Aug. 15, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Sometimes these movements have to be driven by people who are true believers. | ||
| Because what happens is they push things all the way over and then it comes back. | ||
| Americans are not an extreme people. | ||
| We are not extreme. | ||
| Americans are not socialist. | ||
| Americans are not super right-wing. | ||
| Americans want a better life for their kids for the most part and are too busy with with their everyday thing. | ||
| I gotta take my kid to baseball, and I wanna be able to afford after-school activities for my kids. | ||
| That's what they really care about. | ||
| I want a little extra cash. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| As always, guys, click that subscribe button and that little notification bell so you have a small chance, at least, of seeing our videos. | ||
| And joining me today is a comedian, an actor, and co-host of the Fighter and the Kid podcast, Brian Callan, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Big fan, big fan, I love it. | ||
| Big fan, both ways. | ||
| Here I am, I finally made it. | ||
| You're in the internet now. | ||
| This is like the center of the internet, my garage. | ||
| No liability there at all. | ||
| Yes, this right here. | ||
| Everything that we say here stays here. | ||
| No one will get in any trouble. | ||
| You're completely fine. | ||
| As long as you don't express yourself freely and thoughtfully and with reason. | ||
| That seems like a good place to start. | ||
| Comedy in an age of cancellation. | ||
| How are you feeling these days? | ||
| 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? | ||
| I mean, how do you know? | ||
| And already kids are making fun of this stuff. | ||
| So I think that's very healthy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If we were, if this was 1968, we'd be saying the same thing. | ||
| And we'd be even more panicked. | ||
| You know, I think right now we're dealing with a confluence of events. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're dealing with, you know, the George Floyd, the terrible murder of George Floyd. | ||
| You're dealing with COVID-19, where nobody has jobs, nobody has anywhere to go to. | ||
| And you're dealing with all these uncertainties, and you're dealing with this incredibly polarizing figure named Donald Trump. | ||
| So that, all of that stuff, I think, is a perfect storm. | ||
| So when you're in it, it's hard to see Yeah. | ||
| a way out of it and it's hard to see sense. | ||
| I do think, again, there are a lot of bad ideas out there. | ||
| And I do think that, but again, I'm a moderate person. | ||
| I just am. | ||
| I'm naturally moderate, medium. | ||
| Well, when I was on your show, we were trying to figure out what we might differ on, | ||
| We couldn't come up with that much. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Don't tell that to the New York Times. | ||
| Well, you know, again, I think... | ||
| And then I find myself saying, you know, sometimes these movements have to be driven by people who are true believers. | ||
| Because what happens is they push things all the way over, and then it comes back. | ||
| Americans are not an extreme people. | ||
| We are not extreme. | ||
| Americans are not socialist. | ||
| Americans are not super right-wing. | ||
| Americans want a better life for their kids, for the most part, and are too busy with with their everyday thing. | ||
| I got to take my kid to baseball and I want to be able to afford after school activities for my kids. | ||
| That's what they really care about. | ||
| I want a little extra cash. | ||
| I mean, if you really come down to it, and I think that the silent majority, the most they ever really do is write letters. | ||
| We tweet now. | ||
| You know, stuff like that. | ||
| But, you know, come election time, a lot of times, if they feel like their bottom line is being affected, i.e. | ||
| the way their children are being raised, educated, and whether or not they have a little extra cash in their pocket, that'll get them to the polls. | ||
| Otherwise... | ||
| I got enough for this and I got enough for that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They're just as smart. | ||
| I promise you they are. | ||
| I know smarter in a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Academia is a horrible place. | ||
| By their own people. | ||
| Not by the other guys. | ||
| They'll get destroyed by their own. | ||
| Oh, they're not a charitable people at all. | ||
| They're awful. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But you can ignore it. | ||
| Your job is to stay honest and be in the business of original self-expression and keep doing it because it's needed and it's wanted. | ||
| Bill Burr will say that. | ||
| Bill Burr will be like, he says crazy things on stage and people are like, I've seen people go, is he allowed to say that? | ||
| And I say to Bill, I go, you're so gutsy. | ||
| I mean, he goes, no, I'm not. | ||
| Eight people on Twitter hate me. | ||
| Everybody else gets it. | ||
| And he's right. | ||
| Right, they'll call him racist. | ||
| Yeah, but it's such a breath of fresh air. | ||
| My wife happens to be black. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Not that that proves anything. | ||
| That's not a get-out-of-jail-card. | ||
| Yeah, it's not anymore. | ||
| Being black isn't a get-out-of-jail-card. | ||
| Ask Candace Owens. | ||
| Ask Larry Elder. | ||
| Ask Thomas Sowell. | ||
| These people are, you know, Shelby Steele. | ||
| Those people are not, they're persona non grata. | ||
| Ask Condoleezza Rice, who wasn't allowed to speak, I think, at Wesleyan. | ||
| Concert pianist, smart woman, but you're not on that side. | ||
| So those people are afraid. | ||
| They're afraid of true scholarship, of nuance, and of deep thinking. | ||
| And it requires that. | ||
| What about the regular people, though? | ||
| Not the comics that are supposed to be doing this and the artists that are supposed to be expressing themselves? | ||
| Because that's the big one I get now. | ||
| Mail I get every day from people that are just like, I have to be anonymous on Twitter, I can't post on Facebook anymore, all of that stuff. | ||
| Because their job is not expression, and they're afraid they're gonna lose their job if they haven't- And they can. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what's so disheartening is that corporations, if you work for a large corporation, they don't care. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I don't want people to be racist. | ||
| I would. | ||
| And it's not that they're racist or anything. | ||
| Do you really think that because Adidas or Nike or Netflix, whoever stands against racism, | ||
| do you stand against racism guys? | ||
| I do, I do. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| I do. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I don't want people to be racist. | ||
| If you could go back and stop slavery, would you? | ||
| I would, I would. | ||
| Wow, you're so noble. | ||
| And thanks for posting that black square because that's what a single mom in the hood needs from you. | ||
| Boy, she must be breathing a breath of fresh air as she's trying to raise three kids. | ||
| That must be fantastic. | ||
| And her other kids just got picked up on a marijuana bid and is looking at getting stuck in the system that he can't get out. | ||
| But thanks for your black square. | ||
| And thank you, Hollywood actors, for taking responsibility. | ||
| I appreciate that, because you guys are making such a difference. | ||
| It's embarrassing. | ||
| It's embarrassing. | ||
| And thank you. | ||
| Thank you for repeating the phrase that was given to you by someone you don't know, like systematic racism and white privilege. | ||
| It sounds good. | ||
| It makes you feel emotionally cathartic, I suppose. | ||
| What are you actually doing? | ||
| Where were you when a hundred black people were shot in Chicago over Father's Day weekend? | ||
| Five of them children who were killed. | ||
| Where were you? | ||
| Why are you not in the street there, my friends? | ||
| But you're not. | ||
| Because you're too busy. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, you can't be. | ||
| Unfortunately, sometimes things are bigger than you are. | ||
| And so all you can do is reach out like a spastic. | ||
| And kind of say, let me tweet something! | ||
| I'm against racism! | ||
| I'm for peace and harmony! | ||
| You're for peace and harmony! | ||
| I'm for war and chaos! | ||
| Dude, I can't believe that. | ||
| But your bumper sticker and that thing you put up in your store really has changed my mind. | ||
| So I just see a bunch of, it's like watching a bunch of people on stationary bicycles trying to get somewhere. | ||
| It's embarrassing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Suddenly you like fences. | ||
| Look, I've never been a fan of Donald Trump. | ||
| I don't like his personality. | ||
| I don't think he's an effective leader. | ||
| I have a lot of criticisms. | ||
| I did not vote for him. | ||
| I'm not a fan. | ||
| Never have been. | ||
| Did you vote for Hillary? | ||
| I did vote for Hillary and I don't like Hillary. | ||
| I didn't know what to do. | ||
| I couldn't vote for that guy. | ||
| 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, forget that! | ||
| Forget that! | ||
| Isn't she responsible for the Tenderloin? | ||
| Isn't that her district? | ||
| Or is that Maxine Waters, the late Maxine? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Oh, Maxine is here, yeah. | ||
| No, Nancy's up in San Francisco. | ||
| So, I mean, of course. | ||
| So you people live behind very expensive walls. | ||
| I can't afford those walls. | ||
| And I don't have the grades. | ||
| But why is it people can't connect those two things? | ||
| 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. | ||
| You can say whatever you want, but when it comes down to getting votes, Politicians are going to be able to skip over your districts. | ||
| It's not going to matter in five years. | ||
| And I went, wow, that's a contradiction. | ||
| That puts the left in a real predicament here. | ||
| It really does. | ||
| Because now you've got to get very serious about immigration, | ||
| maybe even draconian, hard, terrible, terrible problem when you have children and you have desperate people | ||
| trying to come over your border. | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| I don't know how to solve that. | ||
| But what a dilemma and what a corner they have painted themselves in. | ||
| Yeah, and there's studies, by the way, that show that Latino immigrants who've come here legally | ||
| are now actually much harsher on illegal immigration than your average white liberal. | ||
| What a surprise. | ||
| Because they came in the right way. | ||
| The conservative people. | ||
| Yeah, and they've become the new conservatives. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm starting to think that maybe judging people by the color of their skin and their ethnicity, maybe that can't hold in the long term? | ||
| Dave, you mean treat people like individuals? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So the billion they're cutting from New York City policing that de Blasio wants to get rid of as crime is now, I think murders are up 150% last week. | ||
| That'll be his political liability. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, and it doesn't mean you run it well. | ||
| And it doesn't mean you run it well. | ||
| He's got a very strong, it seems to me from what I've heard, a socialist ideology. | ||
| He speaks like a lot of politicians did in Sweden in the 70s. | ||
| And let's see what happens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| I'm not impressed so far. | ||
| I do think that police unions are very powerful. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So I don't wanna, you know. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, Giuliani, the guy's got a pedigree. | ||
| He was an attorney general. | ||
| He was hunting down the mafia. | ||
| Well, his father got shut down by the mafia. | ||
| Right, so he talks about that. | ||
| 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 remember New York, my mother and father, my mother was born and raised in Brooklyn. | ||
| and then she went to Westchester County, but my family, the Italian side-- | ||
| My dad born in Brooklyn, my mom grew up in Westchester. | ||
| All right, well good. | ||
| So the Italian side, the Sicilian side, are all Brooklyn, Staten Island, | ||
| and then some in Westchester. | ||
| So I would always, I grew up overseas my whole life, but when I finally went to college in Washington, D.C., | ||
| I would come up to New York to see my family, and I had my friends in New York. | ||
| And so I remember what New York was like in 87, 88, 89, 90. | ||
| When you went down to Tompkins Square Park, When they shut it down and redid it, they found diseases in the soil like tetanus, like bubonic plague. | ||
| When my grandfather found out I was hanging out on Avenue A, I was dating Patty Jenkins, who is the great director of Wonder Woman. | ||
| She lived on Avenue A and 11th Street. | ||
| And when I would go down there, man, I was always so nervous because it was Mad Max. | ||
| It was chaos. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| And my grandfather couldn't believe I was hanging out down there. | ||
| And there was an expression back then. | ||
| If you hung out on Avenue A, you were adventurous. | ||
| B, you were bold. | ||
| C, you were crazy. | ||
| And D, you were dead. | ||
| And I'm telling you, man, when I used to go see my buddy John Joseph, who was the lead singer of the Cro-Mags, this is in 1989. | ||
| This was probably 91. 91. | ||
| People don't believe this, but it was 91. | ||
| It was right where CBGB's was. | ||
| I could not. | ||
| He would have to meet me on Houston Street because we would go into Ludlow Street, Rivington. | ||
| Try buying an apartment there now. | ||
| See how much it costs you. | ||
| Forget it. | ||
| I mean, you can't look at a place for under $3,000 a square foot. | ||
| Well, it's a little less now because the city ain't doing so great. | ||
| Okay, maybe a little less. | ||
| Maybe a little less. | ||
| I was, I could not, he had to walk me because I'd get jumped by the local kids, the gangs that were hanging out there. | ||
| And I, I would walk with him, but if I wasn't walking with him, I was in trouble. | ||
| And he, he was adamant about that. | ||
| He goes, you can't, you gotta, I gotta meet you. | ||
| I'm just afraid that, you know, somebody will mess with you. | ||
| So, to see that radical shift under Giuliani was kind of amazing. | ||
| Look, I don't know what it's like to run, be the mayor of a city. | ||
| I don't know Bill de Blasio. | ||
| I don't know what the challenges he faces. | ||
| I do have a sense of what his ideology is, and I don't think it's the best thing in the world for... We are in very different... | ||
| Do you consider yourself that political? | ||
| It's interesting, because you're sort of political, but also it strikes me as more just like, I care about life or something. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There is room for both. | ||
| There's room for both. | ||
| 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? | ||
| It depends on where your brain's at. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's not a show, you learn from people. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| It kind of makes it sense in its way here. | ||
| I'm an optimist. | ||
| I was gonna say, you're an optimist. | ||
| I am. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I am. | ||
| I think that's what happens. | ||
| I think that's who you and I are, and I think that's who a lot of people are. | ||
| Well, it's funny, because people always say to me, are you an optimist or a pessimist? | ||
| And I always say, well, I'm a world-weary optimist. | ||
| I don't think I could do this if I wasn't an optimist. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, if I didn't fundamentally believe, oh, we actually can change people, or any of this actually matters, What the hell would we be doing all day? | ||
| Why would we be talking to all these people, reading these books, and the rest of it? | ||
| It would just be an exercise in futility. | ||
| But you're Jewish, Dave, and so is Sam Harris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Doesn't usually end well for the Jews. | |
| No, no, but the tradition in the Jewish, and Ben Shapiro, the tradition in the Jewish, whether you know it or not, the history of the Jews. | ||
| Moses debated, Moses argued with God! | ||
| Moses! | ||
| God called them the stiff-necked people. | ||
| Debate! | ||
| Debate! | ||
| There are plenty of stories in the Old Testament of rabbis. | ||
| Even if God were to come down and perform a miracle, the rabbis would say, well, how can we be sure of that? | ||
| Three Jews at a table, four opinions. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Do you know how heretical, do you know how outrageous that was? | ||
| Albert Einstein said, hey guys, I know that Isaac Newton said that there's something called time, and it's the alpha and the omega. | ||
| Time's relative. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Time bends. | ||
| And so everything you've ever heard, including the Bible, is wrong. | ||
| They called him, they called it Jewish science. | ||
| They called it Dadaism. | ||
| I mean, so you are standing well in your tradition. | ||
| You should be speaking truth to power. | ||
| You should be pushing back. | ||
| You should be debating. | ||
| That is one of the greatest I get hit up sometimes by Nazis. | ||
| They find my email and I love to have these arguments. | ||
| I love to sit there and go, I'm glad that you're parroting what some moron has put in your head and now let me debate you. | ||
| You're spending time during the day debating Nazis. | ||
| I like to try to change minds. | ||
| And that's what we have to do. | ||
| Because they're usually young angry men who have nowhere to place their energy. | ||
| And if you can start to talk to them... My mind was changed that way, Dave. | ||
| My mind was changed that way. | ||
| I was a young man. | ||
| Do you remember a moment? | ||
| Very well. | ||
| I was a young man in theater school. | ||
| And I had never really met anybody who was gay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm not a, you know, I think we do need some. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I find myself saying I don't know a lot. | ||
| You mentioned Michael Malice right before we started. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He wouldn't have to cook meth if it was legal, right? | ||
| He'd be able to get it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, the way I look at it is this. | ||
| There must be personalities who are going to do that stuff anyway, right? | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| If I was doing a lot of blow, I don't have time. | ||
| I went to a party in Seattle one time after my show, and everybody was doing blow. | ||
| And they were offering me blow. | ||
| As a comic, I've had to... I've got to wake up. | ||
| I've got to catch a flight, or I've got to life. | ||
| I can't... And also, I don't want my heart to stop. | ||
| There are a lot of things where you go, I also don't have time to do math. | ||
| It doesn't work out very well. | ||
| That's a good PSA right there. | ||
| Math, I just don't have time. | ||
| Nobody ever had a lot of problems, did math, and then it got better. | ||
| That bad? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Never. | |
| Said no one ever, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So that's my argument there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I do think you maybe would have more accidental ingestion of things, | ||
| and I don't, but how is the war on drugs going so far? | ||
| Just curious. | ||
| No, quite horribly. | ||
| Yeah, just wondering. | ||
| Look, marijuana is still federally illegal. | ||
| Let's talk to the Mexicans. | ||
| Yeah, talk to the Mexicans. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The longest war in American history. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Be careful of binary thought patterns. | ||
| Good guys, bad guys, Taliban, Ba'athists, and everybody else, all that crap. | ||
| You better be careful. | ||
| Doesn't work out, historically. | ||
| So, I don't know where I was going with that. | ||
| Well, does either book go into why we're there? | ||
| I feel like nobody even knows why we're there anymore. | ||
| I know there was an argument, the Taliban, 17 years ago. | ||
| I'll tell you why we were there. | ||
| We went in there to get rid of Al-Qaeda. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what happens. | ||
| So now you're fighting Taliban. | ||
| You're fighting everybody. | ||
| Isn't it weird how we stay in these places? | ||
| And I think if you asked I think it would be something like 75% of Americans. | ||
| If you said, let's just leave today. | ||
| Let's just, let's just get out. | ||
| We don't know why we're there. | ||
| Nobody knows why. | ||
| That's why I started the question like that. | ||
| Like nobody really knows why. | ||
| That's not how government works. | ||
| We know how it was sold, but right. | ||
| That's not how government works on intent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every, every politician and every government, including the Pentagon. | ||
| So I love these guys who were like, I'm, I favor small government. | ||
| Although I get, we can't cut the military's budget. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Got to have that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| How is that going? | ||
| It's so taboo to talk about the military and stuff like that. | ||
| Bloated bureaucracy. | ||
| So is the CIA. | ||
| So is DIA. | ||
| So is the National Security Agency. | ||
| So is all of it. | ||
| They're huge, bloated bureaucracies, and anybody who's in it will tell you that. | ||
| No, they're not sacred. | ||
| No, it's not hands-off. | ||
| Yes, you should criticize them. | ||
| Yes, you should hold them to account. | ||
| Because I'm not impressed. | ||
| And you know whose fault it is? | ||
| You can't find anybody's fault. | ||
| A lot of people are highly competent, very intelligent people. | ||
| The problem with any government agency, including the military and the intelligence apparatus, is it continues to grow. | ||
| No politician wants to be seen being soft on military, soft on intelligence, soft on | ||
| terrorism. | ||
| So you've got to package these things. | ||
| You've got to pass things like the Patriot Act. | ||
| You're against the Patriot Act? | ||
| You must not be a patriot. | ||
| So packaging. | ||
| Words are very important. | ||
| Black lives matter. | ||
| Are you going to say they don't? | ||
| Are you against that? | ||
| It's very, very shrewd of any movement. | ||
| The first thing you do with a movement is you word it properly. | ||
| You got to spend a lot of time in that boardroom coming up with a really cool, irrefutable, marketable name or phrase. | ||
| And the military does it and administrations do it all the time. | ||
| You're not a progressive? | ||
| You're not for progress? | ||
| What are you for? | ||
| There you go, buddy. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And that's what you better be careful of. | ||
| And I don't think most Americans are hoodwinked. | ||
| I think most Americans know that. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| I have a lot of faith in the common man. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We talked about New York City. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We talked about Afghanistan. | ||
| Seems like the segue to where we're at right now in California. | ||
| What do you make about what's going on with this state? | ||
| We both, we talked about it about a month ago on your show. | ||
| I was strongly considering leaving. | ||
| Like I was looking at real estate. | ||
| I had a whole bunch of people begging me to come to Dallas. | ||
| I would have had a pretty sweet operation over there. | ||
| My feeling right now is I want to stay and fight here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love that. | |
| I love SoCal. | ||
| I love the weather, of course, and all that, but I built a good life here. | ||
| We've got friends. | ||
| I like it here. | ||
| It's a freaking mess, absolute mess. | ||
| I think you're in a bit of a similar situation. | ||
| I am, and I didn't think about staying and fighting until I spoke to you, and I haven't stopped thinking about that, and I think you're right. | ||
| I was just in Austin looking at property, and boy, does that, ugh. | ||
| No, I know, we probably, I told you, we're probably looking at the same houses. | ||
| I'm on Trulia, like, man, what I could get in Austin. | ||
| Look at the amount of money I can save. | ||
| It's cheaper to live. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I live on Skid Row, basically. | ||
| I'm in Venice. | ||
| I've been in Venice for 25 years. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But I don't recognize my town anymore as much. | ||
| It's gotten really bad over there, right? | ||
| It's not just gotten very bad, it's become profitable. | ||
| Because developers now can get these government contracts. | ||
| I mean, I can build you a bunch of apartments for $200 million on prime real estate, on a parking lot, and on the | ||
| beach if you'd like. | ||
| I'd be happy to do that. | ||
| We can create homeless apartments for people who are homeless. | ||
| And don't worry about doing drugs or anything else. | ||
| We're not gonna put any of those restrictions on you. | ||
| You can come and go as you like. | ||
| So there is something that, this is not me, but a scholar I had a long conversation with called the homeless industrial complex. | ||
| Once there's money in bidding and getting homeless shelters for big developers, you better be careful. | ||
| So, these people need to be put in treatment. | ||
| The majority of the people on the street, it's not a housing problem. | ||
| It's not a housing problem. | ||
| It's not a housing problem. | ||
| It is a mental health and addiction problem. | ||
| And until we get serious about that, we're gonna be in big trouble. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, they have their own police force, but Prop 47, and you can't, it's not criminalized. | ||
| I voted for Prop 47 because the way it was phrased, and it had the, again, on the ballot, as I'm voting, I went, well, this makes sense. | ||
| I don't want kids to be in a revolving door of crime, and police chiefs back it. | ||
| Callan, did you read the whole thing? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I didn't have time. | ||
| I'm remiss. | ||
| But that's how they get you in this state. | ||
| I think more than any other. | ||
| During the last election, there was this one thing on the ballot about, you know, do you want to, it was something like this. | ||
| Do you want to put $500 million into education for, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then there's essay, just a giant crazy essay on the whole thing. | ||
| And I skipped all the way to the bottom. | ||
| And on the bottom it says, this can only be repealed or reversed Buy popular vote. | ||
| But nobody ever says, okay, now we'll take the money from the kids. | ||
| But that's government 101. | ||
| Sell it, exactly, the packaging thing you're talking about. | ||
| Nobody reads the fine print. | ||
| And then you throw it back on the people to be like, oh, you'll have to take care of this. | ||
| Deal with this. | ||
| There's always blowback. | ||
| There's always a ripple effect. | ||
| No matter what the intentions are. | ||
| You know, we've spent something like $3 trillion on programs for the poor. | ||
| How's that going? | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| I think at the end of the day, it's not about right or left. | ||
| You've got to ask yourself, do you really think that a bloated bureaucracy called the federal government is the first line of defense? | ||
| Is that the best way to solve these problems? | ||
| Is it? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Is government going to keep families intact? | ||
| Is a government official or a bureaucrat who studies family law or whatever going to keep your family intact? | ||
| Are they going to get you to take care of your kids? | ||
| Are they going to get you the skill set you need in the 21st century, the ever-changing 21st century? | ||
| It's a question. | ||
| Maybe the answer is yes in some cases, but I don't know if that's always the answer. | ||
| And you've got to ask those questions. | ||
| The problem we run into is we go, well I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat, I'm left, I'm right. | ||
| No, no, hold on, hold on. | ||
| Let's go into what percentage of your money do you want to give the government every year, every day? | ||
| I pay something like 52% in taxes. | ||
| So half my day, half my year is working for someone else. | ||
| Half my day, half my year is working for someone else. | ||
| So how much more do you want from me? | ||
| What do you want? | ||
| We can negotiate this. | ||
| Especially in this biz where you also gave a lot to your agent and your lawyer and everything else. | ||
| It's not crying me a river, it's just I know what the reality is. | ||
| To spend $1, I gotta make $2. | ||
| It's always been the case for me. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| I'm giving you half my money. | ||
| Now, is it being spent wisely? | ||
| I bet you I could find cases where it's not. | ||
| 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! | ||
| And they do a lot for the communities of color. | ||
| Where do they make their shoes, by the way? | ||
| Is there any problems with that? | ||
| Maybe, maybe not. | ||
| Again, very good company, and a very profitable company, and they do employ a lot of, but so goes the dance. | ||
| So goes the dance here. | ||
| This is the dance we've been doing for a long time. | ||
| And I'm an optimist, because this country is the great experiment. | ||
| That's what we called it, right? | ||
| It is a great experiment. | ||
| It's like that famous story, whether it's true or not, when Abraham Lincoln came out and said, what did you do in there? | ||
| And we created a republic, madam, if you can keep it. | ||
| It's a great way to say it. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I think we have to keep... | ||
| To the fact that this country is also built on a contract which is, keep your promises, don't take what doesn't belong to you. | ||
| And if you violate those first two principles, then you have to have courts that can make it right and okay. | ||
| And all of that requires an objective mindset and an objective set of laws and objective institutions. | ||
| You know, Callan, I should end it right there, because that was a beautiful... Well, there's no music to it. | ||
| I like to have a little music swell, if you could. | ||
| We could put something in post. | ||
| And I wanted a fan, but my hair, it's not long enough. | ||
| I just like to have... It's all amazing. | ||
| That was a beautiful, perfect ending. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| But, you've led me to the obvious question, then, to really end this thing, which is, alright, you're going to stay in California. | ||
| You're making a lot of sense. | ||
| People like you. | ||
| Governor? | ||
| I mean, would you ever get into politics? | ||
| Because this happens all the time. | ||
| I get people in here who are great, thoughtful, interesting, open, decent, all that stuff. | ||
| And then it's like, well, all right, do you want to get in? | ||
| And it's what people ask me all the time. | ||
| And I'm like, no freaking way. | ||
| I like standup too much. | ||
| You know, I will never stop being a comic. | ||
| Yeah, he is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you'd have to lie because it's who it is. | ||
| So the point is I'm running for governor. | ||
| Put up with these pansies. | ||
| The point is you're running for governor, calendar 2024. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about comedy, instead of the nonstop yelling you get everywhere else, check out our comedy playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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