Feb. 17, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:04:10
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unidentified
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[theme music] | |
| It may sound strange, but as a liberal, I really do believe in American exceptionalism. | ||
| Due to our democratic ideals and personal freedoms, America is a unique and special country in the world. | ||
| You may remember back in 2009 when President Obama said he didn't really believe in American exceptionalism, saying quote, I believe in American exceptionalism just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. | ||
| In and of itself, there's nothing wrong with Obama's general idea here in which each individual country is filled with proud people who believe that their country is unique and special in the world. | ||
| Actually, if this idea fuels people to build a better society that they can be genuinely proud of, then fantastic. | ||
| Of course, by the same token, this nationalism could also push otherwise good people to believe that they should have inordinate sway over the world or influence other nations because they're morally superior. | ||
| Over the eight years of Obama's presidency, he walked back this statement and did actually say that America's exceptionalism was unique. | ||
| For me, there's an additional reason for American exceptionalism which goes beyond just our democratic ideals and our personal freedoms. | ||
| Obviously, we aren't the only country in the world to share in those ideas. | ||
| It's also the additional piece that America is a country of immigrants, a country of people from all over the world who came here to make a better life for themselves. | ||
| We are a nation built by people whose ancestors often came here with nothing and who worked hard to build a better country and life for their children and their children's children. | ||
| While we certainly aren't the only country to welcome immigrants or to build a solid middle class, there's no other nation on earth that more people from more countries have come to live and prosper because of the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| This doesn't mean that everyone can come here and we can have open borders, but it does mean that if you come here legally, you'll be given the same chance as a natural born citizen. | ||
| Even today, as we live in a politically fractured society, and many people will tell you that things have never been worse, the truth is that things have never been better. | ||
| Of course, I don't mean that for every specific person, or every specific job, or every specific industry. | ||
| Times change, and so do people and economies. | ||
| But as a whole, America has done an incredible job of welcoming so many diverse people, having us all share in the American Dream while at the same time All being able to keep traditions and practices from our unique cultures. | ||
| As our economy changes over the next few years, we the people have a massive job of changing along with it. | ||
| In an age where supermarkets will be automated and driverless cars will replace truck drivers, it will be more important than ever for us to change along with the technology. | ||
| The world doesn't stop for anyone or owe you anything. | ||
| You have to adapt to a changing world. | ||
| And in these moments of change, that's usually where America has been at its best. | ||
| Our system, built on the idea that it's your job to pursue your happiness, is the reason that more people still want to come to America right now than any other country on Earth. | ||
| I always find it ironic that so many people who rant and rave about how evil America is are the same people who demand that we let anyone in here. | ||
| Why would anyone want to come to such an evil, unfair and oppressive society? | ||
| Of course this is nonsense, and these people know it. | ||
| There's a reason that people don't leave America in droves. | ||
| Even the celebrities who said they would leave if Trump was elected have somehow managed to stay here. | ||
| For the record, I'm pretty sure that Canada is happy that they didn't have to take in most of those people. | ||
| I mention all this because for all the goodness here in America, we obviously still have some work to do. | ||
| Every society has work to do, which is why people peddling utopia are always frauds and liars. | ||
| In America though, almost every generation has fought to expand rights to other people, not to limit them. | ||
| That's how we got women the right to vote, that's how we freed the slaves, that's how gay people were allowed to marry, and that's how whatever will come next will arrive. | ||
| As for that work that we have to do, I think a lot of it has to do with how we can come together instead of just ripping each other apart. | ||
| I'm a firm believer that most of us want the same things in life. | ||
| We want to work a decent job, eat some good food, have some sex, and go on vacation now and again. | ||
| Most of us aren't racist, homophobes, secretly plotting against each other and trying to push our way of life on everyone else. | ||
| This is somewhere which, no matter where your political leanings are, we can all come together. | ||
| Yes, some of us are from big cities, some of us are from small towns, some of us had ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower, and some of us just arrived yesterday. | ||
| But the only way this all works is if we all bend to fit the American ideals of freedom and of liberty, not if we demand that the system bend to us. | ||
| My guest this week is comedian Trey Crowder. | ||
| Trey is known as the liberal redneck. | ||
| His comedy is a blend of showing liberal elites that rednecks aren't all backwards hicks and showing rednecks that liberals aren't all evil socialists. | ||
| It's almost as if we should judge people as individuals, not as groups. | ||
| You know, the middle of this country for a long time has been the brunt of jokes and the easy way to make fun of anyone who thinks differently than the people in New York or Los Angeles. | ||
| As someone who has only lived in New York or Los Angeles, I've never subscribed to this way of thinking and I've tried not to mock people just because they talk differently or haven't evolved on some social views the second that I have. | ||
| Whether you're Democrat or Republican, straight or gay, black or white, Native American or new immigrant, this country belongs to all of us and it needs all of us to continue to make it better. | ||
| That's the thing with exceptionalism. | ||
| It takes an awful lot of work to keep up. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Joining me this week is a comedian, an author, a redneck and a liberal, Craig Crowder. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm glad to be here, man. | ||
| A redneck and a liberal. | ||
| Yeah, that throws people a lot. | ||
| Do I have to even ask you a question to start this thing or do I just hand it to you there and we go? | ||
| So what has become my favorite way to define that was actually said to me at one of my comedy shows in Austin, Texas, a guy from Mississippi, Who now lives in Austin. | ||
| A fan came up to me and was talking to me and he was like, And he seemed so genuinely frustrated, too, about how he's been stereotyped or whatever for being a redneck or whatever else. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's like, man, I like to blow shit up, but I ain't fucking racist, man. | |
| And he seemed so upset about it. | ||
| I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder. | ||
| I was like, I know, buddy. | ||
| It's all right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But yeah, basically, I grew up in a very stereotypically redneck fashion. | ||
| Dirt poor in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| I've never even really all that weird to me. | ||
| Redneck by basically any standard, but I've never subscribed to any of those sort of like, | ||
| you know, to me, regressive ideologies and stuff that Rednecks are stereotypically known | ||
| for. And it was never even really all that weird to me. | ||
| Well, I've known for a while now that it's weird, but I'm saying I never even had to | ||
| really think about it. That's just how I was. I didn't make a conscious decision to be | ||
| this, you know, weirdo thing that I am. | ||
| It's just how it worked out. | ||
| It just happens, which is pretty much, I think, how it works for everybody. | ||
| What really, if you had to define what a redneck is, what really is a redneck? | ||
| Well, a lot of people For some reason assume that I'm opposed to this guy for whatever reason, but I actually have a lot of respect for him, but I think Jeff Foxworthy defined it the best. | ||
| It involves a TV on another TV? | ||
| Obviously he made a whole career out of defining it, but he got asked that question a lot and the way he ultimately defined it was he said, it's the glorious absence of sophistication, which I pretty well agree with. | ||
| And in our book that I wrote with my tour mates, Corey and Drew, we sort of added an addendum to that, which was not giving a damn, generally speaking, about how people feel about you and the way you live your life and whatever, you know what I mean? | ||
| I do what I do, and I like what I like, and I don't give a damn what you think about it or not. | ||
| That, coupled with the aforementioned lack of sophistication, is what makes a redneck to me. | ||
| Interestingly, it's not really, even though I think people prescribe political leanings to rednecks, in and of itself, it's not really. | ||
| It's just the idea of, sort of, I do what I do. | ||
| Yeah, and want to be left alone, and want to have a good time, and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Honestly, and I feel so, I guess, naive or ignorant or whatever saying this now, but I genuinely didn't realize that to so many people it had those like political connotations or whatever. | ||
| Don't get me wrong, I knew rednecks were stereotyped as being, you know, dumb or, you know, inbred or, I mean, racist or whatever. | ||
| I knew those things existed but I didn't know that to so many people like Part of the definition of the word redneck is | ||
| A regressive, racist, homophobe who hates books and loves Jesus. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's what it means to people and nothing else. | ||
| I didn't realize that that existed at the level that it does until very recently. | ||
| Yeah, and you've done a bunch of videos on YouTube, I think, untangling some of that stuff and showing people, actually, no, that's not really all there is to this stuff, but how poor did you grow up? | ||
| Because you're white, so I assume you get white privilege. | ||
| Did you not have a lot of... | ||
| I've actually had to get used to being white as I've gotten into the middle class and stuff in the past few years. | ||
| That's a recent phenomenon for me. | ||
| I tell people that sometimes. | ||
| It's true and I know it sounds weird to people. | ||
| I never felt white growing up. | ||
| I don't mean to imply that I felt black, or it's like, oh, you know what I mean? | ||
| That's not what I'm saying. | ||
| What I'm saying is, my whole life, when I've heard about white people, | ||
| and what white people do, I've thought of like, you know, Connecticut, like very yuppie-ish, | ||
| like, you know, the landed gentry, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, that's what I thought of when I heard of white people, and I never, | ||
| we were white trash, which is completely different, you know what I mean? | ||
| I point out all the time, like a good example that I like to use is cops, right? | ||
| And now, don't get me wrong, they're not shooting rednecks in the streets, | ||
| but it's a well-established thing, culturally, that like, | ||
| Cops and rednecks don't get along. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Every episode of Cops they ever made either took place in the ghetto or the trailer park. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So like, there was definitely that feeling of like, and I don't know, no I never felt privileged at all to answer your question. | ||
| I mean, That's not the same as saying that I don't think white privilege exists in a lot of arenas or whatever it does, but I think if you're poor, it doesn't really matter very much. | ||
| The good thing is though, or the good thing, but... | ||
| If you manage to become not poor and you're a white man, then hey, it's just aces. | ||
| So now, I don't know how much you have, but you're doing alright now, you're on tour, you're doing good stuff, you've got some TV things cooking. | ||
| You've gotten yourself out of white trash. | ||
| Yes, I have, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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I managed to escape, which is not easy. | |
| Now you can summer in the Hamptons and go to Connecticut like the rest of the people. | ||
| I'm not on that level yet. | ||
| Well, it's just at the beginning. | ||
| But you know what's funny about that is my whole life I've had this thing where You mentioned, like, the Hamptons. | ||
| I've never been, but, like, I promise you, if I, if me and you went to the Hamptons right now and we, like, pull in, we first get in there, whatever, I would immediately become very uncomfortable. | ||
| And it's, and it's an uncom, it's a, the discomfort is in a, like, a... | ||
| I don't belong here kind of way. | ||
| But then there's also the element of like, they know. | ||
| Like they're going to be able to tell, like look at me and tell, like who let the, you know, trailer trash in here or whatever. | ||
| And I know that that's irrational, but I really do like feel that and always have. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So, okay, so you grow up. | ||
| White trash, redneck community in Tennessee. | ||
| Give me some of the good stuff about that, because you've talked about the good stuff and the values and that kind of stuff. | ||
| Well, nature is a big one. | ||
| It's absolutely beautiful there. | ||
| The best part about my home county is the lake, Dale Hollow Lake. | ||
| Objectively awesome lake. | ||
| And so if you're into any outdoorsy stuff, we've got that in spades. | ||
| And yeah, the sense of like community. | ||
| Everybody knows everybody. | ||
| There's cons to that too, obviously. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| But there's a lot of good things about it. | ||
| Like people actually genuinely care about each other for the most part. | ||
| And also the food. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like my grandma's both of them. | ||
| You know, what most people would call soul food or whatever, I guess, but just, you know, frying everything or whatever else. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Not good for the arteries, but good for the soul. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| The music, I think the South, as far as regions go, I think the South has the best music or produces the best music in the country and maybe the world. | ||
| And just the way I mentioned earlier, you know, people like to have a good time. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like people are not Very tightly wound there. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's a lot more like laid back and just like relaxed atmosphere and none of that whole like stereotypical rat race stuff that happens. | ||
| You don't have any of that. | ||
| It's weird because sometimes I like, there's a part of me that needs that or wants that obviously or I wouldn't be doing any of this. | ||
| But there's also a part of me that appreciates that more like Pastoral type thing in my hometown. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What about what about some of the the political stuff? | ||
| When you add that to this so so far we got we got kind of the good stuff But you know the political stuff is where people start going. | ||
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unidentified
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They're all they're all backwards What's weird to me? | |
| And I've talked to like people from places like I'm from about this a lot and they pretty well agree with it like as a kid growing up People were mostly apolitical. | ||
| I'm not saying they were like Democrats or anything like that. | ||
| It's just like, I don't, they didn't really care. | ||
| It was like, it seemed to be more of an attitude of like, ah, to hell with them all. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They're all full of shit. | ||
| They don't care about us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and I mean, and that was pretty much it. | ||
| And obviously that has changed, but I've been gone from the town I grew up in for 12 years now and obviously a lot has changed since I left because it's not like that didn't exist but I was never aware of it being this big like cultural dividing factor or whatever most people just didn't just didn't really talk about it or whatever as I was growing up but then | ||
| My hometown's a good example. | ||
| The factory left and went to Mexico after NAFTA and all that, you know, and the ripple effects of that were sort of, it took a while for it to get as bad as it is now, and I mean it's bad and has been bad for years, like over 13-14% unemployment or whatever. | ||
| for over a decade now and that's just made a lot of people, you know, angry and | ||
| frustrated and upset and whatever else and that wasn't really the case when I | ||
| was a kid. Not on the level that it is now and I think that's really what | ||
| it's about. They've gotten pissed, you know, because their like way of life has been | ||
| has been altered very negatively to a lot of them. | ||
| And so I think that's where they've gotten so riled up and mad like they are now. | ||
| 'Cause I'm not trying to act like they were this enlightened group, 'cause they weren't. | ||
| But when I was living there and growing up there, they didn't have this like rage. | ||
| That they have now. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It just wasn't as much of a thing as it is. | ||
| So it's kind of weird to me too, honestly. | ||
| Doesn't that say something interesting just about economics in general? | ||
| Like that you grew up around this, but there was a factory. | ||
| So people were working. | ||
| So even if things weren't perfect, it's life. | ||
| It's life like everybody else has. | ||
| Then the jobs go away and then suddenly it actually changes everything. | ||
| Yeah, because obviously you're not unique to Salina, my hometown. | ||
| This is the story in most places like that, but so the jobs leave and then the pills come in or the meth or whatever, drug use, substance abuse, goes through the roof. | ||
| So does crime, theft, whatever, things like that. | ||
| The businesses start shuttering the downtown areas, totally dilapidated and whatever else, and it just brings everybody way down. | ||
| It's just this cycle of horrible shit. | ||
| And it really pisses people off or gets them going or both or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so before we go any further, I feel like I have to get your liberal cred, too, because I know we're gonna talk a little bit about what we both feel like is happening on the left, and I always say, like, guys, I'm still a liberal. | ||
| I'm for gay marriage, I'm for legalizing marijuana, I'm pro-choice, I believe in state education, and the list goes on and on. | ||
| I'm against the death penalty, I'm for a reforming prison system, all of that stuff. | ||
| These are liberal things. | ||
| So can you just lay out some liberal cred so that 10 minutes from now when we get on to some other stuff, people go, wait a minute, is he really a liberal? | ||
| Give me some liberal stuff. | ||
| I agree with literally everything you just named off. | ||
| I agree with all of those. | ||
| The sort of gateway liberalism for me was equal rights for gay people because my uncle is gay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I found that out when I was like eight or nine, which is when I found out what gay even was. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I didn't even know anything about it before that. | ||
| And as soon as I learned what gay meant, I learned, hey, your uncle, he's gay. | ||
| Oh, okay, whatever. | ||
| But I started picking up on things that before just went over my head that like, you know, these like rednecks or whatever that I was growing up around that they were saying or that the church was saying about gay people and I immediately didn't like it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And that sort of pushed me in that direction, I think. | ||
| And so that's always been a big thing for me because I take it a little personally because of my uncle, whom I love dearly. | ||
| But everything else you named, you know, prison reform, very, very against the war on drugs. | ||
| That's another thing that I feel very strongly about because it's also personal because my mom is a recovering drug addict who also was a drug dealer who went to prison. | ||
| All that's very personal to me too and I completely agree with it. | ||
| I'm a believer, obviously it needs to be done the right way, but I'm a believer in universal health care. | ||
| I also am very pro food stamps and welfare and things like that. | ||
| I've always felt like it would be baldly hypocritical of me if I wasn't because, like, I survived on food stamps as a kid. | ||
| If it wasn't for food stamps, I don't know what would have happened to me. | ||
| I feel like I'm living proof that those systems can work. | ||
| And yeah, they get abused. | ||
| That's just the reality. | ||
| My attitude towards that has always been, but what is the alternative though? | ||
| Letting kids go hungry? | ||
| Because I'm not willing to do that. | ||
| So we've got to just put up with some of the abuses. | ||
| That's how I've looked at it. | ||
| I think eventually we're going to need a universal basic income because I don't think there's going to be enough jobs. | ||
| that exist for the amount of people that we have. | ||
| So I think it's just the reality of where the world is going. | ||
| All that stuff is pretty liberal in my opinion. | ||
| Yeah, you're a liberal, I believe it now. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| Did you see the story this week about Amazon is gonna have a supermarket with three employees | ||
| because everything else is you're just gonna walk in, scan your phone, you take it, you leave. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I saw, I think they put it together, it's like a promo video or something for that on YouTube that I saw a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Yeah, you just, you literally walk in, just get whatever you want, throw it in a bag and walk out. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because they've got like scanners or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, I mean and that kind of thing's not going away. | ||
| One of the biggest ones, I think everybody realizes at this point how close we're getting to Self-driving vehicles. | ||
| I mean, that's happening. | ||
| There's no doubt that that's happening. | ||
| And truck drivers, that's like the number one occupation in something like 37 of the 50 states in this country or something like that. | ||
| The most popular job is a truck driver. | ||
| The minute that they have freight that can be fully automated reliably and safely, they will. | ||
| And all of that will just go away overnight. | ||
| And that's gonna happen in a lot of industries too. | ||
| And I'm saying, what else are we gonna do? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So that's just how, I just think, again, that's the reality of it. | ||
| It's gonna take something like a universal basic income. | ||
| So you think that would be the answer more than basically retraining an entire population to either fix or the robots or the drones or any of that. | ||
| So that may be a bridge too far, basically. | ||
| Yes, yeah, I think so, yes. | ||
| So you're not gonna take a truck driver and have them fixing drones, just as- | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| And also I think even if you tried to do that, no matter how many drones there are, | ||
| I mean, if you think about, let's say like, one robot replaces one person in a job capacity, | ||
| which is not, that's not true. | ||
| Right, exactly, anymore. | ||
| But even if it is that, I would think that a maintenance person for that robot would also take care of 30 other robots, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's not going to be broken down all the time. | ||
| You understand what I'm saying? | ||
| So you take the one guy it replaces and he's going to fix robots now. | ||
| Well, he's not going to just fix the one robot that took his job. | ||
| He's going to fix 40 robots. | ||
| And again, the reality is one robot replaces 15 people or whatever. | ||
| When you just follow that logic down, it just doesn't track for me | ||
| even if you wanted to do that retraining of people or whatever else. | ||
| The numbers just don't add up, to me. | ||
| But I mean, I'm not an economist or a mathematician, I'm a comedian. | ||
| I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. | ||
| That's just the way it seems to me. | ||
| That sounded pretty good in the scheme of economics as I understand it, you know? | ||
| It's weird to be alive at the time when we know robots are going to replace us, you know? | ||
| Like where it's not science fiction anymore, now it's like, Oh yeah, 20 years from now, when they start talk show hosts, comedians, we're all gonna be replaced by robots. | ||
| Yeah, and in 20 years, or maybe less, people in San Francisco will be getting super pissed at Alabama for having anti-robot laws or something like that. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Alabama's gonna be discriminating against robot Americans or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, we're becoming an episode of Futurama, basically. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| Yeah, sorry, so I wanna back up for a second. | ||
| So your uncle that you mentioned, I've heard you talk about how he influenced your sort of awakening to this stuff. | ||
| So people might find that interesting, that there was a gay man, let's say 15 years ago or so, in the South that existed. | ||
| How was life for him? | ||
| I know that sounds sort of ridiculous, but I think people actually don't understand that even before gay marriage, gay people existed, lived lives. | ||
| Some good, some bad, you know, just like everybody else. | ||
| Well, so when I was a kid, my uncle lived in Nashville. | ||
| Another thing a lot of people don't realize is that for the most part, in a lot of ways, cities are cities. | ||
| Whether, you know, Birmingham, Alabama. | ||
| is still a city which means there's still plenty of like liberal ideals or whatever else there and so like he lived in Nashville which is totally different totally different than Salina but he came back a lot and then when I was in high school from then on he did live in Salina and now I thought before, now that I'm an adult, | ||
| that maybe there's a good possibility that he did go through a lot of shitty things, | ||
| shitty treatment or whatever else, but he didn't tell me about it 'cause I was a kid. | ||
| Right. - You know what I mean? | ||
| And I had enough bad shit going on that he didn't wanna burden me with it or whatever. | ||
| And that's a very good possibility. | ||
| But so far as I'm aware, he never faced any, he definitely never got beat up. | ||
| He never got like, he had a deli there in town for a while or whatever else, and he never got like a brick | ||
| thrown through the window or nothing like that. | ||
| And then he's not the only gay guy in the town either. | ||
| In fact, there's a local businessman who is a gay guy. | ||
| When I was in high school, he had a lot of money, especially for that area. | ||
| When we were in high school, he'd come to high school ball games in Salina, Tennessee, with two little... | ||
| Cuban boy toys. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| Are there a lot of Cuban boy toys in Tennessee? | ||
| I don't know where he got them. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Nobody did. | ||
| But what I mean is like, I mean, he flaunted it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And nothing ever happened to him either. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Everybody was just kind of like, oh, that's Steve. | ||
| You know how Steve is. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
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And that was like... What happened to the Cubans? | |
| He was done with them. | ||
| They went back or whatever. | ||
| And then he got two Ukrainian boy toys or whatever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Again, at the time, I didn't realize how insane that would probably be to a lot of people to know that that had happened there and that they didn't get tarred and feathered or whatever. | ||
| That it was just a thing that people were definitely like, here he goes again. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But that was like the extent of it And that's still not okay to be disgusted by gay people, obviously, but it never translated to any kind of violence or get the hell out of our town type. | ||
| I never saw anything like that. | ||
| People mostly just don't talk about it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| In a weird way though, That actually is okay, right? | ||
| Because it's like you actually are allowed to be disgusted by somebody or be racist or be, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like you can be like, yeah, we don't like it. | ||
| You know, you shouldn't dislike someone because of the color of their skin or their sexuality. | ||
| But at the end of the day, you're saying it's a lot of live and let live people there. | ||
| So even if they saw it and they didn't like it, as long as you're not hurting somebody, then... | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| I remember once when I was a kid at some practice or something, some older kid was giving me shit because my uncle was gay or whatever, which wasn't a rare thing. | ||
| And after it was over, this guy, he's one of the most outwardly stereotypically redneck people you can imagine. | ||
| He's openly redneck. | ||
| He's a swamp people type guy. | ||
| as red as it gets, especially in this place. | ||
| And like, he came up to me afterwards, you know, and was like, he was like, | ||
| hey, your uncle's a good man, Trey. | ||
| You know, don't let him get, whatever, like that kind of thing. | ||
| And that, so I'm saying, there was a lot of that too. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| It's way, way more complicated than people realize. | ||
| But then I meet people. | ||
| I meet people on the road. | ||
| I've got a lot of gay fans. | ||
| I meet gay people in Portland or wherever who grew up in Alabama. | ||
| They just have horror stories. | ||
| I know they're not lying. | ||
| I know that's the reality. | ||
| So again, it's complicated, you know? | ||
| So you're telling me your personal experience can't blanket the entire thing. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| In my anecdotal experience, it's not as bad as people think it is, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where does the religion piece get mixed in that? | ||
| Because I think a lot of the sort of, the coast, you know, the New York, LA sort of hatred or mocking of rednecks and Southern culture, A couple years ago I would have told you just about every single bit of it. | ||
| because it's the easiest thing to attack all the time. | ||
| How much of that stuff is associated with religion, do you think? | ||
| A couple years ago, I would have told you just about every single bit of it. | ||
| I used to, when people asked me how I became a liberal redneck or whatever, | ||
| I would talk about my uncle like I already did, but the effect that that had was I stopped going to church | ||
| because of all the homophobic shit they were spouting or whatever. | ||
| And I was like, "What the hell with that?" | ||
| Why would I take Jesus's side over my uncle? | ||
| I ain't never even emailed Jesus. | ||
| I'm not gonna take his side. | ||
| So I left the church, and that's what I always attributed a lot of that to, and I blame the church for a lot of these attitudes. | ||
| I've really been enlightened a lot myself in the past couple years, especially the past year, being on tour and talking to so many people in so many places. | ||
| And my two tour mates and co-authors, Corey and Drew, they grew up heavily in the church and ultimately left it, which checks out. | ||
| But after talking to them and talking to so many other people at shows and stuff, I don't think it's that simple. | ||
| I think that that has a lot to do with it, a whole lot to do with it. | ||
| But I used to blame, I used to be like, if there was no, if we weren't the Bible Belt, if you took all the Jesus out of the South, it'd be totally fine. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| Because of the economic factors and you still have the whole historical factors and racial factors and all that kind of stuff that wouldn't go away just because you got rid of Jesus. | ||
| So, I mean, it definitely has a lot to do with it, though, for sure. | ||
| Particularly when it comes to Gay, right. | ||
| Gay people and Muslims. | ||
| And the way they feel about those two groups, I still think is mostly Jesus' fault. | ||
| So that's Jesus right there. | ||
| Even though Jesus probably would have been okay with gay people and Muslims. | ||
| He was around a lot of Muslims. | ||
| It was the Middle East. | ||
| Yeah, well I'm not talking about the actual Jesus. | ||
| I'm talking about, you know, Jesus the first American. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Who rode to Texas on a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a machine gun or something. | ||
| Yes, that Jesus, yeah. | ||
| Speaking of Jesus, so tell me about your come to Jesus moment when you said, okay, I am a liberal. | ||
| Like when, so you had your uncle, you had this sort of awakening, but when were you like, this is the political stuff that I believe in. | ||
| Did you have to actually sort of come out to people that you knew? | ||
| Well, again, I mentioned briefly earlier that like, I never, I never realized it was weird until probably like, I mean, probably, Either late high school or college was when I realized, like, how different it was. | ||
| Like, I never thought much about the fact that I disagreed with certain people about certain things, but the biggest factor was, again, like I said, people just didn't really talk about that stuff, so it never really got, you know... | ||
| tossed around for me to realize, oh man, we're on completely different pages. | ||
| The first time that I can remember really thinking that, outside of just the gay rights thing, which I just chalked up as a religious thing, not a political thing, was in high school, in our English class, we would have like debates, because we didn't have a debate team or debate class or nothing. | ||
| We'd have debates like once every other week, and one time in debate class, the English teacher was like, So it's like 2002 or 3. | ||
| Everybody thinks we should not go to war. | ||
| Everybody thinks we should go to war with Iraq. | ||
| Raise your hand. | ||
| And it's about half the students or whatever. | ||
| And she was like, OK, everybody thinks that we shouldn't go to war with Iraq. | ||
| Raise your hand. | ||
| And it was literally just me. | ||
| Like I was yelling. | ||
| And again, I threw my hand up without even thinking. | ||
| I was like, yeah, of course. | ||
| But I looked around and I was the only one. | ||
| And then that other half of the crowd where, you know, she said, OK, now if you just don't know or don't care, raise your hand. | ||
| And that was the other half of the class. | ||
| And she was like, OK, everybody that doesn't care, you're with Trey. | ||
| Everybody else, you're on this side. | ||
| You know, whatever. | ||
| But that's a pretty enlightened teacher, giving you all the people that didn't really care, giving it to the peace guy instead of the war people. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, it ended up just being me against all of them, which I was fine with. | ||
| But that was probably the first time that I sort of had that, as you said, come-to-Jesus moment where I realized that I wasn't like most of the people that I was surrounded by. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When did you get into stand-up? | ||
| So I wanted to be a stand-up since I was 12. | ||
| Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker came out. | ||
| I watched it with my dad and that's what I was like, you know, I want to do that. | ||
| But it was never a question of me going to college or not. | ||
| With my dad, my grandpa, everybody else, I was going to go to college. | ||
| I was going to be the first one in my family to graduate from college or whatever else. | ||
| It was a big thing. | ||
| And so I did. | ||
| And I'm glad I did. | ||
| I don't regret it at all. | ||
| But I focused on that for a while. | ||
| And by the time I got... | ||
| Business school, and by the time I got out, I was 24, and that's when I was like, okay, if I'm ever gonna do comedy at all, it needs to be now. | ||
| And so that's when I started, when I was 24, six and a half years ago. | ||
| I'm almost 31 now. | ||
| Thank God you're a success, because if you were the first family member to go to college and business school, and then you became a failed comedian, that would be the worst possible. | ||
| It's funny, my dad was always cool with it, because my dad was mostly cool with everything, you know what I mean? | ||
| When I'd tell him I wanted to be a comedian or be in show business or whatever, he'd be like, that sounds kick-ass. | ||
| But, outside of him though, every other authority figure in my life, from my grandfathers to guidance counselors, teachers, whatever, because I always made really good grades, and they would tell me, You have an opportunity to get out of here and you can do whatever you want. | ||
| You can be a lawyer, you can be a doctor, all this stuff. | ||
| And if I told them, I think I want to be a comedian, they'd be like, no, what? | ||
| No, not that. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| You're going to waste all this potential you have. | ||
| You've got to do this. | ||
| That was the universal response to that. | ||
| Wow, he's gonna waste it all trying to be a comedian or whatever is what I got a lot of. | ||
| But yeah, it's working out. | ||
| Yeah, it is working. | ||
| So now you're in L.A. | ||
| How's L.A. | ||
| treating you? | ||
| How's L.A. | ||
| for a redneck? | ||
| Well, it's fine for me. | ||
| I don't mind it. | ||
| I'm doing fine with it, but I think it's weird for people around me a lot of times. | ||
| I definitely get a lot of sideways glances and stuff like that at times. | ||
| I've got two little boys. | ||
| I've got boys at the park or something, and I'm yelling at them because they're doing something they shouldn't be doing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But I'm yelling at a child and this. | ||
| Hey, God damn it! | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| With like a trucker hat on or whatever else. | ||
| And then I noticed that like, oh, they stopped doing couples yoga over there. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| This is off-putting to people. | ||
| Just hearing the Southern drawl, I mean, we just don't hear it here. | ||
| Forgetting whether you like it or not, you just simply don't hear it here. | ||
| Yeah, and I mean, so yes, I get a lot of like, you know, that kind of thing. | ||
| But I mean, I think it's funny, you know, it's fine. | ||
| I don't mind it. | ||
| So when I was watching a bunch of your YouTube videos in the last couple days, I thought, wow, here's a liberal that I agree with on so much. | ||
| And it's funny, I told you before, I was born in Brooklyn. | ||
| I lived my whole life in New York City until I moved out to LA. | ||
| So the only two places I ever lived are New York and LA. | ||
| And then I watch your stuff and I find this Tennessee redneck who's a liberal who I'm going, this guy gets what liberalism is. | ||
| What do you sense about the general state of liberalism? | ||
| Like a hot button word that can be used, I guess a little bit in a positive way, but almost at all levels now, it's being used in a negative way. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Even from my allies, even from my liberal allies, I think it's starting to get a little nice. | ||
| I think it's, to me, in a lot of ways, liberalism has jumped the shark. | ||
| Like it's just, they've just went too far with so many things. | ||
| And me and you were talking off air earlier about the fact that like, Where I'm from, and we've already kind of touched on it, but where I'm from and where I've spent most of my life, I'm Karl Marx, man. | ||
| I'm as far left as it gets there. | ||
| Out here in California, I'm a You know, a centrist or whatever, probably, because that's just how much further... And it's true on both sides, though, is the thing. | ||
| It's like with the Tea Party and whatever else and how it... Politically, we've been pushed to the polls, you know, the opposite extremes. | ||
| And it's absolutely true on the left, too. | ||
| And... | ||
| I don't really know what has happened to cause that. | ||
| I think it's just, like, maybe the cultural divide between the two and just the, like, you know, going back and forth and sort of pushing each other. | ||
| The distaste that each side has for the other side just pushes them as far, you know, as much further away from the opposition as they can go or something. | ||
| There again, I'm just a comedian. | ||
| I'm pulling that out of my ass. | ||
| But, like, that's, you know, something like that, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, well look, all of our own personal experiences are what make the reality of it, right? | ||
| So I mean, that's exactly what I've been talking about for a long time. | ||
| I've watched the left go off this way, I've watched the right go off this way. | ||
| I'm a firm believer that there's huge spot right now for people somewhere in the middle. | ||
| It's funny because I have a lot of libertarians on, and I now find much more in common as a liberal with libertarians than I do with leftists. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| So what do we do with that, as good liberals that want to bring the left back? | ||
| Well, I can't ever. | ||
| My thing is, like, economically, not across the board, but in most ways economically, like, libertarianism is not for me. | ||
| There's a lot of the shit that they subscribe to that I don't at all, which is what keeps me from being... | ||
| Do I, what? | ||
| So you want more of a state. | ||
| You see more utility for a state in taxes and things like that. | ||
| Yeah, I genuinely think that it's necessary. | ||
| Now, don't get me wrong, a lot of bloat, and it's way out of hand and does need to be reined in some, I know that's also a little personal to me because I said I went to business school, so I wasn't waiting tables doing moonlighting as a comedian. | ||
| I worked for the U.S. | ||
| Department of Energy. | ||
| That was my day job when I was getting into comedy. | ||
| And so, I mean, I know firsthand about, like, the bloat of the federal government and the inefficiencies of our bureaucracy and all that, and it needs to be cleaned up. | ||
| But I think it's necessary, though, that you have a government that sort of regulates and polices some of these other systems. | ||
| Basically, man, I just don't trust rich people to do what's right for everybody else. | ||
| I never have, and I don't think I ever will. | ||
| Because that's just human nature, I think. | ||
| They're going to do what's right for them and the people in their own self-interest. | ||
| Not across the board, but by and large. | ||
| And so I think we need systems in place to sort of keep that from happening if possible. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that the catch 22 also though? | ||
| Because now the government is run by rich people too, including capitalism and all that. | ||
| So it's like we either have business rich people doing it or political rich people and we're all kind of caught in the middle of that. | ||
| That's the thing is I'm a big believer in that, you know, that we live in a plutocracy and that's a, Big problem for me, because of everything I just said. | ||
| But that is the reality of it. | ||
| I do think, yes, the rich people run the government or whatever, and that's a damn shame. | ||
| But like I'm saying, philosophically, I do think there's a definite need for government. | ||
| I think you have to have it. | ||
| But socially though, and in a lot of other ways, libertarians, I'm absolutely more in line with them. | ||
| I mean, I'm pro-legalization of really just about any drug, to be honest with you. | ||
| But I'm also pro-gun. | ||
| Growing up, that's the least liberal thing about me, but to me it's a freedom thing. | ||
| It actually is a liberal thing, but it's not a leftist thing. | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| It's liberal, so you can protect yourself. | ||
| That is a liberal idea. | ||
| I've never bought a gun. | ||
| I own 17 guns because I inherited my grandfather's arsenal. | ||
| And so, but I'm saying in the South, where I'm from, that's super common. | ||
| And so like, it's not weird to me. | ||
| And it's not like, why would you want to own a gun? | ||
|
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I'm just like, why wouldn't you want a gun? | |
| I'm all for background checks and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| The gun show loopholes and all that need to be closed. | ||
| I'm all for all that. | ||
| But just generally speaking, I got no problem with guns. | ||
| And I'm, you know, pro, I'm very I'm a believer in freedom. | ||
| Real freedom. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's the way I've always looked at gay rights, too. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Privacy of your own home, bedroom, whatever else. | ||
| Go wild. | ||
| As long as you're not hurting anybody else. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| That's across the board for me. | ||
| You're a classical liberal, but I guess for a tour, saying the classical liberal, you just drop the classical. | ||
| I'm aware of the distinction, again, philosophically. | ||
| And also, well, that and, I mean, I'm aware of the distinction, again, philosophically, | ||
| but my whole life, like, in the South, or in the rural South especially, like, a liberal's | ||
| a liberal, man. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, you're either a liberal or you're not. | ||
| To hell with all this, like, classical versus progressive, liberal, whatever, none of that shit matters where I'm from. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So, like, I never thought about it in those terms. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But yes, though. | ||
| I mean, yeah, you're right. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| Yeah, I gotta get my show to Tennessee then because that's what I've been trying to do is show people the difference between real liberalism and what has happened here. | ||
| Oh, they definitely need that in the South because that's the, I mean, right, if they Well, that's a big thing in the South for a long time, is people ask, well, why do they vote against their self-interest? | ||
|
unidentified
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You know what I mean? | |
| Or whatever else. | ||
| And it's like, well, because they don't think that you reflect their self-interest. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And I think, arguably, a lot of liberal policies do, but all they know about liberals is this, like, you know, elitist, frou-frou, overly PC, like, you know, That whole thing is all that they're aware of when it comes to liberals and it's like a total non-starter for most of them. | ||
| Is that the funny thing about Trump and people in the South? | ||
| It's like they took really a New York, really a New York Democrat, he's a big government, it's very clear he's a big government guy, he's happy to do all these executive orders, right? | ||
| A rich guy, an elitist, all of those things. | ||
| Now I get it, he was out of the system, he was out of the political system, so he's thought of as an outsider. | ||
| But he's not religious, there's no reason to believe that he believes in Christianity. | ||
| The one time he sweat during the whole campaign was when he went to Liberty University and had to repeat the Corinthians or whatever. | ||
| So it's like, is that the irony with them? | ||
| It's like, they love him, and then... | ||
| I've actually, I've thought and I've talked a lot about this exact thing because I, and this, I feel so naive about this now, but like I was genuinely stunned when Donald Trump actually won. | ||
| I knew that there was, and I shouldn't have been because I'm from, I'm from where he won. | ||
| If anybody, I should have been. | ||
| Now, I was like cautioning people the whole time, like, look, there's something real here. | ||
| But at the end of the day, I didn't think it would happen. | ||
| And I was shocked. | ||
| And maybe the biggest reason is And I felt this way throughout his whole campaign. | ||
| I was looking around like, what is going on? | ||
| Because this is not an assumption or a theory. | ||
| I promise you, I know this to be true. | ||
| If we could go back In time, like five, six years ago, whenever it was before he first went after Obama for being an African Muslim or whatever. | ||
| If we could go back to pre-that and you polled rednecks, rural working class Americans, what do you think about Donald Trump? | ||
| Because Donald Trump's been famous for decades. | ||
| What do you think about Donald Trump, the dude? | ||
| It would have been almost universally negative, I promise you. | ||
| They would have hated everything, and they did hate everything about him, until he got in all this political shit and started pandering to him. | ||
| They were like, he's an elitist, silver spoon up his ass Yankee who thinks he's better than everybody, and thinks he's better than me, and thinks he knows everything, and he's a big city Democrat, whatever. | ||
| They would have hated everything about him. | ||
| And so the whole time, throughout his entire rise, I was looking around like, really? | ||
| This dude? | ||
| Really? | ||
| And what that says to me, or what I've told myself anyway, to make sense of it is, That just goes to show how desperate they were for a champion of any kind. | ||
| They were so desperate for that, that even Donald Trump was good enough for them to fill that bill. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Do you think that's legit in a way? | ||
| Because I get that from a lot of people. | ||
| My audience is all over the place, from far left people to anarchists to everything, everywhere. | ||
| But I get a lot of that. | ||
| People just saying, you know what? | ||
| I just, the system, it was just, I've had it. | ||
| I just had it. | ||
| You think that's like a legit reason to vote for someone that you may have nothing in common with, that you may think is a snake oil salesman? | ||
| Is that sometimes the right way to do it? | ||
| Not to me, no. | ||
| I've never agreed with that. | ||
| I've heard a lot of that too, a lot of people. | ||
| So what I was talking about is a little bit different when you talk about like people in like my hometown where, you know, they blame NAFTA and they blame the Clintons and whatever else for the factory leaving and all this. | ||
| It's more than just, oh, he's shaking the system up. | ||
| He was making promises directly to them. | ||
| I'm gonna bring your job back and restore your livelihood and all this stuff and that connected with people and I don't think they thought he was a snake oil salesman or even if deep down maybe they did a little bit. | ||
| I think they lied to themselves and said and you know deluded themselves into believing he wasn't. | ||
| But I've also encountered a lot of people who are like you just said they're like you know what? | ||
| Shake things up, that's what we need. | ||
| This guy's something different, whatever we need. | ||
| The system's broken, let's mix it up a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I've never been on board with that. | |
| The general premise of it, yeah, alright, okay, I kind of am with you, but in this iteration, really? | ||
| This is how you want to manifest that? | ||
| It's through Donald Trump? | ||
| No, man. | ||
| Give me the system for four, eight more years, whatever, and then let's get a different maverick in there who isn't this guy. | ||
| I've never agreed with that. | ||
| Yeah, do you think we just sort of forget that all of us, forgetting what our political allegiance is, that we all kind of just forget how actually good it is here? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not to say that there aren't problems, of course. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But that it's pretty damn good here. | ||
| Man, I've actually been trying to work on a bit about that for a long time now about Basically that. | ||
| Things are better here now than they've been for almost any group of people you can name. | ||
| Ever before. | ||
| And that's even true for, like, you know, rural white people, except things were better for them in, like, you know, a couple decades ago. | ||
| But I'm saying if you go back further than that... Right, it wasn't so great for them. | ||
| It was absolutely horrible. | ||
| They were sharecroppers. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So they had a little window of, like, prosperity there, where small-town America was a real thing and industrialism and whatever else. | ||
| Outside of that little window of time, though, this is still better than they've had it historically. | ||
| Ever before. | ||
| And that's true for most people, and yes, people absolutely lose sight of that. | ||
| It's also less violent now, historically, than it's ever been before. | ||
| And people forget all that, too. | ||
| That drives me crazy sometimes, because I think people need to maintain that perspective. | ||
| This is not Armageddon. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Shit is crazy, but... | ||
| We're still all right, you know. | ||
| What do you make about the Armageddon, people? | ||
| Because one of the things I talk about here all the time is the free speech situation, which I think is gonna get a lot worse. | ||
| I mean, it's very clear that a certain amount of people now think it's okay to punch Nazis or punch anyone you think might be a Nazi. | ||
| And if someone's speaking at a school you don't like, you can burn down the school and all that stuff. | ||
| So what do us, as the liberals in this situation that are supposed to defend free speech, What do we do to calm some of these people down? | ||
| I've been trying to figure it out. | ||
| I don't know that I got there yet. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure either because anytime, I'm gonna be honest, anytime that I've tried to like touch on some of that, because I have in some of my videos, I've tried to say things that are in line with what we're talking about right now and They never get the kind of response that my other videos just railing on Trump or the right or whatever dude. | ||
| Everything I've ever said in any of my videos, I believe and that's my genuine thoughts. | ||
| But anything that's ever been like kind of challenging in that way, they're always like, you know, it's almost like I can feel the internet being like, no. | ||
| We don't want to hear all that. | ||
| People just don't want to hear it. | ||
| But I thought the left was supposed to be the tolerant side. | ||
| Aren't they supposed to be the tolerant people? | ||
| It's been that way for my people my whole life. | ||
| For years and years. | ||
| I've been very aware of the hypocrisy of liberals who abhor any kind of intolerance or discrimination being so openly prejudiced towards people like me. | ||
| It's always been that way. | ||
| My whole life it's been that way. | ||
| I've always thought that was bullshit. | ||
| Do you not realize that that's still intolerant? | ||
| And it's always been that way about, you know, poor white trash, rednecks, whatever else. | ||
| But now it's like spreading into this like, they're intolerant of anybody who doesn't agree with them on every single thing. | ||
| You're now, you're a, you know, you're a Nazi or whatever. | ||
| And, you know, stoking the fires of the patriarchy and all this shit. | ||
| I assume you were against punching the Nazi, right? | ||
| I don't want to put words in your mouth. | ||
| I'm against it. | ||
| I don't want to assume anything. | ||
| I take that back. | ||
| I don't give a shit that a Nazi got punched. | ||
| That guy getting punched is fine with me, but I wish it would have just happened in a bar somewhere and somebody just whipped his ass or whatever, because he probably needs his ass whipped. | ||
| Do I think that we need to make it a thing where we just go around punching people that say things we disagree with? | ||
| No, absolutely not, even if they're Nazis. | ||
| It's like when the ACLU defended the Ku Klux Klan or whatever in a court case once over a freedom of speech issue, and like, that's the way it should be. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| Like, yeah, that... | ||
| To hell with the Klan. | ||
| To hell with Nazis. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| People think we're in Indiana Jones again. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| It has to go both ways. | ||
| And this is a slightly different subject, but it's on the topic of what is and is not okay to joke about. | ||
| It's like Trey Parker and Matt Stone said on South Park. | ||
| They tackled it and they were like, look, either all of it's okay or none of it is. | ||
| And that's how I feel about free speech in general. | ||
| You don't have to like the awful shit that he's saying, but this is America, and he has the right to say it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Just like we have the right to say, I have the right. | ||
| I mean, I go after shitty white people, as I term them, hard, all the time. | ||
| If I didn't have the ability to do that, I wouldn't be sitting here right now. | ||
| I wouldn't have a career. | ||
| I'd just be doing whatever else. | ||
| I realize that. | ||
| So I'm not going to be hypocritical and say that only I should have the right to do it. | ||
| Because I'm right and he's wrong. | ||
| And of course I believe that he's wrong, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| That's not how it works. | ||
| You have to apply it across the board consistently. | ||
| It's almost like you have to have ideals even when they're hard to have. | ||
| Yeah. - Crazy, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How many years have you been doing standup? | ||
| Six and a half. | ||
| Six and a half. | ||
| Man, I did 12 years of standup. | ||
| Before you got into all this, right? | ||
| Before I started doing all this crazy shit. | ||
| And I was telling you before how I gotta start doing it again now. | ||
| And I've been speaking to colleges and stuff and sort of working some standup in | ||
| because I see there's such a need for people to say some uncomfortable things. | ||
| But I'm curious, in your six and a half years, Have you seen the way language has changed? | ||
| Was there something that you might have said six years ago that you think now just because everyone's on Twitter and snapchatting your whole set and all that shit that you'd be afraid of saying? | ||
| It's hard as a comedian to sit here and say that I'm afraid of saying anything, but yes, like one thing that bothers me is like if I'm doing, and I still do a lot of this, and I can feel people pull back sometimes, but usually it's okay, but if I'm doing a bit about something that shitty people do or believe, right, and so like in the bit I'm talking about this hypothetical racist or bigot or whatever, and like You say, you know, like if it's a homophobic thing, and you, in the bit, I say queer, or faggot, or whatever, but it's not me saying it, I'm talking about this guy saying it, and then I tear that dude apart right after that for being shitty, but it doesn't matter to a lot of people. | ||
| Just having said the word, they're like, oh god, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why would you do that? | ||
| And it's like, you're not listening to me. | ||
| And I don't like to sugarcoat things and act like that's not how those people are. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, that's what that hypothetical dude would say, and that's the whole point of this whole bit or whatever, but none of that matters to people. | ||
| All that matters is literally just the word, the buzzwords or whatever. | ||
| And sometimes it's like buzz ideas or whatever. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That you're just not allowed to joke about or talk about no matter what. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I absolutely hate that shit. | ||
| And that's the death of comedy, because we need satire. | ||
| So you're trying to satire something to point out hypocrisy or whatever. | ||
| You know, the Charlie Hebdo people, people said, well, they were mocking Muhammad. | ||
| They were mocking extremists, actually. | ||
| And therein lies the rub. | ||
| I used to do a bit about the Transformers before the movies, like from the 80s Transformers, how they were all different racial people. | ||
| And I used to act out a thing. | ||
| Jazz, he was the one black Transformer. | ||
| And I used to say the N-word on stage. | ||
| And it would always get a huge laugh. | ||
| And I remember one time that it suddenly got a groan from a certain amount of the crowd, | ||
| and I remember thinking, "Wow, I'm never gonna tell that joke again." | ||
| And I have no desire to say the N-word. | ||
| It was just me acting out this fictional robot, futuristic robot that doesn't exist, but satire. | ||
| And this has gotten better for me for sure because most people at my shows in particular, they sort of know what I'm about, know what they're getting into, but like, man, with this accent, you literally can't even say black people. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You just say black people. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| This is about to be terrible. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like people immediately recoil because of just the way it sounds. | ||
| So I mean, yes, I've definitely dealt with that kind of thing. | ||
| And one of my first, one of my earliest videos, I remember I was acting out my great great grandmother, you know, who's dead. | ||
| And I said, you know, she's dead if she was still alive. | ||
| She wouldn't be comfortable eating cornbread next to a colored boy, right? | ||
| Because she wouldn't even... colored boy is cleaning it up! | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's not what she would say, but it's like closer to it and I still got so many messages from people that were like, I don't know if you know this or maybe it's different in Tennessee, but we don't really say colored anymore or that kind of thing. | ||
| It's like, of fucking course I know that! | ||
| That's the point of the joke is that it's this antiquated, out-of-date ideal that she would have and I'm making fun of it. | ||
| But just the word, just referring to a black person as colored, no matter the context, | ||
| sets some people off. | ||
| And it's that whole attitude that's like, that is the reason that so many people hate | ||
| liberals. | ||
|
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It's that kind of thing, because it's just ridiculous. | |
| What about the idea that, so you make that joke about your great-great-grandma, and that people now look at historical figures and try to give them the morality of 2017, like, I would guess, I don't know, but I would guess your great-great-grandma probably was a pretty decent woman. | ||
| Right. - Raised some kids and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Yes, maybe she had, there was some racial stuff there too, which is a sign of that. | ||
| But that we suddenly give our morality of today to everyone else, that's a really dangerous thing to do, | ||
| isn't it? - Yeah, without a doubt. | ||
| That's another thing too. | ||
| That's a big reason why I try to be a little more understanding or I'm not just so immediately, | ||
| like, oh, fuck you, to people on the far right or whatever, because I've known so many of them and loved them. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Both my grandfathers are dead. | ||
| If they were here though, they probably would have voted for Donald Trump, right? | ||
| I love the shit out of both of my grandpas and miss them all the time, you know what I mean? | ||
| And like people just shouldn't, but they were from, they're from a different time, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like they weren't bad people, but like both of them man, the n-word, oh god, you know what I mean? | ||
| All the time, but like That was just, it was like, that's just how people talked when they were growing up or over their lives or whatever. | ||
| I remember one time, this is a true story, and this is in my book too, but there was a fight between a white kid and a black kid in the town square of Salina, my hometown, when I was in high school. | ||
| Small town, everybody's talking about it because the white kid got the shit beat out of him. | ||
| And everybody was talking about it. | ||
| And so I was at my grandpa's car lot the next day and he asked me, What was that about? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| I was like, well, I think Jimmy called Kyle the N-word or something like that. | ||
| My grandpa goes, what the hell do you want him to call him, Chinese? | ||
|
unidentified
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In his mind, he was like, well, yeah. | |
| He wasn't trying to be funny. | ||
| That was his genuine first thought. | ||
| He was just a product of his time, and my grandpa was born in 1935. | ||
| So when you start talking about people in the 1800s or whatever, yeah, trying to apply today's standards to them is ridiculous. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm curious, do you ever get it the other way, where you'll say something about regnet culture, and people that are still part of that culture will be like, hey, you're making us all look like idiots, or you're making us all look backwards, or whatever? | ||
| I get a lot of, and especially in my hometown, I get a lot of, oh, he's selling his people out. | ||
| Like, that I'm just, like, exploiting them for, like, a gimmick or whatever. | ||
| But it's not a gimmick. | ||
| It is who I am, so I don't look at it that way at all. | ||
| Also, anybody that grew up with me should know better because, as we talked about earlier, like, I've always been this guy. | ||
| None of them should be surprised by this. | ||
| I get a lot of that, but no, remember what I said earlier about rednecks and not giving a damn what people think? | ||
| I don't get much of like, you know, you shouldn't be making fun of me, man, you know, or whatever. | ||
| Like, I'll just get like, fuck you queer, you know, like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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But not in a like, Right, you're queer for that matter. | |
| Yes, I'm a queer to them. | ||
| Not in the way that they're offended by the redneck jokes, they're offended by my ideas. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| I don't really get a lot of like, oh, you're making us all look bad because they genuinely, for the most part, don't give a shit how they look to other groups of people or whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does all this really show how important comedy is to almost everything? | ||
| Because if you look at Foxworthy and those guys, it was the Redneck Comedy Tour, right? | ||
| That's what it was called? | ||
| The Blue Collar Comedy Tour. | ||
| The Blue Collar Comedy Tour. | ||
| That was finally an outlet for some of these people that we're talking about to just have their shit heard. | ||
| And that's just an incredibly powerful thing. | ||
| Yeah, I completely agree and totally think that comedy is more important now than it's been in a long time. | ||
| Weirdly enough, and I didn't check this, this was in the middle of another interview for a UK magazine, and so I'm talking to this British reporter and she was talking about, she asked me a question Apparently Armando Iannucci, you know who that is? | ||
| Yeah, he's the EP for Veep. | ||
| And he made In the Loop, the movie, and before that In the UK, The Thick of It. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of that guy. | ||
| Colossal fan. | ||
| He's one of my favorite comedy writers on planet Earth. | ||
| And she was like, did you hear what he said the other day? | ||
| And I didn't. | ||
| I was like, no. | ||
| I guess it was news over there or whatever. | ||
| And she said that According to her, he said that he thinks that it's time to step away from joking about a lot of these things because we need to take it seriously and not joke about it. | ||
| And I told her, I was like, well, I still love his work and I'm a huge fan, but I could not possibly disagree more strongly with that. | ||
| Especially if you're talking about, I'm a comedian. | ||
| He's a comedy writer, you know? | ||
| That's my whole job is to make fun of shit and I think you need comedy in times like this because otherwise it's just darkness. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It makes it easier to deal with. | ||
| People do need to talk about it seriously. | ||
| Politicians and people who are actually in the field or whatever, they do need to take this shit seriously. | ||
| They absolutely do because it's very serious. | ||
| But I'm a comedian. | ||
| I don't need to take it. | ||
| That's not my role. | ||
| My role is to take the piss out of it. | ||
| To use his vernacular. | ||
| I don't know why we would stop now. | ||
| To me, it's more important now than it ever is. | ||
| And again, if he didn't actually say that, then, you know, whatever. | ||
| Well, we're going to clip this and send it directly to his people. | ||
| Yeah, but according to a British reporter, that was a quote from him. | ||
| And I was just kind of floored, like, no, no, it's the opposite. | ||
| I've seen a lot of that, though, where comics, I mean, people that I generally respect and like, where they've gone off the deep end, where it's like, no, they're not being funny anymore. | ||
| They're just preaching all the time, and it's like, if George Carlin was around, and I say this on the show almost every week, like every morning I wake up and I'm like, fuck, where the hell's George Carlin when we need him more than ever? | ||
| He would still be being funny about this. | ||
| And that goes to prove your point, that that's what we need. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, we did it. | ||
| We did a New Yorker, L.A. | ||
| guy and a redneck. | ||
| We did an hour. | ||
| This has been an hour? | ||
| I didn't look down once. | ||
| We didn't even stop. | ||
| We said we were going to stop once. | ||
| Yeah, we rolled right through. | ||
| We didn't even stop. | ||
| Flew by. | ||
| It flew by. | ||
| I have a feeling we're going to cross paths again. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I hope so, too. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| You've only been out to L.A. | ||
| for... Not even a month. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| It'll be a month and like four or five more days. | ||
| Yeah, well you probably gotta get a spray tan. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Do you have a trainer yet? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Are you eating carbs? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm all up in all the carbs. | |
| All the carbs, all the gluten, dairy, all that. | ||
| I'm doing a piss poor job of that part of... | ||
| Being a Californian. | ||
| We did, me and Corey and Drew, we came out here and one of the first things we did was shotgun some LaCroix's just to sort of get in the mindset. | ||
| So yeah, I'm, you know, I'm dipping my toes in the water. | ||
| Small steps. | ||
| Yeah, baby steps. | ||
| Alright, well it was a pleasure chatting with you. | ||
| Pleasure's all mine. |
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