Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Fmr John Oliver Writer on Bias, Blackface & Making Sense of the News

Transcript

Fmr John Oliver Writer on Bias, Blackface & Making Sense of the News · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans! Welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
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  Here's a dangerous question for you. Has our culture ever actually reckoned intelligently,
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  had a grown-up conversation about the newer taboos, especially around race and gender,
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  and transgenderism? Or did the media just sort of flip from the casual bigotry that it had
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  in the 20th century to the sensorious hysteria of peak work in a way that actually empowered
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  the rise of the new right and robbed us of the ability to try to think carefully about issues
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  of importance to cultural and social cohesion? One person who was at the call face of the
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  greater wokening and trying to think about this in the way that these ideas were articulated
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  to the public is Jeff Mora, who was a comedy writer on one of the biggest progressive
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  satirical shows in America last week tonight with John Oliver from its first season right through
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  until 2020 when he left the show because he felt that it had become somewhat ideologically
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  captured and perhaps for personal reasons as well. Now Jeff has a wildly popular political
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  satire substack, a comedy substack called I Might Be Wrong and I had planned to chat with Jeff
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  because I've been a little bit out of the news loop. I wanted his thoughts on Minneapolis and Epstein
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  and ICE and the 2020 election, ballots in Georgia being seized and Don Lemon's arrest and the
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  Melania documentary of course, the most important news. But we ended up talking about a much more
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  fascinating subject which is the one that I just articulated like we sort of address blackface
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  and transgenderism as two examples of maybe where the media lost its way, where we lost the ability
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  to cover the news and to satirize the news without pandering to our audiences and preaching to the choir.
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  I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one the only Jeff Moira.
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  Jeff, lovely to see you again. So we did this debate, this debate about whether or not,
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  I mean how did they frame the question again, Jeff? It was basically this sort of vegan question
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  of whether we should give consideration to the shrimp of the world because the argument was
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  there are just so many damn shrimp that are being tortured because humans consume so many more
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  shrimp than they do any other animal that they eat that we should think about like introducing,
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  like spending a little bit of money to like stun them before we kill them or something. And then
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  you was saying that's bachit crazy to spend that money on people not squiggly little bottom dwelling.
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  Yeah, yeah, when we say shrimp people might be wondering is there something American Australia
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  lost in translation does shrimp mean something different? No, we're talking about the crustacean.
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  Yes, from the guy prawns, you know that. We call them prawns also. Do you always call them prawns?
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  We always call them prawns. Yes. No prawns are like the bigger one. Yes, no, in Australia you might
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  hear shrimp if it's those tiny, tiny frozen things that you would get in a Chinese fried rice
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  takeout. Oh, okay. They might be marketed as shrimp, but anything that's an actual
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  crustacean is a prawn, which was especially egregious because back in the 1980s,
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  you're probably too young to remember this as am I, but it's legend in Australia.
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  Why did you think that? No, I was live in the 80s, yeah. Well, you may not remember the ad that
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  Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan did for Australia. This trade tourism, which went wild in America
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  after Crocodile Dundee, and he was standing in Australia in the sunshine with some prawns on a
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  barbecue, and he said, come on down under. We'll throw another shrimp on the barbie for you.
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  Shrimp on the barbie. So now a shrimp on the barbie is like this thing that Americans think
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  that Australians say, and it's something that no Australian would ever say because you would call
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  them a prawn. It's funny. It's funny. It's funny. It's like if you had an American in an ad in
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  Britain, and they're talking about lorries and lifts and stuff, right? Is that type of
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  exactly the right thing? I have to, the farm is going to have to understand.
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  I don't know, because it's true. If you asked an American, like name three things in Australian
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  says, strip on the barbie is going to be one of the three. That's right. And it might not come
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  up with two others, like fosters. People think fosters drink fosters, the pan, and the third one
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  would just go be also crocodile dandy. You call that a knife. This is a knife. That's true.
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  That's that is that is something we always say. We always carry it for that accent.
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  Crocodile. Yeah, it's more knife. Yeah, you've got to go through the nose more a bit.
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  Oh, but no, but I appreciate you be reference to the greatest film Australia has ever made.
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  But the but fosters also interesting story about fosters, chef. Nobody in Australia drinks fosters.
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  It's not even available. Oh, is that right? Really? You would have to go to you. Well, you know,
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  if you went to a gigantic liquor store, like with aisles and aisles of liquor, they would probably
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  have fosters somewhere way up the back and they'd have to go and hunt for it. But fosters did a great
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  marketing campaign of realizing that Australia was popular in America and just marketing themselves
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  as it's Australian for beer. Say yes, like there are a bunch of wines and things. It's all generally
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  I find that when a brand or a person is doing a whole lot of it's doing a whole lot of hoo ha
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  about how authentically they belong to a particular place. They usually just shilling bullshit.
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  It's it's bullshit. It's it's yes, it's a marketing team in New York. Yeah, exactly. Every every
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  like bar barbecue restaurant in the States, like it's it was six guys in L.A. And they realize,
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  yeah, Billy Joe's down home barbecue pit will exactly sell well.
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  What's the Australian one that you guys have an outback steakhouse? Oh, outback steakhouse. That's
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  right. No Australians have been there people from Miami or something. Yeah, it was it was set up by
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  a bunch of Americans who exactly around this time the crocodile done D time were like, yeah,
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  they were looking for a theme for a restaurant. They thought what about an Australian theme and they
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  invented a whole bunch of things that don't exist in Australia. What's a blooming onion? No
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  Australians have ever heard of a blooming onion. And you got a Australian's got a nature. But kind
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  of tasty. Do you have the equivalent? Do you have the the Bizarre world equivalent in Australia
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  where there are like American things, but it's like the American themed restaurant and
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  a rest of development where it's all cowboy like here's your trade donuts. Like you have that.
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  Yes, sort of, but I think America gets a pass because it's cultural hegemony is so profound
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  that we do know what everyone in the world knows sort of what America is like because we see it
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  on television all the time. So it's harder to fake. It's harder to fake badly. But there are still
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  American style diners here, which are done up like a 1950s diner with like the red letter and
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  the, you know, the old frosted shakes, molten shakes and stuff like that. That would be a gimmick.
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  But I'm sure that it's that the sin is more egregious when it comes to like German restaurants or
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  something. Like if you go into a restaurant in Australia, it'll all be like umpa lumpa ladies and
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  like frowlines with huge signs of beer and pork knuckles and things and a German. I just,
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  someone from someone from like, you know, Frankfurt would walk in and go, this is not Germany's
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  aside. No. Yeah, right on that right on the right on the line between cultural interest and offensive
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  stereotype. Just right. Right on the nice edge between those two. Yeah, exactly. I don't even
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  remember how we started talking about Australia. What were we talking about? I the shrimp debate,
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  which I already got us way, way, way of track. Yes, the army from Bentham's Bulldog. I'm
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  blanking on the guy who writes. Bentham's Bulldog. It's because I always think of that. Yeah,
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  the Bentham's Bulldog guy who's it's not Jerry Bentham. That would be a hell of a thing. But
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  it's that's the blog. Um, he's a very old man. Yes, he has this right here. He's still producing.
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  I know. He's one of it. He's he's rising on sub stack very quickly. He's hitting him.
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  Good. His time is hitting him. He I think his name is Matthew has has a very utilitarian position
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  on charity, which is that, you know, obviously your dollar could go to any number of causes. They
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  were trying to take a super. I hope utilitarian is the right word approach to it. Sort of, you know,
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  we've heard the phrase effective altruism looking at that and trying to quantify, you know,
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  what is, you know, one human life versus like a the pain of a billion shrimp or however many shrimp
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  and they did kind of run this calculation and deduce that in his mind, you can do the most good
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  by helping the shrimp. That's because apparently before I didn't know any of this before the
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  debate, but before shrimp are farmed, um, they're sometimes think this is gross, but they
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  gouge their eyes out because apparently it helps with fertility. Well, you don't need to gouge a
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  shrimp. Have you ever seen a shrimp or a prawn Jeff? You see their eyes? You don't, you don't gouge
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  them. Aren't they sticking? Aren't they jutting out on a little twiggly thing? A little on a, yeah,
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  on a twiggly thing. That is the scientific term, you know, the things adopt. It's like
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  not a foreign but a mock my marine biology, Jeff, but it's almost in my brain, it's like if a
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  human put on one of those novelty eyeglasses that have the springs on them with the eyes that
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  the animals dangling down, you wouldn't need to gouge it. You would just yank. So I think they yank
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  the eyes off the prawn because it makes them more fertile, makes the females fertile. Apparently,
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  and I hear your argument that they're kind of begging for it. So, you know, I hear you. There's
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  that and apparently the way they're killed to be more than they could have had inverted eyes,
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  Jeff. Yeah. So I don't know how they found it. Who was the first person who found out that if
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  you yank their eyes off, the females become more fertile? That's a, that's a great question. What
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  other trial and error was that sick fuck going through? Exactly. How many, how many things did they
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  attempt before they landed on the eyes? I know, but I just respect the patience of tracking the
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  fertility data after you've done the yanking and not the yanking. Like you're not just a macabre
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  son of a bitch. You're actually very diligent. You're a diligent nerd macabre son of a bitch.
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  A combination of Gregor Mendel and Joseph Mangoli. That's who you have to be to find that out.
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  Wow. That's that must be the highest brow joke we've ever had on a conversation so far.
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  Not even going to try to dig into explaining it. So we have you here, Jeff, because I've been on
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  vacation and I haven't been paying. I couldn't book anybody better. That's how I get most of my
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  bookings of booking fabulous people. But I felt like, you know what? I need someone in the States who
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  isn't going to be a downer who can bring me up to speed on a few of the things that have been
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  going on over the past few months because the pace of news is just head spinning. And when you come
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  back into it after not having been consuming the news on a regular basis, it's like, wait a second.
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  Am I supposed to care about Melania's movie or the Epstein files or Donald Trump supposedly
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  shitting himself or Greenland no longer being invaded or Venezuela. What is happening? And Iran
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  and attack and like what? And Minnesota and ice. And now Trump is sending the FBI into
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  Georgia, Georgia, renowned up election officials and prosecute them for having correctly
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  processed the 2020 election. It's a lot. I do ask. And the correct answer is the Melania movie.
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  Josh, it has taken the nation by storm. I was hoping you'd say we're all seeing. I did see it.
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  Because of my, because of my stupid job, it's for this goddamn job. I, you know, I run a
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  sub stack. So for my piece that went up this morning, I went and I paid 15 bucks to see Melania.
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  And Josh, it was in the movie theater. Yes, you can't stream it yet. So I, yes, I went out in
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  public. I looked at it. People saw me walking into Melania. Okay. There's a lot. That's a dedication.
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  I have to even get to the movie. I want to know where did you see it? What like what the city
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  did you see it in? And who was in the theater? That's a great question. It doesn't have any.
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  So suburban DC, I live just just on the Maryland side of DC. And it was at the mall out here.
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  So I went out to see it. And I did think I'm going to be the only person to theater. I was not.
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  There were seven women in front of me, seven older women. They, they, they knew each other.
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  They're definitely, I think it's my mom's in one of these groups. She lives near me here in
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  Maryland. And you know, so I think like they go out and somebody picked a movie. And I don't
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  know if Cheryl's going to be allowed to pick the movie again, but somebody picked Melania. And
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  they seem to enjoy it. They seem to enjoy it. They clapped when it was over. Okay. And what did you say?
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  I, I, oh, it's, it's an obvious bribe. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, the one you say bribe. Just
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  explain to people who are not across the news as much as you, what, why it's a bribe and what they
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  will pay to what the Trump. Yeah. So Amazon, I hope I have the numbers right off the top of my head.
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  If they're not exactly right, they're close. It's 40 million. They played 40 million for the rights.
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  And 35 million on marketing, which if you know about marketing for movies, marketing for
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  documentaries, marketing for documentaries, you're like, we will give you a ride to Kinkos.
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  And then you can run off as many flyers as you feel like paying for. And that's the marketing
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  budget. 35 million for a documentary is insane. And, and by the way, also, um, explains why
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  if you squint just right, you can say Melania is the best weekend debut for a documentary
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  in the last 10 years. If you could define documentary really narrowly and things like that.
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  It's like, yeah, but it also got a $35 million push behind it. No, the documentary gets that.
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  So yes, Amazon 75 million all in on this documentary. It looks like they're not going to come
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  within miles of making that back, which normally is something that movies studios care about
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  quite a bit. Uh, so it seems more far more likely to be just a big, uh, it's a, it's a transfer
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  of money. And also it's, um, you know, it's flattering to make this movie. They're trying to make
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  her the comparison in the movie. It's like very blatant. They're trying to say like she's like
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  Jackie O, but better. The Jackie O comparisons are many. And they're like, hey, you know how people,
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  you know, kind of, I hope I, I don't know how dirty I could do this podcast. You know,
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  people kind of cream their jeans over Jackie O's like sense of style, which I always thought was
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  stupid, but people do that. They're like, well, Melania has even more style. So the movie's just
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  her trying on jackets and hats and stuff. And it's, uh, the way I put it this morning on a,
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  in notes was it's like watching someone watch paint dry. It's just unbelievably boring.
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  And the, the only reason it exists is because it's a bright stuff. And so, but Amazon,
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  and there was some, was there a deal that, uh, Trump was going to approve? Or was that the
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  skydance thing with CBS? I can't, I get confused, but there was something that Amazon wanted to
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  carry favor with Trump about. And then all of a sudden, uh, lucky here, we have a, a Melania
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  documentary that we really, really want to spend $40 million on and lose a lot of money,
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  but we're going to pay you for it. Well, any company Amazon's size constantly has business
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  in front of the government, the constantly there, you know, you don't even need to specify
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  which thing. There could be various mergers. There are, um, cloud computing contracts that, um,
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  yeah, there's a lot of government contracts. In Trump's first term, Trump, um, because
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  the other thing is Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon also owns the Washington Post. So that's a powerful
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  media outlet. Oh, yeah, that was the first term. I think that was, I think that was the assumption
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  that there was something about, yeah, because hadn't Trump sued. Yes. Well, I, I don't know if he,
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  I don't know if he was threatened. This is one of those, this is one of the type that
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  it's ultimately didn't ultimately didn't go very well. Also, I'm going to put everyone on your
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  podcast to sleep if I go deep into this. But, um, it has to do with, uh, a, a, a, a special status
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  Amazon has under the US government, uh, for the deliveries, which is kind of the oil that keeps
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  the machinery going so they can do these deliveries all the time. Trump threatened to take that away
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  in his first term. And people speculate it's because he doesn't like what the Washington Post is
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  writing about him. Right. So that happens. So that has physical deliveries of Amazon packages.
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  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, knowing what we know about Trump, we can deduce that it was surely
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  Trump going, you know, what, what leverage do I have over this guy who owns this newspaper,
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  this right and all this bad stuff about me. Oh, I, you know, there's obscure exemption that has
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  to do with, you know, our postal delivery laws. I can yank that away. So he threatened to do it.
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  That was his first time. And again, Amazon has all sorts of interest, including Blue Origin. That's
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  another Jeff Bezos company. So, you know, they have government contracts, or at least potentially
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  could. So, so yes, yeah, space, Amazon, uh, cloud computing. Yeah. So you give, just give the guy
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  $40 million and find a cool way of doing it, which is that Mulani was to make a move, make everyone
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  spend 100 minutes watching her try on hats. And they did. And I watched it. It's so very well, Jeff.
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  If you thought that the rest of the world was spared the indignity of watching this movie,
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  I was checking the movie sessions over the weekend. And, uh, it was there. It was like one session.
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  What is it at one? It's, I think there would like two screens in a city of five million people.
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  But it was there. It's on. Like someone is, someone thinks that someone's going to watch it.
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  That's astounding to me. Yeah. Because I, so I was there because I was writing about it.
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  I kind of suspected everyone else. I seen the theaters also going to be right about it,
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  writing about it. That turned out to not be correct. These seven ladies, you know, at least some
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  of them were fans of the film. I mean, they're all Republicans. They're all like these who launch,
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  right? And they were, I think that's right. There's probably a few people here who are, you know,
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  Trump supporters who want to see, uh, documentary about this lady. I did tell myself if they made a
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  Michelle Obama documentary with people go see that. I thought, yeah, somebody will go see that.
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  So, you know, it's like, okay. Yeah, just not $40 million worth. Like $40 million is a big
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  budget. There's a really big budget for a movie like, you know, you can think of a big
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  independent, like, like a bloom house horror movie or something like that, which would be like,
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  so like a movie like weapons or something like that would have a budget of less than $40 million
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  and it would rake in $100 million within, you know, several weeks. Yeah. And also, if you're
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  usually, and the second place bid was Disney at, I think it was 16 million, it was less than half
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  before they bid. So I think that's a good indication of 40 million is just not with this cost.
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  And the 16 was already had bribe included. The 16 is also a bribe. Yeah. Yeah. The non,
• 19:30
  the non bribe version is like a million. Yeah. Like we'll make money on this if it costs a million
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  bucks. Yeah. Well, I mean, no, to be fair, it's probably, it made a couple million in the first
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  weekend. And I don't know how much it all needs to be. It's been five. It's been five million.
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  You'd probably spend five. Yeah. Yeah. It's been five. But it's also, I think you would want,
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  though, when you're bidding for the rights as you would want access and they had no access,
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  there are no interviews with Melania about a third of the movie. Yeah. About it. It's voice
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  overs. These crappy voice overs is such trite dialogue that she's obviously reading because her
• 20:01
  English is not good, by the way. So the subject of this documentary is in English, only kind of
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  speaks English. When you mail away, if you're mail order bride, be sure to check the English beforehand,
• 20:13
  Donald beforehand. That's right. Conversational does not mean fluent to do different categories.
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  Talk to her on the phone first. But the I thought that I had assumed Jeff that it would be like
• 20:26
  the Taylor Swift documentaries or something where like she is basically working with a producer
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  and a director to tell her story about what her life has been like and what and you get behind
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  the scenes, you know, interviews with her and like her walking into the Oval Office or,
• 20:42
  you know, her talking about her relationship with the president. That's what I, even that I didn't
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  want to say, but I certainly don't want to see it if it's just her trying on hats.
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  Well, it's just her trying on hats. They got no access that like I said, there are no interviews
• 20:58
  with her. I'm sure she worked with the producer, but she worked with the producer to, you know,
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  make it exactly what she wanted. And she gave her notes to pick out the hats. She's like, don't
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  don't show me trying on the red hat. I only want the blue hat because that's the one. She's the
• 21:12
  money very involved, very involved in which hats. There's no access about half the movie is just
• 21:20
  her and cars going from point A to point B because that's clearly like, we can't clear you to go
• 21:26
  and, you know, go into Mar-a-Lago and go to these other locations like it's a security thing. So
• 21:30
  just get her and she's in the car get her and she's in the motorcade. Thank you, Phil. They're in
• 21:33
  the White House. They're in the White House for two seconds and they're in like the entry way.
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  It's like not an interesting room in the White House. And then about a third of the movie is
• 21:43
  inauguration footage. So it's footage that you could watch on YouTube right now just from a slightly
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  different angle. But without her, without her trying to garble her way through the English language,
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  superimposed over the top. So you get that for your 40 million. So now that we've covered the most
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  important story, there's been going on over the summer, a summer down here in my apologies. I
• 22:05
  know it's been icy. It hasn't been intolerably icy and brutal in Washington DC, Jeff. Yes,
• 22:12
  yes, yes. We had a big snow storm and you know, we're not a part of the country that's super
• 22:16
  used to that. So yes, nobody can get anywhere right now. You're not a part of the country that's
• 22:20
  super used to that. My sister-in-law and my husband are currently in Dallas and Dallas got a
• 22:26
  ridiculous dump of snow and ice. You want to talk about a part of the country that's not used to
• 22:31
  getting a dump of snow and ice. That's right. So yeah, the authorities were just like, okay,
• 22:38
  everyone just planned to stay inside for five days because we're not going to be on top. We're
• 22:42
  just going to have to wait for it to melt. Who's got a snowplow in Dallas? Yeah, I think if you're
• 22:47
  in Texas and you're getting a foot of snow, it's like, well, let's just wait for the other three
• 22:51
  signs of the apocalypse. We don't know what else to do. That's right. Other frauds. We didn't plan
• 22:55
  this guy. Now, but the other thing that I wanted to talk about before we get to, well,
• 23:02
  should we just talk about Minnesota and just get it out of the way so we don't have to go on
• 23:06
  on too much. Yeah, okay. You know, ice and things, I mean, the other form of ice, not the cold ice,
• 23:12
  but the immigration. We're sort of beset by both forms of ice right now in this country.
• 23:16
  That's right. Too much of both. Down here, we have neither, thankfully. How tense do you,
• 23:26
  when you're out at the shopping mall and you're joining your seven old ladies to go and watch
• 23:33
  the Melania documentary? Is there any sense in DC or Maryland that that phenomenon is
• 23:42
  imminent or like how on edge of people, if at all? Because you've also had the National God in DC.
• 23:48
  You got the National Guard here. Yeah. So we didn't get the ice deployment. The ice deployment is
• 23:52
  kind of, we should say, ice and border security, specific to Minnesota. And you know, I don't
• 24:01
  know how familiar your Australian blisters are with American geography, but Minneapolis is
• 24:06
  not close to the southern border. I guess it's kind of a border town. It's kind of near the northern
• 24:10
  border, but even then a couple hundred miles. But Minnesota, does Minnesota border of Canada?
• 24:16
  Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. And then, and then also across a lake at borders. Yeah,
• 24:21
  but Canada is not where most of our immigration comes from. I wouldn't have thought so.
• 24:25
  No, kind of. Certainly not the, certainly not the illegal kind.
• 24:29
  That's right. Yeah. Most, yes, a lot of SNL cast members, but they all had visas,
• 24:35
  NBC arranges that. So yes, it's an odd deployment. And the deployment is in Minneapolis,
• 24:42
  because Trump doesn't like the governor there. And he was trying to draw attention to a scandal.
• 24:47
  You know, that's the level we're operating on now. Trump was pissed off at the governor of Minnesota.
• 24:51
  So that's why they got the heavy ice deployment. Well, it's also a blue state. And they've
• 24:55
  been very proud about it. And they're proud about like, you know, being kind of welcoming to
• 24:59
  everybody's. Yeah. And it becomes self. Sorry, I just to just to briefly, but if anyone else is
• 25:05
  ignorant as I was, and it's rather embarrassing, and they didn't know that Minnesota boarded
• 25:09
  Canada, but it borders. It's got Lake Superior, right? On the north east.
• 25:15
  Well, it's potentially named Lake. Yes. Yeah. And then Ontario is the majority of the border
• 25:21
  with Minnesota. And then you got, okay, here's your Canadian geography test. What is the province
• 25:27
  to the west of Ontario? I want to say Scotland. No. Um, is it?
• 25:34
  Damn it. There was an acronym I had to learn it like eighth grade for this. Is it Manitoba?
• 25:40
  I would have to know in order to be able to answer correctly. I'm looking at a map.
• 25:44
  You were so confident that I would know. All right. There we go. There we go.
• 25:48
  Manitoba. It is not Saskatchewan, which I would have said. But I thought which is the next one. I
• 25:54
  thought good about that answer because I didn't know if it was Manitoba, but I knew it was
• 25:57
  in the ballpark, right? And it wasn't British Columbia. Very good. So there's a little
• 26:01
  American grading on a curve here for an American. That's pretty good. So Manitoba also borders
• 26:07
  in Minnesota. And for some reason, I thought Minnesota sat underneath the decoders, but that would
• 26:11
  be Nebraska. Correct. Yeah. Well, we're learning a lot here. So it's cold there. So they got both
• 26:18
  kinds of ice. So cold. Yes. And they got the ice deployment in DC. We we did get the national guard.
• 26:25
  It's sort of a similar deal. It's kind of, you know, Trump, you know, DC does have a crime problem.
• 26:31
  It's always hard to talk about these things with precision because on the one hand, like I don't
• 26:36
  want to hurt for those of you, those are your listeners who, you know, haven't read my blog and
• 26:40
  I assume that's most of them. You know, I'm not one of the, I am on the left. I am a guy who
• 26:48
  ends up voting Democrat. I really try not to be one of these people who's going to like
• 26:52
  relentlessly carry water for a left wing or progressive talking points. So when you're talking
• 26:57
  about crime and I as a DC, well, now near, I was a DC resident for a long time now. I live just on
• 27:02
  the other side of the border. DC has a crime problem. It's like, it's, it's not great. You know,
• 27:06
  what's the ideal number of murders in a city? Zero DC's not at that number, particularly close to it.
• 27:12
  I think it's about, it's probably about nine good ones.
• 27:17
  You know, there's probably about nine. Look the other way on if they happened. Yeah, but,
• 27:22
  but you, but how do you get the right nine people? That's the, that's the tricky thing. If you try
• 27:27
  to nine, it'd be the role. I'm trying to develop a new political system that permits a certain amount
• 27:32
  of government state terror in killing innocents who aren't. Well, we're, we're not there yet,
• 27:39
  but point taken. Maybe, okay, maybe the ideal number is in zero, but it's just the point less than
• 27:45
  it currently is in Washington, DC. Exactly. Sometimes Democrats will just try to minimize crime and
• 27:49
  pretend like it doesn't exist. Like it is a problem. And we, you know, we could do better. But then
• 27:54
  the other side of the coin is Republicans, of course, will make a meal of it and be like, you can't
• 27:58
  walk outside your house without getting murdered. And of course, there's a racial angle to it,
• 28:02
  you know, getting murdered by a non-white and of course, that's not true either. That's why we
• 28:06
  ended up with National Guard, because Trump was sort of like, I'll make, make DC safe. I have
• 28:12
  mostly seen National Guard units wandering around looking very bored. Like it's, it's a weird
• 28:19
  dynamic because the president has this, you know, mission that he's on to make DC safe. And certainly,
• 28:30
  you know, if you're someone like me, I could point to things I'd like to see the DC government do
• 28:33
  to make the city safer. Trump sends the National Guard, but it's weird because they're not
• 28:38
  police men and women. They're army troops. So he's on this mission, but then you actually see the
• 28:45
  people hanging around the metro station, like you see them, they're standing there in the
• 28:48
  metro station. And in my experience, they're typically looking kind of bored. They're like,
• 28:52
  what are we supposed to do? Yes, and often in the National Guard to fight. Yes. And often,
• 28:59
  they're walking around in the National Mall where, you know, the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington
• 29:03
  monument are like, that's not the high-crime areas. They're just, it's kind of tooling around,
• 29:07
  like everyone else, just sort of, you know, eating a popsicle and just, like, the cynical
• 29:12
  and sort of dystopian explanation for why they would be walking around the mall is because Trump
• 29:18
  likes the likes acclimatizing or, as Americans say, acclimating the population to the iconography
• 29:27
  of militarism. And so if in the future, there are disputes about ballots and things. If, you know,
• 29:33
  they're in the future, there are protests that he wants to quash. It's helpful. I mean, the cynical,
• 29:39
  the very cynical version is like he's trying to get us used to the look to the image of troops
• 29:44
  on the streets so that when he actually deploys them, it's less jarring, the less cynical and
• 29:50
  more sympathetic, but still pretty awful explanation is he likes the iconography of military power.
• 29:58
  And he thinks it's cool to be the kind of president who presides over military parades and has
• 30:04
  men with machine guns wandering around making America great. Either way, it's a better explanation
• 30:11
  for why there's national guard on the mall than the, on the mall they're going to somehow prevent
• 30:15
  car jackings in the suburbs. Yeah, you know, with, with Trump, there's probably something to
• 30:23
  all those explanations with Trump. I usually think the dumbest explanation is usually the correct one.
• 30:27
  There certainly is a concern, especially as we get to the midterm elections this November that
• 30:33
  he might try to, everyone says we're worried he's going to try to try to do something nobody can
• 30:38
  quite define what that something might be. But yes, it might be something in the area of
• 30:44
  some sort of martial law, some sort of curfew or even just sort of intimidating people so
• 30:49
  they don't go to the polls like it's all speculation to what happens. But a good dumb explanation is,
• 30:56
  as you said, he likes the trappings of being the president who can order the military around.
• 31:03
  He has this habit of telling these stories where he says somebody got to base they said, sir,
• 31:06
  they always calling him sir in these stories. It's always a four star general coming up and
• 31:11
  calling him sir. He likes that he's got authority over that four star general. So he likes that.
• 31:15
  And he's also always trying to win the news cycle. Just he likes how that's going to look on Fox News.
• 31:20
  You know, DC's a crime hellhole, which of course is a narrative they love on Fox News. You know,
• 31:24
  it's a crime hellhole, but I'm going to take charge and solve it by deploying these troops. So
• 31:29
  he certainly likes that aspect of it, I would think. Why does he keep saying that people are calling
• 31:33
  him sir when it sounds so much better to say what they probably are calling him, which is Mr.
• 31:37
  president. I wasn't going to say anything rude there. But I mean, like, don't you get called Mr.
• 31:43
  president when you're the president? If he, if I was relating a story and I was the president,
• 31:47
  I feel like this very important person came up to me and said, Mr. President, you did the best job.
• 31:54
  That sounds better than saying this very important person came up to me and said, sir,
• 31:59
  you did the best job. I mean, I get called sir when I'm at a restaurant. Yeah, sure,
• 32:04
  McDonald's, they'll say sorry, sorry, did you have to go? And they never say Mr. President,
• 32:09
  would you like fries with that to me? Well, you're right. That would be that would be more
• 32:13
  impressive. But I don't know if you know this about Trump, he ain't smart. So yeah, well,
• 32:18
  probably should do that. I'll tell you what, he's savvy. Uh, if you're just joining a
• 32:22
  mind stream and you're not listening after the fact, we're talking to Jeff Mora, who is a
• 32:26
  satirist and comedy writer. He has a great substat called, I might be wrong, which is subtitled
• 32:31
  comedy politics and swearing in pretty much equal amounts. Uh, he is a former writer of, uh,
• 32:37
  last week tonight with John Oliver, uh, for the first six seasons of that show. We'll talk about
• 32:43
  that in just a moment as well. If you're coming over from Jeff's side, um, Josh Sepson, if you don't
• 32:46
  follow untumbable conversations, uh, we just find interesting people often celebrities, often
• 32:51
  newsmakers, often analysts to have conversations that are not uncomfortable, but they are about
• 32:57
  uncomfortable things that would make your asshole pucker up a little bit if someone expressed
• 33:00
  his right opinion about them at a cocktail party or a work event. Um, so be sure to subscribe and
• 33:06
  follow and all that jazz. So Jeff, I am interested in whether or not you think that there's a role for
• 33:11
  satire in pushing back against the current moment. Like I feel a bit paralyzed as a commentator
• 33:18
  and analyst about what the best strategy of opposition is when you see stuff like the
• 33:26
  ice outrages in Minneapolis and now more recently, the seizure of ballots in Georgia to try to
• 33:35
  create prosecutions of, uh, election officials for doing their jobs in 2020 or the arrest of Don
• 33:41
  Lemon for having attended a protest. Uh, these sort of really new level, I would say, attacks
• 33:49
  on civil liberties and things that rhyme with authoritarianism if they are not it all out.
• 33:57
  I'm skeptical of the utility in general of just doing what the tyrant wants you to do, which is
• 34:04
  throw yourself in front of his jack booted thugs and try to get shot or beaten up in order to create
• 34:10
  a scene because I kind of feel like that just plays into the worldview and the narrative of the
• 34:16
  tyrant anyway. Like every tyrant knows how to deal with unruly violent protesters. That's the
• 34:21
  easiest thing in the book. Like that's great. That's actually a gift really. Yeah. So the alternatives are
• 34:28
  laugh at them and mock them, which is harder for them to defeat, especially for Trump because he
• 34:33
  hates that. Like be a court jester that tells truths to the king while everyone watches on.
• 34:41
  Another is to try to analyze and think about the big picture role that we can all play in sort of
• 34:48
  which is sort of more my job, I think, of like trying to understand why people who support him
• 34:53
  would support him, how we can sort of bridge the divide to avoid collapsing into a total civil war
• 34:59
  rival echo chambers where all of us are so certain of our own righteousness that we end up
• 35:04
  killing each other. But where do you like what do you see the path to growing out of this
• 35:12
  as being? That's a great question. There's a lot there. I try to not get too grandiose in my
• 35:22
  thinking about what I'm doing. You know, I've been a comedy writer for a long time. So I
• 35:27
  was a speech writer for a long time. I was a speech writer and I was doing a stand-up comedy at night
• 35:31
  and that eventually turned into the job at the John Oliver show and then I left John Oliver and now I
• 35:36
  write my own political comedy blog. So I've had a lot of time to think about what this is and what it
• 35:42
  isn't and one lesson I've learned is like, don't get up your own ass because when you're asking
• 35:47
  like, is there a role for satire? There are people who will think, yes, I am the damn holding back the
• 35:53
  flood. I am the antidote to Trump and it is only I who can slay him and that in my experience
• 36:03
  is going to lead to some really unfunny and boring stuff. I just try to, I mean, I'm a political guy
• 36:09
  because again, that was my job before comedy. It was my full-time job and also it's like when I
• 36:13
  started in school, I'm just, you know, this is the area that I'm in, I've painted myself into
• 36:17
  this corner for better, for worse. What was the speech writing? Who were you writing for?
• 36:23
  I was writing for the Environmental Protection Agency, which still exists even though it's a very
• 36:27
  different agency now. Luckily, I got out, you know, in the 2010s, so. Right. And does that mean for
• 36:34
  the director of the agency or something to give speeches or updates about what the agency is up to?
• 36:38
  Like what? Yes, I was writing for, yes, I was writing for one of her assistants, but yes.
• 36:45
  Yeah, right. Okay. So anyway, it's, what I see myself as doing, I'm talking about what's going on
• 36:53
  because that's what people want for me and I try to talk about it in a funny way. So that's
• 36:56
  where humor comes in. That's what differentiates me from, you know, a colony might read somewhere as
• 37:01
  I'm at least attempting jokes. You talked about being strategic in your thinking and the utility,
• 37:09
  for example, a protest, and when they'd be useful, when they'd not be useful, my column going out
• 37:17
  tomorrow, I have no idea what tomorrow is in relation to how people are listening to this, especially
• 37:23
  during Australia. So you're like, I want the head of yours already tomorrow in Australia. Yeah,
• 37:27
  yeah, exactly. So for you last week, my column going up tomorrow from here is about Billie Eilish.
• 37:33
  I did you hear her at the Grammy Awards? Well, I mean, as you know, I've already read your column
• 37:39
  because it already dropped here because I'm in the theater. Yeah, but no, I don't get overwhelmed.
• 37:42
  Oh, everyone loved it. I got to tell you. Awesome. Thanks. No, I just see this Billie Eilish story.
• 37:50
  She won a Grammy and during her speech, she said, no one is illegal on stolen land,
• 37:55
  and that got a big round of applause. And I'm running about how that is exactly the type of
• 38:00
  celebrity activism that I think is counterproductive. I mean, Democrats are constantly accused of being
• 38:07
  the Open Borders party. And there's somebody saying, yes, Open Borders, hooray, ONPS,
• 38:14
  our country sucks. And then it got a round of applause. I mean, it's even even if it weren't
• 38:19
  strategically stupid because it's so off-putting to so many Americans and hands the right
• 38:25
  cartoon caricature of what they think the left is. It's also just fatuous virtue signaling bullshit.
• 38:31
  Yes, there you go. You know, it's like who the fuck are you? What are you talking about?
• 38:37
  No one is, of course, there are people who are here illegally. They are here illegally,
• 38:42
  like cut the bullshit. Now, how do we treat them with respect? You know, we have to, do you
• 38:47
  want to be shooting people in order to get them out of the country? But there are people here
• 38:51
  illegally. And when America was founded, lots of colonial empires were invading and colonizing
• 39:00
  lots of places. That was the absolutely normal thing to do that everybody was doing all over the
• 39:04
  place. There was there was almost no way where that wasn't happening. So what the fuck are you
• 39:08
  talking about? What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, that's kind of hot. Good singer.
• 39:13
  Probably I've never heard any of her music, but I should probably tell her something she want to
• 39:16
  Grammy. Yeah, it's an idiotic statement just by itself because the two parts of it are
• 39:24
  contradictory. No one's illegal on stolen land. Okay, so the first part,
• 39:30
  um, search, you know, no, no ability of a people to decide who lives there and who doesn't.
• 39:34
  But then the second gives a group, you know, an absolute right to the land. So the, if,
• 39:41
  if you have no right to say who's in your society and who's not, then how could land ever be stolen?
• 39:44
  So it doesn't even make any sense. If no one is illegal, then all of the, uh, non-native
• 39:50
  Americans, yeah, are also illegal. Relegal, I guess. Yeah.
• 39:54
  America was fine. Yeah. Yeah. My, my humble opinion is that the way that all went down was bad.
• 40:01
  And, um, people actually do have some, we could, we could discuss, it's obviously a very long
• 40:07
  history of how that happened, but people actually do have a right to decide who lives in their
• 40:10
  society and who doesn't. And, um, as you pointed about, you know, with illegal immigration in this
• 40:15
  country, I always, it's tough because it is illegal. I always think if I were in their shoes,
• 40:20
  I probably also would have immigrated illegally. But, so I'm, in a sense, I'm not mad about it.
• 40:26
  It is illegal. So have I committed a bunch of crimes? I mean, is there a person listening to this
• 40:30
  who hasn't committed, who has never sped in a car, who has never jay walked, who has never,
• 40:34
  you know, accidentally made a mistake on a form that would mean that they had technically
• 40:40
  perjured themselves. I mean, like, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff. I mean,
• 40:44
  just because you were, but you still enforce those things. I mean, yeah. But you're still a
• 40:47
  force, if we didn't enforce speeding, we'd get a lot more of it. And it's frustrating the extent
• 40:52
  to which we struggle to have intelligent conversations on these things sometimes, because you're right.
• 40:57
  What, what do you call it, fatuous virtue signaling? Yeah, we get a lot of that. I think I call
• 41:00
  that fatuous virtue signaling bullshit. But yes, you can, okay, admit the bullshit if you want.
• 41:05
  If you want to, for the gentle ears of your audience, our, our robust Australian ears is
• 41:10
  a slightly more forgiving. You're all rough and tumble down there. You're very rugged, very rugged
• 41:15
  pistol. I just ride, wrestled a topwater crocodile to death before I even came in here this morning,
• 41:20
  Jeff. I assumed you did. Yeah. Just because you had to eat, you had to eat lunch, right?
• 41:24
  Sorry. You had to eat lunch, you don't kill it. And I didn't want to kill the kangaroo who's
• 41:29
  back I had ridden here on because I need him to ride home on. So I had to go into the local swamp
• 41:36
  and find myself a crocodile. But so, and then in terms of just that, I am also interested in
• 41:43
  the process of go of analyzing the news and trying to ring jokes from it, especially on TV. So
• 41:48
  you, you go to John Oliver's show in 2014. This is a bummer, a bummer time, right? I'm not
• 41:57
  miss from everybody. Yeah, he was the president. Yeah, it's a bummer time. That's what I call it
• 42:04
  every morning. I got out of bed. I was like, it's a bummer time. For eight years. I did that.
• 42:11
  Yeah. Also, with your accent, I have to say I had to figure out from context clues that you're
• 42:15
  referring to Barack Obama, because there are a lot more, a lot more ease in his name when it's
• 42:19
  said with that particular accent. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. How do you say? Yeah. So oh,
• 42:23
  Obama, we really lean into the oh, yeah. Oh, Obama. And the Brits had, you know, the Brits,
• 42:29
  they drove me to, it shut me to tears. They would always say a bummer. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
• 42:36
  you know, President Obama, I'm like, have you ever heard that I don't say his name? I
• 42:41
  just want one of them once to say, why don't you say his name properly? So she was like,
• 42:46
  in English, you, the, in the construction of consonant vowel, consonant vowel, the second
• 42:53
  vowel is short. And I was like, what the fuck? This is fat. Yeah, but the man has a name,
• 43:01
  and he says the name that way. Stop it. That's right. Billie Eilish. Stop giving me this
• 43:06
  bullshit. What are you talking about? That actually is such a British attitude, because it is a
• 43:09
  Kenyan name, but they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, but here's how we would say it. And
• 43:14
  therefore that is correct. If he were, was British, which he's not. Imagine he was from Kent.
• 43:21
  For example, yeah. That's how they approach it. So anyway, fat is I was getting up and yelling,
• 43:26
  it's a bummer time into my mirror. I was in blackface while I was doing it, Jeff and I,
• 43:32
  but I would take it off, but leaving the house, because I know that that's not appropriate.
• 43:37
  Yeah. That was okay. Australia since like the 80s. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness,
• 43:42
  you have no idea. I just showed my husband for the very first time a few weeks ago, a video
• 43:49
  of something that happened in Australia in 2009. Is this the Harry Connick junior clip?
• 43:54
  Yes. Have you seen it? I've seen this. Yes. I've seen this. Yeah.
• 43:59
  So in 2009, they brought back an old iconic television show that in Australia was,
• 44:06
  think like the Ed Sullivan show, like back in the day. It was called Hey, Hey, it's Saturday.
• 44:10
  And it was on every Saturday night. It was like a family variety show. I think it was live back in
• 44:15
  the day. And they thought, let's resurrect the show. And as part of, and I think it ran for a few
• 44:20
  years, but it was never as iconic as it was back in the 70s and 80s or whatever. And as part of it,
• 44:25
  they thought, let's bring, they had one of the segments on the show was a talent quest show where
• 44:30
  these, you know, it would almost be like Letterman's stupid human tricks or something. It wasn't a
• 44:34
  real talent show. It was like people who total amateurs doing terrible, terrible amateur acts.
• 44:40
  And they would have a panel more goofy than like real. Yeah, more goofy. It was like a gong show,
• 44:45
  if you know, like the old tradition of banging a gong, and you know, the idiot stops doing what
• 44:49
  they're doing. And they literally had a gong, I think. And so they thought, well, instead of getting
• 44:53
  new acts, why don't we get some of the classic acts that everybody loved back in the 70s? And they'll
• 44:59
  come back and they'll do their act again. And one of those acts, what could go wrong is three guy,
• 45:08
  three white guys in blackface doing a, like a Vordville almost Jim Crow, like Al Jocelyn,
• 45:18
  were they dancing to a Michael Jackson song or something? I think they were, but yes, they're in,
• 45:23
  but obviously, and one of the celebrities on the panel who's judging is Harry Connick Jr.,
• 45:30
  who's been on the show a bunch of times. He's very popular in Australia. He's more popular in
• 45:33
  Australia than he's in the States for some reason. He was big down here. He always sold out.
• 45:38
  There was concerts. He was on the Australian television quite a lot. He did a lot of, spent a
• 45:42
  long time down here. So beloved American institution in Australia. And he's just sitting there. And he's
• 45:48
  like, I don't even know what to say. Oh, God. And then during the ad break, he went up to the
• 45:53
  host of the show, who's like a very ed Sullivan, like iconic figure and was like, I can't,
• 46:00
  let the show, I can't continue to be part of the show unless I say something after the ad break.
• 46:04
  And so they came back from the ad break and there was this very earnest, embarrassing moment,
• 46:09
  where it's just Harry Connick Jr. and the Australian host, whose name escapes me.
• 46:16
  And the host is like sort of awkwardly saying like, well, obviously, it wasn't our attention
• 46:22
  to offend you in any way, Harry, but you know, you're a great friend of the show. So I wanted to
• 46:26
  give you this opportunity to express yourself. And he's just, he does a masterful job at the
• 46:32
  Harry Connick Jr. Being like really raised, in my opinion, of Harry Connick Jr. Yeah. Yeah.
• 46:36
  He basically just says like that is that in my country, that is completely offensive and,
• 46:43
  you know, his really kind of a really hurtful history and would be seen as undoing
• 46:47
  enormous advances that we feel like we've made in recent decades in race relations.
• 46:51
  And if I've known that anything like that was going to be on this show, to be honest,
• 46:55
  much as I would have asked for 40 million dollars in a millennia deal.
• 47:02
  Uh, no, I mean, and so, but so when you say black like it is amazing, then my husband,
• 47:08
  who's American was like, how the fuck did that go on the air in 2009? And it's like, yeah,
• 47:16
  Australia is definitely had different norms. I think until, I think social media and the great
• 47:22
  awakening change things. So now we're probably on similar pages. But up until the 2010s, that was
• 47:28
  still possible. Well, and yeah, you know, yeah, you see a lot more of what's going on here now.
• 47:34
  So yeah, an Australian, obviously, well, probably until pretty recently wouldn't know the whole
• 47:39
  history that we had with blackface. I do the segment of my podcast, uh, called News from 100
• 47:46
  Years ago. It's, I'm reading The New York Times from 100 Years ago, because you can get those.
• 47:49
  And I am, you know, I am learning a lot about the 1920s. I'm becoming an accidental expert
• 47:55
  on the 1920s. And I'm learning a lot about the trends and what they found interesting.
• 47:59
  I did, you know, they find air travel very interesting. Uh, there's a lot of, uh, optimism
• 48:04
  about the League of Nations. And another thing is obviously the race stuff is just
• 48:11
  a different world. It's, it's, it's, it's really backwards. And, um, and then I also open,
• 48:18
  I open every episode with a copyright expired song, which is 100 years old. This is how I got
• 48:22
  into the doing the news from 100 years ago, because I was starting with these songs that are 100
• 48:25
  years old. And, um, yeah, minstrelry was gigantic in the United States. It was a whole genre. And,
• 48:35
  um, you can't watch 10 seconds of these clips today without just wanting to, you know,
• 48:40
  throw into a ball. I get, especially if you're white. It's cringe-worthy, no matter what race you
• 48:44
  are, but if you're white, you also, oh, God, because it's, it's, uh, ugly, ugly stuff.
• 48:50
  But we also, you know, like, we're aware of that and kind of went through the process of,
• 48:56
  understand why that's wrong. Exactly. I mean, and the guy's name, the host's name is Darryl
• 49:01
  Summers, people on the chat are telling me. There's one of the benefits of doing it live.
• 49:04
  Okay. Um, the, the, I, I think you're right that like, there was no intentional racism there.
• 49:11
  It's a bit more like the Justin Trudeau, you know, in blackface, like at a time when it wasn't,
• 49:18
  it wouldn't have been obvious to those people who put on that segment that, and to be honest,
• 49:24
  I'm still not sure that it actually makes a lot of sense morally to have an injunction that is
• 49:32
  as absolute as it has become, either on that or on, for example, the N word. I've always thought
• 49:38
  that the N word, that the phrase the N word is fatuous virtue signaling bullshit since we've
• 49:43
  now coined that phrase. Um, that there are contexts in which it should be okay for us to talk about
• 49:47
  how terrible the word is in which we're not, you know, in which we're smart enough to understand
• 49:51
  when it's being used as a slur and when it's being used when it's being mentioned. And similarly,
• 49:55
  with blackface, you know, if you're mocking degrading, demeaning people on the basis of their race,
• 50:02
  that's one thing. Uh, I would have thought that it would be possible to live in a world in which,
• 50:07
  I mean, I think if the world were less racist, let me put it this way, a world in which it
• 50:13
  were possible for a white person to put, you know, to darken their face for the purposes of a role,
• 50:23
  or to talk about the existence of racial slurs without treading on eggshells would be a less racist
• 50:29
  world than a world in which those have to be taboos. Yeah. Um, the, uh, so if you start from,
• 50:38
  and by the way, we're now having a conversation that kind of like it didn't happen in America,
• 50:45
  because you're right, that we had blackface. And if you watch those minstery clips from back in the
• 50:52
  day, there's no, um, no doubt about what blackface was and why it was wrong. Um, and now we have
• 50:59
  these taboos, which you're saying, you're getting an Australia, because you see our social media.
• 51:03
  So now we have these taboos about blackface that have popped up, but defining what blackface is,
• 51:08
  people often don't do. We really skipped that part. So that's a conversation that we didn't have.
• 51:12
  This podcast is called, uh, uncomfortable conversations. So what the hell? Let's, let's get into it.
• 51:17
  I've actually, yes, I've talked about this with actual black people, um, Thomas Sheridan Williams,
• 51:22
  and I used to do a podcast. So I talked about it with him seriously. Yeah. Very briefly. Yeah.
• 51:27
  Yeah. Favorite riders. And I consider him a friend, even though we don't hang out as much as I do.
• 51:32
  He's a great dude. Yeah. He's been on the show. He's a really good, I've read all of his books.
• 51:36
  I think he's brilliant. He's a good dude and always upfront on comfortable conversation.
• 51:42
  But yeah, so we had these taboos that popped up and we haven't always had conversations about
• 51:50
  why the rules are what they are, or even what the rules are. They're unclear a lot of time.
• 51:55
  And we can surely agree like the table stakes for this conversation is like, okay,
• 52:00
  number one racism's bad, duh, and number two, you don't want to do things that
• 52:08
  stereotype or caricature group of people or race, you know, how offensive would it be if,
• 52:14
  you know, I wouldn't even want to see if somebody decided I'm going to do a caricature of a white
• 52:19
  person. I don't want to see what that is. But then you had cases like Jimmy Fallon did an impression
• 52:27
  of Chris Rock on Saturday Night Live in the 90s, the late 90s. And as they always do on Saturday Night
• 52:34
  Live, they made them look like Chris Rock and that involved paint. But he wasn't doing an impression
• 52:42
  of just any generic black guy. He was doing an impression of Chris Rock specifically. And the
• 52:48
  makeup that they put him in, you know, and again, they always do this on SNL if you're playing
• 52:52
  the president, you know, they're going to make you look like the president. It was, they made them
• 52:56
  look like Chris Rock. It wasn't some cartoonist generic black guy. But then in the the great
• 53:02
  awakening, you know, 2020 specifically, he had to apologize for that. There wasn't really a
• 53:06
  conversation about like, is that black face or is that different? Because ministry, like it's
• 53:11
  blackface and it's, you know, a caricature of an entire racial group. But wasn't that an impression
• 53:17
  of Chris Rock? We never had this conversation. No. Well, I mean, Megan Kelly tried to have that
• 53:22
  conversation on the today show and was fired. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and okay.
• 53:30
  I was working in TV when that happened. I will say that show was hanged by a thread. And then
• 53:34
  that happened. That's true. I mean, that's true of Colbert as well. I mean, that's true. There's
• 53:38
  always, it's never a unique causal thing. But it's certainly, yeah. That the huge brujaha about
• 53:43
  that didn't help. And the fact that there's a straw that broke the camel's back, if you say that
• 53:48
  looks right. Yeah. We do. We don't say it frequently, but it's understood. Okay. There we go. Although
• 53:54
  there's a straw that broke the camel's back. Well, he is, he is a tidbit of Australianer for you.
• 53:57
  Are you going to love this, Jeff? You ready? You sitting down and you hold on to a hat?
• 54:03
  I don't know. Where are the, you know, hold on to Melania's hat, perhaps, where which country
• 54:09
  has the largest number of wild camels in the world? Well, you wouldn't be asking me this unless
• 54:17
  the answer was Australia. That's right. Australia. It would be funny if I was just like, you're not
• 54:21
  an Arab Emirates Saudi Arabia. Just like you just like you thought. Yeah. Australia. Australia
• 54:28
  also has how how how do you have wild camels? Did did two get brought in 1820? There's two camels
• 54:36
  stole off a bread in England. You got shipped to the wild and then just went fuck nuts on each
• 54:41
  other. And now you're neck deep in camels. You cannot trust a British camel. That's what my
• 54:46
  grand-pappy always used to say. They will they're wily and they were getting shipped out here in
• 54:52
  the convict ships. No, they brought out camels. I don't know who it was in the early days of the
• 54:58
  settlement, sorry, invasion, who brought out camels. But I think they, as you can imagine, they're
• 55:05
  extremely useful for traveling long distances when you don't have an air conditioned Lexus to cross
• 55:12
  large desert areas, which were hard hard to get in the 19th century. Yeah, they were very
• 55:17
  hard. They were very expensive. Yeah. And so I don't know if you know about Australia's geography,
• 55:23
  but it Australia is the same size as the contiguous United States. I think a lot of Americans think
• 55:28
  Australia is like Texas. It's the same size as no. I know you're about as big as us. Yeah. And there's
• 55:35
  and it has a half the population of California a bit more. It has basically a population of Florida
• 55:41
  which is all plusted basically around a band. If you if you think of like from like
• 55:49
  from Key West up to what would it be? Probably you wouldn't even get to well, no, you get you get
• 55:57
  past Florida in terms of the geography of it, but you wouldn't even get past it land to say. And
• 56:02
  okay, and 100 kilometers inland. And that's the entire population and the whole rest is desert.
• 56:07
  Or rain forest. And so the camels were handy. And so they brought them out. And the reason why
• 56:14
  they Australia has the best genetically pure most sought after camels that the Arabians
• 56:21
  lust after in their loins is because they've been breeding them or and so in the Middle East,
• 56:26
  they're all kind of fucked up the same way that dogs are all sort of fucked up when they're
• 56:31
  pilgrims. And here we've had like 200 years of evolution of these camels who've just been out
• 56:37
  there wandering around the outback because nobody's used them in over a hundred years. We don't
• 56:40
  do anything with them. And they breed like rabbits or camels. And so there you go. That's your
• 56:45
  Australia camel trivia today. I came on this podcast hoping to learn nothing about Australia.
• 56:53
  That was honestly one of my goals as an American. It harms it harms my America centric view of
• 57:00
  the world. And remember, I'm not only an American. I'm a liberal East Coast elitist. So I really
• 57:06
  don't want to know anything about anything outside of the DC New York quarter is possible. The
• 57:11
  Asella quarter exactly. Yeah. So I am glad if we if we're we're going to get into a discussion of
• 57:22
  racial purity, which is no thing I don't like to do on a podcast. I'm glad it was about camels
• 57:27
  because that is the topic on which like, okay, let's talk about the other conversation about
• 57:32
  racial purity or rather the one that we we didn't quite finish there because I do want to lean
• 57:38
  into the uncomfortable conversation bit because I think it is use. Okay. So your story is that
• 57:41
  we basically went from total sort of carelessness about a really harmful form of old entertainment.
• 57:52
  Could I add? Yeah. Not just carelessness, I wouldn't even say. But joy in the characterization.
• 57:59
  Right. It was a it was an enormously popular hilarious people loved it. They could not get
• 58:04
  enough minstery. It was an enormously I'm sorry. I was I was talking specifically about say the
• 58:10
  transition from between 2005 and 2015 or something or 2004 in 2020, right? Where there was not a
• 58:17
  great no one was calling out for a blackface and when it went on Australian television in 2009.
• 58:23
  Correct. Oh, yeah. It was I mean, it was just like, no one really thought about the how the
• 58:29
  complicated nature of it in the mainstream. Yeah, I was I was born in 1980, minstery in the US
• 58:34
  long gone by 1980. Even I sort of like post World War two minstery, not really a thing, but
• 58:41
  enormously popular in like Bobville 1920s. Yeah. I'd like to believe there was one guy in Mississippi
• 58:47
  who was keeping it alive in his shed, you know, he was like, agdammit.
• 58:54
  Abby six feet in the cold ground before minstery dies in these United Confederate states. He just
• 59:01
  he just loves the form. He just loves the form. And maybe even what it could seem like
• 59:06
  edge racist, but I just I love the form. Exactly. You can say so much. You can say so much about
• 59:14
  the human condition through. There was someone there was someone who was the last guy, someone
• 59:19
  who showed up at an audition like, ah, and they went, no, no, no, no, no, Monday, we decided we're
• 59:23
  not anymore. I'm sorry. Oh my god. That's so true. There was the last. This is a show. Jeff,
• 59:29
  write the screenplay for a movie. The last minstrel show. It's the lot. There must have been
• 59:35
  the last minstrel show in America. What's that story? Who are these guys? Klingon.
• 59:42
  Yeah. That, uh, even by the standards of, uh, stuff I write, that's, that's not going to get made
• 59:48
  by a network, which is saying something. That's like, you can almost make a version of the producers
• 59:55
  where the show that they pitch is a show called the last minstrel show. Yeah. It would be that
• 59:59
  toxic. It's like this. The springtime for Hitler, uh, would be the, they'd be a big minstrel show
• 1:00:04
  in the middle of it. That would be the show within the show. Uh, actually, let's elapse. Okay,
• 1:00:10
  actually, you're getting to another interesting part of this conversation. So, you know, I described,
• 1:00:14
  okay, you know, is it, is it, is it blackface every single time any, any makeup is used? Is that
• 1:00:20
  the standard? Well, just the existence of makeup? If so, why is the, the makeup the thing?
• 1:00:26
  And, um, but another good question is, so another thing we lost is we lost a couple episodes of
• 1:00:30
  30 Rock. Do you know the show 30 Rock? It's one of my favorite shows. One of my favorite shows of
• 1:00:34
  old time. Yeah. I kind of assume it, you know, you seem to be a man of good taste. I assumed you,
• 1:00:39
  well, 30 Rock. It's a hilarious show on the live episodes. They did two live episodes of 30 Rock.
• 1:00:45
  And one of the running jokes in that show is they would, um, cut to old episodes of old shows
• 1:00:53
  from years past because they're kind of, you know, honoring the history of live TV. And one of the,
• 1:00:58
  one of the things they cut to was an Amos and Andy type show. You know, I said there was
• 1:01:03
  in a ton of minstery post World War II. I'm wrong because Amos and Andy was a radio show that
• 1:01:09
  then became, I think it briefly became a TV show. And it was, um, it was two white guys in one of
• 1:01:16
  them, at least one of them. It's like, you know, I've never seen this thing was a doing a, you know,
• 1:01:21
  generic black guy voice, a minstery voice. So the joke on 30 Rock was they, uh, they cut to one of
• 1:01:29
  those shows. And the joke is, of course, about how wildly inappropriate it is. It's, it's like
• 1:01:34
  holy shit. Can you believe? We used to have that. So the joke and it has John Ham in blackface.
• 1:01:41
  And of course, Tracy Jordan, who plays Tracy Morgan on 30 Rock playing an old-timey character,
• 1:01:47
  you know, John Ham walks in blackface. He goes, you know, he freaks out, he goes, oh hell, no,
• 1:01:50
  it, you know, and the joke is, oh my god, that's terrible. Yeah. Those two episodes of 30 Rock are
• 1:01:55
  no longer on peacock. And I, my feeling as a comedy writer is the joke there was this is bad.
• 1:02:03
  Yes, there was blackface. But the comment on the blackface was, this is terrible. Can you believe
• 1:02:08
  we used to do that? And that comment, I think, is absolutely unmissable. There's no other interpretation
• 1:02:14
  you can have of it. Um, so I, I, again, as a comedy writer, I feel like, don't we want jokes that
• 1:02:22
  say like, you know, blackface is bad. Well, why did that get the Stalin treatment? I'm, I don't
• 1:02:27
  think. I mean, it's the same phenomenon as, I don't know if you know, the classic British sitcom Faulty
• 1:02:32
  Towers. Yeah, yeah. Of course, you know, outing after Monty Python. And the two of those episodes
• 1:02:40
  aren't available or I don't know if they've been reinstated, but they were pulled in 2020 or 2021
• 1:02:47
  because there's a Nazi. Is it, I think it's a German. Is it the don't mention the war?
• 1:02:53
  Is it the don't mention the war? Oh, okay. Oh, maybe that, no, I don't know what episode is from,
• 1:02:57
  but basically the old, um, the old guy in the restaurant who used to fight the Nazis, his racist.
• 1:03:04
  And part of the joke is that he's still living in the past. And so he uses slurs and things. And
• 1:03:10
  so for that reason, it was, it's exactly the same phenomenon. Similarly, I mean, when I was working
• 1:03:15
  on Half-Best Live, I was living in New York from 2012 and to 2016. And I had an activist. So
• 1:03:25
  I don't know if you remember this, but Stephen Colbert when he was, when he was doing the Colbert
• 1:03:28
  rapport and he was doing the character of the right wing guy. Um, he did a joke about the,
• 1:03:36
  was it the Washington Redskins? You remember this? Uh, yes, I remember this whole thing extremely
• 1:03:42
  well because it was a, it was a big deal in my world. So I was writing a John Oliver at that point.
• 1:03:45
  So yeah. Oh, okay. So I initiated that whole thing. It was my, it was, it was my interview with the
• 1:03:50
  activist who was trying to get Colbert fired on Half-Best Live that went viral, that caused the
• 1:03:57
  upset that then Joe Rogan played it. You know, Colbert heard about it. Colbert had to come on and
• 1:04:02
  talk about it as a result of this interview with this one who went by the name of Sui Park.
• 1:04:08
  And the, the gag that Colbert had done was he, he was saying that the, uh, that the only reason,
• 1:04:16
  that the reason why they're ahead of the, the boss of the Washington Redskins was donating money
• 1:04:21
  to an indigenous education fund was because he was refusing to change the name of his, uh, race
• 1:04:26
  to the racist name of his, uh, sports team from the Redskins. And Colbert then went on to say,
• 1:04:32
  I too have been accused of Rachel Stereotypes in the past, uh, and they played type of
• 1:04:37
  fictitious old instances of him, you know, pretending to be a Chinese person. And then it came
• 1:04:43
  back to him in the present day. And he said, I, uh, um, as a, you know, as, you know, in, in order to
• 1:04:50
  rectify this, I'm setting up a new foundation called the Ching Chong Ding Dong foundation for
• 1:04:56
  Oriental whatever. And this was the joke being his fix is itself racist. His fix is racist.
• 1:05:03
  The joke that nobody watching the show this racist nobody missed it. His target is a person
• 1:05:11
  the head of the Redskins who thinks he, who, who Colbert thinks is racist and is therefore saying
• 1:05:16
  his solution to the racist name is inadequate. That's the, that's the, that's the reason the joke
• 1:05:23
  is funny. You don't, don't get to fix, you know, racism by simply tokenistically creating
• 1:05:29
  some foundation that you don't give a shit about as a way you're trying to buy off your critics.
• 1:05:34
  Yeah. It's a great job. How much to get out of this 80,000? I got that rich. Okay. 80,000
• 1:05:40
  square again. Yeah. It is a, it is an anti-racist joke. Yeah. It's a firmly anti-racist joke,
• 1:05:46
  but it depoits as well as was the joke on 30 rock. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it was in,
• 1:05:50
  and so I did this disastrous interview with the woman who was trying to get some notice for
• 1:05:55
  the cancel Colbert campaign. And she basically, I would sort of said, do you not understand what,
• 1:06:02
  satire is? Like what the target of the joke is? And she was like, well, I, you know, I understand
• 1:06:09
  that as a white man, you feel that it's your right to talk down to women of course. And that's
• 1:06:14
  understandable. Oh boy. Not going to enact the neighbor of explaining to you why it's
• 1:06:18
  defensive for you to question my opinion. I was like, oh man. What, what is going like? And
• 1:06:24
  that was, it was one of those early moments of wokeness. I was going to say it was so early. It was
• 1:06:28
  so early. It was like, because it was 2012 or 2013, I didn't know it was at least 2014.
• 1:06:34
  Didn't know it was happening. Oh, it might have been 2014. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you are
• 1:06:38
  on. Yeah. Right. And it was like, it was this one of those watershed things that just suddenly,
• 1:06:44
  it was like, I'm talking to an avatar of another human being who's treating me as an avatar of a
• 1:06:49
  white man. We're not talking to human, we're not, we're not human minds having a conversation,
• 1:06:53
  a reason about, that's based on reason. I'm a cardboard cut out of a white man and she's a cardboard
• 1:06:58
  count of woman of color as far as she's concerned. And so eventually I just said, I'm not like,
• 1:07:04
  I'm not criticizing your idea, but it's a stupid idea. Like the idea that we should not try to
• 1:07:11
  understand the context of a piece of satire and that we should try to get someone fired for a
• 1:07:16
  piece of satire before understanding the piece of satire. And she's just so she was just like,
• 1:07:20
  well, I find that totally unhelpful. So I won't participate in this conversation. And how long
• 1:07:24
  after that were you deported to Australia? Sadly, it was my last day on the air. Unfortunately,
• 1:07:32
  fortunately, it was early enough and half post was liberal enough that that worked. But of course,
• 1:07:38
  if that conversation had happened six years later or seven years later, I was going to
• 1:07:42
  get a job. I was going to say it's funny. You should say that. Okay. It's funny. You say
• 1:07:45
  half post was was liberal and yet yet because that's the thing. I'm an old school liberal and
• 1:07:51
  yeah, free, free speech and not, not seeing people as their race is like core liberal things.
• 1:08:02
  I mean, the thing should try to pull on you there, the standpoint ofistemology, you know,
• 1:08:06
  the traditional liberal response to that would be, it doesn't matter what group I'm in or what
• 1:08:11
  group you're in. It only matters the strength of our arguments. And it's interesting for me to hear
• 1:08:16
  that at that time, that was the Huffington Post's view. As you said, we were a company, we were a
• 1:08:23
  business within a business. And I think the Holy Thoughts was, let's just have the kinds of
• 1:08:30
  free-wheeling conversations that are, you know, that are unsensitive. I would not, you know,
• 1:08:35
  necessarily say that the entire publications editorial position was as open-minded, maybe as the
• 1:08:42
  thing you could get away with saying on the air, but it was a great place to work for me.
• 1:08:46
  I underwent the same, you know, I experienced the same things at all of her that, you know,
• 1:08:52
  the same shift, you know, I would say from liberal values to, you know, whatever it is now,
• 1:08:59
  when I got there in 2014, like I said, I'm just, and I think I've stayed pretty consistent over
• 1:09:04
  the years. I'm just a liberal. I sometimes say Obama liberal just to kind of give people
• 1:09:08
  idea of where I'm coming from. And I feel like that was really normal and not weird for that
• 1:09:13
  environment back then. But then by the time I left in 2020, I was like the right edge of
• 1:09:22
  the political spectrum in that office. So, you know, I don't know what you'd call it, you know,
• 1:09:26
  progressive shift. Sometimes you hear the phrase like success or ideology or whatever, but yes,
• 1:09:30
  the values changed. It got very different than that six years. Yeah. I mean, I sometimes, I
• 1:09:36
  usually just get to talk about social justice, like identity politics as opposed to liberalism.
• 1:09:42
  Is the, did you leave or were you pushed? What was the nature of your department? I left. I left.
• 1:09:47
  It was don't let the ass hit you in the door on the way out. Yeah. Wow, it's funny. That's
• 1:09:52
  almost identical to me at the public broadcaster here as well, where I had a radio show,
• 1:09:57
  at a public radio show on the main broadcast network in the largest market in Australia. And
• 1:10:04
  that was from 2021 to 2023. And like it was the same situation where it was sort of like,
• 1:10:15
  you know, my tenure being made impossible because of the things that I wanted to talk about in
• 1:10:19
  the kind of conversations that I wanted to have that we're inconsistent with. Yeah,
• 1:10:23
  luckily it didn't get quite that bad with me. You know, it was just John and I kind of fallen
• 1:10:29
  out of love with each other. We, you know, we had to get divorced. It was like, we just kind of had,
• 1:10:34
  we had to do it. And then also it's like, I wanted to do scripted TV. Late night is a grind.
• 1:10:39
  It's kind of a young man's game. And I was 40 at that point. So it's like, do I want to be a
• 1:10:45
  lifer? So all those kind of more banal considerations were part of it. But yeah,
• 1:10:49
  just kind of not of the same page. Tell me about the golden housey on days at the start. So when
• 1:10:53
  it was a bummer time, uh, to be a plus back to that rather long tangents, which I also didn't
• 1:10:59
  close, I didn't close the loop entirely on what I was saying when I just wanted to make that
• 1:11:03
  point clear about it was we were cool with levels of racist blackface. And then suddenly,
• 1:11:14
  we were so furious about any use of that blackface that paint at all. Yeah. That any, any kind of
• 1:11:26
  paint that it was a firing offense or at least it was attempted to be a firing offense to have
• 1:11:32
  ever done it in any context for any reason. And I suppose the point of my show is in part to try
• 1:11:39
  to go back to try to find those rifts, those disjoints and actually dig our fingers into them
• 1:11:44
  and go, okay, well, what is what what what are the conversations that we should have had
• 1:11:49
  and whether we still should have in order to understand a non-binary view of the world where
• 1:11:55
  it's not like A or B, but there is something more reasoned about and nuanced about our approach.
• 1:12:02
  That was all I wanted to say to close the the chapter on on that thing. So 2014,
• 1:12:08
  you come into John Oliver's show. You don't yet know that there's going to be an orange clown
• 1:12:14
  wrecking everything in two short years. And so what's the process in just in terms of the writers room
• 1:12:20
  in terms of topics in terms of how you get I remember there was a shift in maybe season two.
• 1:12:26
  Correct me if I'm wrong, you'll be able to tell me into doing much more
• 1:12:29
  newsy stuff. And I think was there a journalist hired to like do more of the kind of long form
• 1:12:35
  investigative stuff than there was an issue. Your memory is your memory is good because we did
• 1:12:40
  start out thinking, okay, how is this not the daily show because of course John came from the
• 1:12:45
  daily show and so did our executive producer Tim Carvelle. He had been head writer at the daily
• 1:12:51
  show. And in addition, like some of the staff, none of the writers actually, but some of the staff
• 1:12:56
  in the day. So so it was very much a daily show spin off. And we were trying to figure out, okay,
• 1:13:01
  but what's our what do we what's our value added? What do we do that the daily show doesn't?
• 1:13:07
  And pretty soon we figured out, okay, we do these more long form pieces because we are we don't
• 1:13:13
  have ads. We're on HBO. It's a proper 30 minutes, not 22, which is what a network TV show is in
• 1:13:20
  the US. And there's no interview and we're once a week not four times a week, which is what the
• 1:13:24
  daily show is. So that all pointed to longer form pieces. It's funny that we're having this
• 1:13:32
  conversation right now because the podcast blocked and reported. Do you know, uh, they've
• 1:13:38
  heard of blocked or good good friends with Jesse. Good friend. Okay. Oh, so I've been on the show
• 1:13:42
  a bunch of times. So it has okay. And I and I'm friends with I've never met Katie in person.
• 1:13:47
  We Katie and I have no one has met Katie in person because she lives in the woods in the
• 1:13:51
  Pacific and she never sees anybody. Exactly. Exactly. She's 80% hermit. Um, but I emailed with her
• 1:13:58
  and she's very nice and that Jesse and I have done some live shows. So yes, I'm very friendly with
• 1:14:00
  Jesse and I'm and I'm a fan of their podcast. And um, they are at this moment. We are speaking
• 1:14:08
  in between part one and part two of a dissection of the John Oliver net neutrality piece. And I
• 1:14:17
  Katie emailed me about this because you know, she figured I probably knew something and I do remember
• 1:14:22
  that piece very well. It happened in season one. And it was one of the first pieces that made us
• 1:14:27
  think, okay, we can do this kind of in the weeds. Um, sort of maybe 60 minutes more analytical,
• 1:14:35
  less like what's in the headlines this week and more drill down on an obscure topic.
• 1:14:41
  Because we did the net neutrality piece. It was well received. And that made us think, okay,
• 1:14:46
  we can we can do this. Jesse and Katie, mostly Katie at the moment are kind of getting into
• 1:14:52
  errors that were made on that piece. And she's got some some good points. Now my involvement with
• 1:14:58
  that piece was minimal. It sounds like I'm trying to defend my, like don't talk to me. Yeah,
• 1:15:05
  to somebody else, but this the fact of the matter is every piece has a long and a story as we
• 1:15:10
  call it has two leads and I was not one of the two leads on that piece. So I was I remember being
• 1:15:14
  in some meetings at the beginning and I came in at the end to add jokes. I didn't really have
• 1:15:20
  anything to do with the substance of that piece. So when Katie is running through and saying
• 1:15:26
  this thing was wrong, that thing was wrong. This thing was maybe not technically wrong, but misleading.
• 1:15:31
  It was kind of interesting to me. I didn't know that. I will say though, we have writers on the show
• 1:15:36
  hat. I'm not there anymore. The show is still on. I'm not there anymore. We had writers. We had
• 1:15:40
  researchers. The researchers are really in charge of the news. You know, you asked to do a higher
• 1:15:45
  journalist like, yeah, that's what they did, but they make mistakes. They make mistakes. And I got to say
• 1:15:53
  some of them, you know, let me not ascribe motivations, but let me say they got stuff wrong all the time.
• 1:15:59
  And it was known they were getting stuff wrong all the time. And I was, you know, remember I said
• 1:16:04
  what I left is like don't let the ass hit you in the door on the way out. I was getting arguments
• 1:16:07
  with the researchers all the time because they're just putting wise on the show all the time.
• 1:16:13
  Why do you think? Well,
• 1:16:18
  because this is speculation on my part. Yeah. A, they're true believers. B, when and you'll know
• 1:16:25
  this from working at Huffington Post, like your job is to get stuff on the show. Your job is to
• 1:16:29
  pitch stuff and get it on the show. So you can get stuff on the show. If there's a narrative,
• 1:16:35
  if it's a narrative that really fits what your viewers are going to want, you can get that on the
• 1:16:41
  show, even if it's not really true. And there was a lot of massaging of stuff to make it fit the
• 1:16:47
  narrative. A very common thing is just omit counter arguments. This one guy was horrendous with
• 1:16:57
  statistics. I think he just didn't understand statistics also. He didn't understand if you're like
• 1:17:01
  cherry picking time frames or being weird with baselines or out of context figures and things
• 1:17:06
  like that. So he would do a lot of those underhanded tricks to make a narrative seem more potent
• 1:17:14
  than it was. And that stuff was just endemic and that particular guy that I'm talking about, he's
• 1:17:17
  still there. It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, in my sense, I didn't have experience of it at Huff
• 1:17:24
  Post because the wheels fell off Huff Post live in 2017, which was just early enough that we before
• 1:17:31
  the full brunt, I think, of work madness. And also we were close to it in our own side thing
• 1:17:39
  of Huff Post live, which we had its own sort of floor and didn't really report to anybody. But
• 1:17:44
  I did notice that at the public broadcaster. And my sense during peak work, in mainstream left
• 1:17:54
  wing, well center left, worthy progressive media outlets of which I would include John
• 1:18:01
  Oliver's show as one was that there was a sense that there's a larger truth that is being told
• 1:18:09
  and it needs to be told and honored. And the details of actual facts can sometimes be used as
• 1:18:16
  weapons to undermine a worthyer truth. And so people who I would have expected more from were able
• 1:18:24
  to twist things, shade things, overlook things, not be totally upfront about things. There was also
• 1:18:31
  a transgender piece on John Oliver's show, which was the moment of which I fell out of love with
• 1:18:38
  that show, which I think was great in its early days. What year was it? Because there are two
• 1:18:43
  pieces and I wrote the first one. And don't worry about it fanning me if it was the first one.
• 1:18:47
  I haven't actually in I recollection because I actually I didn't see it at the time. It was after
• 1:18:52
  I drifted away from the show for just family reasons, not watching the show anymore that I saw
• 1:18:56
  it. And I was like, yeah, I don't think I'm going back to it. But what was what was the one I wrote
• 1:19:01
  was and when I say again, I say I wrote it's always a team effort. So I was I was one of the two
• 1:19:06
  leads on the piece that aired in 2015. And I given what's happened in that early.
• 1:19:11
  Okay, because because there was a second one that was done after I left, which was also the subject
• 1:19:17
  of a block and reported episode. So if people want the full one, maybe it was Jesse who brought
• 1:19:22
  it to my attention. Then if he probably was reported episode about it, then that's probably where
• 1:19:26
  I where I got it from because no, it was a very woke trans one. It was like, yeah, yeah,
• 1:19:30
  not serious about actually grappling with the risk of being misunderstood as being like a
• 1:19:36
  transphobia or something. I mean, I'm a gay guy. I'm married to a guy with hips of trans friends.
• 1:19:41
  I'm like super, super cool with it. They should trans people should be respected and have all
• 1:19:46
  of the same rights as everybody else. But there was a moment there was a way of talking about the
• 1:19:49
  particular issue about this issue, which elided any difference between a 15 year old autistic girl
• 1:19:57
  whose friends are all declaring themselves to be genderqueer. And the way she might want to be treated
• 1:20:02
  by the medical establishment versus a what we traditionally called a transsexual person who
• 1:20:07
  from the moment that they were born insist that they were born into the wrong body and is going to
• 1:20:11
  live a life of misery if we don't honor that. It was like they weren't these two things. It was like
• 1:20:16
  it just just this thing that is trans and you have to have fealty and deference towards anything
• 1:20:21
  that any activist says about pediatric medicine, about hormones, about blockers. There is no
• 1:20:28
  conversation to be had here. There's no conversation to be had about women's private spaces, about
• 1:20:32
  whether or not women who have penises should be in crisis rape shelters. There's like it's all just
• 1:20:37
  bigotry. It's all just right wing bigotry. Like that kind of attitude, I just found to be so
• 1:20:42
  anti-intellectual, but people were able to to push it because they felt that there was a larger
• 1:20:48
  a larger truth, which is that we live in a traditionally heteronormative, prejudiced,
• 1:20:54
  structurally racist society dominated by certain types of people. I'm on the side of the
• 1:21:00
  downtrodden. Therefore, we shouldn't let facts get in the way of a mission.
• 1:21:07
  I'm sure that's it sometimes. I don't know why people
• 1:21:13
  do things that way. We were talking about being a hack. Why are people hacks? There are probably
• 1:21:19
  different reasons. I don't know. I did watch that episode you're talking about, which was like 2023
• 1:21:25
  or thereabouts. Well, after I was gone, and I happened to know which researcher did that piece,
• 1:21:32
  and I didn't overlap with her. I have no comment on her skills, but although I did see the end
• 1:21:37
  product, and I know that many of the aspects of that piece have already aged badly, including,
• 1:21:44
  I know one thing they did is they put up that graph of left-handedness, which is such a
• 1:21:50
  facial argument. Do you remember this part of the piece when he chants it? No, remind me.
• 1:21:58
  It's about how societal acceptance of a phenomenon can change the extent to which that phenomenon
• 1:22:04
  is expressed. For example, back in the day, if you were left-handed in school, they'd smack you
• 1:22:10
  on the left hand with a ruler until you started running with your right hand. They have this
• 1:22:15
  graph of the people who are self-reported as left-handed. Around when they stopped doing that,
• 1:22:20
  and the earliest part of the 20th century, it goes up and eventually plateaus, and now you know,
• 1:22:24
  I think it's 10% of the population is left-handed. By the way, I questioned the statistics in that
• 1:22:29
  graph itself, but it's ultimately not important. That graph is put up to argue that the
• 1:22:37
  rise that we have seen in people identifying as transgender is for the same reason. It's because
• 1:22:45
  society is more accepting of transgender people, so the transgender people were always there,
• 1:22:51
  and the numbers we experienced now, but they're only now open about it. Now, for a long time,
• 1:22:57
  thought, very clearly two things are going on here. Number one is that. Yes, absolutely.
• 1:23:03
  If you were trans in the 50s, you probably just took that to your grade. You probably never
• 1:23:07
  said anything to anybody, and you just never knew about it. So I think you'd honestly have to be
• 1:23:11
  very daft to imagine that's not happening. So that is one thing that's happening. It's a
• 1:23:17
  societal acceptance, and we're seeing more expression because of that. And the second thing I think
• 1:23:21
  that is equally obvious is that there is a, I think social contagion is too strong on a term,
• 1:23:30
  but there's a trend. Well, pick your, pick your term. Not all people who were identifying as
• 1:23:39
  trans in 2023 really were there. You know, very often they were young people and they're going
• 1:23:44
  something that they didn't through something they didn't fully understand, but it was such a hot
• 1:23:49
  topic that, and we know so much about how this stuff was being diagnosed. We know about the
• 1:23:55
  shoddy diagnoses, and we know, we all know what it's like to be a teenager if you've been a teenager
• 1:24:00
  that to believe that none of that was happening. I think it's what none of it is zero percent.
• 1:24:06
  I mean, it's such a malleable thing, one's identity. And we're such a social species. It would
• 1:24:11
  be extraordinary if there wasn't, I mean, no, no, no, human is an island. Like, of course, we're
• 1:24:17
  influenced by when it comes to the messy diagnoses of who am I and where do I belong and how do I
• 1:24:23
  fit in and how masculine or feminine am I and how queer or not am I? Like, these are very,
• 1:24:28
  there's a much more ambiguous ideas than left-handedness. They're even more ambiguous ideas than
• 1:24:32
  sexuality, which is more hard. I mean, I also think that sexuality is more fluid than we give it
• 1:24:37
  credit for, but even that is more fixed than a, a, a notional idea. Like, do I feel like I have
• 1:24:44
  aspects of my personality that are more feminine than masculine and am I, therefore, on a spectrum
• 1:24:52
  of non-binaryness? Like, of course, how could, how could ideas, if ideas didn't have the capacity
• 1:24:58
  to change human self-identification and thinking and behavior, what would be the purpose of ideas?
• 1:25:03
  What would be the purpose of us talking or debating about anything? Like, the whole point is
• 1:25:06
  that we think that it's going to have an effect. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they very clearly do.
• 1:25:11
  And all, all you have to do, at least all I have to do is remember being a teenager and remember
• 1:25:14
  how easily I was, how easily influenced I was about all manner of things and how I didn't know
• 1:25:20
  who I was or where I fit. And, you know, thank God I didn't have the internet back then,
• 1:25:23
  or at least I had, you know, crappy dial-up words. If you wanted to get confused about yourself,
• 1:25:28
  it was really going to take a long time. I didn't have any of that. And I think, you know, some of the
• 1:25:34
  people who write most passionately about this are people like Andrew Sullivan, you know, gave people.
• 1:25:39
  And I think they're imagining what it would have been like had they been subject to that environment
• 1:25:43
  at that age. It kind of sounds like, you know, as hard as it was to figure things out, it would have
• 1:25:48
  been even harder if I had, you know, Reddit boards in my ear telling me this or that. But the
• 1:25:54
  point I'm trying to get to is that already in the last few years, we've seen the number of
• 1:25:59
  transgender identifying people going down some, which does indicate that yes, there was a societal
• 1:26:08
  aspect to this. You know, so already the left-handed discraft, you know, people aren't,
• 1:26:13
  uh, the numbers of left-handed people aren't going down because there wasn't a social aspect to
• 1:26:19
  that. But there was clearly a social aspect to people identifying as trans. I mean, another
• 1:26:25
  point that has been made, Jeff, that sort of complicates that picture that the that, uh,
• 1:26:30
  general of a story was trying to push is that when gay, when being gay was no longer taboo,
• 1:26:37
  you know, and this was probably, this was a very rapid, uh, civil rights change in people's
• 1:26:42
  attitudes, like, you know, donation, incredible. It happened in my lifetime. Yeah, literally,
• 1:26:48
  literally, but in, in, in, out, literally, I mean, when we were born, uh, you know, being gay was
• 1:26:53
  illegal in some Australian states and presumably some American states. And, and within the span of
• 1:26:59
  my, between my, you know, between my being a kid and then my being old enough to want to get married
• 1:27:05
  to a guy, you went from total criminality to marriage. Like, that was, it was that fast. And,
• 1:27:14
  and the stunning victory, when that happened, who suddenly came out, it wasn't just young people
• 1:27:21
  who started coming out. All of a sudden, Uncle Herbie, who's 70 reveals that he was gay, all of
• 1:27:26
  every demographic and every age group, fairly equally, as the taboo lifted, came out and said,
• 1:27:35
  actually, I'm a married guy, I've been married for 50 years, but actually I've always been hiding
• 1:27:38
  the slide. When the same thing happened to transgender, uh, norms, the vast majority of new,
• 1:27:47
  newly transgender people were kids were young people. There was not a phenomenon the way there was
• 1:27:53
  with gayness of a huge number of 70 year olds coming out and saying, actually, I'm a woman,
• 1:27:59
  I've been a woman all my life. There was some. Yeah. There's a, every now, yeah, some,
• 1:28:02
  but vanishing, and we're finishing lefew. In the course of this conversation, which appeared
• 1:28:07
  on a clique check back in and for some people are trans, you know, some people are trans. Absolutely.
• 1:28:12
  Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. When we're talking about the, I, when I talk about the social
• 1:28:17
  contagion aspect, I just try to check in every now and then I say, I'm not saying that's the only
• 1:28:21
  thing that was there. Totally. Totally. Absolutely. I mean, it may not even be a majority of the,
• 1:28:25
  of the thing. It's just that anyone who even suggested that it was at all a thing,
• 1:28:31
  was it risk of getting losing their job? Yes. Yes. For a time. By the way, there's a great
• 1:28:36
  episode. I'm just trying to look up when it was we did a, I had a chat with a guy called Nicholas
• 1:28:41
  Grun, who is a professor. No, hang on. It wasn't Nicholas. I'm misremembering. It was Ronan
• 1:28:51
  McCray, who's a professor who has a new book about this was released on January 9th on my podcast.
• 1:28:58
  So if you're, hello, this is on a couple of conversations. If you're just joining from Jeff's
• 1:29:01
  side, I'm Josh Saps. If you're just joining from my side, Jeff Mora is a satirist and former writer
• 1:29:07
  last week tonight with John Oliver, who now has a sub stack. Very funny. Very interesting. John
• 1:29:12
  doesn't have a sub stack. John doesn't have a sub stack. John doesn't have a sub stack.
• 1:29:17
  All of them might be wrong, which is political satire. And so there was an episode on January 9th,
• 1:29:23
  which you should go back and listen to called the LGBTQ threat to gay rights. With this professor
• 1:29:29
  who is basically saying that like all of those advances that we were just talking about from the
• 1:29:35
  gay rights movement, there's a lot of evidence that there's backsliding on that in terms of public
• 1:29:38
  opinion. And to regard those wins as like permanent and unassailable is incredibly naive.
• 1:29:48
  And one of the worst strategic moves that the gay movement has made over the past decade is
• 1:29:54
  hitching its wagons so enthusiastically to a much broader and more ideological
• 1:30:00
  project of gender identity, non-binaryness, transgenderism. There's no such thing as male and female,
• 1:30:10
  biological sex is a fiction and like all of that stuff. Instead of allowing, he's like nothing
• 1:30:16
  against any of that. That's great. It's its own movement. There's no LGBT, like there's basically
• 1:30:25
  LG, maybe B, and T is a completely different thing and we should support it. But to hold hostage
• 1:30:35
  all of the gains of gay rights to public acceptance of a seemingly infinitely expansive set of demands
• 1:30:44
  about how people ought to think about biology and gender is suicidal in a climate in which people
• 1:30:53
  are naturally becoming less prone to gay rights anyway. Thanks in Europe, partly to migration,
• 1:30:59
  thanks in America to the rise of Christian conservatism. So I think that's interesting.
• 1:31:06
  Thankfully, I think he's wrong that things are going to go so wrong for that movement. Let's just
• 1:31:17
  call it that movement because at the moment it's seen as one movement in the US that for example,
• 1:31:22
  we're going to go back to gay marriage being illegal. I don't think that would happen. I think
• 1:31:26
  the support for gay marriage is so robust. We are, it is a court case that legalized gay marriage
• 1:31:32
  in the US. It wasn't an act of Congress. So that makes it a little more ten U.S. and
• 1:31:39
  what all you need is a Supreme Court decision and then it's back to the States. That's right.
• 1:31:43
  They did it with row. I don't see that happen. They did it with row. It's the quality of the
• 1:31:50
  decision in row versus overs fell is very different in my opinion. He's not saying that he's not
• 1:31:55
  saying that he's not predicting disaster in five years. He's saying for thousands of years,
• 1:32:00
  almost everywhere, this minority of people have been denigrated and people all thought they were
• 1:32:04
  disgusting and they've been persecuted. LGBT people. The idea that because three seconds ago,
• 1:32:12
  we managed to get a bunch of successes and therefore we can laud it over everybody
• 1:32:17
  with impunity and have no sense of the legitimacy of other people's concerns,
• 1:32:23
  of religious people's family, traditional ideas about family, for example. I mean,
• 1:32:28
  another point of his is that like the argument before gay marriage was we just want to be able
• 1:32:34
  to participate in marriage. So now he says the number of gay married couples who are openly
• 1:32:43
  in open marriages. To some extent, from his perspective, it's a little bit of a slap in the face.
• 1:32:50
  Like it's not exactly what we sold. It's not exactly what we sold the conservatives.
• 1:32:56
  Like conservatives were willing to go along with it because we said that we wanted to be part of
• 1:33:02
  their club and now that we're in their club, but we're changing the club's rules. Those weren't
• 1:33:06
  the rules of the club that we said we wanted to be part of. I'm not saying that it should be
• 1:33:10
  outlawed or anything. He's just saying like the whole movement has taken on an air of kind of
• 1:33:15
  sanctimonious self-entitlement, which maybe it might just want to check itself slightly.
• 1:33:19
  All right, sanctimonious self-entitlement. Yes. I am a big believer in civil liberties and
• 1:33:24
  do it. It goes back to John's tour about right. Do whatever you want as long as it's not
• 1:33:28
  hurting anybody. So as long as they're not forcing conservatives to be in open marriages,
• 1:33:33
  which I think is a very funny idea. And if they were doing that, I would say no, you can't make
• 1:33:42
  them go to the swingers party. That is if they don't want to go, they don't have to go. But if you
• 1:33:47
  want to go, God's peace is fair enough. Okay, so just I take your point. I mean, I got a story
• 1:33:55
  here that might interest you because you're talking about overreach and how things change.
• 1:33:59
  I'm not only the guy who was one of the two leads on the 2015 John Oliver transgender piece.
• 1:34:07
  I'm also the guy who pitched it. I was the one who pitched. Let's do a piece on this. So I can tell
• 1:34:13
  you exactly what I was thinking when I pitched that. Great. Overreach fell had just happened.
• 1:34:17
  The Supreme Court case in the United States that made marriage legal. And suddenly,
• 1:34:24
  this issue, gay marriage that had been a real hot button issue in the United States for
• 1:34:31
  a solid decade plus. Really, how far back do you want to go? You could go back to Andrew
• 1:34:37
  Sullivan's New Republic article in the mid 90s. But it had been a hot topic and suddenly
• 1:34:42
  total victory. Now what? And that's what I was thinking was now what? And I can tell you that
• 1:34:52
  my brain went to, okay, we have some level of acceptance of gay people. And the numbers get
• 1:35:01
  even better when you think about, you know, young people's attitudes towards gay people. You know,
• 1:35:05
  young people overwhelmingly are, you know, the startling in my voice comes from, it's not just that
• 1:35:12
  like it's gay marriage is legal. There's also just an accepting, you know, there's an accepting.
• 1:35:17
  It's like, yes, that is, there's a lot less. Jeff, especially if it's going backwards,
• 1:35:23
  that is bad news. It's definitely on backwards in the past 10 months, two years.
• 1:35:28
  Yeah. That's bad news and has a lot to do with overreach. But I can tell you in 2015,
• 1:35:33
  I felt that the same kind of acceptance should be extended to trans people. And I still do feel
• 1:35:41
  that way. The line that I always push, because remember, I used to be a speech writer. So I keep
• 1:35:44
  writing this on my blog and I'm hoping that somebody in the Democratic Party will pick this up,
• 1:35:48
  because I feel like this captures it. I think trans people should be equal in our laws and
• 1:35:54
  accept it in our hearts. I think that covers it. Yeah. That covers it. You don't need the
• 1:35:59
  nonsense about trans people in sports, trans women in sports. You don't need to pretend that
• 1:36:04
  there is no difference between men's sports and women's sports. And you don't need to pretend
• 1:36:09
  there is no advantage in that if there is any advantage, it can, you know, be quickly
• 1:36:17
  removed with hormones, oppressing drugs, which by the way, we wouldn't want teenagers to take
• 1:36:23
  them for that reason anyway. So you don't need to buy into the nonsense on transgender sports.
• 1:36:26
  You don't need to buy into the nonsense about gender being a social construct. Stop it. Of course,
• 1:36:32
  it's not, it's like, now I'm flashing back to when I was young and living in the South and people
• 1:36:37
  didn't believe in evolution. It's like, are we really going to be that anti-biology? Gender's a
• 1:36:41
  thing. We can talk about people who don't neatly fit into gender categories, but gender's a thing.
• 1:36:46
  I remember one thing that that Joe Rogan said early in this debate, which I think is still just
• 1:36:50
  the best line about it, which is like, if you go to a dog breeder to buy a female puppy and you
• 1:36:56
  get a home and you realize it's a male, you don't just go, oh, well, there's no difference.
• 1:37:03
  It's just a construct. It's like, you take it back and you don't get me a male dog.
• 1:37:08
  I wanted a female dog. It has to be that going that deep into the nonsense is what's causing
• 1:37:16
  some people to go, okay, and I haven't seen the numbers you've seen, but if there's backsliding
• 1:37:22
  on acceptance of gay rights and whatever, then surely that's the reason people are thinking,
• 1:37:28
  oh, so this whole movement is nuts. Is it not? That's, in my opinion, that's a very bad territory
• 1:37:35
  that we wanted them to. Yes. We'll go back and listen to the McCray episode of Uncomfortable
• 1:37:40
  Conversations because he can articulate it a lot better than I can and probably in a more
• 1:37:44
  impressive accent as well because he's from the British Isles, so our overlords.
• 1:37:50
  Just to wrap up the conversation about satire, so you go in there and
• 1:37:55
  can you just articulate this kind of daily, like what is a pitch meeting like in 2015 and does it
• 1:38:04
  change when Trump comes into power and what is the Trump, what is that Trump era like and trying
• 1:38:09
  to think about what do we do, what exactly do we do with this man and how does it always get elevated
• 1:38:17
  and stuff? Well, there aren't pitch meetings at the John Oliver show. You always hear about these
• 1:38:23
  very tense pitch meetings at SNL. John Oliver's all done by email, so if you want to pitch
• 1:38:30
  something, you're right up a very eloquent and hopefully funny email and if they like it,
• 1:38:34
  then it'll get developed. Trump, at the beginning, if we try to remember the mindset we were in
• 1:38:43
  in 2015, he was this very bizarre figure and nobody thought he would win and there was,
• 1:38:52
  there are a couple of months where it was, you know, kind of funny and it just seemed like a big
• 1:39:00
  it really did seem like it was good for comedy. Everyone always comes up to you when a comedian
• 1:39:03
  like Trump's great for comedy. You came before he was president when he was just running.
• 1:39:07
  When he was just running, right, right. Nobody thought he nobody thought he would even win
• 1:39:10
  the Republican nomination. He was just a circus act that was in the mix and so that's how we treat
• 1:39:16
  us. He was my employer at the time, I don't know if you remember, but on Ariana Huffington's
• 1:39:21
  instructions, they moved Donald Trump's candidacy from the politics section to the entertainment section
• 1:39:26
  and he was the only Republican candidate who was not covered in the politics section of the
• 1:39:31
  page of the entertainment section, which is just when you look back on it, that was exactly what
• 1:39:36
  the kind of thing that middle America was in a backlash against.
• 1:39:41
  There's also this famous clip of John Oliver when he was on the Daily Show, when he was hosting
• 1:39:46
  the Daily Show when John Stuart had gone on hiatus. Trump, he hadn't announced yet, but he was kind of,
• 1:39:54
  he was expecting, he's like, I don't know, things keep going, they're gonna go and I'm thinking,
• 1:39:58
  I might run and then it comes back to John Oliver and he says, do it. He looks at the camera,
• 1:40:03
  goes, do it. That was the attitude at the time. It'll be funny, you can't possibly win,
• 1:40:08
  it'll be a big goof. How wrong we were. There was a while where he was funny. We did the
• 1:40:14
  Trump piece, which was, that was like gigantic for us. I mean, there's also, we're pretty good
• 1:40:21
  about not caring about this type of thing, I think, but anything Trump you did got like five times
• 1:40:25
  the rating of it. He's of anything else you would do. So if you like, look at the YouTube numbers
• 1:40:30
  for that Trump piece, it's just light years ahead of any other piece we did.
• 1:40:37
  Then it got old and it got pretty unfunny. I am now, I've realized, I haven't run with this guy
• 1:40:46
  for a decade now. I haven't run about for a decade and I don't know what else to say about him.
• 1:40:51
  I try to write about him as little as I can. I mean, he's the elephant in the room, so you can't
• 1:40:57
  not write about him. But I do try to avoid just saying the same thing over and over and over.
• 1:41:02
  There's a lane in media where you can just make your name be in the anti-Trump person.
• 1:41:08
  You know, a couple people pop to all of our minds when I say that. They just talk about Trump
• 1:41:13
  every day. It's years, the new outrage. I try to avoid that because again, I'm trying to say
• 1:41:17
  something I haven't said before. So how many columns can I write that it's like he's a dumb man.
• 1:41:22
  He's a dumb man doing dumb bad things. So at the show, and I wrote a good amount of the Trump
• 1:41:31
  stuff that we did in the 2010s during his first term, we were at least trying to find something
• 1:41:37
  different to say about him each time. I wrote a piece and again, I wrote, I was one of the leads
• 1:41:44
  on a piece about, okay, this is good. I don't want to claim credit for the people to work, but
• 1:41:48
  about authoritarianism that at the time I wondered, oh, did we, do we overstate the case?
• 1:41:56
  And then in hindsight, I know we understated the case. So that one aged okay, and I hope
• 1:42:02
  somebody else did too. Not that I'm going to go back and watch. That would be too painful.
• 1:42:05
  But I mean, it was such a weird time. I remember one of the reasons why I moved back to Australia
• 1:42:10
  from New York quite apart from the fact that I was having kids and one of the karma life
• 1:42:17
  was not wanting to cover that man for four years. I mean, I came back in 2017 and I just felt like
• 1:42:25
  maybe I should maybe I should move to Australia. Australia. Oh my god. Can I tell you how blissfully
• 1:42:31
  boring Australian politics is? It's like, it's like, it's such a boring middle aged white people,
• 1:42:39
  mostly male, just wandering around talking about like just boring, some mining. That sounds
• 1:42:45
  lovely. Just, you know, the prime minister will be off meeting the Japanese prime minister in
• 1:42:50
  Singapore at some stupid regional forum. There's like, you know, everyone basically agrees on
• 1:42:56
  everything. It's like, okay. Oh, that's great. I would love to get back to talking about the
• 1:43:00
  estate tax and stuff like. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, the most, the biggest issue with the last
• 1:43:06
  election was whether or not to build a nuclear reactor, nuclear power. We already have a nuclear
• 1:43:13
  reactor for to, you know, for a medical radio isotopes and stuff like that. But like, that was
• 1:43:18
  like the bigger, that was huge. Like, just the question of like an arcane energy question,
• 1:43:23
  whether or not to complement the grid with nuclear. Anyway, so I like that. But that, I remember
• 1:43:30
  those early days of reporting on Trump and doing comedy and satire about Trump as being very,
• 1:43:39
  what's the word shallow, I would say, like revealing how genuinely uninterested the
• 1:43:49
  Asala corridor had been in the rest of the country in anyone who disagreed with them in
• 1:43:57
  people who weren't on the same, who weren't drinking the same cool aid of social justice liberalism.
• 1:44:03
  It was like, Trump is stupid. He's an orange and he's a clown. He's a buffoon. He's silly. He's racist.
• 1:44:12
  And like, there was no, there wasn't much of an attempt. And I feel a little bit paralyzed now
• 1:44:16
  because now it's gotten so bad. And he has, he is so obviously a genuine threat to the Republic.
• 1:44:23
  You know why? I don't think he's ever been until now. So second term is so much worse in the first
• 1:44:28
  so much worse. And I would even say 2026 so much worse than 2025. So let's steady downward
• 1:44:36
  trajectory. We think we're going to slam into the bottom and we never do. Like are you getting me?
• 1:44:41
  We've got three more what? I mean, like, Jesus, like you're seizing election ballots in Georgia to
• 1:44:49
  try to hunt down election officials to prosecute them for properly certifying the 2020 election.
• 1:44:56
  A resting journalist like Don Lemon on trumped up charge is trying to find, you know, random
• 1:45:02
  things that some, who was that justice? The woman who he is a cutie found. They found her guilty
• 1:45:08
  apparently of defrauding something wrong on her home mortgage loan. Oh, yeah.
• 1:45:15
  Which apparently she didn't even do, by the way, even if she had as a leader, just target people
• 1:45:23
  you don't like and then go hunting around and find our kind little reasons why you can ruin
• 1:45:28
  their lives and drag them through the courts for the next three years. What should bankrupt them?
• 1:45:32
  It's just been it's been in our public stuff. It's been in our public stuff.
• 1:45:35
  Totally inconsistent with being a Western democracy. It's like we haven't seen this in
• 1:45:41
  what I would have traditionally called a civilized country. We haven't seen this in like the club
• 1:45:46
  of Western democracies, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Western Europe.
• 1:45:52
  Victor Orbot and Hungary is the only other example. That's it. That's it.
• 1:45:57
  And we have a few more people than Hungary does in this country. Yeah.
• 1:46:01
  And a lot more nuclear weapons. I mean, I guess we can wrap this up, but just by,
• 1:46:06
  I mean, give me some fucking inside, Jeff, like we were so bad the first time around in
• 1:46:13
  Trump one at at I guess humanizing the people who liked him, but I think the only way we get
• 1:46:23
  out of this without a civil war, honestly, is if we continue to ramp up our hatred and demonization
• 1:46:34
  of Maga and all its supporters, then the left will get into power and will not be able to
• 1:46:42
  resist the temptation of doing something similar, maybe not as bad, but it will not be pure.
• 1:46:49
  And both sides will ratchet themselves into an ever-intensifying war of attrition,
• 1:46:54
  which is quite hard to then stop the centrifuge and get back to normality.
• 1:47:01
  So I feel like you almost need a truth and reconciliation process of some kind,
• 1:47:07
  which humanizes the, which cleaves off. It's like a counterterrorism strategy, actually,
• 1:47:13
  or like after apartheid in South Africa, after apartheid Nelson Mandela didn't go hunting for
• 1:47:20
  the criminals, the racist criminals who had run South Africa. He invited them into his cabinet
• 1:47:28
  and was like the only way we're going to get out of this without killing each other is like if we
• 1:47:31
  all work together on what we can agree on. And a counterterrorism strategy is similar, like
• 1:47:36
  cleave off the extremists and try to isolate them and then win over the largest
• 1:47:42
  quorum of the other side as you can. In fact, I remember a line from an Israeli general who said
• 1:47:48
  everyone keeps talking about us and the Palestinian, the Palestinian, the Palestinian, he's like it's not
• 1:47:51
  us and them. It's some of us and some of them against some of them and some of us.
• 1:47:57
  And like, framing it that way and trying to think about how do you outfox
• 1:48:02
  Trumpism by winning over some segments of his winnable fans is like the big conundrum.
• 1:48:14
  Yeah, well, you know, I said that I don't like to write about Trump these days because I feel
• 1:48:18
  like it's just the same thing over and over and that's true. So I often ask myself, okay,
• 1:48:23
  then what do I write about? You know, how can I talk about what's going on in the world but not
• 1:48:27
  just write another. And now he's doing this outrageous thing. Um, column. I write about strategy a
• 1:48:33
  lot, democratic strategy. Again, I used to be a speech writer. I'll be it for an agency. But before
• 1:48:37
  I was at EPA, I had a couple low-level jobs at democratic politics. I think about strategy a lot
• 1:48:43
  and, you know, what is a smart thing to do? What's not a smart thing to do?
• 1:48:48
  Um, one thing I can say about the right half of the American political spectrum,
• 1:48:58
  and I very much take your point about like, I don't like demonizing people. I've never been
• 1:49:02
  somebody who's like, cut off your uncle who doesn't, who likes Trump, you know, don't do that.
• 1:49:08
  Don't cut off your uncle. People are complex and people have all sorts of political views and,
• 1:49:12
  you know, speaking for myself, that's not how I want to live. So I wouldn't recommend anybody do
• 1:49:15
  that. I am kind of flumished that, you know, very bad things are happening. He's not following the
• 1:49:20
  law, not remotely. There's sort of a water gate size scandal every week or two. And everyone's not
• 1:49:25
  everyone, but enough people are like, it's great that it's happening. What are you doing response to
• 1:49:30
  that? How do you process that? I will say most people who vote Republican just hate Democrats.
• 1:49:38
  That's it. There's some ideology, but that is the glue keeping a coalition that is sometimes
• 1:49:46
  51% of the country together. They just hate Democrats. That's it. If you watch Fox News,
• 1:49:51
  and you know, for many years, my job I had to, and I still check in, they're just vilifying Democrats
• 1:49:56
  all the time. Every narrative that they like about immigration or, you know, racially tinged things
• 1:50:04
  or, you know, woke over reach or whatever, it always ties back to Democrats because Democrats
• 1:50:09
  in this story are the enablers of everything bad in this country. They just hate Democrats.
• 1:50:17
  And that's why one thing I talk about over and over and over and right about over and over and over
• 1:50:23
  is how Democrats need to make, sorry to use this term, but are brand. They're brand. I don't work
• 1:50:28
  for them. So I don't know if they're are there or we, but the Democratic band brand needs to be
• 1:50:33
  better. People, when people think of the left, when they think of Democrats, they are thinking of
• 1:50:38
  Billy Eilish saying no, no one is illegal on stolen land. Why don't Democrats more frequently
• 1:50:47
  stand up and just say like, well, that was a dumb thing to say. That's all you have to say.
• 1:50:50
  That was a dumb thing to say. I don't agree with that. They're so afraid of alienating
• 1:50:55
  the progressive wing of the coalition. They don't realize they've got the math completely wrong.
• 1:50:59
  There are like 10 freaks on blue sky who will be offended if you say, well, I was a dumb thing to say,
• 1:51:05
  but there is a very large swath of people in the center who could be one over as long as they know
• 1:51:10
  that you're not some kind of lefty freak who thinks that this is all stolen land.
• 1:51:16
  Or at least I guess it is stolen land, but there's something we can do about that. It's like
• 1:51:20
  all the land stolen. There is no such thing as un-stolen land. It's stolen land.
• 1:51:24
  It's not. I wish we hadn't, I wish it hadn't happened, but we can't rewind the clock and it's
• 1:51:29
  all stolen, so we're going to go. No, I think that they're just, I think that strategically they
• 1:51:34
  think that it's more, well, they might just be cowards, but to be generous to them,
• 1:51:39
  strategically they probably think that it's more important not to alienate the base and have
• 1:51:43
  people stay home than it is to try to win over. That's harder to win over a new person than it is
• 1:51:48
  to energize the base, but I think that's flawed because that logic just only ends you into your own,
• 1:51:54
  ends in your own navel. You just so far up your own ass that you become unappealing to everyone,
• 1:51:59
  but the true believers. There's also just mountains of statistical evidence,
• 1:52:04
  this point, suggesting that there are votes to be won at the center. You can tack to this center,
• 1:52:11
  and that's where the votes are. They're not on the wings. Because of social media, I think
• 1:52:15
  a lot of times we think they're at the wings, but they're not. Of course, and it's so obvious.
• 1:52:20
  I mean, just think about the kinds of conversations. If I were to parachute you into
• 1:52:25
  any home in the Midwest right now in swing states, right? In battleground, in purple states.
• 1:52:34
  Yeah, Michigan. My partner's from New England. Michigan is culture. That's a
• 1:52:38
  purple state. It went for a Hillary went for a Trump. So the conversations that you hear in
• 1:52:46
  diners, these are all basically center left and center right people. Yeah. There are not a lot of
• 1:52:52
  people talking about extremes. Most people are on this roughly the same, but they're in the same
• 1:52:57
  general kind of overt and window of what they want. And they haven't been served that by the
• 1:53:03
  Democratic party since Obama. Yeah. And they want to trust you, which makes perfect sense because
• 1:53:10
  unfortunately, you and I have this sickness where you follow politics very closely, but most people
• 1:53:15
  don't owe to be in their shoes. They don't follow politics that closely. They don't want to go
• 1:53:21
  through this stuff with a fine tooth comb. They want to trust the person they elect to get it right.
• 1:53:27
  And in order for that to happen, they need to believe that the person is trustworthy. They need
• 1:53:30
  to believe they're not some kind of freak, not some kind of extremist wacko. So I don't understand
• 1:53:38
  why Democrats, because most Democrats elected officials like most of them are not extremist wackos.
• 1:53:42
  You know, there are plenty of other failings, you know, cowardice being the most common, but
• 1:53:48
  the ones I've encountered very rarely are they truly an extremist wacko, but so many people on the
• 1:53:54
  left have lost their voice to have what we in the States sometimes call a sister soldier moment,
• 1:54:00
  which was when Bill Clinton, you know, this is ancient history, but there was a rapper named sister
• 1:54:04
  soldier and she had this really extreme song. And Bill Clinton said that she has some unbelievable
• 1:54:10
  extreme comment about America's the most racist, whatever I forget exactly what it was. It was
• 1:54:16
  just insane. And he's and all Bill Clinton said was, wasn't saying, that's not true. And it
• 1:54:23
  helped people understand, okay, so Bill Clinton is not an extremist wacko. Again, talk about
• 1:54:28
  people with failings, but not that particular failing. And Democrats so often can't find our
• 1:54:35
  voice to respond to things and say, well, that's not, you know, we're talking about immigration.
• 1:54:41
  It's like, yeah, we want sane and rational and humane enforcement of immigration laws,
• 1:54:47
  but there does need to be enforcement of immigration laws. Why is that so hard to say? Sometimes
• 1:54:50
  they do say it, but sometimes they fail. Jeff, thank you for explaining to me finally what the
• 1:54:55
  actual genesis of the sister soldier moment is. I understand the meaning of the term from context,
• 1:55:03
  cues in American politics, like standing up to your own side, because that's what the way
• 1:55:08
  everybody uses it. But I did not know that sister soldier was a person who said the thing that
• 1:55:14
  Bill Clinton refuted. So I'm wise today, as we all well, there you go. And I learned about
• 1:55:20
  camels. So, you know, if you are, if you're coming over from uncomfortable conversations,
• 1:55:27
  subscribe to Jeff Mora's sub stack, even just for the free tier, I might be wrong. It's called
• 1:55:31
  comedy politics and swearing in pretty much equal amounts. Jeff is very funny and insightful,
• 1:55:36
  as you can tell. If you're coming over from Jeff's side, subscribe to uncomfortable conversations,
• 1:55:40
  where we have lots of interesting and hopefully fearless and bullshit free conversations about
• 1:55:44
  the most important issues that we face as a civilization and some laughs.
• 1:55:49
  I enjoyed it, Josh. Can I give the address? I might be wrong.org.
• 1:55:52
  And if you're not sure whether you like my stuff or not, half of it's free, half of it's
• 1:56:00
  in front of the paywall. So you can find out for yourself. At least half is free, not paywall.
• 1:56:06
  If you've got uncomfortable conversations, dot sub stack dot com or find uncomfortable conversations,
• 1:56:10
  the podcast on your favorite podcast play. How's that? That was pretty good, wasn't it? That's fantastic.
• 1:56:15
  You're a professional. Yeah, I thought so. Thank you, Jeff.