Meet Jon Stewart – One of My Favorite People

Trevor sits down with Jon Stewart in an epic episode of "My Favorite People". The two talk life, comedy, their experiences hosting The Daily Show, and the benefits of keeping one’s mind occupied.

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

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Thinking about this a lot and trying to wrap my mind around it.

• 0:10Trevor Noah?

  Was the mic killing you? Sorry.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry. I've been thinking about this a lot.

• 0:16Trevor Noah?

  You can pull it with you. You can... That's what I want to do. I want to get like a dynamic mic.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  I'd probably rock a little bit too much.

• 0:22Trevor Noah?

  I want to get like a dynamic one that moves with people.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll try not to fidget. I'll just sit.

• 0:27Trevor Noah?

  No, I'll just keep watching my...

• 0:28Speaker 00

  You know what happens when I'm taping is the sound engineer just keeps telling me to not rock my desk because I have a tendency to like do this and this and this.

• 0:36Trevor Noah?

  You make the sounds.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 0:38Trevor Noah?

  I would hit the buttons. That was mine.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  You would hit the buttons?

• 0:41Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, well, you know, you have the buttons on the bottom of your suit. And so I would always be doing this on the desk.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:46Trevor Noah?

  And then they told, I think they told me this week, week three of hosting.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 0:51Trevor Noah?

  And I don't think I've ever put my hands down the same on a table because I'm so shit scared of screwing the whole thing up, you know?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  I was like, what is Trevor has turned to jumpers? Why is that? Wow. He had a real button issue.

• 1:08Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

• 1:14Trevor Noah?

  Earth can be a lot sometimes. Heat waves, gas prices, bad hair days. Why not go where life is good? Escape to Pluto TV. Turn off your problems and turn on your favorite movies and shows. You know, the ones you already love. From Anchorman, The Legend of Ron Burgundy, to Dirty Dancing, to Top Gun Maverick, from Alias to The X-Files. It's all here and all free. Go where the TV is always good. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 1:49Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it.

• 2:04Trevor Noah?

  Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info and travel days, or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses. Yeah, booked forever, forever.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

• 3:14Trevor Noah?

  Welcome, friend. How are you?

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Thank you. Nice to see you. This is exciting to do this without headphones on. Like, I so don't do podcasts where you go and sit with people.

• 3:24Trevor Noah?

  I'm shocked that you leave the house, to be honest.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  I don't do it very often.

• 3:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Only for you.

• 3:28Trevor Noah?

  Can I tell you, I really take that as a... Yeah. I was thinking that the other day. I was like, John doesn't go anywhere.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 3:37Trevor Noah?

  I met you not going anywhere.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  That's... It's one of the worst reputations to have, because when you do show up somewhere, people are just like, what... So what's going on? Like, it almost feels like your parents have come home.

• 3:49Trevor Noah?

  That's hilarious.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  Why are you here? And you're like, I am allowed to go out. I just mostly choose to not.

• 3:56Trevor Noah?

  Have you always been that way?

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:58Trevor Noah?

  Why?

• 3:59Speaker 00

  It's one of the reasons, I think, I got into stand-up. I am very...

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Which seems sort of contradictory, but I'm very introverted. And so I don't, I don't get energy from socializing.

• 4:14Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, no, I'm the same. Okay.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  You're the same.

• 4:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm the same.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  So like when I was younger, I would bartend to give me the illusion of being out. So I worked in bars forever because you felt like you were out.

• 4:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  But you didn't have the idea where you had to like sit with somebody and socialize. You were doing something you were, so you could focus on task at hand. Comedy, same way. You show up, it's a Friday night, it's a Saturday night. People are out there on dates, they're having fun. And what are you doing? Looking at my notes. Was that, no, no, no, I'm going on and fine. I don't have, I can't. So I, I, I always prefer that.

• 4:57Trevor Noah?

  Huh. I, no, so, okay, here's the thing. I'm like that, but I don't prefer it.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 5:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. All my friends, I think, have strategically chosen because they, they pushed me and kicked me out of the house.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 5:09Trevor Noah?

  All of them, every single one of my friends.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  So modern communication has very much for me quantified the extent of my isolation. Because your phone will tell you numerically how many people tried to get a hold of you that day. On your texts or on your emails. And when I tell my kids, they just feel like, do you live in a bomb shelter? Like, what, you know, I'll be like, I got three texts today. And they'll be like, all day, three.

• 5:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but you've always been a Luddite.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 5:39Trevor Noah?

  Like, you've always, always been a Luddite.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  This isn't going well.

• 5:42Trevor Noah?

  This is going great. What do you mean? This is going great.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  I'm being exposed.

• 5:46Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, you know, you know what I think it is. It's, it's funny.

• 5:50Trevor Noah?

  Look, I mean, I only really came to the US properly when you brought me, you know? You called me.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  I called you on the phone.

• 5:57Trevor Noah?

  It's still the most random call of all time, John.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  And still the one that I still don't understand. I called up Trevor. I saw your stand up. I saw like two minutes of your stand up. And I was like, that guy could do my job. This is very upsetting.

• 6:11Trevor Noah?

  What stand up was this? Cause I was only, I was only doing like South African stuff back then.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  No, no, no, it was a special that you had done.

• 6:17Trevor Noah?

  From South Africa, though?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  I believe it was from South Africa. But I watched it. You know, I, I've been doing this for a long time. And we always have tapes and we're always looking for new talent.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  And there was a authenticity, but also an insight. Like, there was just, you had, you had it. Hey, son, let me tell you something. I don't know how to define it, but you had it. It wasn't the dimples. It was a whole other thing. It was, no, I just remember the material was so like insightful.

• 6:56Trevor Noah?

  Thank you.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  But well, like, there was a warmth. There was all these things that I thought like, oh, that dude, like, that doesn't just happen. You can't fake that. You can't, there is a certain level of artistry, craftsmanship, those authenticity, those things that come together and you smell it like immediately. And, and, and also the converse, like, I can pop a tape in and go like, oh, the audience is nervous for that poor fellow.

• 7:24Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  Like, that's, take that out. It was, it's sort of like, what is it? Dave Portnoy's One Bite, Everybody Knows the Rules. Like, same thing with comics a lot of times. Like, One Bite, Everybody Knows the Rules. You watch it and go like, eight, six, nine, two. You had that. And it's rare. And I'd watched enough tapes to know that it was rare. And I go, who's that guy? And they go, this guy Trevor Noah. And I go, let's have him do this show. And they said, well, he's not, you know, he's not from here. He's from, let's call him. And I was like, I'm Willy Wonka and I'm about to call this dude and blow his fucking mind and say like, son, your, your ship has come in.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  And so we go, Trevor, and we're like, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, New York City. And we'd like you to come in and do a bit for us. And you're like, well, my world tour doesn't end for another two months. And I was like, and it took me a while to figure out like, oh, this opportunity is an enormous constriction of Trevor's visibility and a giant pay cut.

• 8:29Trevor Noah?

  No, but you know what it was for me? No, you know what it was for me, actually? I'll say this, I, I was, I was ignorant, but I'm happy that I was, I'm really pleased that I was ignorant.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:39Trevor Noah?

  So I've never told you this. So I never knew who you were, right?

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 8:44Trevor Noah?

  So you called me, and which was also crazy. You called me, not like an executive producer.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 8:49Trevor Noah?

  You called me directly. I will, I've told this, this part before, but like, I was, I'll never forget. I was in Harrods in London, the mega store that sells everything to the richest people in the world. Not because I could afford anything.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  I was having tea with the queen.

• 9:02Trevor Noah?

  I wish. I was, I was looking, I was staring at an underwater scooter thing, like a moped. You know, like the old school submersible things?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 9:12Trevor Noah?

  It's like that.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  A thing that only three people in the world have.

• 9:15Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  And two of them are salt nuts, yeah.

• 9:17Trevor Noah?

  I'm staring at this, I'm looking at the price, I'm going, how long would it take me? But where would I keep it? How, I don't live near the ocean. But this was just the culmination of my life's everything. And almost in a perfect way. My mom always says, ask God and God will respond. I went, God, how would I ever be able to afford this underwater moped? And my phone rings.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Now, does your mom know God was a Jew in this story? Does she have any sense? She'd been, she'd been cheering for the wrong team?

• 9:46Trevor Noah?

  My friend, my, what do you mean? My mom is, my mom converted to Judaism many long ago.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  What?

• 9:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, my mom been like.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  She, she might have taken my place. I got out of the business at thirteen, so I don't.

• 9:59Trevor Noah?

  So, so you called me. And this was like, I think what I, what I remember most about it was the comedy of the conversation. Cause you called me like, hi, can I please speak to Trevor? Trevor, I was like, oh, speaking. You're like, hey Trevor, this is, um, my name is John Stewart. I'm a comedian from New York City, John Stewart. You said you may, or you may or may not know me. I said, I'm sorry, I don't, I don't know you. And you said, your wording was so specific and it was so funny. You said, nor should you have, nor should you have.

• 10:26Trevor Noah?

  It was so self-effacing, I loved it. You said, nor should you have. And then, um, you said, well, I, um, I host a little show, I run a little show, uh, in New York City. It's, uh, called The Daily Show. And, and I was like, oh.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Pause for applause.

• 10:39Trevor Noah?

  No, but then I said, oh, I've heard of that show. And you said, as you should, as you should.

• 10:46Trevor Noah?

  And I remember in that moment thinking, I don't know who this person is. But I've talked about this with every comedian, like comedian. There is a silliness that comedians possess. And you know, you know what I felt is like, um, I remember when I did comedians in cars with Jerry.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:00Trevor Noah?

  Right? Jerry said to me, I am yet to meet a comedian who answers another comedian's phone call in a normal voice.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:08Trevor Noah?

  We all have like a. Aruga!

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:11Trevor Noah?

  Johnny boy! Well, hello. There's just like a comedians, we, we, it doesn't matter what it is.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:17Trevor Noah?

  There's a silliness.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  I always answer as the queen.

• 11:20Trevor Noah?

  There you go. Hello! You see? No, youngsters, don't even ask them. Don't see if I can rise. This is what I mean. So it's almost like a, it's, it's, it's the badge that we, we, we have at work, you know, like, can you come in? Yeah, yeah, I'm a comedian. Here's my badge. So I go, this man is definitely a comedian. I know nothing about his world. I think I've heard of the Daily Show. And the crazy thing for me was, I, I think you know this part just from the world, but you don't know for me. The Daily Show had the international edition, right?

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 11:51Trevor Noah?

  Right? They used to be.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  On CNN, I think.

• 11:52Trevor Noah?

  On CNN.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Yes, like it was a news show.

• 11:55Trevor Noah?

  So in my world, you used to come after Christian Amon Po.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  No.

• 12:00Trevor Noah?

  Richard Quest.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:02Trevor Noah?

  And like a bunch of other CNN, I mean, the internet, and you know, the international one wasn't like the US. It wasn't just talking heads that shouted each other. It was very, welcome, this is CNN.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:11Trevor Noah?

  Hong Kong markets have opened and CNN is on the ground, right?

• 12:16Speaker 00

  The actual news that goes on around the world, the thing that Americans are.

• 12:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Utterly and blissfully unaware of.

• 12:22Trevor Noah?

  When they were reporting live.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:23Trevor Noah?

  From Beirut, it was live in Beirut. It was that, that CNN.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  And then once a week.

• 12:28Trevor Noah?

  And then this man would come on. And I think I saw you maybe twice, but you left an indelible impression in my brain.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Why is?

• 12:36Trevor Noah?

  Because I didn't know what was happening, but I remember thinking, there is no way this man is going to keep his job. I don't know when I found him in this journey. But he's not gonna keep his job. Because you, if you and the news and you told a joke. And then the audience laughed, but then at some point they like sort of groaned and they. But I didn't know there was the Daily Show. And then it went back to normal news. They're like, all right, now it's time for someone, it's Africa focus, here we go. And I remember thinking, damn, that guy. He's gonna lose his job. He's gonna lose his job. It's why context is so important. You know, you say that. Yeah. But can I tell you? I genuinely believe one of the things that has happened. A lot of people ask me about cancel culture. Right. Always, I'm sure they've asked you. Always.

• 13:21Trevor Noah?

  And the thing I keep saying is, and I genuinely believe this. I don't think there's such a thing as cancel culture. I think people criticize someone if they don't like them. I think people have more platforms to criticize now. Right, before people would write a letter, like my mom used to do that. She would write letters to the broadcaster. In upset. Yeah, yeah, like. Yes, letters to the editor. One I remember was she wrote a letter, there was a, a South African Awarbees. Essentially in South Africa. And they had a hamburger. And the ad was Handel's Messiah. Right, so it's like, hallelujah, hallelujah, it was that vibe, right? My mom only knew that song as a church song. Right.

• 14:02Trevor Noah?

  And I'll, she, this woman looked at me and she said, did they just sell a hamburger? Using the Lord's music? Yes. And I didn't know it was classical music, neither she, she wrote a whole letter. We went, we mailed it together to the broadcaster. They responded very kindly and they said, hey, actually this was not a Christian song. It's been co-opted by religious organizations, but originally da, da, da, da, da. And she read the letter to me and we sat there together like, wow, I, I was maybe, wow. Ten years old, twelve, but I remember even then being like, damn. We just learned something today. This is new, but to that point in that world, con- context is everything. And when I think of like cancel culture and comedy and all these things, I go.

• 14:47Trevor Noah?

  Most of the time. Comedians would be telling a joke in the context of a comedy space.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 14:54Trevor Noah?

  Right?

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:55Trevor Noah?

  You're on stage, the audience is sitting there. We all know this is comedy. So if you look at an audience member and say, "I wish you had died on the Titanic."

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:04Trevor Noah?

  They know you're in a comedy space.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 15:07Trevor Noah?

  Now, what happened is they take that joke out of the comedy space.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 15:13Trevor Noah?

  The algorithm sends it to somebody whose grandfather died on the Titanic.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Oh, that's, that's dead on. That's so fucking brilliant. That's exactly, that's exactly it. And even the people that know the context do it, do that same thing because they want to weaponize it.

• 15:36Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  To hurt you.

• 15:38Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  The other thing that happened in the rise of social media are those that, whose livings now depend on stirring the pot. So I used to do a bit, this must be nineteen ninety-six, ninety-five, something, is about Jewish community, black community, Jews and blacks, you know, why are we so mad at each other? You know, come from the same history, two thousand years of abuse. We just expressed our sufferings differently as people. Blacks developed the blues, Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music, you know, second. I did a whole thing, my grandmother wrote a blues song, gee, it's drafty in here, you know, the whole thing. And then there was a bit about Jews and blacks, we shouldn't fight each other, we should get together and get whitey. Oh, I'm sorry, wrong crowd, you know.

• 16:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  I'll go online now on like, VDARE websites or like white supremacist websites.

• 16:27Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  My face like in like, sort of as gray as they can possibly make it.

• 16:35Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  In the thing, Jews and blacks should get whitey and then like, this Jew thinks that and they know, of course they know, but it's their way of.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  It's an intimidation tactic. But what social media is, is like, when we do a gig, whenever you do a gig, there's always people that aren't digging it.

• 17:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  You feel it.

• 17:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  You work the, you know, cellar. There's always gonna be a couple of tables that are like.

• 17:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. There's always the plus ones.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 17:09Trevor Noah?

  The, the, the people who came with a friend didn't necessarily come for you or the comedy.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 17:13Trevor Noah?

  And they're like, let's see what happens.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  We're not, we're not down.

• 17:15Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  It would bother in the moment. Then you go upstairs, you have play to hummus with your friends, you start goofing off, all that stuff, and you walk away. Social media is, after that show, then you have to ride home in the cab with them while they talk about how bad you were.

• 17:31Trevor Noah?

  Geez, I love that.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  And that's, so it, it's, it's there to.

• 17:36Trevor Noah?

  Man, that's such a great analogy.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  It's there to get you.

• 17:38Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  And it works. People say like, you should ignore it. It's sort of like, hey, let me ask you, uh, if you're walking down the street and someone yells your name, do you turn around?

• 17:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Like, of course you do. You're fucking human.

• 17:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  So you try your best not to allow it to infiltrate the, the, the parts of you that are more stable, but it's very hard to just.

• 18:05Trevor Noah?

  Ah. It's, I think it's very unhuman.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:10Trevor Noah?

  To do that.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Of course. And that is the economy that's grown up around it. So what they do is they try to find the thing that they think will be most upsetting. Now, obviously it loses its efficacy after a while. Like, for me, the funniest part was, like, my dog Dipper died. I don't know if you ever met Dipper. I used to bring him to the show, the three legger. He's the greatest dog in the world. He died, I announced it on the show as a blubbering idiot, and people on social media started responding very positively. So I did a thing I never do, which is post some shit. Here's some pictures of me and my family when we first met. Dipper, we met him at a shelter down on Crosby Street.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  And people started in the comment section of those pictures responding with pictures of dogs they had lost there, sort of. So the first picture was like, this is, you know, Coco, our Cavalier King Charles. I hope that she and Dipper are playing at the Rainbow Bridge. And, you know, this is Mr. Muggles, you know, our cocker spaniel.

• 19:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  And then the third one was, why did you change your name, Jew?

• 19:20Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  And I was like, oh, right.

• 19:23Trevor Noah?

  Ah.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  It's got nothing to do with their lives are sin. Whatever it is, either financially or emotionally, that's their job.

• 19:36Trevor Noah?

  But some of them, you know what the worst thing is?

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:38Trevor Noah?

  Some of them aren't even real. That's the scariest thing, John.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Quite possibly.

• 19:42Trevor Noah?

  No, like.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  But a lot of them are.

• 19:44Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Not only real.

• 19:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  But become famous.

• 19:47Trevor Noah?

  Yes, that's, that's true.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:49Trevor Noah?

  That's true. But I, I think that's what makes it sad for me is when we go to context.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:54Trevor Noah?

  I, I've seen this happen to you. I spend a lot of time analyzing online. I don't spend time actually online. I don't care for it much.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:01Trevor Noah?

  But I love the behind the scenes machinations of it, you know?

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:04Trevor Noah?

  So I sit with engineers, they teach me about algorithms. I sit with.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Really?

• 20:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, I love this. I love, love, love this. Love it to bits. And one of the things I've really loved is seeing how information gets disseminated, but specifically sent to different groups of people for like a, like a really, really distinct purpose, you know?

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:25Trevor Noah?

  And then I started, they, they, they showed it to me even on the, the tiniest things that you and I have done, for instance.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:32Trevor Noah?

  So I hosted the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Right, right, right.

• 20:35Trevor Noah?

  You have as well. Half of my Correspondents' Dinner was played on Fox News, was played on conservative sites, was.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:45Trevor Noah?

  Everything I said about Joe Biden, the Democrats, MSNBC.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Yes. If you've lost Trevor, no, you really were.

• 20:51Trevor Noah?

  It were.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:52Trevor Noah?

  You know, I never thought I'd say this, but, uh.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Oh, I agree with him.

• 20:55Trevor Noah?

  This, this is quite funny. I guess, I guess that's what happens when you get him away from the Daily Show writers.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Right, right, right, right.

• 21:00Trevor Noah?

  Then, uh, I mean, yeah, looks like.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Finally, those woke fuckers.

• 21:04Trevor Noah?

  You know, I guess every now and again, he can be fu- ironically, it was the Daily Show writers that I was with.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Oh, my.

• 21:09Trevor Noah?

  I mean, you're, you know, you're with the crew. So, but. It was, and then on the other side as well. People got the clips.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:16Trevor Noah?

  But they show who they sent it to. It's so weird. It's like it's not a.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  They send it to people purposefully.

• 21:23Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but they also send partially. That's the key thing. I think that's the most insidious. So back in the day, Jon Stewart is at a desk and Jon Stewart says, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:35Trevor Noah?

  You see that? You might not like three, you might not like seven. But you saw that this man counted to ten.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 21:41Trevor Noah?

  Now what they do is they go, take the seven, take the three.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 21:45Trevor Noah?

  Send it to all the people.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:47Trevor Noah?

  Who hate John for saying those numbers. The other numbers, let's get it to these people and we're gonna split that. And so now what happens is you have a world where people hate other people. Not because they know them, but only because they know them by a fraction of the thing they are saying or doing. Which I think is, I think that's like, it's even more terrifying because.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Well, it's also what it, what it tells you is the principle is merely conflict. The principle is.

• 22:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  Is outrage and conflict, but. You know, I always wondered where social media fit in. You know those videos of like? A squirrel decomposing? Like where the squirrel is the content and you just see over time, you're like. Every single part is gonna be brought back into nature. Something's gonna go underground as nitrogen. That's what's, the economy that we live in in terms of ideas is not really an economy of ideas. It's an, it's an economy of. Fragments, of fragments of ideas that are not cohesive or coherent or contextual. But they are monetized and the aggregators come in.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Something I actually wanted to throw on the show on the Mondays is. This idea somehow that social media resembles in any way free speech. Or that it resembles in any way the town square. Because those are. Those are neutral vessels that you fill with ideas. So let's say I go to a town square and it's a place where people come together and it's an amalgamation of ideas and thoughts and things and a gathering spot. So I come in and I go Severance, oh my God, Severance is so good. And then a couple of people come over and they hear about it and they want to talk about it because they've got some opinions on it. And then one other person walks by and goes, you're a Jew. And I go, what? He goes, yeah, no, you're a Jew.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  You changed your name, you're a Jew. And I go, oh, yeah, no, we're, we're talking about Severance. I go, yeah, no, I just, I was notified that you were here and I just wanted to come in and go, you're a Jew. That's social media. That's the algorithm, right? Yeah. So then I go, I think I'm gonna leave. And I, as I'm walking away, the town square goes, hey, before you go, there's someone you might want to check out. It's the you're a Jew guy. And these little tribes, what they're trying to get you to do is be provoked so that you stop and you engage some more. The town square doesn't benefit the longer you stay in an argument. Exactly.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  And it's such an interesting idea that we think it's free speech, but it's not speech. It's ultra-processed speech. It's, it's speech in the way that Doritos are food. Hmm. It's something that has been designed by people in lab coats to get past the parts of your brain that protect your mental health or your... But we don't think of it in that way. We think of it as a pay-in to this right that we have or an example of the highest aspiration of free speech, when in actuality, it's toxic.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Designed as such, it whatever the mental version of obesity and diabetes is, that's what it's designed for. Yeah. And, and I've only been thinking about only because of, of where we're at with speech in this country and how it's been co-opted as this incredible value on the right. Yeah. They're only allowing it to go on the right because they view it as helpful to their larger cause, right? Yeah. You know, societal ideological battles aren't capitalism, communism, or socialism, communism, or any of those other kinds of democracy totalitarianism. Yeah. It's woke, unwoke.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  And for them, social media is a powerful, unwoke multiplier. It amplifies that feeling for whatever reason in terms of virality. Do you remember the, the, it was another, I think it was a hearing where it was Facebook, it wasn't Twitter, and they made Zuckerberg turn and apologize. Oh, yeah, I remember that, yeah. You know, what are you gonna say to the daughters up there? They, you, I think it was that they had purposefully targeted 13-year-old girls at their low ebb. Right, and I think it was Instagram that was the worst offender in that, yeah, yeah. And now, you know, that was back when he had the bowl cut and he was still like... This is before he had the swag switch. Right. Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Give me the Prince Valiant, but not so long. You know, I don't wanna look like a hippie. And then, and now they've given them all permission to just be, to stop pretending. Like, there's something about this moment that I appreciate because the undercurrent of corruption and the underlying quid pro quo and transactional nature of the way the world works is now just, it used to be hidden, and every now and again, they would call them and go, apologize to the girls. And now they're just like, hey, you're all right. And they've made it explicit. Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  It's now, and without shame, it's, in some ways, they've come out of the closet. They're finally being Yeah. themselves. They are. And now we know what we're up against, which I kind of... You prefer that's. I prefer it.

• 27:30Trevor Noah?

  I always say Trump, for everything he's done or whatever, I go Trump has been a black light on America's democracy.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 27:38Trevor Noah?

  You know, so every, everything.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  For someone who stays in a lot of hotel rooms, that is not, that is not the analogy, metaphor, whatever, I hope you go for there. And now I gotta, oh, he is that thing on your hotel mattress that you didn't know was there, but had slept on for two nights.

• 27:58Trevor Noah?

  We're gonna continue this conversation right after this short break. Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long-form interview, or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels.

• 28:41Trevor Noah?

  But one of my favorite features is smart downloads. You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watch. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. And it's like, no, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So, if you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Earth can be a lot sometimes. Heat waves, gas prices, bad hair days.

• 29:26Trevor Noah?

  Why not go where life is good? Escape to Pluto TV. Turn off your problems and turn on your favorite movies and shows. You know, the ones you already love. From Anchorman, The Legend of Ron Burgundy, to Dirty Dancing, to Top Gun Maverick, from Alias to The X-Files. It's all here and all free. Go where the TV is always good. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 30:00Trevor Noah?

  I remember when I first came to The Daily Show. This is before I was, this was when I came and I met you and we were doing segments together. You didn't want to be on Twitter, you didn't want to be on Instagram, you didn't want, you know?

• 30:12Speaker 00

  No.

• 30:12Trevor Noah?

  You, you just had like, it wasn't even like a loathing, it was almost a... No, loathing at least means you're like against it. You almost had a, ah, this thing?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. For me, it felt like socializing. Like, I don't, I like-

• 30:30Trevor Noah?

  Being on social media felt like socializing, okay.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  I like purpose. I like purposeful interaction, I like purpose, I like intention. I like projects, I like making things, I like, you know, woodworking, music.

• 30:45Trevor Noah?

  Do you still make furniture, by the way?

• 30:46Speaker 00

  I, I, once we moved, I don't, I no longer have my, my furniture making equipment.

• 30:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Uh, but I loved it, like-

• 30:55Trevor Noah?

  Cause I heard this about you and I was like, this can't be like real?

• 30:59Speaker 00

  It's real.

• 30:59Trevor Noah?

  What did you make?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Oh god, dressers, uh-

• 31:02Trevor Noah?

  No, John.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Bed, yeah.

• 31:04Trevor Noah?

  I thought you were gonna tell me like a little, you were talking like furniture, furniture, like big on-

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I made our, our kids' first changing table. And then we took a, a little bands on cutout, we used to have cats. And so we would cut out the shape of cats in the bottom of it so that they could go in and go into their, uh, into their litter boxes.

• 31:24Trevor Noah?

  Was this, where did you get this from? How do, how do you just go into carpentry?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  The funny thing is you just go into it. So, I'm always looking for ways to quiet my mind. That are not, you know, in the old days it was drugs and alcohol, right? So, you know, once you wake up in a crack house in East St. Louis at four in the morning and go, "Oh, I think I'm not making good decisions." You try and come up with other ways that you can quiet the noise.

• 31:52Trevor Noah?

  Are you actually saying this? Were you, I-

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Am I actually saying-

• 31:58Trevor Noah?

  That you woke up in a crack house and-

• 31:59Speaker 00

  That's correct. Yeah, this was obviously years ago.

• 32:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm assuming many, many years ago.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  It wasn't, it's been a couple of weeks. Uh, no, it was, I was working-

• 32:08Trevor Noah?

  This is like, I, I knew you as a guy who smoked a lot.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Yes. They were all-

• 32:16Speaker 00

  The sort of the, the, the product of a mind that I had trouble quieting. Right? Huh. And so when I'm busy, I am healthier. And when I am not busy, I was very unhealthy. Because, you know, your mind, it doesn't take long for your mind to go from, you know, hey, that was a good set to you failed everyone that ever loved. Yeah, yeah. And, and trying to find your way. And this is, I mean, I'm talking about

• 32:48Speaker 00

  early nineties, mid nineties, like bad. So I had to find other ways. Now then it was, you know, smoking helped, different things. But I found these kinds of hand to material projects helped me disappear for hours. And it was, it's like, I think what you would imagine a deprivation tank. There's a peace in it. And when you have that peace, when you come out of it, it's not as though the benefit of it evaporates. It stays with you. It's, it keeps you sort of in a grounded state.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  And so, uh, I think that's why I, I was always like really drawn to it is I could just disappear in it. And, and you would build something. So, you know, the tangible part of having something that was the fruit of that labor was wonderful. Right, yeah. It was a fun thing, but that's not why. The why is the hours of measuring and sanding and fixing and fitting things together. And now I'm finding that in music. You know, I took up drums like.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Eight years ago, seven years ago.

• 34:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  And that's another form of that. The benefit of just experiencing and feeling this other state, right? My normal state of being vibrates too hot. It just does. I don't know how to stop it. So these things, the old interventions, as George Carlin said, like, they work for a bit, but after a while, don't work.

• 34:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  And but you find these other ways. And and as I've gotten older, I think the frequency you vibrate at a slightly less intense frequency, so that helps as well. But, you know, there it's very self-destructive to try and stop that if you don't do it in a way that, you know, has an idea towards longevity.

• 35:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  You can stop it.

• 35:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  But the things that stop it are generally the things that also stop you. Like, it's it's in some ways, it's a chemotherapy. Like, you know, drugs and alcohol can stop you from vibrating like that. But you have to you have to be cognizant of like, what else am I killing?

• 35:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  You know, these other things stop it in a much more

• 35:27Speaker 00

  sort of positive, productive, sustainable way. So that's, you know, that's been great.

• 35:34Trevor Noah?

  You've blown my mind.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Really?

• 35:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because I've always seen you, especially in my life, as like a like Yoda. I always call you, I call you Jewish Yoda, you know?

• 35:43Speaker 00

  He means that because I'm I'm short and incredibly old, maybe nine hundred years. And slightly green. I don't know what the lighting's like in here, but the reflection off that.

• 35:54Trevor Noah?

  We clearly have very different perceptions of Yoda. For me, it was because here I was, this random straggler in the universe. And I was just like, doing my thing.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:04Trevor Noah?

  Yoda comes along and goes, hey, I'm going to teach you how to raise a spaceship out of the mud. I go.

• 36:10Speaker 00

  The force was strong in this.

• 36:11Trevor Noah?

  You see, I'm like, I don't even know what the force is. I don't know what the force is.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  You were tapped in.

• 36:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and then I learn how to use a lightsaber. And then the next thing you know, it's Darth Vader and Palpatine in my life. I'm getting death threats from the Starship Troopers.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  You're welcome. What did I tell you? I think I told you once, I go, this is, you know, you're gonna look at this like, oh, what a great opportunity. And I'm like, but I know the truth. The truth is, it's really a Twilight Zone episode where like a guy who has been sentenced to guard this one thing.

• 36:42Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Finds somebody that he can hand the key to.

• 36:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Now it's you.

• 36:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but you gave me, you gave me something that I think nobody gave you, I think. And that was the wisdom on the other side of it.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Well.

• 36:56Trevor Noah?

  Genuinely, you, you gave me.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Whatever I, whatever I had accrued at, at that point, because I also, I had gone into it so blind.

• 37:03Trevor Noah?

  But that's what I mean.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. But I also knew, no matter what, no matter how carefully we crafted it.

• 37:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  No matter how much you and I like, shared about frustrations or look out for this. It's always gonna be like, it's not like that made it easy for you.

• 37:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but if somebody tells you there's a weight on the ground and they tell you that this weight will be the hardest thing you have ever lifted in your life.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:30Trevor Noah?

  When you go to it and it is the hardest thing you've ever lifted in your life, your expectations have been met. And it doesn't mean that the weight lessens in any way. It doesn't lighten the load.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 37:38Trevor Noah?

  But it does mean that you are doing the right.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  This is why I knew when I saw you.

• 37:42Trevor Noah?

  No, you're doing it the right way.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Think about things.

• 37:44Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you're doing it the right way. So you don't, while I was doing it, I wasn't going, this is going wrong. I was going, ah, man, this is hard. The Daily Show is easily the hardest thing I've ever done, like doing in life, genuinely. I've had a hard life, but The Daily Show is the, the hardest thing I've actively done.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:00Trevor Noah?

  That is the hardest, right?

• 38:01Speaker 00

  In, in a, in a work environment.

• 38:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, completely, completely.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:04Trevor Noah?

  And so the reason I say it blows my mind is because I go, from the time I met you, like, people would say, ah, man, John used to be rock and roll. But when they said rock and roll, I thought they just meant like leather jacket and smoking. Because I've, I genuinely, I've met few human beings who are more, um.

• 38:26Trevor Noah?

  Let's put it this way.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:28Trevor Noah?

  First time we were gonna do a segment on The Daily Show. You tricked me because you didn't tell me we were gonna do a segment.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:33Trevor Noah?

  Alright, you said, "Come and hang out." I came to hang out.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:37Trevor Noah?

  We just like moseyed around the office. I'd see you, you know, pottering from one part to the other. You go down to the, you know, field department. You're gonna do a P B, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we chat in the moments that you had free. We chat, we chat, we chat, we chat. And then one of the conversations, you said, "What do you think of New York?" And I said, "Wow, I don't know, man, the potholes." I said, "What is this place?" And we started talking about it. And you were like, "What's it like where you from?" I was like, "Well, the potholes aren't this bad." And we had this whole conversation, we had this whole... And then you said,

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Great.

• 39:02Trevor Noah?

  "We need that on the show."

• 39:03Speaker 00

  Yes, that's a good bit.

• 39:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but beyond it being a good bit, you saw something that I would have never seen. And it was a deeper commentary on the idea of America's exceptionalism versus the world and what the... I was just going, "Hey, man, the road's here." Not what I expected. So, when I hear you saying this, and I think for most people, if they go like Jon Stewart, taking drugs, drinking in a hole. And then we see this man who is easily... And I say this to everyone, one of the wisest human beings I've ever met.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Oh, that's right.

• 39:37Trevor Noah?

  No, but genuinely. And, and not wise in like a "I know everything" way, but rather in, you can look at a thing you don't know and go, "I don't know anything, but this is what I think it might not be or be."

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:51Trevor Noah?

  You know, which, which is what I think a lot of the time wisdom is. Based on my life, this is how I'm going to perceive the situation.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Right. And take, and take nothing for granted. Cause that's, you know, and, and that's where your upbringing and those things, there is a perspective to be given from, you know, it's a humility, right? If you understand the fragility of everything that you experience, you don't ever get to that place. It's sort of like the way I am with conspiracy theorists. Conspiracy theorists will say like, "Hey, man, you know, uh, I'm just asking questions." And I'm like, "You're not actually just asking questions." Cause if you were just asking questions, you'd wanna listen for the answer. And you'd want those answers. When I talk to those people...

• 40:38Speaker 00

  You know, they're like, hey, man, you're a, uh, you're controlled opposition now. You used to question things. I'm like, I still question things. With conspiracy people, I'm not, uh, in any way objecting to their skepticism.

• 40:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  I'm objecting to their certainty, right?

• 40:55Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  If you remain skeptical, but not just of the narrative, but also of the counter narrative, you have to, and, and that is born of, in my mind, instability. I was born of instability.

• 41:12Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  And so, in fact, I'm going to write a book called Born in Instability. And it doesn't have the same.

• 41:21Trevor Noah?

  Where were you born?

• 41:22Speaker 00

  But I was born here, Manhattan, in a doctor's hospital. On, it's not even there anymore.

• 41:26Trevor Noah?

  So you've, you've literally just been?

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Well, my parents are, my father was from Coney Island, from Brooklyn, and my mother was from Washington Heights. So up, they went to City College.

• 41:37Trevor Noah?

  I struggle to understand a lot of the time. I, I've spent many years trying to process it, but I've struggled to understand how you could see me and you when, on the surface, we have such different lives.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 41:51Trevor Noah?

  Cause I, I look at what you just did now. You just pointed at your whole life like this, you know?

• 41:58Speaker 00

  By the way, let the record show, I am correct directionally.

• 42:01Trevor Noah?

  No, you are, you are.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  I am correct.

• 42:05Trevor Noah?

  But, but what I, what I find, the paradox of Jon Stewart for me is, I've met few people who have traveled less and yet have gone to more places. No, I mean this. I know people, I know people who have traveled the world.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:22Trevor Noah?

  And have, and have, no, and have no perspectives and have no curiosities and have no learnings from it. So their bodies have gone to another country or another place.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:33Trevor Noah?

  But their mind and their spirit has not.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:36Trevor Noah?

  You, you get what I'm saying?

• 42:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:38Trevor Noah?

  And yet I meet you.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  And I've been to Buffalo.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Buffalo and Rochester.

• 42:44Trevor Noah?

  Did you travel more now? I hope so.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:48Trevor Noah?

  Okay, this is good.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  I'm just saying that. No, I I tried to because of the

• 42:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because of the kids.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  They got older. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:54Trevor Noah?

  Okay, okay.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  And the time and all that. And we traveled more uh in my diaspora. Uh we traveled more and so

• 43:01Trevor Noah?

  You mean in your diaspora?

• 43:03Speaker 00

  When I wasn't doing The Daily Show, when I wasn't doing

• 43:05Trevor Noah?

  I've only heard of diaspora used like as an African thing.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 43:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Oh, it's a big Jewish thing, the Jewish diaspora. By the way, oh, we'll get into that later. I'm Jewish diaspora thing. I've been really considering this in my head. It's something we can talk about later.

• 43:19Trevor Noah?

  We should definitely talk about it.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  All right. You want to talk about now?

• 43:21Trevor Noah?

  We'll talk about it right now.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Let's talk about it right now. So I've been thinking about this. This is in a larger context of good Jew, bad Jew, right? So I'm not, I'm not, I'm clearly not religious.

• 43:30Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  I sometimes admire people of faith, but I can't get there. Like, I know it's sort of like faking orgasms for me. Like, there's a certain like, yeah, like, and I'll do the people will say like, oh, bow your head in prayer. And I'll be like, mm. And then, you know, we'll do moan a silence and I'll, but in the silence, I'm really like, I wonder, is anybody, oh, look at that dude over there, you know, I'm not really silent. So I don't, I don't get it. But I am Jewish. Like, it just is. It is what it is. And it's born of that. That's my family. They were Jewish. Their parents were Jewish, whatever it was. But this idea somehow, and it ties into Israel, that

• 44:12Speaker 00

  whatever you were born as, you won't be safe unless you are somehow ensconced in some version of an ancestral home.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  I think is a really dangerous precedent. I think the idea that we must go home, like, this is my, where I pointed, that's where I'm from. That's my home.

• 44:36Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Like, I can, I can triangulate where I'm at. This is where I feel most comfortable.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  This is where I'll always gravitationally come back to. I don't live in a diaspora. I've been to Israel. I was like, wow.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  That's impressive. I could see why they wrote the Bible here. It looks very, that's a lot of mountain. That's a lot of desert. Like, but I reject the idea somehow that

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Communities of people aren't whole unless they are able to repopulate some ancient version of where they believe is their source. Does that make sense?

• 45:25Trevor Noah?

  It does. It does make sense.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  And I don't know if that's applicable to the African diaspora. But for me, I think it's a dangerous precedent to tell people that they will never be safe unless they are somewhere else. I always feel like, well, then the job is to make us all safe here. Because this is my home.

• 45:54Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  If that, so that's what I've been.

• 45:58Trevor Noah?

  Chappelle said something to that effect, which I, which I really appreciated. He said, we have to do a better job of making Jewish, and I paraphrase him. Our Jewish brothers and sisters feel so safe that they do not need to defend Israel regardless of what it does. Because they feel like that's the only place where they will be safe.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 46:17Trevor Noah?

  You know, which, which I think was really important.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Because it does, it puts you in a moment where you say to yourself, ah, I have to because they're fighting for me.

• 46:26Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  But that can't be because that's, then they have to be forced to dehumanize someone else. And that can't be. So it's that cycle of always believing that there is this, this final move that we all have to make. And there is, you know, there is also a little bit of apocalyptic rendering in all that, which is there are many people who believe like, all these pieces must be in place for the final fire.

• 47:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's a, that's a, a strong incentive that I didn't know about until I moved to America.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Oh, they didn't do that.

• 47:10Trevor Noah?

  No, that was never a thing where I was from. There was, there was no evangelical group who was saying, we need this to happen in Israel so that the prophecies can come to be. I only learned about it when I got here as, as a.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  What is, in, in terms of like African religious tradition?

• 47:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Right? How similar is it to kind of the different variations that you see here? Is it like, um, is it proselytizing? Is it sort of, um? You know,

• 47:41Speaker 00

  does it have as many different variations?

• 47:43Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 47:44Trevor Noah?

  I'm not a religious scholar. My mother actually is, but I'm not.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Is that why she went Judaism? She actually comparison shop.

• 47:51Trevor Noah?

  No, she actually did. I think one of the reasons, no, really. I asked her about this. I said to her, I was like, why? Why Judaism? And she said, I was always seeking the source. I always wanted to go deeper. She's like, okay, if I'm at Christianity, I want to know, but where does Christianity come from? And I'm gonna go deeper and I'm gonna go deeper and then, you know what I mean? So now, like, week in and week out, it's like her reading the Torah, sending me little scriptures and what, and it's like, I know when Purim is, I know, I have to be in the mix. I'm always in the mix in that way, right?

• 48:19Speaker 00

  You know, my mother sends me messages about knowing when Purim is as well. Different reason.

• 48:26Trevor Noah?

  So, it's definitely as broad because

• 48:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:30Trevor Noah?

  there were so many parts of African religion that was stripped away by colonialism, right? So colonization comes in, a lot of African religion gets stripped away. And so I think for the most part now you have a lot of hybridization.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:42Trevor Noah?

  So there's still, some people go like, I still believe in my ancestors, even though like strict Christianity will say, you don't know, there's no such, God is your only thing you're worrying about.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:51Trevor Noah?

  You don't speak to your ancestors. If you're Catholic, you can speak to Mary, but no one else. And you know, it's that type of thing. So, and that, for me, it was, because I went to four or five churches every Sunday. So, I lived in this most of my life. We went to, I went to a Catholic school.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 49:06Trevor Noah?

  Right? And then I went to a inter-denominational church. But then I also went to Anglican church and then I went to Methodist church.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:15Trevor Noah?

  But the thing I found across all of them is they just have a slightly different bent on one part of the why.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:23Trevor Noah?

  At some point, they have a nexus that combines all of them.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:27Trevor Noah?

  But the biggest thing I would say that's a difference when you talk about the African diaspora is, I love that you had the bit blacks and Jews, because my mom always says that. And because I always grew up saying that. And I remember having to explain this once, I was having a conversation with a friend. It was around the time, I think LeBron James had a clip of himself up. And a video clip, and he was saying like, we gonna make that Jewish money. We're gonna be the Jews, you know what I mean? It was a whole thing, right? And he got, I mean, you can imagine, people were just like LeBron, this

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Come on LeBron.

• 50:00Trevor Noah?

  antisemitic and, and then he put the video down, he apologized, it was a whole thing, it was a whole thing. And I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in L A. And he said, um, he's like, man, I can't believe LeBron did this. And I said, I get what you're saying, and I'm not saying, don't be offended. However, I think you are missing some context. And some of the context you're missing is how Jewish people have been perceived, for the most part, not speaking for all black people, by black people. Sure. Because a lot of black people have gone, there is only one other group we know of, who has also been enslaved, who has also been like chased out of different parts and places. Right. Who have also been ostracized. We only know one group who's done that, who we now perceive to be successful on the other side. Exactly. And so I know a lot of black people have gone, man, we need to be, we need to be the Jew,

• 50:45Trevor Noah?

  we need to be black Jews, we need. And I was trying to explain to him, I was like, I get it from your perspective. Mm hmm. You're not wrong. But I hope you do understand that a lot of it in like parts of hip hop and a lot of it in black culture is, when, when we used to get dressed on Sundays and you would go to church, you always had to look good. Your parents would put you in your nice clothes. Right. And kids in the township in South Africa would say, ow, we go get Jewish, which means you're wearing your Jewish.

• 51:14Trevor Noah?

  And it was, they said that because Hasid's were always in like a. Right, right, right. Yo, people would, we would grow up just be like, yo, these people are dapper, man. Black coat. Yo, these people are dapper. Got your, got your hair on point? Go get Jewish. That's what I'm talking about. So that context, I think, is, is important. But, but I think the main difference is, just to go back a little bit.

• 51:37Trevor Noah?

  Some of it I experienced, and I, I say all of this with the caveat that I don't speak for everyone ever, right? But I did notice in, in the United States, there was a similar idea around Africa and African Americans. Mm hmm. The motherland, right? So there was this idea where people would go, you are not from here. Right? People would say, go back to where you came from. That's right. And so a lot of black Americans would go, I will never be safe. Yes. Until I can go back to where I'm from. That's right. In the same way that you're saying, many Jewish people might go, eh, man, I will never be safe unless there is a place that is distinctly and specifically made for me. Right. And then what would happen was, you know, a lot of African Americans would come to Africa.

• 52:20Trevor Noah?

  And I think on the one hand, they would be shocked by how it's not home. Right. But there's one part of it that they would get, which is, oh, this is why I eat this food, or this is why I hum like this, or

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:33Trevor Noah?

  These are my people who have informed me before I even knew I was going to exist.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 52:38Trevor Noah?

  And there's a certain solace that comes in that.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:41Trevor Noah?

  And to your point, I think sometimes we focus a little too much on the physical thing as opposed to the real thing.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:50Trevor Noah?

  The culture, that is the, that's the thing that should never die.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 52:53Trevor Noah?

  Do you get what I'm saying?

• 52:54Speaker 00

  And that's placeless. That's, that's, that, that you can put in your knapsack.

• 52:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  When you try, you know, that's

• 53:00Trevor Noah?

  And that's the thing people try wipe out, by the way.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Right. And it's the thing also that, and when it mixes, and when it creates something new and unique, beautiful, and it, it has so many colors to it. And it reminds me that so much of all this, you know, when you say like, oh, they view Jews a certain way, or they might view blacks this way, or African Americans this way. No one has discernment for what they aren't. Your only discernment is for, like, I can tell, if I can look at Jews and be like Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Reform, that like, I can break down, I was in

• 53:41Trevor Noah?

  I love that. No one has discernment for what they aren't.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  You can't. It's, it's the hardest thing in the world.

• 53:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Because it's, it's hard enough to have empathy for what you aren't.

• 53:50Trevor Noah?

  You know what?

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Let alone discernment.

• 53:52Trevor Noah?

  It reminds me of, someone said this once, we're having a conversation and someone said, I, it was, it was a white person, and they said, white liberal person, very liberal, very, very liberal, very liberal.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Upper West Side.

• 54:01Trevor Noah?

  Very liberal.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Although not for the school, not our school, you shouldn't, please.

• 54:04Trevor Noah?

  Well, that's different because the kids, you've got to understand, they know each other.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  They have to be together.

• 54:09Trevor Noah?

  No, they know, it's very different.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Here's the other thing too, is you don't want other kids slowing them down.

• 54:13Trevor Noah?

  It's, it's unfair to them, to be honest.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  They want to be gastroenterologists.

• 54:16Trevor Noah?

  It's really unfair.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  You know Max.

• 54:18Trevor Noah?

  It's really.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  He's so smart.

• 54:20Trevor Noah?

  And I'm, I, Max loves everyone, and Max loves everyone.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  He loves everyone.

• 54:24Trevor Noah?

  Loves everyone. I, I want him to have more black friends.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  He has to.

• 54:28Trevor Noah?

  You know?

• 54:29Speaker 00

  He has.

• 54:29Trevor Noah?

  He really does.

• 54:30Speaker 00

  We take, you know, we shop at Benetton because of the

• 54:34Speaker 00

  Because of the role.

• 54:35Trevor Noah?

  And, and we're chatting and this person went, you know, some people cross the road when a black man walks down towards them, it's like 3am and they cross the road and I would never cross the road if I'm walking at 3am and a black man, you know what I do? I walk, I keep my head up. And it was so funny because it was one white person, it was only black people they were talking to. And then we went, well, I mean, sometimes you gotta cross the road.

• 54:57Trevor Noah?

  And they're like, what? And we went, well, what kind of black person? And they're like, what do you mean? And we said, well, you see, you're just saying a black person.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:05Trevor Noah?

  I know for a fact, every black person walking down the street will look at a black person and not just see what you just said, not a black, but you'd be like, I don't know if I, if I want to take a chance here. But that discernment is something that a lot of people don't understand cross culturally.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Mike Huckabee was on the show once and he was on-

• 55:22Trevor Noah?

  I thought you said my cuckaby.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Mike, Mike Huckabee, my cuckaby.

• 55:26Trevor Noah?

  I, my brain for a second.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Huckabee.

• 55:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, Mike, okay, Mike Huckabee.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  I had a cuckaby. Uh, he was on, and he was on one of his Jeremiah ads of culture. And how I think Beyonce had just come out with, it was the album where she was expressing her physical love for Jay-Z.

• 55:45Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  You know, my surfboard.

• 55:47Trevor Noah?

  Surfboard.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  All these things. So he was-

• 55:48Trevor Noah?

  Riding on that board, riding, riding on that board.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  This had upset my cuckaby terribly. Because of the children, Trevor. The children love Beyonce.

• 56:01Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  And now the children are going to know that sometimes when a man loves a woman very much, they use them as surfboards. You understand. It's a very dangerous precedent that's being set. So he's talking about the terrible nature of this kind of sexually explicit and suggestive. Mike Huckabee plays bass in a band.

• 56:26Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  He had on Ted Nugent. Ted Nugent has a song called, uh, Wang Dang Sweet Poom Tang. And he has another song about banging like a 15 year old girl. The Cat Scratch Fever, something like that, that they played.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  And I said, Mike,

• 56:48Speaker 00

  you, you love, oh, that's old Ted, he's a good old boy, you don't understand. It's just, but that surfboard, I mean, come on, you're fucking, but the sweet Poom Tang, come on. You know Ted, he's a good old boy. And what people don't understand is like, they might, a car filled with black people with a lot of bass on it might scare the shit out of a white person. But do they understand their pickup truck with the gun rack? Yeah. blasting country is something that other people don't understand and are fearful of. But that car could pull up to Mike Huckabee's picnic and it'd be fine. Yeah. Ignorance is epidemic. Most people aren't malevolent, but it's,

• 57:33Speaker 00

  we can't discern the difference. I sat with, I was on LeBron's show, The Barbershop. Oh, yeah, yeah, the show, The Barbershop. They went through, they were all talking about the barbershop. It's like, the cra- it was like me. Did you get a lineup or did you, like, did you actually get your haircut? No, no, no. Oh, okay, okay. They, they don't know what to, I don't even know what to. But we're all sitting around and it was, I think Jared Carmichael and Draymond Green and LeBron and Mav Carter. And, you know, they're telling their barber shop stories and they're like, look at me and I'm like, I'm only here to collect the rent. Like, I don't, that's what, that's what we do here. But it was so interesting when we were talking, as Draymond said to me, goes, Jews, man, you look out for each other.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  And in the moment, I was like dumbstruck of this idea of like, Jews, we look out for each other as though, again, somebody who's been faced with not having discernment their whole life. Right. Who so easily passes into the realm of, and oh, by the way, I don't either, but that's fine. And that's so much of the issue is we just don't. It was like in the war on terror where we were like, you know, we were bombing the shit out of countries before we even knew like, wait, Shia and Sunni, what? Yeah. There's different, what?

• 58:55Speaker 00

  If we were able to understand that lack of discernment without placing such negative value on it, in other words, if we were more understanding of prejudice and stereotype and less tolerant of racism, we'd start to understand that prejudice and stereotype are functions mostly of ignorance and of experience. Racism is malevolent, right? But the other is way more natural, but we react as though it might metastasize immediately.

• 59:39Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  And so I think we throw up barriers to each other in a way that we're crossing the street before we have to. And, and the anger that that engenders is, is, is part of what builds, I think, those walls.

• 59:59Trevor Noah?

  I think it's also because, it's exactly what you're saying. But again, more than most countries in the world.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Trevor Noah?

  And I think it's starting to spread now because of social media, but I think more than most countries in the world, in America, that's been weaponized. So when I was doing The Daily Show, I barely got time to really go home to South Africa. Like, you know, it's, it's, it's a slog and then you need the time to relax and rest and blah, blah, blah. But now that I've had more time to go back and just like pop back and pop back.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:28Trevor Noah?

  I, I realized how much nuance I've even robbed myself of because America wants a snap judgment.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:00:37Trevor Noah?

  You know? So America immediately wants the, you said it, it's over, as opposed to, why did you say it? What did you mean by it? Oh, this is how it can be interpreted. It's slow, it's laborious, it's oftentimes boring, but you know what it is, John? It's context.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:54Trevor Noah?

  It is completely, completely.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  Did you just do a call, young man?

• 1:00:58Trevor Noah?

  It's context.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  You just did a callback.

• 1:01:00Trevor Noah?

  But you just walked us.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  You just walked us around the park to where we started, for God's sakes.

• 1:01:04Trevor Noah?

  I, I think, I think.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  I think that's right.

• 1:01:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and I, I've noticed.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  And grace.

• 1:01:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  I think that's the, the, the missing ingredient of context.

• 1:01:12Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like that, actually.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Is often grace and the forgiveness. Going back to Dave, you know, he said something once, I can't remember what we were talking about. He goes, so important, man. Forgive yourself. You know how it gets me. Lean in. Forgive yourself. Give yourself. And I was, I just thought that was such a incredibly, wonderfully foundational concept. Because so much of getting back to sort of the vibration of the brain that, that you need to calm is a lack of grace for yourself.

• 1:01:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  A lack of forgiveness for yourself. For mistakes, for missteps, for, is trying to discern the context of those missteps and what was done of ignorance and what could be cured and what could you learn? Not in a performative way, but in a way that you could then, a seed that you could plant in yourself that you could nurture and grow into something. Right?

• 1:02:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  And that feels like such an important step of that.

• 1:02:24Trevor Noah?

  It's funny you say that. The most difficulty I had on The Daily Show was when I got into trouble for saying the thing that I wasn't saying.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:02:38Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:40Trevor Noah?

  I could handle someone not liking my opinion. I was like, yeah, it's an opinion. We all have that.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:02:46Trevor Noah?

  I don't agree with this. Okay, good for you. Let's have a conversation.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  Did you feel it was purposeful, the misunderstanding? Because my guess is some people didn't understand. Some people understood and weaponized it because they saw advantage.

• 1:02:59Trevor Noah?

  No, I think some people, it was actually the people who I think I was speaking with or for or, you know, in,

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:03:07Trevor Noah?

  It was those moments where you go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I'm, no, what do you mean? You know, it's like you, you played soccer. You know what it's, it's like, it, it, it literally felt like sometimes you're crossing the ball.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Trevor Noah?

  And your team goes, you're trying to clear the ball for them. And you go, no.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  I, I misunderstood. You're talking literally about like your allies.

• 1:03:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  I get it.

• 1:03:29Trevor Noah?

  I remember saying this to the team at the show all the time.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:32Trevor Noah?

  I'd say if there was one thing I would change about American politics, especially for liberals, especially for liberals, is

• 1:03:41Trevor Noah?

  Liberals have a really, for lack of a better term, it's like it's a really black and white system of being in and out. And I find Republicans or conservatives, maybe because they're more religious, they believe more in the the story of redemption. They believe more in like, you didn't mean that? Well, atone and you can come back in.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  That's interesting.

• 1:04:05Trevor Noah?

  You know, you know how many times I heard very Christian people say, I would say, how could you support Trump? And then they would say to me, and I get it completely, they'd go, he's not a perfect vessel. And they'd say, go read the Bible. The Bible is littered with stories of imperfect men delivering a perfect message. And I would be like, damn. And I would envy that for liberals, because I would go, you know how many times liberals would not consider the possibility that the person they are in lockstep with slipped or tripped or didn't even?

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Might actually be an imperfect person.

• 1:04:38Trevor Noah?

  You might find they did something that made sense, and it affected you in a way that you thought.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  So here's how the liberal mind fights back against that very message. So as you're talking, right, it's about the grace of faith and how it teaches you to forgive and and to feel redemption through imperfect vessels.

• 1:05:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  It's such an important part of growth. And as you're talking the whole time, I'm like, you know, the Bible, you know, talks about slavery. I mean, Bible, you know, it's literally instructions for slavery in the Bible. So I mean, you know, you use that as a, so you immediately, and it is, it's a it's a flaw, but it's a thing in my mind, and it's why faith, it's why I'm so faith resistant. I can't let my brain stop.

• 1:05:32Trevor Noah?

  The litigation. I'm full of faith. Yeah, I can't. You see, that's a weird one. It's like, I'm not particularly religious, but I'm. Right. An example is like, I play football, soccer every week, right? Still? Yeah, yeah, still. The knees are. Trevor. We're trying our best here, John. We're trying. You don't play at all? Yeah. Once you hit sixty. You said this to me about forty, by the way. Once you hit forty. Um, no, no, I still play and I joke, one of my, one of my best friends now I met playing soccer here in New York at Pier Forty. And um, we have this team, it is like the United Nations. I mean, Algerians, uh, Nigerians, Ghanaans, French,

• 1:06:15Trevor Noah?

  South Africans, Moroccans, Australians, you name it, they're on, they're on this team from everywhere around the world, every walk of life. And we played together. And my friends know I love being on the team that is considered dysfunctional and useless. Because I have faith that every player is trying to do the right thing. Right. I genuinely believe in it. And I've noticed that sometimes what will happen is a player will be on the other team. They will do something that they thought would go well. Right. They try to cross the ball, they try to shoot, they try to pass, they try to tackle, they fail. And their teammates will treat them like they are against them. And I have such an allergic reaction to this because I go, no, we are on the same team. Are we on the same team? Yes.

• 1:07:01Trevor Noah?

  What were you trying to do there? Were you trying to kick it into our goals? Right. No, you were not. All right. Next time then, angle your foot. And if the person's receptive, I go, yeah, we made a mistake. Let's move on. Yes. I don't think liberals do that, to be honest with you. I think there's like a, there's a, there's a real like, ah, well. Not only, not only are you out. Yeah. You're on the other team. Right. Which is even crazier to me. Imagine playing a game, John. Imagine playing a sport. Every time, every time your wide receiver drops a catch. Every time your point guard passes the ball out of bounds, not only do you bench them, you bench them to the other team. That is an unsustainable way of growing a coalition. Right. Do you know what I mean? It doesn't encourage people. The only thing that, that, because.

• 1:07:46Trevor Noah?

  And again, grace is the key thing.

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  But all groups have that litmus test. Like if I'm looking at, so I'm thinking about the right now. And before I grant them the redemption arc, I think about the vindictiveness of the Trump era. That there's very little of it, you know? There are really no deadly sins in the Trump era in terms of that, when you talk about faith and he can be convicted of this.

• 1:08:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  And evidence of unfaithfulness and sexual harassment, all these different things. And he's an imperfect vessel.

• 1:08:26Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  But the one cardinal sin is fealty, is if you're not loyal enough.

• 1:08:35Trevor Noah?

  You're not wrong.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  So they do have their...

• 1:08:39Trevor Noah?

  No, no, you're not that...

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  It's just...

• 1:08:41Trevor Noah?

  That's where religion comes back in.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:08:43Trevor Noah?

  Thou shalt have no other God but me.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:08:46Trevor Noah?

  That is a...

• 1:08:47Speaker 00

  But that places him beyond the scope of redemption and into the pantheon. Cause I, there was a part of me that thought, oh, it is true. Like I've been involved in, in some liberal movements, like we have a rescue farm. So I was involved in animal rights.

• 1:09:02Trevor Noah?

  I remember when you were...

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  We met some of those folks.

• 1:09:03Trevor Noah?

  Chasing a...

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  Bull, Frank.

• 1:09:06Trevor Noah?

  Let me tell you.

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  His name is Frank.

• 1:09:07Trevor Noah?

  Let me, let me tell you something, John.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  Out in Brooklyn, Red Hook.

• 1:09:09Trevor Noah?

  You know, this is, this is what I love about our lives is that whether you intended it or not, we are forever intertwined.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:09:18Trevor Noah?

  You know, we are trees that have branches that have met and we continue to grow in different directions.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  Lovely.

• 1:09:22Trevor Noah?

  We'll always have those branches that connect us. I remember the day like it was yesterday. I'm at the Daily Show and I start getting text messages, all concerned, but in different ways. Some saying...

• 1:09:41Trevor Noah?

  Is Jon Stewart okay? What is happening to Jon Stewart?

• 1:09:47Trevor Noah?

  Is Jon, and I remember like some people going, genuinely, some people thought you were having your, your snap moment.

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Trevor Noah?

  Your run down the street naked, because all some people saw was-

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  Shave the head.

• 1:09:57Trevor Noah?

  Jon Stewart, running down-

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were in, we were out, uh, along the, a, a bull had gotten loose.

• 1:10:05Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  And, uh-

• 1:10:07Trevor Noah?

  From where, by the way?

• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  It's an excellent question, Trevor. You know, I try not to ask-

• 1:10:13Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Those that-

• 1:10:14Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  The, the bull, I don't know where he came from necessarily.

• 1:10:17Trevor Noah?

  Okay, because I was like, I don't see bulls in New York.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  It's sort of like, they're like brothels. You know they're there. You don't know the address.

• 1:10:23Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  Slaughterhouses are the same one.

• 1:10:25Trevor Noah?

  Got it.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  There's a lot of festivals going on where they're gonna need a lot of goats and they're gonna need them fast and they don't necessarily want them inspected. So, uh, Frank had gotten away from one of these slaughterhouses and was running apparently-

• 1:10:39Trevor Noah?

  Frank's the bull.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  Frank's the bull.

• 1:10:40Trevor Noah?

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  He got out, now, he's being chased, and it's always that news story, you know, they, they, a bull running through Brooklyn? Well, I never, it's a local's news catnip. It's also catnip for my wife, who looks at me and looks at our trailer and goes, if we leave now, we can get to Brooklyn in an hour and fifteen minutes.

• 1:11:03Trevor Noah?

  Or leave where, New Jersey?

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  Leave our farm. We can get there, and if they catch Frank, we can get him and we can take him to a sanctuary. We can get him so that he's not hamburgered, so.

• 1:11:17Trevor Noah?

  I'm assuming this is an animal trailer? It's like a specific-

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  It's a Datsun, it's a four-door, so as long as it goes, no, it's a trailer, yes.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Look, I had to learn all this shit too. Uh, and by the way, like, driving a trailer in New York City is not, it's no easy game.

• 1:11:36Trevor Noah?

  Doesn't seem like fun.

• 1:11:37Speaker 00

  It's fucking gigantic, it's attached to your, we had a pickup, so it's attached to the pickup, so you are twenty-five, thirty feet of vehicle. And they don't necessarily move together, and backing it up is a giant pain in the ass.

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  We get out there too. They finally corral this bull and they bring him in. And we are able to get to the facility where they're holding him. They're holding him at like a dog shelter. Like he's literally in one of the the crates and able to back through and, and you know, call the different arrangements and gonna maybe you try not to pay the people that the bull has escaped from, because that's considered anathema for the movement or whatever.

• 1:12:18Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  So, but we, we get him. There's a bull in our trailer. And I've got to drive him through the Lincoln Tunnel. And it's just, you know, it's, he, you know, he's not a happy bull.

• 1:12:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  He doesn't want to be there. He doesn't, he doesn't, you can't say to him like, buddy, you don't understand.

• 1:12:38Trevor Noah?

  Things are gonna get better, Frank.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  Shits are about to get so good for you.

• 1:12:40Trevor Noah?

  You don't understand how good we are for you, Frank.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  But I have to tell you, in terms of personal satisfaction.

• 1:12:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  Off the charts. Off the charts.

• 1:12:51Trevor Noah?

  It is like the peak of dare I say manliness.

• 1:12:57Trevor Noah?

  Throughout time, John.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

  If you had seen me while we were trying to get him into the trailer, I think you would have.

• 1:13:02Trevor Noah?

  It doesn't matter. It does. Humankind is defined by the moments where we have captured large beasts.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  But I think to ride or eat, not to take to a park.

• 1:13:15Trevor Noah?

  Still, still for me.

• 1:13:17Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:13:18Trevor Noah?

  You get to say, well, ah, yeah, I captured a wild bull.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:13:21Trevor Noah?

  In the streets of Brooklyn. But let's go back to what you're saying about, um, about the republic. You said you, you've dealt with some groups. I'll preface it with this.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Trevor Noah?

  One of my greatest joys about getting to go back to South Africa and spend more time there and come back to the US and, you know, I live in New York, but I spent time there. I spent is that it's, it's reminded me to wire my brain differently, right? If you live somewhere and if you've experienced something, the way it has always been, you think that that's the way it is.

• 1:13:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:52Trevor Noah?

  Right? I find the more you travel, and even this is even with languages. The reason I like learning languages is because they remind me that the order of words is only what I've been told. You are here with me today.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  You believe reality has a certain order, but it does not.

• 1:14:07Trevor Noah?

  Completely. And in another language, it is today is you here on with me, me. And it's like, that's fine.

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  That's fine too.

• 1:14:13Trevor Noah?

  Right? One of the big ones I realized for me personally was.

• 1:14:19Trevor Noah?

  In South Africa, we spend more time, I would argue, most people spend more time shitting on their political party than they do thinking about like the other, you know what I mean? And I think to what you're saying, and I've seen, I mean, we've both gotten flakfoot in different ways.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:14:37Trevor Noah?

  There is a, there's a, there's a certain allergic reaction that you get in America when you do that. And this, I can argue Republican or Democrat, there's like a betrayal.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Oh, no question.

• 1:14:46Trevor Noah?

  How could you, do you understand that we are at war right now?

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:14:50Trevor Noah?

  How dare you, how, how, you, you are undermining, and you go like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying.

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Trevor Noah?

  We, again, we come back to the analogy of sports. Hey, we need to pass the ball. If LeBron says to his team, guys, we're not defending, and someone says, whoa.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  How, what are you talking about?

• 1:15:07Trevor Noah?

  What are you, what are you playing for them?

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  Playing for them now?

• 1:15:09Trevor Noah?

  What are you, a Celtic now? What do you, what do you mean when? You know, and I was like, no. I don't know that that's, have you found a soul for that? Have, or do you just, you just take it on the chin and you keep it moving?

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  I think you take it on the chin and you keep it moving. I mean, I think the, the way that I try and.

• 1:15:25Trevor Noah?

  Like you made Biden old.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  I know, but by mentioning it, I, I handed the election to Donald Trump.

• 1:15:31Trevor Noah?

  You did, John.

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  I believe, uh, uh, his, his niece, Mary Trump, referred to me after that as a threat to democracy.

• 1:15:39Trevor Noah?

  Huh.

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  Which I thought was inappropriate level of, of threat assessment. It's one of those things. So there's, there's, it's sort of, there's two things to it. One is, we both operated kind of artisanal shit talkeries. Like, that is what we do. That's what I do. I have an opinion, I try and frame it within a certain comedic tableau. So when people want to talk shit back, I don't have a whole leg to stand on to be like, what?

• 1:16:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  How dare you talk shit to the man who just talked shit about the thing that I wanted to talk shit about?

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  The second part of it, though, is the reptilian nature of people when they feel that fear, they're very comfortable attacking who they think are the other team. Yes. And they think that if you give them any solace, they don't view it as that might be a constructive, a constructive lens by which to view, like a stand-up comic. What's the worst thing that a stand-up comic can be? Fragile. If the audience is worried for the comic. Yeah, that's. You're not gonna listen. Well, that's what Biden was in that moment. He would come out, and I don't care who you were, like, you were worried. No, you were.

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  You felt it viscerally, mentioning that as a way of maybe saying to people either A, prove that this is the wrong emotion that I'm feeling, or B, get someone there that has the wherewithal to take on this. I would think would be viewed constructively, but it was viewed utterly destructively. You know, in terms of it bothering me, like, nobody likes to be yelled at a lot. Yeah. But I think I've been doing it long enough that the, the thickness of the skin, like, I don't dwell on it in maybe the way I would have when I was younger. But the second part of it is, I remember the war on terror.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  I like America in that fight over Al Qaeda. Big fan. But I criticized America quite frequently. That doesn't mean I wanted Al Qaeda to win, or that doesn't mean that I think, it means that I hold my beliefs and the people that I want to carry the flag for that to a very high standard. And, and that standard, if not met, I think, in the same way that I try to hold myself to a high standard. Yeah. And when failing to live up to it, I'm very critical and, and try and grant that forgiveness. But the point being.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  If you love something, if you believe in the idea of something,

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  you have to stress test it. It's like anything else, man. What's, what's the toughest part about comedy is it's not the writing, it's the rewriting. It's the editing. And why do you do that? You do that because you think you can make it better. And that's the whole of it.

• 1:18:46Speaker 00

  And to have that viewed as the antithesis of that, that as though that sabotage, I think is so wholly wrongheaded, that I don't even know what to make of it. The whole like, you both sidesers it, you're saying they're the same. I'm not saying they're the same at all. And anybody who watches me with any discernment over the course of, forget about one episode over a career, would know that.

• 1:19:15Trevor Noah?

  Don't go anywhere because we got more What Now? after this. Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. But one of my favorite features is smart downloads.

• 1:20:00Trevor Noah?

  You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watch. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. And it's like, no, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So. If you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Therapy is one of those things lots of people talk themselves out of without even realizing it. Like it's too expensive or it's too overwhelming figuring out even where you're gonna start.

• 1:20:45Trevor Noah?

  But Rula is one way to make that first step feel a lot more doable. Offering accessible, affordable therapy that fits your needs. Sign up in just a few minutes and get matched with a therapist who fits what you're looking for. Need to talk to someone quickly? Appointments are often available as soon as the next day. And with insurance, sessions average around a $15 copay. You can also see estimated costs upfront, so there's a lot more clarity going in. And in terms of outcomes, 93% of Rula patients report symptom improvement. If therapy's been sitting in the back of your mind, Rula is a pretty simple way to take that first step. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to rula.com.

• 1:21:30Trevor Noah?

  That's R U L A dot com to find a therapist the easy way.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  Did it surprise you that at The Daily Show, there are so many failsafes of fairness and context? Like, that's what, people say, you guys take everything out of context. Like, have you met Chodz? Like, Adam Chodikoff, who's the guy who does our research, been there forever. He's an institution at the show.

• 1:21:59Trevor Noah?

  These are the credentials of Adam Chodikoff. Chodz was the keynote speaker at the World Fact Checkers Conference. This is, these are the levels we're talking about, like.

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:22:12Trevor Noah?

  This is a person.

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  We trust.

• 1:22:14Trevor Noah?

  Yes, and this is a person where, and you know as well as I do, like, if you work or host The Daily Show, you will at some point have to fight with this man.

• 1:22:22Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:22:23Trevor Noah?

  And.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  And he will say, you can't really say that because the source that that's coming from.

• 1:22:27Trevor Noah?

  Let me tell you something.

• 1:22:28Speaker 00

  That's a liberal, you know, you got it, you can't trust that fact.

• 1:22:30Trevor Noah?

  Let me tell you something. But what he really taught me, more than most human beings, he taught me how to deconstruct data. He taught me how to deconstruct information. He taught me how to make the argument stronger as opposed to relying on the first instinct of the argument.

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  And when he says that, you don't say to him. What are you, both sizing it? You're playing for the other team? No, he's challenging you to be better. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. They thrive in spaces where you can say whatever you want and intimidate others into acquiescence or silence. Where they don't thrive are places where there are evidentiary standards and litigation and proceedings, right? Mm-hmm. An interview is a place of, where someone's gonna ask you real questions, is a place of evidentiary standards and litigation. So, that's not a comfortable space for them. Yeah.

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  Because they have a goal in mind and they wanna get there. How else can they be? George Soros is the most evil man in the world because he spends millions of dollars influencing elections. And say it with a straight face. How in the world, if you say to them, "Look, the bureaucracy is, is not the issue with our government. These are individuals, oftentimes really committed, really smart, working to execute the wishes of the Congress." By you demonizing them, it's you're the guy yelling at the Southwest Airlines counter. Yeah. Right? Not realizing it's corporate, yeah. But they do know. They do it for a purpose.

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  They need scapegoats to get, so if you say to them, "You're the Department of Efficiency, but you've just cut 20% of this. What are the metrics that you use to determine waste, fraud, and abuse?" And their response is always the same. "Oh, looks like the faucets get, the gravy train stopped running." Yeah. "Looks like you don't want, that you don't want this gravy train." And you're like, "That's not what I asked you." What I asked you was, "Show us transparently..."

• 1:24:46Speaker 00

  Why this is more efficient? Their response is always straw man demagoguing. Because they don't want to litigate the reality of it. They just want to steamroll to the vision of the world where if you say DEI, they go, oh, so you don't want a meritocracy? When did we have a fucking meritocracy? Honestly, like when, when has hiring ever not been subjective? And done by people that are more comfortable with people kind of like themselves? And by the way, getting back to the stereotype argument like, and we should have grace for that. Anybody who's ever been in a high school cafeteria knows there's a lot of self sorting.

• 1:25:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  That goes on in the world.

• 1:25:29Trevor Noah?

  Gladwell was on the podcast. He had a brilliant analysis of that. And he said, people are quick to talk shit about DEI. And whether you're for it or against, I've never liked the label of it. And I don't like the intention because I go, you're not, you're not saying we're going to widen the aperture to catch those we've missed. We're not going to watch the South African comedian and just put him in the pile.

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:25:48Trevor Noah?

  Cause I could have been shit and you watched and you went like, good luck to that kid.

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  Here's what I could have said, you know what we need? Black guy. Oh, wait, that guy's actual African black guy? Wait, black guy, I think is three points. African black guy, I think that might be seven points.

• 1:26:03Trevor Noah?

  See, but it's the aperture. And I think that's where people make the mistake. If you're actually trying to make sustainable change, you look at what you try and look at what you're missing, right? If you don't, you look at the labels of what you're missing to try and fill up the gaps. But what he talked about was, and I mean, it was so brilliant, classic Gladwell. He went, everyone talks shit about who gets universities. Oh, these black kids are getting in and these kids is because of, you know, admissions that have lowered the bar, lowered the bar. He goes through the sports that get you scholarships and he goes.

• 1:26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Trevor Noah?

  Lacrosse.

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  Fencing.

• 1:26:36Trevor Noah?

  Fencing.

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  Ice hockey.

• 1:26:37Trevor Noah?

  Ice hockey, ice skating.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  Squash.

• 1:26:40Trevor Noah?

  And he's like, who chooses these sports?

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:43Trevor Noah?

  Who chooses which sport gets you into a college? If you're really slick at what you do, you, you get around saying the thing, but you make sure you're doing the thing.

• 1:26:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:26:55Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:26:56Trevor Noah?

  You find a way to go, oh yeah, let's, let's do.

• 1:26:59Speaker 00

  You have an outcome.

• 1:27:00Trevor Noah?

  That's where, to be honest with you, that's where I think the Democrats are shitty, actually.

• 1:27:04Speaker 00

  No question.

• 1:27:05Trevor Noah?

  I actually think Democrats as like politicians are shitty.

• 1:27:07Speaker 00

  The Republicans are Malcolm X by any means necessary. However, they have to get it and they've got a plan. And the Democrats are-

• 1:27:16Trevor Noah?

  You know what I just thought of, sorry? Someone's gonna clip that line.

• 1:27:18Speaker 00

  The Democrats are Malcolm-

• 1:27:20Trevor Noah?

  The Republicans are Malcolm X. Someone's gonna clip that and they're just gonna put it up like, see? Even Jon Stewart knows, we're the ones trying to free the people. The Republicans, you see? And they're gonna play you again. The Republicans are Malcolm X. The Republicans are Malcolm X.

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  The Republicans are Malcolm X. And the Democrats are a black square on their Facebook page.

• 1:27:42Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  There's a performance to it. The Democrats are the audacity of hope and the governance of timidity. Like, it's the timidity of what's possible as opposed to what should be done, right? So, those two things, it's not a fair fight. So, with DEI, the way I try and talk about it now is in economic terms. Don't think about it as, uh, women, black people, poor people, veterans. Think of it as emerging markets.

• 1:28:12Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:28:13Speaker 00

  If you're a businessman, who doesn't wanna exploit emerging markets?

• 1:28:17Trevor Noah?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:28:18Speaker 00

  That's how you, you know, it's, it's-

• 1:28:20Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man, that's hilarious.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  But what they'll do to that is, again, they'll straw man it. Oh, so you just don't, you don't care who flies the planes as long as they're black? It's like when they say, can a black man be president? You're like Barack Obama, yes. Mr. T, probably not as easily. Like, there's discernment. But what they're looking for is to look at where are places? Because what does that do when you start to build up these supply lines that have withered? It increases competition. It increases the meritocracy. It doesn't decrease it. And they like to pretend that hiring decisions in the good old days-

• 1:28:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:00Speaker 00

  That was merit. People didn't hire their friends or their friends' sons or some good old boy that they played golf with at the club. No, it was all merit. And I don't know if you remember, but the world worked perfectly then.

• 1:29:14Trevor Noah?

  That's one of the biggest things I try and explain to people about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel to a lesser extent, but still, the boys who came from South Africa.

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  Oh God, that's right.

• 1:29:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they they've all been touched. I'm I'm fascinated by it because

• 1:29:30Trevor Noah?

  I don't think it's coincidence that these guys have all lived in and around apartheid South Africa.

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:29:37Trevor Noah?

  And have now gone into the world and are starting to export.

• 1:29:40Speaker 00

  With a vision of how it should be.

• 1:29:42Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And many, many of the elements sound exactly like apartheid South Africa. And what you're saying now is one of the biggest slights that a lot of white people felt in South Africa, the ones who weren't honest, because a lot of the honest ones were great about it. But the ones who weren't honest would go, you could, you used to be able to get a job in this country. I remember asking my mom once, I was very young, and I said, Mom, I um, I asked her, she would always say shame. This is what she'd say. We'd be at the traffic lights and there'd be a homeless person, black, you know, but the white ones, she'd always say shame. And I said to her one day, I said, Mom, you give money to both, but you always say shame when you give it to the white homeless guy. Why? And she said, you know why, baby? Because they don't know how to be poor.

• 1:30:27Trevor Noah?

  And I was like, damn, that's harsh. And she said, and I was like, what do you, I said, what do you mean by that? She said, it's not just that they don't know how to be poor, but they've been told that the world was supposed to work a certain way. And now that it's not working that way, I can't imagine what it feels like. She says, but as black people, we've been told that our job is to suffer. And so we suffer, honey. We suffer and we try to not suffer, but we believe as black people, which means we are, we suffer, we are suffering. And she said, so I feel so bad for them because the only thing worse.

• 1:31:01Speaker 00

  They should have worked out for them.

• 1:31:02Trevor Noah?

  She says, the only thing worse than being in a bad position is being in a bad position when you were told that there was no bad position.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  Right. That you were the default inheritor of the kingdom.

• 1:31:13Trevor Noah?

  And now you go to your point. It's because of the D E I, it's because of the, it's because, now we're gonna see with young men, women are gonna get jobs, oh, it's because they're women, it's like, no, they study more, they.

• 1:31:24Speaker 00

  All these women start going to college, Title IX, all that, and all of a sudden they start kicking the shit out of men academically. And everybody's like, see the, the terrible trials and tribulations of the American male. And you're like, right, because. Now there's competition.

• 1:31:39Trevor Noah?

  And competition in the thing, by the way, that we were never better at them at. We were never better than women at academics. This is every study that has shown it is like men, brain, throw, run, catch. Very good, very good. No, we can't. There's some of us who can concentrate, but for the most part, man brain, like, you know, young boys shouldn't be in class early in the day.

• 1:31:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:32:00Trevor Noah?

  They say if a school was designed perfectly, it would be, boys would go in.

• 1:32:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04Trevor Noah?

  All they would do is run, just run nonstop.

• 1:32:06Speaker 00

  For at least an hour.

• 1:32:07Trevor Noah?

  Just run like crazy. Then they would learn.

• 1:32:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:32:10Trevor Noah?

  Whereas girls can go straight to learn. So the irony for in all of it for me is they were always gonna kick ass academically because that is what their brain is designed for.

• 1:32:21Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:32:22Trevor Noah?

  They just weren't allowed into it before, you know? So now you go, oh, why, why are they sudden? It's like, yeah, they just weren't allowed to compete.

• 1:32:29Speaker 00

  But the exclusion has to be set up as the default setting. Otherwise, it doesn't work. And I think also the other argument that goes through there is how can you punish people who didn't create the system in the first place, but just benefited from it? And bringing this back to South Africa, so that's something that, you know, Elon is now on a thing in other countries. He wants to tell AFD and Germany, it's time to get over the guilt.

• 1:32:54Trevor Noah?

  Oh, he's doing it fully. We're gonna give them refugee status. We're gonna bring them all over.

• 1:32:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:32:59Trevor Noah?

  And for like a half a day, there were a few white South Africans who were like, yeah, this is great. And then they said refugee, and then people explained what that would mean. It's like you just leave your shit, you lose your citizenship, uh huh, and you just come to America.

• 1:33:14Speaker 00

  Right. And get temporary status.

• 1:33:16Trevor Noah?

  And like within a day and a half, some of the biggest Afrikaner organizations came out and they're like, hey, we actually like it here.

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  I don't know if you know, we own like seventy percent of the farm.

• 1:33:29Trevor Noah?

  They were like, look, we, we don't wanna be rescued. We, we just, I think you, what you need to understand is it's not about rescuing us per se. It's, it, like the analogy I had in my head.

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  Just recognizing we're the real victims of apartheid.

• 1:33:42Trevor Noah?

  There you go, my friend.

• 1:33:43Speaker 00

  So what do you do?

• 1:33:43Trevor Noah?

  There you go. It, it, you know what it felt like to me? It felt like people on a cruise ship sending out SOSs saying that they were refugees. And then the helicopter flying in going, wait, you on the slide? Are you?

• 1:33:56Speaker 00

  Look at the buffet. You're not a refugee.

• 1:33:59Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what? And you're like, I thought you were oppressed. And they're like, yeah, they said it closes at ten and now it closes at nine. It's like, wow, I don't think that's oppression. I think it just got a little, yeah.

• 1:34:09Speaker 00

  So what do they do with advantage like that? Do the white South Africaners now need a truth and reconciliation commission? Do they need to go and cry and go, sometimes now when I go places, people look at me funny?

• 1:34:24Trevor Noah?

  I think, to be honest with you, you know, to go back to what we've been saying about social media, to go to what we're saying about dialogue, discourse, et cetera.

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:33Trevor Noah?

  And I do put a lot of this blame at the feet of social media. And I think the media, media got so addicted to the teat of social media that it started creating.

• 1:34:42Speaker 00

  It followed the same circadian rhythms.

• 1:34:44Trevor Noah?

  Thousand people tweet, Jon Stewart offended me. Trevor Noah is an anti Semite. The news picks it up.

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:51Trevor Noah?

  Makes it a thing, then brings it back this way.

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:34:54Trevor Noah?

  And then now the social media gets bigger than the news goes. It's similar to weapons of mass destruction. Oh, we heard there were weapons. The New York Times said there were weapons. We must invade because of the weapons. But it's like, wait, wait, wait, but this is.

• 1:35:06Speaker 00

  Right. And you were the guys who told them there were weapons.

• 1:35:08Trevor Noah?

  You see.

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:35:09Trevor Noah?

  So I, I think in that, so I think there are many, I'm lucky that I get to see them. There are many white South Africans who go, this is bullshit. We now live in a democracy. Things got fair and I'm still in a much better position, even if I'm poor. I'm in a better position than the, the average black South African in terms of poverty, access to work, whatever. But the voices, John, the thing that I get particularly pissed off about is that there's a, there's an insidious voice that knows that this can be used to destabilize so that someone can be enriched.

• 1:35:42Speaker 00

  That's the whole purpose.

• 1:35:44Trevor Noah?

  So you see Elon Musk? Show me a single cause that Elon Musk is supporting that does not, in the end, benefit him financially. Then I will go, okay, maybe he does have a value.

• 1:35:56Trevor Noah?

  Where is he fighting in Europe predominantly, Germany? Where is the place where he's come up against some of the biggest union violations and workers' rights?

• 1:36:04Speaker 00

  What did he get rid of in the government? All the agencies that were regulating his businesses.

• 1:36:10Trevor Noah?

  So.

• 1:36:11Speaker 00

  No, you're dead right. The question is going to be not enough to say that the exclusionary structures of society are no longer operational. How do you repair them in a manner that is still equitable? Right? So, South African, I don't know at all. But if 70% of the farms are still owned, right?

• 1:36:39Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they are.

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  By white people, you can't just walk in and eminent domain it. You can't just walk in and go, well, it should be 70, 30 the other way.

• 1:36:46Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:36:47Speaker 00

  And so that's what we're going to do. So what do you do? How do you repair systems without being punitive to those who may not have had a hand in? In all of that? And is that the key? It's sort of like, look, we can all, at the beginning of every, you know, government meeting, honor the indigenous peoples that came before us, but nobody's giving the land back.

• 1:37:14Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm. So I go, again, visiting another reality with your eyes open makes you realize that there is no one reality?

• 1:37:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:37:25Trevor Noah?

  Now, if you suggested that in most.

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  Shared prosperity.

• 1:37:29Trevor Noah?

  If you, can you imagine if you said to Americans, hey, let me ask you a question?

• 1:37:35Trevor Noah?

  All 330 something million of you, this is your country. Why is it that the oil underneath it can belong to one person?

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:37:45Trevor Noah?

  He has his straw and he could use your.

• 1:37:47Speaker 00

  I drink your milkshake.

• 1:37:48Trevor Noah?

  I took your milkshake.

• 1:37:51Trevor Noah?

  Why, why is that allowed? And someone will be like, no, because you know how hard it is to drill and you gotta get them. And I go, yeah, yeah, I get all of that. But I'm, I'm just saying, acknowledge that you've accepted a reality. You know, when you realize it is when you follow its ultimate conclusion. Water. Like if you said, okay, Trevor, I'll give you some oil. I'm like, ah, what do I do with oil? I don't know what to do with oil. But water now, the same trajectory has started moving, right? Now, more and more water is owned by corporations.

• 1:38:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:38:18Trevor Noah?

  And slowly, slowly, the municipal water supplies are getting shittier. They're not looked after as well. Now your tap water is not as drinkable.

• 1:38:25Speaker 00

  Getting saltier.

• 1:38:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, less and less American water is, which by the way, it was, it was the A standard. A lot of people may not know this. And a lot of people may take it for granted because they've always been drinking the water from the tap. It's not normal everywhere in the world.

• 1:38:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:38:38Trevor Noah?

  Quality goes down. At some point, you have to buy bottled water. At some point, you have to buy water. But no one goes, where does the water come from? Why are we even paying for it? And people go, but Trevor, you gotta understand. Then I go, okay, let's play this game and go to the ultimate conclusion. What if I found a way to extract oxygen from the air? What if I found a way? What if I made a machine? That could suck all breathable oxygen out of the air? And I now had it in my machine. I had it in my machine.

• 1:39:08Speaker 00

  No one else has it. You've cornered the market on breathable air.

• 1:39:12Trevor Noah?

  I've cornered the market. Let's say the machine's not, it's not perfect. Right now, it can only do like a hundred block radius.

• 1:39:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:39:19Trevor Noah?

  But in that hundred block radius, I have all the breathable air.

• 1:39:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:24Trevor Noah?

  Do you think my neighbors would agree with the notion that they should now pay me to breathe?

• 1:39:32Trevor Noah?

  Would that be, would that not be reasonable, John? I worked hard for this oxygen. I extracted it.

• 1:39:38Speaker 00

  And yet if you did it, a month later, it's, it would just be the way it is.

• 1:39:44Trevor Noah?

  And people go, you buy oxygen.

• 1:39:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, you buy oxygen.

• 1:39:47Trevor Noah?

  Oxygen, the NOAA Corporation, they're number one providers.

• 1:39:50Speaker 00

  You would develop.

• 1:39:50Trevor Noah?

  We do have a baseball league for kids who are from disadvantaged backgrounds.

• 1:39:54Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:39:54Trevor Noah?

  I hope you know that we sponsor the baseball league.

• 1:39:56Speaker 00

  And we have a line of blueberry acai oxygen for the very rich people.

• 1:40:04Trevor Noah?

  Um, I know I gotta let you go at some point, but um, if you had a, a magic wand.

• 1:40:11Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:40:11Trevor Noah?

  What's one thing you think it changed? I know one thing won't change at all, but in this moment in time.

• 1:40:16Speaker 00

  I would use it to make more magic wands.

• 1:40:18Trevor Noah?

  Ah, you see, this is why you're brilliant.

• 1:40:20Speaker 00

  Uh. Well, the temptation is always with the magic wand is to go global and to do the whole, you know, and we all have a world of plenty. It's an Eden where, and, and this time in the Eden, we decide, let's, you know what? How about this? Let's just not plant an apple tree. Maybe the whole idea is if we don't put the apple tree, the Eden doesn't get spoiled. So I will, I will not take the easy way out, which would be to wave the magic wand as a panacea. Cause I think it just doesn't, there's probably nothing for us to have insight with. There's not much of a meal in that. If I just, what, what would you do? And it would just be like ice cream and pizza, Trevor. That's what I would do.

• 1:41:03Speaker 00

  I, I think what I would focus on is information ecosystems. Because ultimately, people are creatures of free will, and that's the joy of humanity. And so to steal the free will with a magic wand almost makes this entirely an exercise in the good place.

• 1:41:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:28Speaker 00

  You're in somewhere and you're, and you're bored. There is a, there is a beauty in the not knowing. There's a beauty in the finite nature of all that we have. And there's, and there's a beauty in the resourcefulness that is necessary because life is fucking hard. It just, it's, it's hard. It's a challenge.

• 1:41:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:51Speaker 00

  So I think the thing that I would wish for is not an instruction manual, but an information ecosystem that allowed those who.

• 1:42:06Speaker 00

  Who would wish to access it and see it to be able to make those decisions about their future and about the future.

• 1:42:16Trevor Noah?

  I hear what you mean, yeah.

• 1:42:17Speaker 00

  With the good data.

• 1:42:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I'm with you.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  Not the data that's been co-opted and warped and.

• 1:42:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I'm with you.

• 1:42:24Speaker 00

  Because ultimately, the machine's only as good as the input.

• 1:42:28Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:29Speaker 00

  And so I would probably, with my magic wand, want to clean the inputs. So that we'd still fuck up, we'd still make terrible mistakes, but at least we'd all be be working off of the good data.

• 1:42:43Trevor Noah?

  I like that. I have a friend who works at the United Nations, and I was saying, what is different in how you see the world versus how other people see the world? And this person said, I know the UN's not perfect, and it's fallen apart in many ways, and you know, but they said, the one thing I do appreciate is, at the UN, we get our news from primary source.

• 1:43:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:07Trevor Noah?

  Almost everyone in that building gets the news from where the news actually happened.

• 1:43:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:43:13Trevor Noah?

  And they were saying how you'll be shocked at how different it shapes, how, you know, like, a simple example was, um, um, I think it was like, the, the US at some point, they proposed a, oh, man, you, you know all these English words, I'd lose, I think it was like a triad tease to a ceasefire, or, or a preemptive.

• 1:43:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm sure it was a referendum.

• 1:43:38Trevor Noah?

  It was something like that.

• 1:43:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Trevor Noah?

  And then the American news reported and said, America has supported a ceasefire, and everyone in the UN was like, no, no, no, no one knows what that sentence means.

• 1:43:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:49Trevor Noah?

  You said ceasefire, but you put, but because they had primary source, they saw it, and I, I, I feel like, would you, would you ever do something like that? Would you ever go into something organizational, or would you, I mean, people have asked you, you'd never run for president, right?

• 1:44:01Speaker 00

  Run for president, sure, let's do it. Let's do it tomorrow. Me and Stephen A. Smith.

• 1:44:06Trevor Noah?

  I mean, you could.

• 1:44:07Speaker 00

  That's a, anybody could.

• 1:44:08Trevor Noah?

  That's a winning ticket, that way.

• 1:44:09Speaker 00

  I think, you know.

• 1:44:11Trevor Noah?

  That's a hell of a winning ticket, Joe.

• 1:44:12Speaker 00

  Oh, I, somewhere, I'm not sure where, basic cable, but.

• 1:44:17Trevor Noah?

  You don't think you and Stephen A. Smith could win the presidency?

• 1:44:19Speaker 00

  No, I don't.

• 1:44:21Trevor Noah?

  Huh.

• 1:44:21Speaker 00

  I don't. I think we could win the news that week.

• 1:44:24Trevor Noah?

  Huh.

• 1:44:25Speaker 00

  We would, we would win the news that week.

• 1:44:27Trevor Noah?

  Someone's been chasing bulls for too long. I don't know, Jon Stewart. I don't know, my friend.

• 1:44:33Speaker 00

  If you had asked me the magic wand question thirty years ago.

• 1:44:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Speaker 00

  In that, in the era that I was in, that we talked about earlier, my answer would have been, oh, I think I would have hot and cold running cocaine and blowjobs. And that'll probably disqualify me from them.

• 1:44:51Trevor Noah?

  I think it makes you the perfect candidate.

• 1:44:53Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:44:53Trevor Noah?

  Flawed and evolved and, can I tell you, you look happier?

• 1:44:57Speaker 00

  I am happy.

• 1:44:58Trevor Noah?

  You look, you look young, you look backward. Now you've Benjamin Button.

• 1:45:01Speaker 00

  You know, when you leave.

• 1:45:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  And then the once a week.

• 1:45:05Trevor Noah?

  I mean, that's.

• 1:45:06Speaker 00

  You get.

• 1:45:06Trevor Noah?

  Can I tell you, Joe, I feel like you walked so that I could run. And then I ran so that you could fly, my friend.

• 1:45:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:14Trevor Noah?

  You are flying once a week. Jon Stewart, thank you for the time.

• 1:45:17Speaker 00

  Such a pleasure to see you.

• 1:45:18Trevor Noah?

  Truly a joy, my friend. Thank you.

• 1:45:26Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan. Our senior producer is Jess Hackle. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now.

• 1:46:31Speaker 04

  And adults with active psoriatic arthritis. Don't use if allergic to Cosentyx. Get checked for TB before starting. Increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur like TB or other serious bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some were fatal. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough. Had a vaccine or plan to, or if IBD symptoms develop or worsen. Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or cosentyx.com.

• 1:46:59Speaker 05

  Don't let mysterious symptoms go unsolved. Talk to your doctor about Cosentyx.

• 1:47:04Speaker 06

  Real talent is defined by what people can do, not where they learn to do it. So by stopping at the education section of a resume, you might throw away the perfect hire. Skills-first hiring helps you see talent others miss, like more than 70 million stars skilled through alternative routes. Let their story unfold and gain a competitive advantage because hiring managers who start with skills are 60% more likely to find a successful hire. Hire skills first. Learn why at tearthepapersailing.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council.