America Has Changed. So Has Jon Stewart.

In 2010, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a satirical rally on the National Mall in Washington, D. C., called the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. This was amid the Tea Party movement. Political emotions were running high. And Stewart ended the rally with a speech slamming the media for stoking the country’s divisions. “But we live now in hard times, not end times,” he said. “And we can have animus and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.” That rally has a Rosetta Stone quality to it now. Because what Stewart was describing has only gotten worse. Our divisions feel deeper and more dangerous. So as we enter election week, I wanted to have a conversation with Stewart about some of the arcs he has traced in American politics since he first hosted “The Daily Show” in 1999. We discuss how the media has become increasingly segmented and polarized in the past 25 years, how that has affected politics, how he understands Tucker Carlson’s political transformation and whether his own politics have changed. Note: The Washington Post is one of several news organizations mentioned in this conversation. We taped this interview before the recent controversy at the Washington Post over ending its practice of presidential endorsements -- a decision made by the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos. This episode contains strong language. Book Recommendations: I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This (But I’m Going to Anyway) by Chelsea Devantez The works of Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions, Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, etc.) Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:28Ezra Klein?

  So you go back to the Tea Party moment in 2010. Tucker Carlson had only just been hired by Fox News. He was just two years out from being employed by MSNBC. Elon Musk was standing for Barack Obama. He got Jon Stewart then into his second decade as a host of The Daily Show. And he and Stephen Colbert host this satirical rally to restore sanity and/or fear at the National Mall in Washington, DC. And Stewart gives this speech.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  But we live now in hard times, not end times.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  And we can have animus and not be enemies.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.

• 1:32Ezra Klein?

  When I look back now, from the vantage point of the era we're in and the eras we've been in, this moment, to me, it has this kind of Rosetta Stone quality. There's so much in it that is going to blossom in such strange and terrifying ways. And there's something about this sanity fear framing. It seemed like a joke then. In some way, it doesn't seem like a joke now. In the years since the rally, Stewart has continued to track the media's tendency to amplify some of the worst, most divisive tendencies in American politics. He's now back hosting The Daily Show sometimes. He's got the Weekly Show podcast with Jon Stewart, which is great. So with very, very little time now before Election Day,

• 2:16Ezra Klein?

  I wanted to have him on the show to talk about his understanding of this arc of these decades, what he has seen, the way he has seen the media, some of the figures in it change, the way he has changed. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:44Ezra Klein?

  Jon Stewart, welcome to the show.

• 2:46Jon Stewart?

  Thank you, Ezra. I'm delighted. I'm delighted to be here.

• 2:49Ezra Klein?

  So can we go on the wayback machine to the rally for fear and sanity and/or sanity?

• 2:53Jon Stewart?

  Oh, my God. How? That's a...

• 2:57Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 2:58Jon Stewart?

  How many years?

• 2:59Ezra Klein?

  We were all young.

• 3:00Jon Stewart?

  We were all young and apparently getting a contact high.

• 3:04Ezra Klein?

  That has a little bit of a Rosetta Stone quality for me, that rally. How did it come about? How did you decide to do a rally?

• 3:12Jon Stewart?

  I'm trying to think back. I think what happened was, this was at the height of Glenn Beck, and he was doing these sort of oddly demagoguish rallies where he would go down to Washington and, you know, you would see like older tea partiers in lawn chairs sort of surrounding the waiting pool. And I think it came of that. I think I remember being on the phone with Stephen, and we were just laughing about it. And I said, you know, we should just go down there and bang one of those out. I mean, it was an entire clusterfuck like that. We really, I mean, as you could tell from watching it probably, the preparation was not...

• 3:57Ezra Klein?

  It has been very hard to get clean audio from it. Yes, that's been what I'm running into.

• 4:02Jon Stewart?

  That morning, so Stephen and I, I was doing my show, he was doing Colbert Report. So we didn't rehearse anything. We didn't do anything. And that morning, we were driving over to the mall early. And you don't, at that time, you really didn't have a sense of if anybody would show up. And we're driving in, and there's just a shit ton of people pouring out of it. And we're like, oh, what's going on? And they were all going there. And we'd only set up like two large screen TVs. Like, that's pretty much all we had. And so we sat in a little makeshift trailer. With the Roots, Ozzy Osbourne,

• 4:43Jon Stewart?

  the OJs, and Youssef Islam, and walked through, like, we were literally walking those guys through the ideas. So, the Roots are playing the songs and we're like, "Youssef Islam, you're gonna come out and do Peace Train, we're gonna do the whole thing." And then Ozzy, "You're gonna interrupt after like two bar stanzas with Crazy Train." And Youssef is just looking at us like, "But Peace Train's a beautiful song." "Why would you, why would you interrupt?" It was, the whole thing was bonkers.

• 5:16Ezra Klein?

  There's something about that rally I thought a lot about in, in the years after, because in some weird way, after that, I mean, maybe it was happening then too, the political coalitions kind of split into the aesthetics of sanity, institutions, systems, "In this house, we believe in science", and the aesthetics of fear, conspiracy, rage, anger, a kind of nativist populism. And you were beginning to see it, right? Glenn Beck was the weird thing happening on Fox News. But when you were looking at the landscape then, like, what, what did sanity mean to you? And, and what did fear mean to you in politics?

• 5:57Jon Stewart?

  Uh, well, I think it was, I mean, again, I, I'm trying to put myself back in the headspace of all that. I mean, all of it was kind of a reaction to, and our show was a reaction to, what I saw as kind of this, at that point, probably 40-year project of rebuilding parallel institutions to the left. So there was this idea, you know, people always talked about like, your show, it degraded the discourse and, you know, poked fun at things. And I'm like, "Do you have an AM radio?" Like, I used to, because I drove to a lot of gigs, you know, doing stand-up to the, I don't know, your listeners may not know this, show business is very glamorous. A lot of times, you would get in what we would call a rental car and drive to Rochester.

• 6:42Jon Stewart?

  And then you would go to Buffalo, if you were lucky. And then all the towns in between, Poughkeepsie's connected, you know, you'd hit the old, uh, vaudeville circuit. But I listened to a lot of AM radio. And the vitriol, and, I mean, non-stop fire hose of degradation towards anything

• 7:05Jon Stewart?

  Left of, I want to say Lyndon LaRouche, but anything that left of that was ubiquitous. So I saw that cleaving, that Roger Ailes, sitting in the White House in 1972, or wherever, 1973, or 1974, going, "I will never allow what the left did to Nixon to ever happen again." And so the right, very smartly, rebuilt their own institutions in their image. Colleges, think tanks, media, and they portrayed anything that had been the standard institution as wildly left-wing, an activist, even if it might not be, even if it just had the patina

• 7:49Jon Stewart?

  of, you know, notions of equality, or fairness, you know, the kinds of things that just don't fly in those situations.

• 8:01Ezra Klein?

  So you're describing the fear side of this. I want to zoom you in on the sanity side, because I think that gets at something interesting that happens around then, and is, I think, a big part of politics, which is, it's imbalanced in a way, right? It's not like good versus bad, the sort of aesthetic that emerged. I think it emerged in media too, at that time. There is a lot in right-wing media that is about fear. And left-wing media was not like, "We're going to tax the billionaires," right? Maybe it wants to do that, right? Democrats have become this party-

• 8:31Jon Stewart?

  Well, you've got to define left-wing media, though.

• 8:33Ezra Klein?

  That's totally fair, but let me say, Democrats, right? The Obama-era Democratic Party, the way the Democratic Coalition is changing, is not a class warfare coalition. It is a coalition that is, makes a big point about technocracy. You know, if we could just sort of come together and listen to the experts and look at the right charts, "I am part of this," at Wonk Blog, we'd all come to the right conclusion. Could we just be sane about this, common sense about this? It's kind of a pro-system coalition. And so in this weird way, you develop, I think, this new aesthetic in politics that you guys pick up on. It's not like, "Oh, the right wants to go to war against communism, and the left wants to tax rich people." It has this other cultural dimension. It's like,

• 9:16Ezra Klein?

  "The left are the experts. We're smart. We think about things. The right are, you know, they're the heartland. They're the real Americans. They're tough."

• 9:25Jon Stewart?

  Right.

• 9:25Ezra Klein?

  And it's this whole other, like, slightly orthogonal, but I think now very dominant way that politics cleaves. It is almost- Barely related to what people want to do.

• 9:35Jon Stewart?

  First of all, I cannot tell you how often people just throw the word orthogonal at me.

• 9:42Ezra Klein?

  Do you enjoy it or no?

• 9:44Jon Stewart?

  Everywhere I go, no, I don't. I don't know what it means. Tell me what that means.

• 9:49Ezra Klein?

  See, this is a problem with like the left wing coalition over here.

• 9:53Ezra Klein?

  Sort of existing separately from, right?

• 9:55Jon Stewart?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 9:56Ezra Klein?

  It's like a different, like a totally different space.

• 9:59Jon Stewart?

  So that's, I think that's really a nice perceptive analysis of those Obama years. I would probably go further and say that was the foundation of the left from, I mean, I think that's what the Goldwater revolution was, was more about, you know, this idea that the best and the brightest, right? That's sort of the Kennedy idea of we're going to get the best and the brightest and that's going to get us Vietnam, you know? But I think in some ways what you're describing is that, that original cleaving that I think

• 10:36Jon Stewart?

  Obama maybe represented, but is much more about that Kennedy coalition that came in and the Goldwater coalition that, that rose up to oppose it. Or, I mean Roosevelt to some extent, when you think about the New Deal and maybe that's what they would consider the original sin of the left, this idea that government will expand to help people, which, which was a huge sin. You know, the idea that, hey, wait, that guy's hungry? What if we gave him soup? And people would be like, what? No, that is the job of the sisters of the poor. That government can't do that. But ultimately, that's been the battle.

• 11:20Ezra Klein?

  I want to play you a bit of your speech that day. I was going back and listening to it and one thing that struck me about it, yeah, I'm so sorry.

• 11:26Jon Stewart?

  For me, this is a terrible, terrible nightmare that I'm about to experience. By the way, and the rally to resource sanity, here's what I think social media exists for. Social media exists for people to remind you what they will never forgive you for. Like what we thought was kind of a larf and we're going to have a fun day has turned into, there's very little I can do, even today. That people won't come on. So I get two things on social media in the comments section. One is, you're a Jew. That's just kinda, no matter what happens, whether I put out like, this is a picture of my dog, and like, somebody's gonna come in the comment and be like, why did you change your name, Jew? And the second is, I will never forgive

• 12:09Jon Stewart?

  you for that fucking stupid rally to restore sanity that apparently handed control of Congress to the Republicans.

• 12:17Ezra Klein?

  You know what sucks for you? It has become the worst thing of all.

• 12:20Jon Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Ezra Klein?

  Text. And that is how, that is how we are treating it here. You've, you created a text.

• 12:25Jon Stewart?

  Yes.

• 12:26Ezra Klein?

  So I want to play you a bit of your speech. I'm very sorry. But one of the interesting things about your speech there, and about your show in that time, about Stephen Colbert, is it's, it's not really about the right, it's about the media. So, and the way that the media amplifies hostility and distorts relationships between Americans.

• 12:42Jon Stewart?

  Sure.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Because the image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. It is us through a funhouse mirror, and not the good kind that makes you look slim in the waist and maybe taller. But the kind where you have a giant forehead and an ass shaped like a month old pumpkin, and one eyeball. So why would we work together? Why would you reach, why would you reach across the aisle to a pumpkin-assed, forehead-eyeball monster?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  If the picture of us were true, of course, our inability to solve problems would actually be quite sane and reasonable. Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution, or racists and homophobes who see no one's humanity but their own?

• 13:46Jon Stewart?

  Geez.

• 13:47Ezra Klein?

  How does that hit for you now?

• 13:48Jon Stewart?

  Well, I, there is very little in this world more unappealing than the sound of your own voice being at moments sincere or also projecting. Like, it's, it's very hard to listen to yourself projecting into a field. It's like a bizarro campaign speech where you're like, oh, I, it has the rhythm and tone and volume of a campaign speech, but I'm talking about a pumpkin ass.

• 14:15Ezra Klein?

  So, so there is a big idea at that time. Barack Obama used to talk about this all the time, right? It's the subject of the famous oh four DNC speech that, that launches him to national politics. And that cable news and later Twitter and the 24 hour news cycle and all the rest of it, it distorts us. It's a funhouse mirror. We get pumpkin asses and, and single eyeballs.

• 14:35Jon Stewart?

  I'm so sorry about that. That is not the appropriate reference.

• 14:38Ezra Klein?

  A vivid image, a vivid image.

• 14:40Jon Stewart?

  Right.

• 14:41Ezra Klein?

  And it's wrong. And then on the other hand, as time went on, and I wonder sometimes whether the media was cause or effect here, right? Politics begins to feel, I think, a little more, not pumpkin ass, but when I watch people in politics, when I watch Donald Trump, when I watch people acting in Congress now, I wonder to myself, which one, which of us are the real us, right? It, it doesn't seem like always that our conflicts are so overstated, that the N midi is a distortion. Did you feel it is something that the media amplified and then it became reality? Or do you feel like it's still not reality?

• 15:27Jon Stewart?

  Well, it's, I, it's probably not as black and white as, as any of that in terms of, you know, is it reality? But I can tell you this, I mean, I live in deep MAGA country where I am and there's, you know, New Jersey's a blue state, but there are really red pockets and I live in one and on a day to day basis. So if you're telling me like, do I think my neighbors have an enmity and an unpleasantness that I can't cut? No, I don't think that at all. I, I have wonderful and meaningful relationships with people that, and there's certain topics that you try to avoid and that there are other topics that you don't avoid at all and you give each other tremendous amounts of shit for. So, and again, that's anecdotal, not data. So I can't tell you what's what. I can only tell you my experience, but in my experience.

• 16:14Jon Stewart?

  Media is, um, has an effect. It has a weight and it has an ability to warp perceptions. You know, cable news to me was mind blowing. 24 hour news cycle is good for one thing, and that's nine 11. Like when nine 11 happens, you want that fucking station to be on all day and you want people and you want something because the world is so tenuous in that moment. But in the absence of it, how are you going to keep people watching? We have to, in some ways, impose kind of a contrived urgency or a fear. And it's nothing new. It's just a question of degrees.

• 16:55Jon Stewart?

  How many times, you know, in the olden days of Roger Mudd and eyewitness news, it was, you know, do you have children? Well, you won't believe the dangers in your bathroom. And you're like, well, I would, I shit there. Like I, I would think it's probably not hygienic. But it's always been about how do we keep the eyeballs, right? I'm going to use, can, may I use a not safe for work and somewhat a tawdry example here?

• 17:20Ezra Klein?

  Before now, this has all been safe for work. This has been, this has been your version of PG.

• 17:25Jon Stewart?

  This is a classy program, so I don't.

• 17:27Ezra Klein?

  You, you, you do what you need to do.

• 17:29Jon Stewart?

  Ezra, you're a good man.

• 17:30Ezra Klein?

  Thank you.

• 17:31Jon Stewart?

  Uh, when I was a young man, I'm 13, 14 years old. If I got ahold of a Sears catalog and there was a picture of a woman in a bra in it, I was like, this is the most sexually exciting and arousing image. And as you get older, you get to like, that doesn't work on you anymore. And you get to that point where you're like, three people, a goat? And, and someone's singing Pavarotti. You're like, you know, that, that is, you have to keep stimulating people further and further to different extremities to get that same hit of dopamine.

• 18:09Jon Stewart?

  And those apps and that media, especially now, are scientifically designed purposefully, like the, uh, the woman who was blowing the whistle on Facebook. Like our food is designed to escape that part of your brain that says, I should stop eating right now. Like this is purposeful.

• 18:32Jon Stewart?

  The way that we are divided as people, some of it is political and weaponized by political actors, but the majority of it is capitalism. Capitalism with the idea of how do I generate the most income out of engagement? And it turns out fear and anger and hate and outrage pay huge. I'm not suggesting that a monkey washing a cat is in a tremendous video and that will also get clicks, but that's not a business model.

• 19:10Jon Stewart?

  The business model is creating an atmosphere of outrage and anger. And so when you ask, does that have an effect? It absolutely does, and I think it does rewire the brains of the users.

• 19:25Ezra Klein?

  When I was on your show, we were talking about a piece of this, actually, which is the way that you were saying, you know, there was AM radio and then there was Fox News. And one thing that has happened in, I mean, in my lifetime, right? Which is, and I'm 40, is this tremendous segmentation. The media broke into these like little competitive slices. And competition can be great in the sense that it creates a lot of innovation. And if the innovation is how to get your little slice away from everybody else, sometimes a competition can become warping. And one of the things I always think people get really wrong about the media is they think that it is stronger and more self-directed than it is,

• 20:09Ezra Klein?

  when particularly when it has gotten very, very competitive.

• 20:14Jon Stewart?

  Right. When you say self-directed, what do you mean by that?

• 20:16Ezra Klein?

  I've been involved in lots of different media over the years. And I think something that has surprised me.

• 20:23Ezra Klein?

  From going from somebody who reads it to somebody who makes it is watching the way the media comes to reflect its audience unless a tremendous amount of editorial strength is applied in the opposite direction. So the sense that the media is just driving the audience is not quite right.

• 20:42Jon Stewart?

  So you just named, you named the game. You know, and I think we talked about this, a lie travels eight times faster than the truth, but that means that the truth has to work nine or 10 times harder than a lie. And lies are the thing that are most weaponized. The truth is rarely weaponized, but the lies sure as shit are because that's what propaganda is. And so the thing that you just said about the media not being self-directed, I think is probably putting your finger on, in my mind, exactly what is troubling, that they

• 21:22Jon Stewart?

  themselves are victims of the incentivized algorithm that they're trying to compete with as opposed to viewing it as part of an ongoing battle to combat lies.

• 21:38Ezra Klein?

  Your show has existed in two forms over time, right? There's a form on Comedy Central and then the chopped up form that goes on YouTube.

• 21:47Jon Stewart?

  Right.

• 21:48Ezra Klein?

  Does YouTube change it at all? Do you understand the YouTube difference is audience? And do you think that the fact that it has this other life has shifted the way in its earlier incarnation or in its current one, the show gets made or what gets on it?

• 22:01Jon Stewart?

  It hasn't changed the way we make it. I don't know if chopping it up changes the way people experience it. I would guess it does. You mean in like, because people get shorter and shorter, like it lasts?

• 22:13Ezra Klein?

  Not only do they get shorter and shorter, but in a In an episode, I think about this all the time in my work, right? When I was running Vox, when I was at The Post, it used to be that you bought the paper as a whole, right, or the magazine, I was at The American Prospect, you got the thing as a whole. And so, as an editor at one of those places, you would balance things out, the stuff that was really appealing with the stuff that was maybe a bit more vegetables, the stuff that was a little bit more right and the stuff that was a little bit more left, across the bundle that you are offering people. But when the way things worked was he grabbed one article and shared it around. And that article was then how people understood you. Your ability to exercise editorial control over the whole of the thing went away.

• 22:58Ezra Klein?

  And so, you know, maybe you do an episode that has different things in it for different people, or as a whole, it exists in some way. But then the fact that each segment has its own life, well, if I'm watching it on YouTube, which is often where I watch it.

• 23:13Jon Stewart?

  Right.

• 23:13Ezra Klein?

  That sort of control, that ability to give you the balanced diet, it's actually just not in your control any longer.

• 23:21Jon Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, boy, that's a good one, because it's, you know, television is so different than, you know, I think your background is probably more in writing and how people consume, but reading is such a more active process than viewership. And so, I think because I have always been in stand-up or television, I assume a more passive audience. And so, I never think quite about, did they get the whole thing? Because I just always assume they're doing something else. Like especially, you know, it's 11 at night, it's 11:30 at night.

• 24:03Jon Stewart?

  I just always assumed that I was a mild form of foreplay that just kind of... So, I think the interesting thing about our process that's maybe different than what you're describing is how little we think about who might watch it and how they might watch it. And someone asked me this once, you know, they said, uh, has the social media or any of those other things changed the way people consume your show? And I was like, I don't know. I don't know them. I know this. It hasn't changed the way we make it, which is probably stupid. It has changed the way we try to publicize it. Like, we will send out, like, if there's a good joke junk, we'll send that out there and maybe people consume that as

• 24:45Jon Stewart?

  a way to maybe entice them. But the other part of it is, you're looking at the totality of analysis and news that makes up writing, a considered art form that you're really able to express a variety of, of different elements. And you need the totality of that to, you know, actualize your, your readers. The Daily Show really was like one op ed. And then, and you know, it became, the evolution of the Daily Show wasn't, we became, you know, a series of monologue jokes that became slightly more essayistic. But it was always

• 25:25Jon Stewart?

  just one essay. So the burden of carrying that larger information world, I think we never felt, if that makes sense. And because we were steeped in television, you don't think of it in the same intellectual way that like you might, as you're building Vox or as you're thinking about the New York Times.

• 25:44Ezra Klein?

  Yeah. The, the other thing that makes me think about, which is more private thought I've had over the years, is one of the dangerous things as media went online, you always want to be selling something that isn't the politics as your service to the audience. Um, which is to say, you were selling jokes as your first service to the audience. And there's politics and analysis alongside that, but they could come for the jokes. They didn't have to agree with the politics. The New York Times, that's reporting, right? You, you might hate, you know, what you understand to be the New York Times politics, but there's a ton of international reporting and we have people all over. You know, the New Yorker, it's the, the narrative journalism, right? There's a politics to the New Yorker. But

• 26:25Ezra Klein?

  you can come for the stories first. And when you're just selling the politics, when you sort of distill it down to that. I mean, you're sort of making this about lies and truths. But I think once it just becomes a politics, what you what you can really like, you have to be in agreement. If you're a highly ideological organization and you have an audience, you have to be in agreement with the audience. So they have to be in agreement with you, or you're going to die. And the way that the internet unbundled everything, you couldn't just be coming for the sports. It made that much more intense.

• 27:00Jon Stewart?

  Yeah, so again, that's when we talk about weaponization. So it's this idea, it depends on, I would say, rather than lies and truth, maybe the binary that I would talk about is good faith, bad faith. Are you a purely political actor? Or do you believe there's utility in information? Or utility in good faith argumentation? I would say that a lot of the media is not good faith argumentation. It's political actors weaponizing forms of communication for the desired goal of shifting a political conversation towards one side. You know, and there's different parameters to that. You can do that by heightening your side's political thing. You can do that by demonizing the other side's political thing.

• 27:44Jon Stewart?

  You can do that by undercutting. You can do that by warping. But that's the real difference. I think media doesn't know how to deal with bad actors and bad faith actors that have weaponized it. And so they're forced to. It reminds me of every Supreme Court confirmation hearing where the person that has achieved this level of accolade as a lawyer or as a judge or whatever it is, sits there and they say, what do you think about this? And they go, I am an umpire and I would call balls and strikes and I would stare at decisism the precedent. It's what I, and then they get on the court and they're like, I hate women. And I'm gonna do, you know, it's all a bullshit show that's bad faith.

• 28:56Ezra Klein?

  You may remember, or actually, many people may not remember, there was a show on CNN called Crossfire for a period of time.

• 29:02Jon Stewart?

  That I'm not familiar with. But it sounds fantastic. I like any show that is named after what innocent bystanders get caught in, in a, let's say, gang violence.

• 29:13Ezra Klein?

  For somebody who's never seen Crossfire, because something happened, it ended up getting taken off of the air due to the actions of a rogue comedian. What was it?

• 29:21Jon Stewart?

  What it started out as was this idea of good faith argumentation between people of differing political viewpoints. The original premise of that is not, by definition, a bad thing. I don't necessarily think that the binary of right and left, or liberal and conservative, is a particularly useful one, but...

• 29:42Ezra Klein?

  And it was Michael Kinsley and Patrick Buchanan, the original sanity versus fear, actually.

• 29:46Jon Stewart?

  Yes, but exactly right.

• 29:50Jon Stewart?

  Slate versus Father Coquelin. But what it turned into was, and this is maybe the critique of Crossfire that I think everyone has misunderstood, was this idea of, I wasn't calling for civility. I was calling for a non-Kabuki theater version. That debate, of course, should be robust and, at times, angry. But it should be in a modicum of good faith. And what it had become was sort of this very weaponized incentivized theater. So when you ask, again, back to the original question, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Well, what came first was an intention of having really interesting

• 30:33Jon Stewart?

  argumentation that could be illuminating and articulate differences. And what the business model of 24-hour cable news turned it into...

• 30:47Jon Stewart?

  Was a perverse exercise in cynical, weaponized divisive conversation.

• 30:56Ezra Klein?

  You're gonna enjoy this, so I'm gonna play a clip for, yeah, sorry.

• 31:00Jon Stewart?

  This is not fun.

• 31:02Ezra Klein?

  You've done a lot to deserve this, or it's karma. You do this for other people.

• 31:06Jon Stewart?

  You have listeners out there.

• 31:08Ezra Klein?

  Has this not happened to you?

• 31:09Jon Stewart?

  No.

• 31:10Ezra Klein?

  Really?

• 31:11Jon Stewart?

  No.

• 31:13Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, unfortunately, it's happening now.

• 31:14Jon Stewart?

  I've not had a "this is your life" like this, where you play things that, that... My wife, after Crossfire, my wife, and this was before everything became viral and things like that, like, that really hadn't happened at that point. This was a long time ago. This was like 2000 and I don't know what, four, six, eight, I have no idea. My wife called me, called me, not texted me on my iPhone, like, none of that shit existed. She called me and said, "Don't you ever do something like that again." And, and I tried.

• 31:43Ezra Klein?

  Well, I'm gonna play first what you did, and then we can talk about it. Sorry, you can cover your ears.

• 31:48Jon Stewart?

  I'm here to confront you because we need help from the media, and they're hurting us. And it's, the idea is...

• 31:57Speaker 03

  If the indictment is, let me get this straight, if the indictment is, if the indictment is, and I have seen you say this, that Crossfire reduces everything, as I said in the intro, to left, right, black, white.

• 32:07Jon Stewart?

  Yes.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Well, it's because, see, we're a debate show. It's like Singing the Weather Channel reduces everything to a storm front.

• 32:12Jon Stewart?

  I would love to see a debate show.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  30 minutes in a 24-hour day where we have each side on as best...

• 32:16Jon Stewart?

  No, no, no, no, that would be great.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  And have them fight it out.

• 32:18Jon Stewart?

  To do a debate would be great, but that's like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  I'm sorry. I think you're a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring. Let me ask you, let me ask you a question on the news.

• 32:31Jon Stewart?

  No, this is theater. I mean, it's obvious. How old are you?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  35.

• 32:35Jon Stewart?

  And you wear a bow tie?

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do. I do.

• 32:37Jon Stewart?

  So, so this is...

• 32:39Speaker 03

  No, no, I know, I know. You're right. Let me just go. Now, come on, come on.

• 32:42Jon Stewart?

  And listen, I'm not, I'm not suggesting that you're not, you're not a smart guy, because those are not easy to tell. But the thing is, that this, you're doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  You do debate.

• 32:55Jon Stewart?

  It's not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery.

• 33:00Ezra Klein?

  I knew Tucker Carlson in those days, and his signal characteristic to me, the thing I think you were picking up on particularly about him, is... He treated it all as a joke. You can go back and read Tucker Carlson's old magazine journalism, and it's great hilarious magazine journalism. He was a very, very good magazine writer when he was young. And he went through all these, you know, very quick transformations. He was on MSNBC for a while. People forget that. Rachel Maddow's, one of her early breaks was that she was a regular contributor to Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC. He was this kind of good times libertarian type. And he was a guy who treated it all kind of as a game. Right above it. I guess what I will say for him now is I don't think it's a joke to him now.

• 33:46Ezra Klein?

  Something happened there. I think his politics are much more serious and much more real. And obviously for that, much more dangerous.

• 33:54Jon Stewart?

  Humiliation happened.

• 33:55Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I'm curious how you understand his, what happened to him psychologically.

• 34:00Jon Stewart?

  Well, I think, and I hate to do this, Cesar, I'm gonna, I'm gonna describe this to you in professional wrestling terms, since that was one of the analogies that I used on there.

• 34:09Ezra Klein?

  See, this is actually the sport I know.

• 34:11Jon Stewart?

  Okay, then Ezra, you and I are gonna have a good time here.

• 34:13Ezra Klein?

  We're in good shape here. K-Fabe, I got it.

• 34:16Jon Stewart?

  Beautiful. So what I was complaining about on Crossfire was K-Fabe, was this idea that this is just theater and everybody's playing a character and nobody's a blah, blah, blah. But the other way to describe it for them is there's an establishment and then there's the anti-establishment, right? The disruptors and the rebels.

• 34:34Jon Stewart?

  Tucker Carlson was establishment and he tried to be a face. He was a heel, like, like Fox News. Megyn Kelly, same thing.

• 34:41Ezra Klein?

  Face being a good guy, heel being a bad guy in wrestling.

• 34:43Jon Stewart?

  That's right. So she's on the heel network, Fox, but she's kind of the face on Fox. She's the one that like every now and again will say something and like the establishment or liberals will go like, wow, she actually, that's empathy. That's like, that's interesting. Oh, she's not toeing a dogmatic party line, right? So they decide like, oh, I will live amongst the faces. I will join them. I will be a part of the establishment. And the establishment and the faces reject them. They feel wrongly and with a dogmatic litmus test, and it's never good enough, and it's their intolerance that put them in that position. So they tried to live amongst the normies, right? And when that blows up and creates humiliation and returns them to, I think,

• 35:31Jon Stewart?

  Their true herself, I prefer them the way they are right now. I kind of dig it. It is like,

• 35:39Ezra Klein?

  Explain that.

• 35:40Jon Stewart?

  I'd rather someone not pretend to be Barbie and just be who she is, which is, I think Ursula from The Little Mermaid. See, I went from pro wrestling to The Little Mermaid. You know, in many ways Ezra, I am still stuck in the same entertainment options that I was using when my kids were little. I am frozen in that time. But, but do you get my point about like, what happened is they view, and Donald Trump in the same way. He views that there's this world that is excluding them. And they are excluding them purely for dogmatic and they think they're better than me and they hold these views that they think their shit doesn't stink.

• 36:21Jon Stewart?

  And I stepped into that world and tried to, you know, be amongst them. And, and they rejected that because they're assholes. And now I can just be in my own world and be as angry and as vicious as I think I was treated. And I think that's kind of the way it goes.

• 36:41Ezra Klein?

  I think it's so interesting. I, I don't know Megyn Kelly's story as well as I know, or watched Carlson and Trump.

• 36:47Jon Stewart?

  I think it's a very, I think it's very similar.

• 36:49Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I've just,

• 36:49Jon Stewart?

  Her moment was the, I joined NBC.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  This morning is the launch of Megyn Kelly today, just about six minutes from now. Megyn, good morning. Good morning.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  I can't hear anything you guys are saying, but I am excited and we're excited for the country.

• 37:06Jon Stewart?

  Show didn't go that well. And, and by the way, in both instances.

• 37:09Ezra Klein?

  And this is after being run out of Fox News, by the way, because she asked hard questions of Donald Trump at the first debate, right? She was rejected by the right first because she was not sufficiently pro-Trump. And he came after her and within a year she was out.

• 37:24Jon Stewart?

  Right. And that's why we're seeing, that's what I meant by she was a face. She became a face. So if you think about it, both Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly were rejected and the reasoning behind their rejection, I think is still misunderstood. Uh, I didn't get Crossfire canceled. Crossfire's ratings sucked. And CNN looked for a way out, and that was a convenient flashpoint. And by the way, none of that had much to do, you know, with Tucker Carlson anyway. Person I really didn't like there was Novak, but he just wasn't on the show that day. But, and Megyn Kelly in the same thing. Her show just wasn't connecting on NBC.

• 38:02Speaker 05

  And I want to begin with two words. I'm sorry. You may have heard that yesterday we had a discussion here about political correctness and Halloween costumes.

• 38:11Jon Stewart?

  And then she had that moment of, uh, it was a blackface, I think, comment about the thing.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  I defended the idea, saying as long as it, as it was respectful and part of a Halloween costume, it seemed okay. Well, I was wrong, and I am sorry.

• 38:26Jon Stewart?

  If her show was killing it, they'd have found a way to forgive it. They'd have found a way to keep her on there. They'd have found, but they used it as a convenient excuse.

• 38:35Speaker 06

  After public outcry stemming from controversial comments she made this week, all eyes are on what happens next for the anchor as her time with the Today Show comes to an end.

• 38:45Speaker 07

  The move comes four days after her blackface comments that provoked a firestorm leading to a tearful apology. The chairman of NBC News condemned Kelly's remarks during the staff town hall, according to Variety, saying, "There is no place on our air or in this workplace for them."

• 39:01Jon Stewart?

  But I'm sure for her, it was incredibly painful and felt like a canceled because of my viewpoints. But the truth of the matter is NBC executives and CNN executives, they aren't woke. They aren't any of those things. They're fucking desperately trying to hold on to their jobs by generating ad revenue by whatever means necessary. And so that's what they got caught up on. And by the way, though, the way that it happened. Attack them at a core level. And that's what's created it like I've been canceled a shit ton of times.

• 39:43Jon Stewart?

  But the only reason I was canceled is like the network executives just were like, yeah, this show sucks. But they didn't say like, you're a bad person and that's why we're canceling the show. And that's what they did to them. The industry, rather than standing up for what was really going on there, which is you're not generating enough revenue and interest to justify your large contract or whatever it is. They turned it into, we're getting rid of you for a moral failing or lapse. And that was wrong. And that's not, listen, I don't care for what they do.

• 40:24Jon Stewart?

  I don't care for their opinions, but what happened to them was wrong.

• 40:29Ezra Klein?

  The executives are interesting here. I was thinking about this when you were relaying that story about Roger Ailes.

• 40:36Jon Stewart?

  Yes.

• 40:36Ezra Klein?

  There was a period of time in my life, I did a lot of MSNBC and was a guest host on a lot of the primetime programs there. And so I knew the people who ran it pretty well. And what I'd say about the people who ran MSNBC was they were fundamentally not that ideological, they were television executives. What they cared about, and that's why Tucker Carlson had a show and why they were so excited about Joe Scarborough, you know, and still are, why recently they tried to hire Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, sort of disgraced RNC chair that didn't end up working out due to revolt by people at the network morals. Roger Ailes is honestly ideological, right? He had, as he's put it, he had a vision, right? He had a view about how things should be.

• 41:17Ezra Klein?

  He wanted to be successful, but he also actually knew what he was trying to achieve in the world. Those NBC executives who brought on Megyn Kelly. It was obvious to me that that show wasn't going to work, but they wanted the look of bringing on Megyn Kelly because they are not that ideological and particularly don't want to be seen.

• 41:35Jon Stewart?

  But they're lying to themselves because they place things in a moral universe when they really are just crass executives who are trying to sell like, that's the part where I think the critique, if there's one critique of the media from the right that I do agree with is the moralizing nature. I don't know that there is, you know, the idea that these media executives moralize their position. Like, there may be no greater disparity between reality and whatever idealized moral image you have of yourselves than the Washington Post putting on their masthead, "Democracy dies in darkness." Like, who

• 42:16Jon Stewart?

  the fuck do you think you are? You have a board up in your room that shows like who's getting what clicks where. Like, that's just nonsense. I mean, I would almost welcome, maybe not necessarily a more moral component, but a component of the news media that is more forceful editorially. Like, Ailes's greatest trick was delegitimizing the idea of editorial authority while exercising almost complete editorial authority, but doing it a way that was really smart. Like, there is no condescension and moralizing on Fox. It's people on a couch asking questions. Do you think there's just, you know, are

• 43:01Jon Stewart?

  you worried about how many terrorists are coming in on the border? Do you ever worry about that? Whereas if you turn on M S E sometimes, you're like, it's like birds descending, you know, at sea on a tuna boat going, "That's factually incorrect! Incorrect!"

• 43:20Speaker 08

  Not correct, incorrect.

• 43:22Jon Stewart?

  And you're just like, ah, I can't listen to this. But that's the brilliance of it. So when I say like, Megyn Kelly's right, like, I do believe she's right. They pretended that they had to get rid of her out of some moral obligation to enlightened racism sensibility. Like, fuck you. That is so not what you did. If they're making money, they're making money. And they'll let you get away with anything. Anything. As we see. But when you ain't making money anymore, and they don't, for some reason, have the temerity to just go, yeah, you're not making us any money. They find some pretense of your moral failing and yank you.

• 44:04Jon Stewart?

  And so I get where some of that anger comes from, from those folks. Don't have a ton of sympathy, because I've been fired a bunch of times too, but for the, the old fashioned reasons of sucking.

• 44:41Ezra Klein?

  When I think of Tucker Carlson now, I miss the triviality. I miss the, that there was enough agreed upon that you could have the theater, the Kabuki, and now it feels like we've slipped down in this place where it's like, will we be a white ethno-nationalist state? That's harder to have like a funny debate over.

• 44:59Jon Stewart?

  But you always have to caution yourself against a nostalgia about this other time that existed, because, you know, William Hearst and yellow journalism and, you know, Remember the Maine can be just as damaging, even though it's newspaper. Or think about, you know, radio in Rwanda. Or think about, you know, propaganda that was piped into soldiers' ears during, you know, different times on the radio. But again, Media has to continue to raise the bar in terms of the circadian rhythm of it, the cadence of it. It has to happen faster now. It happens more.

• 45:41Jon Stewart?

  And the difficulty is for the parts of media that we look at as utility, right? Think about the checks and balances of the government. This is going to be a segue that doesn't make any sense. But think about in the way that they described the House of Representatives and the Senate. Somebody's got to be the Senate, not the Senate as it's presently constituted, but the normal Senate before it was an assisted living facility. So, you know, it has to be the saucer that cools the milk or whatever the fuck they want to describe it as. And that's what we're missing. Because what's happening is everybody's chasing that most dopamine-addled, you know, cocaine hamster sitting in a cage tapping

• 46:20Jon Stewart?

  the bar. Like, whatever makes content, right, becomes kind of fodder for all the other outlets that make their bones on content. So like, I don't know what will be clipped from this. Generally, something will be clipped. Generally, it's something that will reflect very little context about what we're talking about, but could be considered the most divisive or confrontational or provocative or partisan moment, right? I did an interview with Tim Walz yesterday. What will get clipped out of that is I had a moment where I was like, do we need the Chaney's? Can we get rid of the Chaney's?

• 47:03Jon Stewart?

  We don't need the Chaney's. And that's the moment that will be grabbed because how do those other outlets make their money? They don't make their money by going, oh, I saw this interview and it had blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They make their money by getting people to click. So rather than cooling it or debating it in good faith or looking at the issues, they look for a moment that they can exploit. And I don't look back with fond nostalgia over the early 2000s. Even the New York Times credulously published something and Dick Cheney and his friends got to go on all the Sunday shows the next day and go, even the New York Times says Saddam Hussein is trying to make a nuclear weapon

• 47:43Jon Stewart?

  with these tubes that can only enrich uranium. Like, I have no nostalgia that somehow this form of media can be more dangerous or persuasive. Like, it can all be very dangerous.

• 47:58Jon Stewart?

  And that's why we have to, in whatever moment we're living in, fight like fucking hell to take the danger out of it. And to get better understanding into it. And we have the mechanisms and we have the talent and we have the people. We just need the will. Roger Ailes built Fox News Media out of tenacity and will and skill as a producer. We have to match that with the same intentionality that he brought to it. I sat in his office one day and we yelled at each other for an hour. But my takeaway from it was that empire was built out of the back of his head.

• 48:40Jon Stewart?

  Purposefully with an idea to delegitimize any media that may take away from his vision of what the world should be.

• 48:51Ezra Klein?

  God, there's so much there. When you were, when you were talking about nostalgia, like I will die on the hill of fighting the George W. Bush revisionist nostalgia. Donald Trump is the fault of Dick Cheney. We would not have Donald Trump if we had not had Dick Cheney and the Iraq war and the delegitimization of the entire upper echelons of the Republican Party that came out of that much failure.

• 49:17Jon Stewart?

  Right.

• 49:18Ezra Klein?

  So something about seeing Dick Cheney, who now endorsing Harris and Liz Cheney, who, to be fair, I do admire that Liz Cheney was willing to lose her seat to oppose Donald Trump's anti-democratic movements.

• 49:33Jon Stewart?

  Think about the bar that sets, though, Ezra. That's, I applaud the courage of someone who recognizes a coup and decides to say something about it.

• 49:43Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but how many of the others didn't?

• 49:45Jon Stewart?

  No, that's what I'm saying. Like, that is the lowest bar.

• 49:49Ezra Klein?

  But there is this way, it's like between. Recognizing there's something important there and the like the genuine absence of accountability, right? I mean, there is something.

• 49:58Jon Stewart?

  Oh, I think other people recognize there's something important. I just think they put the project over the principle.

• 50:05Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 50:06Jon Stewart?

  Look, we're in a different world now, man. Like, the old world communism versus capitalism moment is over. And by the way, it was a fight that had more death and destruction in it than I think was probably ever necessary. All that really I think this country needed to fend off communism and socialism is a decent social safety net, which I think was was demonstrated. But now we're in a different world where the alignment is, I think, woke versus unwoke. And the interesting thing is, the unwoke people think they're the defenders of classic liberalism, when all of their allies in it, like Orban and Putin and that, that's the new alignment

• 50:49Jon Stewart?

  of the world. Woke versus unwoke. And the classic defenders, the people in the media and in government who say, I'm the defenders of the Constitution and free speech, and would like to align myself with Orban and Putin. Like, the cognitive dissonance that occurs there is mind blowing.

• 51:08Ezra Klein?

  I remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter to protect free speech and make sure Twitter was politically neutral. And now here we are.

• 51:17Jon Stewart?

  But no, it's and but but it's in many ways a cynical exercise. And you can say to them, Donald Trump is threatening broadcast license because he doesn't like that they're critical of him. Or Donald Trump is calling people the enemy within and not migrant gangs. He's talking about Nancy Pelosi. And you say, so how are you the defender of the First Amendment? And that's the guy you're throwing? Well, that's just bluster. Oh, he doesn't mean that. He doesn't think, you know, none of this particularly makes any sense. And if you want to talk about cancel culture, there is no greater cancel culture than being a

• 51:58Jon Stewart?

  Republican and speaking out even in the mildest forms against Donald Trump. Where's the free speech in any of this? It does. None of this makes any fucking sense, Ezra. Make sense of it, Ezra. You're very smart. Please help me.

• 52:13Ezra Klein?

  I think that I like the cut you're making. Like, I do think there's something to the woke, non woke. I think that people, I mean, we were talking about this when I was on your show. It's funny because we're circling some of the same topics here.

• 52:24Jon Stewart?

  Right.

• 52:25Ezra Klein?

  It is one of the oldest findings of political science, that people are not that ideological. That the people who have this-

• 52:31Jon Stewart?

  I definitely agree with that.

• 52:32Ezra Klein?

  Have this like, who experience politics as this well-connected sense of this web of policies that all go together. And if you, you know, you, you pick the liberal web or the conservative web, that's like 10% of the population. Like, most people are just not how they experience politics or the world. And one of the things that bugs me is the endless, at this point, I don't think people should still be saying, should still be surprised that Donald Trump has appeal. We've seen Donald Trump like-

• 53:01Jon Stewart?

  Sure.

• 53:01Ezra Klein?

  -figures in too many other countries. The fact that he doesn't appeal to you. But if you believe Donald Trump should be losing this election by 60, you know, 65, 35, and it's just like a failure of political strategy on Kamala Harris's part, like, I think you've missed the boat. You've missed the actual, like, appeal of strong man politics, which have been there forever. You've missed the appeal of people who say-

• 53:23Jon Stewart?

  Preach.

• 53:24Ezra Klein?

  I don't like how all this is changing and I want it to stop. There are people I love who support Donald Trump, and it's one of the best things in my politics that I have them in my life. Because like, one, it keeps my sense of people's complexity alive, but, but two, one thing you hear is just people saying, I don't know, everything's different now and I don't, like, I don't feel like I have a place in it. And-

• 53:45Jon Stewart?

  Sure.

• 53:46Ezra Klein?

  On some level, Donald Trump agrees with them. It was better before. Make America Great Again. And that's a politics that sometimes gets policies attached to it, but it's not really a politics that is about policies or even about any one thing. I mean, vibes, a sense of do you fit in the world and where it's going? Do you have status in the world and where it's going?

• 54:06Jon Stewart?

  I don't want a strong man as long as it's my strong man.

• 54:09Ezra Klein?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:10Jon Stewart?

  As long as it's following along. To that point, Ezra, I mean, you know, look, I'm not in a swing state, so I don't know exactly, but we still have down-ballot races that are being, you know, communicated all the time. The big clamoring about Kamala Harris was she has to define who she is through a series of policy things that appeal to the American people and that will help them get comfortable with her as a leader and da, da, da, da, da, da. Every commercial that I see on my television, there's only two arguments the Republicans are making, Republican candidates are making two arguments. We're all gonna die because of people coming over from the border and Kamala Harris is for they, them, Donald Trump is for you. Those are the only two commercials. Trans people and migration. That's it.

• 54:55Jon Stewart?

  And they all talk about trans people shouldn't be in sports as though like that is the dominant theme of like high school athletics now is like my kids were high school age a couple of years ago. I don't recall there ever being a trans person playing the sport or dominates or having any consequential action on that. But I will tell you this, if you're concerned about competition and fairness, I've seen a lot of parents who reclass their kids, drop them down a grade, not because they can't handle the social aspect of it, not because they can't handle the academics, but because it will make them a more appealing athletic prospect.

• 55:35Jon Stewart?

  So 19-year-olds are beating the shit out of 14-year-olds in high school sports. You want to do something about competition, do that. But what they've done is they've taken a kind of non-problem and blown it into a catastrophic emblem of a society in decline.

• 55:54Ezra Klein?

  But emblem is such an important, I think, word there because the thing, the reason there is strength to what they're doing, because yeah, it's not, look, if we could, I am fully happy to say if we could agree on giving people rights and protection from discrimination, we can then have some conversations about the right way to manage swimming at the NCAA level. Like, I think like, like, a society could say like, sports are arbitrary, we're gonna figure something out. But it's a, it's all a signal like of they are turning society into something you don't understand anymore. It's not a policy.

• 56:30Jon Stewart?

  But they're taking it though, and they're like, what they do though is, and they blow it out anecdotally through like these social media apps with their algorithms and incentives. That is the whole point as we circle back to the thing, is they are able to take those uncomfortable feelings of change.

• 56:50Jon Stewart?

  And create an urgency, you know, there's something very like I have anxiety and insomnia, had it my whole life. What it does is actually physical. Like your mind will take you to places that you believe in your body are now happening. Cortisol is flowing and you feel an urgency and an almost a fear and a panic. Whether or not what you're experiencing is real, imminent, impossible, it doesn't matter. And what the algorithms do that is so destructive and brilliant is what people in white lab coats

• 57:33Jon Stewart?

  do to Lay's potato chips. They design it in a way, the algorithm finds a way to take a piece of information and put it into your body in a way that drags you into a rabbit hole and creates in your body that sense of panic and fear. They physicalize it in a way that a newspaper never could. And that's the danger here. And always, by the way, the most vulnerable populations. You notice that it's not anybody but like the people with the fewest defenders. Always.

• 58:08Ezra Klein?

  Always. I want to end on not how everybody else changed, but how you did. And when I go back to old Jon Stewart, I'm not going to play anything at you. You're safe now.

• 58:17Jon Stewart?

  Please.

• 58:19Ezra Klein?

  There was this sort of sanity, we can all be, you know, let's have some common sense here. Like, let's not be idiots. You have this great long traffic analogy in your sanity speech about us all on the road together. And I listen to you now, listen to the podcast, got to appear on it, which was a thrill. And there's a, you're more of a populist now, like left populist. But it feels to me like the sense that-

• 58:40Jon Stewart?

  Politically, I think I've always been.

• 58:42Ezra Klein?

  I think politically, but there's a sense that I did not used to get from you. That I would describe your politics much more now, not as technocratic, but as power conceives nothing without a fight.

• 58:54Jon Stewart?

  That I completely agree with. I think the difference is- In the populations that I'm talking about, I think I've always separated, you know, the idea has always been, you know, eighty to ninety percent of the people can find some ability to work together in common ground and move forward in a productive fashion. And the other ten to fifteen percent of those people run the place. And that has always been my position. And I think some of it has been informed by having to go down to Washington to try and accomplish something, not in the media world, but in the real world.

• 59:33Jon Stewart?

  And the realities of what it takes to move a machine that is built for the status quo and built for the disconnect between their power structure and the needs of the people that they purport to represent. So there is certainly a more sober view of what it takes to move that machine. But I have never thought there was anything other than the people and the machine. And what's so frustrating about that is we, the people, by the people, for the people, of the people. And what is it about that process that removes us from them?

• 1:00:17Jon Stewart?

  That's the part that I think is so difficult. So now, when I think of solutions, I think less of those processes and changing it in more fundamental ways. I think less of, we gotta get more unionizing, gotta get more people, and think like, no, the whole fucking structure has to change. They need to be able to participate in the investment and shareholder economy at that table. Whatever feast is being had there must be had here. Poor people shouldn't have to get better lobbyists. Veterans who are struggling with toxic exposure shouldn't have to find public figures. You know, none of this shit should be the way that you permeate that bubble.

• 1:00:57Jon Stewart?

  But I don't think the fundamental truth that people inherently in day-to-day lives have an ability to be with each other healthily, that hasn't changed for me, I don't think.

• 1:01:11Ezra Klein?

  That's a great place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:01:17Jon Stewart?

  Let's see, "I Shouldn't Be Telling You This" by Chelsea Devantez. That's what I have there.

• 1:01:25Ezra Klein?

  Oh, that sounded like you were telling me a secret. No, the book is called "I Shouldn't Be Telling You This."

• 1:01:29Jon Stewart?

  Oh, yes. She's a friend of mine who is a wonderful comedian and a writer. And her memoir, she just written, I think, a few months ago, and it's absolutely wonderful.

• 1:01:40Ezra Klein?

  Chelsea Devantez was her name?

• 1:01:42Jon Stewart?

  Chelsea Devantez, fabulous comedian. You know, whenever I recommend books, I always go back to the books of my youth.

• 1:01:52Ezra Klein?

  That's great.

• 1:01:53Jon Stewart?

  And so, it's always Vonnegut. Get your hands on Vonnegut. If there was anyone that I think more impressed my worldview, it was Vonnegut. This idea of a guy who had been through World War II in Dresden and yet still maintained a hopeful, humanistic approach, even tinged with the cynicism that obviously comes through people like Carlin. And any book by Carlin or Vonnegut, and I know those sound disparate.

• 1:02:21Ezra Klein?

  Where do you start? Give me a Vonnegut for...

• 1:02:24Jon Stewart?

  I would start Breakfast of Champions with Vonnegut, or maybe Player Piano. You know, "Boy, You Just Can't Go Wrong," Cat's Cradle, "You Can't Go Wrong," Slaughterhouse Five, whatever you want to do. God bless you, Mr. Roswell, whatever you want. It just doesn't matter, because you'll dive in and you'll be transported to that world of a hopeful, heartbroken man, writing about what he thinks people could be. It's that, you know, it's the William Shatner Blue Origin moment, where he goes up in space and he looks down on the earth and goes, "How are we blowing this? How the fuck, in this dark expanse of nothingness, we have the one..."

• 1:03:08Jon Stewart?

  It's like, the same thing, I think, when they always say, like, "We're going to Mars." And you're like, "But the water and the food is here! Why? Why don't we just stay here and make this work? What's wrong with that?"

• 1:03:21Ezra Klein?

  A hopeful, heartbroken man. Jon Stewart, thank you very much.

• 1:03:25Jon Stewart?

  All right.

• 1:03:45Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klans show is produced by Elias Isquith. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Sami-Lusky and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Stross.

• 1:04:18Jon Stewart?

  Ezra, that was fun.

• 1:04:19Ezra Klein?

  Super fun, man. Thank you.

• 1:04:21Jon Stewart?

  Oh, good. I'm glad.

• 1:04:22Ezra Klein?

  I've wanted to have you on the show since I started it. That was all I'd hoped for.

• 1:04:26Jon Stewart?

  I'm delighted and I hope to have disappointed you and your production team. That's really what I go for.

• 1:04:32Ezra Klein?

  In all the right ways.