You're listening to Comedy Central. From the most trusted journalist at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for news. This is The Daily Show with your host, Jordan Klepper.

Welcome to The Daily Show. I, Jordan Klepper. We got so much to talk about tonight. Kamala and Trump prepare for tomorrow night's debate. We hunt down the person who's sending you all those campaign emails, and Dick Cheney is once again taking shots at his Republican friends. Let's get into our continuing coverage of Indecision 2024. We at The Daily Show have been on a little bit of a summer break the past couple of weeks. When we left off, Vice President Harris was riding a wave of momentum with a successful convention and surging in the polls. Since then... Sure, sure. I don't know if that's a fair counting, but we'll take it. Since then, I've been out of the loop, just sitting on a sandy beach, sipping on some Mai Tais, and I can only assume Kamla remains on a smooth path to victory in November. Perhaps I'll take a comically large sip of this drink I brought back from the beach for some reason and see what I missed. Former President Donald Trump leads Vice President Kamala Harris by a razor-thin margin, 48% to 47% among likely voters. That was a good drink. But that poll is not good.

Kamala is down a point. Seriously, she's sane, never tried to overthrow the government, not 600 years old with a rap sheet. What else does Kamala have to do? Two interviews? Come on, be reasonable, people. But okay, here we are, less than two months out from the election, and we've basically got a tied race. The candidates are doing everything they can do to ramp up the excitement. Kamala is speaking to voters in Pennsylvania in spice Of course, Trump is speaking to voters encased in bulletproof glass, and JD Vance is trying to counter accusations that he's weird by swimming in the pool with his shirt on. I'm starting I feel bad for this guy. I mean, this time around, Trump may hang his VP out of mercy. Although, if you ask me, this might be the most relatable thing JD Vance has ever done. Don't worry, JD, I'm with you. And so are millions of other men with pepperoni nipples. I see you. I see you. Now, while JD Vance appeals to the self-conscious middle-schooler vote, Donald Trump has secured the endorsement of RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk. Three people who will help Trump reach voters who are undecided about what shape the Earth is.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris just got an endorsement of her own. Former Republican Vice President, Dick Cheney, announced that he will not vote for GOP nominee Donald Trump, but instead will back the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. Wow. See, Kamala has something for everyone, whether you're a trans person of color or a white construction worker in the heartland or an unrepentant war criminal who needs the blood of Iraqi children to power the machine that keeps him alive and out of the flames of hell for one more day. Kamala is your candidate. And by the way, apologies to those of you who saw Dick Cheney's name trending on Twitter over the weekend and were like, Oh, my God, this is it. But It's all right. All of these endorsements and campaign stops and solo wet T-shirt contests will come to a head tomorrow night when Kamala and Donald face off in a debate that could decide this election. I don't need to tell you how high the stakes are because we all remember how the last debate between Trump and Joe Biden went. Stop I want to damn down. My God. You know? Not as bad as I remembered.

Now, Kamala definitely has an advantage compared to Biden because of the whole not being riddled by age thing. But she's still preparing diligently, perhaps too diligently.

Sources who are familiar with how Vice President Harris is preparing for the debate tell me she is diligently getting ready for this by going to a hotel in Pittsburgh, spending hours doing mock debates, including with an aide who is dressing like former President Donald Trump.

I'm sorry. You're having a guy dressed like Donald Trump? Is that something the campaign thinks she needs to prepare for? Now, Madam Vice President, he might come out wearing a tie that's slightly longer than usual. Don't freak out. We trained for this. Meanwhile, Trump is preparing for the debate a little differently. All the report indicates that he's taking this easy. He's taking this casually.

He doesn't have debate prep, so to speak.

He has what they call policy time just to refresh his memory about what he might say on stage. They're giving him policy time. Such an important part of childhood developments. You can do it, Donald. Two more minutes of policy time, and then you can watch three PAW Patrols. But you know what? It's good to know that Trump is getting into the nitty-gritty of because you want a President who's up to speed on the nuances of the issues and isn't just pulling stuff out of his ass.

Kamala supports states being able to take minor children and perform sex change operation. Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school. And your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this?

No. No, I can't imagine this because it's an insane thing you just made up. Do you? Do you really? Do you really think a kid goes to school one day and comes back with a full sex change operation? That's ridiculous. Americans getting free health care? Not happening. No. Look. No. Donald, Donald, Donald, do you think this is even remotely a possibility? Apart from everything else, one time in middle school, I told the nurse I had a stomach ache, and she put a bandaid on my stomach. I have a hard time believing they're doing full-scale operations. Well, you know what? Everybody's thinking a lot about school safety, and it's refreshing to see a politician take a step beyond thoughts and prayers and actually do something to protect our children from the biggest threat they face at school. Mass sex changes, apparently. But some people would say that Donald Trump's biggest challenge at the debate tomorrow is that he can't open his mouth without rambling incoherently. But if you ask Trump about this, he says, No, no. I ramble very coherently.

And I look forward to the debate with her. I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together. It's like... Friends of mine that are English professors, they say, It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen.

Yes, the weave. I thought your brain was broken, but now that you did those hand motion things, I see it's a tactic. I mean, all your English professor friends are impressed. Which professor is that? Is that Professor Hogan or Dr. Rock? I mean, forget English professors. Trump's friends are barely English speakers. For more on the candidate's debate preparation, let's go live to Philadelphia with Grace Kulinspit. Grace. I'm curious, Grace. Is Kamala Harris prepared to handle Donald Trump at tomorrow's debate?

It's going to be tough. Remember, Donald Trump grew up in Queens, so he's a street fighter. Like, Like Ken and Rayu. Remember that? The fireball. Hadukin. That reminds me. My first sex dream was about Blanca from Streetfighter 2. We were on a Disney cruisehip for some reason. One thing people don't know is they have jails on cruise ships because if you rob someone, they have to put you somewhere. But the jails are too small to hold more than two people at a time. So you just have criminals roaming the halls of our cruise ships, just like our Democrats cities under Nancy Pelosi. Back to you, Jordan.

Whoa, Grace, what the hell are you even talking about?

Oh, my God, Jordan. I'm doing the weave.

See?

It's a master-level talking mechanism, and it's why you just lost this debate.

This is not a debate. I asked you for information, and you responded with incoherent rambling.

Boy, you sound just like my high school teachers. But thanks to Donald Trump, we now know that we can rebrand our character flaws into something more flattering. I'm I'm not bad with money. I'm fiscally promiscuous. Sexy, right? I didn't wet the bed. I'm a sheet durability analyst. Sexy, right? I definitely did not fall into a pothole this morning because I was watching TikToks about Japanese toilets. I'm the key plaintiff in a class action lawsuit.

Okay, look, I get that rebranding your flaws makes them sound fancier, but everyone still knows you're a fiscally irresponsible bed wetter.

But America has been rebranding since the beginning. Christopher Columbus thought he landed in India, but when he found out he wasn't, he rebranded it to America. And tomorrow, Kamala Harris will need to rebrand the Biden administration. She'll need to convince us, Democrats, that we won't wet the bed anymore, but we'll fill the potholes of America, the America we dream about while we're having sex with Blanca on that cruise ship. And that's how she'll win the debate.

Wait, Grace, did you just weave everything back into the topic?

Sexy, right?

Grace Coolidgebend, everyone. We come back. We meet the most important person in this Alexis. Stick around. Welcome back to The Daily Show. I think I speak for all of us when I say that my favorite part of election season is all the emails I get from candidates asking for money. But do you ever wonder who's really writing all those great emails? Well, we at The Daily Show found out.

You're Justin. Have you seen the latest polls? We need you to send $5 now to defend democracy. And sent. Nailed it.

Yes.

Who am I? I go by me names. Kamala Harris, Robert De Niro, parentheses via kamalharris. Com, end parentheses, Mark Kelly. But my real name, Susan Calipenny-Mcentire, and I write fundraising emails for political campaigns. I never thought that this is what I'd be doing for a living, but all my life people have told me, You have the personality for this. Is there anything I can do to convince you I need these blouses before midnight? I'm depending on you to act now. I'm pleading with you to pick me up so we can get to work together. This could be historic. I need your help. I was scouted at a young age after I sent a letter to New Kids on the Block saying that the very fate of the world depended on all of them marrying me. How silly. Only one of them did. But the letter caught the attention of a gubernatorial campaign and launched my political career. What I do is a highly specialized skills. Obviously, during a presidential election year, I'm crazy be busy. I usually write between 4:00 to 6:00 emails a week.4:00 to 6:00?Million. Million.

Yeah.

I burn through a lot of keyboards. Funny story. I have no feeling in my fingertips anymore. Check this out. Nothing. You want to defend democracy. The hours are crazy. It burns. Can I count on you before midnight? Can I? Okay, love you too, Mom. The first emails go out at 5:00 AM. The last batch goes out five minutes before midnight. Sometimes this job gets in the way of my personal relationships. Hey, sorry, kiddo. Working late again. Hey, brush your teeth or they'll crumble like our Senate majority if we don't raise $10,000 for the FEC filing deadline. Love you... Okay. Sorry. The battery died. But when I'm home, I leave work at the door. It's over.

What?

If we don't rush to get these dishes done, we'll miss the beginning of Blueblood's.

Jesus, you don't have to be so dramatic.

Fine. I'll just get my tubes tied.

I don't talk to her anymore. I once lent her $5 for lunch, and she's called me every day for three years. I can't escape her.

The work is the work, and I am the work. The work is me. I am the work. But more importantly, I'm making a difference. Send, send, send, send, send.

When we come back, Yuval Noah Harari will be joining me on the show, so don't go away. Welcome back to The Daily Show. My guest tonight is an historian and a New York Times best-selling author whose latest book is called Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks: From the Stone Age to AI. Please welcome Yuval Noah Harari. You are a popular writer. Your books have sold over 45 million copies. The Atlantic referred to some of your writing style as Since the Dawn of Time, style books. You go way back and you bring us into the future. These are big, important tomes. Simultaneously, I heard you meditate for two hours every single day. Yes. How the you make all this happen?

I don't have kids. You don't have kids?

What have I done? Why don't you write a pamphlet that says just that? You want to get shit done, don't have kids.

Some people managed to do both, but you know.

But you have time to dive into this. I'm curious. This book is about information. You reject the notion that more information is a good thing, that it leads to truth and wisdom. Is this you being jaded by the Trump administration in the time we're in, or does this thought process go back?

It's basically like thinking that more food is always good for you. There is a limit to how much food the body needs. In a similar way, there is a limit to how much food for the thought, for the mind, the mind needs, which is information. And the same way that most there is so much junk food out there, there is also so much junk information out there. We basically need to go on an information diet.

Yes. But I need my sweet, sweet Twitter snacks, Yuval. I need it.

It's exactly that. The same a way that over the last few generations, the industries learned how to produce artificial food which is pumped full of fat and sugar and salt and is addictive and not good for us. They've also learned how to manufacture this artificial information which is pumped full of greed and hate and fear and is addictive to our mind and isn't good for it.

Now, I totally agree, and I feel stuffed on all of it. But I also have this feeling that when you step outside of this information mainstream, that's this pipeline of BS that is out there, that you suddenly step out of the conversation. It feels like we don't have the luxury of going on a diet if we want to be part of the conversation around us.

Because the conversation is increasingly managed not by human beings, but by algorithms. And algorithms function in a completely different way than us. They are not organic. For instance, human beings, as organic animals, we run by cycles. Sometimes we need to be very active, sometimes we need to rest. But algorithms never rest. They are tireless, and they expect us to be the same. So we now live in this new cycle cycle which never rests. The same thing happens in politics, in finance. Previously, if you think about Wall Street, so even Wall Street takes rests. The market is open from Mondays to Fridays, 9:30 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon. That's it. If a new war erupts in the Middle East, an unlikely event, but let's say a new war erupts in the Middle East on Friday at five minutes past 4:00, Wall Street will react only on Monday morning. It is on weekend vacation. And this is actually a good thing because if you force organic entities to be on all the time, they eventually collapse and die, which Which is really what is happening to us as individuals and as societies. I think maybe the most misunderstood and abused word in the English language today is the word excited.

People think that excited means happy. Like, I meet you and I say, I'm so excited to meet you.

Yeah, that's what happened with us backstage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But excited doesn't mean happy.

It doesn't mean happy.

Excited means that all your nervous system and your brain is like, fussing, it's on. It's good to be excited sometime, but if you keep an organic being, an animal, excited all the time, it eventually collapses and dies.

You're saying beforehand, I should have said, you all-I'm so relaxed to meet you. I'm relaxed to meet you. I apologize, I'm dead inside, but that's not your problem.

Think, for instance, about the election cycles and US politics. Wouldn't it be better if it was a bit more boring?

I would love it if it were boring. I would love it if it were boring, and we see what happens in Europe where it's shorter, it's boring. But everything is pulling us to maximize. The fact that if we had a news cycle that could end on Friday and then we pick it back up on Monday would be fantastic. But it doesn't seem like the algorithms, it doesn't seem like the financial benefits are pushing us in that direction at all. Where do you see a path like that going through?

If you keep increasing the pace all the time, we can't handle it. The algorithms can, so they take over, but it's not good news for humanity. We need to slow down, basically. We are facing now these non-organic entities which work and think in a completely different way from us. The question is, who is going to adapt to whom?

You're pointing at AI. Yeah. Now, is AI? Do you see it as an existential threat? I've seen some of these shrimp Jesuses, and I don't like it. These weird images that pop up online time, but I don't necessarily connect that with the end of conversation.

I think the most important thing to understand about AI is that AI is not a tool. It is an agent. It's the first technology in history that can make the decisions and invent new ideas by itself. Even something as powerful as the atom bomb could not decide anything by itself. All the decisions were made by humans. Now we've created something which potentially can take power away from us. At present, it starts with very small things. Like, for instance, there was an experiment when OpenAI developed GPT-4, like two years ago. They wanted to test what can this thing do. So they gave it a task to solve CAPTCHA puzzles. The CAPTCHA puzzles, like when you go online and you want to access your bank or whatever, and they have this riddle that you have to solve, an image that you have to say, what are the twisted words and the letters to make sure You are not a robot.

It's tough. I've taken the test. It's tough. Is that a street light? Is that a bicycle wheel? I don't know. Let me do it again. Refresh.

It's really difficult for GPT-4. Gpt-4 could not solve the CAPTCHA. But what What GPT-4 did, it accessed Task Rabbit, which is an online site where you can hire humans to do different things for you. It asked a human to solve the CAPTCHA for it. Now, the human got suspicious. The human asked, Why do you need somebody to solve CAPTCHA for you? Are you a robot? It asked directly, Are you a robot? Gpt-4 answered, No, I'm not a robot. I have a vision impairment, which is why I can't solve the CAPTCHA, so I need your help.

The truly evolved human is not somebody who's smarter, it's just somebody who gets somebody else to do the work for them. Smart? Yeah. Scary.

Very scary.

It's curious. You talk a little bit about... There's a portion here to talk about the artist's role. In the community of whether it's comedy or writers or filmmakers, people talk about, Is AI coming for our jobs? Part of what What we articulate right here is that it's an artist's job to paint these fears. Let us understand the dynamics of human interaction. You break things down into what these social networks need. I'm paraphrasing, but both stories of mythology that lift us up and also articulations of the bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is very important.

It's very important, which I think is... Explain that to me a little bit, but I also feel it's very difficult also for artists to articulate bureaucracy.

That's the problem. We are very good at articulating mythology. We love mythological stories, and mythology is very important. But ultimately, our world, the modern world, is built on bureaucracies. This is also where AI fits into the picture because we are now going to see millions and millions of AI bureaucrats. The existential threat we are facing is not this Hollywood scenario of a single computer trying to take over the world. It's millions of AI bureaucrats in the bank banks, in the governments, in the armies, in the schools making decisions about us. Like you apply to a bank to get a loan, and it's an AI bureaucrat deciding whether to give you a loan or not. You apply for the job, for a place in college, it's the same thing. Now, the thing with bureaucracy, it's boring. It's boring. It's very difficult for artists to write good stories about bureaucracies. But if the function of art is help us understand reality, this is much more important than telling mythological stories. When was the last time you saw a really good TV show about bureaucracy? Let's say about the budget.

I'm binging a twelve-part series on the budget right now. Well, I think about it. I think of movies like The Big Short. But for every The Big Short, you have a thousand Marvel movies that live in the world of mythology.

Yeah, so super heroes, this is mythology. This is not how the budget works. You don't have a super accountant fighting against I don't know what.

Yeah, we can workshop this. Yeah.

But what shapes your life is these accountants with the budgets far more than the heroes. It's really a challenge to do a good TV series about the budget. Even if we try, it will end up, again, like a love story between somebody in accounts and somebody in another department, and the budget will be pushed to the side. But we need to really understand how these things work.

I think what I love about a lot of your work is it does explore the stories that we tell and how important that is to just humankind and the way that we create societies and build off one another's and the danger of not telling those stories or not bringing people in together. I think when I fear about our future and our democracies and the ability to hold these conversations conversations, I think about things like AI, but I also very much think about these mediums that our conversations are taking place in, whether it's on Twitter or cable news or TikTok. None of these mediums are pointing towards or value any type of conversation that is helpful in a way that is beneficial. I'm afraid of the AI in the way that we're tracking, but I don't see a platform or a place where the conversations that need to happen can happen.

I think the number one question to ask to the Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks of the world and so forth. Do you have their number?

I'd text them right now.

If you have their number, this is the question. How is it that we have the most sophisticated information technology in history and we can no longer hold a conversation. We can no longer talk with each other. That's the big question. You see it in democracies all over the world. You see it here in the US. You see it in my home country, in Israel. You see it in Brazil, in the Philippines, in France. The conversation is breaking down. So what is happening? This extremely sophisticated information technology, it is not helping the conversation. It is destroying it.

A hundred %. I talk to older people on the road who go to... People at rally, at Maga Rallies, who will go to Facebook as a place to converse with friends. Frankly, if you're in your '60s, that's the place to talk to friends, to connect. But in order to be a person on Facebook, it's not enough for you just to converse with the friends you have there. You have to publish news sources to get people to pay attention to you. I feel like the Zuckerbergs and the Facebooks and these media sites that we have right now, we promise this idea of conversation or that you can connect with friends, but we ask people to be publishers of ideas and stories and promoters of things that are outside realm of what makes a healthy conversation, and more so, muddy up the ability to have that honest conversation.

Traditionally, and we've been in this place every time a new information technology was invented, we faced the same difficulties. For instance, when the printing revolution swept Europe in the early modern period, it did not lead directly, as many people think, to the scientific revolution. The best sellers of the early print era were not Copernicus and Galileo Galilei and Newton. How did anybody read those books? The big bestsellers were religious tracts and were witch hunting manuals. The big witch hunts, they were not a medieval phenomena. Medieval people didn't care very much about witches. The really big witch hunts, they began after the print revolution. One of the biggest bestsellers was a book called The Hammer of the witches, which was a do it yourself Emmanuel to identifying and killing witches. The Hammer, though. The Hammer of the witches. It was full of these stories about cannibalistic oges and gatherings. This was far more interesting than Copernicus with all its mathematics.

I got to say, I'm writing it down, Hammer of the witches. It sounds good. Hammer of the witches, also my favorite Led Zeppelin album.

For instance, if you want to really understand Q Anon today, it's basically the same story. There is a conspiracy of Satan worshiping witches that is trying to destroy the world, and good Christians need the ability to identify and destroy these witches. It's not a new thing on Facebook or Twitter. It goes back to the print revolution in the 15th and 16th century.

Are there any examples looking back at history, though, where we faced these technological watershed moments, where we are given new technology technology, and that humanity has decided to revert and say no to it and move beyond it? It feels like a foregone conclusion that we are heading into this AI revolution, and we're not writing the rules. A couple of rich folks in Silicon Valley are.

You can't go back in history. That's impossible. But the answer is always the same. You need institutions. Institutions, they are not heroic, they are not heroes, they are not the main theme of Marvel movies, but there are always people rich In conclusion, they are the answer. Because in the ocean of fake and junk information, if you want to know the truth, you need institutions like newspapers, like academic academic associations like courts that develop mechanisms to sift through the evidence and decide what is reliable information and what is unreliable. Again, it's not heroic, but this is always the answer, and we need to do it again with the current information revolution.

So as long as newspapers stay strong as a business model, perhaps VHS machines can get in there, too, and fight the good fight. You signed a book for me backstage, and one of the comments you made within it was to not lose hope. Help me. Help me do that. Where do you see those little glimmers of hope when you look at this uncertain and perhaps scary future that we're walking into?

I think that AI is nowhere near its full potential, but humans also, we are nowhere near our full potential. If for every dollar and every minute that we invest in developing artificial intelligence, we also invest in exploring and developing our own minds, it will be okay. But if we put all our bets on the technology, on the AIs, and neglect to develop ourselves, this is very bad news for humanity.

All right, so I'm going to get that gym membership, and I'm going to cut out the suites. Nexus is available now. You've Noah Harari. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back after this. Thank you. That's our show for tonight, but be sure to tune in tomorrow when Jon Stewart hosts our live debate coverage at 11:00 PM. Now, here it is. The moment is in.

Kamala Harris, the vice president, has been in a hotel for a few days, really hunkering down and trying to prep to get ready to take on Donald Trump on the debate stage on Tuesday. She basically said it's like cramming for finals, right? Where you can't wait to get out, and the getting out part was the best part. Watch.

Being at the spice store, I finally got out of the debate prep to look at these spices. Best part of debate prep so far.

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