The Daily Beast Podcast - John Oliver and Sam Bee's Lessons from Jon Stewart

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

On this week’s The Daily Beast Podcast, guest John Oliver and co-host Samantha Bee take a trip down late-night TV memory lane, sharing fun times and lessons learned from their time as correspondents on ‘The Daily Show.’ Joanna Coles and Sam dive deep into the Beast’s exclusive story of the consultant making serious bank on Trump’s campaign payroll, and obsess over Kanye West’s sexploits as well as other, unrelated sex toys.  Subscribe here https://episodes.fm/1767675909 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, just pop it in to share an excerpt from the newest episode of the Daily Beast podcast, hosted by our chief creative and content officer Joanna Coles and late night legend Samantha Bee. Brought to you by 5'9. So it's now time to introduce our Beast of the Week, none other than John Oliver, the brilliant comedian, writer and political commentator, has redefined Sunday nights. Born in my homeland, John rose to prominence on the daily show with Sam and John Stewart before launching his own show. last week tonight where he blends biting satire with real investigative reporting. He's won multiple Emmys. We're not going to mention that because I don't want it to go to his head. But his show is essential viewing.

And I laugh every time I talk to John. So take it away, Sam. We are in the room together, and this interview has already gone off the rails. Joanna can't handle her technology. Everybody's swearing. Let us begin. And I just want to say that John Oliver taught me to use the word fuck with enormous, enormous

efficacy, I would say. Oh, sure. That's what. I think you deep down knew how to use the word fuck. I think I've encouraged you to listen to the way you've been brought up. It's in there.

The skills were in there. You were born with them. Okay, how do you two, you two know each other? Do you only know each other because there's a club of British expats that you have to join like it's a requirement,

or do you know each other, know each other? Tell me everything. All British people know each other. There's not many of us. So especially if there's British people overseas, historically less of us than they used to be centuries ago. We really traveled to a fault. You just all congregate at T and sympathy together? Yes, and slightly less power than we used to have.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. For now. Don't rule us out. Don't rule out the greatest comeback of all time. It would be the greatest comeback of all time. So, John, here's my question. I want to take you back.

to England and I want your memories of growing up in Britain. Can you remember anything about it? Do you know what? It was, my kids have just started watching Junior Bakeoff on Netflix. It's the British kids, I find it incredibly difficult to watch because they're so stressed those kids and they're so negative about their bake-it. My kids can't understand why you would behave this way. My eldest son is eight this morning before he left to school. I got an impression. I got an impression. I went, okay, what's this going to be?

Is this going to be a Star Wars thing? He went, who's this? He went, oh, my cake's not working. Oh, no, I can't do it. I need more time. My icing's gone wrong. It's bad. Went, oh, no.

So that's a roundabout way to say that I think I'm witnessing some of my childhood right now in the junior bake-off. And it's British kids. with absolutely no self-confidence. You know what? I share that as a Canadian, but without the cute accent. And I'm jealous. It sounds so much better when you say it.

So you two came out of the school of John Stewart. It's astonishing how many people came out of that school, Colbert, Jason Jones, Rob Cordray, Larry Wilmore. You guys both got your own shows. What was so special about John Stewart and that time? How did he produce all that? Sam, what would you say? Scholliver.

I don't know. I just think it was like a great training ground. I mean, my God, it was like going to college. Yeah. Really intense day after day, month after month, college. And you went to all these like just like cripplingly terrible interviews. You would get on a plane and go to suit. Falls, South Dakota and spend three days interviewing someone who hates you.

Yeah. You learned by your mistakes and you're in an environment where it moves so fast, right, you couldn't kind of linger in your failure as much. You just had to get on with it. And I think that was probably a really good way to get your learning curve up fast. And so if you're willing to really throw yourself at it and it really could be difficult at times, there was almost no way not to be better like a year later than you'd been the year before. I think it forged our POVs in the fire. And also, as I look back, I think,

oh, you know what, John actually as a person has a spectacular work ethic. He kind of works, he works harder than anybody. And seeing that, kind of just seeing him lead by example was a really great kind of high level of mentorship as well. And also, just like really special. We're just really special. That's right. You're really special. Absolutely amazing to leave Steve Carell off that list, Joanna, as well. Absolutely spectacular.

Not just not to lead with him, but to leave him out altogether is just absolutely mind-boggling. All together. A lot of people were left off that list. And if they heard this, they would be really best off and they're definitely going to text us later. Okay. Well, I think we should let them know. They've been left off

because that's the English way, right? The English way is just to ignore things. Exactly. It's just such precise passive aggression. All right. So, John, you grew up in a country. We share this in common where we were just so depressed as children because you have no confidence. And you realize, do you think it was actually a bigger thing that Britain itself was just losing influence? And so everybody just sort of gave up. The time that we were growing up, we weren't losing influence. It had gone. Okay. It had gone. I think more about it now, actually, in terms of the timeline of when we were growing up, because also growing up in a country really from the Second World War,

you know, my parents had experienced that as children. So it was a pretty grim time. Before Europe opened up, yeah, it was, it wasn't, it was definitely a Britain of Mike Lee films, right? Not actually Richard Curtis films. Not Richard Curtis film. I don't know. I think Richard Curtis might have lived Riches Curtis films.

I've only lived that life through watching them. Yeah, but we lived in Mike Lee films and Barry Hines films, actually, Kez. Sam, there was this mythical Kez, which was a bad little boy that just his only friend was a kestrel. Oh, God. Yeah. I remember there's a poem in that. I remember pig, sowed drunken bastard. Pig, soud drunken bastard.

Because I think it was thrilling to read when you read Kez. I also read that book that you could read swear words. That was so grim. So grim. So, I don't think people. Because people go, oh, I don't know how you could have left England to live in America. I love London. You have no idea what it was like growing up in the north.

It was depressing. There were brownouts and blackouts from minor strikes. Yeah. It was, and you're right, Europe hadn't opened up. And at least everybody in Yorkshire viewed Europe as the enemy. They viewed French as having been weak because the Germans had overrun them during the Second World War. Not untrue. Not untrue. And they view Germany as the enemy still.

Yeah. And also, Sam, if you're wondering, did that one bird who was his friend live a long happy life in that story? Impossible. No. Well, I guess this is canceling out my next question. How much do you love the royal family and how many T sets with their faces do you use every? Oh my gosh. This is so sad. You get how offensive that question is, right, Sam? I've seen you deliver versions of that question to like thousands of people's faces. The castoral is dead and everything is mud. Yeah. What was the question?

How many, am I found in a royal family? Not in any shape or form. No, no. That feels like a vestigial tale that should have fallen off long ago. My God. Have you watched either of the shows about Prince Andrew and his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein? No. There's one on Amazon and there's one on now.

Netflix. No, I watched the third one, the Newsnight interview. Yeah, they're both based on that. Oh, okay. Yeah. No, I haven't. The, it thought to me, I've watched the Newsnight interview and thought, yeah, I think we all know where we are here. Yeah, it was just incredible. Well, Michael Sheen does a very good job of an impetuous, childish Prince Andrew. Like, what happens to the royal family? I have absolutely no idea. I think it'll probably be, you know, in times gone by, what happened to royal families with the French in particular who could be pretty spectacular. There was a severance of the royal family physically as well as emotionally. But I think they'll just become more and more ornamental, more than they already are.

I think it's pretty clear they serve no practical function. It's a tourism magnet, I think. You can see that. Whenever there's royal weddings now and they interview people, you see GMA interviewing people down the line, in the street. There's a lot of American accents in there. It does feel like it's the rest of the world turning up to say, we want to go and see this thing you do. And British people are generally just drunk in the streets, having street parties, which sure are wedding adjacent, but it's also an excuse to day drink. Well, at least everything's going really smoothly here. Now that we've

all emigrated from our native lands, any regrets about becoming an American citizen? Joanna, are you a citizen now? I am a citizen. When was yours? I want to say sort of, 10, 15 years ago. At the time I was editing Mary Claire, and they had this full American day for me, and I came back from the ceremony, which was very moving. And who should be in the office? Everybody had bunting, American flags in the office, but the most American person they could find, who was Jessica Simpson at the time. Jessica Simpson was there in a star-spangled outfit with cartons of barbecue. and we all had amazing amounts of barbecue. Jessica Simpson just said welcome to being an American,

and we ate lots of cupcakes. I can't believe this. Yeah, that was my, it was just welcome to America. That's the ultimate welcome. It was spectacular. That's the goddamn dream. Yep, it was a dream. It was a dream.

Every immigrant, having gone through the hell of the U.S. immigration process, should get Jessica Simpson in a star-spangled body suit. serving them barbecue. It was amazing. So when did you become an American? I became an American at the end of 2019. But I remember my version of that was when I first got my green card. I was so stressed.

I was having to re-up my visa every year. Jill Katz and Pam DePace at the Daily Show office brought it into me with like a single flag in a piece of apple pie. And I nearly cried. I think the problem, I think they were thought, oh, this is a joke. And I don't think they understood how stressed I'd been about this. So I wasn't able to make a joke out of the thing.

I couldn't believe I was holding this thing, which meant that I wasn't having to pack up everything once a year, go back to London, go to the U.S. Embassy, beg to be let back in with no guarantee that was going to happen. That would have been a stressful time to be receiving a green card and to be naturalized too. Were you naturalized during the Trump administration? Yes. So it was at the end of 2019 just before COVID hit. So the problem was I couldn't get to.

I didn't believe it, right? I was kept waiting for this weight of relief to come off my shoulders, but I couldn't use my passport. And it didn't feel like until I knew I could walk through US customs with a passport, I didn't really believe it had happened. So actually, I hadn't, I didn't get to leave the country. I voted before I left the country. When I voted and it said your vote has been counted, that was the moment for me. I thought, holy shit, it's real. But that was a year later. Wow. Yeah, it's strangely stressful. I remember sitting waiting for three, three weeks in London. I called the visa office every day and I was like, is it there? Is it there? And they're like, no, not yet. It's so stressful. It's weirdly, weirdly stressful.

It gets worse as the longer it goes on, right? Because I think we probably all know this. Like when you start building a life in a country that you don't, you're not legally guaranteed to live in, the more you build that life, the more precarious it feels because you know it could get taken away from you at any second. Well, and also when your children are a different nationality to, I mean, I was conscious I had American children because they were born here, but we were not the same nationality. I found that very stressful, especially after 9-11, actually. So we've all taken citizenship. What do you think of America now? You mean how it's doing out of 10? Yes. I'm going to hold off on scoring it for three and a half weeks. I don't think it's possible to know how America's

doing right now. I think we're about to find out how many. I think you should extend that and take it all the way to inauguration, because I'm just not sure that you're going to have a resolution to that question. Oh, man, that's a really strong point. That's right. You've kind of got to get past, is it January, somewhere around January the 5th, maybe just after that. January 20th. Oh, January the 6th. Yes, yes. Okay. So, so how do you feel Carmelah is doing? It's very, very hard to say. I don't really have any idea. The polls are incredibly close. Do you read them? Do you get up in the morning? Do you doomscroll the way that I do? Oh, you don't. There's not much point. It's clearly there were, most of the big swing states were within the margin of error. So there's not much you can read into

them other than this is going to be incredibly close. To the extent that it kind of always is, it's just it feels hard to get your head around how it can be close this time, given what happened last time. Can I ask, how are you planning the next week's shows? Like, how much are you giving attention to what's happening now? How much are you creating? I mean, you're always kind of, you know, you are always having evergreen segments kind of like percolating. How much are you pivoting to it in the weeks leading up to it? Last week, we were trying to take a long look at the attempts at election subversion because it felt like it was worth trying to get all of that into one place, the extent to which all the claims of nonsense voting are absolute horseshit.

It felt useful to show how nonsense it is as well as just tell people its nonsense to really kind of trying to forensically work through exactly how much that is built on a total lie. So there's a couple more things like that we're working on in run up to the election where it feels like trying to meet the biggest lies at face value and pull them a part. So that's kind of what we're planning in the run-up to the action. What we'll do afterwards, I think will depend on how that goes. Right. I remember when I was doing my own child that we were like, we should have a cake because we kind of aired midweek. And so we had to be like a little bit responsive. And we're like, let's get a cake made. And one half of the cake would be like a celebratory

half. And then we'll have the opposite side, which would be the upside down world of the cake with like a demon hanging off of it, like melting the cake from within. You're just in case. You kind of have to plan for everything. It's tricky because you're on Wednesdays, right? So you would think that you would know enough by then. I'm not sure, like you were pushing it back then. I'm not sure that will be the case now.

I don't think we're not going to know unless there's an absolute landslide on Tuesday night. It might well be, especially if Georgia goes into litigation, that we'll be struggling to know on Sunday or on Saturday when we tape who's actually one. You're going to have to get your own goblin cake. I want it delivered by a terrified looking Jessica Simpson. Oh, God, yes. That Star Spangled Bikini has been through some shit. So do we think that we may not know for some days or even possibly some weeks?

Because it does feel like the Republicans are getting in, yeah, all sorts of, structures to contest the election if the Democrats win. It's not even just the counting alone. Like Pennsylvania is going to take longer just because they're not allowing, as they haven't before, like any opening of the ballots to be smoothed out. So it will get pushed back. Georgia really could take a long time if they're allowed to do any of the things that the new law passed last month has suggested that they're going to be allowed to do in terms

of having hand recounts of precincts and demanding the exact same total from three people. It's, everything could well get pushed back. I would be really surprised if we know Tuesday night. Yeah, and everybody's been really deeply practicing getting further radicalized since January 6th. Everybody's doing a really good job of just like studying up for what comes after. And actually what's going on now and this armed militia in Hurricanes

territory is pretty worrying. I don't know if you've been following this. No. Those words don't sound good at all. So the disinformation around the hurricanes meant that there was various FEMA workers yesterday. Right, were confronted by an armed militia and were basically called, you know,

called back from FEMA to stop going out there. So it does feel like the beginning of this may have already started. Oh, for sure. I think it's definitely already started. Yeah, we'll see. I think it's going to be a tense time. But yeah, I think long gone, I think, other days, probably for the foreseeable future where you planned election night parties with results.

I say you, I mean like party, like the political party, the idea there would be a cascade of balloons. And in 2008, remember, Sam, we were on air. It was that early, right? I'm not wrong about that, right? It was like 1120 or something. Yeah. Yeah.

We were on the air. That's right. And it was so emotional and it felt that that was a balloon drop. Balloon drops are over. The balloon drops now are just filled with sand and the balloons hurt you. That's right. They just land with a sequence of spots. They just bruise you like a bag of oranges. I've got so many questions to ask you, but I want to know what your media diet is. I've got two little kids. So Junior Bake Off, Bluey, still, we're still watching Bluey. And for me, Liverpool, I'd watch Liverpool football games. Well, where do you get your news from? How much time do you spend?

You said you didn't doomscrolls, Sam doomscrolls all the time. But where do you get your information from? What do you trust as an information source? It's a little different from us than the daily grind of shows, right? Because we're not necessarily in that daily news diet ecosystem. So the beauty of the machine that we have here is that with these longer, stories. What we're really relying on is our researchers talking to experts. So to the extent possible, we're trying to get information from the source there, from the people who've written

studies or have monitored stories for their entire lives, not necessarily from, oh, this outlet is generally good, because they'll all disappoint you. I want to recommend an article that I read the other day in the Atlantic about a place called Point Nemo, which is the furthest point. on the earth's surface away from land. And that's where I'm going to go. Where's that? It's in the South Pacific. Yeah, I was going to get, oh, South Pacific.

Okay. Just get yourself a houseboat. The waves are 70 feet on a good day. The worst weather in the world apart from actually where we grew up. It's worse in Britain. It's worse in the north. It's Point Nemo and the north of Britain. Yeah.

Terrible weather patterns. Seventy foot waves, at least that's dramatic. In Britain you have like a low cloud that's just kind of pressing down not on your body but on your soul and it's a cold that again isn't interesting cold it's just a damp wet cold. You know you will notice that I haven't mentioned

that you've got 30 Emmy Awards because I don't want you getting big-headed on this show. If you had stayed in the UK what would you be doing now? I mean I didn't come to America like the Beatles, right? I didn't come having achieved success in the UK and then sacrificing it for success in America.

I failed my way to the US. I did not have a glittering career in the UK. So I think the honest truth is what I've done, I think is what I was doing the whole time, which is just doing an Edinburgh show every year. That was the thing I loved the most. Edinburgh Fringe show. Yeah, Edinburgh Fringe. Yeah, exactly.

Do the Edinburgh Festival once a year, write a new hour. that was kind of the one regular backdrop to my life before I came here. I would do that every year, see all the comedians I knew up in August. Every year's the best place in the world in August is the greatest. So I'd be doing that and then, I don't know, I worked for a little bit, a little bit for Radio 4, had some shows cancelled. So, I don't know, maybe I'd be working for them. I've no idea. So interesting.

And I love the story that you tell of your first. night on the daily show when J.K. Rowling was there. Yeah. It was so confusing. The whole, did Sam, were you, were you on the first night? Was that a move that he would make? I can't remember. I think so. We would usually do a kind of a group thing to introduce someone, but my memory is so shot. I can't remember. I think I realized after watching the pattern after the fact that a very kind thing he did was made sure that on your first day, day in the office you were on that night to kind of stop it becoming too big a thing in your head. So I just got in from Britain. I was jet lagged. It was very, very hot that summer. And it was all a

blur. And so I remember them saying, you're going to be on tonight. That seemed like a bad idea. I think it was a hugely good idea in hindsight because I was too tired to feel as nervous as I should have done. And then weirdly, yeah, J.K. Rowling was in the audience that night. She was Oh. Because I think he was interviewing her at Radio City for a new book. And so she was just sitting, not as a guest. She was just sitting in the audience. And I didn't know until I was walking back off.

Then you look at her and think, hold on. This can't be really. What is America all about? I know. It was a very, very strange experience. And weren't you wearing little round glasses at the time? I was. I don't like the tone.

your voice. You know, one of the things that nobody knows about when we worked at The Daily Show was that we had to supply our own wardrobe. Okay. Yes. Oh, is that true? Okay, that explains a lot. There was a, it was very low, but we were just not, you know, that changed, like kind

of evolved over time, but the outfits that I wore when I started were, first of all, I came from camp. You know, this is an interview is not about me, but I came from Canada. They were like, by the way, when you come here, you're going to need to buy a suit. I bought a brown suit. Let's just talk about how ugly. I think my seat was brown too. I think I've got browned.

I think most of you were wearing brown suits. I think you might have been brown. Yeah, because when we go into our home country and we go, excuse me, suit salesman, I need a suit. They go, you know what you need? Brown. Nothing looks better on camera than tan. It doesn't fit anything, but it's not out of place anywhere.

It's equally out of place everywhere. I think I had a problem shoot too. Yeah, Jim Margulis used to make fun of me because he was like, if you go too near a light, your suit is going to melt. Can you get a better one? It was a real point of friction from when it changed and when we finally started,

I think we started getting suits from Banana Republic years later. And previous correspondents were absolutely furious that was happening. They couldn't believe it. And it was a problem because doing field pieces, you're constantly like climbing trees, grabbing onto the bottom of trucks. But you rip through suits, and it's a not insignificant investments. That's why you go brown.

Brown is always the key. I remember Jason. Jason going through it to a pig farm. And his feet were saturated with just pig feces. His whole hit a throw out his shoes and suit just saturated. And you were like, that's like $400 more. Yeah. It was very, very helpful when Banana Republic gave us disposal.

Very. Thank God. But the only reason I mentioned your small, round glasses. How? That didn't J.K. Rowling say that you reminded her of Harry. Yes, that was the one thing she said to me. And what was depressing was,

I had spent basically the years since her book was released, doing stand-up, having, oh, hey, Harry Potter, shouted at me before I got to the mic. And then J.K. Rowling herself. And then J.K. Rowling basically heckled me in real time saying, yeah, you look like Harry. Went, okay. Oh, God.

That doesn't help. And I think I changed my glasses, really soon after that. Well, you've had a whole makeover. I mean, your hair has changed since the beginning of last week. A whole makeover? Well, this is, wow. You can take Joanna out of Marie-Clair.

Jessica Simpson came over and gave you an American makeover. This is what happens. Yep, she did. I mean, I've watched your hair progress over the years. This isn't like a regular interview, is it, John Oliver? She has been, she has been at every major chapter point of my hair story. I think your hair looks great. But I also love the story.

Anyway, I also love the story of how you met your wife, who I have such a wonderful recent story of your wife because she is an ambulance. She works in the ambulance world. And I was in the ER with a friend. And I'm sitting there and this goddess, because John's wife is surprisingly gorgeous. And when I say surprising, which is mine and John, I can say that. But she's absolutely gorgeous. And I'm sitting there. And I've got to organise an ambulance from this ER to the hospital at uptown.

And this apparition in the most beautiful ambulance uniform, which is all navy with these fabulous heavy boots, comes up. And she goes, don't worry, I'm going to get you the best ambulance. And I realize it's Kate. And I'm like, even in the ER in you, you're hustling for who do I know? How can I get the best ambulance? And I found myself saying, is it the best ambulance? Has it got the best equipment?

She was like, don't worry, I got you. But describe how you met her because I love this story. I do remember coming back from that shift saying, I saw Joanna. And she said, like her friend, you know, there was something going on. And she said that my boots looked fabulous. I remember looking down at her boots and thinking, I think the word fabulous might mean something different than I. think it makes. So wonderful, heavy, big, leather, strong boots. Yeah. I met her with Sam, actually. I was, we were working at the 08 convention, the two conventions. We were in St. Paul, Minnesota.

And so we were running around on a layer of the convention center that we were not allowed to be on. This goes back to the immigration thing. I was very, very worried about getting, I couldn't get arrested, right? I can get thrown out of places where I can't get arrested on a visa. That's a disaster. So whenever they started calling security, we have to make sure I would want to make sure that's not the police, right? Because those are two different encounters. As one point, as we're kind of running away, I can't remember who I was with. I think it was Stuart Miller. Smills, we called him.

I think Kate was in the army. She just got back from Iraq. She was with a veterans group, and she hid us. She didn't know what the Daily Show was, but she saw people running and hid us. You know, she's, it's the medic M.O., right? You see someone running, you want to help them. That's the cutest way to meet. That is so cute.

To get saved. I don't remember what her boots were that day, Joanna, but I'm guessing they were fabulous. I think they were fabulous. And she signed up to go to, oh, she signed up to join the Army after 9-11, right? Of 9-11, yeah. Yeah, she signed up 9-12, I think, or close, yeah. Yeah, and I remember her descriptions of going to the Iraq War and having to rescue people who'd been basically burned.

and she has extraordinary stories of being a medic in Iraq. Yeah, she was in Fallujah, Tarji, Baghdad. She was all over the place. Yeah, I still hear every now and then new stories will come out. But yeah, they all, they had a hell of a time in every possible meaning of the word hell. This was great. Oh, my God, it's so nice to see your face. You too, mate.

It is really nice. You're doing your Vegas residency at the Beacon. This is awesome. Yeah, that's right. Tell us about that. Plus my hair journey is just a, whereas with another, I can just use it up for you. Yeah, the hair six. I like that.

I like it. I think you should do spiky up top, spiky up top. And so you've got a residency at the beacon. Yeah, I do with Seth every month, Seth Myers. Yeah, we're being there. Okay, so Sam, you and I should go. We should totally come. Yeah, we started last summer during the strike when we were both running around,

desperately trying to do stand up to. I'm just going to stand up to. I'm just going to sit in the front. wrote and I'm going to mount the words Harry Potter. And I hope you feel the love. You can put right angles on your glasses. They still present as round. Oh my God. This was so fun. It was so fun. John, thank you very much. Did you hit record at the start of this, Joanna? Or was this? No, no. Now it starts. Now we hit record. Yeah, now we hit. That was just warming you up. It was warming you up. John, give my love to Kate. Very good to see you and the boys. Thanks, mate. That was so fun.

That was so enjoyable. So enjoyable. I love hearing your stories about working on the daily show. Oh, my God. It is so fun to see his face. He works so hard. I can't recall the last time we saw each other socially. It was a really long time ago. So this was a joy. Well, he's quite hermitty, I think. He is. Yeah. He's, I mean, he has a really, you know, time-consuming job and he does a lot of it. I mean, we did see him at the George Clooney event. Yes, he was the, in fact, we should have mentioned that to him. He was the host at the George Clooney. the event. And John Stewart was there too. So the two of them and then you, three representatives from the Daily Show. Yeah. Yeah. And also he's got two little kids and I feel at that stage in your life, there's work and there's family and there's nothing else. There's nothing else. There's not,

there's no, yeah, there's not much to give to your social life. It kind of ceases to exist for a number of years and that is, okay. He's so funny. I just, I don't know if you feel this with Canadians. And I know you're married to obviously a Canadian Jason Jones, who was on the Daily Show too. But there's such a comfort with being with people where you just get the cultural references. I've lived here 27 years. And I still have a level of comfort with British people that I don't quite have with Americans. It makes total sense. Yes.

No. I mean, the minute I locate and we find each other, we will find each other at a huge party, you'll always find the Canadian in the room for me. And then we immediately know exactly we speak the same language like instantly. It's amazing. I have an anecdote about a Canadian, which might be, it might just be a good time to surface it, which is that I'm at a party and I see a friend barreling towards me with a man who I recognize, a youngish man that I recognize.

And I think it's her son because she's asked me to talk to her son, who's in his sort of mid-20s, about journal. And I've totally failed to do this. So I'm sort of frantically overcompensating when they barrel towards me. And I grab his hand and I say, oh, my goodness, your mom loves you to speak so highly of you. It's so good to see you again. You know, excited to talk to you about journalism. And he puts his hand out and he goes, Justin.

Justin Trudeau. And I was like, that's why I recognize you. The prime minister of a whole country. But it was out of context. I wasn't expecting to see the prime minister. of Canada at that particular party. Your mom is so proud of you. She speaks so highly of you.

You're a good boy. You're a good boy. You're a good son. That's my best Canadian anecdote. That is amazing. Of course, the Canadian most memorable to you at a party is the literal prime minister. Because our prime ministers go to parties that are just like regular parties. They're a little bit.

It's a little low key. You're the most famous Canadian. Sometimes you'll be in Ottawa, in Canada, and you could just like see a Prime Minister jog by. That's what Canada's like. We're never going to see Donald Trump jogging. Oh, he's too busy dancing on a stage to music. Want to hear more? Subscribe to the Daily Beast podcast wherever you're listening to this to catch a new episode every Thursday.