The Joe Rogan Experience - #1498 - Jon Stewart

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

Jon Stewart is a comedian, director, writer, producer, activist, and television host. He's the director fo the new film "Irresistible" that releases on June 26, 2020.

Hi, Jon Stewart. Hi, Joe Rogan. What's going on behind you? What is all that jazz? Oh, it's all my, when my kids were younger, this is their, I'm in the attic. Oh. So, when they were younger, I came up here with their cousins and doodled, and I got kicked up here.

It's my office now, and I'm here with the bunny and the guinea pig and the rat. Hey, man, I miss you. I miss you on TV right now. I really do. This is a perfect time for you. It's kind of crazy that you're not hosting that show anymore. But there's so many people doing that. I really did burn out. I felt like it's just redundant. The nice thing for what you do is you get to curate and kind of be more active in to follow your own rhythm for it.

I was really tied to that rhythm of the 24 hour news cycle. Right. And how fucking redundant it is and how cyclical. And at a certain point, I was like, I don't know what else to do with this. And so I didn't want to stay just because I could. I'd just done it long enough. And so I thought, well, let me just, it was just time. I felt like the audience needed a fresh perspective.

I needed a fresh perspective. Like, I just felt done. Like, I was more mad about shit than inspired, you know? I appreciate that you decided to go out at the literally at the very top but it seems like especially like right now like john oliver's killing it and trevor noah's doing your show and it's like this is this is that there's so much to mock it's almost like an overload and doing real commentary on politics today. In my opinion, it's almost like you're doing commentary on pro wrestling.

Like this is a rigged game and you're out here pretending like this shit makes sense. Yes, it really is. You're right. Well, it's also because that's the economic system that's been set up around politics is the very same that vince mcmahon set up around wrestling you create i mean it is a kind of

you know kayfabe it's a sort of like there are characters you know what it's like when you're trying to produce something every day you're going to go with kind of a boilerplate structure so you're going to say all right our show revolves around you're from the right you're from the left whatever comes in we're gonna filter it through that we're gonna keep it produceable but it starts to like you say it becomes you know authentic but the same thing would happen to me sometimes with like I'd be doing shows and and you would know you weren't necessarily feeling the outrage of something or uh that the commentary was going to be as spicy

or as deep as you might want it but you might kick it up a notch anyway because it was performative and i always i always had to fight that instinct to not to not give in to the gravity of what was expected. Well, it's such a tightrope to walk because you're commenting, you're doing comedy on something that's actually serious. And it's great to mock the ridiculous aspects of it. But really, if you're doing The Daily show right now like we really are in a legitimately troubled time like it's not it's not like a troubled time of 10 years ago or eight years ago like this is a real troubled time no and i think as that builds up it becomes harder and harder but i can recall you know people people say sometimes and look i think there's a certain nostalgia that people

view my time on the show as um and i'm not being self-deprecating i just mean you know when you walk away from something i think a kind of nostalgia about how you know i took a fair amount of shit while i was there and uh but but the point is like, Charleston happened when I was hosting that show. Ferguson happened. The Iraq War happened. 9-11 happened. Jesus. These types of things were always, and what would happen is you started to feel like you were expected to say something profound about it.

And knew that you didn't really have that in you at times or just that's a bar that was beyond, you know, you really did just want to help your staff get through it more than than anything else. And so these events would come up and the weight of feeling like you had to say something meaningful in that moment for people, because that's the role that either they had, you know, let you know that you had in their lives or that the show kind of took on, you know, became kind of difficult to navigate because the shit is so cyclical like man i could go back and and do you my 10 war on christmas bits here when that shit would flare up but like at a certain point when things like charleston happened or eric garner like i had nothing in the tank comedically like all i could do was stare into the camera and just express sadness and help us it's like you know it is it's impotent rage at a

certain point hmm you rage against it but over a period of 16 years if you feel the thing you're raging against grows stronger right and kind of collapse on top of you and and you not make headway nobody likes to piss in the ocean yeah or you like it but at a certain point if that's your job i think it i think people began to look at the show like it was supposed to change things and and that's a hard that's a hard place to be for for a comedy show well it's because you're reasonable and there's not a lot of that out there and like legitimately and like the people are like please you do it look people are begging for the rock to run for president this is how desperate we are people have asked me to do it look i'm a fucking bona fide moron you don't want me running anything you certainly don't want me

running the country and if enough people have actually asked for that you just know there's a feeling of desperation in the air and you know when you were running that show and and you were you were doing great comedy about real shit and as this real shit compounds and piles up and it doesn't seem to have any effect on this real shit all this great comedy after a while i can understand why it would start to feel like what am i doing here like how long how long do you do you know who what is that guy's name who was doing the resistance the guy was in the basement of gq ken oberman keith oberman sorry yeah a little unhinged right he was doing this thing in the basement against trump and he's like it's just days from now when trump is going to be arrested and i could feel that this was also

kind of what he was doing like he was trying to make some sort of an impact but it just kept not working it kept not working and yeah and it's still all chaos and he's like fuck this and then he just walked away from it you know it seems like trying to enact change is so difficult that when actual change happens it's one of the reasons why it happens in such a big way it's like there was so many people bounding at the wall and pounding at this wall that when boom when the george floyd protests broke through then all of a sudden it's we've got real change let's take down these fucking statues and light everything on fire and there's this feeling of change and of chaos that is also representative of the fact that it takes so long to turn our cultural battleship

it's like to actually get a real turn it's so hard it's so everything stays the same no matter how mad people get that turn even at that point that's still the easy part yes the turn is the easy part like this shit's not going to get fixed by HBO Max pulling Gone with the Wind. Like, it's fine. But, like, when you pull a movie nobody was planning on watching on a streaming service, nobody can find. Like, we're still at the symbolic stage. We're still doing the shit that is symbolic. And this is where leadership becomes such a crucial component. So you have this great awakening of energy

it has to be channeled into something lasting and meaningful and we have to diagnose the real problem underlying this moment so that we don't make a mistake in just changing the window dressing and and the gilding on the buildings yeah like this has to be this has to be foundational in a way that will create something lasting and that's that's the hard part it seems like the shift is big enough that something is going to happen in that regard it just seems like this shift is nothing like anything we've ever seen in our lifetime and it's worldwide which is really crazy. Like the George Floyd deaths sparked all these protests worldwide, which has really never happened before with anything that really has taken place in America.

And it just seems like there was also a lot of frustration during the bailout period of the COVID crisis that all these corporations were getting so much money. The people got one $1,200 and then then there was no more talk and that this you don't know where the money you know there's really no accountability even for where that money went right that's a great point joe because that's so that's what i'm talking about by structural change like i feel like in this moment this horrible uh crime and murder sparked something but what's underlying that is not just the racial inequality and the inequities but this whole idea of we build our society economically from the top down yes like that's the shit that's got to change right we have to well like when you talk when

you're in a pandemic right and tens of thousand people are dying and then we say to ourselves all right well who are the essential workers who who are the ones that are the fabric of our society and culture that keep the the the wheels turning and the trains running. Like, who are those people? Well, it turns out they're the most poorly compensated people in our society. Yeah. Because we've flipped the paradigm for some reason since the 80s. The investor class has gotten the break and the working class has gotten minimized we've devalued work

while overvaluing investment it's such a good point it does i don't think we can have the structural change until we flip that like fuck man when people talk about freedom like and and liberty what's more uh for freedom and liberty than not having your health insurance tied to your job right yeah what kind of freedom do you have to make decisions in your life when you fear that if i take a chance if i go for something if i try and change my lot in life my kids will no longer be covered by uh so like all the things that we built up to accept i think we have to turn it over and it has to lean well people should be able to have like a dignified you you should be able to work a job and not be poor you should get a work job

and not need food stamps like that's where we're fucked we spent how much in this pandemic like three trillion dollars something like that four trillion something along those lines who knows if a hundred million of it went to coca-cola like we have no idea right but you got 80 bus drivers in new y York who were dead because they had to keep going in the middle of a pandemic. Yeah. I think you're making a really good point about what's essential as well. When we found out what the essential workers are, right? People who work at supermarkets, people who build homes, like all these essential jobs.

And can't afford to bunker down. Yes, can't afford to. You're putting yourself in, you know, it's funny, I was talking, a friend of mine named DT, who is, you know, he was really like grievously wounded in war, right? And I was talking, we were talking about like coronavirus, and I was like, I feel like I'm in fucking danger when i go out and yeah welcome to being downrange like you know what i mean like yeah it's just not it's not something that we as americans would ever consider our lives we're we're really sheltered in a lot of ways

to what a great, uh, vast majority of the world faces, but also what a vast majority of our own citizens face in terms of having lies that lives that they feel are built on sand as opposed to granite. And so his point was like, yeah, you know, that's what it feels like when you're in a war.

But I signed up for that, but like bus drivers and grocery store workers, like, they had to fucking decide, like, I need this money more than I need to protect my life and maybe the health of my family. What a terrible position to have to be in. And unprecedented, and we're ill-prepared for it. And it really did highlight what's essential, though, which is, back to your point about this idea of income equality. Like, people will balk at that. Like, hey, this is a game. If you want to figure it out, figure out how to make more money. Invest and do this and become a banker and you fucked up and you wanted to be an artist.

Or you fucked up and you wanted to be a carpenter. You should have been a you know whatever and but what they don't understand or don't consider is when shit hits the fan like it did with the covid crisis you recognize like hey all that stuff is nonsense if someone doesn't take out the garbage all that stuff is nonsense if you don't have health care all that stuff is not none of that money means anything if the fabric of society deteriorates to a point where literally everybody has to stay in their home and you can't work and that's what happened and it really flipped the whole thing on its head because we we had to consider survival we had to really consider survival instead of just existence

we were saying oh my god we have to protect ourselves from this viral viral attack and what it makes you realize is how much money it takes to ante up to the american way of life what i mean by that is like if you want to buy if you just want to buy in to play a hand right what's your ante well now they say've got to go to college. So you're talking about a $200,000 ante. Yeah. To get in the fucking game. Right, to get a job when you get out where you're not going to make a fraction of that every year, so you're going to be behind the eight ball for the rest of your life.

Right. Now think about black people not being able to build equity and wealth through generations of government policy that excluded them from whether it's the Homestead Act or the Federal Housing Administration or the GI Bill. All these government interventions, socialism, if you will, entitlements, if you will, were made to help white families build equity, over generations black people were explicitly excluded from that so add that on top of the amount of money that you're going and you start to see the hole that we've dug for people yeah and if we don't address that hole i don't care how many fucking comedy sketches we pull and how many things go like we we're not

doing anything yeah we haven't addressed the hole that exists from being 150 years removed from slavery which is crazy that's not that's a a blink in time it's nothing and how crazy is it that like and you always i always hear it from like the butt people they're like the george floyd thing yeah that was terrible but and they as soon as they say the butt, I'm like, no, no, but no,

but he wasn't an angel. No, but you know, it doesn't matter. And when you're upset that people are pulling that Confederate statues, like people have been begging for that since they got, those things got put up in the 1920s to really lock in Jim Crow. Like those things aren't there.

They're not memorials to the dead. They're hagiography to a war for slavery. Like when we shot the movie down south, man. So I saw these monuments. You would think they would say, like, here's a statue of Robert E. Lee. This motherfucker. To keep people slaves and then we built this thing in the 20s to make black people kind of afraid so that they knew they couldn't take but it doesn't say that right it said this this great man like of course people are going to pull him down because they've been begging for us to do

something about it for 100 years it's also the origins of those a lot of those statues were actually put up during the civil rights movement and they're cheaply made they were put up as a middle finger to the civil rights movement no no question yeah but but we need something at a like there has to be a process you know I always think about like what South Africa did there has to be a painful lead process that allows us because I

still think to this day and I don't know how your experience with this is but like I still think there's a large swath of you know white people in society who feel like they blame black people for not being able to get out of this hole that we put them in or that the government put them in but they think it's a problem of culture and virtue like hey man if they would just uh

pull their pants up and uh talk different you know they wouldn't have such a hard time hey why don't you just work harder? It's a ridiculous perspective and it's also not based on, you don't have, anyone who would think like that doesn't understand how human beings develop and grow. If you have someone... It's widespread. I would say it's widespread. Yeah.

It's a dangerous narrative whenever you blame people for their circumstances, if their circumstances are grossly out of their control and really severely limit their progress. And that exists also for if you want to talk about coal mining populations in Kentucky. It's the same shit. It's people that we don't all start out at the same starting block. So all you pull yourself up by your own bootstrap, motherfuckers, you're lucky you have arms. OK, there's people out there born with no arms like we should all be thinking of ourselves in this country as a community not as a bunch of people in competition with each other we're all piling our money together every year we throw our taxes into the mix to try to take care of the

infrastructure and the government and the housing and all the all the different things that get paid for by our taxes. We're a community, man, and we're not thinking like a community. We're thinking like a bunch of people that don't want other people to have the same shot in life. I think you struck on something, though, that's very important in all this, and that is a theory of limited resources. And that is a theory of limited resources. Like a lot of the conflict between what you would consider like the more nativist wing of American politics and the more progressive side is this idea of resource guarding. I work my fucking ass off.

I play by the rules. And they're going to take all my labor. Right. And they're going to pour're going to I work my fucking ass off. I play by the rules and they're going to take all my labor and they're going to pour it into these people. And I do think we have to address that idea that like we're here to build a stronger foundation, a granite bearing for everyone to stand on so that there's a few people standing on Mount Everest and everybody else is in sand and quicksand isn't the way that we run the society. And think of these programs not as entitlements but investments. If we invest in dignity of work shit and start building that up, well, food stamps and welfare start to go away. Because we're building something more substantial.

We built a great middle class in the 50s for white people. We have to do the same now for the country. And also reassure people who are resentful of that, that they're not being left behind either. That nobody is saying, and your lives are fucking cake. And it's not like it's going to change your life that much either, man. This mentality that, oh, Bernie Sanders, like when I was a supporter of Bernie Sanders when he was running, I got pushback from people that were like, so you want to give your hard-earned money, more of it away to the government, and you think the government's going to solve this?

My perspective was, if you just looked at it this way, if you could give, let's just get crazy, if you could give 25% more money to taxes, but the world would be 50% better, wouldn't you want to invest in that? Like, I understand that people are check to check i understand but if people like me people that earn a good amount of money are the ones who are going to be hit the hardest if you wanted a better world wouldn't you be willing to invest some of your money into that better world and if that money goes to making sure that no one has to do this in the future and that we we develop this better these better communities in these places

that have been fucked for decades you want you don't want that you don't want a better world for your children you want you don't want to save her what do you want to do die with all this money in the bank like it's crazy it's a question of you know when you look at the greatest anti-poverty program we've ever put in place, it's Social Security. Now, the flip side of that is what they'll say is that the problem with some of this is they don't trust the mechanism by which that money is going to be invested. Of course. Because they've been sold, to some extent, a little bit of a lie, that this trickle-down theory. So every administration that comes

in is going to stimulate the economy. They all do it. We don't have a free market. The Fed right now is driving so much money into stocks. You're talking about zero interest rates, negative interest rates. They're driving everything away from bonds and savings so that the stock market, which for some reason we've come to look at like a pulse oximeter of the nation, which it's not. It's oh my God, we lost 300 Dows today. We've come to look at it like it's our temperature. So everybody's going to stimulate the economy. So what did, let's look at what Trump did.

So $1.5 trillion tax cut, right? Overwhelmingly, though, it went to people who already have a shit ton of money. And then we cut the corporate tax rate from, I don't know, I think it was 35 down to 21, right? Supposedly, they were going to reinvest it, but they mostly did buybacks. So they're increasing their investor wealth through that as well. So you're talking about trillions of dollars of stimulus, right, that are just going to that same theory. Take those trillion dollars and let's invest. Let's stimulate the economy, but not from up there, from down here. Let's take that and fucking Marshall Plan our country and build it so that it's sturdy on the legs.

You know you're a fighter. Sturdy on the legs. If you're not sturdy on the legs, you got nothing. My idea is we should get Dick Cheney involved and we should hire Halliburton to fix up the inner cities like it did all the places we bombed in Iraq. Give him some no-bid contracts, pour that money back into the community. I mean, I'm joking about Halliburton, but it is a business. There's something there. Well, I had a thing.

We're trying to do this thing for veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who've gotten sick from burn pits. Are you familiar at all with burn pits? No, what is it? So in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, I mean, this will go back generations, but in Iraq and Afghanistan, a lot of the hired contractors to dispose of the detritus of war, they would build these sometimes 10-acre, 20-acre pits. Everything would go into them from mess waste to hazardous materials to computers to everything. They light it with jet fuel, and they burn it. So now you've got guys that are downrange that are also down. I mean, they're living.

They're basically camping out in an toxic waste dump, right? In an incinerator. So they come home and you're starting to see pulmonary issues, cancer issues. These guys, they're dying. And they're not being, they have to advocate against the government. It's not being, they have to advocate against the government. So we're trying to put together, working with this team coalition, Wounded Warrior groups and people, VSOs and groups like that, to address this legislatively similar to what was done for the 9-11 community, right? So I thought, because it's always about money. You know, we always have money for war, but we almost never have money to pay for what are the absolutely could have seen coming a mile away consequences of what our veterans face when they come back.

Right. We don't take care of them. When they're out of sight, they're out of mind. out of sight, they're out of mind. And so my idea was you have all these profiteers, Raytheon, Halliburton, all these groups, make them kick in 10% big, a contingency in war so that when these guys go home and the government backs away, there is money there to take care of what is the natural damage that's done to these people in the name of fighting for our country. So that they don't, and their families, I mean, these people have to become their own lawyers. They have to go in front of medical boards, and they have no support. Their families are oftentimes caring for them, whether they have health issues or traumatic brain injury or uh uh you know other kinds of invisible wounds and they're kind of

hung out to dry yes not kind of very much so um but you know the ufc uh had a program back in the day where we were uh working with the intrepid center for excellence to work with uh traumatic brain injury patients and to raise money for them and we were doing this uh ufc fight for the troops to raise money for it and what got me sick was how how is it that we have to do this like how is it that this isn't something that's taken care of in the budget clearly in advance you're blowing people up and you're you're you're not preparing for people to come back injured you're sending young brave women and men to die for their country or or risk severe brain damage and you don't have enough money set aside to treat them when they return i'm like that's insane everybody thinks that soldiers come back and they've got health

care for life no they don't no they don't you've got a care for life. No, they don't. No, they don't. You've got a five-year window, but if you get something that they deem was not service-related, so you could have been sleeping next to an open-air burn pit. There's a guy in Texas, we work with his wife, Rosie, and Leroy Torres, who's literally like, his case wouldn't be, they denied his case in front of the Texas Supreme Court. Yeah, it's evil. It's evil. Absolute intention to deny healthcare, and it goes all the way back to Desert Storm.

You remember the whole... To Vietnam. Yes, yes. People are still fighting the government over Agent Orange. Right. And still being denied. Yeah. Yeah.

It's bonkers. It's crazy. And the depleted radiation sickness that people were getting from the Iraq war. Right. And the guys that went, you know, that K2 base. Yeah. And I think it was Uzbekistan. And it was a toxic weight.

Like these soldiers literally had like irradiated tar on their boots. Sick as shit. And they can't get, you know, there's blue water. All right. There's, I'm telling you like every or inevitably,

and they're always told the same thing. Hey, we don't have the science yet and you know it's going to take us 20 to 25 years on the science but you do have the science because you got the science from fiat not like yeah there's a jet fuel burn at the trade center so like the science is in use that science like stop fucking with these people and help them yeah the jet fuel burn at the trade center is another excellent example of first responders right that were terribly sickened and many many of them died because of the fumes and and people in the surrounding areas in fact um donna summers

died of lung cancer and she lived near there yeah i don't doubt that it's related it could be related but it's many people did jimmy's droga he was a cop and he got really sick i mean those guys developed the the pile cough like a day into the search and rescue but jimmy's droga he gets sick and they kept trying to tell him that a first it was in his head then it was, it had nothing to do with where you were and working on the pile in 9-11. And then they tried to say, like, it's from snorting drugs. They fucking, you know, ruined this man's reputation as he's dying. He dies. They do an autopsy in his lungs.

Everything you could possibly imagine from a pulverized building jesus asbestos limestone cyanide like oh crap like it was an utter disaster and and they just keep fighting people and they're doing the same thing to these veterans now with with the the burn pits and it's you know the whole thing's just got to stop. There's got to be a presumption for these illnesses so that these guys don't have to fight so hard to get, you know, disappear from your health care. I think along the same lines we're talking about reform of the police department, there has to be some reform of the health care system that deals with veterans. Because it seems to be just this long history of doing it a certain way to save the most money possible and the idea that these guys are sacrificial anyway you know

they're sending them off to potentially die if they come back alive we you know we do our they do their very best to not treat them and to not spend any more money on them and it's it's sick it's amazing we have so many guys that are still patriotic that still want to go and do this considering the fact they're treated so poorly when they return yeah and they lose you know listen being in the military is isolating in the first place it's just not that you know it's only less than one percent i think of the population put on top of that when you get out you know you're used to being with a unit you're used to that camaraderie you're used to uh all pulling for the same you know working as a team well now

you're removed from your unit and if you're hurt that's even further isolating you know uh and in that moment to have to then you're worried about your future your family's future and in that moment when you when that's when the government should step in and go, hey man, you fulfilled your service to us. You fulfilled that covenant. We will fulfill that covenant to you. We will send that, we'll do the right thing. Right.

And they do the opposite. They do the opposite. Some of this shit is so simple and fair and obvious. And you do wonder, like, how has this system become so corrupt and corroded that we can't anymore as a people do the right thing? Just do the right fucking thing. How did we get here well i think again this speaks to what's going on in this country in terms of revolt that we we realize like all this stuff whether you're talking about the health care system whether you're talking about

police reform whether you're talking about impoverished communities that are stricken with crime and drugs that it's not changing under the normal conditions like something has to, and something has to happen in a big way to change it. And all these things need to be addressed. Healthcare of soldiers needs to be addressed. Reform of the police. Reform of these communities. It has to be addressed. If you're going to spend trillions of dollars to bail out these large corporations,

you've got to work on these other problems too. You can't just ignore them because they're not the ones who are funding your campaign. But that's a huge issue, and that's the thing that's got to stop. Look at even 2008, right? So we have this enormous economic collapse in 2008. The housing market sinks, and these derivative mortgage things go down. And the world economy grinds to a halt. Thousands of people lose their jobs, foreclosures all over the place.

So they come in and they pump billions of dollars into the organizations that sunk the fucking ship in the first place. That's where the money goes. And I remember asking the treasury secretary at the time, you know, this is a mortgage question, right? Because the derivatives made it like a geometric problem. So if they're bundling mortgages and 8% of those mortgages go underwater, it sinks the derivatives market, which is trillions of dollars as opposed to billions of dollars. So I said, you know, with all that money, what if you just made those mortgages that were underwater whole? Because the moment you do that,

doesn't that fix your derivative problem? Don't you, haven't you just made, and plus then people get to keep their houses. And what he said to me was, you can't do that because of moral hazard. So moral hazard is a theory that you can't incentivize bad behavior. So what he's saying is the people that took out mortgages on their homes that went underwater, that's their fault. fault. So you can't bail them out, because that would be sending a hazardous message morally about the economy. So I said, what's the moral hazard of then making the people that actually blew up the economy whole again? What's that? How is that not moral hazard? And he said, the plane was on fire and we had to land it. But they were the ones who lit the plane on fire.

You're rewarding them for that. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard both sides of that argument. I've heard the argument that nothing's too big to fail. Let it fail. And then I've heard the argument that if it did fail, it would be so catastrophic. But I'm saying it wouldn't have failed. So it was a failure because they bundled more.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, they did it all to themselves. But if you made the mortgages at the base of that, okay. So let's say 10% of the mortgages were underwater. But, you know, so let's say you had a $200,000 mortgage and now the house is only worth $150,000. So instead of giving a million dollars to AIG at the top, give $50,000 to that mortgage, bring it into line with its value. Suddenly that thing's not underwater anymore. It's like putting ballast into a ship that's sinking.

suddenly that thing's not underwater anymore it's like putting ballast into a ship that's sinking put the ballast in the ship comes up rather than just saying all right we'll buy you another fucking chip that almost seems too logical though that's right that's kind of part of what's the problem with all this but that's what i was saying like that's moral hazard i was just like i don't even know what to do with that incentivizing bad behavior doesn't count when you're the ones who tank the economy i mean it's not it's like what you're talking about today like if someone tried to say that these small businesses that are going under because of the covid sanctions because everybody's been locked down rather if if those people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps it's a great example why that

analogy sucks because like there's nothing to do man you can't work there's nothing you like what do you want them to do there's no opportunity it's everything shut down if you go under at this time it's not your fault it's one of the rare times if i'm the government right now here's something i could do that's like again like it seems like a simple solution which is like just suspend and extend. Yeah. So the country shut down, right? What's people's oftentimes biggest worry?

My rent or my mortgage? Yeah. Suspend and extend. You know what? We're going to do a six month suspend. Nobody is going to be. And if the landlords need to be helped out, that's where we'll focus. We'll make sure that the landlords don't go under from having to pay too much in taxes or having to pay too much in repairing.

But attack the problem at its core, which is people's insecurity about they're unemployed. They have to still pay the rent and their mortgage or other bills. They have to still pay the rent and their mortgage or other bills. Let's take a big chunk of their nut. Oftentimes for people, mortgage and rent is one of the biggest nuts. Just fucking say like, because he's clearly we have the wherewithal and the money. We're suspending and extending. Everybody like give people a chance to breathe just for a moment.

And for the landlords, I'm not trying to dick them over like give them some kind of uh rent a real estate tax break or some operating expense or keep everybody you know what it's almost like like you're a patient on a ventilator like let's just keep everybody a fucking live yeah Yeah. Till we get past this moment, because they keep saying, well, we got to, you know, we got to reopen the economy. We are the economy. Right. There is no corporations, maybe people, but these corporations still can't catch COVID. We can. understand why they don't do something that seems simple and addresses like a real concern grassroots on the on the floor again you're speaking too logically i think it's uh it's just

a it's such a difficult time too politically because the the ideas get segmented into left or right right like even the ideas of how to address covid how to address the economy how to address all the everything becomes politicized and it's that's that's terrible you know that's unfortunate yeah that's it's really unfortunate because well it's even yeah it's it's it shouldn be that way. And I'm not sure how it started that way. And it's really unfortunate. There's got to be more emphasis on testing. And there's got to be more emphasis on showing people how to keep their immune system healthy. And then recognizing people that can't do that and doing what we can to protect them.

You're going to wear a mask. Joe Rogan said, if you say it out loud, I'm going to wear a mask now. I've always been, I was fucking with Bill Burr to try to get him to rant people think i'm really serious about that i was like what are you gonna wear a mask and i see bill over there steaming i'm like here he goes here he goes like i wear a mask whenever i go out in public because it's the law and i don't want anybody yelling at me but also though when you side note i get tested excuse me i get tested all the time too what's on a side note what how great is burr he's the best i love him he's so funny he's so funny and so prolific but here's the thing that i almost love even more he'll just send me like a video

of like a great drummer that he loves oh yeah yeah i Yeah. I took it up, but he's really good. But, uh, I just love that dude. He's so good. He's great. And I love getting him wound up. That's what I was doing with the whole mask thing. And people think I was like really arguing you shouldn't wear a mask or you're a bitch.

God it's, but that's also the problem with soundbites on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, it exists. It's the content factory.

And, you know, anybody that creates content's you know it exists it's the content factory and you know anybody that creates content you know then that goes out into the world and look they're looking for for high balls too and that's why i always feel like like i take shit but i can't complain about it because that's part of the game right that's part of the game it's what i do for a living so like when people say political correctness it's it's overwhelming i just say like amen it's just other people pushing back and getting to say their shit and that's exactly what they should be doing the internet has democratized you know outrage and there's more speech now than there's ever been before in the history of the world. Like we all know, you know what it's like that, what's the movie with Mel Gibson where he knows

what women think? So he had ESP. Twitter and the internet is just, we all have developed ESP and now we know what everybody is thinking. It's all every day. we're just bombarded by what everybody's thinking well you're also bombarded by the people that spend the most time doing it because there's a lot of mentally unwell people that spend their entire day camped out on twitter having arguments and if you want to venture into that world and risk your consciousness and your health your met your literal mental health by communicating in this really crude manner with text messages and arguing over semantics with people that you don't even know. It's a terrible way to exist.

Are you on Twitter? Do you have a Twitter account? No, I have a Twitter account, but I don't read it. You don't read it? No, I post things on Instagram. They go to Twitter. Occasionally I'll post things on Twitter, but I don't read it. It's just too toxic, man. I get it. And I know when I've fucked up, and I know when people are mad at me when it's legit and valid, and I know when they're mad at me for nonsense. And I am my

worst self-critic, so I don't need other people yelling at me. I know what I did wrong. I stay clear. I think that's the only approach you can have in this environment i think it's a healthy way to look at it and you know i always try and keep myself like you figure when when people are coming at you there's probably going to be something constructive in there sometimes i have the energy to like find it and sometimes i'm just like i really can't do this yeah sometimes you can't do it but yeah there's value in criticism it's very important but not too much it's's like anything else. There's value in a little bit of snake venom. You develop a tolerance, but if you get a big fat dose, you're dead. And in many ways, it's the same with interacting with people that are upset with you. There's going to be people that are upset with everybody for no reason, no matter what the story is in the news, even if it's clear cut to to you and i there's going to be someone who has a violent opposition to that idea it doesn't mean they're right and it doesn't mean you're right it just means people have a lot of different fucking ways

of looking at the world and if you want to exist in conflict in perpetuity stay on twitter and stay on twitter all day long and just argue with people i don't want to do that you know and again it's not that i don't have any room for improvement it's not that i don't appreciate or accept or recognize the value of criticism because i definitely do it's that it's not healthy it's not healthy for me it's not it'll it could directly affect the kind of content i put out it's not good that's what i was about to say do you feel like one of the hardest thing to do is to maintain your kind of creative barometer so that you don't let those kinds of things when you feel like they're not constructive pull you too far to the outrage world or some other things like to maintain that and that's why i think it's good

like what you do in terms of conversation like you basically say you know i'm going to do long form because that you know feels like at least from my perspective the healthiest form yeah is conversation but is even in that case people will take long form edit things out of context and then it becomes the same problem that we have with Twitter and with everything else you get these little sound bites these little video clips and you don't understand the full context of the conversation or what was actually said and then people get outraged

at that we are living in a very strange time and I believe it's an adolescent stage of communication and I think it's going to give our frustrations for this are going to give birth to a better form and i think one of the things that podcasts uh what it's in response to and the popularity of the long form is in response to people being upset with like these traditional late night talk show things where there's a window here with one guy on the right and a window here with a guy on the left and there's a person in

the center and they're yelling at each other and then you cut to commercial and you don't really feel like things got resolved so the response to that where people are gravitating it's three it's theater yeah i think this is safe was it hard for you you know when we came up with comics it was also at that point like it was sort of a gladiatorial environment you know and i remember you know the boston scene uh you know was always like that's a tough scene yeah and you'd come up and it was kind of gladiatorial and but you had that audience and you develop kind of that thick skin is it hard to then make that switch in your mind to this different form that's so much more considered so much less about uh uh

conquering the stage yeah it is about being open and is that something that for you what what was the switch for you from those two forms because that's a that's an interesting switch well in the beginning there wasn't a very good switch you know it's like one of the reasons why the early episodes sucked it's like i didn't know what i was doing and i didn't think anybody was listening it was just for fun and there was a lot of just hanging out with comics and just doing what comics do if we're at a diner somewhere just talking shit and making each other laugh but we were doing it and videotaping it and then along the way

I started interviewing actual interesting people and talking to them and having conversations and not I don't you know I there's a place for comedy and then I don't I make a really Big point in never trying to force comedy into places where it doesn't belong That's I do that also with the ufc when i do commentary i'm never funny there's no reason to be it's not what my job is you know and then when i'm doing a conversation with someone i just try to talk i don't try to be a comic i don't try i just i'm a human i want and i want to know what they're talking about and i want to i want to get them to expand upon their ideas as best as they can. And I want to be engaged.

That's all I'm trying to do. So it wasn't that was a big transition. It was that I had to learn how to do this thing that I didn't think was a skill. I thought that being on the radio or podcasting was just talking. That's what I thought. It's like you're just talking. And then I realized, no, no, no. You're talking in a way that people want to listen. You making it entertaining you're keeping your ego in check you're you're moving the conversation along while not being overbearing you're not letting people

ramble too much where it's boring you you got to figure out how to juice things up and push them and massage them and move them around it's a skill and I didn't think it was a skill and you know and like I said, that's one of the reasons why my early episodes suck so bad. There wasn't even any consideration to the fact that people were listening. It was just fun. We were just doing it for ourselves. And then along the way,

and this also speaks to the value of criticism, I read a bunch of criticism about what was wrong with the podcast. You know, that i talk we talk over each other i talk too much whatever it was and i took it to heart and i would uh think about it i'll go okay i got to consider that people are listening to this this isn't just what i want to say it's what i want people to hear and how i want it just like stand-up you wanted the joke to easily enter into a person's mind so it's so well written and so perfectly timed that the audience goes john stewart's got this i'm just gonna sit back and let him take my thoughts on a

ride and that's that's what really good stand-up is i mean it's one of the reasons why dave was able to do that uh 846 special that way where he has this long drawn out story with so many important points and a few laughs thrown in there but so engaged and it's he's so you you just go with him you just let him take you just let him take you and that's that's everything whether it's someone giving a speech or you know i mean even like just almost every conversation that we have it's there's a skill to it that we're not taught i mean you know what it's like to talk to someone where they're not even really talking to you they're just kind of waiting for them to talk they're waiting for you to finish so they can talk about themselves that's that's a real problem with people and

communicating and i had to learn how to i learned how to be a better communicator really but also how to be authentically you because there is now like i think the best measure sometimes of art or a stand-up or those things is when you you hear things or see things that are uniquely that person like nobody could have delivered 846 but dave right like perfect yeah it just authentically uniquely him your voice that you develop authentically uniquely and that's a hard thing to develop it's funny because i feel like that's what stand-up helped do for me because when you do that in front of our eyes even i'll give like boston as an example you know when we'd be working nicks you do that that run of nicks is like the framingham and the other ones you know but go to the the one in in central boston first and i can remember i hadn't played the room before and i was

i was a young comic and i just done letterman i think i'd gotten like a big break. And so the guys at Nick's booked me on that run to be headlined my first run on those Nick's properties. So I came into Nick's and they were just going to throw me up on stage. And what they did was so such a learning experience because you kind of think like I'm on Letterman. I'm just going to walk into this place. I'm coming up from New York. Hot bed of comedy. I'm going to fucking strut my stuff at Nick's. And they threw up before me.

I think it was Lenny Clark, Kenny Rogerson, and Sweeney. And I walked down the room, and it was like Dresden. They had so blown that room out with brilliance. like dresden like they had so blown that room out with brilliance and then it was like and uh from new york a letterman guy john stewart and it was it was like they were clubbing a baby seal like i was just i was helpless man they did that to everybody it but so like wonderfully humbling yeah and you because it makes you realize in the moment like all right i've got a shit ton of work to do yes like just murder it with brilliant shit and they're just like oh boy yeah if you want to be humbled that the boston comedy scene in the

late 80s and the early 90s that was the place to be it was a great place to develop too though because it lets you know i mean you never want to be overconfident it's one of the worst things you could be in anything and you never want to be lazy if you're especially when you're delivering something to people that are actually paying to see you talk right like man there's such a such a important connection that you have to those people it is gotta you've gotta do the work it's got to be your best version and if you're not doing that and they know you're not doing that they get angry at you it's like it's the anger that an audience has towards a comic that's bombing is very difficult to describe you know like they're mad they can do that too they can talk too like why the fuck are you talking like if you're not on and you know like they're mad they can do that too they can talk too

like why the fuck are you talking like if you're not on and you know there's real valuable lessons to that as a comment coming up that you do apply to whether it's podcasting or hosting any kind of a show yeah no there's a fragility to it and if you don't stay on top of it you know the energy that room is it is a bear that will get up and walk out of the room uh if you're not careful but it's interesting also though now so you're known now stand up when you're known versus stand up when you're not is also a different experience because you walk into a room when they know you and there is you know you don't have to be as sharp if you don't want to because of that. And that's a discipline as well.

You kind of make sure that you're not coasting on maybe some goodwill that they had for you based on something else. That's very dangerous. That's one of the reasons why the comedy store is so important because when I go there, it's not my crowd. It's my crowd and, you know, uh, Anthony Jesselnik's crowd and Allie Wong's crowd. And like, there's a lot of people there coming to see everybody.

And you're going on after all these murderers. So when you're in that kind of an environment, you sort of have to dot your I's and cross your T's. You've got to do the work. Right. Are you still really involved? Because for me, once I started the show and once I had kids, I don't really get

to the clubs anymore so it it almost feels like old-timers day when i show up like he's gonna you know uh but i wish i i wish i could get out there more every night it would be you know it'd be like eight o'clock and i'd be like oh shit i should just drive up to the city and go work the cellar and then my wife will be like bachelor in, shit, I should just drive up to the city and go work the cellar. And then my wife will be like, Bachelor in Paradise is on. All right. Yeah, well, the way I had been setting it up at the store was all my sets would be after 10 o'clock for the most part, except rarely. Rarely I would do an 8 o'clock show. So everybody would be in bed.

So I'd leave my house, and my set wouldn't be probably until 11. So I'd leave my house, and everybody wouldn't be probably until 11 so i'd leave my house and everybody'd be asleep and it was perfect and i just and i that's also my favorite time to write too i would come home from the store and everybody'd be asleep fire up a joint and sit in front of the laptop and come up with some ideas and it's i had it down to a science before the the lockdown right how's the lockdown has the lockdown messed with your routine are you a creature i don't know i mean i mean for my comedy routine it certainly has i don't know i mean i'm doing my first shows this weekend in houston i don't know what the fuck's gonna happen

i don't know if i know how to do it anymore it's gonna be very strange i think houston is like you you couldn't go more into the belly of the beast like right now yeah like it's like being on the surface of venus like it's off the charts with this thing yeah i'm gonna go on stage with two bottles of lysol and just you know how girls do that thing when they spray perfume when they walk through it i'm gonna do that with lysol on stage a little bit on the i mean i think it's really critical to strengthen your immune system and i do a lot of things to do that and i think that that's something that people need to really concentrate on and i really wish that our elected officials were talking more about that and having speeches with doctors and

doing the opposite you remember michelle obama tried to do like try to put kale in something and everybody was like what the i'm sorry we're going back to tater tots yeah i mean just the science on vitamin supplementation and how critical it is for your immune system particularly vitamin d that is that could literally save lives and that knowledge is not secret that knowledge is out there you did the those those episodes on the game changers the uh with james woods and that was it was fascinating to watch because i i watched that movie and you know nutrition is also like diet is such an important part of what we do to ourselves that we that we don't think and especially in a time of covid where so many people like you say like

when you see what this does to people with type one diabetes or or uh with other kinds of uh you know conditions that might be caused from either poor diet or lack of access to uh you know healthier options and things like that you realize like shit we've put ourselves in a very vulnerable position yeah very vulnerable without we andrew schultz had a really good point he said this this pandemic highlighted the vulnerabilities both in our economic system and in our health system like the way we are as human beings the what who who's vulnerable the obese people people with diabetes older folks i mean, it highlights all these issues where, you know, we really need to concentrate on for the future. If you want more people to survive this, there are strategies

that can be implemented. And we really need to talk to people about just being normal stuff, being well hydrated, making sure you're not dehydrated well rested um teach people meditation techniques it's not hard to learn some breathing exercises that have been actually proven to increase your immune function it's not hard to teach people about vitamin d and supplementing it if you can't go outside so how do you get people then to take action because here's the other thing you remember like people's lives are hard yeah you're yeah when you're talking about like what we talked about earlier like economic inequality you know it's hard to go into an area where they feel like shit i don't know where my next meal is coming from and be like so here's what we're going to do we're just going to sit and breathe quietly for

five minutes and everything's good you know it's a really difficult it's like hierarchy of needs you know uh how do you how do you work into the idea that those types of theories are actually important to the betterment of like and the stability of the larger part of their life when they're fighting so hard just to stay afloat yeah it's a that's an interesting point. And I think what you have to do is it has to be, first of all, told by people who are doing it successfully. So people that are doing it that like maybe were struggling with their immune system and turned it around and got healthier, like those people are the ones that the people that are in a bad position right now, they really respond to when it comes to there's an emotional connection with if you see some guy who's on the cover of men's

health magazine he's ripped and he starts talking about fitness you're like get the fuck out of here i can't relate to you i'm never going to look like that but if you see someone who is in this the situation that you're in currently and they turned it around you already look like that well not me but listen i've been working out my whole life i've never stopped okay but if someone is fat i'm talking from their perspective and they see some guy who's really thin and chiseled then it's not going to make sense to them that they could ever be like that but if they see someone there's a lot of really fantastic photos and and instagram and facebook pages online where you can get inspiration from someone

who actually stuck to a diet, actually stuck to an exercise routine, and then speaks really well about how much it improved the way they feel, their emotions, their depression, all the aspects of their life. And that's, I think, one of the more, like David Goggins is a great example of that. I use him all the time because he's this incredibly inspirational guy who is a Navy SEAL. And at one point in time, he was 300 pounds. He was drinking milkshakes. And he puts those pictures of himself on Instagram all the time just to let people know, hey, I'm not some alien.

I'm a person who is weak just like you. I was lazy. I got fat. And then I figured out how to train my mind to be disciplined. And I figured out how to train my mind to be disciplined, and I'd figured out how to be happier. And I think that that's really important for people to see that we're not in a static state. We're all in a constant state of improvement and growth, hopefully, or deterioration if you're not careful.

But does that, you know, the thing that I worry about those sometimes is, similarly to economic distress, does it make a person's health be a function of their virtue does it does it take something that is beyond a lot of people's control that isn't that a little bit of like hey man if you just pull your pants up you you could do it like no it's not it's no it is all the way i know what you're like no it's not it's know what it is all the way i know what you're saying but it's not it's i did this and i can show you how i did it and maybe you can do it too that's what it is we don't have to look at every success is somehow or another thumbing in the face of people who can't achieve a similar goal but but there are enough people out there

that can that we should concentrate on that because i think it'll have a significant improvement on the overall health of us again as a community and i think this is really how we have to look at the the united states and human beings on earth in general we have to look at each other as a bunch of people that could very well be neighbors we're we're a community and if you're my friend and you were fat and you were willing to listen, and I used to be fat too, and I can tell you, hey, man, this is what I did. I stopped drinking soda. There are people that are, Jim, I mean, I understand the point there. And look, I'm an advocate for plant-based stuff. I think it's a healthy way to do it.

But obviously eating is such a personal experience that I hesitate to ever impart that in any other way. But I just feel like sometimes for people, it's almost more debilitating for that mentality of this is how you do it. You just got to get your shit together and go through this way. I do think you have to present more options, but know that it's maybe more complicated and people can be overweight or whatever and be healthy. It's not necessarily, uh, you know, something that's corrosive to them, but well, it is though being overweight is necessarily corrosive. It's not healthy for anybody. It's less healthy than being at an optimal weight. That's what's important. It gives you some sort of a burden. Whether that burden is sustainable is debatable. Maybe for some people it is, for some people it isn't. 90 and they're fine other people get pancreatic cancer like hicks and die in their 30s it it it depends wildly on the person but the idea that you can be fat and you can be healthy i think is a dangerous narrative because you're telling people listen don't improve you don't have to you can be healthy and be obese at the same time But the medical science does not really support that.

The more weight you lose up to a certain point, but if you get to a healthy body mass, your body works better. It's really simple. It doesn't tax your immune system as much. It doesn't tax your heart as much. It's better for you. It's better for your joints.

It doesn't mean that we should ignore people that are overweight and you know and pretend that you know that they're they're not worthy or they're not they're not good folks i have a very emotional reaction to that because i feel protective you're nice over people and i i just yeah i think you're a sweetheart it's great that's a good thing no it is it's the the reason why you're thinking like this because we're talking right we're talking about people doing well and you're like fuck what about the people who can't do well let's reach out to them and offer them an olive branch and yeah i get it man i guess you're you're right you're right look i have very good friends that are morbidly obese and they don't want to listen

and there's nothing i can do i just hug them when i see them and you know i hope that one day they You're right. You're right. Look, I have very good friends that are morbidly obese, and they don't want to listen, and there's nothing I can do. I just hug them when I see them, and I hope that one day they come to grips with it and they change, but they don't have to. You live this life for a certain amount of time, and if you want to live it eating cake and drinking beer, that's you. You do whatever you want. In the end, we're all going to be on the ground.

It's all pointless. Wait a minute we just had an hour-long conversation about optimistically taking this country and turning it around and got very fatalistic all of a sudden well that's true the end in the end we're all dying that's how the story ends we're all dead so the the story what i don't want people to do is suffer and i want people to feel better while they're alive and i think that's something that's missed in the message of health improvement it's like you will actually have a better experience on earth and it'll help you mitigate stress it'll help you uh it'll help you have better relationships because you won't be burdened down with a lot of like anxiety and stress that literally comes from a physical release of energy.

I look at the body like a battery, and I think that some people's batteries are just overflowing with corrosive material because they never exert it. They never blow it out. A battery is a bad analogy, but there's a certain amount of physical requirement I think your body has. And if you don't give that body that physical exertion, it doesn't feel good. We've evolved to hunt and gather and build homes and survive from predators.

And we carry around all the burdens in our body of this past. And there's no getting around that. And you can either deny it and just deal with all the tension, or you can exert your energy, find some way to calm your mind and live a life that's better let me ask you a question because now this is i'm wondering because you're talking about sort of evolving to a place where your body and like when you had james on and he was talking about plant-based do Do you have moral qualms about meat? Or do you not?

Like you said, we're hunters and that. Is that ever an issue for you? Or is it purely a health issue? There's both things. There's a health issue. There is a moral qualm with factory farming. There's not a moral qualm with hunting. Because I know the reality of the life of a deer.

qualm with help with hunting because i know the reality of the life of a deer if you don't kill that deer it's going to die a horrible death from a wolf or a coyote or a mountain lion or whatever the fuck gets a hold of it it's going to freeze to death it's going you can either die quickly by the hand of a person you respect that life and it'll nurture your body and the bodies of your family our problem is a disconnection more than anything and let me tell you something when the covid lockdown happened i got more requests from friends and more requests for information about hunting and gun ownership how do i protect myself and how do i feed myself and how do i grow food those were three really big questions that i kept getting from people it's funny i have such a different perspective on it in terms of just the um the relationship between myself and i didn't i was a big meat eater it's a big like deli guy pastrami and corned beef and all that my wife uh got into

rescue and these types of things and we ended up with a farm with pigs and goats and sheep and things like that. And it became untenable for me to make that decision. You know, that sort of that decision of, I think you'll be better off if I kill you. And it became, it was something I could no longer manage once I knew the process of it. And that was a hard, it's been a very hard process for me. It's only been about four or five years. How is your health?

Um, I mean, I'm an old Jew, so baseline pretty much, uh, we don't age well to begin with. How old are you now, John? We age a bit like avocados when you leave them out. I'm 57. I'm 52. So we're in similar boats. Similar boats. Yeah.

But, I mean, it's hard to know I feel good, you know, if you look at markers like cholesterol or blood pressure or those things, it's better. look at markers like cholesterol or blood pressure or those things it's better but like you say i don't i don't know enough about how the body processes to know if i'm i feel better the numbers say i'm better but you know genetics i'm sure plays a part in it as well but the funny thing is like i don't even think about it anymore like i just don't even think about it anymore well once you get into a custom and once your gut biome changes you know you really get accustomed to whatever you're eating good or bad

unfortunately and that's one of the reasons why people have such a hard time quitting sugar and bread and pasta and things along those lines so your your body just craves it. That's what it wants. When you start eating healthier food, your body does crave that. You can go off of meat and still be incredibly unhealthy. You can be vegan and just exist on Lay's potato chips. And it's a tougher road, and the world is certainly not built for that, The world is certainly not, it's not built for that. And it certainly feels a little bit of a narrower lane that you have to do.

And I also think it's an incredibly emotional topic. Yeah. Like very little that's as emotional and personal as what people put in their bodies and how they eat and what they do. And I'm always very respectful because I also, I got no leg to stand on man i like this is what i'm doing it feels better for me but i i always say like but it's such a personal and individual choice and you everybody's got to do for themselves the only thing i would say is like I do think it's important for people to get educated on it, to read up on, like you say, factory farming, or what might be the, you know, nutritional cost of it, or what are some of the things that are in it, or what maybe is it going to do to our immunity when, you know, we use so many antibiotics in the meat production. use so many antibiotics in the meat production i you know that's the only thing i say is like try and educate yourself to how your meal gets to your table that's why i'm a huge advocate for like

local farming and agriculture because those are the people they're just growing their food and they're bringing it to your table and i i find that incredible but but I also don't, I try not to take a position of judgment on people because I feel like that's unfair. Well, I think that's very wise of you. And I think that there's a lot of people that share your position on animal death. And I think that's one of the more promising aspects of laboratory created meat. As long as it can be done in a way that's actually going to be healthy for us. It seems like there's some real science behind that, and they're very, very close to releasing that on a large scale.

So it would be actual meat that doesn't come with death, which is really fascinating. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. You're talking about like the one that they had. I saw like it's a tank, and he pulls out, and it's like $20,000 for a chicken breast. They did that, yeah.

It was really expensive at one point in time, but they've gotten it down to a burger now. Like, they can actually make a burger out of this stuff. And they feel like as this technology improves, they, I mean,

essentially flesh, when it's not... If you could still have the part of meat that you like, but it came without death, do you think you would make that switch or is that something that well i certainly would with domestic animals the the difference between that and hunting there's uh there's a conservation aspect of it um one thing

that leads to uh protection of wildlife habitat is actually the money that comes from hunting tags and hunting equipment. There's that. There's also the type of relationship you have with your food when you actually work very hard and hunt it and kill it is very different than buying food from a store. And I would say similar, in a similar way, growing. Whole food. When you go to whole food, sometimes you really got to stop that. You know, there's a lot that goes into the trip to whole foods. Yeah.

It's hard to find a good parking spot. That's right. Yeah, I get it. Growing your own food in your backyard is very satisfying, too. And I would say to people, like, that's a microcosm. Like, it's a very micro form of what it feels like to hunt an animal and then eat it and feed your family for you know if i shoot an elk i eat it literally for a year so one animal death equals like a year of my meals and um you know there's also the moral

high ground position you know i think a lot of people love to look at the moral high ground of eating vegetables and only eating vegetables as being a superior way to live their life and that's that's a good decision i understand where you're coming from i understand that there's people that look at life very differently than me they maybe don't have this sort of fatalistic perspective even though it's respectful i have a very fatalistic perspective when it comes to just all organic organisms competing for resources and for life. These animals, I mean, I've run into them when they've killed each other. I've seen animals that have been taken out by other animals. I've come across their bodies torn apart by wolves in the woods.

It's a wild, wild thing out there man and i think we're so insulated by it in the in our culture of today that it's one of the reasons why veganism and all these things are becoming so attractive i would hope that along with that we're going to be nicer to each other that we're going to be we're going to grow to be a kinder human race i really i really hope that yeah because i think it's it's about consideration you know for me i think it was there was a certain part of consciousness that i never ascribed to animals to some extent it's funny because i always thought of myself as oh i you know i love animals i you know i've always had dogs and cats and you know you find a bird with a broken wing you stick him

in a box and two weeks later he flies away and you're a hero but i never really ascribed like individuality to them and i think that was the change for me was interacting in an in an individual way on your farm on the farm yeah you know i always told my wife once once we named them but it's fun yeah you watch them like their're playing they'll play or they and it it just changed my relationship to what i wanted it to be with animals and it it just made it untenable in that moment for me but i truly understand like that that is a really individualized, personalized experience that I made. And like I said, I would love it for people to make that connection because I think it's profound. There is something about that connection for people that when they do see it, you know, it's funny.

I'll talk about the pigs and they'll be like what you know they're where they just eat everything you're like no they're really playful they're smart don't like dogs you do belly rubs yeah it's it's but that was shocking to me i didn't know that i just thought oh it's like a blob again beings we're talking about nature john and there's nothing natural about a farm. That's part of the problem. I mean, it's all it's an animal prison and they're domesticated because we give them food and we kind of remove the natural fear that they would have of any, you know, eyeball facing forward predator, which is what we are. You know what's interesting about their health? You know what's interesting about, too?

Their health. Like, having our farm with sheep and goats and pigs, and they're all rescues, is like having a nursing home. Like, you can't believe the fragility of factory-farmed animals. Like, they are born to be sick. Like, pneumonia. Like, genetically designed to gain too much weight for their legs it really is you know the island of miss victoria like they they've genetically modded or done whatever they've done and and the health of these animals that are in our food supply yeah that our mainstay of our food supply is really suspect yeah Yeah, that's why I prefer hunting.

If you're eating an animal that's a wild animal, you're eating an athlete. I mean, they're sinewy and thick and they're strong and they've survived. And they're so much more nutrient dense. When you're talking about factory farmed animals, you're talking about, I mean, factory farmed animals is the worst version of what human beings are capable of. They were capable of ignoring suffering to the point where we lock them all in warehouses, their piss goes down in a tunnel and fills a small lake up, and they've flown over these places with drones. It's horrific, right? The pig farms in particular, they're horrific. But when you're talking about what you're doing on

your farm like of course you can't eat those things they're your pets that would be i mean you're you're naming them and feeding them and touching them but i extrapolate that now so i i think what happened was i went oh right that's in the same way that like i love my dog but if you have a dog i wouldn't kill your dog right because i look at dogs now in a different way so i think i extrapolate to the animal kingdom in a way a different i have i feel like because of my wife and she's been she's a much kinder, smarter version of me. So because of her kind of showing me that relationship and experiencing myself, like it's just changed the way that I view it.

And that's been, and it kind of takes us back around to the earlier part of the conversation. Because when you think about animal agriculture and you talk about those hog farms, where are they located? They're located in the poorest neighborhoods. They locate, and the environmental damage that they do is also damage that's done to poor rural communities

that live around them now i'm not suggesting that there's not economic there's an economic incentive in an industry around it and certainly not you know you don't just end industries but reform again like it it's sort of like uh george p bush said this he was talking about donald trump because i'm going to support donald trump because donald trump is the only thing standing between america and socialism and i was like the only thing standing between amer America and socialism. And I was like, the only thing standing between America and socialism is an inability to meaningfully reform capitalism and its more damaging effects. And if we can't do that, then the people take to the streets. I think reform, like Bernie was talking about and those other guys, that will save capitalism. That will save democracy by showing that we recognize that there is collateral damage

to the systems that we use to gain wealth and to gain power. And if we can reform those systems meaningfully for the people who suffer most terribly under them we save it but if we can't the bastille gets stormed like that's just what kennedy say if you make peaceful evolution impossible you make violent revolution inevitable yeah so we i think at some point we have to demonstrate the will and the stamina to be able to attack these problems. And that's why I'm voting Joe Rogan. Yeah, no, I think everyone agrees, but everyone feels like their hands are tied. And again, I think that's one of the reasons why these protests and just this whole explosion

after George Floyd has been so transformative. I think because people recognize like this is a real moment of change and of course opportunists and looters and all kinds of other crazy shit happened along the way but it's it speaks to the fact that there's so many people in the street it speaks it speaks to this this like we can actually do something now we've got momentum let's keep it moving are you hopeful hopeful? Yes, I'm always hopeful. I'm very optimistic, even though I have a fatalistic perspective. Exact same.

In these terrible times, how do you remain hopeful? And I'm like, because better people outnumber shitty people. Yes. I long shot. They do. That's just the truth. They really do. Sometimes we're powerless.

Sometimes we may act out of fear or resource garden, whatever that is. Better people outnumber shitty people by a long shot. And we're in an adolescent stage of our evolution as a civilization. It's growing and changing. There's never been a civilization like us today. And we're growing and changing to try to suit our real sensibilities and to try to to try to get better at this fucking thing and not just accept this old crazy corrupt structure that's existed forever thank you yeah you put a little fire in my belly good like this you know i've been around doing the thing but like uh i've really've, I've really enjoyed, uh, I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Listen, man, I always enjoy talking to you. I appreciate you very much. And I don't get to see you enough. All right, my friend. And, uh, hopefully when this all ends, uh, everybody can gather again at the, you know, at the store and have, do a good set and talk some shit with each other and have some fun. Let's do it, brother. Take care of my friend and good luck with your film.

Irresistible is out when?'s do it, brother. Take care, my friend, and good luck with your film, Irresistible. It's out when? Now? Tomorrow. I'll watch it. John Stewart, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, my brother. Thank you, sir. Bye.