Comedian Bryan Callen joins Dave Rubin to critique the "cognitive elite" and argue that humor remains a vital safety valve against corporate overreach and polarized politics. He opposes defunding police, citing New York's rising murder rates under Mayor Bill de Blasio, while warning that unchecked Latino immigration could render the Black vote obsolete. Callen also attacks California's "homeless industrial complex," linking homelessness to mental health issues rather than just housing shortages caused by Prop 47, and rejects full drug legalization due to community harms. Ultimately, he identifies as a moderate valuing nuance over ideological purity, declining a gubernatorial run to preserve his freedom of speech. [Automatically generated summary]
I think that it feels as though this is the last bastion for satire, honest expression, original self-expression.
You know, I've had comics call me and say, well, I've got this show with a certain network and I'm afraid that what I said, I expressed a point of view that was more complicated than some black or white, no pun intended, you know.
Oh, you're going for it already.
and uh should i should i do this you you have comics now wondering if they should edit themselves in podcasts and my answer is if that is what if if you are um Worried about that because you're working for that network, then you shouldn't work for that network, then you're no longer a comic, then you're no longer in the business of original self-expression.
Thoughts and art has always been there to disturb, to shake things up.
Let's take Will & Grace as an example.
I auditioned for that show maybe five times.
I can't remember if it was for Jack, if it was for Eric, if it was for both.
And I knew it was going to be a hit, but it was so groundbreaking.
It was so astonishing.
It was the first time that gay people were kind of highlighted as this as people with senses of humor who wanted the same thing that straight people want.
I remember that being a radical new Idea and it you know Back then, you know, we always talk about how you can get canceled for certain words.
You say well in the Well, let's say all through all of American history up through probably the 90s If you were found out to be gay in a in the workplace Well, if you didn't get fired, you weren't gonna get promoted.
It was a major liability and physically dangerous so Along comes Will and Grace And a network took a risk.
So in that sense, you know, you can point to examples where it's very important to continue to speak your mind.
And it's very important when the pendulum swings too far right or too far left or too far in any direction.
As an artist, you gotta push back.
You gotta kinda go, you gotta make fun of it.
And that's the one, through all this insanity, and there are a lot of bad ideas out there, And there are a lot of sort of like, we're very polarized.
There's no room for nuance, as you know, as I'm sure you've picked up on.
But I do think Americans have this really great safety valve, this switch, which is humor.
We tend to make fun of ourselves.
We tend to make fun of cancel culture already.
We tend to make fun of all these things.
Trump is always being made fun of, and so is the other side.
So I think at least We are going to always, we'll always have that thing.
Even kids now, my friend's son, who is 16, my buddy said, look at that, look at that butterfly.
I wonder what he's gonna land on next.
And his friend said, dad, how are you assuming that's a he?
But doesn't this seem a little unique in that there's like a runaway train aspect to it right now, where it used to be kind of like, oh, one person randomly said one thing and they get taken out, where now it just feels like the whole track got destroyed, the train is going off, and everyone's kind of going with it at the same time.
No, I think you're a very reasonable... I've listened to you many times, and I've listened to your guests, and the truth is you are a reasonable, fair-minded person.
Yeah, I want to stick with the comedy thing for a little bit because you mentioned how if you're a comic and you're working at a network that's making you censor or making you question yourself, then you're working at the wrong place.
Isn't it odd though that for all of us that are now in the podcast, YouTube, whatever you want to call this thing, That now we're watching ourselves do it, to ourselves.
We're on our own bosses.
I'm not saying you're doing it, and I'm not doing it, but we know a lot of people now that are getting in trouble because of what's being said on podcasts, and we know that, you know, media matters, watches every word that somebody's gonna say, so that if, you know, anybody says one thing the wrong way, they can take them out, even though these guys own their stuff.
Yeah, but trouble, when you say getting in trouble, the truth is that they're not.
The truth is, I look at getting in trouble as not being able to earn a living.
You know, corporations are incredibly, in many ways, spineless.
And we'll get into that in a second, what I mean by that.
But I think that you're still, look, I'm on stage all the time.
I was in Arizona, I was in Texas.
Anywhere I go when I when I say things that seem reasonable when I criticize the Sort of even whether it's conservatives or liberals and I can I criticize both people love it people clap people laugh because Typically, I think, I always find that if I'm feeling this way, so is most of the country.
Because most people are, they're just reasonable.
They're not indoctrinated into an ideology.
That is, I think the danger in that is that if you look at a lot of the media, and you look at a lot of the cognitive elite, if you want to call them that, They, you know, I think it was Sam Harris who said, I don't know anybody who smokes.
Camille Paglia said, I don't, most of these people don't know anybody who listens to sport radio or works with their hands or has been in the military.
That's a big problem.
That's a huge part of the country.
And no, they're not dumb.
No, they're not.
They're just as smart as anybody in the CNN boardroom or in the Huffington Post boardroom or at Fox news.
And I've been around, I'm too old now, and I've talked to, probably with my podcast, my old podcast, I bet I've spoken to, I don't know, I'll say 400 academics, maybe I'm wrong, but a lot of them, and from really big universities, because they'd write a book and I'd read it and I'd interview them.
They're specialized.
They're specialized in one particular field.
It doesn't mean they have a comprehensive understanding of the world.
Not better or not more insightful than anybody else.
Because they live behind very expensive walls.
They are in their own purified echo chamber.
They're terrified to step outside of that echo chamber or say anything that would grate against the orthodoxy because they will get destroyed.
And, and it's, it's, it is what Obama called the circular firing line.
Um, so I think it was another guy.
It was maybe Vaclav Schmel.
I can't remember what he said.
Most of these people who are driving this debate, who are coming up with these terms like white privilege, like systematic racism and stuff like that, um, are at the bottom of a well.
And they're looking up at their sliver of the sky and all they can see is that sliver of the sky.
There isn't a comprehensive understanding of the world.
When you live in the real world and you have to make a restaurant work,
when you have to manage a restaurant, when you get down to the level of detail,
nobody is talking about your gender or your sex.
We've got to get the food to the customers, man.
And we've got to stay in business, which means I don't have time for that.
I have time for bottom line stuff.
And then I've got my kids, and I've got to make my relationship work, and I've got this pain here, so I'm nervous about that.
That's what it is to be a human being.
So, a lot of this stuff, when you say getting in trouble, for what you said.
It's not real.
There's a lot of chatter and a lot of white noise.
There's a guy that's about five houses over, I will walk out with you after this and show you, who's got the Bernie bumper sticker and Coexist and the whole thing.
Sure.
And he has literally the biggest fence in the neighborhood.
Not only does he have a fence in front of his house, his door has a fence in front of it.
I've never even seen this before.
I'm sure they have more of them in Beverly Hills.
But his front door, extra fence right there.
And it's like, oh, well, you got all the bumper stickers right.
And especially in the beginning when he was like, you know, I want a ban on Muslims.
I want to build a wall.
It just all sounded un-American.
But my biggest criticism of Trump is that he's a Trumpist.
I mean, if I were debating Trump, I'd be like, you care about Trump.
You don't care about the country.
So I have my criticisms.
What's interesting about the sort of, and I was a critic of the, I don't like the idea of building a wall.
There's got to be a smarter way to do this.
I mean, you know, I just, it just, it just sounded terrible.
So, but, but what's interesting about the most vocal, the people that are really against the wall and things is the people that are doing that live behind very expensive walls.
Try getting in, try getting over the wall that is Harvard, the wall that is Yale, the wall that is Princeton, the wall that is Wesleyan, the wall that is Williams College.
Well, here's another thing that I thought of that I thought Kansas Owens had said.
Because what I've been doing lately is I'm on YouTube and I watch debates between black conservatives and black liberals.
And I get a lot from both sides.
I love it.
I'm not, you know, it's very interesting.
I'm the guy who's been, my dad had me reading Thomas Sowell a long time ago, you know, and stuff.
But what's interesting is that she said, look, if black lives really matter and you are worried about the black vote and the black political influence, which is what it comes down to, especially in local politics, You better get serious about criminalizing the border, because if you have unchecked immigration from south of the border, the Latino vote, God bless them, is going to render your vote as an African American obsolete.
They make up a lot of the school boards in this country, and they're Catholic, and they're conservative, and they're tight-knit families and stuff like that, yeah.
You mean what the principles this country was founded on?
Yeah.
Look, we've always been a country where we are a contradiction.
We've been doing this racial dance, and Jamie Masada, who's the owner of the Laugh Factory, told me an amazing story about when Richard Pryor showed up.
This is in the 70s.
Paul Mooney was there.
Paul had a big afro.
And Paul Mooney, Richard Pryor came in with this crazy Mercedes.
And Paul Mooney goes, what are you doing, bro?
That's a white man's car.
Are you crazy?
And Richard Pryor said, what are you talking about?
And he said, get in the car.
So Paul Mooney gets in the car.
He says, I'm driving.
So Paul had this Afro.
It's Richard Pryor.
It's two other comics.
I think one was black as well, maybe.
And then it's Jamie Massad in the back.
And they take a drive.
And they got stopped four times for swerving.
And finally, a black cop in Beverly Hills said, you're Richard Pryor, he's the greatest thing in the world, and they let him go.
But they went to Brentwood, they went to Beverly Hills, and so there is no doubt that historically, there is no doubt if you're African American, you have a different relationship with the police than you do if you're white.
There's no doubt about that.
I would never argue that in a million years.
The question is, the question is, what do we do about it?
What do we do about it?
Dismantle the police force?
So these are the bad ideas that I think are these reactionary ideas.
And de Blasio is not a man who lives in reality, in my opinion.
And I think he's a guy who, you know, he's talking about how... I don't think he's ever had a real...
I don't think he's ever had a real job, and he'll tell you if he was here, he'd say, I run a company that's got 50,000 employees, and I know, I know Bill, I know, that's good on you, except for you don't have to turn a profit.
I do think they get a lot of money to the tune of sometimes they get too much money in terms of the tax base in those towns like Stockton can't afford to support the fireman's safety union, the police union.
Michael Lewis wrote a good book highlighting this in a book called Boomerang.
I recommend it to people.
And he highlights California.
So sometimes when you're talking about defunding the police, you're talking about taking money away from those very powerful unions and putting it into other programs.
I understand that.
Again, again, You know, when I dismiss it as a liberal argument, I'm not being fair.
There are very smart people on the left who are looking at data as well, and they have something to offer.
Right, well, look, you know where I stand on this, and it's like, if you told me you were cutting budgets, if you told me you were cutting basically every city, federal, state, the whole thing, budgets by 20% across the board, I think we'd be just fine.
I don't think when you're looking at 150% increases in murder that what you should be doing optically, If not even granularly or correctly, you should be doing it, because it just doesn't look right.
But you mentioned something to me right before we started.
I had Giuliani on a couple of weeks ago.
And when you say that de Blasio is not qualified, or it's like, what has he done to prove that he can run this city?
So his whole life, in many ways, led to being the mayor, the guy in charge of the most important city during the most terrific terrorist attack, the whole thing.
You were telling me a little bit about what it was like to be in New York City.
You got a couple of years on me, so there were some things that you remember that I don't quite remember.
I think Albert Camus said, in the 20th century, no one can afford to not be politically and philosophically committed.
And the 20th century saw what happens when you're on the wrong side of the coin, when bad ideas win, when bad ideas like collectivism and fascism win the day. People die. People die. And I can take you to
80 million graves to prove that point. See the 40-year European Civil War called World
War I and World War II.
and the famines in China, and the famines and forced collectivization in Stalin's Russia,
etc. etc. So my favorite expression is, "You may not be interested in politics,
but it's interested in you, and it will come for you." So yes, I'm political,
and yes, I'm philosophical. And it's very difficult to earn your opinion. It's difficult.
It takes a lot of time.
It takes a lot of reading.
And it requires you to change your mind and stay humble.
So, I guess, I am political, but I don't know, I try to be, I try to be middle of the road.
No.
A better way to say it is I try to be responsive to the evidence.
I try to really listen to people I disagree with.
I do.
And I get a lot out of it.
I try to listen to people who are, for example, I've read a lot of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Ta-Nehisi would be considered on the left side of the spectrum in black intelligentsia.
He's a beautiful writer, man.
It's almost like these psalms he writes.
They're so moving.
I mean, that guy's an incredible writer.
It's okay to be really moved by something and have it emotionally move you and to believe it and to have it affect your DNA and still fundamentally, rationally, maybe disagree with the big picture and to be more on the side of someone like, I think it's John Werther or Larry Elder or Shelby Steele or Thomas Sowell.
Do you think some of that's just emotional makeup?
That some of the guys that lean right, they tend to just focus more on provable facts versus perhaps the pros that you're talking about or something like that?
Yeah, Coleman Hughes, who's sort of a disciple, a young disciple.
I mean, Coleman Hughes is figuring his way through the world as his can of zones.
But both of them are very energetic, very intelligent, very articulate human beings who happen to be They've just read, they're parroting, with all due respect, they're parroting the great thinker, the towering intellects like Thomas Sowell and stuff, and not taking anything away from them.
They have a lot of guts and they're taking on the fight.
But Coleman Hughes said something really, really interesting about, he and Werthner were talking and said, well, you know, we sound very, white they said and we we sound very rational and we sound we're both kind of atheists and what martin martin luther king had going for him he was not terrestrial he was up there and he was speaking i mean they the the if
Killer Mike is one of my favorite Americans.
I might vote for Killer Mike.
I love that guy.
That guy's read it all.
That guy's so brilliant.
I mean, he's a guy who I really, really jive with because he seems like he's on both sides of the spectrum.
We need someone as articulate and as of that community.
See, when I hear someone speak, someone like Killer Mike speak, I, and most people go, that guy comes from a part of the world where things like Bills, rent, are all you can think about.
He knows a lot of kids who've been either shot, put in jail, rightly or wrongly, or living in that.
They're caught up in the system.
And they pay for it with their blood.
They pay for it with losing years on their life.
Their grandmother's the only one who owns a house, and then somebody's trying to take it from them.
They live these terrible things.
Until the sort of black intelligentsia, this is what they were saying, until they have someone who is that theatrical, who can really speak with that musicality and that dramatic effect, they will always be the guys who are kind of, you guys are just, you guys are kind of over there and you're too rational.
We keep forgetting that people on the right and the left, you know, we keep forgetting that it's about changing minds.
It's about persuasion.
I get that you have your point of view, and I get that you have your graphs, and I get that you can point to things like that.
But, you know, if you speak like Tucker Carlson, or if you speak like Coleman Hughes, or whoever it is, or if you speak like whatever, they are very thoughtful, rational people who make very good arguments.
A lot of times that's not how your mind is changed.
Your mind is changed when someone can hit you here and hit you here.
And that's what someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates has.
That's where art And comedy and satire come into play.
You change people's minds by getting them to laugh, getting them to relax, getting them to feel valued, getting them to understand that the way they feel matters.
It's not, you know, the reason a lot of black people are really upset and taking to the streets is not made up.
That has to be acknowledged and it has to be seen.
And we have to see that first.
And then you find a way to get nuance in there.
Because they are open to nuance.
Not yet, sometimes.
Not yet.
Human beings, at first, when you hit me, when I get hit in the mouth, you've got to give me a second because I want to hit you back.
It's my instinct.
If I'm holding on to something that I care about a lot and you pull it out of my hand, I'm going to reach for it.
Even an infant does that.
You gotta give us time to reach for it.
Let me grab it back.
Let me hold on to it.
Give me a day.
Give me a year.
And then we'll come back and we'll have the debate.
And we'll be able to get all those little things in there.
And I think that's why I take heart in this country.
Because at the end of the day, we always seem to come back here and we figure it out and we make fun of how crazy we were when we were having our tantrum on the right and the left.
And then we somehow figure out when we get down to the level of detail.
The Jews have always been in a very precarious position.
They've always been this tiny minority who are the greatest innovators of all time because they've always been on the outside looking in and saying, something's not right here.
Sorry to rock the boat, but it's not fair.
Think about it.
Think about Sigmund Freud.
Sigmund Freud was a Jew who said, there's something called the subconscious.
What?
Oh, and by the way, you secretly want to have sex with your mom.
And my wonderful, the man who changed my life, a couple men have changed my life,
but he was this wonderful teacher at the neighborhood playhouse named Richard Pinter.
And he had this giant mustache, and he was a gay man and openly gay.
And I'd never met, I was 22, I'd never really actually, and he was, he said, he started talking to me,
and he said, "Oh, that embarrassed you."
And I said, "Oh, what?"
And he said, "Oh, you have one idea of what it is to be a man, don't you?"
Yeah, you have a very strong idea of masculinity.
But being emotional is also masculine.
It was the beginning of my journey of, you know.
So I was suddenly exposed to the theater world in New York, and I was around gay people.
But if you had told me that two gay people, especially two gay men, could raise a child, I remember arguing with a girl and saying, no, we can't have that.
It's not safe for the kid.
I don't remember what I was saying.
But I was 21 or 22 or 23.
And she was raised by two gay parents.
And she changed my mind.
She changed my mind.
Well, she didn't.
She got me started.
And then I grew up.
And I started to take a look at the world.
And I started to read.
And I started to think.
And I matured.
And lo and behold, now I'm pro-gay marriage.
And I'm pro all, what, I know.
And guess what else I am?
I'm pro legalization of drugs.
And I'm, you know, I'm all those things.
I'm pretty libertarian in a lot of ways.
But that doesn't mean I don't believe in some government.
Yeah, well, that's where, when I was on your show, we started talking about that stuff and trying to figure out, all right, so where are our misaligned things?
Are you for legalizing all drugs?
You're down to this meth and crack and the whole shebang.
He's down to legalize absolutely everything, and I debated this with him.
Weed, sure, all the psychedelic stuff, absolutely.
And I wouldn't want to be putting people in jail because of doing small amounts of coke or something like that.
But to me, you can't.
I know that if everything was legal, That if my next door neighbor was cooking meth, it is not good for the community, it's not good for my house value.
Yeah, but if more and more people were doing these things, and I know it's not a perfect argument because people aren't necessarily doing it, not doing it because it's illegal now.
So sometimes I think that I don't know if anybody, you know, there's a lot of scotch available anytime I want.
I got a bunch of it in my house.
I don't have time to get to drink scotch.
I don't feel well the next day.
It doesn't go with me.
But some people can't stop drinking scotch.
So I really wonder if all of this stuff was zoned and it was available the way any kind of a drug could be, under supervision or whatever it is, would you do it?
Well, if you get caught in your car on meth, if you get caught in your car
and you're wired, you're gonna go to jail, or if you get tested at your workplace,
you're gonna be in trouble.
So I think responsible people still wouldn't have the luxury or wouldn't wanna do it.
Talk to the Mexican population, the people that have to live with this stuff.
How many bodies have they had to bag innocent civilians and stuff?
So, I'm not impressed, and, There's a lot of money in this stuff, but I'm not impressed.
Collective madness exists, and I am not impressed with, for example, I've just read two books on the Afghanistan wars.
Stephen Cole wrote Ghost Wars, and he wrote Directorate S, and he did an exhaustive study, he's a Washington Post journalist, an exhaustive study on the CIA wars in Afghanistan, and our relationship with Pakistani Special Services, the ISI.
And boy, oh boy, boy, oh boy, we've been there for 17 years.
And every year the generals in the Pentagon would say, this is the decisive year, baby.
We're going to turn the corner.
And they tried everything.
These are not dumb people.
They tried it all.
Any argument you can come up with.
We've got to have local people.
We've got to win hearts and minds.
They know all that.
They did it all.
They did everything they could, as well as they could.
But boy, do they get good at killing Taliban.
And boy, you better be careful when you have a president like George W. Bush, or anybody else, who looks at these people and says, who labels an entire group of people like they're the good guys and they're the bad guys.
Problem is, when Al-Qaeda, after Tora Bora, after all of them found themselves in the Waziristan, the hinterlands, and in Pakistan, We had all these, we had this entire military apparatus.
We had these highly trained commandos who had nothing to do.
And even though the Taliban were reaching out under Mullah Omar, who said, we want to share in a ruling, we want to share in ruling the new Afghanistan, would just cut us in.
Come to the negotiating table.
When you have someone like George W. and people say, no, the Taliban are all barbaric, which maybe they were, but we can't negotiate with them the way they did with anybody who was Ba'athist in Iraq.
And then you add the fact that we have to fight another war.
We have to invade Iraq in 2003.
I know we haven't done anything yet in Afghanistan.
Let's do a two-front war.
What happens is you have this military apparatus, and who do they turn to?
Well, al-Qaeda is not there anymore, but the Taliban is there.
And they're there, and they harbored al-Qaeda, so they must be terrorists too.
And so, when you cut them completely out, when you take away any option for them to participate in the ruling of the new Afghanistan, they have to fight.
And so, you call them Taliban, and I've talked to a lot of soldiers, tip-of-the-spear guys about this, and I've talked to, I've read enough, and people that were really involved in this stuff, You call him Taliban.
That's a kid who's 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, who doesn't have anywhere to turn.
And that local group called the Taliban are going to give him four squares in a cot, three squares in a cot, and a sense of purpose?
It's the, you know, I don't pay that 13% tax or whatever it is, or 18%.
So yeah, I could save a lot of money.
And what's happening in California, it seems, is businesses are leaving for just that reason, because it's very expensive to do business here.
What California has going for it is a very diversified economy.
and amazing weather.
And it's just a huge, important state for a lot of reasons.
But California was the state that worked.
And we have a Democratic supermajority.
And if you look at local politics, it's just anytime you have a supermajority of any group, I don't care if it's Republican or Democrat, I don't think that's good for democracy.
Your vote, if you are someone who leans even a little bit right, doesn't count.
Save it.
Stay home.
We don't care.
And you aren't getting elected to local office.
You're not getting elected to government office.
Unless you are pro-big union across the board.
Good luck!
Good luck otherwise.
And I'm a member of a union.
I'm in SAG.
So I understand the value of unions, but...
It's expensive to do business and unless you can push back a little bit or come up with a compromise, I'm not bullish on California and that ain't me.
I've talked to some very smart people who are economic animals and all of them agree and all of them are looking to get out because It's too expensive.
Is it weird to you watching it spread in different areas?
So Venice always had a certain amount of that, now it's definitely more, but like Hollywood, which also always had a certain amount, it's like kind of taken over Hollywood.
If you just go to straight up, especially now where there aren't as many other people on the streets, now it just seems like all there are, kind of like transient people and homeless and tents and And as that inches closer to West Hollywood, now it'll inch closer to Beverly Hills, and that then is when it gets pushed the other way.
And that's just the way it is when you're a giant state and federal bureaucracy.
It just is.
So, is there a better way to do this?
Is there?
You know, I have my charities that I do.
I have my own personal things.
So, I think there is.
And I think that we have to be creative.
And I think that creativity and beating bad ideas with better ideas comes from individuals.
I don't think it comes from group think.
I think groupthink is dangerous.
I think groupthink is oppressive.
I think groupthink becomes orthodoxy and tyrannical.
And if you disagree with me, try to get somebody on the board of any corporation to speak Honestly, and with nuance, about any of these topics, they'll all say, I'm not touching that one.
There's something wrong with that.
There's something wrong with the fact that people on boards who are reasonable, thoughtful, go, there's something wrong with when the entire board of Nike, which is all white, pretty much, has to take these very, sort of like, And another thing, we're not racist at all!
Yeah, I would never wanna do politics, because I think that if I were in Gavin Newsom's place, or Eric Garcetti's place, and I've been critical of them, because I don't know what it is to be them, and I don't know what it is to have their job.
But I think that I would probably find myself in a very similar position as those guys.
And I'd probably go, ooh, I was a little harsh on them.
Because I had a conversation with Arnold Schwarzenegger about that.
I was with John Leguizamo and I talked to him about what it was like to be governor, and I got some pretty amazing insight.
And one of the things you'll always hear someone in power say, whether they're governor or president, they always say the same thing, which is I didn't have nearly as much power as people think I did.
I didn't have any power, a lot of times they'll say.
I couldn't do anything.
The Founding Fathers wanted a country like that.
They wanted government to move slowly.
They didn't want power to rest in one person's hands.
Thank God.
Look at the amount of pushback Trump gets.
Thank God.
I love doing what I do.
I love being a comic.
That's all I care about sometimes.
That's when I feel the most alive.
I think if I had to be a politician and go through all of that, And the frustration of having to compromise and to see how things really work.
It's like that expression, you don't wanna see how sausages are made or laws are made.
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