Welcome to Tucker Carlson Show. It's become pretty clear that the mainstream media are dying. They can't die quickly enough. And there's a reason they're dying, because they lie. They lied so much. It killed them. We're not doing that. At tuckercarlson. Com, we promise to bring you the most honest content, the most honest interviews we can without fear or favor. Here's Here's the latest. Do you have strong feelings about Disney?

Yeah, I do. It's terrible.

You think Disney is terrible?

I think it's become terrible.

I agree with that, but I can't quite articulate why.

Well, it's lazy.

Disney's lazy?

When people take their kids on vacation there, it's like, I understand it, but there's other places to go that are real, that have actual history. You could teach your kids about country. You could teach them about anything. You could teach them about things that have actually happened. I don't think Disney World is a terrible place to go, but you shouldn't be doing it every year. There's people that go every year. There's people that go without children. There's people that go Without children? Yes, because people are sick. There's this whole group of Disney adults, people that really enjoy Disney World. They meet their wives at Disney World. They meet their husbands at Disney World, and somehow then not not procreate. And they love it, and they say they remain children forever, which I don't think is the goal of life. And yeah, I just think it's upsetting when I see it.

So it's like an emotional retardation that gets you?

Yeah. You're looking at people that are stunted. They're unable, for whatever reason, to access other... There's a lot of art in America. There's a lot of literature. There's a lot of film. It's not all cartoons. Not all Disney. Not to take anything away from a lot of the great Disney classics, but it's supposed to be the beginning of your journey and not the whole thing. You know what I mean? The Little Mermade is supposed to start you off, but then you go and find other things. What's terribly depressing to me or disturbing, or both, is that you have people that are still as into it as they were when they were five, except they're 40. I think that's a big problem.

It's It's not cheap. I've never been.

No, it's hot. It's very hot, and it's not cheap. They have all these meal plans now that they offer people, which is like these terrible gross food that they'll give you throughout the day. If you pay an all-inclusive fee, someone will go and put a churro in your mouth every half hour. Then there's a lot of Disney people out there talking about how to do the parks. There are these people, plus-size people that are now trying to review Disney rides to see if they fit in them. There are people that have YouTube videos dedicated to the type of shoes you have to wear at Disney World because there's a lot of walking. There's people that go, I love Disney World, but I refuse to walk. Is there a way? Can I get? It's become very big with the maybe voluntarily a disabled community where you have...

Is anyone voluntarily disabled? It seems to be.

We have a few people. I mean, I'm not an Olympic swimmer. I'm not going out there and shitting on people. But I'm saying there are people that seem more excited about the scooters and the wheelchairs and everything like that, and a lot of them love Disney World.

What's the connection? Just societal collapse?

Well, societal collapse is, I think, the connection. But there's something about being a child forever and a place that tells you you should be a child forever, and that it is good to have the qualities of a child forever. It was like a diaper fetish. It's a diaper fetish. It's like there was a woman who in New Hampshire wanted to open a diaper spa where adults would wear diapers because they have some type of fetish where they like to be in diapers. And this woman was trying to open it in this tiny New Hampshire town, and many people in the town got mad at her. It's very hard to open a small business. Nobody really wanted that. It was a diaper spa. I was for it because I said, If you make the migrants that are coming into this country, work at the diaper spa, they'll just go to Europe. I said, We don't need a wall. We just need to get everyone over to the Diaper Spa. But I put the modern, a lot A lot of the modern Disney World cultural stuff just above the Diaper Spa, where you have people that are going to this place where they feel like children.

I don't know what it is. I think you should go for your children It's an experience for them. When it becomes about you in any way, I think it's sick.

But it also seems important, like this is a measure of something.

Yes, I do. I think that this is a weird There's a weird obsession with this idea that you're like, This is me. I have no shame. There should be things I think that people are ashamed of or they like quietly. Maybe if you love Disney World and you're an adult, you shouldn't announce it to the world. I don't need sweatshirts and T-shirts and tank tops and Mickey hats. I don't need to see on your social media how much you adore Disney World. If you can't fit in a ride at Disney World, I don't need you to review that on YouTube for everyone. There is something about keeping somethings close to the vest because they're shameful. Well, because they're certainly not ideal. The idea that this is not your best self that you're putting out there. I understand as a comedian, there's a lot of things that we do where we don't put out our best self. But we always try to make We make it funny and we make a joke out of it. But there are a lot of people out there now, I feel like, that are forcing the world to accept them in their worst iteration, if that makes any sense.

Without admitting that that iteration sucks.

Yeah, or without admitting that that iteration, at the very least, needs some work. I think there's a lot of people out there that are just like, Hey, this is me. This is it.

That sounds like giving up.

There's a lot of giving up, I think.

Do you feel Is there a sense of that around us, people are giving up?

I think there's a lot of people that don't see a future, and technology has made the world pretty isolating, which is the exact opposite of what it was intended to.

Yes, I remember that. You're old enough to remember the promise of technology, which is to bring us together.

Everyone is going to be together, but it seems pretty isolating. I think a lot of people are out there and they don't see any future that that they are excited about and they don't think they can have a family or afford the standard of living that they would want a family to have. I think there are a lot of people out there that struggle with that for sure.

And technology is related to that.

Well, I think I think technology has certainly it's lessened community. I think physical communities have suffered a little bit because all of the way that everyone grows up now is pretty flattened. Everybody's been flattened technology, meaning everybody's looking at the same things, the same algorithms. They're being fed the same stimuli, the same inputs. Whereas when I grew up, you would meet people from different regions of the country, and they grew up completely different. They had a different musical taste, and they had completely different histories and cultural influences.

And accents.

And accents and everything. Everybody came together. There was this really interesting cultural diffusion that happened when you met someone from Louisiana and someone from Seattle, Washington. Now, I got to be honest with you, I feel like that's less true. I feel like it's less true because I think everybody's growing up with these same algorithms. They're being fed the same things. When you meet people, they're not as interesting as they once were because you've all had a similar childhood, whether you know it or not, because you've been fed the exact same stimuli over and over again every day on your phone.

Which, even leaving aside the potential for controlling people's brains and making them obedient surfs, which does seem like the point to me, it homogenizes everything. It makes everyone just flat and boring.

It makes everybody boring. It's one of the things that, again, you would think that the great promise of technology would be the exact opposite, which is that everybody was going to be more unique or more interesting. But that hasn't happened.

I noticed this with the early Apple ads. The idea behind the personal computer was this is your window into the world, but it's also a way to broadcast your own unique qualities, and you're you, you're distinct from everyone else. Then you look at the Apple Store and everyone's dressed exactly the same. They have the same nose ring, the same T-shirt. The store, to me, just screamed, Obey.

Right. Well, that's what it seems like. There seems to be a comfort in that type of making everything very clean and homogenized, where everybody is expected to to have the same value system, and that value system is being given to them.

I was really struck last night at the dinner that we had by how many people you know and by how many places you are all the time, not just on tour, but you seem to be talking to people. That was the opposite of the life I thought comedians lived, where you're alone online in your hotel room.

Why do you do that? I can't speak for all I know a lot of us do travel a lot. A lot of us talk to... I've always just been very curious about the world. I'm incredibly curious about why things are the way they are, why certain people and certain ideas become popular, why certain things seem to be inevitable, how the society is set up, the things that we know, the things we don't know, the hidden power structures that we start to realize how enduring they are as we get older. You don't realize that when you're young, everything when you're young It seems to be. I remember watching Saturday Night Live as a kid, which was a hilarious show that I loved, and it was Bush and Gore. It was very funny. It was these two guys. We had Will Farrell, and I forgot. I think Darryl Hammond did Al Gore. It was really funny. You thought that was what the world was. It was these just we have two people, they have opposing ideas, we all go vote. Then one of those people becomes a president for four years, and then that person enacts an agenda that people either disagree with or agree with, and that person has varying degrees of success, and then they're judged four years later.

That's what I thought. That's what everyone thought. I think my understanding now of this country is so much deeper and more complex and more interesting than it originally was, because now I believe that those things are only part of the larger story of how the country actually operates.

What changed your view? When was the moment when you realized that's not actually what's happening?

I read a book called Family of Secrets, which was an interesting book by a guy named Russ Baker, and he wrote about the Bush family. It was about basically a lot of these events from JFK to Watergate, that he had this alternate understanding of how these events had happened. He had gone and interviewed lots of people, and he had researched. I think the book took him about five years. It came out I think, 2007 or 2009, maybe. I was reading it. I was in the mortgage business, and it had fallen apart, and there was nothing to do. We'd all sit in our offices and fuck off because it was nothing to do. I was reading this book.

Where did you get it?

Of Barnes & Noble. It was just a book. Really? Yeah, it was just a book. On your own? Yeah, just on my own. Me and a friend were reading it, and we each got them. I was reading it, and I started to analyze things in a way that I never had before. Basically, It was this light that went off in my head. I'm like, Well, what if everyone's lying? What if everyone's not telling the truth? What would it look like then? What would it look like if everyone was just making things up or telling you what you wanted to hear? It was like, it really is an interesting way to look at things. It's a bit cynical. But when you start looking at all these things, you go, it doesn't even make sense. It doesn't make sense that you'd have a country where you have all these billionaires, and then they would be told what to do by these people in Congress that have no money. Some of them are relatively uneducated. You have all these billionaires that are controlling large sectors of the economy, but they're just going to take edicts from the guy, the local milkman that ran for Congress in Georgia, and he's going to tell those guys what to do.

That never made sense to me. It also never made sense to me that when I watched SNL as a kid, I'd watch these debates and They were almost identical to the ones on TV. They were silly. You'd have these two guys, and Bush wasn't a great speaker, and Gore was insufferable. They did these characters really well. But I'm like, It's so weird that a comedy show is almost identical to the actual world that we live in. I'm like, There's no way that that's the only level of power in the country. There's very little chance that that's how it is. Then you start reading, you read books like The Devil's Chest Board by David Talbot about the creation of the National Security State, about the Dulles Brothers and how influential they were. You read all these books. He founded salon. Com and stuff like that, and then wrote that book. It was completely removed from polite society. But You read all these books, you get interested in it. It was just very interesting to me. I was an actor as a little kid. What actor? Not a successful one, but my parents would take me into the city for auditions.

I wouldn't get anything because I was a cute little kid, but I had a gravelly voice, and it just didn't work.

You didn't even smoke when you talk like that?

They knew it was coming. My body knew I was going to start, so they prepared. But I realized how acting was interesting because in Hollywood, I was really close to getting a job once, but I was 4 inches too tall. The kid that got it was 4 inches shorter, and he looked better next to the star of the show. It was Grace Under Fire, Brett Butler. It was a sitcom. You realize That's how arbitrary a lot of these decisions are that are made. When you're a little kid, you become a little cynical because you're auditioning for all this stuff and you're looking at the way. Sometimes the director's son gets the job, and sometimes you don't even know why you didn't get the job. You did a great job. Basically, as a young person, you're aware of the limits of certain types of meritocracy, where it's like there's stuff behind the scenes happening. I think I started to think about politics in that way. It was funny to me. It was much funnier.

Did you have anyone to talk to about this?

Friends, people that I grew up with that might have been into it, too. But it wasn't- But this was pre-2016? Oh, yeah. This was like 2009, '10. It just seemed very funny to me.

What did you make of 9/11 through that lens?

Well, when I was young, I was very supportive of the Iraq War and George W. Bush. But I was on cocaine. Did that help? That helps. It really did. It's a patriotic drug, to be honest. But I was believing everything that everyone said it. We were invaded by these people, and we were invaded because they don't have shopping malls in Afghanistan, and they don't have McDonald's, and they can't get chicken nuggets like I do with my friends. They can't smoke pot in the mall. So they all decided to kill us. Well, that's terrible. So we have to go over there and build shopping malls so that these guys can go hang out and get whatever they need so that they're not miserable and all that stuff. I believed it. I believed all of it. I was a fervent advocate of that because it made a lot of sense. I'm like, We've got a good thing. They've got a thing that's not too good. We have to go and help them. It was this thing where I just believed that and I believed in it. I voted for Bush, and I thought that my first vote was for Bush.

It was the second term. I had friends that went off to Iraq. I'm like, We got to do this. We can't dishonor their memory by pulling out and doing all this stuff. I really believe that. I've now completely switched. I now see it as a complete disaster, a huge mistake and error. As far as 9/11, at that point, I believe that it was exactly how they said it happened. Now, quite frankly, I don't know. It seems improbable that all of these things happened the way that they said that they happened. I don't know what exactly happened. People have attacked me for saying that because I question now more than I did.

You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right, left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood, and we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network. And we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tuckercarlson. Com/podcast. Our entire archive is there. A lot of behind-the-scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running. Tuckercarlson. Com/podcast. You will not regret it. Well, you've been attacked for admitting that you're agnostic on it?

Yeah, people will call you names and try to use use that as some type of, and you know about this, people calling you names. When you say, I don't really know what happened on 9/11, they go, they try to use that as a pejorative against you and say you're a conspiracy theorist, you're a nut job, you're whatever. You go, Okay. I mean, those things don't mean as much.

But do you ever think to yourself, anyone who believes the story at the White House press briefing is a fucking moron?

Yes, I think that. It's funny to me how wrong we are. Being wrong is funny. That's one of the For me, for the reason, I became interested in this dimension of power in America is because I actually, either you laugh or you cry. I started to laugh, and I think how wrong everybody is. How do you...

I mean, your insight, which is really smart, that the former milkman from Georgia is Probably not giving orders to the goaligark. That's right. That doesn't actually make any sense.

That makes no sense.

How do you think things really work?

Well, I think that you have a group of people that have a lot of power and a lot of influence. They probably have different ideas. They're probably not a monolith. They probably are different religions and races, but they're interested in preserving their level of power. I think that becomes their main Their main objective, and I think this is the thing that they all relate on, whether they sue each other or dislike each other or have wars with each other in the press. We tend to think that these are blood feuds, and these are, and probably some of them are. But at the end of the day, they are all interested in retaining their level of power in American society and all over the world. I think those people operate in a lot of different ways, but a huge way, I believe that they operate is subverting the democratic process here and all over the world, meaning the will of the people cannot get in the way of whatever they want to do. I think they have to disguise that agenda in any way that they can. The new thing now, for example, is, which this is very...

You know what? Today, I'm in a diner and I'm watching. I'm having breakfast and I'm watching this terrible air strike in Rafeh, this place I didn't even know existed a month ago. I'm not like a... And this guy is holding this headless child. It's horrific. We're watching it in the diner. You're watching it and listen, I think Israel should exist. I believe they have a right to exist. Antisemitism exists, blah, blah, blah. I know that it's not all great over there. But you're watching this and then you go, This seems unreal. It seems very extreme. Then the I think that's fair. The position of people on the internet that are supporting this no matter what without any is, Well, do you know how Hamas treats gay people and women? And you go, How dumb do I How stupid do I look that this is the argument? How dumb do I look that you are expecting me to believe that American foreign policy has been about the rights of women Is that why we were in Afghanistan? It had nothing to do with mining rights or lithium-ion or any of that stuff. It has nothing to do with the strategic importance of certain locations.

It all has to do with teaching girls to read- Protecting the gays and women. And protecting the gay people, and we're teaching women to read. It's crazy. It's crazy. But that emotional appeal works on people, and they go, Well, I guess we have to kill children then. That baby is homophobic. Kill. And you start going, It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense from a logical from a political standpoint. It makes absolutely no sense. People can debate about Israel or what we should be doing or giving them or funding. But so again, you're taking this, you're shoehorning this narrative into this conflict, and It's, I think, the way a lot of these people that have an agenda operate, where they go, We need to present this Ukraine war as a way that we are fighting a murderous dictator who's going to take over all of Europe. Even though there wasn't evidence of that. No evidence. It was really not a ton of evidence. No. There was almost none. You have to believe that. Now, I live in Beverly Hills, California. I live outside of the city limits, but I say I do. The worst people in the world in Beverly Hills, monster people, they make valets cry, get my effing car.

You know what I mean? People jump out of windows, they walk to get in their bodies, to get in their Porsche. It's crazy. That happened in the building I lived in. Someone jumped out the window. Yeah, this Hollywood producer, Steve Bing, he killed himself. I knew Steve. He jumped out of the window. Do you think Steve killed himself? I don't know. I don't know. But I did- Steve was a great guy. It's sad. I have no idea what happened.

Steve was the biggest donor to the Democratic Party under Clinton.

Yeah, that's a deadly move. It's a little deadly.

Then Steve began, I know because he told me, changing his views on things. Then the next thing you know, Steve Bing has committed suicide. I don't know, but a friend of mine who's very close to Steve Bing, and I was friends with Steve Bing, said, That was not. No, that's not what happened. That's very possible. That's your building. I know where that is.

I used to live there, and I moved out of there because it has a dark energy. Can you imagine?

Did you really move because it had a dark energy? Yeah.

I couldn't really sleep. Friends would come over and we'd sit in the living room in one of these apartments and they'd go, What's this? We're not those people. We're not like Crystal's people.

You sound It was virtually sensitive.

Yeah, I guess I'm sensitive enough to realize it was just something. Then there was a lot of junkies beating each other up and beating up their girlfriends and stuff. The cops would have to come all the time. Not a great building. I won't say which one it is. I don't want to be sued. But because I did trash them on the podcast, and they were upset. But it was not a great building. But the same people who would walk over, and I talked to the valets the morning after that happened, there were people going, Oh, that's terrible. Anyway, it's the Blue Porsche. Let's go. This is the type of person that we're dealing with in Beverly Hills. You need people that are like that to a degree. You do need people that are not singing Kumbaya all the time. But let's just say these are not incredibly sensitive souls. They're living in Beverly Hills, right? I remember everyone had a Ukrainian flag immediately after the war started, like they had been shipped.

Well, because they care. Yeah. Unlike you, they care. They care about democracy.

Right. So all these people who kick their maid down the stairs.

I'm laughing because I grew up around people like that in Southern California, so I know you're right.

People that scream and yell at people in restaurants when something's not macrobiotic or v. They apparently became all humanitarians in the span of one night, and then the Ukraine flags roll over the place. And if you asked any question about the Ukraine or what was going on or why Russia went in or why they would be in NATO.

Because they hate our freedoms.

Yeah, right. It was the same argument. It's the same very strange, Manechean, good and evil argument. Totally right. You would I had dinner with RFK and his wife, who I adore, and his son was there, and his son served in Ukraine. Yes. He's a brave kid. God bless him. Hey, everyone does something, right? Yeah, of course. He was talking about it, and he said, and everyone at the table was saying, you know how hard it is to... We were sitting in Malibu at dinner, and they go, you know how hard it is. That's serving the Ukraine. I go, yeah, but I'm defending Vladimir Putin in Malibu at a dinner party. That's actually tougher. You're the one who needs the medal. I actually need the medal. To me, I just thought, this is very funny. What shuts down comedy is fundamentalism. Of course. When people say to you, you can't ask questions, you can't know things, it's why every dictator in the world hates comedians. They don't want anybody asking any questions about anything, and they shut everything down. That's why people get offended very easily, usually have something to hide. The coolest people in the world are the people that will poke fun out on the show, and they don't care, and they think it's fun, and they go, This guy's a buffoon, and who cares?

Or maybe there's some truth in it that I should learn from. Or whatever.

Or that, perhaps. But when you make fun of people and they lose their mind, it always suggests something. Every time that I would ask about the Ukraine, I go, Why exactly? We've never heard of the Ukraine. Every vice documentary about the Ukraine was that they were a white supremacist neo-Nazi country. Every vice documentary was a bunch of people in the Ukraine walking around with SS tattoos and shields. I go, and these people just overnight became great allies and brave people that we loved. It was like, Okay, listen, I feel bad. Their country got invaded and they're doing what they have to do and whatever. But I just don't know. It's just very interesting to hear people that have never thought. I mean, these people that I live around have never had a thought about another human being in their life. They've never had a thought. In fact, they wouldn't even be effective in what they do if they did. These agents and managers, they can't see you as a human being. They have to see it as a product, and that's what makes them good at what they do. Of course. They have to see it as a product.

You can't work in a slaughterhouse if you love cows.

That's correct. You can't. You can't pet the cow and go, Are you tired? Do you need some time off? How's your wife? You have to look at the cow and go, It's 100 grand. Get on the plane. If you don't like it, do drugs. What happens is-They're the worst people I've ever known.They're the worst agents.The ages They're always the black sheep of a very wealthy family who everyone else is successful. It's always like you have a guy, when you have an agent, they go, My brother works at Goldman Sachs. My sister is a neurosurgeon, and I do this because I have no talent I have skills, except I was born rich and I'm a sociopath, and I don't have any educational background, but I was never going to work at Popeye's making chicken sandwiches. So I sit here at a desk, and that's who most of them are.

Can I ask you something. It's funny. In the last couple of years, obviously, I know a lot of people have been canceled. I had these fake scandals wherever they come from. Then every one of them has been dropped by his agent. In a couple of cases, that agent has been Jay Serez, I think, but other agents, too. A buddy of mine said to me, Well, I can't believe this happened. I was really close to my agent. I know his kids. I went to his house all the time. The second the person had any No problem at all, the agent issues a statement distancing himself from his own client. Yes. Adding to the dog pile.

Well, this is what happens. This is what they have to do.

But shouldn't that be a death penalty offense? The agent? Who would hire an agent who did that?

Everyone. Why? Because what happens is everybody in that town is full of shit. Okay. Everybody. And everybody goes on that. Everybody It's the type of town where if someone calls you up and goes, So and so died, you go, Yeah, okay. No one believes anything. You go, Sure they did. It's a complete... It's a fun house. It's a Hall of Mirres. It's a place. So the agent that drops you, in many cases, we'll call you and go, Hey, I'm really sorry. The higher-ups will drop me if I don't drop you. Everyone's on the chopping block there, from the CEO of Paramount to the person who's working making salads for their at CAA or UTA or WME. Everyone's on the chopping block. There's nobody there that really... Everybody just goes with the wind. If somebody doesn't like a comedian, if the consensus is that that comedian's bad, everyone's like, They're bad. They're a demon from hell. Then if it swings the other way and that comedian starts doing really well, they're like, They've had a great year. There's nothing behind their eyes. There's nothing there. That's just the accepted reality of the town. That's why-It's almost like no hard feeling.

You're right.

You're having a human reaction.

Yeah, loyalty is so important.

To a video game. You see? That's what's happening. You're having a human reaction to a video game, which is what it is. It's just Everybody's plugged into this matrix. Nothing's real. What people do is real, like the comedy and the movies and the art and the whatever and the books and all the things that people create. But how people in the business handle them and respond to them is dictated 100% by the winds that blow in. If the woke win blows in, they go, We're doing woke. Get every fat woman, get every minority. They're on television. I want women so fat they can't breathe on their own. I want them in wheelchairs. I want them to have one leg, and I want them to be Indigenous. Go. Then when that makes no money, they go, Great. White guys, let's do that. White guys are back. Then if people get mad again and they want to go, They don't believe in it. The people there don't really believe in anything. It's just like they're just waiting to see which way they can go. Some of them like comedy. Some of them like comedy, and that's the The best you could say for some of them.

Have you ever in all your time in LA experienced an authentic human emotion?

One time I went to a Thai restaurant, it was closed and it was very sad. It was? Usually, you have to look at other races for human emotions. They're like Mexicans. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? You who are usually coming out of a church or doing something like that. It's a very weird place. I've learned to love parts of it and hate parts of it. It's very different from where I lived. It's these vast canyons It's like, a mountain is very empty and it's very hollow and people are very passive, aggressive and laid back. They're not as intense. I grew up in New York and Long Island with a lot of intense people. There's a lot of... It's just a a town that functions primarily with the... The only rule there is that everything's always great. Everybody is always like, Things are great. How are you? Oh, good. No matter what's going on in their lives, They want to present this thing. Everything's great because you want to be near winners. You want to be near good people and people that are doing well. Everybody just has to present that side of themselves at all times, which is why people say, Oh, it's and that it's not real, but it is that's the guiding principle of that place.

Not to get too dark, but what if things aren't great? Things aren't great for a lot of people.

Things are not great.

Who do you talk to?

Great question. I think there are little groups of people that have honest moments. I've had honest moments there with people, but the people that I've had honest moments with... It's very funny because it's the only place where someone will meet up with you and look around and you think they're selling you a heroine, but then they're just going to say something remotely conservative. It's very interesting. People just go like, The border is Oh, it doesn't look good. Somebody will be like, Biden is a little old. But it is weird because everybody's terrified of... But that's changing now because I think the institutions have less power and the internet has grown and people are more free. I think it is changing and there are definitely opportunities for people to connect with an audience outside of that system. I think that system is now also responding very positively for the first time to people that have gained an audience on the internet. I think they're starting to understand the value of that. It isn't this world in which everybody's good or bad or perfect or not. There are people that make mistakes, and there's people that also are really good people that are not reflected by a certain action.

You know what I mean? There's this idea that people are entire people. They're not just one thing you didn't like. That's exactly right. I think that's what's the future, hopefully, is this nuance and complexity. Whereas we went through a period where it was very simple and everybody was like, bad, good, ally, not, enemy. Now I think we're going to go, Oh, that guy, and take a beat and be like, What's she about? And take a breath. I do it all the time with people.

Like treating people as human beings.

Treating them with human beings. I do it all the time with people that I completely disagree with on everything. Yeah, me too. This person is psychotic. But I take a step back and I go, Let me look at them as a human being and not just a collection of tweets that make me want to vomit.

I want to ask you about that, but before we pass on from LA, I haven't lived there in many years. Sure. But I visit, overrun with homeless people, addicts, mostly, but also non-addicts. Just a lot of people living outdoors. It's really A sad visible sign of collapse in my view. But it's all black and all white, pretty much. La, I think, is a majority Hispanic city.

It's a white Hispanic city, primarily.

But I don't see any or many Hispanics living on the street. What is that? Almost none. Almost none. In a city that's a majority Mexican origin, and there's nobody like that living on the street, why?

Well, I think if you look at- Because they're rich. No, I think a lot of these homeless encamments are open air drug markets. People don't want to talk about it. People don't want to malign people that are homeless that aren't on drugs. Of course, there are people that are homeless that aren't on drugs. But I will tell you this, everybody in LA has observed people that are homeless that have mental issues, and some of those mental issues are brought on or exacerbated by drug use. This is just plain and simple. This doesn't say that all poor people are drug addicts. No one's saying that. No one's saying that you have to be a drug addict to end up homeless. What people are saying-Let me just say, since both of us are sober for-That's correct.

And off drugs and alcohol, I think we have the right, actually, to assess this. That's right. Let's stop the bullshit.

That's right. All of the people that are struggling with addiction have not been helped by the people whose job it is to help them, and the government's job is to provide a safe environment for everyone, for people that are to drugs, to people that aren't addicted to drugs. The way to provide a safe environment for people that are addicted to drugs is not permit them to live on the street and use drugs in a tent. Exactly. It is not to permit people to use fentanyl on the street and to overdose on the street and die. This is not a compassionate thing, and this is not a good policy.

If you had a niece or nephew who is addicted to drugs, and you may, would you give them money for drugs and let them live on the street?

No, I've had members of my own family that- That's what I'm saying.

We all have.

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I'd buy little lanyards and stuff that they're selling. I go, Do you think this is a long-term solution when you have this homeless encampment in a park and then people are treating it like a farmer's market? All these wealthy white people that want to help are going there giving them money for heroin and buying an avocado or some crazy thing. I don't even know what people were selling there. But when the cops broke it up, there was a lot of tension in the community because the community was against it. They didn't want the homeless encampment broken up. They were very angry. They were like, How dare these fascists break I woke up this homeless encampment, again, where people were overdose and dying. In their own neighborhood. Yes, they wanted. That's the thing. I was standing the other day in San Francisco, and this woman said to me, I said she was... I go, Yeah, the city is falling apart. I go, The mayor in London Breed, I go, I don't know what she's really doing. She goes, Yeah, she's trying to criminalize addiction. We went down that road. I'm like, Wait a minute. So your take is that the mayor of San Francisco is too conservative because she's trying to criminalize addiction.

I'm like, You got to criminalize the behaviors that are often inherent with addiction. Robbing people, selling drugs, crimes that involve procuring drugs, trafficking people. There's all these things that happen. There's something that goes on, and it's on the West Coast more than the East Coast, for sure, where people don't understand understand the value of standards being enforced. They don't see it. They don't get it. They think that it's a completely insensitive way to look at the situation and saying, We have a standard. You don't sleep in a tent. You don't camp on the street. There are homeless shelters. You got to go. We have project room key, you got to go to a hotel room. But if you're going to participate in that program, you have to submit to drug testing and counseling because we can't have people using drugs in that program and providing drugs to other people.

We're not going to pay people to commit suicide.

We're not going to pay people to kill themselves on the street. That's the standard, and we're forcing that standard. People, for whatever reason, don't seem to believe that that is-But maybe they're the ones who lack compassion.

Again, would you treat a loved one the way they treat the so-called homeless? No.

It's very interesting. I don't know what it is. Maybe they have this freak, weird fetish with people dying all around them. I don't know what it's. It's very sick.

I'm very honest. Why know Hispanic? Why know Mexicans in the city that's majority Mexican? There are all kinds of problems in Mexican neighborhoods. Sure. A lot of poverty, gangs. They have problems.

A lot of people come to California to be homeless in California. Well, maybe that's it. Because of the weather, and then there's programs.

Shouldn't someone study what the Mexicans are doing and maybe do that?

Yes. Our governor lives on a vineyard, so good luck. But good luck about the studying happening. Yeah, you do not see a ton of- You really don't.

You don't, yeah. Way disproportion to the population. Way, way disproportion.

Well, it's also you don't see a lot of Mexican people not working.

That's what I'm saying. So maybe the solution is not working, is not actually having the offended effect.

In LA, a lot of the white people, no one has a job, even the ones that have money. They sit around, they have smoothies. What is that? They float around. I don't know, but no one really works. I noticed that. They float around for cafés. They have fake meetings.

They take meetings all the time.

They talk to another person, and that's a meeting, and they go, What about this? What do you think is going on? They have coffee, and they go, This coffee is not as good as the last. No one seems to be working at all. Where's all the money come from? I don't know. I have no idea. The CCP? I don't know. For real, though. I don't know who's floating it. Usually, when I have a lazy friend, you go back in their family lineage, someone got a bag of money somewhere. The dad, the grandpa, the great-grandpa, someone's got money somewhere. I don't know. I mean, with LA, you meet a lot of people that are drifting around and they're aimless.

But aimlessness is very expensive, especially- It's very expensive.

I don't think that the Mexican culture is Catholic culture. It's a religious culture. It's a culture of working. It's a culture of parties and food and enjoying life and getting the most out of life. But it doesn't seem to be a culture that I would associate with aimlessness. No. It doesn't seem aimless at all. It seems to be pretty... I'm sure there are problems in in every community, but there's a lot of aimlessness. It's like, that's the thing of people talk about... People talk about race and all this stuff, but it's like, the white people in the West Coast are maybe the most damaging group of people to civil society I've ever seen in my life. When you talk about the people that live in Seattle and Portland, the things that laws that they pass in favor, and I've never seen a group of people wreak more havoc on a civil society in my life than the West Coast of the United United States.

What's the motive there, do you think?

I don't know. I don't know if it's no sun. I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is. I just know that- But they're trying to destroy things. They're trying to destroy things. In Portland, there was a van, this woman driving around a van and just shooting people up. It was called a stabbing wagon, where they're just shooting up drug addicts on the street. It was crazy. It was like, insane. Then they just reversed at Portland. They were like, This is actually- You don't have to be for the drug war, which I wasn't really for.

Sure. Hassling people for partying at home, even though I'm sober against that. Sure. But if you get to a place where some girl is shooting people up with narcotics, she should be in prison.

There's always a limit, right? Because these people, they have all these ideas. Then what happens is a few people die in front of them in a Whole Foods. They start going, Well, maybe. It is funny. They go, Oh, that was a lot. When someone dies in a Whole Foods in front of them, they start going, You know what? Because the consequences a lot of these people are just so far removed that they're just not present. They're just not. They're behind a gate. They're somewhere within the 40 minutes out of the city, whatever it is, and they just don't care. But then people start dying in Whole Foods, and then they start going, Yeah, maybe this isn't ideal. This might not be great. It takes that, though. It takes something extreme like that for these people to wake up.

Obviously, I'm a bad person, but I don't want the pivot to happen without someone being punished for this. Yeah. As someone who grew up out there when it was really idyllic, it was peak human civilization in 1975 in Laurel Canyon. Now it's dystopian. It's like, someone should have to be held to account for this. Pay the price for that. But they won't. They'll be like, Actually, I was never for that. It's like the COVID vax. I was, Well, I always had concerns.

No, you didn't. It's interesting. Do you think they would treat the internet the way they treat the real world? Like all these people who they love how functional their sites are, anyone that says anything gets banned immediately. Everything's very clean. They work very well. You can access them pretty easily. They work a lot on the user experience. How's the user experience walking down the street?

How's the 405?

In the Castro, how's the 405? How's your user experience there? How are you interfacing with the person who just OD'd in Whole Foods? Like, apply all of the same things to the real world. They just don't seem to care.

That's a brilliant observation.

They seem not to give a shit. They seem to care mainly about the digital world in which they're creating and ushering people into at a very rapid pace, and they don't seem to care about the real world. If I was a conspiracy nut, I might say that the worst the real world is, the more people are dependent on the digital world, and the quicker you can get them all there. That might be if I was having fun, I might notice something like that.

You might shut down the entire US economy and force everyone to stay indoors for a year?

Seems like it might be a decent plan.

But would that actually work? Would people choose Amazon over local retailers, do you think? Yeah.

You could transfer, you could cancel rent and then transfer all that wealth from local landlords and demonize them to corporate landlords who now own a lot of the United States. If you've ever had a local landlord, which I have, you're much better off. I've been broke for years. I was a comedian. You're much better off sitting down with someone face to face like this and going, I can get it Thursday, than you are dealing with Black Rock.

They're not as compassionate?

They seem not to be. They seem not to be. This idea that we demonized anybody that owned a two-family house and we said, Look at this scumbag landlord, and They own a three-family house where they live in one of the units, and the other two units are people that they rent to. We said, Look at these people. They're pieces. You know what happened? All the corporate landlords bought everything, own everything, and are raising It's losing the price of residential real estate for everybody that is trying to buy a house. It's weird where we do it because we've got this-I never hear anyone talk about that. No one talks about it. No one cares. No one talks about the fact that most of the new constructions in London, at one point, it was 60%, it might be more now or less, but at one point it was about 60% of all new constructions I bet it's higher now are being bought by foreign nationals with LLLCs. They're not living there. It's doing in New York. I mean, they're doing it in all of these cities. Most of these buildings, you look at New York, Billionaire's Row, there's four lights on, this huge skyscraper who's there, no one's home.

There's no school bus, no one's taking their kids to school. It's a guy that comes in and is laundering money through real estate in cities like New York and London and places that- That's why as the economy craters and people are just poor because of inflation, housing prices don't drop.

No. Rents don't drop.

No, that's right. It's being artificially propped up. That's why these cities are really rich, wealthy city. You go, Who the has all this money? Who has all this money to buy these apartments? And then you go, Oh, it's criminals from all over the world that are washing a lot of dirty money in real estate. I'm sure maybe just rich people that aren't criminals, but a lot of them are guys. If you look it up, it'll be like a guy who poisoned a river in Zambia. That's why all these real estate shows are fake. They're all not true. They're all these with these attractive women, they walk around and they find a guy who's a basketball player or a guy who's an actor. None of them are even buying the houses, by the way. I know the people that work on these real estate shows, they really sell the houses to a lot of people that just come in speaking complete Mandarin. I have a friend who's a real estate agent, and they come in, they speak complete Mandarin to a translator. He just points. He's Beverly Hills and pointing. There you go. They stand outside and look at the view.

They're the ones who are actually buying houses, or Russian nationals, oligarchs, or people from the United Arab Emirates, or people from the Brazilian mining magnets, or people from India. It's not really a lot of domestic buyers in LA. In New York, it's a ton of foreign nationals. That's why these real estate shows just aren't true. If they were true, it would be a real estate agent greeting someone at the door and going, This is a beautiful house. How did things go at The Hague? Are you okay? Everything was good at The Hague? Great. We saw that. Take a look at the veranda. They have a great... That would be the real show, but it's not the real show.

But what about the people who live here? They can't afford housing.

They can't afford housing. And no one cares. No one cares because the whole game now is people just say, Rent, rent. Take Ubers. You don't need a car. You don't need to own anything.

It doesn't matter. You moved personally in the opposite direction. You made money after years of being poor. Yes. It sounds like you didn't put as much in the market as you did into real estate.

Why? Real estate to me is something I understand. I would probably get richer if I knew more about stocks or if I knew... I was caught up in that Bitcoin craziness where I still have a good amount of crypto. We talked last night, I remember sitting at a table with Jake Paul and a few of these guys, and Jake Paul is like, Are you investing in Cum Rocket? I said, What is that? And he was like, Well, it's a coin. It's a shit coin, but it was going up. He's like, I've made all this money. I called my business manager 2 AM in Miami, and I'm a sober guy, but I feel high. Me because I'm calling my business manager at 2 AM, going, Should I invest in Cum Rocket? And he goes, I think so. I think probably... So this is how nuts everyone got.

Did you invest in Cum Rocket?

I didn't. I was at the end of the day, I pulled out, and I'm like, No, let's just stick with the Bitcoin and Ethereum.

You pulled out of Cum Rocket.

I pulled out of Cum Rocket. I said, You know what? This is too volatile. You went with the withdrawal method. I went with the withdrawal method of Cum Rocket. I said, We don't want it all over the place. But it was a crazy time. It was an insane time. Nfts, people were making millions of dollars. People were making all this money with Bitcoin. It was a complete house of cards. It was crazy. I think Bitcoin is a good thing. I think having this decentralized currency is actually a really cool thing. But like everything else, the world that grew around it was a world of criminals and con artists and flim-flam artists and people that were full of shit, and people that were just taking all this money and pumping all these things up, and just all these were stock scams and Ponzi schemes and stuff like that. Real estate, to me, seemed the most safe because I understood it. I get it. I understand People always need houses, want houses. They give you joy. They make you happy. They're things that promote other things in society that I think are good, like having a family and keeping a family and having a house on Long Island where I could have my family come and visit.

I'm an hour from my father, and I'm only a few hours from family that lives in Rhode Island. I think having places for people to gather is very important. It was part of my childhood, and those things are huge. I don't think you get as much joy from Cum Rocket as an investment. You might get more money, so I understand that. But I've also watched Friends not be able to, and I got lucky because I was a comedian. I got started on a podcast. Joregen helped me out a lot by putting me on a bunch, and I got really lucky. But I have friends that are hardworking people, firefighters, teachers, nurses, the people that actually do the jobs that makes society work and run. They're having a tough time now because the interest rates are 7% and the house values. With the rates, I think it's the most expensive time to buy in, like 40 years. It's crazy.

How closely do you follow residential real estate in markets? Very. Are they going to come down?

Yes. The answer is eventually yes. There's more inventory coming in 2025. I think that rates dropping will get people off the sidelines. Right now, it's an inventory problem where there's just not a lot of houses. There's not a lot of houses on the market. Boomers don't want to die, and they don't want to sell their homes. Boomers used to sell their homes, go to Florida, get a condo. Boomers don't want to do They're actually retiring. In some cases, bigger homes. It's hilarious and somewhat satanic.

Just because this selfishness is so ingrained in them.

It's so ingrained in them that their whole... The thing about the boomers is they've been alive for a very long time. Many of them have gained absolutely no wisdom.

So what they've done That's not easy, by the way. It's not easy.

It's actually impressive. What they've done is everything's in material. So this big house that they lured around. I mean, some of my friends, parents, I'm writing a book about them. They're hilarious. They know nothing. I mean, nothing. But they lured around big suburban castles, and their whole sense of self-worth comes from this. It comes from materialism. So the idea that they would leave this big house, which is every argument that a boomer ever tries to win, they just point at their house. I mean, they don't know anything. They have zero idea. They've read no books about anything. They're a very funny, they're the last really, truly funny generation, I think, because everyone has becoming flattened But they are just very funny and deeply selfish. I mean, it's funny to watch them. It is funny, but they're never going to get rid of these houses. Their kids are being held hostage. I mean, the whole economy, I mean, Biden. These very old people, Mitch McDonald, they won't retire. None of them have any plans on retiring. They want to die in office. That's very much like across the board. Nobody will sell their house. Nobody will step down at their job.

It's just a generation of people that don't want to stop.

Because they're afraid of what's coming. They know they'll be punished in the next life?

I don't even know. They seem to be very ambivalent about that. They seem to face death in a very like, They don't seem to be doing it. I'm impressed.

They don't seem appropriately afraid.

Yeah, I'm somewhat impressed by them, actually. They're very casual about it. I think because their main fear My teachers are discomfort. I think if they're gone, there won't be any more discomfort. There's no more traffic.

So you're writing a book about the boomers? Yeah. They were my teachers growing up.

It's not all bad, but They're all bad.

I hated them from first grade when I realized, too, they were.

They're funny, though. To me, the thing that I say when I say they're not all bad, they're terrible at all the things you would say that they're… But they make me laugh.

They're very funny. Every trend Over the last 70 years, they've driven and fallen for completely. Whatever dumb trend, from the pet rock to feminism, to COVID, they're all in on every trend.

The thing with the boomers is their lives started in their Woodstock, people, right?

A hundred %. They all went to Woodstock.

We all believe... My parents didn't because it was traffic. I kid you not. They turned around because it was too much traffic. Can you imagine? They were boomers even then. They literally turned their car around. I mean, it's unforgivable. It's unforgivable behavior. What happens is we are led to believe they're this very progressive generation of very interesting-Change agents.agents of change and spiritual people, agents of change, and spiritual people. Then we see, of course, that they're just selfish drug addicts that want to just do drugs in a field which has its benefits, but let's not pretend it's a grand life strategy. Then they just buy into the... They're the most propagandized generation in terms of advertising. The Edward Bernay stuff, they fell for everything. They fed us all poison growing up. They fell for everything. They fell for every corporate slogan. My father, who I love, but will cry at commercials. He would cry I add the Budweiser Clydesdales into the 9/11 thing. He loved the Budweiser frogs. They loved commercial. Boomers adored commercials. They liked a Good Folgers commercial with family sitting together and they're drinking coffee. Boomers loved It was commercials. They thought that all of these things, that corporations really cared about them.

They were somewhat naive. I think they're spinning out a little bit now because they've realized a little bit to some degree how wrong they were about everything. Now it's becoming apparent.

But they like being lied to, is what you're saying?

Well, they liked it because it was all about comfort. The idea of moving into the suburbs and getting this house and having all these things, the mark of success became comfort. For years in America, the mark of success was like Conquest or going and settling something. Achievement. Whatever. Achievement or coming up with a company or an advancement, make people's lives better. Then it became about comfort. It's where do you live and how leafy green is the suburb? Where's the pool? It was just like, let's relax, let's grill. I think what happened was a lot of these people just became creatures of this environment where everybody was one-upping each other with cars. But they still had that hippie thing in them. They would still do weird stuff. My friend's dad has a band, and it's like, he'll go and play in this band. It's a terrible band. But they'll have fun. There were just these things that they keep from that era, even though they have gone fully down the road of just materialism. They didn't really like their children. That's the other thing I find funny. They view their children as obstacles to their own success and fulfillment.

The boomers really didn't like their children. It was the first generation of people that didn't really want their children to have it too much better than they did, if they wanted them to have it better at all. It was a weirdThat's disgusting. I know, but it was just a very weird adversarial relationship. My friend's mother just faked. She didn't go to his wedding. She faked some injuries. She said she was attacked in a... She was attacked in a supermarket. This is lately untrue. What? Lately untrue. She made up this story that she was attacked in a supermarket parking lot. She just was like, I'm attacked and I can't go. She just missed his wedding. She didn't go to his wedding. Why? They're crazy, these people. I don't know these boomers. I don't know why they do what they do, but it's just very funny. One very funny thing was after my mother died, I swear to God, I was on the phone with my aunt, which is her sister, and I go, What do we think about a funeral, everything like that? Maybe Thursday. She goes, I know. She goes, We've We had a boat thing.

Not really. Is her sister? Yeah, she goes, We're going to go on the boat with some friends. But she goes, We could get it. Maybe we do it next. We figure it out next week. But that's why I do love them. I don't hate. I love them because it's like, they're horrible, but they make me laugh so much. I was able to just fuse the stuff together to make it. The millennials suck, too, and there's other generations that are a problem, but they make me laugh. But they are terrible. They are really terrible. That's what makes them so funny.

What's so funny is they're getting credit for it, though, finally. Someone who's disliked them since 1977, they really have, too, because they spoke entirely in clichés. They're just so banal. It's very banal.

It's very banal.

Shallow and the materialist. You're exactly right. But now it seems like they're just reviled by everyone. Is that true?

Yes, they're reviled by everyone. I remember growing up, all my friends' parents, they all spoke in sayings. Totally. And none of it meant anything. They would demonize perfectly good jobs, like union jobs. You want to be like that guy? You want to be like that guy? They had these empty corporate hellscape jobs. Totally. It all turned them into alcoholics and everything. But they were like, You want to be like that guy? It was usually like an in-shaped guy, like work in construction. They're like, You want to be a scumbag like him? Or do you want to sit in an office like me and cheat on your mother? They always demonized other people. You were always in a rat race with other kids. They always talked about these other kids are doing better than you. It was a weird... But nothing was really focused on excellence as much as it was focused on winning to make them look good. If you had boomer parents in sports, they were always like, they weren't getting you up and making you train, but they would go to the games and yell. They would go like there was this woman, her daughter was a swimmer, my mother was a swim coach, and this woman would get up and scream, she'd be totally in her daughter's corner there, just screaming and yelling.

But you'd never see her at any of the practices at 8:00 AM when the kids in the pool. They wanted the end result. This was the whole thing.

So they're the ones who push the college lie. Dylan needs to go to Princeton, and I'm so proud of them.

They have to go to college. Our kids went to college, and they pushed that lie because, again, all they wanted to do is get their kids away from them. So that's why they were 80 activities every week. You could... Martial arts, soccer, dance class, whatever it was that they could put you in a car and put you away. They'd drop you off somewhere. Good luck. So college was like, great. Here we go. We're done. They went to college. Treat your sofa only €1 this Junebank holiday at Mace. The one and only H. B. Iceberger is only €1 this weekend. What Whatever the weather, enjoy a classic iceberg, or try getting creative with it and make iceberg shakes or a dough burger.

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Follow our socials at Mace Ireland for full details. Mace, going the extra smile. Available May 31st to June third in participating stores while stocks last. Terms of conditions apply. Did you go to college? No. I went to a community college for two years and dropped out. I won a debate, Championship gold medal in debate. I just dropped out of college and went into finance because I didn't like-What did your parents say, your boomer parents? They were disappointed. They were thinking I would fail.

They knew you well.

There are two options for a boomer kid, a millennial or whatever you want to call me, a Gen X or whatever, succeeding, which they would be happy about because they would claim total credit for it, and then failing, and then they would go, Well, you didn't listen to us. Of course, you failed. I think with me, they were very much like, He's going to be a big mess. We're going to get to tell people all the time how you didn't listen to anything we said, and this is why. But then it ended up, it looked like it was going one way, it went the other way. They're fine now. They're cool with it, but it's just they didn't expect it. They didn't expect it. Would you-They said to me, my father's wife said to me, who I do like a lot, but she said, she goes, How does someone like you who made every decision in their life end up in a house like this? But that is the way today.

That is the way they talk. But maybe you made the right decisions. Does that occur to them? Never.

It's interesting, but that is the way that they speak.

Because the results, do you tell the story, right?

You would think, which is why I'd love it. You would think. But yeah, they were interesting. Their spiritual life was materialism. Their lives were really about themselves more than anyone else. There's never been a generation where it's been about them as much as it is. My aunt said to me during COVID, it made me laugh. She goes, We're on the phone. I do. They just made me laugh so much. She goes, I hope everybody gets this vaccine. I said, Yeah? She goes, I hope everyone gets this vaccine. I said, Yeah? She goes, Because I want to travel. I worked my whole life. She goes, I've worked my whole life. And By the way, everyone's worked their whole life. Of course. It's the funniest thing to say, everyone's worked their whole life. What are you talking? Okay, 20 people didn't work. They grew up with whatever. But she goes, Everybody better get this vaccine because I want to travel. I want to go on cruises because I've worked my whole life. I believe she's been retired for about 30 years. With full dental.

Maybe 25 years.

But it is just a fight. It's very funny the way that they are. They're perfect.

You said a minute ago that the Internet has decentralized power and disempowered all these institutions. Those are the institutions that decided who was successful and who wasn't, particularly in the entertainment business, news, sports even. What does this mean for their ability to crush people they don't like, to cancel people?

They'll have to find new ways to do it. I think They're a little panicked. I think it hurts their ability to do it substantially, dramatically. That way? Yeah, I think dramatically.

You said you're friends with Louis CK, who I don't know. I'm not defending Louis CK, but I remember reading the details of that and thinking, Okay, maybe unattractive.

Louis has been able to have a great career.

Is that a crime?

What was that? No, not at all. He's been able to have a phenomenal career.

Why did they do that to him?

Well, I mean, it was a moment in which, and I don't know the details of every single a build accusation in that piece, but I do know that it was a moment where people weren't thinking people wanted to punish.

But even if they were all wanted to punish. Even if everything written about the guy that I read was true, you'd be like, All right, that's embarrassing.

Well, that was a time when it wasn't enough that someone admit to a mistake or admit to... It was about destroying people. It was about ending their lives. But why? I just think people get caught up in these moral panics and they want to hurt people. This is something deeply innate in our beings that have to be dealt with. We have to figure out why we do this. But this is something that people like mobs and they like getting their pitchforks out. I think he's been able to have a phenomenal career. He's made movies. He's sold at Madison Square Garden. He's done all these things. His fans love him, and he's one of the greatest comedians that's ever lived. So you have that. But yeah, it was a time when people just wanted other people to be heard. It wasn't enough to say, I fucked up, no matter who it was or what they did. I think now, I think people People are looking at the full picture of a human being and going like, You know what? I think we're all over that. I'm hoping we're all over that. But there are forces out there that are going to have to adjust.

I don't know what they did. Louis CK was not. They may go back to killing people. That's what they did for a long time. That's what they did for a long time. Then they started destroying their reputations.

But before that, they killed them, if you remember that. Yes. People would die in all these weird ways.

They said cars would go off things and people get shot in the middle of hotels.

Then it just started to be like, we're just going to take out people's reputations. It does seem like a lot of people are dying.

Have you noticed this? It does seem.

Not just Steve Bing. Yeah, there's a lot of problems.

It's not good. Okay. But just back to what you said, it turns out that he not only survived this character assassination attempt, but thrived. He thrived because his talent spoke for itself and people know who he is. Is anyone keeping track of all the other guys who were destroyed? I think a lot of them are doing great. I think a lot of them are doing fine because I think, as we talked about, it's not the worst thing to have people turn on you because it builds resilience. You know who your real friends are. You fall back on your talent. You lean on your talent. You lean on the things that you can do better than anyone else, and you try to make those even better. You have to be more effective in a way. You can't Coast. The tide will not carry you. You have to find ways to create your own environment and create your own inertia to move the things you're doing forward because you won't be carried anymore by the mainstream. You have to just go. I think that's ultimately a good thing. Well, Sue, it's bad that people kiss your ass.

It's bad for your soul. It's not good. You must deal with that. No, I think I deal with people that lie to me all the time. That is a version of kissing your ass. People lie. People make things. You don't get a lot of good feedback all the time. But then there are people that I trust to give me real feedback, and they're not people that I'm usually paying. You start paying people that can get complicated. But there are some people that I pay that I do trust to give me real feedback. But then there are also a lot of people that earn money off when I earn money, that tell me everything's great all the time.

I go, I don't know if that was great.

I go, No, it was great. Their job is to just keep you in a positive mind frame so that you keep earning money.

Their job is not to bring any negative or real things to the forefront.

Don't you think it's good for you to be attacked and confronted and belittled and humiliated and brought to who you really are once again? I think it's certainly good if you're a creative person and you have to create and you have to shake yourself out of a comfort zone, for sure. Do you get enough hate that it keeps you human? I think so. I think I get enough hate. You got enough today. I think I get enough of people that don't like what I do or say, for sure. I think things are appropriately difficult, meaning I have friction and that's good. I think that people... I'm not a person who is beloved with a lot of what I say, but my fans are people that like I do like me, but then there are people that need some convincing. I think that's good.

I think that's good. I don't mind that when I sit down with people and my manager or people like that will tell me, they go, Yeah, they like you, but they don't know really who you are. I think you get a lot of similar stuff where people go, Well, they have ideas about you that are not from you. They are just out there. Well, I agree. I don't think there's anything wrong with being attacked for your actual crimes. There's nothing wrong with that, and I welcome it.

It's being called names that actually aren't accurate. Yeah, for sure. I once was talking to a New York Times reporter who was telling me what a racist I was. I said, I'm actually... First of all, I would tell you if I was a racist, I'm really not a racist. I'm actually a sexist. Right. Which I thought was hilarious, true. I thought, What if that's a good line? Yeah. Didn't print it. No, they won't print it. If someone said that to me in an interview, I would print that.

Yeah, I participated once.

I don't know a I know some people in journalism, but I participated once in this thing where there's a few journalists that wanted to talk to a comedian because they were like, We want to start using more comedy in our pieces. I was like, Wait, what? They were just these totally unfunny people.

It was just tough.

I was like, Guys, just write the fucking news.

But they wanted like-What did you tell them?

I just said, I don't know. I think people that are good at this stuff are good at it. I can't tell you how to make something funny because they were basically saying, We think that our reach will grow dramatically if we're funny. I go, It might grow dramatically if you reported facts.

That might- Did they laugh?

No, they didn't. They were like, What? That's all. Are there any journalists you like or read or trust? Sure. I mean, there's people that I read all the time. Like who? I read Andrew Sullivan a lot. I don't always agree with him, but I think he's well worth a read. I've read Seymour Hirsch, every article that he writes. I read Barry Weis. I'll read the Free Press, whether I agree or not. Taibi? I'll read Taibi.

I'll read your stuff, Daily Caller, people that have written there. I'll read Thomas Friedmann. I'll read Nicholas Christ. I'll read the Times. That's why I read Washington Post. I'll read Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic, and I disagree with her.

I don't want to go to Russia tomorrow. I have an engagement. Thank you. I have a lunch. She's very hiked about the Russia thing. God bless. Why she so mad at Russia? I don't know. They all want to go to war with Russia. I have things to do. What is that? I have a kitchen renovation. Do you think, by the way, it's a little weird as you're an adult man with a job. It's a little weird to have someone like Anna Applebaum or any of these people tell you what your opinion should be? It's very strange. She's very aggressive on this Russia issue. There's this idea that I think we have this We have a deficit of purpose in the country. Yes. This is what I think. I think we have a deficit of purpose. I think the elites feel it. The people that have lots and lots of time to think about these things feel the deficit of purpose. I think if you're working 20 hours a day to feed your family, you don't have a deficit of purpose. No, you don't. But I think if you're lounging around in a DC townhouse trying to figure out what problems that you need to go out and desperately solve, you have a deficit of purpose.

I think this idea gives them the sense that now we are back in World War II, and there's good and there's evil, and this is the purpose. This is why we've all been on the planet, to confront the country with the most nuclear weapons of any other country over two regions of the two northern provinces in Ukraine, which if you Google image them, take it. I mean, truly, and I'll give him part of this country, too. There's a lot of this country we don't need.

Which parts? A lot.

There's parts of it that we don't need. I'll give him part. If Putin wants it, we'll give him parts of California. North Jersey? Yeah, we'll give him some parts of that.

I think we should actually, let's really fuck him.

Let's give him upstate New York. Let's give him a lot of Michigan. Let's give him stuff where he goes, Hey, man, I'm good.

Could he fix Schenectady, do you think?

I don't know if anyone could. I was just in Schenectady, and I like the people there, but I don't know if anyone could. I actually said on stage, it would be nice if Putin invaded this. What response did you get? They all laughed. They're great comedy audiences. They get it. But yeah, I think there's a deficit of purpose. I think people are like, Ann Applebaum, I'm sure she's a lovely lady or whatever. I don't think so. She's a little vicious in the way she writes. Loathsome, yeah. Never met her, but it's very aggressive It's very like, We got to go to Russia, and we got to fight Putin.

I'm like, Is it weird some rich girl in DC is telling other people to fight war?

That's weird to me. I go, Are you? Is this a bad day thing? Are you I wake up and I go, I should jog, I should work, I should do better things that I don't end up doing. I go, I should have a breakfast of just some macrobiotic LA sludge that it's more healthier. I never think I should go to war with Russia. No, I know. I've never thought of that. I've never thought of that. I should take a road trip. I should connect with an old friend. I've never thought that I should go to war with Russia.

I've never I never thought that was a good way to spend the summer.

Do you think there's a reason that they don't want you to go to Russia? I don't know. I think that they like... We need enemies. We have a huge national security apparatus that relies on conflicts. We sell a lot of weapons. We have a huge investment in that. We're arming the Ukraine in an unwinnable war that everybody knew was unwinnable. It was incredibly bloody, and it didn't have to be. This is something where the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, went and performed Rock in the Free World. I don't know if you saw that. I did see it, yeah. Did that inspire confidence? It's disturbing. It's crazy. If my child died in a war and then the Secretary of State of the country that's supposedly backing us showed up to play music, I would be in the middle of the war, by the way.

The war is not over.

It would be a little disturbing to me. It It's just very strange. Then the Kamala Harris thing of like, Well, this was a bigger country that invaded a smaller country, and that was her.

Kamala Harris is like a Brentwood mom.

She's like a wine drunk Brentwood mom. That's the way a mom would explain that. That's the way a Brentwood, California, Pacific Palisades, tuna, Tartare, Chardonnay. Mom explains that. She goes, It's a bigger country, and they've invaded a smaller country. That's the level of understanding they want us to have of any conflict. Maybe that's not the truth is what you're suggesting. Yeah, but imagine it's not.

I imagine it's not.

Everybody that I've spoken to, respect people like RFK and everything. There's a whole narrative that nobody's read about. Nobody understands. The war was ongoing since 2014. Yeah, it's always been that. And just because we weren't paying attention doesn't-Why did these Minsky Accords not get signed? What do you think it's really about, actually? I think it's about I think when people like Anne Applebaum write that Russia is a failed state and we need to Westernize it, this is in the Atlantic. It's a failed state. She's written these things, and this is a common... Maybe a state you don't like. It's the opposite of a failed state. It's a coherent state. Yeah, you cannot like it. It's been around for a thousand years. I remember when it was my job to give shopping malls to Afghanistan. I remember that. Oh, you do? I remember when I was a senior year in high school and everybody goes, Here's what we're doing. We're going to Afghanistan and Iraq. We're going to democratize the Middle East. This was the project. Now, these psychopaths want to democratize Russia. Back then, they were Republicans. Now, they're calling themselves Democrats. It doesn't seem to matter.

They float between the two parties. Bill Kristol is on MSNBC now all the time.

I'm old enough to remember that, I mean, how did we leave Afghanistan 20 years later? Does it seem democratized? The Taliban's in power. We should have a five-year moratorium on any conflict after this.

After 20 years and the Taliban goes back in power, it's like if you have a party-Reharmed by us? Yeah. If you have a party at your house and it burns down, your parents should go, You're done now. You're done. In our new house, you don't have any parties. You got to really establish that you've grown and learned from this. That was crazy to me. When all these people make these arguments, I go, It doesn't really make sense that we would be doing this again. Do you feel that changing? To the extent that you're with with Brentwood Wine Moms now, are they less enthusiastic about the brave Ukrainian people? They don't care. They don't care, exactly. No one cares. No one really cares. It's just fun to pretend to care. No one cares. No one, no one, unless you're from the Ukraine or you live in the Ukraine, no one cares at all. It is not even a real thing. If it comes up at a dinner, people go, Terrible, terrible, horrible. Do they have the sticky toffer pudding? No, it's not real. It's not on our shore. It doesn't affect us. We don't fight. We just arm people.

We send money. We don't care. It's not. It's the Israel guys, I think.

It's not real. People get very upset, but none of these things affect us because we can watch them, but they're not impacting our daily lives. They're not impacting our daily lives. Now, if the government said to us, now, there They're starting to do these really interesting things. They're going, We need the draft. We want to do that again. Germany is thinking about that. We're thinking, Military Times ran an article where they're like, Selective service. We should reinstate the draft. People are You got to go, Fuck yourself? How does that sound? That's right. Go ahead and do that, and then we can talk. People are starting to perk their ears up now. That changes everything. People start to go, Wait a minute. What's going on? Because they're clearly preparing for something Big, huge. This is in the cards. You can feel it. You talk to military people about it, they go, What? I don't even know if they know, but there's something ominous that they're preparing for. You can feel it that they're preparing for something big. They're floating all these ideas about draughts.

We haven't heard these for 20, 30 years. Not even when, supposedly, remember, terrorists were going to blow up every city in America?

We didn't hear about the draft. We didn't hear about the draft. When terrorists were going to blow up, you're going to be sitting at a lunch table is going to blow up. We didn't hear about the draft. Now we're hearing about the draft. Something's coming. I don't know what's coming, but something ominous. They're planning for something. If you can feel it. I don't know if that's something you've picked up on or you think. Certainly have. Maybe you think, Maybe I'm being dramatic. You're not being dramatic. It's as simple as they can't lose the war against Russia. We're waging a war against Russia. It's not Ukraine. Is Macron in France, going NATO troops in Ukraine. Remember when they were trying to enforce a no-fly zone? I remember doing a show in the Warner Theater in DC. It was a great theater. I'm like, a no-fly zone enforcing that guarantees a hot war, an actual war with Russia, immediately overnight. That's right. Immediately as soon as you shoot that out. It's just what they want. It was two years ago, and they were saying, Let's do it. I remember very well. I was going, Wait a minute, guys.

What the fuck? We're going to war with Russia tomorrow? I was like, What's going on? I said, We've done enough with the sanctions.

What did we take out? We took out the taco Bell. There you go. We said no McDonald's. Dramatically improve the country. No McDonald's. We took out all the poison food. I said, Listen, we've done enough. I remember talking to Louis about it. I was like, Make it Louis. But it's just so crazy. There's just something about all these celebrities clamoring for a war with Russia.

I go, There's something strange about this. There's something weird. I don't know what it comes from, this need But they are preparing. You can feel it. When Macron goes, Maybe we should have NATO trips in France, and when Germany goes, Maybe we should have a draft, and you go, Wait a minute. What's happening? What is happening? But you said a minute ago that there's no chance Ukraine, quote Ukraine, which is really NATO, which is really the United States, can win against a nation with 100 million more people in deeper industrial capacity. The whole thing was stupid from day one.

It's not winnable, right?

Yeah. Which is true. But What if we quite obviously lose? Then it means after years of-Well, we've already almost lost in the way, if you think about this. Russia, Putin has purged people that were disloyal in the government. He's consolidated power. He's opened a bigger trading relationship with China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, I believe.

Economic production in the company is up. The industrial production is up. He evaded all these sanctions, pretty much. Wages have gone up. Wages have gone up. He's in a stronger position now than he's ever been after this policy. His country is thriving. Ours is not. It's a weird thing to look at that situation and go, he has already won in that sense. If the goal was to strengthen him, which clearly wasn't, the goal was to bleed out the Russian military, it hasn't worked.

But I do think they're trying... There's something else is going to happen. I don't know what they're going to do. But if it becomes really obvious, like with the Afghan pullout, that we lost. That's right. All those words that we've been throwing at you for the last two and a half years, they were fake. We are powerless. We are weak. And now we have no credibility. It's totally discrediting for Tony Blinken, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, all the monsters in charge of wrecking our country are humiliated. They can't have that, right?

Because it's about them. It's not about us. It's about them.

We're going to probably commit more money to that situation I could even see a situation where, and I hope we're not stupid enough to do this, but they are starting to float this idea of money is not enough. I don't know what's next, but we know what's next. We don't want what's next. When people go, Well, we might need troops. We should have NATO troops. Well, this is what they're doing.

They're going, We should have NATO peacekeeping force.

It's very interesting. Recently, they've gone, What about some NATO peacekeeping forces there?

Let's just put some there.

What does it to drop a, quote, peacekeeping force into a war? Where are the NATO peacekeeping forces in Gaza? Where are the NATO peacekeeping forces? Are they not on the way? In Raafal, are they not there? Where is that? Nato peacekeeping force in Ukraine. We know what happens next. It's a cold-blown war, and that's terrible. It's World War III. But it sounds like that's accelerating. It seems to be. I mean, again, I'm no genius, but I pick up on little clues that are out there, and I go, Huh? It seems- Mike Johnson, the new speaker, is not He's not going to stop it, you think? I don't think he's going to stop it. No, I don't think anyone's going to stop. I don't think anyone's going to stop. What's your read on him? I need more evidence. I mean, he seems like an empty suit a little bit. I mean, that seems to be my vague or reflection, generic understanding of him is like an empty suit. Controlled? Yeah, I feel like he's... There is, and it's not party-specific, but there interests that are just bigger than the parties.

It is a lot of... We have 22 intelligence agencies. Most people can name three, four. We have a Pentagon that's incredibly Well, fine. I'm not saying we shouldn't have a military or intelligence agencies, but none of these people are elected. We don't really know what any of them are doing, and we don't really know the rationale for why they're doing certain things.

Those things never come up to a vote.

Nobody votes on...

Even like our immigration policy, nobody ever voted on that. Nobody ever said, Well, here's what I think should... No, they've refused to have a vote on it. Yeah, they haven't had a vote on it. How can people... We're mad about invasions around the world, and we're spending untold billions to stop invasions. But at the same time, we've had millions of military-age men come into our country because there's no border. No one's ignoring that as they're staring so intently at these foreign conflicts. What is that? Well, the most compassionate thing to do is invade countries, make them unlivable, and then have their people come over here and cut your grass. But clearly, that's what's going on. That's all that's going on. It's where we're destabilizing whole regions of the world. A lot of those regions are coming into America, and there's just no plan. Obviously, there should be some type of... I just don't think that all these people that... In Greenwich, Connecticut, for example, I can't imagine, just from knowing some of them, they barely like each other in the house. There's no way they love El Salvadorians. There's just no way that they want El Salvador.

It's not because they're El Salvadorian.

It's just like they don't even like each other. They don't like the neighbor.

There's no way that they love the nation of Guatemala. They want people to work for less money than they can pay Americans. I mean, this is just truth. Nobody wants to talk about it, but you look at LA. La has tons of that. The gardeners, people building houses, people... You have it all over the place. Rich people get a lot out of having people come to this country and they don't have to pay them. How is it different from futalism? Having a lot of surfs. Not too different. It's not too different. I'm sure there's a lot of people come to the country, they're good people. They want to feed their families and work, and they end up being abused, and they end up in a situation that isn't good. For sure. This is this idea that we can just import all of these people, everybody, and then there's not going to be significant growing pains. How many people we can assimilate into a physical space and a cultural space and a financial space. When nobody's being honest about any of those growing pains, nobody's even saying it's a mixed bag. Nobody's even saying it's good and bad.

Everyone's going, No, it's great. If you don't like it, you're a Nazi. That is why you see all over Europe and a lot of people electing leaders that are anti-immigration, anti-migration, because they themselves understand that there are downsides, significant.

Sweden is now one of the most dangerous countries. There's all kinds of articles being written about Sweden, that the crime rates have gone up dramatically over the last 10 years.

Well, what's happened over the for the last 10 years. Why do the sweets put up with it? Or why do Americans put up with it? What is it about people in the West, I'll just say it, white people who they just feel like they can't complain or something? Well, I think This is twofold. Number one, certain people benefit from it. Certain people go, Well, the maid, the nanny, I'm getting my nails done. We've got cheaper help at the beach club, or whatever it is. There are people that have a direct benefit from it. There are people that feel like they ignore any potential negative or downside because they feel like they have a lot of guilt for whatever reason. Maybe it's the colonial period of the 17, 18 centuries, or they feel like that the right thing to do is just to ignore any potential downside to immigration because they feel guilty about how the country was established or how people were treated or any of that that feeds into that mindset, even though if you go back, obviously, before the 17th and 18th century, slavery was all over the world, conquest was all over the world, people were killing each other, different races were subjugating and killing other races, people fought over land, religion.

It was a madhouse. It was plunder, it was violence. This was the way of the world. But most people don't have any knowledge of the ancient world. They don't have any knowledge of anything path. That period of colonialism is where most people start their knowledge of history. In that period, the West is seen as the enemy of anything that is good. The guilt that gets embedded into people is then, I think, manifested in these conversations about immigration, where it's like, listen, to me, it's very economic. There's times when the country will need more immigrants, and there's times when the country will need less. But there's probably a way to decide who comes into the country.

We should be able to check their background to make sure that they are not terrorists, they're not dangerous, they're not doing these things. I don't think that's an unreasonable ask. Well, if you're importing millions of people, over 10 million people with no education and no skills, high tech skills, at exactly the moment when technology, AI, is going to eliminate millions of jobs, especially low-end jobs.

What is that? It seems crazy. It seems like intentional harm. Yeah, well, it certainly seems that the people don't really care. I don't think people care. I think you drive through. I think a lot of people have just written off large swaths of the country. I travel around doing comedy all over the country. You see places where people go, Oh, they've given up on this. They've given up. They don't care. I remember Detroit when people just went, Oh, that's bankrupt.

It's done. It's coming back now. But it was in American City.

People just went, We don't care.

Then people gave up. This happens all over the place.

I think You're a real estate investor and a nonstop traveler. I travel a lot. Where are the places that you think are promising over the next 20 years? South Florida, anywhere south of Jupiter. East Coast. Yeah, East Coast. There's a business climate there that people like. The thing that's happened with California, which was a beautiful and amazing and a great state, it's like there's this idea that you can't do it in California. It's so hard. There's so many regulations. Everything costs so much money. The houses cost so much money. It really is a dream, and it's a pipe dream. New York is becoming like that, too. There are these places that have become so unattainable for people that they're going elsewhere, and they're going to Texas, they're going to Florida. It's not always political either. Some of it is, but some of it is economic.

It doesn't sound political?

Yeah, no. It's people that are like- Sounds way deeper. I can't afford to live here, and then the value of what I'm getting for my money is not worth it anymore. If I'm living in Venice Beach, California, but somebody climbs over my wall and decapitates my wife, I don't care that the Mexican food is better. There is something. There's a trade-off. I think that's happening, but South Florida is good. I think that Texas, I think Central Texas is still going to grow. I think it slowed down. Austin was a boom during the pandemic. Central Texas, I think, will grow. I think like, Idaho. I think any of those areas, obviously, Montana, all those areas are getting very expensive. But, Idaho, I think, climate-wise is going to be pretty good. Any of those mountainous regions that are incredibly pretty, and I think they're not going to be 115 degrees and stuff. So I think a lot of people will probably migrate in that area. I think Hudson, New York, that area, anywhere that's an hour and a half, two hours out of a city because people are working remote or they're working two or three days a week, areas like that.

I think that Hudson Valley is going to be big.

What about the West Coast?

Listen, Arizona, certainly, if you could take the heat.Not a Coast.

No, I mean Washington, Oregon, California.

I think Washington State, of all of those, Washington State is the most resilient. I Portland is tough. I think that unless they reverse a lot of their policies, it's going to be tough. But I think the lifestyle of the West Coast, Washington State is a beautiful state. Seattle is a little bit of a mess, but most people live there not to live in Seattle. They live there to live in the mountains and the lakes. It's beautiful. I think Washington State, I think their tax system is a little better, and I think that there's a lot of people. I would say that that area holds and builds in the West Coast. I think Orange County, California, which about an hour and a half south of LA, where the DA actually prosecutes crime and people feel better raising their families there. They get that lifestyle of being by the beach and things like that. I think that holds. Hopefully, San Francisco is getting reversed and gets better. I don't know. I tend to think that it may come back. I don't know, but that would be a hope, too. What about homeownership?

You grew up in a world, you're not even that old. People owned their homes, middle-class people owned homes. Is that over?

It seems to be over in the sense that it's becoming more and more difficult, I think, for people now to There's trade-offs to owning a home. Owning a home is not perfect for everybody. It's not right for everybody. It's not always ideal. It is ideal for people that have the finances to do it and to live. I think people are looking at their lives now and they're going, The amount of money and work and all the things that we're going to have to do to own this home just may kill us. It shouldn't be that way. But I think that's what's happening. I think the trade offs now are much higher. Why isn't anyone running on homeownership? That was a pillar of American society.

Because you got to shut down the real estate lobby.

You got to shut down all these people.

You have to stop. But they're the worst people in the world.

I know. They're the worst. But people won't tell. There's this idea that... I think, again, it's like we are a capitalist country. I'm a capitalist. I think it's great to make money. But I do think that there is a point where consolidation, you have all these companies, you have three or four companies running everything, doing everything. You're preventing the spirit of capitalism. You're preventing small businesses. You're preventing competition. You're preventing all these things. You have this conglomerate of all of these different multinational corporations that just are these nameless faceless blobs that own the government. I mean, it's just hard to imagine people opening a restaurant, starting a bed and breakfast, opening a hardware store, opening a business. They can't do it. Now, owning a home is the new opening of business, where it's like, I remember 20 years ago, people were like, We can't open a business. Are you nuts? Now, it's like people are going, Oh, I can't own a home. Because I remember people in this country used to open businesses. That was also a thing. People used to actually have a business and work for themselves. That has all been put out.

I mean, there are still people doing that, but it's very few. Corporations run everything. You go to New York City, everything's a Chase Bank. Everything's a steakhouse that has 15 locations. It used to be like mom and pop diners and stuff that had great food and weren't that expensive. Maybe you waited a little longer, maybe there was an attitude, maybe there's a crazy person there who ran the place who was an eccentric, but it was fun. Now everything is corporate. I mean, every sushi restaurant looks like every steakhouse, and they all look hedge funds. You know what I mean?

You go into every place and you're like, What does the hedge fund look like?

Just do you marble and like a neurology clinic, right? So everything... And I know you're big on architecture, so that's one of my things, too, is it's like the sameness of everything, how hollow and corporate it is. It's designed to just exist primarily on a screen. It's like you lost... That's the thing people people go, Oh, who cares? It's a small businesses. No, but the country you live in is fundamentally different. You see different things.Physically different.Physically different. Why does nobody notice that? Nobody notices. Nobody cares. People are just being ushered into this new thing, and nobody's asking. Everything is the same 10 corporations. It's the same 20 restaurants. You go to any town and you have the football stadium, the baseball stadium. You have the two chain steakhouses everyone's heard of, a cheesecake factory, a mall, a bad area, some historic place that no one goes. A Marriott, a Hilton, a nice old hotel that's broken down but is charming, and it has a brunch on a Sunday. Then it's surrounded by 45 minutes to an hour of urban decay. That's every city in America, outside of 10. Where's the resistance? When I was a kid, there was a group called Earth First, which I made fun of because they were like, Liberals or whatever.

Now I love them, but there's nothing like it left. They would just go put sugar in the gas tank of bulldozers. We're trying to clear-cut woods to build a development. Their point, they were Kuzinskiites. Well, corporations have done a great job of going, We love you.

We like you. We actually think you're great. We think it's great. We're progressive. Everything you're into, we're into. Everything that the internet says is good, we vibe with. We're open to everything. We're going to do everything you want. If you want a black female CEO, You're going to get one. We're not stopping at Swep Shops, but you're going to get a black female CEO. We can get anything you want. We will do anything you want. You want a polyamorous orgy here at Chase? We'll do it. We'll do it. We're going to foreclose on everyone's house, but we'll do that. And they keep moving the goalpost around where you're confused. You go, What exactly is happening? And that's why I'm amazed at their ability to do it. When we grew up, we always looked at these corporate Wall Street guys. They were all fucking criminals. And we were watching our own backs, even though we know you need to make money. And maybe there's a way for us to make money together, but we always got to watch our backs. The tech people are now very much like, We're utopians. We're great. We're good. Everything's good.

We drink green juices. We ride bikes. We care about the environment. We care about you. And that's it. All the 14-year-olds are killing themselves because of our product, but we're good people. And there's something really scary about people that come to you. It's always very... I'm just the type of guy where if somebody comes to me out of nowhere and goes, Hi, I care about you. I love you and I care about you and I want you to have the best life ever. I go, Cool. What's this about? Because I know what's coming next. Which is rape. Yeah. What's coming next is just get in this van. I think we have a situation where the tech people are saying, Get in the van. I hate this. I can't believe what I'm saying is that that's a brilliant analysis. Yeah, smart. Really smart. I'm not inviting you into the van. That's a sincere praise.

That's a much more effective, but also a much more female approach. Yeah. Rather than just do old-fashioned fascism or old-fashioned futalism.

I'm the Lord, you're the surf.

If you don't like it, I'm going to flog you. There's something straightforward and less threatening about that. Right. Yes. There's something straightforward about knowing people's intentions. Intentions are big. If they're out in the open, I'm much more comfortable. If I know why, if you walk on a car lot and somebody comes up to you to sell you a car, It's completely understandable. Whether that person is honest or not, whether they're going to give you a good deal or not, you know exactly what they're trying to do, and you know what their end goal is.

They want to sell you a car so they can be funny. Yeah, exactly. When someone is trying to remake the world you live in for your benefit, and you have no idea why they're trying to do it, and you have no idea what it will look like. You have no concept of what this world is going to look like. We were all promised this world is just a world is going to connect everybody, all this stuff, and the free and open exchange of ideas and information. What it becomes this lonely, isolating thing where everybody, teenagers are being severely damaged by these products that are out there. It's not good. There are people that their mental health has deteriorated on these platforms. There doesn't seem to be any accountability. Nobody cares. There's a few books about it, and there's a few people that are upset about it. It's It's also very co-opted by... You also have the political angle, too, where it's like everybody's talking about banning TikTok, and I'm sure TikTok has spyware and what else. But everyone's talking about it because kids are now sitting down at the table with their family and watching the Gaza stuff.

They're going, Why are we shooting this baby in the face? Their family is going, Well, I don't know. There's a very good reason for that. There's a good reason for it. I want you to focus on your driving test. You go, Yeah, but they're lighting these people on fire. Now all these kids are getting information from TikTok, and nobody likes it. Nobody likes it. Now it's going. Now it's going. Banning TikTok is not an effort, a last-ditch effort to save us from child. I don't think they care. No, they don't care about your kid's mental health. I don't think they ever have. I don't think They're interested in your kids mental health. They're not interested in your mental health. They're not interested in the mental health of anybody.

So they're certainly not interested in your kids mental health.

And they're not banning TikTok because they care about your kids mental health. That's just completely untrue. Now, I'm not saying that TikTok is an innocuous thing. I'm sure there's things in TikTok that I'm unaware of, but their reasons for it are not the ones they're saying. What's your relationship with technology? I use it for work. I have to use it. But be specific. It's enabled me to make a career out of what I do. I'm very excited about it. I think we have to live with it.

It's not something we can become Luddites and just get...

I'll post clips of things I've done. I will read a lot. I go to Drudge. I read all these things. Every day, I read a lot. Then I go to Instagram and things like that, and I post where I'm going to be. I'm going to be here if you want to come see me or if I'm going to do whatever. Then I go in and record a podcast, usually once or twice a week, twice a week, every week. Then the clips are cut. I post the clips and everything like that. It's a relatively healthy relationship. You can't start reading about yourself. I don't read about myself. Rogan taught me that. He's like, Don't read about yourself. And he's right. Good or bad, he's right to just ignore it and do what you're going to do. So smart. He's right about 100% of that. I don't really read about it, but I remember growing up without it. I remember not having access to a smartphone until I was probably in Blackberry. I was in college. You're not even 40, though, right? Yeah, I'm 39, but I was late to the game. It sounds like you, probably in the last year of American children, not to marinate in technology from birth.

Yeah, we were the last year. We were half in, half out. We were certainly not marinating in it from birth. We were a generation of people that started, and some of us were more savvy than others, but it started in middle school, but it didn't come on anywhere nearly as strong as it comes on for kids now because we didn't have smartphones attached to us. I mean, I had a flip phone in high school. It was like, who care? You could call your friend, you could text, but it wasn't. You weren't inundated all day with these things. But it sounds like you make an effort, just to answer your question for you, to connect with people directly rather than just-Yes, I love going and seeing people. I believe in that. I'll go out, I'll leave the Earth doing that, meaning I don't want to be a part of the... I mean, I might have to, to some degree, for my career, but I don't want to be in a metaverse. I don't want to be in a virtual world. That has no appeal to me. It sounds like you literally fly around to see people.

I do, yeah. I think it's important. No one does that. I know. It's interesting. I know. It's important to see people stay in their bubbles. I like to see people all the time.

I like to talk to people. But physically.

Yeah. There's something about a friendship that I believe needs a physical dimension It doesn't mean you have to see them all the time. But the idea that you can have dinner with someone, even if it's once or twice a year, but the idea that you can be in their presence is important to me. It's not just somebody that exists online in the digital. You don't just do that for work reasons. No, I do it socially. I do it to see people.

I want to know what's going on.

I don't think you know what's going on reading text. I agree completely. Is that why you've managed to stay sane despite being on the road all the time?

Well, I mean, sane is a relative term, but I think it It helps to see people and get out of the world of whatever the entertainment business is and just see friends and people that are raising kids and have businesses and have lives and live in different parts of the country and are excited about different things and have challenges I don't have and have the aspirations that I find very interesting and helping them in any way that I can or going there to just hang out with them and their families.

It's important to me to go and see the actual people living life. I'm a big fan of that. I I think people staying in a place, I understand that people have to do it. There was economic conditions in my life where I had to do it. But now that I have the ability to go and travel and meet people, I think it's a cool thing to do. How do you not go crazy on the road all the time? It's difficult. I think it's difficult. Because I have to record this show, I'm always somewhere where I have to do the podcast twice a week. I try I try to, like I said, when I'm on the road, I try to bookend things where I can visit friends, see people. Old friends of mine will come out to a show and we'll go out and grab dinner, take a walk around their neighborhood. There is something to me about trying to connect with people that wasn't as important to me. Now I'm older, it's become really important. It wasn't important to me. If you came to me even five, six years ago, I would go, Who cares?

Now, if someone out of nowhere goes, Hey, we went to high school together. They're even weirded out by it. I saw you performing everything, and I go, What are you doing?

They're like, I don't know.

I'm like, I got nothing to do on Saturday, and I will go to their house. We'll take walks. I want to connect with people now. You do not spend 12 hours in a hotel room?

No, No, no. I try my hardest to meet people that I know or go to a place I find interesting.

You must know a million people who spend their lives like you do on the road, and they all go insane or get addicted to something weird. I don't think you could do it forever. I think I'm 39. I think I've got a few years left. I don't think I'll be doing this forever on the road. I do believe that. I do believe that there's an endpoint to it. Sorry, agents. But I do believe that eventually you have to say, Okay, I've done enough and I've seen enough, and this has been great, but I'm going to do it a lot less frequently. But there's a lot of people that, listen, everybody battles with things on the road. The road is a difficult place to be because you're taken out of your environment. Oh, yeah. You're dropped in this thing. The comforts that people look to, I mean, everybody battles different things out there.

Drugs, food, sex, lying, cheating, gambling, whatever it is that you have issues with. The road makes it come out.

You have to keep vigilant about certain things so that you're not in like, get into trouble. Yeah. I mean, that's why touring musicians die at 27, right? That's right. Yeah, for sure. They live hard. How many years have you done it? I've been on the road now, probably about consistently since about 2017, 2018. Okay. It's under 10 years. Even before that, I was doing stuff, but it was much less... I wasn't going all over the place. I was staying. I was in New York, and I would go Connecticut or Pennsylvania or Boston or DC. But now I'm doing a lot more and I'm all over the country, and then we travel internationally, too.

So it's definitely-What's the worst you've ever bombed?

Good question. You do these fundraisers in Long Island. You would get booked, and they were very bad rooms for comedy that have these circular tables where people are eating dinner with each other. Then you would be in the corner of the room with the microphone, and they would bring you up. But a lot A lot of times, you'd be following a performer or somebody. This was a woman who was crying. Her daughter died of cancer, and she was like, She was a fighter, and we love her, and everyone's clapping. Then the guy gets up and goes, Now we have a comedian. I went up, I'm doing jokes about frozen yogurt and stuff, and it just didn't... It was bad. It was bad. It was bad because it was utter disinterest. There's bombing where people hate you and you can almost feed off the energy of hatred. Then there's utter disinterest. There's utter like, God, this was a bad idea, and we're checked out.

The worst thing is you knowing it was a bad idea.

It was a terrible idea.

I shouldn't be there, and we shouldn't have done this.

What joke is offending people more than any other? I have a bit about the Ukraine people don't like. Really? I do, yeah. What do you say? Well, I can't say it here because then no one will see me. But no, I'm kidding. What do I say? I say... What do I say? I describe a scene where I said, This guy, Zalinsky. I said, I don't like him. He's ripped. He's good-looking, and he wants money. There's nothing worse than a good-looking guy that doesn't know where to get any money. I go, he pops up in the middle of the Grammy Awards when you're just trying to watch wet-ass pussy with your children. I said, You called them into the room and you bring out your pregnant 12-year-old and she's twerking in the living room and your other kid comes out and they're nonverbal and they're just in the back swaying. Then this guy from a country you've never heard of wants money. I go, Vladimir Putin's maybe not a great guy, but so far, he's asked me for zero dollars. I agree. Some people did not like it. They didn't like it? Some people didn't like it.

Some people like it, but to me, it's funny. It's just funny the idea of what a mess a lot of the people are in this country that we're asking for money.

I know. That makes me laugh. The idea that they're like, I'm just describing this crazy scene, and then they're like, Wait, do you mind?

It's just funny to me. It's just funny to me the idea that It's like, you got to get these people. It's so important. It's absolutely more important. It's more important than your own children. Yeah. That was the joke. You've never been to Russia, right? I've never been. I tried to go. We went on a tour. We were in Finland, which is close, very right there border. I was standing in my hotel lobby going, I want to go to St. Petersburg for dinner. The woman's like, We're a NATO country. I go, Great. I would really like to go. I said, I'll fly private. I'll pay. She goes, No, you can't go to Russia. Then I think one of your buddies texted me, one of your guys said that... Because I asked, I said, How do I get in? Because you have to go through a non-NATO country. You got to go through whatever, Turkey or Serbia.

I was like, That's a whole thing.

But I wanted to go. I wanted to go to dinner. It was a great restaurant I wanted to go to. Are you going to go? I would love to go, yeah. I've never been. But I like it. There's tons of beautiful architecture. Amazing. Great restaurants.

There's tons of architecture. I want to go back. You should come.

Let's go. I'm into it. Would your agent drop you if you went? No. You sure? No, I don't think so. He might book me in Russia. No, my agent is a real money-grubbing monster. Really? He's a real monster.

If you said to your agent-I might be in Latvia on a corner like this with a microphone, but yeah, what do you say?

So your agent has never had moral qualms with anything you do? My agent wouldn't know what a moral qualm was if you took out a dictionary and explained it to him. He's a good guy.

Would it be his favorite thing that I was in Russia? Perhaps not, but he wouldn't drop me.

Is there anything you could do that would make him drop you?

Sure. Absolutely. I think they drop you for all kinds of reasons, but I don't know. I would say the most dangerous thing for me to do that would get my agency to drop me would be to assert my humanity.

I am not an animal. I am a man. Yeah, that would be tough. I think that would be hard. Last question. Of all the comedians working today, the top ones, what percentage of those are, I'm sure I'm saying exactly what they really think. Most of them. I think that the really good ones are funny. I think the most important thing is to be funny. Then a lot of times that comes from a place of saying what you feel. Yeah. Sometimes it comes from a place of creating great characters. It can come from many different places. But certainly, if you say what you want and you take ownership of it and you say it in a way that people find funny or interesting, that's the job. That's the only job. That's why it's a great job is because it's really the second oldest job. The oldest job, I don't think I'd be great at.

I certainly wouldn't command the prices I do in the second oldest job, which is being a town crier. It's all we do is we're standing in the town square and going, Hey, what's going on? I think a lot of them are saying, and I think that that's going to be the major shift.

I think that's what people are connecting to. It's just interesting. The guys who dominated the business 10 years ago. Not all, but many seem to be in terminal decline. Some of them seem like people who are reading a script or who approach their job with a lot of things they were not allowed to say. Well, I think it's the platforms change. What was TV is now the Internet. What was film is now all digital, for the most part. There are films and everything. And the platforms, the internet has a lot more freedom. There are a lot of restrictions, and there are all kinds of profit models and monetization issues with all kinds of sites and whatever. But if you look at it, Overall, there's a lot more freedom on the internet than there is in a corporate, advertiser-supported network. So the freedom to say things now has increased. I think a lot of the people that existed 10 years ago weren't part of that system. Maybe if they were, maybe they would have had, maybe they would have felt more comfortable. I think they just came up at a time when there were sensors and everything you said had to go through standards and practices and sales and advertising.

You had to have all these. You could still do really funny, great stuff with all of that.

But on the internet, it's the Wild West. You have more freedom now than you did.

It feels like a lot of freedom. It feels like people are saying exactly what they think right now. I think so. How long can that continue? I mean, that's a threat. I think it's also we all feel, not to be cryptic, but I do feel like, not that I don't want to do the not like we're living in our last day's thing. But it does feel like times are too... I feel like things are getting hot all over the world. I think people realize the value now of being just, let's get out with it. It's like when people, when they're dying, they just say what they need to say. I think as our society is dying a little bit, people are saying what they need to say. I think the time for politeness has gone out the window and niceties. I think people are embracing just the truth of what they have to say because we are living in times that are certainly wild and perilous. You're looking at Russia and China and all these things, North Korea, and you're looking at problems in your own country, like fentanyl, this, that, and the other thing.

It's like the idyllic idea of America has been shattered.

I think a lot of people are picking up the pieces of that, and they're like, Listen, if I'm going to live in this country, and I'm going to exist in this time, I'm going to speak speak and say what I want. Are we going to look back in five years and see this as this brief renaissance of free speech before the onslaught of totalitarianism?

Well, hopefully not. It does seem all of a sudden, out of nowhere, and even in the past two months, that there is actual free speech.

I hope that that isn't the case. I don't know. I don't have a crystal But how can you continue to run this country in the way that you are, if you're the people who are running it, and allow people to criticize you this precisely?

You have to make it financially beneficial. I think that's the whole thing. They are going to co-opt the methods of distribution to a degree that if we call them pedophiles, they'll make money from it. That's me.

Wow, is that dark?

That's like-They're not going to get called pedophiles for free.

That's the darkest thing I've ever heard. So they're not going to shut down the speech. They're just going to monetize it, monetize the attacks on themselves. It seems to be a happy medium. I'm going to stop there to give myself time to think about what you just said.

Thank you very much for having me, by the way. And thank you for dinner and everything.

I really appreciate it. I know you hate compliments, but there were some profound-Well, that's good. Well, thank you.Thank you.Thank.

You very much.Tim Dylan.I appreciate it.Thank.

You, buddy. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson's show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson. Com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson. Com.