he's cracked political correctness, what he's cracked is the agreement that we had been coming to as a society, and that agreement was, Diversity is a benefit to the nation, and tolerance is a benefit to the nation, and having different points of view is a benefit to the nation. | ||
| That has all gotten lumped into—that agreement has gotten lumped under political correctness. | ||
| And when he says he's cracked political correctness, what he's—what I think he means is he has—he's attempting to unravel that agreement. | ||
| And what's left is white nationalism and nothing else. | ||
| Because Trump's appeal is not policy-based. | ||
| He has none. | ||
| It's not judgment-based. | ||
| He seems to have no better judgment than anybody else and possibly worse. | ||
| It's not principle-based. | ||
| He has none. | ||
| It's not character-based. | ||
| He has very little to none. | ||
| All he has Is on day one, starting with Mexicans are rapists and whatever else he said, that's what he has. | ||
| And he's built on that from that's been his entire campaign has been divisiveness and hatred geared towards angry white males. | ||
| Yeah, well I love hearing your answer on that because obviously I like Milo and I've given him a platform and we work together and stuff. | ||
| But the whole point of my show is that I want to hear that and I want to hear what you're saying. | ||
| Well, when I've watched your show, I've watched him on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And... | |
| You know, I think he's a disgrace. | ||
| I think he's an utter disgrace. | ||
| I have a feeling you're going to hear from him on Twitter. | ||
| I very well might. | ||
| But he's not verified, so... I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| So at least it starts there for you. | ||
| And it feels very calculated, and it feels very Machiavellian to me, and it feels very put on, and it... And he is allowing himself to be used, I think, as a... | ||
| A tool by the intolerant right and the fact that he's gay, for example, makes it all the more appalling to me because he's giving them moral license to say, well, we like this guy, you know, we like this crazy Brit, this crazy flaming Brit or whatever, and that is I think an unconscionable use of moral licensing and that he's allowing himself to be used in that way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And promoting himself in that way. | ||
| Moral licensing. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Did you just come up with that right there? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's something. | ||
| Somebody said that before. | ||
| I learned it from Malcolm Gladwell. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So, moral licensing. | ||
| So, I guess part of this is that our system is just so broke. | ||
| That anyone that had a moral license or a moral compass, would you ever want to run for president? | ||
| I mean, could you imagine as a smart person ever wanting to put yourself into politics at all? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So is that the bigger problem here? | ||
| We're just getting what we've created, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you have any If you've lived any kind of life—Hemingway, for example, | ||
| Kerouac, whoever—those guys could not run for office. | ||
| Anybody who's lived a life that has any human experience— Right. | ||
| So meaning you might have cheated on your wife. | ||
| You might have snorted some coke. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You might have done any number of things that make us human, make us flawed human beings. | ||
| You know that stuff's going to come up. | ||
| You know you're going to be vilified. | ||
| You know. | ||
| So if you're thinking about running for office, somebody like Ted Cruz, for example, who's been thinking about being president his entire fucking life, he's lived his life in such a way to make his resume The resume of a future president, or at the very least a senator. | ||
| You're not exaggerating by the way, there's video of him at like 16 saying I'm running for president. | ||
| In Princeton saying I'm going to be president. | ||
| And so you live your life in a way that is calculatedly unrelatable to the rest of the nation. | ||
| You know, someone like Bill Clinton, who I think probably was running for president his whole life too, At least he wears his humanity on his sleeve. | ||
| He's like, you know, I'm just a big goober. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's part of his appeal. | ||
| But I can't imagine subjecting myself to the kind of public scrutiny that is required, knowing that there's people whose job is to dig up shit on you, just about your personal life. | ||
| That has nothing to do with your ability to make good policy decisions. | ||
| Yeah, what does it tell you that when a show, what's the show with Kevin Spacey, it's Ben Blankenship? | ||
| House of Cards. | ||
| When House of Cards, I watch House of Cards, and I think, wow, there's a lot more reality in that than anything that I'm watching on CNN. | ||
| Meanwhile, all the CNN people are pretending to be themselves. | ||
| I hate that, by the way. | ||
| Do you like that? | ||
| Oh, no, it bugs me. | ||
| Yeah, it bugs me. | ||
| It drives me fucking crazy. | ||
| What movie was I watching just this past couple days ago? | ||
| I was watching one of the, just some, you know, superhero movie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's like... Jake Tapper shows up. | ||
| Oh, it was Jake, who I like. | ||
| I think it was Jake, who I like. | ||
| What movie was it? | ||
| Superhero movie. | ||
| Oh, Batman. | ||
| Batman Superman. | ||
| I don't know if it was Jake, actually. | ||
| Oh, it was Anderson Cooper in that one. | ||
| I was like, you guys are all pretending to be yourselves. | ||
| Why can't we have alternate universes where there are also, we can have kryptonite, but we can't have alternate newscasters? | ||
| If you're going to be a journalist, be a journalist. | ||
| Don't show up in Batman. | ||
| Right, but doesn't that show, it's like, they all want to be stars, too. | ||
| And I say this, it's probably with some due irony, two people that are public people and share our opinions, but it's like, they all want to be in, right? | ||
| They go to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, they all want to have dinner with these people and go to the parties and all that. | ||
| That's, to me, one of the biggest problems we have in the whole country. | ||
| Well, the political star-fucking, I guess I don't really have a problem with it. | ||
| It doesn't upset me maybe the way that it upsets you, because I do feel like in any profession, most people in any given profession are trying to do a good job. | ||
| Like, when I see Anderson Cooper reporting on something, I feel like most of the time he's doing a pretty good job, you know? | ||
| I think he's pretty good. | ||
| Chuck Todd, who I think can be a little supercilious, but I think he's trying to do a good job. | ||
| And I think he's doing—I think he approaches things the way he approaches them for a very specific reason. | ||
| It's thought. | ||
| It's thought. | ||
| It's thought out. | ||
| Jake Tapper, the same way. | ||
| And, you know, these guys will land punches. | ||
| That kind of meshing of politicos and journalists doesn't really upset me because | ||
| it seems like well if you're a journalist you want to have relationships with these people to get information | ||
| Yeah, I guess for me the bigger problem is that if you ask easy questions and look I'm an interviewer | ||
| So if you ask easy questions, you're gonna get them to come back | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So if I had Obama here one time and I knew this is the one time that maybe will set up the rest of our relationship | ||
| I don't think I would attack him in a way that I might the second time | ||
| But even that because that causes a problem because then they always go at a press conference | ||
| They're always like oh guy who I know I get easy questions from you know, right, but there's a way to | ||
| Have that conversation [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| Have a tough conversation with him or with anybody in a way that he doesn't feel attacked. | ||
| I think most politicians are receptive to being asked. | ||
| tough questions in a respectful way. I thought Jon Stewart was a master at that. Jon Stewart would | ||
| have any conservative on his show, he would read their book and he would grill them about it. | ||
| But it was always respectful. And I think as a consequence, they would come on the show because | ||
| they knew they would get a fair hearing for their ideas. | ||
| And they may end up, they may walk out feeling foolish, but it's not because of him, it's because | ||
| of them. | ||
| What do we do, do you think, to make people smarter again? | ||
| I keep saying that being smart is now counter-culture. | ||
| Culture is dumb right now. | ||
| And when I meet smart people, I'm like, thank God. | ||
| Culture is gleefully dumb. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| As a culture, we're probably smarter than we've ever been. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| There's this attitude that Book learning is somehow anti-American. | ||
| Knowledge is suspect. | ||
| Science is political. | ||
| It's very much an up-is-down, down-is-up kind of world. | ||
| But I still think that's a... | ||
| That's a minority of the country that really believes that. | ||
| Yeah, I firmly believe it's a minority, but it's the minority that we keep hearing from. | ||
| I mean, that's what I keep saying. | ||
| On the political side, it's like we hear from the crazies on the left and we hear from the | ||
| crazies on the right. | ||
| And I would argue that most people, I think really 80% of us, actually want pretty decent | ||
| things and pretty similar things. | ||
| I think if you're just a regular conservative, you don't want a world that's very different | ||
| from what the average liberal really wants. | ||
| You might have a couple of policies. | ||
| So how do we get those voices to be heard again? | ||
| Well, for one thing, I think it's important for the larger… [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| national dialogue to state what you just stated, which is true. | ||
| And I would say it's even larger than 80%. | ||
| We all essentially want the same things. | ||
| We want safe communities. | ||
| We want opportunities for our kids. | ||
| We want the ability to make a little money and feel like if we, to use the tritest political | ||
| expression, work hard and play by the rules, we'll get ahead. | ||
| That's basically all people want. | ||
| On both sides. | ||
| So if conservatives can agree with that statement and liberals can agree with that statement, you go, fine. | ||
| We know where we're going. | ||
| It's really just a question of tactics on how we get there. | ||
| That's where we disagree. | ||
| But as long as we keep in mind that the goal is the same, I think we can work together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we become so—and this is largely a result of the entertainment aspect of journalism. | ||
| We've become so polarized because that's what drives eyeballs to television screens, | ||
| is people yelling at each other as opposed to people having comedy and being like, "Oh | ||
| yeah, we agree. | ||
| We basically agree." | ||
| Flip. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the irony is people want that. | ||
| I know they want it because they're messaging me every day saying that what I'm doing here | ||
| is what they want to see. | ||
| You get it. | ||
| You're important. | ||
| We get it. | ||
| You're doing God's work. | ||
| We get it, Dave. | ||
| Listen, if a hundred other people were doing this, I would gladly find something else to do. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I really would. | ||
| And that would show a good sign that some smarter things have occurred here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wrote a book a few years ago with my friend Meghan McCain. | ||
| I wanted to ask you about that, yeah. | ||
| And that was essentially the central thesis of the book, which is we all kind of want the same things. | ||
| We differ on the margins maybe a bit about guns, for example, but even then we don't because conservatives and liberals both want gun deaths to fall. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just a question of how we get there. | ||
| There's a certain disingenuousness, I think, on the part of the right about how we get there. | ||
| In fact, entirely disingenuous. | ||
| But just from a purely philosophical point of view, both sides would like to reduce gun debts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So then it's just, how do we get there? | ||
| So when you wrote that book, and that's actually when I had you on my SiriusXM show many lifetimes ago, when you wrote that, and I think I had Megan on maybe the next week or something, what made you think, like, oh, I should talk to her, because she's obviously, she's in it, her dad's a pretty powerful guy who ran for president, and, you know, but she's on the right, and I, do you consider, I mean, do you consider yourself on the left? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Or do you just, yeah. | ||
| So what made you think that, like, this is the- I triple parentheses. | ||
| I'm all in. | ||
| You got a couple more parentheses. | ||
| I'm all in. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What made you think, like, let me talk to her and let's do this? | ||
| Oh, well, that was the reason. | ||
| 'Cause it was ahead of it, yeah. | ||
| That was the reason. | ||
| It was, she's somebody who I should have very little in common with. | ||
| Let's go on the road together and write a book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And see if we can sort of bring these issues to light a little bit. | ||
| And we did. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| And we wrote a good book, and nobody bought it. | ||
| 'Cause nobody wants to hear that we're more similar than dissimilar. | ||
| Yeah, that's such a dangerous, that's the thing I want to unpack with this | ||
| more than anything else. | ||
| Is like, we've got to get past it. | ||
| And it's, you know, I turn on CNN, and it's like, people think they're watching news, | ||
| and they're not watching news. | ||
| They are literally watching Wolf Blitzer debate between a Trump spokesman and a Hillary spokesman, and people think that that's news. | ||
| Meanwhile, Brexit happens, and we don't even, we literally, I watched CNN almost a full day just trying to see, like, what are they gonna show us? | ||
| It was on in the background. | ||
| I didn't have the audio on the whole time. | ||
| But like, there was nothing. | ||
| There was, you know, like, one 30-second thing every four hours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it's like, our media is just making us dumb, too. | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| I think there's a certain percentage of the population that will look at the coverage of Brexit and be curious enough to want to understand more what that means. | ||
| And there's a much larger percentage of the population that understands the headline of what Brexit is and doesn't need to pursue that any further. | ||
| And then there's a certain amount of the population who doesn't give a shit. | ||
| But, I mean, hasn't that always been the way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's always been the case that, you know, I don't, if anything, I feel like we're more engaged as a nation than we've ever been, almost because we can't help but be. | ||
| And I think that's good and bad. | ||
| I think what's going on in the country right now, there's absolutely a Pollyanna-ish way of looking at it and saying this is actually quite good what's happening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That there is, I mean, aside from people just being gunned down in the streets, which isn't great, So you're saying that the issues that are being earthed up are good. | ||
| The issues that are being dredged up are necessary issues. | ||
| And they're being brought to the fore by two imperfect messengers. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| So as we're taping this right now, Black Lives Matter is in, like, the throes of—there's a lot of stuff going on, I mean, between the shootings of the black people that has obviously been going on for quite some time, but these last few in particular, and now the protests against it, and then the cop shootings and everything else. | ||
| Where do you kind of fall on all of this stuff? | ||
| Because I find it very hard, and even as I'm prefacing this, I know that no matter what we say right now, a certain amount of people are going to hate it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Even if they agree with us on 99%, if we say one word the wrong way, people will start freaking. | ||
| So I haven't talked about it that much because I find it's very hard to decipher what's actually happening by watching little clips of things. | ||
| There's a few things we know that are happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's start with the Black Lives Matter side of it. | ||
| And incidentally, I don't think these are two opposing sides, but just separating them out. | ||
| We know that black people are being killed by police. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| We've known it for years. | ||
| We've known it for generations. | ||
| We've known it for centuries. | ||
| Black people get killed. | ||
| What changed is obviously The ability to livestream those deaths as they're occurring. | ||
| It has changed the dialogue. | ||
| It's very hard for white people to now say—or to live in any kind of denial about that now, when you see the evidence presented in front of you. | ||
| And there's a lot of white people trying very hard to maintain that denial. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think most of us look at that and go, oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| What you were saying for the last 300 years, I guess that's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The blatant denial people are the ones that drive me nuts. | ||
| Because you could say that, we can get to the other part of this too, you can say there's some legitimate issues there, but it's the people that no matter what happens, no matter what evidence they're shown, they immediately go to that. | ||
| Well, it goes to character assassination immediately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Somebody had, you know, weed in the car or whatever. | ||
| Well, they deserve to get shot. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| No, they didn't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's that side of it. | ||
| And then the other side is that violence gets redirected towards police, and I haven't heard anybody defend that in any way, shape, or form other than A couple crazy people on Twitter just being idiots. | ||
| The two ideas are not opposed. | ||
| We shouldn't be killing people. | ||
| Let's just start with that central premise. | ||
| People are dying unnecessarily. | ||
| And I believe that there is an incredibly entrenched There's no polite word for it. | ||
| Racist culture in police culture. | ||
| I've seen enough evidence and read enough accounts and spent enough time looking at it and into it to suggest that that is a problem. | ||
| A real problem. | ||
| A genuine problem. | ||
| Probably a plethora of historical and cultural reasons. | ||
| So something's broken with policing. | ||
| And I think always has been. | ||
| But now we're just seeing it. | ||
| That needs to change. | ||
| The idea that The police force we've come to think of more and more as a militarized force, as an extension of the military. | ||
| That has to change. | ||
| It's weird, sorry to cut you off, but it's weird that people don't see that. | ||
| That piece of it, where when we have these tanks out there, or not tanks, but these armored vehicles on our streets. | ||
| It happened very gradually. | ||
| Yeah, and that doesn't feel like, if you were just looking at it, removing the specifics. | ||
| We've armored tanks on our streets. | ||
| Forget why they're there, but that in and of itself, this seems like a problem. | ||
| It's alarming. | ||
| Like, you should have to call the National Guard. | ||
| If you need a tank, pick up the phone, call Gomer Pyle, have him bring the tank. | ||
| There's no reason the police forces need them, but what it does is it inculcates an us-versus-them mentality, both from the police's point of view and from the community's point of view. | ||
| And the idea of community policing is lost. | ||
| The idea of to protect and serve is lost because it's become a—these police precincts, I think in many communities, have come to feel like occupying forces, as opposed to extensions of the community. | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
| routinely recruit from the military, I think is a problem. | ||
| There's no real linkage between those two organizations. | ||
| The police are paramilitary to a certain extent. | ||
| But the local police force, in my mind, should be essentially liaisons from the law, | ||
| law enforcement, to the community. | ||
| And it should be a partnership. | ||
| It should be a two-way street. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So an army is dealing with enemy combatants, but that's not the way that police obviously should be there. | ||
| By definition, an army is dealing with an opposing force. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you recruit from the military to fill out your police ranks, I have a hard time believing that they're not going to bring that mentality to policing, and it infects the entire culture. | ||
| And it's been that way now for, I think, decades. | ||
| So what do you make of—because one of the things that I've struggled with is when I see the protests and they're in the middle of the street where they're not supposed to be, on highways and things, And, you know, when they've been burning cars or whatever it is or looting sorts of things. | ||
| Look, those things are not legal. | ||
| You're allowed to protest, but you can't shut down highways and all that stuff. | ||
| And usually the cop, usually, not always, of course, but usually you see the cops basically trying to keep law and order. | ||
| So it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy here, right? | ||
| Because you create something, you do something illegal. | ||
| Even if the intentions are good, your motives are good, but you shut down a highway, which you can't do. | ||
| Now the cops have to do something, and now you've created this stalemate here, and now of course everyone's got cameras in everybody's face, and they're just waiting for the pin drop to set the whole thing off. | ||
| So how do we unfurl some of that? | ||
| You've given two different examples that I think are not quite the same. | ||
| To me, there's a big difference between sitting down in the middle of a highway and burning a car and looting a store. | ||
| Sure, but both are illegal. | ||
| Both are illegal, but one is causing Property damage and destruction, and is essentially a violent act, versus the non-violent protest of sitting down in the middle of a highway. | ||
| It is illegal. | ||
| Right, but you could be stopping ambulances that need to get places and all kinds of other stuff. | ||
| But you could also do those sit-downs in a park. | ||
| You can. | ||
| But you don't get the fanfare. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And protest is about spectacle. | ||
| That is its point. | ||
| I may be annoyed at the people sitting in the middle of the highway, but I don't have the same reaction to that as I do to people being destructive in their community. | ||
| And I think sitting down in the highway is a perfectly viable non-violent demonstration. | ||
| Where I think Black Lives Matter is falling short, And I was reading this commentator on Twitter, Oliver Willis, who was talking about this all night. | ||
| Without a directed legislative agenda, it's so much smoke. | ||
| But there's no—it can't catch fire. | ||
| There's no substance there. | ||
| And I think that's true. | ||
| I think, at this point, the black lives matter. | ||
| Because it's not really, it's not an organization. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's whoever wants Black Lives Matter can claim it. | ||
| You can claim yourself to be a member of Black Lives Matter, and you are. | ||
| But it needs more directed leadership. | ||
| It needs to have some stated legislative and policy goals. | ||
| Otherwise, all you're doing is you're raising awareness for something that people already know exists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is the inherent problem with that, though, that they feel the system has failed them? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Are they true or not? | ||
| So their goal is to make waves, not necessarily—like, they're trying to change the system in a way that the system doesn't want to change. | ||
| Like, that's where this thing's at loggerheads, right? | ||
| Yeah, but the only— Like, if a guy came out and said, I have this legislation that's going to do this and this and this, it's almost like, well, the protesters wouldn't be down with that. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| Again, it's the blank slate theory. | ||
| It's easy to say, I project all my hopes onto X, X candidate, X political movement. | ||
| It's much harder to go to then take the next step to Y and Z and saying, well, here are some legislative Yeah. | ||
| Wouldn't it be fun to talk about some of this stuff with some level of comedy involved? | ||
| But I getcha. | ||
| I getcha. | ||
| I warned you in an email. | ||
| I'm like, prepare for me not to be funny. | ||
| I'm not going to be funny. | ||
| And I said I wanted one applause break. | ||
| We don't even have a studio audience, but I was hoping for one minor applause break there. | ||
| I don't know how to talk about this stuff in a funny way. | ||
| I mean, I just find it interesting. | ||
| I mean, I'm just some dude who reads the newspaper and is just interested in it and doesn't pretend to know how to make it funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are there any comics right now that you really think are hitting this out of the park? | ||
| Just sort of the general cultural or political stuff? | ||
| John Oliver, Samantha Bee, you know, the people who came from The Daily Show I think are Still doing the best work in that arena? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We need Jon back, right? | ||
| I had some issues with him, but I think we need him back. | ||
| Yeah, well, he was the best. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think he is coming back, right? | ||
| He's got some HBO... He's gonna do, like, little snippets on HBO or something. | ||
| But, I mean, sort of that nightly long form... It would be great. | ||
| It really would be. | ||
| Yeah, so let's shift to movies and comedy and TV, but we can probably circle it back to some horrific societal stuff and end-of-civilization stuff. | ||
| But in case society ends, I want you to at least be able to share your thoughts on some of the movies you've made and some of the other stuff. | ||
| I'd rather talk about wonky shit. | ||
| All right, well, you know what? | ||
| Five minutes of it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I was gonna go for 12 to 15. | ||
| We'll do five minutes of it, and then we'll finish back with all this stuff. | ||
| So first off, I was telling you right before we sat down that you were in Wet Hot American Summer, which I hadn't seen until about a year ago, even though I went to one of those camps. | ||
| I went to Camp Shanawanda up in Pennsylvania, and I thought it was one of the most absolutely hilarious movies I've ever seen. | ||
| I watched the series on Netflix, which now you just told me you're writing for season two, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Which is pretty great. | ||
| But you didn't write for season one. | ||
| I did not write for season one. | ||
| I did not write the movie. | ||
| Yeah, is that hard for you in a movie like that where there's so many of your friends obviously writing and you didn't get to write but you have to just act it? | ||
| Is that harder than if you're writing for it and acting in it? | ||
| No, I mean, I've been friends with all of those guys essentially my entire adult life, so it's as if I wrote it. | ||
| You know, we share a sensibility. | ||
| It was just fun. | ||
| And it's not like they were so precious with the words that you couldn't... So they let you kind of do your thing? | ||
| I would imagine you guys are having a great time, because it's such a great... Oh yeah, it's really fun. | ||
| And now, I mean, I'm nervous writing for it, because I feel like I have something to live up to as a writer, which I didn't have just showing up on set. | ||
| So I'm conscious of not fucking up something that I think is really funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Alright, so we're going to pack all the comedy stuff in real quick. | ||
| So you're working on like 87 other things. | ||
| You're on Gaffigan. | ||
| You're doing something that I just saw billboard. | ||
| Another period? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So that's, I haven't seen it, but it's like a take off Downton Abbey? | ||
| It's Downton Abbey. | ||
| It's as if Well, they pitched it to me as the Kardashians meets Downton Abbey, and that's essentially what it is. | ||
| And it's really funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So what channel is it on? | ||
| Comedy Central. | ||
| I should know that. | ||
| I should have known that. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| We've ruined the whole interview. | ||
| It doesn't matter to me. | ||
| I'm not here to plug shit. | ||
| You're not plugging. | ||
| You're not plugging. | ||
| You said, well, let's talk about the real stuff. | ||
| That's all I want to talk about. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's circle back to the real stuff. | ||
| I mean, I've got other shows out, too. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| I'm on a lot of shows. | ||
| What's your favorite thing, out of all the things you've done? | ||
| So, I always associate you with the I Love the 80s stuff, which probably—does that cause you to roll your eyes, kind of like it was? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| But you were like—it was almost as if that whole genre of stuff, which, you know, they did a zillion shows after that at Best Week Ever, and I Love the 70s, I Love the 90s, I Love the 20s, or whatever else. | ||
| And now every channel has those shows, too. | ||
| But you were sort of the one that, like, got it. Did you kind of real, like, you figured out what | ||
| that thing was, that commentary thing was. I think in a way that some of the other people maybe | ||
| didn't get. | ||
| Well, when it first started, it was much more sincere. | ||
| It was much more like Soleil Moonfry going, do you remember Wacky Wall Crawlers? | ||
| Oh, I miss Wacky Wall Crawlers! | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that was never my approach to it. | ||
| My approach was just, just make jokes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I feel totally comfortable shitting on your childhood right now. | ||
| And that, yeah, they eventually The tone of it shifted more towards that than the, can you remember, Wacky Wall Crawlers tone. | ||
| Yeah, speaking of the 80s, does Sega Genesis do anything for you? | ||
| No. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| No. | ||
| Sega Genesis? | ||
| After my time. | ||
| So you're 8-bit Nintendo or ColecoVision? | ||
| ColecoVision, Intellivision, Atari 2600. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So even 8-bit Nintendo? | ||
| We only have five years apart. | ||
| Technology changes, man. | ||
| It moves very fast. | ||
| I had graduated from video games by the time the Sega Genesis came out. | ||
| Yeah, so I remember once I auditioned, or I shot a Best Week Ever once. | ||
| One of the jokes I did, it was right when Current TV came out, which was Al Gore's television thing, and my joke was something to this effect. | ||
| I was like, oh, you know, Al Gore has a new TV channel called Current TV. | ||
| Can you imagine if George W. Bush did, oh yeah, Fox News? | ||
| Not the most brilliant thing ever, but I thought pretty solid. | ||
| That's a solid joke, right? | ||
| And I remember the producer kind of looked at me from the side like, we're not going to be doing that sort of thing around here. | ||
| And I don't think they aired it. | ||
| That was too political for that? | ||
| That was, like, too political for that. | ||
| That's pretty mild. | ||
| Extremely mild. | ||
| But, you know, we live in corporate culture where everyone's afraid to offend everybody. | ||
| How do you deal with that stuff? | ||
| Now we can circle back to that. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Have you ever said—oh, no, you've gotten into some heat, right, for some tweets? | ||
| I've said shit on Twitter that gets people upset. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm not just talking about the Nazis. | ||
| I mean, like a whiter. | ||
| Whiter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, never really like widespread condemnation. | ||
| It's always coming from the Michelle Malkin crowd, who never... She called me whiter than toilet paper once or something like that. | ||
| She said, this guy's whiter than old toilet paper. | ||
| Well, not according to the alt-right, you're not. | ||
| You're not even white, my friend. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Big Jew. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Not even white. | ||
| I am not particularly self-censorious, is that the word? | ||
| Yeah, but do you think about it ever? | ||
| Because I do sometimes think, man, like there'll be something that I want to say, like really, and even just, I'll be like, I gotta change this one word. | ||
| Not because it's really what I mean is any different, but because the mass. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with making sure that what you're trying to say Is being heard in the way you want to say it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, when I've gotten in trouble on Twitter, it's generally because I've been too hasty in terms of how I say something, not really about what I'm saying. | ||
| I have no problem with there being consequences for people saying stupid shit. | ||
| The First Amendment allows you to say whatever you want, but it doesn't protect you from the consequences of your speech. | ||
| It's just the government can't come in. | ||
| So you can use your speech, and then other people can use their speech to counter your speech. | ||
| It's actually a beautiful thing, right? | ||
| It's a beautiful thing. | ||
| And if I want to be a total asshole on Twitter and say racist, horrible shit, I can do that. | ||
| You know, my employer might get upset with me, and I have to understand that going in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So there's free speech, but consequences. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| There's always been consequences to free speech. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think the concept of free speech is widely misunderstood in this country. | ||
| People think they should be able to sort of excrete whatever diarrhea they want from their mouth, and they absolutely can. | ||
| But if somebody comes along and is like, I'm going to wash your mouth out with soap, you've got to be prepared to deal with that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not punch you while I'm washing your mouth out, but they can use their speech. | ||
| I'm not going to throw you in jail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's funny, when I went to UCLA, as I mentioned before with Milo, and we just did one of these, which we've done many times before. | ||
| And there were all these protesters, and first they were blocking people from coming in, | ||
| which you can't do that. | ||
| You got to—you can protest, of course, but use your—do a counter rally the next day, | ||
| scream all you want, all that stuff. | ||
| But you can't throw garbage cans. | ||
| And they were getting in cops' faces. | ||
| I mean, really, there were people with phones right in cops' faces just begging to, like, | ||
| set them off, which goes to the whole other thing we discussed. | ||
| But at one point, one of the protesters came in and started screaming in the middle of | ||
| it. | ||
| And she said, "Look, I bet you that if you ask Milo a question right now, a direct question"—so | ||
| we were going to do this at the Q&A—"but if you ask him something right now, he'll | ||
| answer it." | ||
| And she just screamed, "I hate you! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hate you!" | |
| And I was like, that's the problem here. | ||
| That's my problem with what's happening on the left. | ||
| It was like, I opened the door for you to make a point. | ||
| Let's have that exchange of ideas. | ||
| But all she could come up with was that. | ||
| And it was like, that was your chance to say, no, you are a whatever you want to call him. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You don't like Muslim people. | ||
| You don't like that. | ||
| But whatever you want to do, like, this is it. | ||
| I'm giving you a chance. | ||
| There's a lot of cameras here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're in front of 500 people and that's what you came up with. | ||
| And that's my problem with a lot of what's going on on the colleges. | ||
| It's like these people don't even know what they're protesting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They just hear something that they kind of don't like and then they freak out and they want safe spaces and trigger warnings and all this other nonsense. | ||
| Well, I am, uh, as somebody who traffics in free speech for a living, I am cognizant of The concern on campus is that free speech is being shut down. | ||
| And, of course, I oppose that. | ||
| I oppose inviting somebody to campus and then, because some group has an issue with that person, disinviting them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A college campus, of all places, should be a place where every point of view is heard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No problem with protesting. | ||
| Those people, but as you said, protest in a respectful way, or protest in a way that is lawful. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You don't have to do it respectfully. | ||
| You can be loud and upset and angry. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But I agree with you. | ||
| I don't think you can block the entry. | ||
| Well, you can. | ||
| I mean, you're just going to get arrested. | ||
| That's on you. | ||
| But I do think The college campus thing has gotten—from what I read—I mean, I don't know, because I'm not experiencing it, but it feels like it's gotten very intolerant. | ||
| And that's a problem. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
| And the danger is that these are our future leaders. | ||
| I mean, that's what I'm concerned about. | ||
| The thing is, I don't think it's a problem, ultimately. | ||
| I think it's a problem in the sense that—I think it speaks to a larger problem. | ||
| But I do think people will leave those institutions and take their place in society, and it will | ||
| I'm not concerned about it long-term, particularly. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I mean, you don't think, like, that just a generation of these people who have been sort of coddled into this safe space thing, that they're gonna be the 20-year-olds that are 25 and 30 and 40? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That eventually they'll have been so used to never hearing anything that they didn't like, or everything that they don't like is hate speech, in their eyes, that they've diminished the ability to do this. | ||
| That's my concern. | ||
| I think it's a legitimate concern. | ||
| I've seen no evidence to this point that it's going to be a problem down the road. | ||
| Maybe it will be, maybe it won't be. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not that concerned about it, only because I feel like My basic philosophy in parenting and in life is the kids are alright. | ||
| They're going to be fine. | ||
| Did you steal that from a movie? | ||
| I did not! | ||
| You were thinking that before the movie? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| The kids are alright. | ||
| They'll be fine. | ||
| It'll all work itself out. | ||
| The larger point is this idea that victimization is empowerment. | ||
| That you, by claiming victim status, are thereby empowered and thereby take the moral high ground in whatever you do by claiming victim status. | ||
| That's problematic to me. | ||
| So what do we do about that? | ||
| Because that gets to the heart of all of this thing. | ||
| Everyone's trying to figure out how they're a victim so that they can somehow be a little more moral than everyone beneath them. | ||
| With very few exceptions, a lot of people can make a claim. | ||
| You know, their claims are not without merit. | ||
| Whether you're black, Hispanic, Muslim, female, gay, whatever it is you are, you can make an argument. | ||
| Like, you have faced some problems, and you have to deal with them. | ||
| And there's nothing wrong, I think, in asserting and stating your case and saying, this is where I feel like society is coming short and dealing with us. | ||
| But there's no, as you're saying, there's no, there's no positive Movement beyond that. | ||
| Once you've identified your grievances, you can't wallow in them. | ||
| Because the world isn't going to give you anything, and I don't think the world should give you anything. | ||
| We should all be treated equally. | ||
| The playing field has to be equal, and maybe the playing field isn't equal. | ||
| Well, that's I think the larger issue, that the playing field isn't equal. | ||
| And so, what's so funny about Trump is he's elevated the white male to victim status. | ||
| He's somehow made white men into victims. | ||
| You know, that's the final frontier of hilarity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's funny to me, too, because if I make fun of Hillary, which I do all the time, they | ||
| love it and it gets a zillion retweets. | ||
| And if I make fun of Bernie, of course they love it. | ||
| If I make fun of anyone, and the whole time they're telling me how much they love free | ||
| speech. | ||
| And again, I say this as I understand that free speech element to this thing. | ||
| But then every time, I mean, I make a Trump-boom-boom. | ||
| "You, you see, you don't get it yet!" | ||
| And then look, they can use their free speech to counter me. | ||
| But I always think it's like, I just want them to understand | ||
| like a little bit of the irony here. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like guys, I'm literally, like I'm not like, kill the guy. | ||
| I'm like, he's orange. | ||
| It's hard when your guy's being attacked, you know, in an election season. | ||
| You know, even as somebody who's not like an ardent Hillary supporter, when I hear getting attacked, | ||
| like my hackles go up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I have to check myself. | ||
| I'm like, why? | ||
| Why do you care? | ||
| That's funny because I've had, I don't really like Hillary and I don't like Trump and I don't know what, I may vote for Gary Johnson, I'm still not sure, I'll say something in a couple weeks I guess, but like, I've defended Hillary at times because I think the attacks from a lot of the Bernie people were totally unfair, like making it sound like she's truly this warmongering neocon, it's like she's not calling for war against anyone, you know what I mean? | ||
| I know she's made some bad choices, but Obama was the president for a lot of those bad choices, | ||
| too, like, you know, Libya and whatever else and a lot of the Syria stuff. | ||
| But it's like, every time I defend her, then people say, "Ah, you're a Hillary supporter," | ||
| and then I make a bad joke about Trump, and then they say, "You hate me." | ||
| Like, it's like, it's just, it's a lot of noise at the end of the day. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the world you're trafficking in right now. | ||
| Yeah, the noise world? | ||
| The noise, the world of the voters. | ||
| Where's the quiet world? | ||
| Come to my house in Connecticut. | ||
| Very quiet. - Yeah, all right. | ||
| You are from Connecticut. | ||
| Very quiet. | ||
| But the problem is, though, that you're a heterosexual white man, and I feel like being around that privilege wouldn't be that great for me. | ||
| For you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Gay-married, dude, so technically a little better than you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you know what? | |
| We're... We like a little... | ||
| A little diversity up in Connecticut. | ||
| You like a little, what do you get? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Yeah, you're not in, what's the really, Greenwich, are you? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, no diversity over there. | ||
| I used to, when I was doing stand-up, I would do catering gigs a lot in Connecticut. | ||
| There was not a, I mean, it was the whitest thing. | ||
| There was colors of white that I had never seen before. | ||
| That's how white it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not that there's anything wrong with that. | ||
| Where I am is pretty white, and it's embarrassing. | ||
| To the point where every Sunday there's concerts on the green in my little town. | ||
| You know, the few black families that live in town, you know, you just, you just stare at them like this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the most patronizing way, like, I love you. | |
| I love you. | ||
| White guilt is something. | ||
| Oh, it's the worst. | ||
| It's the worst. | ||
| I, I, there, there are, there are times where I feel like I could die from white guilt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Uh, I was on a cruise ship and the wait staff at this dinner, I don't know, they're from all over the world. | ||
| And at one point, One of the evenings, they had to perform a song and dance for us, the waitstaff. | ||
| And it was unbearable to me. | ||
| I honestly felt like if I could die from white guilt right now. | ||
| Oh, because you were all white patrons mostly on the cruise. | ||
| We're all rich whiteys staring at these people from Bangladesh going, thank you for coming to the dinner tonight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We hope you like your chicken or whatever they were singing. | ||
| And you're just like, oh my God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are the songs about the food? | ||
| No, the first songs were not about the food. | ||
| But that would have been, that would be pretty good. | ||
| It was like a subtext of the songs. | ||
| Like you're eating the stuff we don't eat. | ||
| You know, that would be kind of. | ||
| All they give us is lentils. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We hope you like the meat. | |
| I'm glad we ended this thing on a funny note. | ||
| So you see what we did there. We went serious, then we went... | ||
| I think there was something funny about 15 minutes ago? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I thought there was one moment of humor about 15 minutes ago? | ||
| Just don't introduce me as comedian Michael Ian Black. | ||
| Just citizen Michael Ian Black. | ||
| American citizen. | ||
| How about depressed, dark? | ||
| I'm not depressed. | ||
| No, but I'm trying to give you a little cred. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because if you're depressed or if you had a limp or something, that way next time you come on I'll say, this guy's depressed. | ||
| He's limping. | ||
| You know what, next time I'll tell them that he couldn't fly first class. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I did fly first class coming out here. | ||
| On JetBlue. | ||
| On JetBlue again. | ||
| It has good seats. | ||
| It's real nice. | ||
| It seems like extra. | ||
| Like you don't even need all that space. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh no. | |
| Well you know what it's for? | ||
| It's for halfway through the flight they come and jerk you off. | ||
| Meanwhile, I'm doing it myself back in coach, like some kind of schmuck. | ||
| And on that note, I want to thank Michael Ian Black. | ||
| You can follow him on Twitter, and if you want to send him any Nazi memes or anything like that, he might retweet you or comment on it. | ||
| I think that's possible. | ||
| Or check out MichaelIanBlack.com and the thousand shows that he has in production at the moment. |
Export Selection