The Daily Show: Ears Edition - TDS Time Machine | Conversations with Podcasters

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

It's podcasters, going on TV, only to be put back into a podcast. Take a listen to these interviews with podcast hosts (or hosts-to-be) when they visited The Daily Show. Joe Rogan sits down with Jon Stewart years before he would go on to conquer the pod world, to talk Fear Factor and dodgeball losers. Trevor Noah is joined by the "Pod Save America" hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor. Jameela Jamil visits Desi Lydic to talk her podcast "Bad Dates." "Revisionist History" host Malcolm Gladwell talks to Trevor remotely to talk social justice. Ryan Holiday of "The Daily Stoic" talks to Jordan Klepper about bringing philosophy into everyday life. "Pivot" co-host Kara Swisher joins Desi to talk about her tech bro takedown "Burn Book." And Stephen J. Dubner breaks down his "Freakonomics" legacy with Ronny Chieng. -- Stream full episodes of The Daily Show on Paramount+: https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/the-daily-show/ The Daily Show airs weeknights at 11/10c on Comedy Central. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Comedy Central. On sports night and six feet under. Oh, I'm sorry. News Radio. Now he's the host of NBC's reality series. I can read. NBC's reality series Fear Factor. Here's a little taste of that.

Fear Factor. I'm Joe Rogan. Welcome to Fear Factor. The stunts you're about to see were designed and supervised by trained professionals. They are extremely dangerous. Do not attempt these stunts anywhere, anytime. So I should try them. Please welcome Joe Rogan.

Joe! What's up, dude? It's very nice to see you. The last time I see you, you're on the set of news radio, you're having some fun. Then I turn around and you're pouring rats on a... Well, I wasn't porn, man. I'm just hosting. You're just hosting.

Who are these folks that are coming out to have rats bored on their heads? Regular folks who want to be on TV. Now, doesn't that make you sad? Does it? No, no, it makes me laugh. It doesn't make you laugh a little bit, right? It makes me laugh a lot. Yeah, it really does.

Afterwards, like, the one that doesn't win, because I know they get some money, right? There's a lot that don't win. Five of them don't win. Six people every week, and five people have to go home with nothing. And what are they, like, as they're leaving her, they're like, thanks for the T-shirt. Like, what do they say? They think it's fun, you know? It's, look, everybody who does the show has a good time.

They really do. It's ridiculous as it sounds, because they can't believe they're actually doing it. You know, I'm sure... Have you done any of this stuff? Have you got to anything? I would do almost everything. I would have done a lot of the crazy stunts. They look like fun, but the insurance clause is what would you not have done?

The insurance clause? They have a huge one. You guys have insurance? It's like 42 pages long. Really? Oh, do we have insurance? Oh my God, it's ridiculous. I mean, you've seen some of the stunts?

So can you like, like on this show, I can pretty much be high every night. Like, it doesn't matter. But for your show, are there things that they have to do? Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure I couldn't be high from all. Let me ask you this, because I read, I haven't had a chance to see it. reading the warning though. Could I be any more wooden?

That was menacing. But seriously, that was the most menacing disclaimer. That was one of those like... Well, that only came out after the jackass thing. They were going to have no disclaimer. And then, like, the kid burned himself. They're like, oh, my God! And they just wanted to protect themselves against the tards.

Like, everywhere you go. Whatever you do. Put up a disclaimer. Let me just get this straight. You went, the kid burned himself, and then they were like, oh, we gotta worry about kids burning themselves. That's exactly how I did. Here's what was read in the thing.

These are the critics. These are my favorite people. I'm my favorite people. Tom Shales, Washington Post says, A Sickening Exercise and Cruelty and Vanality, rotten and Despicable. Wall Street Journal, the most depressing, nauseating,

disgusting prime-same series to date. And Joel Siegel, Good Morning, America, thrill ride of the summer. Number one. Now, what do you do when you wake up the next day and you see that stuff? I laugh. First of all, they're critics.

And anybody who sets out to become a critic is a loser. That is a fact. Critics are all failures. No one wants to be a critic. They're failed authors and screenwriters. They are dodgeball victims, and that's why these people are writing these little scathing reviews.

No one sets out to make their life's work to critique other people's chances. Those people are all poohs. Every single one of them. Every one of them. That is a fact. Can I tell you what I feel bad about? What?

Is I was a dodgeball loser? Well, you know what, dude, it's not a bad. There's two types of people in the world. People that were throwing and people that were ducking. All right? But you define yourself. No, there were other people. There were people getting hit in the face.

I was getting hit in the face. I was got, can you still see spalding? Can you stand still? Didn't you try to duck? No, I didn't stand still. I was like one foot four. What was I supposed to do? How did you attempt to duck?

You're classified as a ducker, but they defined you. I probably still owe you lunch money, even though I didn't go to school with you. Dude, I was not a lunch money taker. I threw the dodge ball, but I never took anybody's lunch money. I think that's wise. But this is fun for you. You're having a good time. It's fun.

And it really is fun for the people who do. do the show honestly right they have a good time because it's so silly right somebody does you don't think anybody's going to die from this thing no no no no but they they they by the time it gets to the stunt when pass the stunt people it's been done so many times it's like meticulously planned out these guys coordinate everything like weeks and weeks and weeks in advance the stunt guys test it and retest it they're not going to let anything that's any more dangerous than playing like a game of tag football seriously can i tell you how bad honestly i broke my collarbone playing tag football you could hurt yourself in tag football uh I was just going to tell you though that that

idea about planning the show out, I'm gonna try that. Because we so don't do that. You should always try to plan things out. Damn it. It's good to see you, though. Good to see you. And you're having fun? You're gonna get back into the acting thing and do all that?

If it's fun. I just, look, I'm a stand-up comedian. That's what I love to do. He's still doing that going around. Yeah, everything else I just do for money, really. I'm very funny one at that. Joe Rogan, the whore of Hors, Joe Rogan. Tonight are the founders of Crooked Media who created the popular political podcast,

Pod Save America. Please welcome, John Favreau, John Lovett, and Tommy Vita, everybody. This is fun. Yeah. I've never had three cups on the desk before. It's a lot of us. Looks like we're going to play one of those games.

Let's get straight into it. First of all, big fan of what you guys do on the podcast, Pod Save America. A lot of people don't know this, but the two of you started off or recently worked as speechwriters for President Barack Obama. How does it feel seeing President Obama

out there on his own without you guys? It's not like a baby cub. No, but I mean, emotionally, there must be some connection, though. You guys rolled together for so long. I miss him. I miss working with him. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. Yeah. That's what I'm looking for.

That's what I'm looking for. That's exactly what I'm looking for. From now on, I'll fake it. You guys go. You got to fake the emotion. It's also nice. You miss seeing someone leading the country that is a good person that loves family

and cares deeply about what he's doing and takes it seriously. I miss that every day when you see Trump who just doesn't. I mean, that's the hardest thing. Like how you just end who doesn't. Normally you'd be like,

who doesn't exhibit the same? Who doesn't? He just doesn't. Let's talk about the podcast. You guys started off your podcast, but then you moved it to, you know, your media company, Crooked Media.

Great name. And now it really is, there's a certain level of activism that's involved in the podcast. Why did you make that decision? We thought it's an important time to, there's a lot of people out there who are scared of the Trump presidency

and maybe they haven't paid attention to politics in a long time, and they're saying, how can we get involved? What can we do? How can we help? That's the question we always got when we did a podcast before. And so we want to help people answer that question. I mean, the political conversation is broken, right? I mean, you see it on TV every day, see it on cable. I want to people help them figure out what is going on, what's important, and how can they get involved? Now, you don't just criticize. I mean, the Democrats are also

in an interesting situation where many people are saying the party isn't where it should have been after a president who was as strong as Barack Obama was. The president himself, said he didn't do a great job of keeping the grassroots, I guess, mobilized. Keith Ellison complained about that as well. If you're looking at that going forward and you were strategizing, what would you think the Democrats need to do to, I guess, begin a game plan for the next election? I think that's the hardest question. That's a question everybody's got to figure out how to answer because we lost.

We lost the presidency. We've lost the Senate. We've lost the House. We've lost the governorships. We've lost state legislatures. So that's not great. So it's a rebuilding year, you know. I'm sorry.

It sucks, but we're in real bad shape, guys. But the good news is, I think, that it is a wake-up call. I think people were complacent, and now Trump is president. We are feeling the consequence of that. There's never been this much energy. You have people marching. You have people going to protest. You have people showing up at airports, climate marches, women marches.

And I think the fundamental question is, how do you harness that energy and turn it into votes? Turn it into people knocking on doors and going to the polls, not just on a presidential year. We won by three million votes, right? But in off years. I also think we've got the opposition part down, and now we need to feel. figure out what we stand for, have a positive message that connects with people, that, you know, an economic agenda that will help change people's lives and just give people something to vote for. I think that's something we learned from the last election.

It's interesting. Yeah, you can, you can applaud for that. You can applaud. It's, it's interesting that you say, you've got the opposition part down, because during the campaign, a lot of people felt like Hillary shifted her focus too much to being against Trump and not enough to being for her platform. You were asked to write on the Hillary campaign, and I believe you said, no, I can't write for this. I cannot carry on writing for Hillary,

because it feels like this is like speech by committee. What does that mean? There's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking. We talked about this, that like, everything went wrong, right? There's a lot of decisions that she made that could have made the difference. She lost by two few votes for that not to be true. But she was out there talking about economic issues. They wouldn't get covered because everybody was talking about it.

because everybody was talking about Trump, which is a challenge we should learn from. I'm not doing that to make excuses for Hillary Clinton. I'll go after Hillary Clinton. I don't care. What's she going to do to me? Nothing. She's just a woman in Chappaqua.

But I think it's... Come on our show, Hillary. We're going to get Hillary. We're going to get Hillary on this show. All the shows. Off to that, yes. She's definitely on the show. She's going to come to your show so you can come off to her.

I feel it. I can fully get on it. But I think it's important to learn that it's really hard to get the media to focus on. an economic policy speech, when the only part they're going to put on television is the one minute where you go after Trump, right?

That was a big problem for their campaign, which is something we should learn from right now. I honestly could spend hours talking to you guys. Your podcast is fascinating. The three of you are fascinating. Unfortunately, I do not have the time, and that's why we listen to the podcast. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you for having us. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Be sure to subscribe to Podcast America and go to Get Crookedmedia.com for more podcasts. John Favreau, John Lovett, and Tommy Vitoe, everybody. We'll be right back. Heartless Media Podcasts, bad dates.

Please welcome Jamila Jamil. You'd be bringing the fashion. I knew it. And I brought my little bag. It's a bit weird that I bring my handbag on television. You don't trust anybody. No, it is. I think it's specifically like a woman of color thing

where we're just always ready for some sort of shit to go down. Well, I want to be prepared. Don't trust anyone. No. Don't trust anyone. Most of all you, babe. Yeah. You're doing so wonderfully.

I'm loving you on the show. I'm so fan of yours. You have a new podcast out, bad dates. It is so funny. You get the best guests, and they come on and they tell these horrendous, worst date stories. Yeah, it's so disgusting. It's unbelievable. Never listen to it with any of your children.

Oh, no, that's a bad idea. All your parents. It's so filthy. It's so funny. And it's not about, like, traumatic bad dates. It's just about the silliest things we've ever done on the road to love or shagging or both. You told a horrible date story. The one that I almost gave Al Roker a heart attack.

Yeah. Yeah. For the second time. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know about the first one. Yes, no. No, I don't know.

I just made that up. No, you did, but it was a great, it was a great story. And has that guy ever come back? No, but everyone's looking for him. Everyone's looking for him. Well, tell them the story. He's a famous man. Basically, there was an incident with, um,

He, oh God, he took three steps into my apartment, passed out and had a seizure and all of his front teeth broke and flew across my apartment. And I had to call 911, which was actually really exciting if you're English and you've seen it done in the movies. But I did that. The police come in and the ambulance and the fire brigade and everyone's trying to resuscitate him. They bring him back to and they're like, sir, have you taken anything? He's like, yeah, I've had a little bit of cocaine, but I always take cocaine. And I was like, oh, sure, red flag. And then they were like, have you taken anything else?

And he was like, no. And they start pulling the blanket over his body. And as they go past his penis, he gets rock hard. And he looks at me, like, bleeding with such regret and goes, I might have had some Viagra. It's disgrace. Oh, such a beautiful first-date story. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. They, this is... It's not James. It's not my boyfriend, James. And now they're together, they're in a healthy relationship. This is reason alone why they should start regulating erectile dysfunction medications as much as they regulate the abortion bill. Is it Chris Evans? It's not Chris Pine.

But he has had a beard ever since, because he split his chin open that day and had loads of stitches. So just look under it. the chins of all of your next few guests. There you go. You'll maybe finally. Oh my God. It's such a funny. So to honey.

Do you, so, so the, you hear all these horrible bad date stories. Yeah. What, if you could give a piece of advice to people who are out there dating right now, having heard all these stories, what would you say? Anything's a dildo if you're brave enough. It's so appreciated, you guys. Bad dates. We're holding homes again.

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Quince.com slash daily show. So earlier today, I spoke with one of my favorite authors and a best-selling author, Malcolm Gladwell. We talked about his podcast, revisionist history, and how you can teach him. to think the way you don't think. Check it out. Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to the Daily Social Distancing Show. Thank you. I'm very flattered to be on it. I'm honored to have you here because I said this to you before we started recording, but I'll say it to you again while

people are watching, so there's witnesses. You are one of the people who has taught me to always question what I think I know about the world. And you're an expert in doing that in your books. You know, you create and tell stories about things that are seemingly unconnected, and then by the end of the story or by the end of the book, we start to realize how everything is connected

or how everything affects something else in a way that we never thought possible. Your podcast does that as well. And one of my favorite episodes in the podcast is where you talk about elections. And what was really mind-blowing for me was getting to a place where I realized, as human beings, we are horrible at predicting

who is going to be a good leader. And so I found myself at the end of that episode of the podcast going like, wow, Maybe elections should be lotteries. Maybe we should have no elections, no money being spent, no people campaigning, just a lottery system of all the people who want to run should run. Do you still stick by that though?

Is that something that you believe in when you look at elections? The cues we use to predict who's going to be a good leader are faulty. Do I think that should be true of a presidential campaign? No. But I do think there is a way to restructure our elections, where we do cast the net a lot wider.

And maybe at a local level, we should go with lotteries as a way of picking who our leaders should be. I think there's something to that. Right now, America's going through a really, really tough time. I think it's exacerbated by coronavirus. The George Floyd protests have now swelled into a nationwide movement where people in the country are saying we want to see change predominantly

within the police force. For those who think they have an idea of police, police reform, defunding the police, or even abolition, what do you think some of the unthought thoughts should be about this whole process? Well, my question would be, we've done a very good job, I think,

in the last couple of months, focusing on what reform of police behavior in this country looks like. Now I think it's time for us to turn the attention on ourselves. what are the kinds of things we can do, non-police officers can do, to make the job of policing better in this country? And I think that's the part we've neglected. We make the police in this country deal with things like mental illness and homelessness.

Why? Because we have radically underfunded the social support mechanisms for those two social problems. The cops get that job by default. It's a really hard job. They're not trained to do it, and they don't want to do it. Right? And so what we're doing is we've taken a group of people who already have an insanely difficult job. We've made it a lot harder. Why? Because we're too cheap and we're too unfeeling and we're too lazy to build adequate support systems for people who are very much in need in our country. So there's a case where I think stage two is time for people like me and you and all of us to stand up and say, okay, I am willing to support greater funding for. for homeless services for the mentally ill in order to improve the quality of policing in this country, among other reasons.

That's where I think we should be headed right now. And I feel like if people in the police department saw that, they would be much more willing to embrace reforms because they would say, you know what, we're all in this together. It's a very different place to start a reform conversation than a conversation that's all about here's what you're doing wrong. It's interesting because actually you're the perfect person for me to ask this too, because there's a puzzle that I've been trying to solve in my brain,

and the puzzle that I have is around protest. In America right now, there's an interesting conundrum. People go, what is the correct way to protest? And although I'm distilling it down, there seems to be two schools of thought. Protest should be something that doesn't disrupt the status quo, doesn't, like, break anything, doesn't put anybody out of their way. Another school of thought is, no, the very definition of protest

is that it is meant to make society itself uncomfortable and, you know, not be able to live its life as if everything is normal. And I think to myself, protest in many ways is defined by your standing in life. You know, so the more you have, the less of a tolerance you'll have for protest. In all your studies and in the work that you look at and in the ideas, have you come across anything, or do you even think the mind of Malcolm Gladwell can go, like, there is a definitive answer to this, or is this something that society has never, ever figured out? Yeah.

There is no definitive answer. I mean, it's funny you said that I would be the appropriate person to ask. I would say, actually, you are, you're South African, the best contemporary example of how to handle a successful protest reform movement. The last 25 years is Nelson Mandela, right? And what does Mandela have in common with other successful historical examples? Martin Luther King. we could make a list, Gandy, that they are, their protest is purposeful and disciplined. What I would like to see from the protests that we have now is that same discipline and purposefulness.

I think we have it in large part, but there are times when it doesn't seem to be out of those things. When a bunch of people get out of control and just start breaking windows, then I say, I don't really know what that is a achieving. When I see people, those kinds of protests that were in New York or in major cities where, you know, tens of thousands of people would march purposefully and peacefully with one voice demonstrating the world that this is not some minor niche group in society that's upset. This is everyone. That, to my mind, I had a number of people who studied police reform very closely to say to me that that had tremendous impact. in moving, in getting people like Congress to take police reform seriously. So that's one side of my brain. There is another argument, though, and that is that without that side of the protests,

they wouldn't have been seen as the reasonable person to deal with, the reasonable, you know what I mean? People say Martin Luther King Jr. needed Malcolm as much as the other needed the other. That's the puzzle I'm playing with in my head as I go, like, is it the peaceful protest that work? or is it the fact that the peaceful protest is seen as peaceful relative to another protest?

You get what I'm saying? So, for instance, Colin Kaepernick was protesting peacefully. He was met with the utmost resistance that anyone could be met with. And I'm sure now if he kneeled, people will say, well, that's a much better way to protest than breaking a window. Yeah. Yeah, I do think there's something to what you're saying. I would only add that to my mind there is an immediate existential threat to all of this,

which is the possibility that Trump gets reelected. And all I care about right now is that we get through this election intact. You know, that an awful lot of what we're seeing that is malignant and pathological in America right now is simply a result of this guy in the White House. So, you know, my fear, I don't know whether it's a legit fear or not,

but part of me worries that the more violent kinds of protests have the effect of aiding Trump's reason. election. Before I let you go, you have done a lot of work looking at the way human beings see each other, the way human beings interact with each other, and how that can define progress or a stagnant society. Is there a better way for us to communicate, specifically, I should say, with people we don't agree with? And I'm not talking about Nazis, I'm just talking about people who we just have like some, some, you know, political disagreements with. We need to find a way to community, to understand the complexity of the people we're talking to. So you and I could come,

could make a list of all of our identities, you know, you are a South African, you are biracial, you are a comedian, you are a successful author. And you and I may have profound disagreements all along one of those lines, but we may agree on six of them. And I feel like what's happened in our society now is, you know, you'll talk to someone who loves Trump, and you'll assume that's the most important dimension in their life and that the difference between you and that person politically is irrevocable. There's no way you can bridge that gap.

But then if you talk to them for a little bit longer, you would discover they're a massive basketball fan, and so are you. And I think a lot of times those other identities are a lot more important than the ones we spend all of our time obsessing over. And I think it's time for us to start looking for ways to find common ground with people and getting beyond the most kind of obvious and salient of their identities. I could talk to you for hours, but luckily I've got the podcast for that. I've got the books.

Thank you for taking the time. Congratulations on another wonderful podcast season, and I hope we'll be seeing many more. Thank you, Trevor. Yes, tonight is considered one of the leading stewards of Stoic philosophy. He's behind the Daily Stoic. Stillness is the key. The obstacle is the way and much more. Please welcome Ryan Holiday.

Thank you for having me. Ryan, I've been a fan of yours for quite some time. You're a popular man. Twelve best-selling books. That's a lot of books. That's almost more books than I've read. But you have a lot of fans out there, from very successful comedians like myself,

to folks in the NFL, to senators. Sort of what you speak to goes across many aisles, if you will. For those who don't know a stoic philosopher, what are the tenets of stoicism? Stoicism, if I had to summarize it in one sentence, I would say it's this idea that we don't control what happens to us in life, but we control how we respond to what happens in life. And the Stoics say that basically every situation, big ones, small ones, ones you wanted, ones you didn't want, it's all an opportunity to respond with these four virtues. The virtues are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. So the idea is that that is what life is asking from you, one or all of those virtues in some of you.

kind of a combination. That's what it's demanding of you. And what's cool about the Stoics is, like, I think when people hear philosopher, they think like, you know, a tweed jacket or an old white guy in a Toga or whatever. Sure. But the Stoics were philosophers, they were thinkers, but they were also doers. The most well-known Stoic is Marcus Aurelius, who's the emperor of Rome, the philosopher king. But there were Stoics who were slaves, who were soldiers, who were artists, there were men and women. They were people trying to do what we're all trying to do, which is make sense of the crazy world that we live in. Right. I think a criticism of stoicism is if you look at, is it a philosophy that comes from a place of privilege? Sure. For people that are

in situations where, even institutional situations, you look at things like racism, active in movements, where like the situation that they cannot control is one that is inherently oppressive. Is Stoicism teaching you how to accept those things and not push back? Is there inherent privilege in there? It's hard to get more privilege than the Emperor of Rome, right? But the philosopher that influences Marcus realist, more than any other philosopher who he quotes in his writings all the time is this guy named Epictetus, who is a slave. The exact opposite of Marcus, you have extreme power and you have extreme powerlessness. All throughout history, the Stoics have been involved in social movements.

and positive change making because, yes, there's a lot we don't control, but we do control what we do. We control whether we vote, whether we go out to a protest, whether we speak out about something, right? So courage is one of the virtues. Justice is another virtue, discipline is a virtue, and then wisdom is a virtue. All of these, I think, propel us into being informed

and then being active in the world. How do we utilize something like this? So I go on the road, I talk to a lot of folks, and I get into infuriating conversations more often And then people ask me, how do you deal with something like that? And I do go to philosophy. I go to Bourbon as well. A hell of a philosophy.

I don't know if you know the philosopher, Bookers. He's great. McCallin is a great one, a Scottish philosopher. He's great. But I do find elements of like, again, controlling your response and your temper. And also empathy, help me get out of things like that. People also, I talk to a lot of people who are really frustrated what's going on.

Both sides of the aisle, there's scary times. People turn to God. I think less and less people are turning to God. Like, what do you say and what can people find in philosophy, in Stoic philosophy, that can help them, they can provide a balm to two days where you wonder just how long, well, we're going to be able to fight this battle, whether it's climate change, whether it's democracy, whether it's just getting up in the morning. Yeah, philosophy at its best is what they call the guide to the good life,

human flourishing, not just to happiness, but productivity and purpose and meaning and being able to endure suffering and pain and loss as we all have to go through in life. But I think if we can see philosophy as something we lean on, something that gives us counsel, that's really helpful, not as this thing that only people in universities do, but that it's, it's like they're there for all of us. I think one of the problems is as those other systems have fallen away, whether people are turning away from the church or they're disillusioned with higher education or they're disillusioned with the media. Like, where do they go? They go to random stuff on the internet. And a lot of those people are grifters or they're trying to weaponize

those feelings or those doubts or those emotions of those people. And so, you know, people end up down these dead ends. And we can pity them, but also understand that, like, that's not a good way to go. If you had to replace a philosophy quote, if you had to replace live, laugh, love. One of my faves. One of my faves. What should I, if I take that down from my living room.

You're looking for a sign at home goods. I need a nice sign at home. What should I look at every day? Marcus opens book two of meditations with a thought. He says, today the people you will meet will be jealous and stupid and annoying and obnoxious and mean, right?

He goes on. He's tracking. He's preparing for the day ahead, right? And so some people think this is depressive, stoicism that it's best. But then he goes, but you can't hate them and you can't let them implicate you in ugliness. He says, because we're meant to work together. We're like two rows of teeth or two hands, and that we're all part of this large thing together. And that some people are fulfilling their role by being the kind of people that you have to interview.

And then the rest of us are doing the best we can. And that is life. I love it. And that is life. Ryan Holiday, everybody. selling book is called Burn Book, a tech love story. Please welcome, Kara Swisher. I enjoyed this very much.

Thank you. It says a tech love story, but it reads like a burn book, baby. That's correct, yeah. Can we talk about this weird transformation that all these tech bros have? Because something happens to them over the years. We have some examples here. This is. Yeah.

Zuckerberg. So in his own. And then Bezos. I remember those pants. He wore them a lot. Yeah, and then the Elon. What happens? Is there like a douche code or something that they...

Well, you know, it's interesting. When you get that rich, you can avail yourself to all kinds of, say, human growth hormone or steroids or whatever. And they want to sort of live forever. My next book is about this, actually. The fact that a lot of this Live Forever stuff has been started by tech people. Because they want to live forever. And continue to have their brain. I mean, a lot of people think AI, especially because there's so many men running it, especially

white men, it's their way of having children, right? They want to continue themselves through the AI. All just ego. Just crazy ego. Narcissism, ego, delusion, things like that. What is this bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk? You say you think it's going to crumble and fail miserably. There can be only one attention whore, speaking of hoars.

But I do think that even when he was jumping around the stage, did you notice Donald Trump like, hmm, he's sucking up my oxygen. He didn't love it. He didn't love it. If they didn't like each other before, Trump attacked him relentlessly. I have so many texts where Elon was attacking Trump. Very similar to J.D. Vance, didn't like him, thought he was an idiot, called him an oaf, and things like that. And then suddenly he realized whatever happened to him and it's a mix of, you know, COVID issues around his family.

Obviously, the journal's written about his ketamine use and everything else. And so this combined into this, he sort of soured the way the internet did, the way Twitter did. But now he sees how easy he can manipulate Donald Trump because it's not very hard. And especially, he just, $75 million is very attractive to someone like Donald Trump. Of course. I have one final question for you as the tech expert in the entire universe. In the universe, yeah. What happens if I don't accept the cookies?

We're way past cookies now. You're one sweet cookie. Thanks are cooking. Where are my gloves? Come on, heat. Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be. This winter, stay warm. Tap the banner to order your groceries online at voila.ca.

Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. For economics, now in a new 20th year-anniversary edition. Please welcome, Mr. Stephen Dubner. You're welcome. Thank you for having you. 20 years. I read this book in college, and it changed the way I saw the world.

Why is everything in this wrong? Well, we didn't have chat GPT yet. Let's start with the title, Freakonomics. That makes everyone think it's a study on like Diddy Potty's or something. That's what our, that's what our, publisher thought. They said, there's no way we can call this book Freakonomics. They said, do you know what freak means? And I thought I did, but then they said it has to do with, you know, children, animals, sex, things like that. And I didn't actually know that. But you,

but you went with it anyway. We persevered, yes. And it's a real, I mean, before we get into the substance of the book, it's almost a triumph of publishing, this story, that you made this book, because when you wrote it, co-wrote it, you guys didn't think that it was going to become the phenomenon? We did not. We did not. We did not. Every, I think every writer, like, you finish your manuscript, and it goes to the publisher, and they're getting it ready. And that's the period that we call the lull before the lull. Because you assume that, like, you work hard on it,

but most books, you know how many books are published every year? It's like $250,000. And most people, the average American reads, like, zero. So the numbers are not good. The numbers are not good. You could say the Freakonomics don't make sense in that one. But when you, I like, it's an interesting story. You talk about in the foreword of this 20th edition

that you called it Freakonomics, a publisher said that name's not going to work, and you did it, and so it kind of freed you from the burden of expectation, and you wrote the book you want. Is that because the publisher kind of gave up on it after you named it that? No, in the sense, no, it's a publisher going like, hey, these f***s are not listening to us anyway.

You don't want to listen. We're just publishers, what do we know? We just sell books every day. You don't want to listen to us. Oh, right, what are the f***ing? you want, and then you wrote it and it blew up, and then you were rubbing it in their faces the whole time. Yes.

That is exactly what happened. Yes. Very awesome. No, I love it. We all love underdog showbiz stories of sticking it to metal-sum producers and studios. And I mean, in case for the less educated people here who don't know, this book is divided into kind of almost case studies.

Yeah. Right? Which is also unconventional structure for a book. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, we didn't have, so I have a co-author, Steve Levitt, who was on this show, probably in the studio right near here, but not the same one 20 years ago when the book first came out. He was on with John Stewart. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry to come on with me. And, yeah, we didn't expect the book. Like, we had a blast writing it.

And Leavitt is an economist. I'm a writer. We started to spend some time together. And he did, in economics, what I like to do as a writer, which is find whatever stories, often odd, are surprising and just go deep on them. But the beauty of this is, I'm a writer. We look for stories, but Levitt as an economist, had data. So we had data on sumo wrestlers and real estate agents and what people name their babies and all these different things. And so what we did is we just told stories like you do in a regular book, but with a lot

of data and we showed our homework. We tried to really explain to the listener why this thing that we say that is true, why you should believe it. And it's really hard for me to understand why it succeeded the way it did other than, And there were a lot of young people like you in college trying to figure out, like, I know when the authority figures tell me the way the world works, they're lying. I know that. And institutions, you know, they kind of tell you one story, but it doesn't work out that way.

So we were just trying to blow the lid off that with data. For sure. Now that you mentioned, it did feel very countercultural at the time when, you know, and now 20 years later, you guys are the institutions now. I guess so. You guys are the old guys. You know. But, no, I mean that when I said it changed the way I look at the world, it did, because

it kind of made me think about, it was written, it was very easy to read, first of all. So it was kind of like academics, but made dumber. Yeah, I was, I was the, my partner is in academics, so you know what part I am of that. No, you made it accessible. And regardless of, you know, whatever was the facts involved, but it just made me think of a, it's a different way to look at the world, that there's these, you could take two separate situations and there could be hidden causation between them. So, you know, for people, again,

for the uneducated people on social media, but watching this on YouTube on the toilet while taking a shit. You know, so for example, if you haven't read the book, there's a story in here about connect. Can I just say I'm glad that they're taking a shit on the toilet? I mean, that's a win. You gotta...

I guess. You guess. I mean, I somewhat consider it the bare minimum, But I guess in 22ndi 6, we take that as a win these days. If you're taking a show on the toilet, congratulations. You made it to the toilet. And there's connections here between, you know, abortion and crime rates and stuff like that. 20 years later, I reread this.

I think there was a second edition. You added a foreword. But really, it hasn't changed that much. It didn't. So do the studies and the connections still hold up? Yeah, I mean, I know thanks to the Internet, which we all love in many different ways. The internet. I hate you guys.

Legacy media for life. So it is true that if you do good nonfiction work, so I'm a journalist by training, worked at the New York Times, et cetera. There are a lot of things that are great about real journalism, including the fact that rather than asking one person what's going on, you ask a lot, you fact check it, et cetera, et cetera.

That said, if you write a book, which is full of what we argue is all true stuff backed up by data, there will be a million people who say, well, in my experience, that's not true. And then it starts a kind of pissing war there. The good news is that the book, which we kind of went back and re-examined a bunch of times in Levitt and his co-author on the abortion crime study that you mentioned, actually went back and did a whole new study with 20 years more worth of data. And yeah, the book is legit.

I was very happy. That's good to know. It was great to know. If you were to rewrite this book, in 2026. Oh, not possible. Oh, why not possible? Like when I read it now, like, you know,

I hear the voices of the people that we were then. And when you're 20 years younger, you're a different person. I think we're a little bit more like callow. And also the environment was different. You could just say stuff. Now you're in an environment where because of the amplification of social, no matter what you say, there will be an avalanche coming at you. And unless you're really good at tuning it out,

which I encourage everyone to become really good at, because that's important. Then you're going to doubt yourself and you're going to dial it down. You're going to make boring stuff, and we did not want to be boring. Okay. I don't know if you watch this show. We talk about a ton of shit every day. And I say this with truly no bravado, objectively. I truly do not give a .

If you watch that, so I kind of disagree on this, we can't say anything now. Okay, I'm gonna leave now. No, no, please, don't let me tell you. But I guess what I was trying to, not so much that you are younger and more spry back then. I just mean like... I was so spry, let me tell you.

But what I meant more was like, if you were to write this book now, what case studies might you put in there? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I would, I mean, the ones I'm thinking about are not necessarily as fun. fun. Like, there were a lot of fun ones, sumo wrestling, I mentioned, so on. Like, I would write a lot about AI now. I think... Just to sell the book, could you quickly explain the connection being sumo wrestling

and... Oh, yeah. So it turns out that sumo wrestlers will collude with each other, even sumo wrestlers from opposite teams or stables, because they will help each other kind of maintain their rank in the big rankings that determines basically whether you eat or not. So we looked at collusion in sumo wrestlers. We looked at cheating teachers, which I think probably... still happens a little bit. Can I tell you what was so interesting about that? We looked at, it turned out that teachers, when the standards were raised for children, the no child left behind standards where, you know, schools would be punished if a certain number of children would fail. It turned out there were some teachers that would actually cheat on behalf of their students.

They would actually take their standardized tests, erase the wrong answers and write in the right ones, which is terrible and sad. Sad face. But what was particularly interesting was that the teachers who cheated were the bad. teachers. In other words, it was the bad teachers who had to cheat on behalf of their students because the teachers hadn't done a good job teaching them. So now I think we would write about AI. What I love, sorry, before you get to the 2026 stuff. I don't even have to get to the time. No, no, I do want to hear what you hear, but one thing I love about the whole tone of these books is that you kind of present all this stuff as you just did kind of objectively without judgment, here's the connections where you're like it or not,

without providing any solutions whatsoever. And I love it. I love it. That's what's about, yeah. Yeah, I'm like, all right. You're like, I would argue. Socrates just throwing these mediocrates in the air and going, you know. But, I mean, please answer to you, but I do want to hear about 2026, though. I don't care about 2026. No, I do. I do.

I care. But what I would say is that you're right that we probably don't provide a lot of solutions, but I really appreciate and like that you said without judgment. Because I feel that whether you're in entertainment, journalism, running a country, whatever. I think the easiest trap to fall into is bringing your what you think, your values, which you think are the only values, to every argument, whether it's about health care, whether it's about housing and so on. And that's just prima facie, a stupid way to operate, because not everybody believes like you. So we were trying to just lay out like,

this is the way the world works using these case studies or stories, and you, smart person who reads a book. Now you go in the world and do something with it, without us telling you what to do. Sure. No, and I think there is value there. It is value that without. So I actually appreciate the tone you guys took with it. And I guess that's why I would love to hear

what your 2026 kind of insights would be so that we could go into the world and act like smart asses like you guys. And just drop some fact toys on this. Let me think. OK, if you happen to be seeking asylum and you get before a judge, an asylum judge, make sure you don't have the slot right before lunch.

Okay, bad, bad fortune for you. So if you happen to be like the last one before lunch, you should do something like vomit to clear the courtroom, so the judge comes back after he or she is eaten? Who says you don't provide solution? This is what I'm talking about, yeah. I'll tell you what I'd be writing about. Oh, sorry, could you just explain a little bit why that's the bad?

Oh, because hungry people make bad decisions. It's no joke. And if you look at like sports referees... But what if my case is weak, I need the judge to make a bad decision to get me into the country. Oh, to get you into the country? Oh, that's a different story.

Yeah, yeah, okay. So I haven't gone that far with that logic. I'll tell you, how do you feel about artificial insemination? Is that a topic that interests you? It interests me a lot, I would have to say, yeah. Okay. I like watching that a lot. So one thing I've learned recently is that there are two animals.

that are very popular in America, one of which is conceived almost... Republicans and Democrats. One of which is conceived almost always by artificial insemination. The other, never. And I found this interesting. The one that always is is turkeys. And the reason is that we like to eat breast meat from turkey

in America with mayonnaise and mustard and so on. And so they've bred the turkeys to have such big breasts that they physically cannot get close enough to procreate anymore. Therefore, all turkeys you eat are the product of artificial insemination. But on the other hand, on the other hand,

thoroughbred race horses, they're not allowed to be bred by artificial insemination. And the reason is that Kentucky has this real stranglehold, a monopoly on the thoroughbred breeding industry. And they know that if they were to allow artificial insemination, then no longer does everybody have to bring their horses to Kentucky to be bred by a real horse with a real, you know, thing.

Okay, but how do they police that? There is a horse penis police force. Just blocking the artificial insemination. Yeah, I guess it's in the registry. You have to have the mother and father need to be physically present at the same time. Aren't you glad now you know? No, I, hey, but this, honestly, being 20 years old and reading all this was actually very eye-opening, so I really appreciate it.

And like what else, I mean, any other lessons you take from this that, I guess, you know, how do we get people to, I don't know, just read more? Oh, you know, here's my thing. First of all, people are reading more books now than they were five and ten years ago, which is really interesting. It's very interesting. It's a surprise because the trend was not going there. I will tell you, I mean, this is apropos of nothing other than I'm a fan of this guy. He's a guy named James Daunt, who's an English bookstore owner. He opened a store called Daunt in London years ago.

He was so good at running these small, great bookstores that the Barnes & Noble of England hired him to run their stores, Waterson's, and now the Barnes & Noble of America, which is called Barnes & Noble, hired him to also run Barnes & Noble here. So this one guy has really changed the way books are being sold in America. And I think the Amazon model, everybody liked it because it's easy, but it wasn't really about loving books. And so I think books are coming back with a force.

I understand that that one is available in finer books, that's nice. Stephen, thanks for writing the book. Thanks for changing the way I looked at the world. It was really insightful as a young person in college. I really appreciate it. Freakonomics, 20th anniversary edition is available now. The show is check out the Freakonomics Radio podcast.

Stephen Dubin, everybody. Explore more shows from the Daily Show Podcast Universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the Daily Show weeknights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Paramount Plus. This has been a Comedy Central podcast.