The Daily - 'The Interview': John Oliver Is Still Working Through the Rage

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

The host of "Last Week Tonight" talks about what he’s learned in the ten years of making the show, why he doesn't consider himself a journalist and not giving in to nihilism.

From the New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Nobody is doing late night comedy quite like John Oliver. He got a start at The Daily Show in 2006 as its senior British correspondent. Yep, that was his actual title. But since 2014, he's had his own show, HBO's Last Week Tonight. The show opens with a short riff on the news of the week, but the main event is a deep dive into a single, often deeply nerdy topic. This season alone, he's talked about state medical boards.

Our main story tonight concerns medicine, the thing that tongues technically are, even though personally I consider them candy. Corn. Modern farm policy was born during the Great Depression, when farmers faced a crisis. And the case for universal free lunches in American schools. Maybe we should be considering lunch as an essential school supply. You know, like books or desks. We accept that they're subsidized by the government as an investment in kids' futures.

And I'd argue lunch should be too. It's comedy married with moral outrage. And the show's work has actually led to real world change, which even has a name, the John Oliver effect. Last week tonight has won 30 Emmys, including several a few weeks ago. And in this tumultuous moment in America, when people are inundated with low quality hot takes

and poorly researched arguments, its fact-based approach has blurred the lines between entertainment and journalism, building a devoted audience in the process. All of which made me curious about how Oliver sees himself and his work. Here's my interview with John Oliver. Hello, it is a pleasure to have you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. You just walked through the halls of the New York Times. This is your first time here, right? It is my first time in this building.

Yes, I saw the red staircase, and that really is the main thing, isn't it, that you think of when you walk through this building. It's empty right now, though. We're here quite early. We are here quite early. So it's less bustling than you would want a cartoon newsroom to be. I will take that under advisement. It usually is busy. We are busy here, normally. This is not an accusation of there's basically nothing happening here at the New York Times.

Never. As it happens, if you were looking for people throwing balled up pieces of paper at each other and yelling about deadlines, that was not my experience. Not your experience. Not yet. No. Not yet. You know, we are in this very contentious political moment. And one of the things that I noticed was that you have said you've never wanted to cover a debate on your show.

Yes. Is that still true, even though President Biden had this unbelievable debate in June that caused the race to upend itself, and the most recent debate with Kamala Harris and Trump? I mean, they've been pretty consequential. Yes, I guess the Biden-Trump debate was pretty consequential because Biden isn't the nominee

anymore. So it'd be hard to push back on that. I guess it's very hard to say how consequential it is in real time, isn't it? That's the problem. They can feel very consequential, but you just don't know. And so I don't know what we could add to the commentary on those debates that isn't widely available everywhere else. It feels like to a certain extent our show has moved into an area where we are very much slow cooking and so there's not much there for us. Also those debates tend to be pretty uninspiring to me. As a form of entertainment, yeah, you could definitely be entertained by what happened.

But you know, what they actually mean, I don't know yet. It is pretty depressing that it's this close. That's I guess my aftertaste from it. That it's still this close when everyone can see what you can see in that debate. It's hard not to find that somewhere between depressing, infuriating, and outrageous. Last week tonight has been on the air for 10 years. Yeah. And that maps pretty neatly onto the Trump era.

You sounded like you were about to sigh then. It's been on for 10 years. No, that's not what I was doing. Let me be clear. But when you look back, what are the biggest ways that you think the show has changed? So when we first began, we were doing our main story in one week, then it became clear that was a crazy thing to do, it was a terrible way to set it up because we would come up with the idea

for a story, start writing, three days later, research would come in and we should wipe away everything that we'd just written. So now you're trying to write the show in two days and that's not a good idea. So now the answer to how our shows change is that we write those main stories in six weeks. So we're writing six stories in six weeks. So we're writing six stories at one time. So that doesn't really relate to Trump's role in the last 10 years, but in terms of

the development of our show, that is the most critical part of it. Hmm. You know, it's funny, going back to the first season as a viewer, I found it to be remarkably similar. No, I mean, yeah, there's a consistency there. I mean, it is a compliment. I was literally wincing both inside and outside. I saw you wincing. You did this face like, what is she going to say?

I don't do many interviews about myself, so I am kind of emotionally in a defensive position. And unfortunately, I think it's translating to my face. Because every time I say something, just your face looks like you're absolutely, you know, having a very, very difficult bowel movement. And so... I'm sorry. Wow. Let me start again.

All right. You know, there is a consistency there. And it does seem like you understood what you were up to quite early on. I think we learned some big lessons early on because I guess one of them would be, we did one story called Prisons and it was about 16 minutes and that seemed like a long time at the time. And I think what we gradually learned was it is crazy to try and talk about all the problems with Prisons in 16 minutes, especially if two of those minutes are going to be a song with Sesame Street characters at the

end. So since then, we've basically come back and redone that story in 20 different ways because we've talked about prison labor, prison phone calls, prison recidivism, prison reentry. Like it's, there are so many different aspects to criminal justice that you can't just slap prisons on it and say, oh, we've done it now. It was, in hindsight, I look back at that and do slightly wince, thinking, oh man, we're moving really fast through some incredibly

complicated aspects of this problem that deserve a lot more attention than we're giving it. You know, you obviously say you don't do journalism. Yeah. I do see you as a sort of opinion columnist though. I mean, it does seem like an extended, very pointed, very deliberate crafting of an argument that you want people to understand. Does that resonate for you?

Maybe. I mean, I think the, certainly by the end of the story, like the last few minutes of the story is opinion, right? Whenever we're saying, so what can we do? Everything after that probably is an opinion because people will feel differently about that. Everything up to that point is what it is. We've so rigorously fact and legal checked everything up to that point. There's no real opinion or wiggle room in that. Well, I mean, opinion columnists also get fact checked. I guess what I'm getting at though is not that facts are mutable, but you can choose the kinds of arguments that one puts forward, right?

And so you're crafting a narrative about certain issues. I guess, right, centrally we were really hard to make sure that we do incredibly rigorous fact checking both because we wanted to be right and we're talking about companies just basic self preservation. You don't want how big is your fact checking team? Oh, I mean, we have six senior researchers, six junior researchers and a whole bunch of lawyers. So yeah, a lot. So yeah, it's very, very important. I guess that's why I'm instinctively pushing back a little bit on this is, I'm not saying you said it like this, but this is just opinion.

Of course, you're right that how we feel about a story is probably present in terms of how we research it, but I really can't stress enough how much work goes into making sure that we are totally right on the facts. Like, if you're going to work this hard, we're gonna put art researchers through this, we're gonna, for six weeks, looking at sometimes incredibly dour stories. If you're gonna ask writers to write jokes with sometimes incredibly bleak material, you wanna make sure that that stands up to scrutiny. That would be too depressing to make mistakes there. Talk to me about the process.

Who comes up with the ideas? Everybody can pitch stories. Everyone on staff can pitch stories in our email channel and then we'll give it to a researcher to say, is there something here? Has this story shifted in any way? Is now a good time to tell this story. They'll go away for two or three days, come back with a broad answer on that. If we feel like it's worth going forward, we'll add a footage producer to that story to check whether there's any footage to go with it, whether there's something that we

can show to tell the story. And then they will write packets over the next couple of weeks. There'll be like a 400 page footage packet only a hundred page research packet. The writers will have been following along with some of those meetings. Then they will take those packets away for a week write outlines Jokeless outlines then we will combine those outlines. Then we will send them away to write a draft. That'll be another week.

Then it'll be the production week. And is it you that's deciding the topics? Myself and Tim Carvel. We run the show together. Tim was at The Daily Show with me. Yeah. And what are the ones that appeal to you the most? That's a good question.

I guess, what was there? I'm blanking. There was a story that we did recently that had Tim and I bouncing in our chairs a little bit and walking away from it. Hostess care, Hawaii, RFK. Why are you going to hit me with hospice care? Hospice care was interesting. But I don't know. Hospice care was interesting, but I don't know that it was that.

I don't know, I guess in general it will be ones that feel really challenging, that it feels like we can bring something to with directing this machine that we built, directing them at a complicated, perhaps superficially unappealing story and getting something palatable and fun out of it. Either that or I guess the really honest answer is something very, very dumb. So you have these heavy subjects and the two ways that I see in your show that you use comedy is either taking something that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand and just putting in something completely absurd to lighten it, to give it levity, to just

have it be a kind of mood breaker or using things that are very much to do with the issue at hand but are funny in and of themselves because people have said absurd things or they've, you know, they've done things that are just kind of crazy. Is that the kind of stuff that you're looking for, the material that you're looking for after you've done the bones of, you know, this kind of big endeavor? You mean once we've got the outlines? Of the story itself? Yes, definitely. That is the challenge for the writers.

And it's a really hard challenge, but it's a really satisfying one as well. And we try our best to put the writers in a position where they can succeed. But I think we've got better at that over the years. In the past we would sometimes be handing them stuff that is so dry and so bleak. They justifiably would be sitting there going, what do you want me to do with this? Like this is a horrendous episode of like a comedic Chopped.

I can't give you a cake out of these ingredients. So now we try and like troubleshoot that on the way in so that they have enough stuff which is light and funny enough that they can attack the material more directly so that you vary the jokes. When it comes to pacing out the clips of the show, that is something that we look at constantly but I guess that the first time that we really reckon with it is when we get the writers outlines and we combine them because then we're literally putting the story up on flash cards so that you can see it and this is gonna sound ridiculous but we literally

have like a blue star sticker that we stick on a clip that's really sad and red stars and ones that are very funny and so you want to make sure that you in terms of a blue star really sad clip you don't want many of those because those are really hard to write any joke off without it feeling incredibly glib. What you want is as many red star clips as you can. That's the challenge for the footage producers. So it's a hugely collaborative process. And at its best, it should be better than the sum of all of our parts.

And how much does your view of the topic change over the course of the story? I mean, does the process confirm, strengthen, you know, your thinking or does it challenge it? Oh, it can definitely shift it. You can go, I mean, I guess one of the slightly dispiriting patterns you can find in research and these stories is some of the data that is most commonly passed around by activists can collapse. There is some real as I'm sure you know garbage data passed around where it feels like well you've inflated this by 15% and it really did not need

to be there's a perfectly usable stat that's slightly less than what you're saying which you can actually stand on rather than this one which is just nothing. That can be pretty annoying when foundational stats collapse under relatively minor scrutiny, but things are generally, with some of these systemic problems, worse than you thought when you start looking at them. It's relatively common that at some point in the story process that we've just talked about, I'll walk into Tim Carvel's office and we'll look at each other after we've just learned

a certain part of a story and say, burn it down. Burn everything down to the ground. You feel rage. Yeah, because things are so much worse than you thought they were and you thought they were pretty bad. Then you have to work through that, right? Because nihilism is completely useless. That thick cowers way out. So you work through that. And I have found generally with these stories that the light at the end of the tunnel, albeit that light might be smaller than you would like it to be ideally, is that there are activists

making small incremental progress on the ground and that progress is really, really important. How do you not give into the nihilism? Because you delve into these very disturbing, bleak, some would say almost dystopian topics. Just classic comedy show fodder. Yeah. And I mean, you're still angry and going into, you know, your colleague's office and feeling furious. How would you not be though?

Unless you're a sociopath. Yeah, I don't know how you wouldn't be. I mean the thing that's exciting about the show is that we have these resources, right? In a time when expertise has been absolutely put through a sausage grinder, we are very, very fortunate to have researchers who have access to great experts in a field, whatever that field may be, from criminal justice to deep sea mining, they will talk to us to make sure that we get something right. And it is such a privilege to be able to find something interesting and then send a researcher away to talk to

great experts in the field to get an answer. It's having a machine for your own curiosity that is like the internet, but it brings back reliable results. Do you know what else it's like? What? Journalism. Well, let me say, with the journalism tag, it's a little tricky, right? I am not a journalist. I did not train as a journalist. We do have journalists working for our show. A lot of them.

I'm glad someone's hiring journalists. Unfortunately, it might just be us. So yes, I am not a journalist, but they are for sure. But don't you think like saying that you're not a journalist or not acting as a journalist allows you to allied some of the accountability that you have with the journalists? I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question.

I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question.

I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. sure. But don't you think like saying that you're not a journalist or not acting as a journalist allows you to allied some of the accountability of journalism right? Which is... That's interesting. I really hope that we don't allied that responsibility. I both don't think I'm a journalist because I'm I really think I am NOT. I could send my researchers away for six weeks and I

think they'll come back saying, yeah, you're not. But in terms of the responsibility of journalism, we do have intense fact checking because we want it to be right. I mean, again, our stories are aggregations of incredible journalism. So it cannot function without journalism. Now we recheck it to make sure it's accurate or that it hasn't changed. But we're building this to make jokes.

It's just, we want the foundations to be solid or those jokes fall apart. Those jokes have no structural integrity if the facts underneath them are bullshit. So that's what's important. It's funny because it's true. Sort of thing. Well, it's only funny if it's true. Right. Yeah. And so it has to be true for it to be funny. But I guess the why is are you trying to make the world a better place? Are you trying to...

No, but I mean, really, what is the big driving force here? Because some people would say, I just want to make people laugh and entertain them. Some people would say, yeah, I want people to think about something and maybe have a nice conversation over dinner with their husband. You seem to have a much bigger aim here. I will say the most important thing to me and to lots of people at the show is to do this in service of writing really funny, weird jokes about interesting things. So that is our outcome.

It's not necessarily to make the world a better place. I'm not sure that comedy can do that. To a certain extent, sometimes it's fiddling while Rome burns. But I think what we want is to get the best ingredients that we can to write comedy from. That's the really honest answer. It's the thing I love the most in the world. I love writing comedy so much. It's just it feels like this is the best process through which we can write interesting, fun, surprising

jokes. It seems to have made you uncomfortable that I've accused you of trying to make the world a better place. I guess the problem, I mean, this might be a hang up of being British. British people took a real stab at, if not making the world a better place, making it a more British place and it didn't go too well. So yeah, you don't want me involved in that. Your segments now go on YouTube after they air on Sundays.

Yes. But this season for the first time HBO is delaying putting the episodes on YouTube by four days. Yes. I assume this is to encourage people to subscribe. I assume that too, yes. To max the streaming service. I take that that's frustrating to you. Yeah, it's massively frustrating to me.

I was not happy with it at all. I certainly can make the same assumption that you do, which is that they want to make sure that people watch it. I would prefer people watch the show in its entire form when it goes out. This is a partly self-serving, not just that I would like my employer to be happy, but we do take a lot of effort to make sure that the show makes sense as a whole, so that if we're doing a really bleak main story, we like putting real dumb stuff around it. When we did Death Penalty Drugs, the pent-up Arbitol, pretty bleak story.

We made sure that we had a story after that about a stock photo model that we managed to fly in from Azerbaijan. I like the conflation of those two things. So I would much rather people watched the show altogether because that's how we make it. altogether because that's how we make it. So I hope that they, I hope it works because I worry about it. I worry that they, I guess it remains to be proven to me that this was necessary.

Are you worried about the method of distribution? I mean, we know that, you know, cable TV, generally speaking, is... Sure. Changing. Changing. A lot. A lot. And...

Definitely. You know, YouTube is obviously exponentially growing, and it's a place where a lot of different types of people come to get their content. So you want everyone to see it in its full entirety, but is it also that it reaches just a different type of person? Yeah, I think that's what I was what I love about having the show on YouTube or the a story is that we can reach beyond HBO subscribers that I think that that feels really important to me. I think it's a good advert for HBO I think it reflected really well on them and still does the fact that they

released this main story. I really, really appreciate the fact that they do that. I would rather they did it straight after the show that we've always done it, but I'm very grateful that they are willing to still do it at all because I do think it's a good advert, not just for our show, but for the network because we are very lucky to have a big staff, right? That staff costs money. And so we're lucky to have an employer that will pay the costs of our show, which is small by their standards, by Dragon's standards, but, you know, not in significance. I mean, do you see your show in the same format that it is,

in the same way that it is 10 years from now? I mean, I hope so. If I'm still alive. You look healthy. Ha ha ha! Let me just say. I'm going to have to have that statement sent through this building's fact checkers, and I don't think either of us are going to like the answer that comes back. You look healthy. You have to add some qualifying language to that.

For a 47-year-old man with two children who's been through a pandemic recently and a stressful job. Albeit that stressful job isn't that stressful by general standards. I have no idea what the future is of television or of late night. There will be a future, but I don't know what it's going to look like yet. And I have an active interest for sure in knowing the answer to that. Last week tonight was renewed for another three seasons last year. Yes. Meaning it will be on the air till at least 2026.

Yes. What? Oh boy. Oh boy. Would make you feel... Oh boy. No, no. I didn't like the way you said the word. at least 2026. Yes. What? Oh boy. Would make you feel... Oh boy, I didn't like the way you said the word, what there? What do you think you're doing? What do you have planned over the next five years?

Because I'd take any dream trips right now. Yes, it does. You should go. You should go now. I do not think you should go now, but I am curious what would make you feel done with the show? That's a good question. I don't know.

I've seen, I guess I worked with Jon Stewart for a long time. I saw him get exhausted. So I know what that looks like. I saw him reckoning with the fact, oh, I don't know if I can do this in another, I've done this in every possible way that I can do it. And he was right about that. Like, he can't really do it any better. I've not hit that point yet. I still absolutely love making the show. I get excited, like, to your point of, like, bouncing up and down in the chairs when we feel that we're onto something with a story, or we've worked out something really dumb to do.

It's so fun. Maybe I've made this sound very academic, the way that we make it, the show, but it's so fun. I can't believe that we get to do it. I can't believe that we get to ram stories down people's throats that they might not naturally want to hear and that they will watch it and I can't believe that we get to play with HBO's resources and do dumb things on fiscally irresponsible scales. I love it so much. So I guess my answer is that point might come.

I don't feel like I'm there yet because this is, I still can't believe that we get to do this. Why haven't you ever had a fill-in host? Huh. You mean like Kimmel? Or like, or like, let him roll that way? Well, like, I mean... It's a little, I hadn't considered that.

I think it's a little tricky, not because I'm indispensable, because I don't think that's true. I think it's more that because of the way that we make the show, I don't think that would make any sense because there are these six week cycles. So you would need someone, if I'm talking myself out of a job here, but you'd need someone to come in for one of those cycles. and that's a lot to ask of them. Honestly we have a stand-in who does like a technical rehearsal that we've used from the start. He's pretty good. We call him Hot John because he's pretty good looking as well

and sometimes you watch him do the rehearsal and think, oh shit, that's pretty good. You have a stand-in called Hot John. That's not his name, but it's what the staff call him. And I think I've really think about it now. I think I've participated in that joke without fully realizing that I'm the butt of it. After the break, I called John Oliver back and asked him about why he can't help but laugh at the hard stuff. Comedy is the way I handle the world.

So the darkest moments of my life, I still find myself compelled to try and make jokes, either to take the weight off some of what's happening, or to sometimes to feel what's happening a bit more. Hey Lulu. Hey, how are you? Good, thanks. Good, buenos dias. Where are you? Good, thanks. Good. Buenos dias. Where are you? I'm in our office. So it should be quiet.

It's before the dogs get here. So. Okay. I want to ask you something about our last conversation where you couldn't remember which episode it was that got you bouncing in your chair. Do you remember now? Oh, I had, yes, before then I would say the thing that has been most rattling around my head since we talked is that I know that we spent a long time talking about the label of journalism

and I didn't want you to feel like I was dodging it there. I guess just to be completely clear, we really don't elide the responsibility of that term. The accuracy of our show is so, so important to us. We go to lengths that I think many would find absurd from the outside in terms of accuracy. We recheck reporting to check that it is still valid. When we show people in clips, we try and contact as many of them as we can to check that they felt their story was told accurately and whether there's any other context that we should know. We do so much and the responsibility of that label is really important.

It just doesn't apply to me. And I guess the thing that I wanted to get to the bottom of, because it seemed interesting to me, was because this comes up quite a lot and this felt like it would be, this kind of conversation feels like it might be a good time to get to the bottom of it is I was wondering why it's so interesting to you or why getting to a fuller answer. Is it that you feel like I've dodged in the past? And how would you feel if I said yes to that, that I am a journalist?

Because my sense is you'd feel, no, you're not, rightly. I think the reason it comes up a lot is because there is a sense that you are a news source, but you don't have the constraints that journalists have, right? You can, for example, take a topic that is very complicated and difficult and put in a lot of jokes to make it arch or funny, to sort of move the audience in a particular direction. And so I think there is this sort of dissonance that happens when journalists like myself are engaging with this. We're curious about how you view yourself.

I mean, I don't think it's like a, it's not a knock. It's more just trying to understand how you view yourself and your show and where it sits in the ecosystem, right? That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that is where much of the show would be, I guess to that first comparison you made would be more editorial, right? It's just that, I guess what I, I guess when I recoiled at being described as an op-ed was, was not wanting the worst version of that to be applied to this show, not just someone deciding,

I'm going to say my opinion because it is not just that. To get back to a point that I wanted to make, because I think this is useful to the discussion that we've been having, is do you remember which episode it was that got you bouncing in your chair? I do. It was an episode recently because I remember the literal bounce. We were working on an episode about the West Bank and I think what I was so excited about was the challenges that were ahead of us and the material that we were gathering and the opportunity that we had

and it really felt to me in working on that story it felt like, oh, this is the point of having a show where you can talk about whatever you want to talk about. This is kind of using that incredible opportunity to do something hard. I found this episode fascinating. I was in Jerusalem as a reporter for many, many years. This stuff is really hard. That episode talks about the Israeli settlements and you really tried to parse what is very complicated and very nuanced and you packed a lot in.

So what was the reception after it went out? Uh, I'm sure some people liked it. Some people loved it and some people hated it. Do you pay attention to that? Some people loved it and some people hated it. Do you pay attention to that? I like paying a little bit of attention in the wake of our stories, especially regarding how experts respond to it in stories in general. I know that people aren't always going to agree with the conclusions that we land on. But I do want experts to think that the information that we presented is accurate.

It raises this question for me about something you said when we first talked. Basically that you ultimately see the show and the stories you focus on as a vehicle to write jokes. Yeah. And I can see that logic when you're doing a piece about corn or UFOs, for example. Both very funny. And you don't see the logic applying to something that's more complicated. You don't do a half an hour about one of the most contentious issues in the world because

it's comedy gold, do you? Oh, I mean, that's an interesting perspective. I guess comedy is the way I handle the world. So it's the darkest moments of my life. I still find myself compelled to try and make jokes, either to take the weight off some of what's happening, or to sometimes to feel what's happening a bit more. I find people employing comedy at moments of tragedy, incredibly meaningful. I know some might find it glib or offensive. To me, it is the absolute opposite of that.

Weren't done well. I still think one of the best moments in late night comedy over the last decade was Jimmy Kimmel talking about his son Billy's heart surgery. It was incredibly generous to be so emotionally honest and raw. Uh, it was incredibly brave to be that honest, knowing that people were going to ask him how his son was every day for the rest of his life after that. And, and this is the most important thing to me, it was really funny. And the fact that he was telling jokes while choking through tears was the thing that really,

really meant something to me. It was more sincere because he was communicating through jokes. Explain that to me. It was more sincere because he was communicating through jokes. Because it's like, I love comedy so much. It is, like I say, it has been, it's my favorite thing, just in general in the world. So I do not see a distinction between how could you joke about this. For me, it's more like, how could you not? How could you not tell jokes about a situation that is absolutely absurd? Darkly absurd, but absurd.

Does that make sense? And that would apply to the West Bank too. Do you think it also gives, I'm thinking of Jimmy Kimmel in particular, do you think it also gives people access to very uncomfortable emotions? Probably. And for me, look, I'm British, right? So my ability to deal with my emotions is and has been limited at best. The very fact that I'm telling you, yeah, I find it better to laugh at things rather than feel them sincerely as a human being, that I'm telling you, yeah, I find it better to laugh at things rather than feel them sincerely as a human being, says something. What I found so meaningful about Jimmy's thing was I had had, our first child's pregnancy

was really difficult and I just couldn't, I couldn't talk about it in general. I certainly could not do anything as generous as decide to talk about it publicly so that the people who would also experience situations like that could feel that their experiences were being reflected back at them. I didn't have the emotional ability or even the comedic abilities to do that. So that's why I was so in awe of what he was doing in the crucible of that pain. It's just, it's absolutely incredible as a comedian what he managed to do. And yet for me, the fact I was laughing along with the lump in my throat made it way more impactful for me. Has being a parent exacerbated that burn it down

feeling that you mentioned about some of the ways the world is messed up or the opposite? I do remember after the Brexit vote happened, looking at my baby son and thinking, oh, this is sad. Your horizons have slightly contracted because he would have been able to have a British passport, which would have been an EU passport, meaning that he could live or work anywhere in the EU, which for young people in Britain was a massively consequential thing to have access to. My little sister left college, went straight to France, started washing dishes in a bakery,

ended up learning to bake. Now she's a pastry chef. Like the ability to move, having those borders opened, massively consequential. So I will say there was a selfish side of me watching that vote, looking down at me thinking, oh, your world got smaller. That's very sad. But no, in general, my feeling of let's burn it down when we're at a point of researching a story where things seem utterly hopeless.

And the history that we have of working through that despair, partly by seeing the incremental changes that are possible, that's probably pretty consistent. I don't think they've really changed, changed my disgust with the political process and my hope for better. Are you going to talk about that with your kids at the dinner table? Are you going to be that dad? Oh God. I mean, that's a really fair use of that dad there.

I mean that actually in the best possible way. Am I going to say to them, things are unfair? Just like sit and talk about the state of the world and have them be engaged in it. And yeah, I'm probably going to be that test. I mean, my husband's like that with our daughter and she loves it some days and hates it others. Yeah, of course. I think that feels like an utterly human response to that.

There's a time and a place for this, dad. Can we please talk about something else now? John Oliver, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks, Lulu. I appreciate it. That's John Oliver. New episodes of Last Week Tonight air Sunday nights on HBO. It's also streaming on Max. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabel Bacon,

mixing by Afim Shapiro, original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, photography by Philip Montgomery. Our senior booker is Priya Mathew. Our producer is Wyatt Oram. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Special thanks to Jason Ziniman, Rory Walsh, Renan Morelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Nick Pittman, Mattie Masiello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schuman, and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing,

follow or subscribe to the interview wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash The Interview, and you can email us anytime at theinterviewatnytimes.com. Next week, David talks with the legendary Al Pacino about his new memoir, his career in Hollywood, and what his work has meant to him. his new memoir, his career in Hollywood, and what his work has meant to him. I felt as though my life was saved by acting, my existence, because I knew that I could do something.

It was just like having been able to play the harmonica or something. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro, and this is the interview from the New York Times.