The Daily Show: Ears Edition - Jon Stewart Invites Panel of Trumps to Debate Iran War | Mayor Matt Mahan

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Trump's war in the Middle East rages on, with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and Americans gearing up to face the infamous R-word: recession. Plus, FCC Chair Brendan Carr and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aren't happy with the news media's confused coverage of the war in Iran, so Jon Stewart gets some truth and clarity from a panel of experts: President Trump, Donald J. Trump, DJT, and John Barron. Mayor Matt Mahan of San José sits down with Jon to discuss his candidacy for governor of California. They talk about building constituents' trust by reducing homelessness, crime, and delivering on housing promises, regulating AI to help the industry boom in a way that protects people's livelihoods and privacy, and what his background in public school teaching and tech start-ups taught him about examining data to create pragmatic solutions in government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You're listening to Comedy Central. From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for news. This is The Daily Show, with your host, Joe. Daily Show, my name is John Stewart, man. I think I might have come in too hot. Hold on.

Don Stewart. We got a great one for you tonight. Later on, I'm going to be joined by the mayor of San Jose, California. Matt Mann. He's going to be here. He is one of the over 400 candidates. currently running for a governor of California. In the Democratic primary, we'll talk to him.

But first, as you were well aware, terrible war has been raging for two weeks now. But as of last night, it is clear that opera and ballet have defeated Timothy Sheldon. Contest! A knockout! Even before they brought out prima ballerina Misty Copeland in the middle of the sinner's performance

right in front of them. So opera and ballet. Can't wait to switch out my Ukrainian flag profile picture for the playbill to deflater mouse. Is that the, oh, is that the playbill? I don't even know. I like how we put in parentheses there, the bat, as though that's not common knowledge amongst the people. By the way, also another conflict with a less certain outcome. Let's get into it right now with our ongoing coverage.

Nothing bad can happen. only good happen. It can only good happen. As many of you know, war is God's way of teaching Americans' geography. And class is in session. I give you the

straight of Hormuz. Of course, Gen Z will tell you, no Hormuz is 100% straight. But it's a passageway choke point for 20% of the world's oil, kind of a lazy river for fossil fuels. Not to be confused with the strategic Iranian island of Khargh, which we also attacked. We attacked

Harg and Khormuz. Because if we've learned anything from these past 20 years, it's that America will bomb anywhere that has a scrabble score above 12. Oh, oh, we'll get to you, Uzbekistan. And you guys, you're not going to believe what Iran did after we attacked them. The Supreme Leader said that the Strait of Hormuz, which is a critical shipping lane for nearly 20% of the world's crude oil, will remain closed. Was it scheduled maintenance? Oh, wait.

Is this because of the incessant bombing? Oh, we're going to play the one card we have to stop you from collapsing all of our infrastructure. Real mature. Well, you know what? Close it. See if we care. Gas prices up, diesel prices up, jet fuel prices up. And in some quarters, you're beginning to hear whispers of concerns over the R word.

Recession. Come on, open an open to our existential fight for existence. Inconvenience, our commute. And by the way, the R word? Oh, this whole thing is the R word, all right. That's not the R word I would use for the decision to attack Iran. But Iran has now closed the Strait of Hormuz, leading to surging gas prices and risking the global economy. Of course, there was no way to know that that was going to happen.

General Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned President Trump that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump acknowledged the risk, but told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the street. Oh, would they? Oh, don't worry about it, everybody. Gee, who would have thought that a guy who did this during a solar eclipse would ignore a warning? By the way, my favorite part of that goes, he looks up in a solar eclipse. Free time! But not to worry, this sudden bottleneck of the world's oil supply, it's not a big deal.

It's barely closed. The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit, should Iran not do that? Other than Epstein, it's a wonderful island. But they're shooting? Now, the ships cannot make the passage because they're being attacked. And the risk is too great. There were some mines that have been laid.

It's going to take a lot of foresight and planning to thread this needle, come up with a strategic plan. Luckily, I think the president has one. I also asked the president about the rise in oil prices, $100 a barrel. And he said this, these ships got to go through the strait of removes and show some guts. Show some guts, captains, Philip. I know you may not want to sail the slowest moving vehicle on earth. packed with the most flammable liquid on earth

through the most active war zone on earth but on the other hand you know maybe there's an easier solution to the myriad difficulties that have arisen from a hasty war of choice that seems light on plans for the inevitable unforeseen consequences and contingencies

the Trump administration is threatening to go after US TV networks for their coverage of the war with Iran it's the solution what if we just didn't hear about it. We've got two choices. Do this war better, or make sure that the news networks only tell you that we are doing this war better.

I know which one FCC Chairman Brendan Carr prefers. FCC chairman Brendan Carr hosted this on X, quote, broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions, also known as the fake news, have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. No, he didn't. Networks have to learn. You better not lie and give misinformation about how this war is going.

That's Donald Trump's job. Did the United States bomb a girls' elementary school? Based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran. He's going to lose his president license. Unless he moves to basic cable, Jump in, Donnie, the water's warm. To be fair, the administration isn't just criticizing how the media covers the war.

They're being constructive about it. Allow me to make a few suggestions. People look up at the TV and they see banners, they see headlines. For example, a banner or a headline. Mid-East war intensifies splashing on the screen the last couple of days. What should the banner read instead? How about Iran increasingly desperate? Slow down, I'm right.

Hold on. It's desperate having. So smart. You know, we should be doing that. Like, instead of the straight of Hormuz is closed, like they put up there, why not just say 99% of world's waterways now open? And by the way, news organizations, what's with all the depressing footage of things being blown up and people running away in terror?

Surely there's a more uplifting version that honors our greatness. Iran has claimed responsibility for that hit. They said they used underwater drones to strike the oil tank. tankers, video showed enormous fires following the impact. Was that so hard? Well, if you can't trust the fake news media, and we've got so many unanswered questions about the reasons for the war, how long it's going to go.

I mean, who can we turn to for clarity? To give it to us straight. There's no better communicator than our president. President Trump laid out clear objectives to the American people. He's the best communicator I've ever seen. Why am I allowing myself to get all confused and flustered? Why don't we just go to the sorrows? All this time we've been relying on independent sources or outside observations and analysis

when the truth and the clarity have been staring us in the face all along. So to clear up all the confusion about this war, confusion. To clear up all the confusion about this war, I've assembled an expert panel to help explain what the war is actually about in a lucid and clear-cut way. So please welcome to the program. President Donald Trump, Donald J. Trump, DJT, and John Barron. Guys, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today. It's great to be here and great to be back.

It's a great honor to be here. I just want to say it's a pleasure to be with you. I have no idea who you are, but that's okay. Good one. But all right, let's get right into it. Look, let's just start with the basics. There's been some confusion over whether or not we are even at war. Can you clarify for us, if America is at war, I'll start with you, Donald Trump.

This was just an excursion into something that had to be done. Okay. All right. Thank you. It's not a war. It's an excursion. President Trump, do you agree? This is an excursion, a little excursion, and I think it's only that. Okay. So it's actually like a minor, just like a walkabout, like a bit of an exploding amble, if you will. John Barron, how is this excursion going, this little susson of, we're winning the war by a lot. So it's a war, because earlier we heard President Trump and Donald Trump say it's an excursion.

It's both, it's an excursion that will keep us out of a war. Okay. All right, DJT, it's both a war and an excursion that will stop the war that it isn't. excursion in the streets, war in the sheets. Is that what I'm hearing? It sounds good to me. I bet it does, sir. But thank you so much for not clearing that up.

Do you have any sense of how long this is going to go? Combat operations continue at this time in full force, and they will continue until all of our objectives are achieved. Understood. So obviously we have to bear down and achieve all these objectives. before we could ever just stand up and say it's over, we won. We won. We won the bet in the first hour it was over. That was two weeks ago. So the objectives, if we won and our objectives are met, and that was

two weeks ago, why are we still at war? We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough. Motherfucker. So we're there till we win, we've won, we haven't won enough. I'm I'm sorry, we've got Don from Palm Beach on the line. Sir, you said, you said the war will end when we achieve our objectives, and they're very clear, and that we've won, but not won enough. Sir, if you can, how will we know then when we've won enough? When I feel it. When I feel it in my bones.

I'll do respect to your bones. But should we really be giving them more responsibilities? Seems like they've got enough on their plate with the getting you up and down the stairs thing. Gentlemen, I don't mean to be pessimistic, but I can kind of see why we're having trouble keeping the straight of Hormuz open. In fact, there are some naysayers out there. I want to read you a tweet. Guys, I want to hear your response to this. This is a tweet from Donald J. Trump at Real Donald Trump. Here's what he says. Hopefully, China, France, Japan, South Korea, the U.K. and other. will send ships to the area so that the whomew's straight will no longer be a threat.

How do you guys respond to that? That tweet by Donald Trump, would the military support of other nations be helpful and welcome in this endeavor? We don't need anybody. We're the strongest nation in the world. We have the strongest military by far in the world. We don't need them. Everybody needs us. We have the weapons.

We have the strength. We're very strong. They need us much more than we need them. I will tell you that right now. See, this is the clarity. This is the clarity that we've been looking for. We're going to go it alone with our bomb buddy, BB. We're the strongest country in the world.

All right, let's move on to another topic. I'm sorry, Donald, you had something you wanted to say? They should be not only thinking it, as they should be helping us. What does surprise me is that they're not eager to help. We need anything, any piece of apparatus that they may have because of a situation that they have, they should be jumping to help us. We requested two aircraft carriers, which they had, and he didn't really want to do it.

I said, why don't you send some ships over, and he really didn't want to do it. So to sum up, if I can, we don't need your help. We don't want your help. I know it's hard to imagine, but we're not the only people affected by this bombing campaign. The Iranian people,

along with suffering under this terrible regime, are now living through an intense aerial bombardment. Gentlemen, what's your message to the Iranian people? Now is the time to stand up for the Iranian people and help take back your country. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny. I call upon all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment.

That's big. You're calling on the Iranian people to try to overthrow their own government. Donnie, down in Palm Beach, do you agree with that statement? So I really think that's a big hurdle to climb for people that don't have weapons. Who's going to do that? They literally have people in the streets with machine guns, machine gunning people down if they want to protest, okay?

Sir, it's an excellent point. Donnie makes an excellent point. Guys, there seems to be some disagreement amongst the Trumps on the merits of, let's call it an Aronuary 6th type movement. And I've got to be honest with these. guys. I mean this. There are others even more critical of your decision to launch this. I'm going to play this for you, and then I'd like your reactions. Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. Guys, I mean, you can dismiss the comment, but that's from the author of the art of the deal. How do you respond? I would say that it's

one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Really are a loser. What an idiot. What a jerk. Low IQ. He's a low IQ individual. Well, sir, I can't disagree. You know, there have been many who've been saying for some time.

You know, I'm wondering, we may have disagreements about how long this is going to last or what the ultimate objectives are. But I think we all agree that sending American men and women into harm's way is the gravest decision any American president can make. I think the American people wish Godspeed to her. soldiers, wisdom to our leaders, and a just peace that accommodates and recognizes the humanity of all those. I'm sorry, am I boring you? Oh, President Donald Trump, am I boring? Donald Trump, can you believe this guy? Oh, for fuck sake. Does anyone on the panel want to jump in and come? Oh, my God. You know what? I didn't want to have to do this, but how's the ballroom renovation going? I think we'll need it for 150 years.

I think I'll save money on the doors because it can't get more beautiful than that. Thank you for clarifying all of our questions on this fresh war. When we come back, Mayor Matt Mayn of San Jose will be joining in the studio. My morning flew by and I didn't have time to cook anything. And I looked up at the clock and now it's 10 a.m. And I'm hungry. And it's March.

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With a limited time offer, get Huell today with an exclusive offer of 15% off online with the code Daily Show at huel.com slash daily show. New customers only. Thank you to Huell for partnering and supporting this show. If you're busy, this is a game changer. Is the mayor of San Jose and a Democratic candidate for governor of California, please welcome the program, Mayor Matt Mann. So, thank you. You are the mayor of San Jose. How long have you been the mayor of San Jose?

And tell me a little something about San Jose. So I'm going into my fourth year. San Jose is an amazing place. City of a million people, heart of Silicon Valley, largest city in Northern California, believe it or not. San Francisco gets a lot of attention. But we are the biggest city. It does get quite a bit of attention.

Most diverse, most innovative, great food. It's a magical place. That's amazing. And so you decided to run from where. you were, I'm assuming, you ran some kind of startup. I was in the startup world. Before that, I was a public school teacher. Okay.

Yeah. What grade did you teach? Seventh and eighth grade, English and History. Oh, that's wonderful. And you left there, when? Teaching. 2008. Interesting.

To do what? To get into the tech. You're a son of a big. I know, you got me. You got me. But hold on, hold on. They're building civic tech tools to help people participate in their democracy. Oh, that's interesting.

And hold their elected officials accountable. Lovely work. So what made you want to get into the politics side of it? Well, I've always followed local politics and just felt that government at its best creates opportunity, makes people's lives better. I grew up in a little farming town on the central coast, Watsonville. Sure. Home of Driscoll Strawberries and Martinelli's apple cider. Great place.

No, they know. Oh, they know they're agricultural products. All they were talking about were strawberries and cider. That was all I couldn't get them on anything else. Every question they would ask, what's your favorite strawberry? Well, we definitely have the best. So my mom was a teacher. My dad was a letter carrier.

The public library was our after-school program. I mean, this is just when government services work, they create opportunity. They make people's lives better. And right now, not just in California, across the country, we're seeing declining trust in government. We're seeing people turn to authoritarianism because they just want things to work. And they're tired of being asked to pay more for less. And that led me to want to get involved and see if I could help make our local government work better for people. So you've been doing that. You're doing that four years.

I'm assuming are you, and you decide to jump into the governor's race. Are you also running for mayor? How long is the mayor's term in? San Jose? Four years. So you're done? Actually, we re-aligned around the presidential cycle. I got re-elected with 87% of the vote. Not bad.

Didn't stuff any Bauer boxes. Look at little Putin over here. 87% of the vote? What? That's bananas. In America. So you get elected.

When was the election? So that was four years ago, then I ran two years in, and now I'm halfway through a four-year term. And you were like, fuck this. Well, John, I just didn't think enough people were running for governor. How many people are running for governor? It's unclear. At least a dozen. And on the Democratic.

So explain to the people, you know, California is not like a typical, like there's a Republican primary, there's a Democratic primary. This is an open primary. It's wide open. So anyone with any party affiliation, can vote for any of the candidates. There are Republicans running, a ton of Democrats. Top two go head to head in November. So there are like two or three Republicans running.

And like eight or nine or ten or eleven, twenty. At least. Democrats. It's a great plan, and it's so smacks of the Democratic Party. To split the vote into such fractious fiefdoms. that the only two people standing are the two Republicans. So smart. So typical.

Have the Democratic candidates discussed this with each other? Right now, Undecided is beating everybody, okay? Wait, what? Yeah. Undecided is still in first place, which is part of why I jumped in, because... I think we need to be clear. with Californians about how we're going to make their lives better. Spending in California is up 75% in the last six years.

It is a disaster waiting to happen. It matters. Do you know why they film all the earthquake movies with the rock there? You've been in a drought for eight. Why don't you go run New Hampshire? What are you doing out there? You know, what we're doing in San Jose has been working. I'm really proud of our city.

We've come together around focusing on our biggest problem. in being much more pragmatic. We've led the state in bringing people indoors. We've reduced homelessness by about a third, by building basic dignified shelter, improving outreach, doing more prevention. We've hired police officers from our community, done a lot of community policing,

and started to tackle quality of life crime. Crime has dropped. We're not the safest big city in the country. Really? Yes, sir. That's not bad. We have... We've reduced barriers to building housing.

We've sped up permitting, dropped our fees, thousands of new homes. And you'd like to transfer that. Now, does California hamstring you in any way in this list of a conscience? Because the thing about California that surprised us, is fourth largest economy, I think in the world, yes? I mean, it's like running a country.

But you're running a country by referendum. You know, they've got all those propositions. You can't raise property. You know, the Bel Air Hotel pays the same property taxes as like a guy who's living in, I think, Eagle Rock. Like, what, how do you run a state? state that is that faca, uh,

Queens English, that word. Uh, in terms of how it hamstrings your ability to address those problems and, and use the funding properly to move in different directions. Well, we're still less constrained than you might think. The state has incredible revenue. We, we spend 350 billion dollars a year. We're able to because we have the world's leading industries, not just tech, Hollywood. Right. agriculture. Californiaans are the most innovative and productive people on earth. We have a lot of resources. Right. I would push back on that a little. I think it's time to, I think we've got to ask our government to do better before we ask people to give more. And we're seeing plenty of models, including in San Jose, but also other states. Mississippi is doing a better job of educating low-income students than we are in California. I think that's completely unacceptable.

When government works, it helps working people really achieve their full potential, the American dream. And we have closed that off to too many people because the state is too expensive. We have to really own our challenges. Yes, we've got to fight against Donald Trump. California has to lead the fight against this authoritarian administration in Washington. But the best way to do that is to deliver better public schools. more affordable housing, more affordable energy, and really show that our values in California work and practice.

That's what I've been working to do in San Jose. Work and practice, yes. I want to do that statewide. You bring up a really interesting point, and I think this is something that has been divorced from. Democrats are generally the party that believes that government has a role to play in improving people's lives. Republicans are generally the party that says,

I bet I can break that. So for Democrats, it's always been interesting that they've had trouble connecting the money that they're asking to raise through taxes to the value it's providing to taxpayers. So to the point of like there's a lot of referendums up there now, a billionaires tax or getting people that pay $100,000 not to have to pay any income tax. But I think too often the politicians haven't connected that money to real value. I don't think people trust that that that money will be spent responsibly or have any efficacy. So predictably, being the capital of Silicon Valley,

we created some dashboards to show people how we were spending their dollars. It works. Because we're being replaced by AI? Hopefully not too soon. It's more of a co-pilot. I see. We've set goals. We've set goals around reducing homelessness, reducing crime, building more housing, cleaning up our city, growing the local economy, and showed people how we're spending their dollars.

And they're responding to that. Well, more importantly, it's making us better. When we look at the data, when we say, okay, here's the program we're funding, here's the policy, this is what we thought would happen, and then it didn't happen, we adjust. We're actually learning, we're getting smarter, we're doing more with the dollars we have. And in the last three years, by reducing homelessness and crime and blight and getting housing under construction again, we've increased trust in government in San Jose by 40% by delivering results. This is the antidote. How'd you measure that, AI? Because I've gotten some answers from AI that are a little, the word I think is FACTA.

Yeah, yeah, this is just a classic survey. We do a survey every year. We ask people what they care about. We're focusing on those things. We're being transparent about how we're spending their money. We're holding ourselves accountable for spending it in ways that deliver. Give me an example of, let's talk about homelessness. So how do these tools help and a concrete example of sort of where the efficacy was shown not to be working in the adjustment made?

Because I think that'll help people get their head around sort of what this governing philosophy is all about. When I came into a local office, we had a plan to end homelessness. The problem was there wasn't any math. I said, well, how are we actually going down homelessness? And as I did the back of the envelope math, it was clear that we were. would need 20 years and $6 billion that we didn't have and we had no plan to have. In just San Jose. In terms of what we were doing.

Because we were putting all of our money into the slowest, most expensive solution. That is a great solution for the lucky few who would get a brand new apartment that would cost a million dollars to build and take six years or more to build. I just said this isn't going to scale. We can't actually meet the need. We have thousands of people living on our streets, hundreds of year dying. We've got to get people indoors a lot faster. much more cost effectively.

So we started buying old motels in converting them. We bought modular units or tiny homes and put them out on publicly owned land. We created safe sleeping and parking sites. We started to rapidly expand safe alternatives to the streets and really give people a dignified alternative. Critics would say, to be fair, that that kind of solution is temporary housing. It doesn't really end homelessness. they would say, and your critics, by the way, called us

when they found out you were on the show. You're apparently on people's radar. And they said that in San Jose, they felt that it was a mirage, that you didn't really reduce homelessness. It seems like six and one half dozen, they're saying that by temporarily housing people, that's just pushing it down the road.

Is that a fair criticism? I don't think it is. Number one, we've ended an immense amount of human suffering. Fewer people are living outside. intense. Fewer people are dying outside. We've moved thousands of people indoors, the vast majority of whom remain off the streets. And already in just the last four years, 28% of the people we've moved indoors have graduated to permanent housing. Some have gone on to get jobs, be able to pay their own rent and really kind of reenter society. It's not easy. We're talking about

a population that needs a lot of help. We're starting from a very difficult situation where people have in some cases spent years chronically homeless, in many cases dealing with addiction and mental illness. But giving people a safe indoor place with a private room with a door that locks, access to a case manager, three meals a day, and a safe place is so much better than where we've been. And while I would love to build a brand new apartment for everyone who needs it, our rigid commitment to there only being one solution to this problem has in practice left thousands of people to live and die on our streets, not to mention the broader impacts on the rest of society. And to bring it back to where you started the show with cursing.

Cursing about Donald Trump. When we fail to move the needle on the basics, like sheltering people who are suffering and dying on our streets, we give a lot of amnium. to folks who would approach the problem very differently. We'd rather just lock everybody up who's homeless, which isn't a real solution. So we're trying to move forward pragmatic solutions, get people stabilized, give them dignity, connection to case management and services, give them a real chance to turn. And that for you, that's the approach you're taking on it.

Let's examine it. Let's break it down. Let's not look at it as a blob. Let's look at the individual data and see what has efficacy. Take housing. Our biggest policy failure, biggest barrier, biggest barriers, to economic mobility in California is the lack of housing. And at some point, we have to own that problem. That's one we can't blame Donald Trump for. We have to look in the mirror and recognize

that when it takes two years to get environmental clearance or city fees add 20% to the cost of building a home, we're part of the problem. We need to make it much easier to build. We've got to build faster. I just put the most comprehensive housing plan of any candidate in this race on my website at mayhand for California.com.

and I break down how we reduce the cost of building. Does it worry you that whenever they search that website, they end up on Maha? Does that bother you in any way? You've got to get the N in there. You can't spell Maha. That end is really important. You've jumped in.

It's only been a few weeks, and you've clearly got, you've raised a ton of money so far. You raise a thing. A lot of it is Silicon Valley. For the country at large, that's a, I don't want to say, demonized,

industry, but it's a frightening one for a lot of people. You know, speaking of homelessness, like, you know, MET is about to lay off, I think, 15,000 people. We know we're all very concerned that AI is going to make a lot more people be in that position where they're vulnerable to homelessness and all kinds of other types of issues. Re-issue, why are they supporting you? Why should we trust their money, and why should we trust their money, and why should we trust

their industry. Well, first of all, I think I'm... You have five seconds. I think I'm the only candidate in this race who has actually regulated tech. As mayor of a big city, we use a lot of technology, including AI, and we are very careful

about what data we collect. We're completely transparent with people. We can go to our website and see what we collect and why we don't use facial recognition with some of our technology. We choose to delete the data after 30 days if it's not useful. So we're really clear about what we collect and why

and how we protect people's privacy and data security. People are right to be concerned. These tools are very powerful. They can make our lives better. They can also create a surveillance state or all sorts of other terrible outcomes. Job disruption. In terms of jobs, we haven't waited for AI to happen to us. I think it would be a mistake to try to regulate the industry to the point where it's just created somewhere else. We need to shape it. We need to regulate in a way that makes it work for people. Are they in any way open to that kind of discussion? Because the general sense that I've gotten, and maybe this is just from a few of the louder voices, is they are very clear about any interference in what they are doing in the lab underneath the volcano that they live in,

is helping China. So, you know, the things that you're saying, are they amenable to that discussion in any way? Some tech leaders get it and are. Some aren't, but it doesn't matter. We have to be because technology has to work for people. Technological change is incredibly hard on people. There are a lot of risks here.

We have to manage this transition in a way that make sure that people still can earn a livelihood, are safe, that their privacy is protected. It is really important that we get this right. We do want the innovation to happen here. We want to make sure that the jobs of the future are created here first, and that we have a say in how this technology is used. But there's a difference between being in the private sector and creating a tool

and sitting in a public policymaking role and thinking about the second and third order effects and how we protect people. Right. Yeah, you're an interesting part of this new, you know, as we're looking to a generation of Democratic leaders. There's people like there's Mayor Lurie in San Francisco. There's there's people within the Democratic Party who are saying like we have to be more solution oriented and we can still have progressive value through that type solution. Are you in touch with other people of that similar mindset? Are you guys always discussing and workshopping solutions? How does that operate?

Yeah, Mayor Lurie and I talk regularly. Mayors are quite pragmatic typically. We get stopped at the yeah. Yeah, we're held a I mean, I take my kids to the grocery store on Sunday. It takes me two hours to get through the grocery store because everybody wants to talk about... Oh, I just thought you're incredibly indecisive. Yeah. In two hours, I was just like, oh, Christ, I'd probably be behind him in line. Green grapes are purple. They're both so delicious.

But yeah, people want to talk to you. People know who they're mayors, and they want to know what you're doing to make their life better every single day. I want to bring that level of accountability to Sacramento and show people that our California values in practice can lead to better public schools, more affordable housing, more affordable energy, safer streets. We've got to prove that.

If we don't, we lose the trust of voters. When's the primary? June 2nd. Oh, it's coming up. Real soon. Do you think anybody is dropping? It's not going to be you because now you've got a little nest egg now so you can stay in there.

But is anyone dropping out? Or is this just going to be like scream until the end? Well, look, voters aren't even, most voters are not even aware that an election's coming. This is an off-cycle race. People are just starting to tune in. And I think that when they see what we've done in San Jose to be the safest big city to reduce homelessness faster.

Have you guys had a big debate yet together? We've had a few debates. I think we're going to have many more. And I'm excited to share with people how we get California back to basics. Who's leaving first? Who's the war? Who's, who's, let me ask you this. weakest link who's going first

I'm gonna let the voters decide that one sorry so smooth thank you very much for joining us really interesting man we go we check in with your host for the rest of the week mr jordan klepper jordan i swear to god we look like a before and after picture it it looks like jordan is the before and then they put me

in the meat dehydrator You're sinewy in a good way, John. Smaller and just grayer and sinewy. Jordan, what's on deck for this day? Oh, man, John, I got to tell you. We'll be talking about high gas prices with the war in Iran escalating. You know, everyone is feeling pain at the pump,

except for those of us who had the foresight to buy the cyber truck. Everyone laughed at us. They called us cyber cucks and tiny penis big wheel board. and the saddest bunch of incels in the pedophile van of the future that can't go six miles without randomly exploding. But who cares? Because you have nowhere to be anyway.

But guess what I'm doing while you guys pay $4 a gallon for gas? Riding in your cyber truck? No, I'm rebuilding my mother-in-law's house. My cyber truck blew up. Took the whole building down. Good luck with that, Jordan. Jordan Klepper, everybody. Here it is the moment of day.

But they gave me a list of names of your sheriff. Sir, you can pick the name you'd like, sir. I said, the name of what? The name of the attack on the ran, sir. And they gave me like 20 names. And I'm like falling asleep. I didn't like any of them. Then I see Epic Fury.

I said, I like that name. I like that name. Sorry. Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the Daily Show. Week nights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Paramount Plus.

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