Fmr John Oliver Writer on Bias, Blackface & Making Sense of the News

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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,
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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
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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,
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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money very involved, very involved in which hats. There's no access about half the movie is just
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her and cars going from point A to point B because that's clearly like, we can't clear you to go
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and, you know, go into Mar-a-Lago and go to these other locations like it's a security thing. So
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just get her and she's in the car get her and she's in the motorcade. Thank you, Phil. They're in
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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
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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
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know it's been icy. It hasn't been intolerably icy and brutal in Washington DC, Jeff. Yes,
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yes, yes. We had a big snow storm and you know, we're not a part of the country that's super
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used to that. So yes, nobody can get anywhere right now. You're not a part of the country that's
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super used to that. My sister-in-law and my husband are currently in Dallas and Dallas got a
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ridiculous dump of snow and ice. You want to talk about a part of the country that's not used to
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getting a dump of snow and ice. That's right. So yeah, the authorities were just like, okay,
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everyone just planned to stay inside for five days because we're not going to be on top. We're
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just going to have to wait for it to melt. Who's got a snowplow in Dallas? Yeah, I think if you're
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in Texas and you're getting a foot of snow, it's like, well, let's just wait for the other three
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signs of the apocalypse. We don't know what else to do. That's right. Other frauds. We didn't plan
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this guy. Now, but the other thing that I wanted to talk about before we get to, well,
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should we just talk about Minnesota and just get it out of the way so we don't have to go on
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on too much. Yeah, okay. You know, ice and things, I mean, the other form of ice, not the cold ice,
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but the immigration. We're sort of beset by both forms of ice right now in this country.
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That's right. Too much of both. Down here, we have neither, thankfully. How tense do you,
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when you're out at the shopping mall and you're joining your seven old ladies to go and watch
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the Melania documentary? Is there any sense in DC or Maryland that that phenomenon is
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imminent or like how on edge of people, if at all? Because you've also had the National God in DC.
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You got the National Guard here. Yeah. So we didn't get the ice deployment. The ice deployment is
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kind of, we should say, ice and border security, specific to Minnesota. And you know, I don't
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know how familiar your Australian blisters are with American geography, but Minneapolis is
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not close to the southern border. I guess it's kind of a border town. It's kind of near the northern
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border, but even then a couple hundred miles. But Minnesota, does Minnesota border of Canada?
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Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. And then, and then also across a lake at borders. Yeah,
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but Canada is not where most of our immigration comes from. I wouldn't have thought so.
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No, kind of. Certainly not the, certainly not the illegal kind.
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That's right. Yeah. Most, yes, a lot of SNL cast members, but they all had visas,
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NBC arranges that. So yes, it's an odd deployment. And the deployment is in Minneapolis,
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because Trump doesn't like the governor there. And he was trying to draw attention to a scandal.
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You know, that's the level we're operating on now. Trump was pissed off at the governor of Minnesota.
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So that's why they got the heavy ice deployment. Well, it's also a blue state. And they've
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been very proud about it. And they're proud about like, you know, being kind of welcoming to
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everybody's. Yeah. And it becomes self. Sorry, I just to just to briefly, but if anyone else is
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ignorant as I was, and it's rather embarrassing, and they didn't know that Minnesota boarded
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Canada, but it borders. It's got Lake Superior, right? On the north east.
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Well, it's potentially named Lake. Yes. Yeah. And then Ontario is the majority of the border
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with Minnesota. And then you got, okay, here's your Canadian geography test. What is the province
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to the west of Ontario? I want to say Scotland. No. Um, is it?
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Damn it. There was an acronym I had to learn it like eighth grade for this. Is it Manitoba?
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I would have to know in order to be able to answer correctly. I'm looking at a map.
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You were so confident that I would know. All right. There we go. There we go.
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Manitoba. It is not Saskatchewan, which I would have said. But I thought which is the next one. I
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thought good about that answer because I didn't know if it was Manitoba, but I knew it was
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in the ballpark, right? And it wasn't British Columbia. Very good. So there's a little
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American grading on a curve here for an American. That's pretty good. So Manitoba also borders
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in Minnesota. And for some reason, I thought Minnesota sat underneath the decoders, but that would
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be Nebraska. Correct. Yeah. Well, we're learning a lot here. So it's cold there. So they got both
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kinds of ice. So cold. Yes. And they got the ice deployment in DC. We we did get the national guard.
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It's sort of a similar deal. It's kind of, you know, Trump, you know, DC does have a crime problem.
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It's always hard to talk about these things with precision because on the one hand, like I don't
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want to hurt for those of you, those are your listeners who, you know, haven't read my blog and
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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
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ends up voting Democrat. I really try not to be one of these people who's going to like
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relentlessly carry water for a left wing or progressive talking points. So when you're talking
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about crime and I as a DC, well, now near, I was a DC resident for a long time now. I live just on
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the other side of the border. DC has a crime problem. It's like, it's, it's not great. You know,
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what's the ideal number of murders in a city? Zero DC's not at that number, particularly close to it.
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I think it's about, it's probably about nine good ones.
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You know, there's probably about nine. Look the other way on if they happened. Yeah, but,
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but you, but how do you get the right nine people? That's the, that's the tricky thing. If you try
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to nine, it'd be the role. I'm trying to develop a new political system that permits a certain amount
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of government state terror in killing innocents who aren't. Well, we're, we're not there yet,
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but point taken. Maybe, okay, maybe the ideal number is in zero, but it's just the point less than
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it currently is in Washington, DC. Exactly. Sometimes Democrats will just try to minimize crime and
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pretend like it doesn't exist. Like it is a problem. And we, you know, we could do better. But then
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the other side of the coin is Republicans, of course, will make a meal of it and be like, you can't
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walk outside your house without getting murdered. And of course, there's a racial angle to it,
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you know, getting murdered by a non-white and of course, that's not true either. That's why we
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ended up with National Guard, because Trump was sort of like, I'll make, make DC safe. I have
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mostly seen National Guard units wandering around looking very bored. Like it's, it's a weird
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dynamic because the president has this, you know, mission that he's on to make DC safe. And certainly,
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you know, if you're someone like me, I could point to things I'd like to see the DC government do
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to make the city safer. Trump sends the National Guard, but it's weird because they're not
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police men and women. They're army troops. So he's on this mission, but then you actually see the
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people hanging around the metro station, like you see them, they're standing there in the
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metro station. And in my experience, they're typically looking kind of bored. They're like,
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what are we supposed to do? Yes, and often in the National Guard to fight. Yes. And often,
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they're walking around in the National Mall where, you know, the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington
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monument are like, that's not the high-crime areas. They're just, it's kind of tooling around,
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like everyone else, just sort of, you know, eating a popsicle and just, like, the cynical
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and sort of dystopian explanation for why they would be walking around the mall is because Trump
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likes the likes acclimatizing or, as Americans say, acclimating the population to the iconography
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of militarism. And so if in the future, there are disputes about ballots and things. If, you know,
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they're in the future, there are protests that he wants to quash. It's helpful. I mean, the cynical,
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the very cynical version is like he's trying to get us used to the look to the image of troops
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on the streets so that when he actually deploys them, it's less jarring, the less cynical and
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more sympathetic, but still pretty awful explanation is he likes the iconography of military power.
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And he thinks it's cool to be the kind of president who presides over military parades and has
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men with machine guns wandering around making America great. Either way, it's a better explanation
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for why there's national guard on the mall than the, on the mall they're going to somehow prevent
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car jackings in the suburbs. Yeah, you know, with, with Trump, there's probably something to
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all those explanations with Trump. I usually think the dumbest explanation is usually the correct one.
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There certainly is a concern, especially as we get to the midterm elections this November that
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he might try to, everyone says we're worried he's going to try to try to do something nobody can
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quite define what that something might be. But yes, it might be something in the area of
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some sort of martial law, some sort of curfew or even just sort of intimidating people so
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they don't go to the polls like it's all speculation to what happens. But a good dumb explanation is,
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as you said, he likes the trappings of being the president who can order the military around.
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He has this habit of telling these stories where he says somebody got to base they said, sir,
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they always calling him sir in these stories. It's always a four star general coming up and
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calling him sir. He likes that he's got authority over that four star general. So he likes that.
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And he's also always trying to win the news cycle. Just he likes how that's going to look on Fox News.
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You know, DC's a crime hellhole, which of course is a narrative they love on Fox News. You know,
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it's a crime hellhole, but I'm going to take charge and solve it by deploying these troops. So
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he certainly likes that aspect of it, I would think. Why does he keep saying that people are calling
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him sir when it sounds so much better to say what they probably are calling him, which is Mr.
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president. I wasn't going to say anything rude there. But I mean, like, don't you get called Mr.
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president when you're the president? If he, if I was relating a story and I was the president,
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I feel like this very important person came up to me and said, Mr. President, you did the best job.
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That sounds better than saying this very important person came up to me and said, sir,
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you did the best job. I mean, I get called sir when I'm at a restaurant. Yeah, sure,
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McDonald's, they'll say sorry, sorry, did you have to go? And they never say Mr. President,
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would you like fries with that to me? Well, you're right. That would be that would be more
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impressive. But I don't know if you know this about Trump, he ain't smart. So yeah, well,
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probably should do that. I'll tell you what, he's savvy. Uh, if you're just joining a
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mind stream and you're not listening after the fact, we're talking to Jeff Mora, who is a
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satirist and comedy writer. He has a great substat called, I might be wrong, which is subtitled
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comedy politics and swearing in pretty much equal amounts. Uh, he is a former writer of, uh,
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last week tonight with John Oliver, uh, for the first six seasons of that show. We'll talk about
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that in just a moment as well. If you're coming over from Jeff's side, um, Josh Sepson, if you don't
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follow untumbable conversations, uh, we just find interesting people often celebrities, often
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newsmakers, often analysts to have conversations that are not uncomfortable, but they are about
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uncomfortable things that would make your asshole pucker up a little bit if someone expressed
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his right opinion about them at a cocktail party or a work event. Um, so be sure to subscribe and
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follow and all that jazz. So Jeff, I am interested in whether or not you think that there's a role for
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satire in pushing back against the current moment. Like I feel a bit paralyzed as a commentator
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and analyst about what the best strategy of opposition is when you see stuff like the
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ice outrages in Minneapolis and now more recently, the seizure of ballots in Georgia to try to
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create prosecutions of, uh, election officials for doing their jobs in 2020 or the arrest of Don
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Lemon for having attended a protest. Uh, these sort of really new level, I would say, attacks
369
00:33:49.280 --> 00:33:56.960
on civil liberties and things that rhyme with authoritarianism if they are not it all out.
370
00:33:57.600 --> 00:34:04.080
I'm skeptical of the utility in general of just doing what the tyrant wants you to do, which is
371
00:34:04.960 --> 00:34:10.640
throw yourself in front of his jack booted thugs and try to get shot or beaten up in order to create
372
00:34:10.640 --> 00:34:16.560
a scene because I kind of feel like that just plays into the worldview and the narrative of the
373
00:34:16.560 --> 00:34:21.120
tyrant anyway. Like every tyrant knows how to deal with unruly violent protesters. That's the
374
00:34:21.120 --> 00:34:26.560
easiest thing in the book. Like that's great. That's actually a gift really. Yeah. So the alternatives are
375
00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:33.920
laugh at them and mock them, which is harder for them to defeat, especially for Trump because he
376
00:34:33.920 --> 00:34:40.480
hates that. Like be a court jester that tells truths to the king while everyone watches on.
377
00:34:41.360 --> 00:34:48.240
Another is to try to analyze and think about the big picture role that we can all play in sort of
378
00:34:48.960 --> 00:34:53.600
which is sort of more my job, I think, of like trying to understand why people who support him
379
00:34:53.600 --> 00:34:58.960
would support him, how we can sort of bridge the divide to avoid collapsing into a total civil war
380
00:34:59.440 --> 00:35:04.640
rival echo chambers where all of us are so certain of our own righteousness that we end up
381
00:35:04.640 --> 00:35:11.120
killing each other. But where do you like what do you see the path to growing out of this
382
00:35:12.000 --> 00:35:22.720
as being? That's a great question. There's a lot there. I try to not get too grandiose in my
383
00:35:22.720 --> 00:35:27.440
thinking about what I'm doing. You know, I've been a comedy writer for a long time. So I
384
00:35:27.520 --> 00:35:31.840
was a speech writer for a long time. I was a speech writer and I was doing a stand-up comedy at night
385
00:35:31.840 --> 00:35:36.160
and that eventually turned into the job at the John Oliver show and then I left John Oliver and now I
386
00:35:36.160 --> 00:35:42.320
write my own political comedy blog. So I've had a lot of time to think about what this is and what it
387
00:35:42.320 --> 00:35:47.840
isn't and one lesson I've learned is like, don't get up your own ass because when you're asking
388
00:35:47.840 --> 00:35:53.200
like, is there a role for satire? There are people who will think, yes, I am the damn holding back the
389
00:35:53.200 --> 00:36:03.360
flood. I am the antidote to Trump and it is only I who can slay him and that in my experience
390
00:36:03.360 --> 00:36:09.840
is going to lead to some really unfunny and boring stuff. I just try to, I mean, I'm a political guy
391
00:36:09.840 --> 00:36:13.200
because again, that was my job before comedy. It was my full-time job and also it's like when I
392
00:36:13.200 --> 00:36:17.920
started in school, I'm just, you know, this is the area that I'm in, I've painted myself into
393
00:36:17.920 --> 00:36:22.400
this corner for better, for worse. What was the speech writing? Who were you writing for?
394
00:36:23.200 --> 00:36:27.520
I was writing for the Environmental Protection Agency, which still exists even though it's a very
395
00:36:27.520 --> 00:36:34.560
different agency now. Luckily, I got out, you know, in the 2010s, so. Right. And does that mean for
396
00:36:34.560 --> 00:36:38.880
the director of the agency or something to give speeches or updates about what the agency is up to?
397
00:36:38.880 --> 00:36:44.560
Like what? Yes, I was writing for, yes, I was writing for one of her assistants, but yes.
398
00:36:45.040 --> 00:36:53.920
Yeah, right. Okay. So anyway, it's, what I see myself as doing, I'm talking about what's going on
399
00:36:53.920 --> 00:36:56.640
because that's what people want for me and I try to talk about it in a funny way. So that's
400
00:36:56.640 --> 00:37:01.120
where humor comes in. That's what differentiates me from, you know, a colony might read somewhere as
401
00:37:01.120 --> 00:37:09.680
I'm at least attempting jokes. You talked about being strategic in your thinking and the utility,
402
00:37:09.680 --> 00:37:17.360
for example, a protest, and when they'd be useful, when they'd not be useful, my column going out
403
00:37:17.360 --> 00:37:23.440
tomorrow, I have no idea what tomorrow is in relation to how people are listening to this, especially
404
00:37:23.440 --> 00:37:27.520
during Australia. So you're like, I want the head of yours already tomorrow in Australia. Yeah,
405
00:37:27.520 --> 00:37:33.920
yeah, exactly. So for you last week, my column going up tomorrow from here is about Billie Eilish.
406
00:37:33.920 --> 00:37:39.200
I did you hear her at the Grammy Awards? Well, I mean, as you know, I've already read your column
407
00:37:39.200 --> 00:37:42.880
because it already dropped here because I'm in the theater. Yeah, but no, I don't get overwhelmed.
408
00:37:42.880 --> 00:37:49.600
Oh, everyone loved it. I got to tell you. Awesome. Thanks. No, I just see this Billie Eilish story.
409
00:37:50.160 --> 00:37:55.920
She won a Grammy and during her speech, she said, no one is illegal on stolen land,
410
00:37:55.920 --> 00:38:00.160
and that got a big round of applause. And I'm running about how that is exactly the type of
411
00:38:00.160 --> 00:38:07.440
celebrity activism that I think is counterproductive. I mean, Democrats are constantly accused of being
412
00:38:07.440 --> 00:38:13.440
the Open Borders party. And there's somebody saying, yes, Open Borders, hooray, ONPS,
413
00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:18.480
our country sucks. And then it got a round of applause. I mean, it's even even if it weren't
414
00:38:19.040 --> 00:38:24.560
strategically stupid because it's so off-putting to so many Americans and hands the right
415
00:38:25.280 --> 00:38:31.200
cartoon caricature of what they think the left is. It's also just fatuous virtue signaling bullshit.
416
00:38:31.200 --> 00:38:37.280
Yes, there you go. You know, it's like who the fuck are you? What are you talking about?
417
00:38:37.280 --> 00:38:42.720
No one is, of course, there are people who are here illegally. They are here illegally,
418
00:38:42.720 --> 00:38:47.840
like cut the bullshit. Now, how do we treat them with respect? You know, we have to, do you
419
00:38:47.840 --> 00:38:51.440
want to be shooting people in order to get them out of the country? But there are people here
420
00:38:51.440 --> 00:39:00.160
illegally. And when America was founded, lots of colonial empires were invading and colonizing
421
00:39:00.160 --> 00:39:04.480
lots of places. That was the absolutely normal thing to do that everybody was doing all over the
422
00:39:04.480 --> 00:39:08.400
place. There was there was almost no way where that wasn't happening. So what the fuck are you
423
00:39:08.400 --> 00:39:13.360
talking about? What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, that's kind of hot. Good singer.
424
00:39:13.360 --> 00:39:16.640
Probably I've never heard any of her music, but I should probably tell her something she want to
425
00:39:16.640 --> 00:39:24.960
Grammy. Yeah, it's an idiotic statement just by itself because the two parts of it are
426
00:39:24.960 --> 00:39:29.760
contradictory. No one's illegal on stolen land. Okay, so the first part,
427
00:39:30.320 --> 00:39:34.880
um, search, you know, no, no ability of a people to decide who lives there and who doesn't.
428
00:39:34.880 --> 00:39:40.640
But then the second gives a group, you know, an absolute right to the land. So the, if,
429
00:39:41.200 --> 00:39:44.960
if you have no right to say who's in your society and who's not, then how could land ever be stolen?
430
00:39:44.960 --> 00:39:50.320
So it doesn't even make any sense. If no one is illegal, then all of the, uh, non-native
431
00:39:50.320 --> 00:39:54.720
Americans, yeah, are also illegal. Relegal, I guess. Yeah.
432
00:39:54.720 --> 00:40:01.280
America was fine. Yeah. Yeah. My, my humble opinion is that the way that all went down was bad.
433
00:40:01.840 --> 00:40:07.280
And, um, people actually do have some, we could, we could discuss, it's obviously a very long
434
00:40:07.280 --> 00:40:10.560
history of how that happened, but people actually do have a right to decide who lives in their
435
00:40:10.560 --> 00:40:15.200
society and who doesn't. And, um, as you pointed about, you know, with illegal immigration in this
436
00:40:15.200 --> 00:40:20.720
country, I always, it's tough because it is illegal. I always think if I were in their shoes,
437
00:40:20.720 --> 00:40:26.640
I probably also would have immigrated illegally. But, so I'm, in a sense, I'm not mad about it.
438
00:40:26.640 --> 00:40:30.080
It is illegal. So have I committed a bunch of crimes? I mean, is there a person listening to this
439
00:40:30.080 --> 00:40:34.720
who hasn't committed, who has never sped in a car, who has never jay walked, who has never,
440
00:40:34.720 --> 00:40:40.080
you know, accidentally made a mistake on a form that would mean that they had technically
441
00:40:40.080 --> 00:40:44.800
perjured themselves. I mean, like, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff. I mean,
442
00:40:44.800 --> 00:40:47.920
just because you were, but you still enforce those things. I mean, yeah. But you're still a
443
00:40:47.920 --> 00:40:52.640
force, if we didn't enforce speeding, we'd get a lot more of it. And it's frustrating the extent
444
00:40:52.640 --> 00:40:57.120
to which we struggle to have intelligent conversations on these things sometimes, because you're right.
445
00:40:57.120 --> 00:41:00.480
What, what do you call it, fatuous virtue signaling? Yeah, we get a lot of that. I think I call
446
00:41:00.480 --> 00:41:05.200
that fatuous virtue signaling bullshit. But yes, you can, okay, admit the bullshit if you want.
447
00:41:05.200 --> 00:41:10.480
If you want to, for the gentle ears of your audience, our, our robust Australian ears is
448
00:41:10.480 --> 00:41:15.520
a slightly more forgiving. You're all rough and tumble down there. You're very rugged, very rugged
449
00:41:15.520 --> 00:41:20.320
pistol. I just ride, wrestled a topwater crocodile to death before I even came in here this morning,
450
00:41:20.320 --> 00:41:24.560
Jeff. I assumed you did. Yeah. Just because you had to eat, you had to eat lunch, right?
451
00:41:24.560 --> 00:41:29.360
Sorry. You had to eat lunch, you don't kill it. And I didn't want to kill the kangaroo who's
452
00:41:29.360 --> 00:41:36.400
back I had ridden here on because I need him to ride home on. So I had to go into the local swamp
453
00:41:36.400 --> 00:41:43.040
and find myself a crocodile. But so, and then in terms of just that, I am also interested in
454
00:41:43.040 --> 00:41:48.560
the process of go of analyzing the news and trying to ring jokes from it, especially on TV. So
455
00:41:48.560 --> 00:41:57.840
you, you go to John Oliver's show in 2014. This is a bummer, a bummer time, right? I'm not
456
00:41:57.840 --> 00:42:04.320
miss from everybody. Yeah, he was the president. Yeah, it's a bummer time. That's what I call it
457
00:42:04.320 --> 00:42:10.240
every morning. I got out of bed. I was like, it's a bummer time. For eight years. I did that.
458
00:42:11.200 --> 00:42:15.200
Yeah. Also, with your accent, I have to say I had to figure out from context clues that you're
459
00:42:15.200 --> 00:42:19.200
referring to Barack Obama, because there are a lot more, a lot more ease in his name when it's
460
00:42:19.200 --> 00:42:23.600
said with that particular accent. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. How do you say? Yeah. So oh,
461
00:42:23.600 --> 00:42:29.760
Obama, we really lean into the oh, yeah. Oh, Obama. And the Brits had, you know, the Brits,
462
00:42:29.760 --> 00:42:36.240
they drove me to, it shut me to tears. They would always say a bummer. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
463
00:42:36.560 --> 00:42:41.120
you know, President Obama, I'm like, have you ever heard that I don't say his name? I
464
00:42:41.120 --> 00:42:45.600
just want one of them once to say, why don't you say his name properly? So she was like,
465
00:42:46.640 --> 00:42:53.600
in English, you, the, in the construction of consonant vowel, consonant vowel, the second
466
00:42:53.600 --> 00:43:01.920
vowel is short. And I was like, what the fuck? This is fat. Yeah, but the man has a name,
467
00:43:01.920 --> 00:43:06.080
and he says the name that way. Stop it. That's right. Billie Eilish. Stop giving me this
468
00:43:06.080 --> 00:43:09.520
bullshit. What are you talking about? That actually is such a British attitude, because it is a
469
00:43:09.520 --> 00:43:14.480
Kenyan name, but they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, but here's how we would say it. And
470
00:43:14.480 --> 00:43:21.040
therefore that is correct. If he were, was British, which he's not. Imagine he was from Kent.
471
00:43:21.040 --> 00:43:26.560
For example, yeah. That's how they approach it. So anyway, fat is I was getting up and yelling,
472
00:43:26.560 --> 00:43:32.640
it's a bummer time into my mirror. I was in blackface while I was doing it, Jeff and I,
473
00:43:32.640 --> 00:43:36.320
but I would take it off, but leaving the house, because I know that that's not appropriate.
474
00:43:37.120 --> 00:43:42.080
Yeah. That was okay. Australia since like the 80s. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness,
475
00:43:42.080 --> 00:43:49.040
you have no idea. I just showed my husband for the very first time a few weeks ago, a video
476
00:43:49.040 --> 00:43:54.960
of something that happened in Australia in 2009. Is this the Harry Connick junior clip?
477
00:43:54.960 --> 00:43:58.560
Yes. Have you seen it? I've seen this. Yes. I've seen this. Yeah.
478
00:43:59.520 --> 00:44:06.320
So in 2009, they brought back an old iconic television show that in Australia was,
479
00:44:06.320 --> 00:44:10.800
think like the Ed Sullivan show, like back in the day. It was called Hey, Hey, it's Saturday.
480
00:44:10.800 --> 00:44:15.920
And it was on every Saturday night. It was like a family variety show. I think it was live back in
481
00:44:15.920 --> 00:44:20.400
the day. And they thought, let's resurrect the show. And as part of, and I think it ran for a few
482
00:44:20.400 --> 00:44:25.760
years, but it was never as iconic as it was back in the 70s and 80s or whatever. And as part of it,
483
00:44:25.760 --> 00:44:30.000
they thought, let's bring, they had one of the segments on the show was a talent quest show where
484
00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:34.480
these, you know, it would almost be like Letterman's stupid human tricks or something. It wasn't a
485
00:44:34.480 --> 00:44:40.400
real talent show. It was like people who total amateurs doing terrible, terrible amateur acts.
486
00:44:40.400 --> 00:44:45.040
And they would have a panel more goofy than like real. Yeah, more goofy. It was like a gong show,
487
00:44:45.040 --> 00:44:48.880
if you know, like the old tradition of banging a gong, and you know, the idiot stops doing what
488
00:44:49.120 --> 00:44:53.200
they're doing. And they literally had a gong, I think. And so they thought, well, instead of getting
489
00:44:53.200 --> 00:44:59.280
new acts, why don't we get some of the classic acts that everybody loved back in the 70s? And they'll
490
00:44:59.280 --> 00:45:08.640
come back and they'll do their act again. And one of those acts, what could go wrong is three guy,
491
00:45:08.640 --> 00:45:17.280
three white guys in blackface doing a, like a Vordville almost Jim Crow, like Al Jocelyn,
492
00:45:18.160 --> 00:45:23.440
were they dancing to a Michael Jackson song or something? I think they were, but yes, they're in,
493
00:45:23.440 --> 00:45:30.000
but obviously, and one of the celebrities on the panel who's judging is Harry Connick Jr.,
494
00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:33.040
who's been on the show a bunch of times. He's very popular in Australia. He's more popular in
495
00:45:33.040 --> 00:45:38.800
Australia than he's in the States for some reason. He was big down here. He always sold out.
496
00:45:38.800 --> 00:45:42.640
There was concerts. He was on the Australian television quite a lot. He did a lot of, spent a
497
00:45:42.640 --> 00:45:48.400
long time down here. So beloved American institution in Australia. And he's just sitting there. And he's
498
00:45:48.400 --> 00:45:53.920
like, I don't even know what to say. Oh, God. And then during the ad break, he went up to the
499
00:45:53.920 --> 00:45:58.560
host of the show, who's like a very ed Sullivan, like iconic figure and was like, I can't,
500
00:46:00.160 --> 00:46:04.240
let the show, I can't continue to be part of the show unless I say something after the ad break.
501
00:46:04.240 --> 00:46:09.680
And so they came back from the ad break and there was this very earnest, embarrassing moment,
502
00:46:09.680 --> 00:46:16.160
where it's just Harry Connick Jr. and the Australian host, whose name escapes me.
503
00:46:16.960 --> 00:46:22.480
And the host is like sort of awkwardly saying like, well, obviously, it wasn't our attention
504
00:46:22.480 --> 00:46:26.720
to offend you in any way, Harry, but you know, you're a great friend of the show. So I wanted to
505
00:46:26.720 --> 00:46:32.560
give you this opportunity to express yourself. And he's just, he does a masterful job at the
506
00:46:32.560 --> 00:46:36.880
Harry Connick Jr. Being like really raised, in my opinion, of Harry Connick Jr. Yeah. Yeah.
507
00:46:36.960 --> 00:46:43.280
He basically just says like that is that in my country, that is completely offensive and,
508
00:46:43.280 --> 00:46:46.720
you know, his really kind of a really hurtful history and would be seen as undoing
509
00:46:47.280 --> 00:46:51.840
enormous advances that we feel like we've made in recent decades in race relations.
510
00:46:51.840 --> 00:46:55.360
And if I've known that anything like that was going to be on this show, to be honest,
511
00:46:55.360 --> 00:47:02.000
much as I would have asked for 40 million dollars in a millennia deal.
512
00:47:02.480 --> 00:47:08.320
Uh, no, I mean, and so, but so when you say black like it is amazing, then my husband,
513
00:47:08.320 --> 00:47:16.960
who's American was like, how the fuck did that go on the air in 2009? And it's like, yeah,
514
00:47:16.960 --> 00:47:22.400
Australia is definitely had different norms. I think until, I think social media and the great
515
00:47:22.400 --> 00:47:28.480
awakening change things. So now we're probably on similar pages. But up until the 2010s, that was
516
00:47:28.480 --> 00:47:34.720
still possible. Well, and yeah, you know, yeah, you see a lot more of what's going on here now.
517
00:47:34.720 --> 00:47:39.760
So yeah, an Australian, obviously, well, probably until pretty recently wouldn't know the whole
518
00:47:39.760 --> 00:47:46.240
history that we had with blackface. I do the segment of my podcast, uh, called News from 100
519
00:47:46.240 --> 00:47:49.840
Years ago. It's, I'm reading The New York Times from 100 Years ago, because you can get those.
520
00:47:49.840 --> 00:47:55.520
And I am, you know, I am learning a lot about the 1920s. I'm becoming an accidental expert
521
00:47:55.520 --> 00:47:59.680
on the 1920s. And I'm learning a lot about the trends and what they found interesting.
522
00:47:59.680 --> 00:48:04.240
I did, you know, they find air travel very interesting. Uh, there's a lot of, uh, optimism
523
00:48:04.240 --> 00:48:09.520
about the League of Nations. And another thing is obviously the race stuff is just
524
00:48:11.200 --> 00:48:18.080
a different world. It's, it's, it's, it's really backwards. And, um, and then I also open,
525
00:48:18.080 --> 00:48:22.240
I open every episode with a copyright expired song, which is 100 years old. This is how I got
526
00:48:22.240 --> 00:48:25.360
into the doing the news from 100 years ago, because I was starting with these songs that are 100
527
00:48:25.360 --> 00:48:34.640
years old. And, um, yeah, minstrelry was gigantic in the United States. It was a whole genre. And,
528
00:48:35.440 --> 00:48:40.960
um, you can't watch 10 seconds of these clips today without just wanting to, you know,
529
00:48:40.960 --> 00:48:44.560
throw into a ball. I get, especially if you're white. It's cringe-worthy, no matter what race you
530
00:48:44.560 --> 00:48:49.920
are, but if you're white, you also, oh, God, because it's, it's, uh, ugly, ugly stuff.
531
00:48:50.720 --> 00:48:55.360
But we also, you know, like, we're aware of that and kind of went through the process of,
532
00:48:56.400 --> 00:49:01.040
understand why that's wrong. Exactly. I mean, and the guy's name, the host's name is Darryl
533
00:49:01.040 --> 00:49:04.720
Summers, people on the chat are telling me. There's one of the benefits of doing it live.
534
00:49:04.720 --> 00:49:11.760
Okay. Um, the, the, I, I think you're right that like, there was no intentional racism there.
535
00:49:11.840 --> 00:49:18.320
It's a bit more like the Justin Trudeau, you know, in blackface, like at a time when it wasn't,
536
00:49:18.320 --> 00:49:24.960
it wouldn't have been obvious to those people who put on that segment that, and to be honest,
537
00:49:24.960 --> 00:49:32.560
I'm still not sure that it actually makes a lot of sense morally to have an injunction that is
538
00:49:32.560 --> 00:49:38.000
as absolute as it has become, either on that or on, for example, the N word. I've always thought
539
00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:43.040
that the N word, that the phrase the N word is fatuous virtue signaling bullshit since we've
540
00:49:43.040 --> 00:49:47.440
now coined that phrase. Um, that there are contexts in which it should be okay for us to talk about
541
00:49:47.440 --> 00:49:51.280
how terrible the word is in which we're not, you know, in which we're smart enough to understand
542
00:49:51.280 --> 00:49:55.920
when it's being used as a slur and when it's being used when it's being mentioned. And similarly,
543
00:49:55.920 --> 00:50:02.240
with blackface, you know, if you're mocking degrading, demeaning people on the basis of their race,
544
00:50:02.240 --> 00:50:07.200
that's one thing. Uh, I would have thought that it would be possible to live in a world in which,
545
00:50:07.200 --> 00:50:13.440
I mean, I think if the world were less racist, let me put it this way, a world in which it
546
00:50:13.440 --> 00:50:23.520
were possible for a white person to put, you know, to darken their face for the purposes of a role,
547
00:50:23.520 --> 00:50:29.200
or to talk about the existence of racial slurs without treading on eggshells would be a less racist
548
00:50:29.200 --> 00:50:38.640
world than a world in which those have to be taboos. Yeah. Um, the, uh, so if you start from,
549
00:50:38.640 --> 00:50:45.680
and by the way, we're now having a conversation that kind of like it didn't happen in America,
550
00:50:45.680 --> 00:50:52.080
because you're right, that we had blackface. And if you watch those minstery clips from back in the
551
00:50:52.080 --> 00:50:59.760
day, there's no, um, no doubt about what blackface was and why it was wrong. Um, and now we have
552
00:50:59.760 --> 00:51:03.120
these taboos, which you're saying, you're getting an Australia, because you see our social media.
553
00:51:03.120 --> 00:51:07.760
So now we have these taboos about blackface that have popped up, but defining what blackface is,
554
00:51:08.720 --> 00:51:12.400
people often don't do. We really skipped that part. So that's a conversation that we didn't have.
555
00:51:12.400 --> 00:51:17.360
This podcast is called, uh, uncomfortable conversations. So what the hell? Let's, let's get into it.
556
00:51:17.360 --> 00:51:22.800
I've actually, yes, I've talked about this with actual black people, um, Thomas Sheridan Williams,
557
00:51:22.800 --> 00:51:27.520
and I used to do a podcast. So I talked about it with him seriously. Yeah. Very briefly. Yeah.
558
00:51:27.520 --> 00:51:32.240
Yeah. Favorite riders. And I consider him a friend, even though we don't hang out as much as I do.
559
00:51:32.240 --> 00:51:36.640
He's a great dude. Yeah. He's been on the show. He's a really good, I've read all of his books.
560
00:51:36.640 --> 00:51:41.760
I think he's brilliant. He's a good dude and always upfront on comfortable conversation.
561
00:51:42.640 --> 00:51:48.880
But yeah, so we had these taboos that popped up and we haven't always had conversations about
562
00:51:50.480 --> 00:51:55.440
why the rules are what they are, or even what the rules are. They're unclear a lot of time.
563
00:51:55.440 --> 00:52:00.000
And we can surely agree like the table stakes for this conversation is like, okay,
564
00:52:00.800 --> 00:52:07.440
number one racism's bad, duh, and number two, you don't want to do things that
565
00:52:08.160 --> 00:52:14.000
stereotype or caricature group of people or race, you know, how offensive would it be if,
566
00:52:14.000 --> 00:52:19.840
you know, I wouldn't even want to see if somebody decided I'm going to do a caricature of a white
567
00:52:19.840 --> 00:52:27.920
person. I don't want to see what that is. But then you had cases like Jimmy Fallon did an impression
568
00:52:27.920 --> 00:52:34.800
of Chris Rock on Saturday Night Live in the 90s, the late 90s. And as they always do on Saturday Night
569
00:52:34.800 --> 00:52:42.160
Live, they made them look like Chris Rock and that involved paint. But he wasn't doing an impression
570
00:52:42.160 --> 00:52:48.240
of just any generic black guy. He was doing an impression of Chris Rock specifically. And the
571
00:52:48.880 --> 00:52:52.640
makeup that they put him in, you know, and again, they always do this on SNL if you're playing
572
00:52:52.640 --> 00:52:56.960
the president, you know, they're going to make you look like the president. It was, they made them
573
00:52:56.960 --> 00:53:02.480
look like Chris Rock. It wasn't some cartoonist generic black guy. But then in the the great
574
00:53:02.480 --> 00:53:06.640
awakening, you know, 2020 specifically, he had to apologize for that. There wasn't really a
575
00:53:06.640 --> 00:53:11.680
conversation about like, is that black face or is that different? Because ministry, like it's
576
00:53:11.680 --> 00:53:17.200
blackface and it's, you know, a caricature of an entire racial group. But wasn't that an impression
577
00:53:17.200 --> 00:53:22.640
of Chris Rock? We never had this conversation. No. Well, I mean, Megan Kelly tried to have that
578
00:53:22.640 --> 00:53:29.920
conversation on the today show and was fired. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and okay.
579
00:53:30.720 --> 00:53:34.320
I was working in TV when that happened. I will say that show was hanged by a thread. And then
580
00:53:34.320 --> 00:53:38.480
that happened. That's true. I mean, that's true of Colbert as well. I mean, that's true. There's
581
00:53:38.480 --> 00:53:43.440
always, it's never a unique causal thing. But it's certainly, yeah. That the huge brujaha about
582
00:53:43.440 --> 00:53:48.240
that didn't help. And the fact that there's a straw that broke the camel's back, if you say that
583
00:53:48.240 --> 00:53:54.160
looks right. Yeah. We do. We don't say it frequently, but it's understood. Okay. There we go. Although
584
00:53:54.160 --> 00:53:57.920
there's a straw that broke the camel's back. Well, he is, he is a tidbit of Australianer for you.
585
00:53:57.920 --> 00:54:02.320
Are you going to love this, Jeff? You ready? You sitting down and you hold on to a hat?
586
00:54:03.360 --> 00:54:09.680
I don't know. Where are the, you know, hold on to Melania's hat, perhaps, where which country
587
00:54:09.680 --> 00:54:17.920
has the largest number of wild camels in the world? Well, you wouldn't be asking me this unless
588
00:54:17.920 --> 00:54:21.920
the answer was Australia. That's right. Australia. It would be funny if I was just like, you're not
589
00:54:21.920 --> 00:54:28.640
an Arab Emirates Saudi Arabia. Just like you just like you thought. Yeah. Australia. Australia
590
00:54:28.640 --> 00:54:36.000
also has how how how do you have wild camels? Did did two get brought in 1820? There's two camels
591
00:54:36.000 --> 00:54:41.680
stole off a bread in England. You got shipped to the wild and then just went fuck nuts on each
592
00:54:41.680 --> 00:54:46.880
other. And now you're neck deep in camels. You cannot trust a British camel. That's what my
593
00:54:46.880 --> 00:54:52.160
grand-pappy always used to say. They will they're wily and they were getting shipped out here in
594
00:54:52.160 --> 00:54:58.640
the convict ships. No, they brought out camels. I don't know who it was in the early days of the
595
00:54:58.640 --> 00:55:05.840
settlement, sorry, invasion, who brought out camels. But I think they, as you can imagine, they're
596
00:55:05.840 --> 00:55:12.080
extremely useful for traveling long distances when you don't have an air conditioned Lexus to cross
597
00:55:12.560 --> 00:55:17.040
large desert areas, which were hard hard to get in the 19th century. Yeah, they were very
598
00:55:17.040 --> 00:55:23.360
hard. They were very expensive. Yeah. And so I don't know if you know about Australia's geography,
599
00:55:23.360 --> 00:55:28.960
but it Australia is the same size as the contiguous United States. I think a lot of Americans think
600
00:55:28.960 --> 00:55:35.760
Australia is like Texas. It's the same size as no. I know you're about as big as us. Yeah. And there's
601
00:55:35.760 --> 00:55:41.120
and it has a half the population of California a bit more. It has basically a population of Florida
602
00:55:41.200 --> 00:55:48.560
which is all plusted basically around a band. If you if you think of like from like
603
00:55:49.840 --> 00:55:57.360
from Key West up to what would it be? Probably you wouldn't even get to well, no, you get you get
604
00:55:57.360 --> 00:56:02.080
past Florida in terms of the geography of it, but you wouldn't even get past it land to say. And
605
00:56:02.080 --> 00:56:07.120
okay, and 100 kilometers inland. And that's the entire population and the whole rest is desert.
606
00:56:07.200 --> 00:56:14.560
Or rain forest. And so the camels were handy. And so they brought them out. And the reason why
607
00:56:14.560 --> 00:56:20.240
they Australia has the best genetically pure most sought after camels that the Arabians
608
00:56:21.200 --> 00:56:26.960
lust after in their loins is because they've been breeding them or and so in the Middle East,
609
00:56:26.960 --> 00:56:31.280
they're all kind of fucked up the same way that dogs are all sort of fucked up when they're
610
00:56:31.280 --> 00:56:37.360
pilgrims. And here we've had like 200 years of evolution of these camels who've just been out
611
00:56:37.360 --> 00:56:40.400
there wandering around the outback because nobody's used them in over a hundred years. We don't
612
00:56:40.400 --> 00:56:45.920
do anything with them. And they breed like rabbits or camels. And so there you go. That's your
613
00:56:45.920 --> 00:56:53.840
Australia camel trivia today. I came on this podcast hoping to learn nothing about Australia.
614
00:56:53.840 --> 00:57:00.560
That was honestly one of my goals as an American. It harms it harms my America centric view of
615
00:57:00.560 --> 00:57:06.240
the world. And remember, I'm not only an American. I'm a liberal East Coast elitist. So I really
616
00:57:06.240 --> 00:57:11.680
don't want to know anything about anything outside of the DC New York quarter is possible. The
617
00:57:11.680 --> 00:57:22.720
Asella quarter exactly. Yeah. So I am glad if we if we're we're going to get into a discussion of
618
00:57:22.720 --> 00:57:27.040
racial purity, which is no thing I don't like to do on a podcast. I'm glad it was about camels
619
00:57:27.040 --> 00:57:32.480
because that is the topic on which like, okay, let's talk about the other conversation about
620
00:57:32.480 --> 00:57:38.160
racial purity or rather the one that we we didn't quite finish there because I do want to lean
621
00:57:38.160 --> 00:57:41.920
into the uncomfortable conversation bit because I think it is use. Okay. So your story is that
622
00:57:41.920 --> 00:57:51.680
we basically went from total sort of carelessness about a really harmful form of old entertainment.
623
00:57:52.160 --> 00:57:59.680
Could I add? Yeah. Not just carelessness, I wouldn't even say. But joy in the characterization.
624
00:57:59.680 --> 00:58:04.880
Right. It was a it was an enormously popular hilarious people loved it. They could not get
625
00:58:04.880 --> 00:58:10.240
enough minstery. It was an enormously I'm sorry. I was I was talking specifically about say the
626
00:58:10.240 --> 00:58:17.760
transition from between 2005 and 2015 or something or 2004 in 2020, right? Where there was not a
627
00:58:17.840 --> 00:58:23.920
great no one was calling out for a blackface and when it went on Australian television in 2009.
628
00:58:23.920 --> 00:58:29.360
Correct. Oh, yeah. It was I mean, it was just like, no one really thought about the how the
629
00:58:29.360 --> 00:58:34.080
complicated nature of it in the mainstream. Yeah, I was I was born in 1980, minstery in the US
630
00:58:34.080 --> 00:58:41.600
long gone by 1980. Even I sort of like post World War two minstery, not really a thing, but
631
00:58:41.600 --> 00:58:47.360
enormously popular in like Bobville 1920s. Yeah. I'd like to believe there was one guy in Mississippi
632
00:58:47.920 --> 00:58:53.200
who was keeping it alive in his shed, you know, he was like, agdammit.
633
00:58:54.560 --> 00:59:01.360
Abby six feet in the cold ground before minstery dies in these United Confederate states. He just
634
00:59:01.360 --> 00:59:06.560
he just loves the form. He just loves the form. And maybe even what it could seem like
635
00:59:06.560 --> 00:59:14.400
edge racist, but I just I love the form. Exactly. You can say so much. You can say so much about
636
00:59:14.400 --> 00:59:19.040
the human condition through. There was someone there was someone who was the last guy, someone
637
00:59:19.040 --> 00:59:23.200
who showed up at an audition like, ah, and they went, no, no, no, no, no, Monday, we decided we're
638
00:59:23.200 --> 00:59:29.920
not anymore. I'm sorry. Oh my god. That's so true. There was the last. This is a show. Jeff,
639
00:59:29.920 --> 00:59:35.120
write the screenplay for a movie. The last minstrel show. It's the lot. There must have been
640
00:59:35.120 --> 00:59:41.840
the last minstrel show in America. What's that story? Who are these guys? Klingon.
641
00:59:42.800 --> 00:59:48.960
Yeah. That, uh, even by the standards of, uh, stuff I write, that's, that's not going to get made
642
00:59:48.960 --> 00:59:55.280
by a network, which is saying something. That's like, you can almost make a version of the producers
643
00:59:55.280 --> 00:59:59.440
where the show that they pitch is a show called the last minstrel show. Yeah. It would be that
644
00:59:59.440 --> 01:00:04.400
toxic. It's like this. The springtime for Hitler, uh, would be the, they'd be a big minstrel show
645
01:00:04.400 --> 01:00:10.000
in the middle of it. That would be the show within the show. Uh, actually, let's elapse. Okay,
646
01:00:10.000 --> 01:00:14.480
actually, you're getting to another interesting part of this conversation. So, you know, I described,
647
01:00:14.480 --> 01:00:20.800
okay, you know, is it, is it, is it blackface every single time any, any makeup is used? Is that
648
01:00:20.800 --> 01:00:25.360
the standard? Well, just the existence of makeup? If so, why is the, the makeup the thing?
649
01:00:26.080 --> 01:00:30.960
And, um, but another good question is, so another thing we lost is we lost a couple episodes of
650
01:00:30.960 --> 01:00:34.560
30 Rock. Do you know the show 30 Rock? It's one of my favorite shows. One of my favorite shows of
651
01:00:34.560 --> 01:00:39.280
old time. Yeah. I kind of assume it, you know, you seem to be a man of good taste. I assumed you,
652
01:00:39.280 --> 01:00:45.920
well, 30 Rock. It's a hilarious show on the live episodes. They did two live episodes of 30 Rock.
653
01:00:45.920 --> 01:00:53.360
And one of the running jokes in that show is they would, um, cut to old episodes of old shows
654
01:00:53.360 --> 01:00:58.160
from years past because they're kind of, you know, honoring the history of live TV. And one of the,
655
01:00:58.160 --> 01:01:03.360
one of the things they cut to was an Amos and Andy type show. You know, I said there was
656
01:01:03.360 --> 01:01:09.520
in a ton of minstery post World War II. I'm wrong because Amos and Andy was a radio show that
657
01:01:09.520 --> 01:01:16.720
then became, I think it briefly became a TV show. And it was, um, it was two white guys in one of
658
01:01:16.720 --> 01:01:21.920
them, at least one of them. It's like, you know, I've never seen this thing was a doing a, you know,
659
01:01:21.920 --> 01:01:29.600
generic black guy voice, a minstery voice. So the joke on 30 Rock was they, uh, they cut to one of
660
01:01:29.600 --> 01:01:34.560
those shows. And the joke is, of course, about how wildly inappropriate it is. It's, it's like
661
01:01:34.560 --> 01:01:41.520
holy shit. Can you believe? We used to have that. So the joke and it has John Ham in blackface.
662
01:01:41.520 --> 01:01:47.200
And of course, Tracy Jordan, who plays Tracy Morgan on 30 Rock playing an old-timey character,
663
01:01:47.200 --> 01:01:50.560
you know, John Ham walks in blackface. He goes, you know, he freaks out, he goes, oh hell, no,
664
01:01:50.560 --> 01:01:55.600
it, you know, and the joke is, oh my god, that's terrible. Yeah. Those two episodes of 30 Rock are
665
01:01:55.600 --> 01:02:03.520
no longer on peacock. And I, my feeling as a comedy writer is the joke there was this is bad.
666
01:02:03.520 --> 01:02:08.960
Yes, there was blackface. But the comment on the blackface was, this is terrible. Can you believe
667
01:02:08.960 --> 01:02:14.240
we used to do that? And that comment, I think, is absolutely unmissable. There's no other interpretation
668
01:02:14.240 --> 01:02:22.480
you can have of it. Um, so I, I, again, as a comedy writer, I feel like, don't we want jokes that
669
01:02:22.480 --> 01:02:27.840
say like, you know, blackface is bad. Well, why did that get the Stalin treatment? I'm, I don't
670
01:02:27.840 --> 01:02:32.800
think. I mean, it's the same phenomenon as, I don't know if you know, the classic British sitcom Faulty
671
01:02:32.800 --> 01:02:40.560
Towers. Yeah, yeah. Of course, you know, outing after Monty Python. And the two of those episodes
672
01:02:40.560 --> 01:02:46.480
aren't available or I don't know if they've been reinstated, but they were pulled in 2020 or 2021
673
01:02:47.040 --> 01:02:53.200
because there's a Nazi. Is it, I think it's a German. Is it the don't mention the war?
674
01:02:53.200 --> 01:02:57.840
Is it the don't mention the war? Oh, okay. Oh, maybe that, no, I don't know what episode is from,
675
01:02:57.840 --> 01:03:04.880
but basically the old, um, the old guy in the restaurant who used to fight the Nazis, his racist.
676
01:03:04.880 --> 01:03:10.240
And part of the joke is that he's still living in the past. And so he uses slurs and things. And
677
01:03:10.240 --> 01:03:14.960
so for that reason, it was, it's exactly the same phenomenon. Similarly, I mean, when I was working
678
01:03:15.040 --> 01:03:25.040
on Half-Best Live, I was living in New York from 2012 and to 2016. And I had an activist. So
679
01:03:25.040 --> 01:03:28.320
I don't know if you remember this, but Stephen Colbert when he was, when he was doing the Colbert
680
01:03:28.320 --> 01:03:36.640
rapport and he was doing the character of the right wing guy. Um, he did a joke about the,
681
01:03:36.640 --> 01:03:42.320
was it the Washington Redskins? You remember this? Uh, yes, I remember this whole thing extremely
682
01:03:42.320 --> 01:03:45.360
well because it was a, it was a big deal in my world. So I was writing a John Oliver at that point.
683
01:03:45.360 --> 01:03:50.960
So yeah. Oh, okay. So I initiated that whole thing. It was my, it was, it was my interview with the
684
01:03:50.960 --> 01:03:57.280
activist who was trying to get Colbert fired on Half-Best Live that went viral, that caused the
685
01:03:57.280 --> 01:04:02.560
upset that then Joe Rogan played it. You know, Colbert heard about it. Colbert had to come on and
686
01:04:02.560 --> 01:04:07.600
talk about it as a result of this interview with this one who went by the name of Sui Park.
687
01:04:08.080 --> 01:04:16.240
And the, the gag that Colbert had done was he, he was saying that the, uh, that the only reason,
688
01:04:16.240 --> 01:04:21.280
that the reason why they're ahead of the, the boss of the Washington Redskins was donating money
689
01:04:21.280 --> 01:04:26.560
to an indigenous education fund was because he was refusing to change the name of his, uh, race
690
01:04:26.560 --> 01:04:32.480
to the racist name of his, uh, sports team from the Redskins. And Colbert then went on to say,
691
01:04:32.560 --> 01:04:37.600
I too have been accused of Rachel Stereotypes in the past, uh, and they played type of
692
01:04:37.600 --> 01:04:43.600
fictitious old instances of him, you know, pretending to be a Chinese person. And then it came
693
01:04:43.600 --> 01:04:50.880
back to him in the present day. And he said, I, uh, um, as a, you know, as, you know, in, in order to
694
01:04:50.880 --> 01:04:56.080
rectify this, I'm setting up a new foundation called the Ching Chong Ding Dong foundation for
695
01:04:56.160 --> 01:05:03.920
Oriental whatever. And this was the joke being his fix is itself racist. His fix is racist.
696
01:05:03.920 --> 01:05:11.600
The joke that nobody watching the show this racist nobody missed it. His target is a person
697
01:05:11.600 --> 01:05:16.720
the head of the Redskins who thinks he, who, who Colbert thinks is racist and is therefore saying
698
01:05:16.720 --> 01:05:23.040
his solution to the racist name is inadequate. That's the, that's the, that's the reason the joke
699
01:05:23.040 --> 01:05:29.600
is funny. You don't, don't get to fix, you know, racism by simply tokenistically creating
700
01:05:29.600 --> 01:05:34.800
some foundation that you don't give a shit about as a way you're trying to buy off your critics.
701
01:05:34.800 --> 01:05:40.880
Yeah. It's a great job. How much to get out of this 80,000? I got that rich. Okay. 80,000
702
01:05:40.880 --> 01:05:46.000
square again. Yeah. It is a, it is an anti-racist joke. Yeah. It's a firmly anti-racist joke,
703
01:05:46.000 --> 01:05:50.880
but it depoits as well as was the joke on 30 rock. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it was in,
704
01:05:50.960 --> 01:05:55.840
and so I did this disastrous interview with the woman who was trying to get some notice for
705
01:05:55.840 --> 01:06:02.560
the cancel Colbert campaign. And she basically, I would sort of said, do you not understand what,
706
01:06:02.560 --> 01:06:09.920
satire is? Like what the target of the joke is? And she was like, well, I, you know, I understand
707
01:06:09.920 --> 01:06:14.640
that as a white man, you feel that it's your right to talk down to women of course. And that's
708
01:06:14.640 --> 01:06:18.880
understandable. Oh boy. Not going to enact the neighbor of explaining to you why it's
709
01:06:18.880 --> 01:06:24.480
defensive for you to question my opinion. I was like, oh man. What, what is going like? And
710
01:06:24.480 --> 01:06:28.400
that was, it was one of those early moments of wokeness. I was going to say it was so early. It was
711
01:06:28.400 --> 01:06:34.720
so early. It was like, because it was 2012 or 2013, I didn't know it was at least 2014.
712
01:06:34.720 --> 01:06:38.400
Didn't know it was happening. Oh, it might have been 2014. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you are
713
01:06:38.400 --> 01:06:43.760
on. Yeah. Right. And it was like, it was this one of those watershed things that just suddenly,
714
01:06:44.080 --> 01:06:49.040
it was like, I'm talking to an avatar of another human being who's treating me as an avatar of a
715
01:06:49.040 --> 01:06:53.920
white man. We're not talking to human, we're not, we're not human minds having a conversation,
716
01:06:53.920 --> 01:06:58.880
a reason about, that's based on reason. I'm a cardboard cut out of a white man and she's a cardboard
717
01:06:58.880 --> 01:07:04.880
count of woman of color as far as she's concerned. And so eventually I just said, I'm not like,
718
01:07:04.880 --> 01:07:11.600
I'm not criticizing your idea, but it's a stupid idea. Like the idea that we should not try to
719
01:07:11.600 --> 01:07:16.640
understand the context of a piece of satire and that we should try to get someone fired for a
720
01:07:16.640 --> 01:07:20.480
piece of satire before understanding the piece of satire. And she's just so she was just like,
721
01:07:20.480 --> 01:07:24.560
well, I find that totally unhelpful. So I won't participate in this conversation. And how long
722
01:07:24.560 --> 01:07:31.600
after that were you deported to Australia? Sadly, it was my last day on the air. Unfortunately,
723
01:07:32.880 --> 01:07:38.880
fortunately, it was early enough and half post was liberal enough that that worked. But of course,
724
01:07:38.960 --> 01:07:42.400
if that conversation had happened six years later or seven years later, I was going to
725
01:07:42.400 --> 01:07:45.840
get a job. I was going to say it's funny. You should say that. Okay. It's funny. You say
726
01:07:45.840 --> 01:07:50.320
half post was was liberal and yet yet because that's the thing. I'm an old school liberal and
727
01:07:51.520 --> 01:08:02.000
yeah, free, free speech and not, not seeing people as their race is like core liberal things.
728
01:08:02.000 --> 01:08:05.680
I mean, the thing should try to pull on you there, the standpoint ofistemology, you know,
729
01:08:06.320 --> 01:08:11.360
the traditional liberal response to that would be, it doesn't matter what group I'm in or what
730
01:08:11.360 --> 01:08:16.160
group you're in. It only matters the strength of our arguments. And it's interesting for me to hear
731
01:08:16.160 --> 01:08:23.840
that at that time, that was the Huffington Post's view. As you said, we were a company, we were a
732
01:08:23.840 --> 01:08:30.160
business within a business. And I think the Holy Thoughts was, let's just have the kinds of
733
01:08:30.240 --> 01:08:35.440
free-wheeling conversations that are, you know, that are unsensitive. I would not, you know,
734
01:08:35.440 --> 01:08:42.400
necessarily say that the entire publications editorial position was as open-minded, maybe as the
735
01:08:42.400 --> 01:08:46.000
thing you could get away with saying on the air, but it was a great place to work for me.
736
01:08:46.640 --> 01:08:52.400
I underwent the same, you know, I experienced the same things at all of her that, you know,
737
01:08:52.400 --> 01:08:58.640
the same shift, you know, I would say from liberal values to, you know, whatever it is now,
738
01:08:59.280 --> 01:09:04.000
when I got there in 2014, like I said, I'm just, and I think I've stayed pretty consistent over
739
01:09:04.000 --> 01:09:08.160
the years. I'm just a liberal. I sometimes say Obama liberal just to kind of give people
740
01:09:08.160 --> 01:09:13.440
idea of where I'm coming from. And I feel like that was really normal and not weird for that
741
01:09:13.440 --> 01:09:19.920
environment back then. But then by the time I left in 2020, I was like the right edge of
742
01:09:22.080 --> 01:09:26.560
the political spectrum in that office. So, you know, I don't know what you'd call it, you know,
743
01:09:26.560 --> 01:09:30.880
progressive shift. Sometimes you hear the phrase like success or ideology or whatever, but yes,
744
01:09:30.880 --> 01:09:36.720
the values changed. It got very different than that six years. Yeah. I mean, I sometimes, I
745
01:09:36.720 --> 01:09:42.640
usually just get to talk about social justice, like identity politics as opposed to liberalism.
746
01:09:42.640 --> 01:09:47.360
Is the, did you leave or were you pushed? What was the nature of your department? I left. I left.
747
01:09:47.360 --> 01:09:52.640
It was don't let the ass hit you in the door on the way out. Yeah. Wow, it's funny. That's
748
01:09:52.720 --> 01:09:57.120
almost identical to me at the public broadcaster here as well, where I had a radio show,
749
01:09:57.120 --> 01:10:04.800
at a public radio show on the main broadcast network in the largest market in Australia. And
750
01:10:04.800 --> 01:10:13.440
that was from 2021 to 2023. And like it was the same situation where it was sort of like,
751
01:10:15.600 --> 01:10:19.360
you know, my tenure being made impossible because of the things that I wanted to talk about in
752
01:10:19.360 --> 01:10:23.680
the kind of conversations that I wanted to have that we're inconsistent with. Yeah,
753
01:10:23.680 --> 01:10:29.520
luckily it didn't get quite that bad with me. You know, it was just John and I kind of fallen
754
01:10:29.520 --> 01:10:34.560
out of love with each other. We, you know, we had to get divorced. It was like, we just kind of had,
755
01:10:34.560 --> 01:10:39.520
we had to do it. And then also it's like, I wanted to do scripted TV. Late night is a grind.
756
01:10:39.520 --> 01:10:45.040
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
757
01:10:45.040 --> 01:10:49.440
lifer? So all those kind of more banal considerations were part of it. But yeah,
758
01:10:49.440 --> 01:10:53.440
just kind of not of the same page. Tell me about the golden housey on days at the start. So when
759
01:10:53.440 --> 01:10:59.840
it was a bummer time, uh, to be a plus back to that rather long tangents, which I also didn't
760
01:10:59.840 --> 01:11:03.920
close, I didn't close the loop entirely on what I was saying when I just wanted to make that
761
01:11:03.920 --> 01:11:13.520
point clear about it was we were cool with levels of racist blackface. And then suddenly,
762
01:11:14.480 --> 01:11:26.000
we were so furious about any use of that blackface that paint at all. Yeah. That any, any kind of
763
01:11:26.000 --> 01:11:32.160
paint that it was a firing offense or at least it was attempted to be a firing offense to have
764
01:11:32.160 --> 01:11:39.200
ever done it in any context for any reason. And I suppose the point of my show is in part to try
765
01:11:39.200 --> 01:11:44.800
to go back to try to find those rifts, those disjoints and actually dig our fingers into them
766
01:11:44.800 --> 01:11:48.400
and go, okay, well, what is what what what are the conversations that we should have had
767
01:11:49.360 --> 01:11:55.600
and whether we still should have in order to understand a non-binary view of the world where
768
01:11:55.600 --> 01:12:02.400
it's not like A or B, but there is something more reasoned about and nuanced about our approach.
769
01:12:02.400 --> 01:12:07.760
That was all I wanted to say to close the the chapter on on that thing. So 2014,
770
01:12:08.560 --> 01:12:13.280
you come into John Oliver's show. You don't yet know that there's going to be an orange clown
771
01:12:14.640 --> 01:12:20.880
wrecking everything in two short years. And so what's the process in just in terms of the writers room
772
01:12:20.880 --> 01:12:26.000
in terms of topics in terms of how you get I remember there was a shift in maybe season two.
773
01:12:26.000 --> 01:12:28.960
Correct me if I'm wrong, you'll be able to tell me into doing much more
774
01:12:29.920 --> 01:12:35.040
newsy stuff. And I think was there a journalist hired to like do more of the kind of long form
775
01:12:35.040 --> 01:12:40.000
investigative stuff than there was an issue. Your memory is your memory is good because we did
776
01:12:40.000 --> 01:12:45.280
start out thinking, okay, how is this not the daily show because of course John came from the
777
01:12:45.280 --> 01:12:51.760
daily show and so did our executive producer Tim Carvelle. He had been head writer at the daily
778
01:12:51.760 --> 01:12:56.880
show. And in addition, like some of the staff, none of the writers actually, but some of the staff
779
01:12:56.880 --> 01:13:01.760
in the day. So so it was very much a daily show spin off. And we were trying to figure out, okay,
780
01:13:01.840 --> 01:13:07.200
but what's our what do we what's our value added? What do we do that the daily show doesn't?
781
01:13:07.200 --> 01:13:13.600
And pretty soon we figured out, okay, we do these more long form pieces because we are we don't
782
01:13:13.600 --> 01:13:20.480
have ads. We're on HBO. It's a proper 30 minutes, not 22, which is what a network TV show is in
783
01:13:20.480 --> 01:13:24.480
the US. And there's no interview and we're once a week not four times a week, which is what the
784
01:13:24.560 --> 01:13:32.080
daily show is. So that all pointed to longer form pieces. It's funny that we're having this
785
01:13:32.080 --> 01:13:38.960
conversation right now because the podcast blocked and reported. Do you know, uh, they've
786
01:13:38.960 --> 01:13:42.960
heard of blocked or good good friends with Jesse. Good friend. Okay. Oh, so I've been on the show
787
01:13:42.960 --> 01:13:47.760
a bunch of times. So it has okay. And I and I'm friends with I've never met Katie in person.
788
01:13:47.760 --> 01:13:51.360
We Katie and I have no one has met Katie in person because she lives in the woods in the
789
01:13:51.360 --> 01:13:58.240
Pacific and she never sees anybody. Exactly. Exactly. She's 80% hermit. Um, but I emailed with her
790
01:13:58.240 --> 01:14:00.960
and she's very nice and that Jesse and I have done some live shows. So yes, I'm very friendly with
791
01:14:00.960 --> 01:14:08.560
Jesse and I'm and I'm a fan of their podcast. And um, they are at this moment. We are speaking
792
01:14:08.560 --> 01:14:17.760
in between part one and part two of a dissection of the John Oliver net neutrality piece. And I
793
01:14:17.760 --> 01:14:22.400
Katie emailed me about this because you know, she figured I probably knew something and I do remember
794
01:14:22.400 --> 01:14:27.040
that piece very well. It happened in season one. And it was one of the first pieces that made us
795
01:14:27.040 --> 01:14:35.360
think, okay, we can do this kind of in the weeds. Um, sort of maybe 60 minutes more analytical,
796
01:14:35.360 --> 01:14:41.280
less like what's in the headlines this week and more drill down on an obscure topic.
797
01:14:41.280 --> 01:14:46.080
Because we did the net neutrality piece. It was well received. And that made us think, okay,
798
01:14:46.080 --> 01:14:51.520
we can we can do this. Jesse and Katie, mostly Katie at the moment are kind of getting into
799
01:14:52.480 --> 01:14:58.000
errors that were made on that piece. And she's got some some good points. Now my involvement with
800
01:14:58.000 --> 01:15:05.120
that piece was minimal. It sounds like I'm trying to defend my, like don't talk to me. Yeah,
801
01:15:05.120 --> 01:15:10.880
to somebody else, but this the fact of the matter is every piece has a long and a story as we
802
01:15:10.880 --> 01:15:14.400
call it has two leads and I was not one of the two leads on that piece. So I was I remember being
803
01:15:14.400 --> 01:15:19.360
in some meetings at the beginning and I came in at the end to add jokes. I didn't really have
804
01:15:20.800 --> 01:15:25.440
anything to do with the substance of that piece. So when Katie is running through and saying
805
01:15:26.720 --> 01:15:30.800
this thing was wrong, that thing was wrong. This thing was maybe not technically wrong, but misleading.
806
01:15:31.360 --> 01:15:36.560
It was kind of interesting to me. I didn't know that. I will say though, we have writers on the show
807
01:15:36.560 --> 01:15:40.800
hat. I'm not there anymore. The show is still on. I'm not there anymore. We had writers. We had
808
01:15:40.880 --> 01:15:45.760
researchers. The researchers are really in charge of the news. You know, you asked to do a higher
809
01:15:45.760 --> 01:15:51.360
journalist like, yeah, that's what they did, but they make mistakes. They make mistakes. And I got to say
810
01:15:53.200 --> 01:15:59.520
some of them, you know, let me not ascribe motivations, but let me say they got stuff wrong all the time.
811
01:15:59.520 --> 01:16:03.440
And it was known they were getting stuff wrong all the time. And I was, you know, remember I said
812
01:16:04.560 --> 01:16:07.840
what I left is like don't let the ass hit you in the door on the way out. I was getting arguments
813
01:16:07.840 --> 01:16:13.040
with the researchers all the time because they're just putting wise on the show all the time.
814
01:16:13.600 --> 01:16:16.160
Why do you think? Well,
815
01:16:18.960 --> 01:16:25.680
because this is speculation on my part. Yeah. A, they're true believers. B, when and you'll know
816
01:16:25.680 --> 01:16:29.600
this from working at Huffington Post, like your job is to get stuff on the show. Your job is to
817
01:16:29.600 --> 01:16:35.920
pitch stuff and get it on the show. So you can get stuff on the show. If there's a narrative,
818
01:16:35.920 --> 01:16:41.120
if it's a narrative that really fits what your viewers are going to want, you can get that on the
819
01:16:41.120 --> 01:16:47.920
show, even if it's not really true. And there was a lot of massaging of stuff to make it fit the
820
01:16:47.920 --> 01:16:57.120
narrative. A very common thing is just omit counter arguments. This one guy was horrendous with
821
01:16:57.120 --> 01:17:01.440
statistics. I think he just didn't understand statistics also. He didn't understand if you're like
822
01:17:01.520 --> 01:17:06.880
cherry picking time frames or being weird with baselines or out of context figures and things
823
01:17:06.880 --> 01:17:14.000
like that. So he would do a lot of those underhanded tricks to make a narrative seem more potent
824
01:17:14.000 --> 01:17:17.440
than it was. And that stuff was just endemic and that particular guy that I'm talking about, he's
825
01:17:17.440 --> 01:17:24.160
still there. It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, in my sense, I didn't have experience of it at Huff
826
01:17:24.160 --> 01:17:31.280
Post because the wheels fell off Huff Post live in 2017, which was just early enough that we before
827
01:17:31.280 --> 01:17:39.200
the full brunt, I think, of work madness. And also we were close to it in our own side thing
828
01:17:39.200 --> 01:17:44.720
of Huff Post live, which we had its own sort of floor and didn't really report to anybody. But
829
01:17:44.720 --> 01:17:54.000
I did notice that at the public broadcaster. And my sense during peak work, in mainstream left
830
01:17:54.000 --> 01:18:01.120
wing, well center left, worthy progressive media outlets of which I would include John
831
01:18:01.120 --> 01:18:09.280
Oliver's show as one was that there was a sense that there's a larger truth that is being told
832
01:18:09.280 --> 01:18:16.400
and it needs to be told and honored. And the details of actual facts can sometimes be used as
833
01:18:16.480 --> 01:18:24.320
weapons to undermine a worthyer truth. And so people who I would have expected more from were able
834
01:18:24.320 --> 01:18:31.200
to twist things, shade things, overlook things, not be totally upfront about things. There was also
835
01:18:31.200 --> 01:18:37.920
a transgender piece on John Oliver's show, which was the moment of which I fell out of love with
836
01:18:38.640 --> 01:18:43.120
that show, which I think was great in its early days. What year was it? Because there are two
837
01:18:43.120 --> 01:18:47.200
pieces and I wrote the first one. And don't worry about it fanning me if it was the first one.
838
01:18:47.200 --> 01:18:51.520
I haven't actually in I recollection because I actually I didn't see it at the time. It was after
839
01:18:52.240 --> 01:18:56.480
I drifted away from the show for just family reasons, not watching the show anymore that I saw
840
01:18:56.480 --> 01:19:01.040
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
841
01:19:01.040 --> 01:19:06.000
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
842
01:19:06.000 --> 01:19:10.560
leads on the piece that aired in 2015. And I given what's happened in that early.
843
01:19:11.360 --> 01:19:17.360
Okay, because because there was a second one that was done after I left, which was also the subject
844
01:19:17.360 --> 01:19:22.320
of a block and reported episode. So if people want the full one, maybe it was Jesse who brought
845
01:19:22.320 --> 01:19:26.160
it to my attention. Then if he probably was reported episode about it, then that's probably where
846
01:19:26.160 --> 01:19:30.720
I where I got it from because no, it was a very woke trans one. It was like, yeah, yeah,
847
01:19:30.720 --> 01:19:36.800
not serious about actually grappling with the risk of being misunderstood as being like a
848
01:19:36.880 --> 01:19:41.360
transphobia or something. I mean, I'm a gay guy. I'm married to a guy with hips of trans friends.
849
01:19:41.360 --> 01:19:46.240
I'm like super, super cool with it. They should trans people should be respected and have all
850
01:19:46.240 --> 01:19:49.840
of the same rights as everybody else. But there was a moment there was a way of talking about the
851
01:19:49.840 --> 01:19:57.440
particular issue about this issue, which elided any difference between a 15 year old autistic girl
852
01:19:57.440 --> 01:20:02.080
whose friends are all declaring themselves to be genderqueer. And the way she might want to be treated
853
01:20:02.080 --> 01:20:07.760
by the medical establishment versus a what we traditionally called a transsexual person who
854
01:20:07.760 --> 01:20:11.040
from the moment that they were born insist that they were born into the wrong body and is going to
855
01:20:11.040 --> 01:20:16.080
live a life of misery if we don't honor that. It was like they weren't these two things. It was like
856
01:20:16.080 --> 01:20:21.680
it just just this thing that is trans and you have to have fealty and deference towards anything
857
01:20:21.680 --> 01:20:28.000
that any activist says about pediatric medicine, about hormones, about blockers. There is no
858
01:20:28.080 --> 01:20:32.240
conversation to be had here. There's no conversation to be had about women's private spaces, about
859
01:20:32.240 --> 01:20:37.440
whether or not women who have penises should be in crisis rape shelters. There's like it's all just
860
01:20:37.440 --> 01:20:42.720
bigotry. It's all just right wing bigotry. Like that kind of attitude, I just found to be so
861
01:20:42.720 --> 01:20:47.920
anti-intellectual, but people were able to to push it because they felt that there was a larger
862
01:20:48.560 --> 01:20:54.320
a larger truth, which is that we live in a traditionally heteronormative, prejudiced,
863
01:20:54.320 --> 01:21:00.640
structurally racist society dominated by certain types of people. I'm on the side of the
864
01:21:00.640 --> 01:21:05.120
downtrodden. Therefore, we shouldn't let facts get in the way of a mission.
865
01:21:07.920 --> 01:21:11.360
I'm sure that's it sometimes. I don't know why people
866
01:21:13.200 --> 01:21:19.120
do things that way. We were talking about being a hack. Why are people hacks? There are probably
867
01:21:19.200 --> 01:21:25.680
different reasons. I don't know. I did watch that episode you're talking about, which was like 2023
868
01:21:25.680 --> 01:21:32.000
or thereabouts. Well, after I was gone, and I happened to know which researcher did that piece,
869
01:21:32.000 --> 01:21:37.920
and I didn't overlap with her. I have no comment on her skills, but although I did see the end
870
01:21:37.920 --> 01:21:44.160
product, and I know that many of the aspects of that piece have already aged badly, including,
871
01:21:44.240 --> 01:21:50.160
I know one thing they did is they put up that graph of left-handedness, which is such a
872
01:21:50.160 --> 01:21:54.880
facial argument. Do you remember this part of the piece when he chants it? No, remind me.
873
01:21:58.000 --> 01:22:04.080
It's about how societal acceptance of a phenomenon can change the extent to which that phenomenon
874
01:22:04.080 --> 01:22:10.640
is expressed. For example, back in the day, if you were left-handed in school, they'd smack you
875
01:22:10.720 --> 01:22:14.080
on the left hand with a ruler until you started running with your right hand. They have this
876
01:22:15.360 --> 01:22:20.640
graph of the people who are self-reported as left-handed. Around when they stopped doing that,
877
01:22:20.640 --> 01:22:24.480
and the earliest part of the 20th century, it goes up and eventually plateaus, and now you know,
878
01:22:24.480 --> 01:22:29.360
I think it's 10% of the population is left-handed. By the way, I questioned the statistics in that
879
01:22:29.360 --> 01:22:36.720
graph itself, but it's ultimately not important. That graph is put up to argue that the
880
01:22:37.600 --> 01:22:45.840
rise that we have seen in people identifying as transgender is for the same reason. It's because
881
01:22:45.840 --> 01:22:51.440
society is more accepting of transgender people, so the transgender people were always there,
882
01:22:51.440 --> 01:22:57.760
and the numbers we experienced now, but they're only now open about it. Now, for a long time,
883
01:22:57.760 --> 01:23:03.600
thought, very clearly two things are going on here. Number one is that. Yes, absolutely.
884
01:23:03.600 --> 01:23:07.840
If you were trans in the 50s, you probably just took that to your grade. You probably never
885
01:23:07.840 --> 01:23:11.680
said anything to anybody, and you just never knew about it. So I think you'd honestly have to be
886
01:23:11.680 --> 01:23:17.920
very daft to imagine that's not happening. So that is one thing that's happening. It's a
887
01:23:17.920 --> 01:23:21.680
societal acceptance, and we're seeing more expression because of that. And the second thing I think
888
01:23:21.680 --> 01:23:29.520
that is equally obvious is that there is a, I think social contagion is too strong on a term,
889
01:23:30.240 --> 01:23:39.520
but there's a trend. Well, pick your, pick your term. Not all people who were identifying as
890
01:23:39.520 --> 01:23:44.160
trans in 2023 really were there. You know, very often they were young people and they're going
891
01:23:44.160 --> 01:23:49.440
something that they didn't through something they didn't fully understand, but it was such a hot
892
01:23:49.440 --> 01:23:55.200
topic that, and we know so much about how this stuff was being diagnosed. We know about the
893
01:23:55.280 --> 01:24:00.880
shoddy diagnoses, and we know, we all know what it's like to be a teenager if you've been a teenager
894
01:24:00.880 --> 01:24:06.160
that to believe that none of that was happening. I think it's what none of it is zero percent.
895
01:24:06.160 --> 01:24:11.440
I mean, it's such a malleable thing, one's identity. And we're such a social species. It would
896
01:24:11.440 --> 01:24:17.520
be extraordinary if there wasn't, I mean, no, no, no, human is an island. Like, of course, we're
897
01:24:17.520 --> 01:24:23.520
influenced by when it comes to the messy diagnoses of who am I and where do I belong and how do I
898
01:24:23.520 --> 01:24:28.480
fit in and how masculine or feminine am I and how queer or not am I? Like, these are very,
899
01:24:28.480 --> 01:24:32.880
there's a much more ambiguous ideas than left-handedness. They're even more ambiguous ideas than
900
01:24:32.880 --> 01:24:37.600
sexuality, which is more hard. I mean, I also think that sexuality is more fluid than we give it
901
01:24:37.600 --> 01:24:44.960
credit for, but even that is more fixed than a, a, a notional idea. Like, do I feel like I have
902
01:24:44.960 --> 01:24:52.320
aspects of my personality that are more feminine than masculine and am I, therefore, on a spectrum
903
01:24:52.320 --> 01:24:58.160
of non-binaryness? Like, of course, how could, how could ideas, if ideas didn't have the capacity
904
01:24:58.160 --> 01:25:03.840
to change human self-identification and thinking and behavior, what would be the purpose of ideas?
905
01:25:03.840 --> 01:25:06.960
What would be the purpose of us talking or debating about anything? Like, the whole point is
906
01:25:06.960 --> 01:25:11.040
that we think that it's going to have an effect. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they very clearly do.
907
01:25:11.040 --> 01:25:14.880
And all, all you have to do, at least all I have to do is remember being a teenager and remember
908
01:25:14.880 --> 01:25:20.240
how easily I was, how easily influenced I was about all manner of things and how I didn't know
909
01:25:20.240 --> 01:25:23.920
who I was or where I fit. And, you know, thank God I didn't have the internet back then,
910
01:25:23.920 --> 01:25:28.000
or at least I had, you know, crappy dial-up words. If you wanted to get confused about yourself,
911
01:25:28.000 --> 01:25:34.480
it was really going to take a long time. I didn't have any of that. And I think, you know, some of the
912
01:25:34.480 --> 01:25:39.120
people who write most passionately about this are people like Andrew Sullivan, you know, gave people.
913
01:25:39.120 --> 01:25:43.120
And I think they're imagining what it would have been like had they been subject to that environment
914
01:25:43.920 --> 01:25:48.720
at that age. It kind of sounds like, you know, as hard as it was to figure things out, it would have
915
01:25:48.720 --> 01:25:54.960
been even harder if I had, you know, Reddit boards in my ear telling me this or that. But the
916
01:25:54.960 --> 01:25:59.680
point I'm trying to get to is that already in the last few years, we've seen the number of
917
01:25:59.680 --> 01:26:08.160
transgender identifying people going down some, which does indicate that yes, there was a societal
918
01:26:08.160 --> 01:26:12.560
aspect to this. You know, so already the left-handed discraft, you know, people aren't,
919
01:26:13.120 --> 01:26:19.680
uh, the numbers of left-handed people aren't going down because there wasn't a social aspect to
920
01:26:19.680 --> 01:26:25.280
that. But there was clearly a social aspect to people identifying as trans. I mean, another
921
01:26:25.280 --> 01:26:30.720
point that has been made, Jeff, that sort of complicates that picture that the that, uh,
922
01:26:30.720 --> 01:26:37.840
general of a story was trying to push is that when gay, when being gay was no longer taboo,
923
01:26:37.840 --> 01:26:42.880
you know, and this was probably, this was a very rapid, uh, civil rights change in people's
924
01:26:42.880 --> 01:26:48.240
attitudes, like, you know, donation, incredible. It happened in my lifetime. Yeah, literally,
925
01:26:48.240 --> 01:26:53.440
literally, but in, in, in, out, literally, I mean, when we were born, uh, you know, being gay was
926
01:26:53.440 --> 01:26:59.360
illegal in some Australian states and presumably some American states. And, and within the span of
927
01:26:59.360 --> 01:27:05.760
my, between my, you know, between my being a kid and then my being old enough to want to get married
928
01:27:05.760 --> 01:27:14.320
to a guy, you went from total criminality to marriage. Like, that was, it was that fast. And,
929
01:27:14.960 --> 01:27:21.120
and the stunning victory, when that happened, who suddenly came out, it wasn't just young people
930
01:27:21.120 --> 01:27:26.320
who started coming out. All of a sudden, Uncle Herbie, who's 70 reveals that he was gay, all of
931
01:27:26.480 --> 01:27:35.360
every demographic and every age group, fairly equally, as the taboo lifted, came out and said,
932
01:27:35.360 --> 01:27:38.720
actually, I'm a married guy, I've been married for 50 years, but actually I've always been hiding
933
01:27:38.720 --> 01:27:47.280
the slide. When the same thing happened to transgender, uh, norms, the vast majority of new,
934
01:27:47.840 --> 01:27:53.600
newly transgender people were kids were young people. There was not a phenomenon the way there was
935
01:27:53.600 --> 01:27:59.680
with gayness of a huge number of 70 year olds coming out and saying, actually, I'm a woman,
936
01:27:59.680 --> 01:28:02.960
I've been a woman all my life. There was some. Yeah. There's a, every now, yeah, some,
937
01:28:02.960 --> 01:28:07.120
but vanishing, and we're finishing lefew. In the course of this conversation, which appeared
938
01:28:07.120 --> 01:28:12.640
on a clique check back in and for some people are trans, you know, some people are trans. Absolutely.
939
01:28:12.640 --> 01:28:17.440
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. When we're talking about the, I, when I talk about the social
940
01:28:17.440 --> 01:28:21.120
contagion aspect, I just try to check in every now and then I say, I'm not saying that's the only
941
01:28:21.120 --> 01:28:25.920
thing that was there. Totally. Totally. Absolutely. I mean, it may not even be a majority of the,
942
01:28:25.920 --> 01:28:30.480
of the thing. It's just that anyone who even suggested that it was at all a thing,
943
01:28:31.440 --> 01:28:36.960
was it risk of getting losing their job? Yes. Yes. For a time. By the way, there's a great
944
01:28:36.960 --> 01:28:41.440
episode. I'm just trying to look up when it was we did a, I had a chat with a guy called Nicholas
945
01:28:41.440 --> 01:28:51.040
Grun, who is a professor. No, hang on. It wasn't Nicholas. I'm misremembering. It was Ronan
946
01:28:51.040 --> 01:28:58.640
McCray, who's a professor who has a new book about this was released on January 9th on my podcast.
947
01:28:58.640 --> 01:29:01.840
So if you're, hello, this is on a couple of conversations. If you're just joining from Jeff's
948
01:29:01.840 --> 01:29:06.320
side, I'm Josh Saps. If you're just joining from my side, Jeff Mora is a satirist and former writer
949
01:29:07.040 --> 01:29:12.480
last week tonight with John Oliver, who now has a sub stack. Very funny. Very interesting. John
950
01:29:12.480 --> 01:29:17.040
doesn't have a sub stack. John doesn't have a sub stack. John doesn't have a sub stack.
951
01:29:17.040 --> 01:29:23.280
All of them might be wrong, which is political satire. And so there was an episode on January 9th,
952
01:29:23.280 --> 01:29:29.920
which you should go back and listen to called the LGBTQ threat to gay rights. With this professor
953
01:29:29.920 --> 01:29:35.120
who is basically saying that like all of those advances that we were just talking about from the
954
01:29:35.120 --> 01:29:38.720
gay rights movement, there's a lot of evidence that there's backsliding on that in terms of public
955
01:29:38.720 --> 01:29:47.360
opinion. And to regard those wins as like permanent and unassailable is incredibly naive.
956
01:29:48.400 --> 01:29:54.480
And one of the worst strategic moves that the gay movement has made over the past decade is
957
01:29:54.480 --> 01:29:59.520
hitching its wagons so enthusiastically to a much broader and more ideological
958
01:30:00.080 --> 01:30:10.880
project of gender identity, non-binaryness, transgenderism. There's no such thing as male and female,
959
01:30:10.880 --> 01:30:16.720
biological sex is a fiction and like all of that stuff. Instead of allowing, he's like nothing
960
01:30:16.720 --> 01:30:25.040
against any of that. That's great. It's its own movement. There's no LGBT, like there's basically
961
01:30:25.040 --> 01:30:35.360
LG, maybe B, and T is a completely different thing and we should support it. But to hold hostage
962
01:30:35.360 --> 01:30:44.560
all of the gains of gay rights to public acceptance of a seemingly infinitely expansive set of demands
963
01:30:44.560 --> 01:30:53.440
about how people ought to think about biology and gender is suicidal in a climate in which people
964
01:30:53.440 --> 01:30:59.520
are naturally becoming less prone to gay rights anyway. Thanks in Europe, partly to migration,
965
01:30:59.520 --> 01:31:06.160
thanks in America to the rise of Christian conservatism. So I think that's interesting.
966
01:31:06.160 --> 01:31:17.280
Thankfully, I think he's wrong that things are going to go so wrong for that movement. Let's just
967
01:31:17.280 --> 01:31:22.000
call it that movement because at the moment it's seen as one movement in the US that for example,
968
01:31:22.000 --> 01:31:26.320
we're going to go back to gay marriage being illegal. I don't think that would happen. I think
969
01:31:26.320 --> 01:31:32.880
the support for gay marriage is so robust. We are, it is a court case that legalized gay marriage
970
01:31:32.880 --> 01:31:39.040
in the US. It wasn't an act of Congress. So that makes it a little more ten U.S. and
971
01:31:39.040 --> 01:31:43.760
what all you need is a Supreme Court decision and then it's back to the States. That's right.
972
01:31:43.760 --> 01:31:50.160
They did it with row. I don't see that happen. They did it with row. It's the quality of the
973
01:31:50.160 --> 01:31:55.680
decision in row versus overs fell is very different in my opinion. He's not saying that he's not
974
01:31:55.680 --> 01:32:00.240
saying that he's not predicting disaster in five years. He's saying for thousands of years,
975
01:32:00.240 --> 01:32:04.800
almost everywhere, this minority of people have been denigrated and people all thought they were
976
01:32:04.800 --> 01:32:12.800
disgusting and they've been persecuted. LGBT people. The idea that because three seconds ago,
977
01:32:12.800 --> 01:32:17.440
we managed to get a bunch of successes and therefore we can laud it over everybody
978
01:32:17.520 --> 01:32:23.840
with impunity and have no sense of the legitimacy of other people's concerns,
979
01:32:23.840 --> 01:32:28.080
of religious people's family, traditional ideas about family, for example. I mean,
980
01:32:28.080 --> 01:32:34.320
another point of his is that like the argument before gay marriage was we just want to be able
981
01:32:34.320 --> 01:32:42.080
to participate in marriage. So now he says the number of gay married couples who are openly
982
01:32:43.040 --> 01:32:49.520
in open marriages. To some extent, from his perspective, it's a little bit of a slap in the face.
983
01:32:50.800 --> 01:32:56.560
Like it's not exactly what we sold. It's not exactly what we sold the conservatives.
984
01:32:56.560 --> 01:33:02.240
Like conservatives were willing to go along with it because we said that we wanted to be part of
985
01:33:02.240 --> 01:33:06.640
their club and now that we're in their club, but we're changing the club's rules. Those weren't
986
01:33:06.640 --> 01:33:10.800
the rules of the club that we said we wanted to be part of. I'm not saying that it should be
987
01:33:10.800 --> 01:33:15.120
outlawed or anything. He's just saying like the whole movement has taken on an air of kind of
988
01:33:15.120 --> 01:33:19.760
sanctimonious self-entitlement, which maybe it might just want to check itself slightly.
989
01:33:19.760 --> 01:33:24.960
All right, sanctimonious self-entitlement. Yes. I am a big believer in civil liberties and
990
01:33:24.960 --> 01:33:28.480
do it. It goes back to John's tour about right. Do whatever you want as long as it's not
991
01:33:28.480 --> 01:33:33.760
hurting anybody. So as long as they're not forcing conservatives to be in open marriages,
992
01:33:33.840 --> 01:33:42.720
which I think is a very funny idea. And if they were doing that, I would say no, you can't make
993
01:33:42.720 --> 01:33:47.280
them go to the swingers party. That is if they don't want to go, they don't have to go. But if you
994
01:33:47.280 --> 01:33:55.280
want to go, God's peace is fair enough. Okay, so just I take your point. I mean, I got a story
995
01:33:55.280 --> 01:33:59.600
here that might interest you because you're talking about overreach and how things change.
996
01:33:59.600 --> 01:34:07.680
I'm not only the guy who was one of the two leads on the 2015 John Oliver transgender piece.
997
01:34:07.680 --> 01:34:13.120
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
998
01:34:13.120 --> 01:34:17.200
you exactly what I was thinking when I pitched that. Great. Overreach fell had just happened.
999
01:34:17.920 --> 01:34:24.000
The Supreme Court case in the United States that made marriage legal. And suddenly,
1000
01:34:24.800 --> 01:34:30.960
this issue, gay marriage that had been a real hot button issue in the United States for
1001
01:34:31.920 --> 01:34:37.760
a solid decade plus. Really, how far back do you want to go? You could go back to Andrew
1002
01:34:37.760 --> 01:34:41.600
Sullivan's New Republic article in the mid 90s. But it had been a hot topic and suddenly
1003
01:34:42.480 --> 01:34:52.720
total victory. Now what? And that's what I was thinking was now what? And I can tell you that
1004
01:34:52.720 --> 01:35:01.280
my brain went to, okay, we have some level of acceptance of gay people. And the numbers get
1005
01:35:01.280 --> 01:35:05.440
even better when you think about, you know, young people's attitudes towards gay people. You know,
1006
01:35:05.440 --> 01:35:12.160
young people overwhelmingly are, you know, the startling in my voice comes from, it's not just that
1007
01:35:12.160 --> 01:35:17.040
like it's gay marriage is legal. There's also just an accepting, you know, there's an accepting.
1008
01:35:17.040 --> 01:35:23.200
It's like, yes, that is, there's a lot less. Jeff, especially if it's going backwards,
1009
01:35:23.200 --> 01:35:28.240
that is bad news. It's definitely on backwards in the past 10 months, two years.
1010
01:35:28.240 --> 01:35:33.280
Yeah. That's bad news and has a lot to do with overreach. But I can tell you in 2015,
1011
01:35:33.280 --> 01:35:41.200
I felt that the same kind of acceptance should be extended to trans people. And I still do feel
1012
01:35:41.200 --> 01:35:44.640
that way. The line that I always push, because remember, I used to be a speech writer. So I keep
1013
01:35:44.720 --> 01:35:48.800
writing this on my blog and I'm hoping that somebody in the Democratic Party will pick this up,
1014
01:35:48.800 --> 01:35:54.160
because I feel like this captures it. I think trans people should be equal in our laws and
1015
01:35:54.160 --> 01:35:59.920
accept it in our hearts. I think that covers it. Yeah. That covers it. You don't need the
1016
01:35:59.920 --> 01:36:04.240
nonsense about trans people in sports, trans women in sports. You don't need to pretend that
1017
01:36:04.240 --> 01:36:09.760
there is no difference between men's sports and women's sports. And you don't need to pretend
1018
01:36:09.920 --> 01:36:15.520
there is no advantage in that if there is any advantage, it can, you know, be quickly
1019
01:36:17.200 --> 01:36:23.120
removed with hormones, oppressing drugs, which by the way, we wouldn't want teenagers to take
1020
01:36:23.120 --> 01:36:26.320
them for that reason anyway. So you don't need to buy into the nonsense on transgender sports.
1021
01:36:26.320 --> 01:36:32.240
You don't need to buy into the nonsense about gender being a social construct. Stop it. Of course,
1022
01:36:32.240 --> 01:36:37.120
it's not, it's like, now I'm flashing back to when I was young and living in the South and people
1023
01:36:37.120 --> 01:36:41.520
didn't believe in evolution. It's like, are we really going to be that anti-biology? Gender's a
1024
01:36:41.520 --> 01:36:46.160
thing. We can talk about people who don't neatly fit into gender categories, but gender's a thing.
1025
01:36:46.160 --> 01:36:50.960
I remember one thing that that Joe Rogan said early in this debate, which I think is still just
1026
01:36:50.960 --> 01:36:56.800
the best line about it, which is like, if you go to a dog breeder to buy a female puppy and you
1027
01:36:56.800 --> 01:37:02.880
get a home and you realize it's a male, you don't just go, oh, well, there's no difference.
1028
01:37:03.040 --> 01:37:08.560
It's just a construct. It's like, you take it back and you don't get me a male dog.
1029
01:37:08.560 --> 01:37:16.480
I wanted a female dog. It has to be that going that deep into the nonsense is what's causing
1030
01:37:16.480 --> 01:37:22.880
some people to go, okay, and I haven't seen the numbers you've seen, but if there's backsliding
1031
01:37:22.880 --> 01:37:28.720
on acceptance of gay rights and whatever, then surely that's the reason people are thinking,
1032
01:37:28.880 --> 01:37:35.360
oh, so this whole movement is nuts. Is it not? That's, in my opinion, that's a very bad territory
1033
01:37:35.360 --> 01:37:40.160
that we wanted them to. Yes. We'll go back and listen to the McCray episode of Uncomfortable
1034
01:37:40.160 --> 01:37:44.160
Conversations because he can articulate it a lot better than I can and probably in a more
1035
01:37:44.960 --> 01:37:49.600
impressive accent as well because he's from the British Isles, so our overlords.
1036
01:37:50.960 --> 01:37:55.680
Just to wrap up the conversation about satire, so you go in there and
1037
01:37:55.680 --> 01:38:04.640
can you just articulate this kind of daily, like what is a pitch meeting like in 2015 and does it
1038
01:38:04.640 --> 01:38:09.760
change when Trump comes into power and what is the Trump, what is that Trump era like and trying
1039
01:38:09.760 --> 01:38:17.280
to think about what do we do, what exactly do we do with this man and how does it always get elevated
1040
01:38:17.280 --> 01:38:22.400
and stuff? Well, there aren't pitch meetings at the John Oliver show. You always hear about these
1041
01:38:23.200 --> 01:38:30.000
very tense pitch meetings at SNL. John Oliver's all done by email, so if you want to pitch
1042
01:38:30.000 --> 01:38:34.800
something, you're right up a very eloquent and hopefully funny email and if they like it,
1043
01:38:34.800 --> 01:38:43.440
then it'll get developed. Trump, at the beginning, if we try to remember the mindset we were in
1044
01:38:43.440 --> 01:38:51.680
in 2015, he was this very bizarre figure and nobody thought he would win and there was,
1045
01:38:52.960 --> 01:38:59.360
there are a couple of months where it was, you know, kind of funny and it just seemed like a big
1046
01:39:00.240 --> 01:39:03.840
it really did seem like it was good for comedy. Everyone always comes up to you when a comedian
1047
01:39:03.840 --> 01:39:07.040
like Trump's great for comedy. You came before he was president when he was just running.
1048
01:39:07.040 --> 01:39:10.240
When he was just running, right, right. Nobody thought he nobody thought he would even win
1049
01:39:10.320 --> 01:39:16.320
the Republican nomination. He was just a circus act that was in the mix and so that's how we treat
1050
01:39:16.320 --> 01:39:21.200
us. He was my employer at the time, I don't know if you remember, but on Ariana Huffington's
1051
01:39:21.200 --> 01:39:26.400
instructions, they moved Donald Trump's candidacy from the politics section to the entertainment section
1052
01:39:26.400 --> 01:39:31.040
and he was the only Republican candidate who was not covered in the politics section of the
1053
01:39:31.040 --> 01:39:36.720
page of the entertainment section, which is just when you look back on it, that was exactly what
1054
01:39:36.800 --> 01:39:40.960
the kind of thing that middle America was in a backlash against.
1055
01:39:41.680 --> 01:39:46.000
There's also this famous clip of John Oliver when he was on the Daily Show, when he was hosting
1056
01:39:46.000 --> 01:39:54.640
the Daily Show when John Stuart had gone on hiatus. Trump, he hadn't announced yet, but he was kind of,
1057
01:39:54.640 --> 01:39:58.320
he was expecting, he's like, I don't know, things keep going, they're gonna go and I'm thinking,
1058
01:39:58.320 --> 01:40:03.360
I might run and then it comes back to John Oliver and he says, do it. He looks at the camera,
1059
01:40:03.360 --> 01:40:08.240
goes, do it. That was the attitude at the time. It'll be funny, you can't possibly win,
1060
01:40:08.240 --> 01:40:14.880
it'll be a big goof. How wrong we were. There was a while where he was funny. We did the
1061
01:40:14.880 --> 01:40:21.440
Trump piece, which was, that was like gigantic for us. I mean, there's also, we're pretty good
1062
01:40:21.440 --> 01:40:25.440
about not caring about this type of thing, I think, but anything Trump you did got like five times
1063
01:40:25.440 --> 01:40:30.560
the rating of it. He's of anything else you would do. So if you like, look at the YouTube numbers
1064
01:40:30.560 --> 01:40:34.480
for that Trump piece, it's just light years ahead of any other piece we did.
1065
01:40:37.680 --> 01:40:46.240
Then it got old and it got pretty unfunny. I am now, I've realized, I haven't run with this guy
1066
01:40:46.240 --> 01:40:51.440
for a decade now. I haven't run about for a decade and I don't know what else to say about him.
1067
01:40:51.440 --> 01:40:57.040
I try to write about him as little as I can. I mean, he's the elephant in the room, so you can't
1068
01:40:57.040 --> 01:41:02.160
not write about him. But I do try to avoid just saying the same thing over and over and over.
1069
01:41:02.160 --> 01:41:08.880
There's a lane in media where you can just make your name be in the anti-Trump person.
1070
01:41:08.880 --> 01:41:13.040
You know, a couple people pop to all of our minds when I say that. They just talk about Trump
1071
01:41:13.040 --> 01:41:17.440
every day. It's years, the new outrage. I try to avoid that because again, I'm trying to say
1072
01:41:17.440 --> 01:41:22.480
something I haven't said before. So how many columns can I write that it's like he's a dumb man.
1073
01:41:22.480 --> 01:41:31.680
He's a dumb man doing dumb bad things. So at the show, and I wrote a good amount of the Trump
1074
01:41:31.680 --> 01:41:37.200
stuff that we did in the 2010s during his first term, we were at least trying to find something
1075
01:41:37.200 --> 01:41:44.000
different to say about him each time. I wrote a piece and again, I wrote, I was one of the leads
1076
01:41:44.000 --> 01:41:48.880
on a piece about, okay, this is good. I don't want to claim credit for the people to work, but
1077
01:41:48.880 --> 01:41:55.680
about authoritarianism that at the time I wondered, oh, did we, do we overstate the case?
1078
01:41:56.240 --> 01:42:02.080
And then in hindsight, I know we understated the case. So that one aged okay, and I hope
1079
01:42:02.080 --> 01:42:05.040
somebody else did too. Not that I'm going to go back and watch. That would be too painful.
1080
01:42:05.040 --> 01:42:10.080
But I mean, it was such a weird time. I remember one of the reasons why I moved back to Australia
1081
01:42:10.080 --> 01:42:17.120
from New York quite apart from the fact that I was having kids and one of the karma life
1082
01:42:17.920 --> 01:42:25.920
was not wanting to cover that man for four years. I mean, I came back in 2017 and I just felt like
1083
01:42:25.920 --> 01:42:31.120
maybe I should maybe I should move to Australia. Australia. Oh my god. Can I tell you how blissfully
1084
01:42:31.120 --> 01:42:39.120
boring Australian politics is? It's like, it's like, it's such a boring middle aged white people,
1085
01:42:39.120 --> 01:42:45.120
mostly male, just wandering around talking about like just boring, some mining. That sounds
1086
01:42:45.120 --> 01:42:50.320
lovely. Just, you know, the prime minister will be off meeting the Japanese prime minister in
1087
01:42:50.320 --> 01:42:56.160
Singapore at some stupid regional forum. There's like, you know, everyone basically agrees on
1088
01:42:56.160 --> 01:43:00.320
everything. It's like, okay. Oh, that's great. I would love to get back to talking about the
1089
01:43:00.320 --> 01:43:06.080
estate tax and stuff like. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, the most, the biggest issue with the last
1090
01:43:06.080 --> 01:43:13.520
election was whether or not to build a nuclear reactor, nuclear power. We already have a nuclear
1091
01:43:13.520 --> 01:43:18.240
reactor for to, you know, for a medical radio isotopes and stuff like that. But like, that was
1092
01:43:18.240 --> 01:43:23.680
like the bigger, that was huge. Like, just the question of like an arcane energy question,
1093
01:43:23.680 --> 01:43:30.960
whether or not to complement the grid with nuclear. Anyway, so I like that. But that, I remember
1094
01:43:30.960 --> 01:43:39.040
those early days of reporting on Trump and doing comedy and satire about Trump as being very,
1095
01:43:39.040 --> 01:43:49.280
what's the word shallow, I would say, like revealing how genuinely uninterested the
1096
01:43:49.280 --> 01:43:57.120
Asala corridor had been in the rest of the country in anyone who disagreed with them in
1097
01:43:57.840 --> 01:44:03.600
people who weren't on the same, who weren't drinking the same cool aid of social justice liberalism.
1098
01:44:03.680 --> 01:44:11.280
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.
1099
01:44:12.640 --> 01:44:16.960
And like, there was no, there wasn't much of an attempt. And I feel a little bit paralyzed now
1100
01:44:16.960 --> 01:44:22.960
because now it's gotten so bad. And he has, he is so obviously a genuine threat to the Republic.
1101
01:44:23.600 --> 01:44:28.560
You know why? I don't think he's ever been until now. So second term is so much worse in the first
1102
01:44:28.720 --> 01:44:36.400
so much worse. And I would even say 2026 so much worse than 2025. So let's steady downward
1103
01:44:36.400 --> 01:44:41.680
trajectory. We think we're going to slam into the bottom and we never do. Like are you getting me?
1104
01:44:41.680 --> 01:44:49.200
We've got three more what? I mean, like, Jesus, like you're seizing election ballots in Georgia to
1105
01:44:49.200 --> 01:44:56.240
try to hunt down election officials to prosecute them for properly certifying the 2020 election.
1106
01:44:56.240 --> 01:45:02.960
A resting journalist like Don Lemon on trumped up charge is trying to find, you know, random
1107
01:45:02.960 --> 01:45:08.880
things that some, who was that justice? The woman who he is a cutie found. They found her guilty
1108
01:45:08.880 --> 01:45:13.920
apparently of defrauding something wrong on her home mortgage loan. Oh, yeah.
1109
01:45:15.600 --> 01:45:23.520
Which apparently she didn't even do, by the way, even if she had as a leader, just target people
1110
01:45:23.520 --> 01:45:28.320
you don't like and then go hunting around and find our kind little reasons why you can ruin
1111
01:45:28.320 --> 01:45:32.640
their lives and drag them through the courts for the next three years. What should bankrupt them?
1112
01:45:32.640 --> 01:45:35.200
It's just been it's been in our public stuff. It's been in our public stuff.
1113
01:45:35.200 --> 01:45:40.400
Totally inconsistent with being a Western democracy. It's like we haven't seen this in
1114
01:45:41.280 --> 01:45:46.240
what I would have traditionally called a civilized country. We haven't seen this in like the club
1115
01:45:46.240 --> 01:45:51.680
of Western democracies, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Western Europe.
1116
01:45:52.400 --> 01:45:57.120
Victor Orbot and Hungary is the only other example. That's it. That's it.
1117
01:45:57.120 --> 01:46:00.400
And we have a few more people than Hungary does in this country. Yeah.
1118
01:46:01.120 --> 01:46:05.920
And a lot more nuclear weapons. I mean, I guess we can wrap this up, but just by,
1119
01:46:06.720 --> 01:46:13.200
I mean, give me some fucking inside, Jeff, like we were so bad the first time around in
1120
01:46:13.200 --> 01:46:23.600
Trump one at at I guess humanizing the people who liked him, but I think the only way we get
1121
01:46:23.600 --> 01:46:33.600
out of this without a civil war, honestly, is if we continue to ramp up our hatred and demonization
1122
01:46:34.320 --> 01:46:42.560
of Maga and all its supporters, then the left will get into power and will not be able to
1123
01:46:42.560 --> 01:46:48.480
resist the temptation of doing something similar, maybe not as bad, but it will not be pure.
1124
01:46:49.040 --> 01:46:54.560
And both sides will ratchet themselves into an ever-intensifying war of attrition,
1125
01:46:54.560 --> 01:47:01.200
which is quite hard to then stop the centrifuge and get back to normality.
1126
01:47:01.200 --> 01:47:07.120
So I feel like you almost need a truth and reconciliation process of some kind,
1127
01:47:07.200 --> 01:47:13.360
which humanizes the, which cleaves off. It's like a counterterrorism strategy, actually,
1128
01:47:13.360 --> 01:47:19.280
or like after apartheid in South Africa, after apartheid Nelson Mandela didn't go hunting for
1129
01:47:20.000 --> 01:47:28.080
the criminals, the racist criminals who had run South Africa. He invited them into his cabinet
1130
01:47:28.080 --> 01:47:31.520
and was like the only way we're going to get out of this without killing each other is like if we
1131
01:47:31.520 --> 01:47:36.880
all work together on what we can agree on. And a counterterrorism strategy is similar, like
1132
01:47:36.880 --> 01:47:41.760
cleave off the extremists and try to isolate them and then win over the largest
1133
01:47:42.400 --> 01:47:48.320
quorum of the other side as you can. In fact, I remember a line from an Israeli general who said
1134
01:47:48.320 --> 01:47:51.840
everyone keeps talking about us and the Palestinian, the Palestinian, the Palestinian, he's like it's not
1135
01:47:51.840 --> 01:47:56.640
us and them. It's some of us and some of them against some of them and some of us.
1136
01:47:57.920 --> 01:48:02.800
And like, framing it that way and trying to think about how do you outfox
1137
01:48:02.960 --> 01:48:12.960
Trumpism by winning over some segments of his winnable fans is like the big conundrum.
1138
01:48:14.160 --> 01:48:18.800
Yeah, well, you know, I said that I don't like to write about Trump these days because I feel
1139
01:48:18.800 --> 01:48:23.760
like it's just the same thing over and over and that's true. So I often ask myself, okay,
1140
01:48:23.760 --> 01:48:27.520
then what do I write about? You know, how can I talk about what's going on in the world but not
1141
01:48:27.600 --> 01:48:33.680
just write another. And now he's doing this outrageous thing. Um, column. I write about strategy a
1142
01:48:33.680 --> 01:48:37.360
lot, democratic strategy. Again, I used to be a speech writer. I'll be it for an agency. But before
1143
01:48:37.360 --> 01:48:43.760
I was at EPA, I had a couple low-level jobs at democratic politics. I think about strategy a lot
1144
01:48:43.760 --> 01:48:47.760
and, you know, what is a smart thing to do? What's not a smart thing to do?
1145
01:48:48.400 --> 01:48:58.640
Um, one thing I can say about the right half of the American political spectrum,
1146
01:48:58.640 --> 01:49:02.960
and I very much take your point about like, I don't like demonizing people. I've never been
1147
01:49:02.960 --> 01:49:08.000
somebody who's like, cut off your uncle who doesn't, who likes Trump, you know, don't do that.
1148
01:49:08.000 --> 01:49:12.480
Don't cut off your uncle. People are complex and people have all sorts of political views and,
1149
01:49:12.480 --> 01:49:15.840
you know, speaking for myself, that's not how I want to live. So I wouldn't recommend anybody do
1150
01:49:15.840 --> 01:49:20.400
that. I am kind of flumished that, you know, very bad things are happening. He's not following the
1151
01:49:20.400 --> 01:49:25.680
law, not remotely. There's sort of a water gate size scandal every week or two. And everyone's not
1152
01:49:25.680 --> 01:49:30.880
everyone, but enough people are like, it's great that it's happening. What are you doing response to
1153
01:49:30.880 --> 01:49:38.240
that? How do you process that? I will say most people who vote Republican just hate Democrats.
1154
01:49:38.880 --> 01:49:46.080
That's it. There's some ideology, but that is the glue keeping a coalition that is sometimes
1155
01:49:46.080 --> 01:49:51.680
51% of the country together. They just hate Democrats. That's it. If you watch Fox News,
1156
01:49:51.680 --> 01:49:56.080
and you know, for many years, my job I had to, and I still check in, they're just vilifying Democrats
1157
01:49:56.080 --> 01:50:04.560
all the time. Every narrative that they like about immigration or, you know, racially tinged things
1158
01:50:04.560 --> 01:50:09.120
or, you know, woke over reach or whatever, it always ties back to Democrats because Democrats
1159
01:50:09.120 --> 01:50:17.520
in this story are the enablers of everything bad in this country. They just hate Democrats.
1160
01:50:17.520 --> 01:50:22.880
And that's why one thing I talk about over and over and over and right about over and over and over
1161
01:50:23.840 --> 01:50:28.880
is how Democrats need to make, sorry to use this term, but are brand. They're brand. I don't work
1162
01:50:28.960 --> 01:50:33.920
for them. So I don't know if they're are there or we, but the Democratic band brand needs to be
1163
01:50:33.920 --> 01:50:38.560
better. People, when people think of the left, when they think of Democrats, they are thinking of
1164
01:50:38.560 --> 01:50:46.560
Billy Eilish saying no, no one is illegal on stolen land. Why don't Democrats more frequently
1165
01:50:47.200 --> 01:50:50.000
stand up and just say like, well, that was a dumb thing to say. That's all you have to say.
1166
01:50:50.560 --> 01:50:54.480
That was a dumb thing to say. I don't agree with that. They're so afraid of alienating
1167
01:50:55.120 --> 01:50:59.360
the progressive wing of the coalition. They don't realize they've got the math completely wrong.
1168
01:50:59.360 --> 01:51:05.440
There are like 10 freaks on blue sky who will be offended if you say, well, I was a dumb thing to say,
1169
01:51:05.440 --> 01:51:10.640
but there is a very large swath of people in the center who could be one over as long as they know
1170
01:51:10.640 --> 01:51:14.240
that you're not some kind of lefty freak who thinks that this is all stolen land.
1171
01:51:16.000 --> 01:51:19.920
Or at least I guess it is stolen land, but there's something we can do about that. It's like
1172
01:51:20.000 --> 01:51:24.640
all the land stolen. There is no such thing as un-stolen land. It's stolen land.
1173
01:51:24.640 --> 01:51:29.520
It's not. I wish we hadn't, I wish it hadn't happened, but we can't rewind the clock and it's
1174
01:51:29.520 --> 01:51:34.640
all stolen, so we're going to go. No, I think that they're just, I think that strategically they
1175
01:51:34.640 --> 01:51:39.200
think that it's more, well, they might just be cowards, but to be generous to them,
1176
01:51:39.200 --> 01:51:43.280
strategically they probably think that it's more important not to alienate the base and have
1177
01:51:43.280 --> 01:51:48.560
people stay home than it is to try to win over. That's harder to win over a new person than it is
1178
01:51:48.560 --> 01:51:54.320
to energize the base, but I think that's flawed because that logic just only ends you into your own,
1179
01:51:54.320 --> 01:51:59.840
ends in your own navel. You just so far up your own ass that you become unappealing to everyone,
1180
01:51:59.840 --> 01:52:04.960
but the true believers. There's also just mountains of statistical evidence,
1181
01:52:04.960 --> 01:52:11.200
this point, suggesting that there are votes to be won at the center. You can tack to this center,
1182
01:52:11.200 --> 01:52:15.600
and that's where the votes are. They're not on the wings. Because of social media, I think
1183
01:52:15.680 --> 01:52:20.400
a lot of times we think they're at the wings, but they're not. Of course, and it's so obvious.
1184
01:52:20.400 --> 01:52:24.320
I mean, just think about the kinds of conversations. If I were to parachute you into
1185
01:52:25.680 --> 01:52:34.560
any home in the Midwest right now in swing states, right? In battleground, in purple states.
1186
01:52:34.560 --> 01:52:38.560
Yeah, Michigan. My partner's from New England. Michigan is culture. That's a
1187
01:52:38.640 --> 01:52:46.240
purple state. It went for a Hillary went for a Trump. So the conversations that you hear in
1188
01:52:46.240 --> 01:52:52.080
diners, these are all basically center left and center right people. Yeah. There are not a lot of
1189
01:52:52.080 --> 01:52:57.840
people talking about extremes. Most people are on this roughly the same, but they're in the same
1190
01:52:57.840 --> 01:53:03.440
general kind of overt and window of what they want. And they haven't been served that by the
1191
01:53:03.440 --> 01:53:09.920
Democratic party since Obama. Yeah. And they want to trust you, which makes perfect sense because
1192
01:53:10.880 --> 01:53:15.120
unfortunately, you and I have this sickness where you follow politics very closely, but most people
1193
01:53:15.120 --> 01:53:21.280
don't owe to be in their shoes. They don't follow politics that closely. They don't want to go
1194
01:53:21.280 --> 01:53:27.520
through this stuff with a fine tooth comb. They want to trust the person they elect to get it right.
1195
01:53:27.520 --> 01:53:30.560
And in order for that to happen, they need to believe that the person is trustworthy. They need
1196
01:53:30.560 --> 01:53:38.320
to believe they're not some kind of freak, not some kind of extremist wacko. So I don't understand
1197
01:53:38.320 --> 01:53:42.960
why Democrats, because most Democrats elected officials like most of them are not extremist wackos.
1198
01:53:42.960 --> 01:53:47.200
You know, there are plenty of other failings, you know, cowardice being the most common, but
1199
01:53:48.320 --> 01:53:54.400
the ones I've encountered very rarely are they truly an extremist wacko, but so many people on the
1200
01:53:54.400 --> 01:54:00.400
left have lost their voice to have what we in the States sometimes call a sister soldier moment,
1201
01:54:00.400 --> 01:54:04.640
which was when Bill Clinton, you know, this is ancient history, but there was a rapper named sister
1202
01:54:04.640 --> 01:54:10.560
soldier and she had this really extreme song. And Bill Clinton said that she has some unbelievable
1203
01:54:10.560 --> 01:54:16.240
extreme comment about America's the most racist, whatever I forget exactly what it was. It was
1204
01:54:16.240 --> 01:54:22.080
just insane. And he's and all Bill Clinton said was, wasn't saying, that's not true. And it
1205
01:54:23.040 --> 01:54:28.160
helped people understand, okay, so Bill Clinton is not an extremist wacko. Again, talk about
1206
01:54:28.160 --> 01:54:35.840
people with failings, but not that particular failing. And Democrats so often can't find our
1207
01:54:35.840 --> 01:54:41.760
voice to respond to things and say, well, that's not, you know, we're talking about immigration.
1208
01:54:41.760 --> 01:54:47.200
It's like, yeah, we want sane and rational and humane enforcement of immigration laws,
1209
01:54:47.200 --> 01:54:50.560
but there does need to be enforcement of immigration laws. Why is that so hard to say? Sometimes
1210
01:54:50.720 --> 01:54:55.200
they do say it, but sometimes they fail. Jeff, thank you for explaining to me finally what the
1211
01:54:55.200 --> 01:55:02.000
actual genesis of the sister soldier moment is. I understand the meaning of the term from context,
1212
01:55:03.200 --> 01:55:08.480
cues in American politics, like standing up to your own side, because that's what the way
1213
01:55:08.480 --> 01:55:14.080
everybody uses it. But I did not know that sister soldier was a person who said the thing that
1214
01:55:14.080 --> 01:55:20.080
Bill Clinton refuted. So I'm wise today, as we all well, there you go. And I learned about
1215
01:55:20.080 --> 01:55:27.280
camels. So, you know, if you are, if you're coming over from uncomfortable conversations,
1216
01:55:27.280 --> 01:55:31.760
subscribe to Jeff Mora's sub stack, even just for the free tier, I might be wrong. It's called
1217
01:55:31.760 --> 01:55:36.400
comedy politics and swearing in pretty much equal amounts. Jeff is very funny and insightful,
1218
01:55:36.400 --> 01:55:40.080
as you can tell. If you're coming over from Jeff's side, subscribe to uncomfortable conversations,
1219
01:55:40.080 --> 01:55:44.480
where we have lots of interesting and hopefully fearless and bullshit free conversations about
1220
01:55:44.480 --> 01:55:48.480
the most important issues that we face as a civilization and some laughs.
1221
01:55:49.120 --> 01:55:52.160
I enjoyed it, Josh. Can I give the address? I might be wrong.org.
1222
01:55:52.800 --> 01:56:00.720
And if you're not sure whether you like my stuff or not, half of it's free, half of it's
1223
01:56:00.720 --> 01:56:06.720
in front of the paywall. So you can find out for yourself. At least half is free, not paywall.
1224
01:56:06.720 --> 01:56:10.160
If you've got uncomfortable conversations, dot sub stack dot com or find uncomfortable conversations,
1225
01:56:10.160 --> 01:56:15.120
the podcast on your favorite podcast play. How's that? That was pretty good, wasn't it? That's fantastic.
1226
01:56:15.120 --> 01:56:17.520
You're a professional. Yeah, I thought so. Thank you, Jeff.