Ep 49 | The Far-Left Feminist Disowned by His Own | Jamie Kilstein | The Glenn Beck Podcast

About this time every year, our attention turns to the solemn anniversary of 9-11.

It's a moment when we all take time to reflect on those who gave their lives that day.

Seems weird for those of us who remember it, what we promised ourselves we would do.

Those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the years to come.

Those who went to war, how are we treating them?

Defending our liberties in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

And now here we are, 18 years later.

We find ourselves seemingly in a state of permanent war.

We're warned that the Islamic State is poised to make a comeback.

We watch as the crescent of Iranian influence extends its long shadow.

And in Afghanistan, our leaders are now negotiating the terms of peace with the Taliban, which I thought we had wiped out at one point.

Well, I want to tell you about a new film that is out, ties all of this together.

It's called Mosul.

It is the story of the last battle of the Iraq War, documenting the 2016-2017 fight against ISIS in Iraq's second-largest city.

It's It's directed actually by a CIA officer, Danielle Gabriel.

Mosul is the name of this film.

It's much more than a war story.

It is a journey that will take you up the Tigris River right into the heart of darkness of the ISIS Caliphate, revealing an apocalyptic battle against two unyielding enemies: the violent Islamic extremism and the sectarian mistrust and hatred that will remain long after all of the politicians declare victory.

It's available now on iTunes or Amazon, Vimeo.

Just visit www.mosel-hash film.com.

You know, at some point in our lives, most of us hopefully learn the danger of acting like, what, I'm fine, I don't have any problems.

If you don't learn that early, and if you add politics into that lack of humility or self-reflection, wow, you have a dangerous cocktail.

Today's guest has undergone quite a transformation, and he had a huge slap in the face that woke him up.

One of the greatest lessons he learned is that if you act like you don't have any problems and you use that attitude to further your own political ideas, you're probably in for a reckoning.

He made his career calling people sexist.

Then hashtag me too related accusations popped up against him in an article on a feminist blog.

The blowback was really intense.

People took the joy he used to take in attacking other people, attacking him.

He had burned bridges.

Everybody turned against him.

This is on the left.

He had been banished from his own group, even though those accusations weren't true.

He no longer had a tribe.

That's when he went,

wait a minute, maybe I've been part of the problem here.

In the aftermath, he's gotten back into comedy.

Last year, he started a podcast that has done really well.

His journey has had more bumps and twists than just what I'm telling you.

It is hardly the start of it.

I have a feeling Jamie Kilstein and I are going to be sitting down more than once because I've got a lot of questions.

He is fascinating.

Next on Studio 19.

When I invite somebody at the studio, and I learned this

in the opposite way from Katie Couric.

When she first left the Today Show, she went to Yahoo and she was

doing some sort of a podcast.

And she approached me and she's like, please.

And I'm like, I'm not doing any interviews and I know what all these interviews are like.

No, thank you.

She's like, no, no, no, it won't be that way.

I promise.

I really, I need a big get for the podcast.

And I said, no, because you're going to sandbag me.

And she's like, no, I won't.

I promise you.

I promise you.

Please.

I need this favor.

So I did it.

And she sandbagged me.

Just so horrible.

Just such such a horrible human being.

And when I invite somebody onto my show,

it's important that if I'm inviting you into my house,

I'm not going to sandbag you.

And so when we met a few minutes ago in the hallway,

I said, you know, hey, don't, don't worry.

You know, you're welcome here and there's no problem.

And you said something really strange.

You said, no, I'm more excited about doing this than I've been for a long time.

Why?

I didn't get nervous until you said, don't be nervous.

And I was like, ah, crap, do I look nervous?

Because I was like super stoked.

Because, I mean, for a couple of reasons.

One,

I have dad issues and we used to fight.

Two, I think that

I'm starting to,

there's been,

it's been really hard not to be calculated with my career and what I mean by that is

when I was sort of disowned from the far left and I went from being rich to having no money like no money

There's a path for that and the path for that is to

go right wing

and to go and not like this show but to do the opposite of what I was.

The people who wanted to talk to me kind of had ulterior motives.

That still happens every once in a while.

Like, I have really cool fans from the left and the right.

Every once in a while, you'll get the person who's like, hey, man, like a big fan of yours.

And you're like, oh, great.

Thanks.

And they're like, we got to get these whores.

And you're like, nope, nope.

Like, you're not on my team.

I don't want this.

And, you know, I had offers.

I remember I got an offer to

kind of write one of those books,

you know, about leaving the left.

And I know, and by the way, when this happened, I was living on a couch with my cat at my friend's house and literally holding my cat, like crying, afraid I wouldn't be able to like afford to keep my cat.

And if I wrote that book, you know, why I left the left and the right is right, I would get a check for like a billion dollars and I'd be set.

And I don't think you'd be on this show.

I don't think I'd be on this show and I wouldn't be happy and it would read as disingenuous and it would crash and burn.

I would become a different version of who I was before.

And so I went, I mean, I was depressed and suicidal and I got out of that.

And I got off social media and I started teaching jiu-jitsu for like a year in Los Angeles.

And for the first time in my life, and I thought I would never go back to stand-up, never go back to podcasting.

And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was helping people.

where I was teaching kids and I was teaching adults who were afraid to fight how to fight.

And I was watching them spar and and I realized that all of this time I was screaming and yelling online wasn't anything.

Like I've joked about this before, but I was literally the person where if like a girlfriend was like, Jamie, your mom's on the phone, I'd be like, tell her I can't talk.

I'm tweeting about feminism.

You know, like I was ignoring people in my life to be self-righteous online.

And so I really think it was because of that year.

of helping people.

And by the way, I didn't know anyone's politics.

Like jujitsu, MMA guys, a lot of them are like apolitical, like kind of of conservative, definitely more like alpha than I'm used to being around.

And I actually found out what it was like to talk to people who I disagree with and to help people in real life.

So to your question,

I will be called a thousand percent.

I will be called alt-right for doing this show.

People are called alt right for doing Rogan's show, and he's very liberal.

I will be called.

Alt-right is an alternative to the right.

Yeah.

It's not the right.

They don't believe in the Bill of Rights.

Doesn't matter.

I would be called all right.

I'll be called a sellout.

People will say, oh, he's going down this path where, you know, he was

once he lost financial freedom or once he lost his financial way on the left, he's going to the right.

I'm like, I wish I did that because I would have a lot more money than I have right now.

It is not sexy to pitch a podcast to like my agent in the time of Trump about nuance and moderation and having conversations with people who deserve me.

If I became the right-wing version of Jamie and was just screaming about woke culture all day on Twitter,

I would be making a lot of money.

If I went full right-wing and ratted out all the people on the left,

which is plenty to say, I would be making a lot of money.

But I'm desperately trying to do the right thing.

So the reason I'm excited about doing this,

even though I will be called whatever I will be called, is even as a liberal,

what do we accomplish by just screaming at each other and by just being in our own echo chambers?

I'm legitimately, I'm becoming a lot more moderate on certain issues.

So I'm, I think, intellectually curious to talk to conservatives who I think are intelligent and learn things that I don't know.

I think I'm going shooting with someone who works here after

this.

Have you ever shot before?

No, of course not.

Oh, we gotta, I'm coming.

I gotta go.

I've just been screaming and yelling about guns, and I'm like, I've never shot a gun

before.

That was fun.

Yeah, and I'm like, if I'm going to, even if I'm going to, by the way, criticize it, then I should have done it and I should know what I'm doing.

This is the thing that I think conservatives are starting to say now in their own circles and

I'm just so sick and tired of the gun debate.

If you don't know what a semi-automatic is, if you don't know

everything's a weapon of war.

A knife is a weapon of war.

If you don't know what these things do and how they work, and I mean, even just a basic understanding, I can't have a conversation with you.

Well, and I want to have, I feel like there are probably, if I were a gun owner, if I were an NRA member and I saw all these mass shootings, I more than anybody would want regulation, right?

Or would want changes or to talk about solutions.

Correct.

Because you're getting called all these horrible things.

Yes.

Like you're

happy about school shootings, which has got to be a nice.

thing.

NRA members, I'm not talking about the leadership.

I'm talking about NRA members that I know.

They are the most law and order kind of people because they get so pissed off that they get the bad name.

So that they're really responsible.

This was my hypothesis on the podcast, on my podcast, and I'm glad I'm right.

Where I just, you know, it was like me as like an MMA fighter, whenever people would be like, oh, it's a blood sport.

I'm like, oh, you've never come to a gym because it's the nicest people in the world who would never get into a bar fight, who have no ego because they're getting their ass kicked every day.

They're wonderful people who would step in and help someone off the street as opposed to these liberals that would like run in the other direction and then, you know, tweet about it.

And I, I, so I just naturally assumed that.

gun owners would be the same way.

I would be livid.

It's like when you criticize America and people go, well, then get out.

You're not American.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no.

I'll criticize America because I love it.

I think that it's why we're the most triggered by our family, right?

Because we love our family.

I think it's important to criticize the things that you love,

but I think that

it's important, however, like

you get triggered with your family.

Yeah.

I get triggered with my family.

You come after my family.

Wait a minute.

And I'm right in your face.

100%.

Even though.

If I would stop and go, I might say, yeah, you know, you got a point on that.

Yeah.

Okay.

But we don't.

We jump to defend.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we go.

You're not allowed to hate my family.

Only I can hate my family.

Right.

And so it's, it's, what's happened is we get to these, we get to these cartoons to where conservatives are flag-waving, you know, F-16, you know, flying firework show, and that's what America is.

It's the old red, white, and blue.

That's what it is.

And then the left, it just hates America.

they're communists yeah

well there are those people over here like i'm gonna blow them out of the water right now and there are those people who genuinely hate america but then there's people like um what's her name tulsi gabbard who's

she's going to serve she she's taking two weeks off now i may disagree with her but she doesn't hate America.

No, and what's so funny is she's actually called out

Kamala Harris and called out a lot of the candidates on some of their more conservative policies and the left instead that man the day after Twitter on the debates when Tulsi was trending

I was I was thrilled to watch her call out

a lot of the Democrats and All these mainstream liberals were like, she's an Assad apologist.

Like, this has got to be Russian bots who are making her trending.

And it's like, Jesus, can't we take some criticism without saying this like Russian bots?

Hillary Clinton, matter, like the Russia stuff, I'm I don't really listen to, but regardless, it's like she was the worst candidate ever candidate.

Horrible.

She was a terrible candidate.

And to be like, it was Russia.

It's, you know, we talk about AA and recovery.

It's like, if you are not going to take responsibility for your actions, you are never going to learn.

You are going to keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

We should be thrilled to have someone like Tulsi who has served, who will call out candidates on their behalf.

This is a 1995 or even 2000 version of a Democrat that is like the all-star.

She would have been the all-star

even maybe even 10 years ago.

She is now, because she doesn't hate certain things, because she won't crucify everything and everybody.

Yeah.

She won't be accepted by that core group that is needed for the primary.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, and one more thing I wanted to say about, well, when we were talking about guns,

you said something that made me think of people have gotten very defensive,

understandably, because of those caricatures, right?

Every right-wing person is being called a Nazi, which they are not.

Every left-wing person is being called a stone socialist, which like kind of.

But like,

I get it.

But,

but.

When I think because people get so defensive online, they're always being attacked.

A lot of times they don't defend things that in their heart they feel like they should.

So, what I mean by that is

my friend Jason, who works here,

he posted something really wonderful after the El Paso shooting about how we need to come together and we need to fix this.

I saw Republicans using the words white supremacy, which I would have never assumed would happen.

And I saw

most every Republican I followed talked talked about something with guns has to change.

And this dude is gun owner, go shooting, et cetera.

And I retweeted that and I said, this is what we got to do.

I'm saying the same thing as someone from the left.

We got to come together and we got to figure this out without screaming at each other.

And a bunch of my conservative followers, a bunch of his conservative followers were saying some of the most heartfelt things.

You know, too many kids have died.

Stuff that I literally and naively would assume that the right wouldn't care about, that they just wanted wanted their guns.

They just wanted their bunker of guns for when, you know, I literally just assumed that everybody was like, they're going to come for my guns.

Like, they all think they're like Steven Seagal from the movies, but in real life, they're like Steven Seagal in real life, you know, just like very sadly, like, come and get it.

And by the way, the government would take your guns because they have tanks.

And

all these conservatives are being incredible.

I want to just correct that before I forget.

Al-Qaeda, ISIS, everybody else, they've done a pretty good job going against the United States of America.

I don't accept

because that is what the Second Amendment was for, you know, it wasn't like, I mean, it wasn't like they were like, what sport should we put into the Second Amendment?

Right

about hunting.

Correct.

That's not what it was.

No, like it was a fear of an out-of-control government.

And everybody says, oh, you're going to fight with the tanks.

Well, look at the guys who were living in the cave.

Right.

They kind of did it.

Right.

And you, I don't ever want to get there, but I don't understand the left when they say, Donald Trump is a Nazi.

We're going to be a fascist country.

Quick, let's give him our guns.

That's interesting.

I've never heard that.

I've never heard it put that way.

I don't get really.

Well, but

the.

That's what the Second Amendment is for.

But it's really interesting because when, I believe it was under Reagan, when a lot of gun

legislation was happening was when the black panthers were showing up uh armed and

you know killer mike who's this amazing uh rapper and activist and he pisses off liberals a lot um from run the jewels he talks about he's like i don't want the black communities giving up their guns because of what's happening um

the clan that was their deal right they went from house to house for your protection martin luther king asked for a concealed carry permit his sheriff said for your own safety, sir, I don't think so.

Come on.

Come on.

Well, I want to continue this conversation while we are at the range, or whatever you guys call it,

at the gun place.

At the shooting place.

I'm going to have to just wear one of my jiu-jitsu shirts just to be like, I'm still a man when you see how scared I am of this kickback.

But what I was going to say is, all the conservatives were saying really heartfelt things.

And

a bunch, I don't want to say all of them, but a bunch of liberals who commented were like, oh, you're falling for it.

You're falling into their trap.

Right.

And that was so disheartening to me because I'm like, this is what you claim you want.

Here is a gun owner.

Here is a conservative.

Here is a family man saying, I want to do something.

A Republican saying, I want to do something.

And if every time a Republican says, I want to help, or if every time a Democrat shows up to a conservative cause and says, I want to help, we just get shunned away, then

nothing's going to happen.

So what I was going to say before is, I think that people are so defensive.

And because if the left is going to call every Republican a Nazi, and then Donald Trump does something really heinous,

and a conservative wants to tweet about it, they're going to think about it.

They're going to be like, Why would I do this if I'm just going to get called a Nazi anyway?

You know, like, I called, I called every major press person I know, Chuck Todd, all of them, yeah, after Trump won.

Yeah, and I said, do not make my mistake.

I made the mistake.

No, I made the mistake of

not seeing what I was saying was actually

dividing and tearing apart.

I thought I had certitude.

I thought that I was right.

Well, in some things, I was right.

In other things, I wasn't.

But more importantly, the way I said it and the way it was taken out of context and then put into tweets,

it divided.

And I said, don't, you're going to be tempted to say, everybody over there is a monster.

Don't do it.

None of them wanted to hear that advice because there's no money.

Well, that's what I was going to say.

So they screwed up.

So I don't totally buy the narrative about the left-wing media.

As someone who was left of left, I was always furious when they said MSNBC is like the right-wing Fox because MSNBC is still pretty moderate.

They're still owned by G.

There's like 15 hours of Joe Scarborough on that show, you know what I mean?

Where I was just like, you're just not going to compare it.

Bill Donahue was fired when the Iraq war was incredibly popular and he was criticizing it.

That wouldn't have happened on Fox in the opposite way.

But

when they say it's the liberal media or all fake news, it's you hit it, where they're profit-driven.

They covered Trump more than they covered Bernie Sanders because they thought it was hilarious and Trump would never win and it was very clickbaity.

And then when they realized they screwed up and now the nation is furious, including a lot of conservatives, that Trump won, now they're attacking Trump, attacking Trump, attacking Trump.

Which is only making it worse.

So much worse.

Because it's making people, like I said, with social media, just hunker down and be like, we're going to defend our guy no matter what.

and

if I got up every day and I had if the media was reversed I mean I think we can both agree that the media is lopsided oh they're the worst yeah okay so um

if if I had control of the media if Fox and you know Rush Limbaugh were the dominant voices in America and there were clones of them all around and you were just in this little camp sure and we were like you're a bunch of commies yeah and we hate you and you're the problem.

You would be so defensive.

Yeah.

So defensive, you would run to anyone who would stand by your side.

Well, and so this happened.

Danger.

This happened to me where when

I was going down that road financially

of do I go right wing?

You know, do I go like full conservative?

And like I had nights on that couch where I was like, I'm going to watch Ben Shapiro videos.

I'm like, no, I'm still liberal.

Where I tried.

I really did try.

It wasn't, it really wasn't money.

A lot of it was conservatives were just being nice to me.

And I lost all my friends.

And I got divorced.

And I felt like a pariah.

And I was in Los Angeles.

I don't live there anymore.

I was in Los Angeles.

And I felt like If I walked into anywhere, someone would hear some rumor about me or think something or everyone hated me.

And I was going crazy so when it was conservatives who were just being nice and were like hey man what happened to you was like weird um and like conservative women were like reaching out to me and like stuff like that and a lot of eventually liberals did too um but none of my old friends reached out to see if i was okay um

wow how did that feel horrible i mean it was

that was the worst part because like i've been

i've been financially screwed before.

I dropped out of high school to start stand-up.

I lived in my car for two years just trying to get gigs.

I, when I wasn't getting gigs over here, I would fly overseas because they liked political stuff more.

Um, that's what, like, Hicks had to do, like, back in the day.

And I would fly over there and I'd make a bunch of money, come back.

I played the Sydney Opera House with me and Christopher Hitchens.

And then I got back to New York the next week and couldn't get booked at like some crappy comedy club in New York.

Um, so like, I've hustled hustled and I've struggled and I was like, if I have to go back there, cool.

If I have to live in a studio apartment forever and teach kids jiu-jitsu, like at least like I'll respect myself.

Fine.

But that is what,

that's what hurt a lot.

I had,

I remember when I first started to make it, a guy who was my idol growing up, just an idol.

And I, I just, this guy meant everything to me.

Noam Chomsky?

And

he called me out of the blue one day

because he wanted to offer me congratulations on all my success.

And I was like, I was like an eight-year-old kid.

All of a sudden, I was just like, oh, hello.

How are you?

And I just was so because he was just the guy showing up.

And

I realized about two minutes in the phone call,

he was just trying to get money from me.

And I was

just destroyed.

And when you, when you are, when you're either on the up or the down,

the, the, the, the, the games that are played by the people you thought

were better than that.

Yeah.

I, uh,

that happened a little bit on my way up.

I had people who would,

who were, who would just bully me at clubs or like talk trash online.

The second I would get something, I would get on Conan or I would get, I would just get an email with no like self-awareness at all, just straight up, like, hey, who books that?

And I'm like, you know, you're terrible to me, right?

Like, you're a bad person.

Why are you doing this?

Um, not even opening it up with, like, hey, I know this is bananas that I'm sending you.

Uh, but then when I thought about it, and in a weird way,

it kind of made it easier for me because when I thought about the people who didn't reach out to me,

now look, if I was accused of like something heinous or whatever,

okay, I get it.

But I mean, I like publicly have talked about like suicide a lot and depression and addiction, and then I disappear for a year.

And so to have no one on the left reach out, the only people that reached out to me.

Friends.

Yeah.

The only people that reached out to me were comics.

And I had spent years,

I was on that part of the left where we would trash comics if they said something offensive, if they said whatever.

And suddenly these comics that I abandoned, I abandoned being a comedian for being a political lefty.

They were the ones who reached out.

Rogan reached out.

Doug Stanhope reached out.

Like people who they were just like, hey, I hope you're not dead.

I hope you're okay.

And it reminded me that comics, while they're demonized and scrutinized so much nowadays,

they're misfits and they're sweet and they know what it's like to feel broken, right?

And they reached out.

The ones who remember

Lenny Bruce.

yes yeah but the ones who like you have gone awry and like you know what I'm gonna virtue signal right those guys are really dangerous because do they not know yeah so I'll tell you so my trajectory was kind of interesting where I started off so I idolized Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, George Carlin,

Pryor.

And

none of them would be working today.

They would all like, they would be in jail.

And

what's crazy?

No, they wouldn't be in jail.

They'd be in this cyber jail.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you know what I mean?

We've always been afraid of the government.

It's the mob.

That's what's just like, well, what the.

Even like, and I should not bring this up, but it's a great example where, like, Louis C.K., let's not talk about what he did.

There are prison sentences for people, right?

And the left talks about that a lot.

The left talks about forgiveness.

The left talks about prison reform.

Rightfully, I think.

I think that our prison system is also very broken.

But you question the motive if you really believe that if you can't forgive.

Where they never want him to work at, like, he gets up at a comedy club and they want that place shut down.

And it's like, do you want this guy with daughters just to, he screwed up?

He apologized.

Again, I don't want to get into Sarah Silverman.

Yeah,

right.

And Sarah Silverman, by the way, who also just got fired this week.

Right.

That's what I mean.

Oh, I thought you meant Sarah Silverman talked about how she was friends with Louie and she

did a deal in Blackface, then comes back a couple of years later and says, Wow, that was really stupid.

But the thing in Blackface was mocking people who were racist.

Of course.

Then she says,

I was mocking the racist thing, but I shouldn't have done it in Blackface.

And now, years later, this doesn't make any sense at all.

And that's the best comedy.

And that's the comedy we used to idolize.

For me,

I can say that I believed most of the things that I talked about when I was on the radical left.

The one thing that I always felt gross was going after comedians because I know that comedy comes from pain.

So whenever someone's like, whenever I'm doing an interview and they're like, so were you the class clown?

I was like, are you out of your mind?

Like the class clown like called me gay and beat the crap out of me.

Like I was not the class clown.

Like a lot of the comics were the nerdy, quiet, shy ones who would just write in notebooks.

And

my first memory of when laughter affected me

was when

something terrible would happen to my parents.

There would be a relapse.

There would be a cop showing up at our door.

There would be an ambulance, whatever.

And me and my brothers would be upstairs and we were terrified and we didn't know what to do.

And the second someone made a joke, and it would always be offensive because we have a family member being carted away in an ambulance,

everyone would start laughing.

And once you could laugh, it took the power away from this really terrifying issue.

And then you could start to brainstorm and be like, okay, what do we do?

It would almost like snap you out of a trance.

And so whenever I talked about offensive things or whenever I talked about edgier things, it was never to offend people purposefully.

It was like, let's dig really deep and see how far we can go and then let's talk about it.

And I think that's where comedy can be the most powerful.

Now, there are comedians, usually newer comedians, who will see edgy comics, who will see someone like Richard Pryor, who is confessing to this horrible domestic situation he was in and this drug addiction.

And as a new comic, you go, oh, so I just talk about like hitting women and doing smoke and crack.

And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.

Like he would do it with vulnerability, with

whatever.

And a lot of comedians, they would rather hear a groan than silence because silence is the worst thing.

So they'll just throw out like some rape joke or some whatever.

And that stuff,

I'm not even offended.

Just as a comic, I don't like that.

But I felt like I had a phase where I was doing very well with stand-up.

It was like the year I was almost famous where I did Conan and the green room and Robin Williams took me under his wing and I had managers and agents.

And then it kind of plateaued.

and as my comedy sort of plateaued because again it was still like pretty edgy um

i was definitely the guy that a lot of industry would be like hey we love what you do and you're like great do you want to work with me and be like oh jesus i would get fired like no no no no no like that was like every meeting i had um but this podcast started to get more popular and

On the left, I was hilarious because we're not really known for our humor.

And I was suddenly like the cool kid.

I was suddenly this high school dropout that was on MSNBC panels.

And I had really intelligent, smart fans who were using academic jargon I never heard before.

So I felt smart and I felt accepted and all this stuff.

And so the show

just sort of started going less comedy, more in that direction.

And so

I did become that,

but that's not.

the comic I am.

That's not who I started as.

It was just I was getting approval from those people.

And a lot of times, I mean, I think you've been there.

Like, when you're getting approval and adulation and you suddenly feel like you're someone and you're doing something, it's powerful.

It's really powerful.

I think fame and fortune are battery acid to the soul.

Yeah.

I didn't even get the fortune part.

That's the worst part about it.

I wasn't even like, oh man, I'm going to sell it in my pool.

I was still like in Brooklyn.

But it's, it's because the minute

the minute you want it,

the minute is the minute you're done, you're headed in the wrong direction, right?

Wrong direction, and that's what was happening to me.

It's funny.

It's you think you're above so much, and then you look back and you're like, God, I was that cliche.

I was that cliche who was in a marriage that wasn't working, so I just bought all this stuff and I said all these things because I was trying to project this image.

And

you really, it's like quicksand, like you get stuck in it, um, and you don't even really realize that you're just making it worse and worse.

Did you, when you

left Fox, was there,

because I feel like when you do rock bottom or when you do take a turn, you can go in two directions.

You can get really bitter.

And I talk to people who have been in similar situations to me and they're bitter.

And I'm not.

I would have died.

I wouldn't have made it if I was like my ex-wife or these girls.

Like, ugh, like just gross to think about

maybe it would have helped me in some ways i don't care um

and then

in a weird way i think rock bottom is what can subvert that battery acid test in the sense that once you've hit that or once you've made a drastic change suddenly you do things for the right reasons and now i'm not trying to be rich.

I'm not trying to be famous.

I'm like, I'm going to do what I do and hopefully I can make a living.

So when so when

I hit rock bottom in the 90s

and

very similar story to yours.

Okay.

Hit the bottom.

Took me about four years to dig myself out

and

turn things around.

And then my second bottom was completely different.

Interesting.

I need to pay attention to this.

Yeah.

It was,

I don't think you're going going to have a problem with it.

It was, all right,

I'm not, I'm going to be, all I wanted back, you know, because you lose everything.

Only thing I wanted back, not money, not fame, nothing.

All I wanted was my integrity.

Yeah.

Because I had blown my integrity.

Got it.

And so it's 95, and that's all I want.

I want to be able to look at somebody and say, no, I mean this, and have them believe me.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

So I worked so hard for that and really, really tried to do the right thing.

Then a little arrogance, because you have success, arrogance

creeps in.

I was doing comedy on Fox, deconstructing Fox and the cable news network by making, I was mocking a cable news show on a cable news show.

And I knew

I have to perform, and I'm a decent performer.

I have to perform to be able to get people to watch an hour on Woodrow Wilson.

So how can I make that really entertaining?

You know, oh, I can throw a frog in a blender, and I can do this, and I can pour gasoline over somebody, and they'll watch it thinking that people will, especially people in media, would be smart enough to go, wait, wait, wait, take all that crap away.

Sure, I hate him because he's this performer.

But what he said here, here, and here is there any truth there right because if that's true that's a problem yeah

i thought people in the media would be more

would be less disingenuous and they would be curious uh which was a problem um and at the end i was you know sitting in my my Bloomberg building apartment on the 56th floor looking at Central Park.

And I realized, oh my gosh, I want this really bad.

Run for your life.

And so I was afraid of

fame and fortune because I had a little bit of it early in my life.

And once you want it, it doesn't matter.

Your good intent is gone.

Yeah.

I mean, I think for me, I've caught myself a couple of times.

I've caught myself

where,

and you see this online a lot.

So there's, there's the right, there's the left, and then there's the middle that I kind of align with, like, you know, the sort of like Jordan Peterson, IDW, Dave Rubin, whatever.

And

I've had phases where I'm like, well, I'm just going to start retweeting all these like moderate dudes and I'm going to start like attacking who they're attacking.

And then I'm like, oh my, I'm literally a moderate version of progressive Jamie.

And I'm like, I don't want to to do that and i've also caught myself if i do a right-wing show and i got a bunch of followers and people are like hey disagree with you but you know great job in this show or whatever um let's say i want to retweet something that i really like that aoc said i'll be like maybe i shouldn't do this um i've talked to friends of mine it's hard it's really hard and especially when you know like I'm in love.

I moved out of LA.

Like, I never thought I was going to have kids.

Like, we want to have a family.

And right now,

you know, the money that I had would have been able to do that.

And I have to start again.

And you see people kind of going up who are just screaming and yelling on Twitter.

And I know

even now, even I haven't started doing it.

I'm desperately trying not to, but the times I've gotten the most like Patreon people from my podcast have been when I, and I haven't done this on purpose.

But like when that liberal left because he's like, you talked about Clinton with Epstein.

And I'm like, of course I'm going to.

He left.

And so a bunch of people went, screw that guy.

And they became members.

And when I saw that, there's that part of you that goes, oh, if I make like a bigger deal about this on Twitter, I'll get more people.

We were just having this conversation.

My dad, my

second bottom was

even with good intentions,

you just screwed everything up.

Okay.

This is where I'm like.

And so I'm like, oh, crap.

So I've spent the last five or six years, eight years going, okay, so wait, how do you navigate?

And every day,

every single day,

you know, I've got hundreds of people relying on me keeping a job going.

You know, all this closes down.

Right.

And

every day,

I'm smart.

I know how to make it work.

Right.

And you have this choice and you're like, oh, oh, man, I could do that,

but it just takes, and very few people,

you know, I came out so strongly against Donald Trump, and I became, I think, bigoted and hateful because I wasn't listening for people's pain.

Right.

When your friend does something just crazy and you're like, wait.

Hey, man.

Wait, what?

Okay.

If they're your friend, you say to them,

What the hell's happening in your life?

Yes.

Okay.

I didn't do that to my audience.

Right.

I just said, are you out of your mind?

You idiots, right?

You idiots.

So I made the same mistake again.

And I almost did that with this new show.

Like, I could feel where every day I was like going after the woke people.

That just happened to be the story I was talking about.

And I'm like, this isn't it.

This isn't what I want.

But the society doesn't reward you for that.

You know, if you and I, we could even, and I, unfortunately, I know these people,

you and I, we're at different ends.

So, all right, when the cameras go on, we're going to talk about this.

Let's just battle it out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That would be huge.

Oh, we could do stadium tours.

Yes, yeah, 100%.

Pendillette and I, yeah, we're good friends.

Yeah, yeah.

And he, I was just with him in Vegas, and he said, We have got to tour.

He said, I don't care if anybody comes.

He said, I just love our back-and-forth dialogue.

And I said,

Well, I'd like to tour too, but uh, I gotta, I'm busy making money, you know, so uh,

would anyone come?

And we both stood there and went, I'm not, I'm not sure because we're both able to disagree and go, now, wait a minute.

Right.

Explain that to me.

But I do think that people, God, I hope so, or else I'm doomed.

Cause I'm like, you have a bunch of staff.

I'm like, I have like a one-bedroom apartment, a girlfriend, and a cat.

And I'm like just teetering right now, like looking at those Patreon numbers every day.

Where

I do think that

when people ask me comedy advice or they say they want to start a podcast, I go,

it's the easiest advice in the world, but it's hard to take.

Where it's like, you just have to be genuine.

If you can be talking like this and get up on stage and be talking the same way and not trying to be someone else, you will be successful.

And it takes years.

You, people, it's so weird with comedy.

You could have the most respected intellectual whoever, and that first open mic, they are talking like Andrew Dice Clay.

Michelle Obama could do an open mic and she'd be like, so I'm nailing my wife.

And you'd be like, what, Michelle?

What is happening?

Like, it is so bizarre what happens with comedy.

But that's what I would do.

I would say for podcasting, if Joe Rogan pitched his podcast to like an agent and was like, yeah, some days we'll have Hunters, maybe Alex Jones.

We'll have some UFC guys.

Then we'll have like Tulsi Gabber.

Like people would be like,

that's so frantic.

That's all over the place.

You have to have like a theme and you have to have this.

But he was genuine to himself.

You're being genuine to yourself.

You've built this.

I'm being genuine to myself.

I have this podcast.

It is so much harder

start for me, what I noticed, because I know if I was starting crap on Twitter, we used to make so much money on this old podcast with no advertising, just because I was every day just like riling the troops, riling the troops.

With that said, the audience we on this new podcast I have, the audience now might even be more conservative.

At least the people who give money are.

I'm watching liberals and conservatives talk on our Patreon page about someone was really depressed and a bunch of people like jumped in and was like, hey, try this because we talk about mental health on the podcast too, like besides politics.

And

those people are going to stick around.

And I would, even from a business point of view,

I would much rather

10,000 listeners that are with me for life and are good people and can hear me and be like, hey, I disagreed with that, but I'm not going to like be a baby and walk off with my $5 a month or whatever.

I would rather that than,

i mean dude i had like a rabid fan base before and could sell out clubs and maybe 15 of them listen to my new show i mean when they got their orders that like jamie's out uh i was gone i had a guy on facebook the day before all of like all hell broke loose was like hey i just want you to know because of you and your stand-up like you saved my life Next day, it was Jamie's this monster.

He's a bad liberal, whatever.

He didn't even delete that comment.

You know how you can like add a comment on Facebook?

He added to his original comment, like, screw you.

I hope you don't, whatever.

Um, and it was just like gone.

They were, I mean, these were kids who,

you know, listened to the show that, like, I helped with like suicide or I helped with whatever.

Um, and like, Jesus, I'm glad they're okay.

But that was a crazy thing just to see like everything good that I like tried to do.

They're like, that doesn't count anymore.

You know what I mean?

Can we go back?

Because I haven't gotten to a single question I wanted to ask you.

Yeah, that's my bad.

No, no, no.

No, it's mine too.

I find you fascinating.

Let me go back in case somebody doesn't know who you are and what your trial is.

Now that we've talked about the backhand,

the worst interview ever.

No, no, it's like Artsy.

It's like a David Lynch movie.

It's like jazz.

Let's start with.

Where should we start?

Should we

start 2008?

Okay.

Where is that?

I'm really bad with years.

2008.

Obama had just been elected.

Okay.

Okay.

I was never really good at business in the sense that when I was doing very political material,

to start, it was right after 9-11.

People didn't really want that.

Then when Obama got elected,

I really liked Obama.

Um,

but, and, and this I'll like pat myself on the back a little bit.

Um, one of the things I talk about the most on the podcast now is that people should have like principles over partisanship or like values over teams, whatever.

And when Obama started doing stuff that I disagreed when Bush did it, I called Obama out.

Um, I called Obama out on Conan for drones and did not go over.

I mean, the audience, like the set looked fine, but they got like a lot of hatement.

I've not been back on Conan.

So I like finally had this opportunity.

And now I did it again.

Now that Trump is president and every comedian is making a ton of money off of going after Trump, I'm like, don't you think we should all have conversations?

Like I've always been on like the wrong side.

That's good.

I think so.

That's good.

Lenny Bruce.

Right.

I have a picture of him getting arrested

that my friend gave me.

And so 2000.

I have a book for you to read.

You got to read The Pendulum.

Oh, yeah.

I haven't read it.

It's great.

And it talks about how society swings back and forth.

And people like you, people like me, are always right out of step.

Yeah.

Either a little ahead or a little behind.

But those are the ones that make the difference.

Yeah, and that's what...

You're not going to be loved.

No, and I and I told myself that, and I've had people say that to me with what I'm doing right now.

I think, and we'll get into it, there's still such shame behind what happened to me that

it's not like before.

Like under Bush, I could feel like, you know, oh, I'm like Carlin.

I'm like, you know, sticking it to the man and going after the powerful.

But when people will say stuff like, you know, oh, I'm just going on Glenn Beck show because like the left doesn't like me anymore.

It's like, I know that's not true, but also that's what I would have said to me.

And it still makes me be like, Am I?

You know, now, if I was going on right-wing shows, I'm like, we got to build a wall.

Then it's like, all right, I'm going to sell out.

Like, whatever.

That's good.

I don't think we ask ourselves enough.

Am I?

That's what, when I left Fox,

that was the number one question.

Yeah.

A year before, two years before, I was at CNN.

I was hammering.

God, I remember that.

Yeah.

I was hammering.

I was calling for Bush's impeachment.

Right, right, right, right, right.

And I was the second, or the third most admired man in the country.

You know, that Palestine.

That's bad year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember this.

A year later, half the country hates me.

Yeah, sure.

And so I get to the end of that and I'm like,

okay, I know I'm not the guy that is the most admired.

I'm not tied with the Pope and Nelson Mandela.

That's insane.

But I'm not this guy either.

And I spent a long time, and I think you still do, and I think it's healthy to some degree to go,

gosh, a lot of people are saying this about me.

Not necessarily am I, which is where I started, but what is it I'm doing that causes them to feel that way?

Is there something I can do differently that will negate that?

Or what is it that they're seeing or their pain is showing?

You know what I mean?

Because you're built on pain.

Yeah.

You're built on pain.

That's comedy.

Comedy is just like a hill of pain.

Yeah.

But then

it's tricky.

It's tricky when you're in survival mode, too, because I've always been like a hustler from,

and I mean that in a good way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, from, again, dropping out of high school to start stand-up, I was like, I know what I want to do.

I'm not good at many things, but the things I'm good at, I use that attic brain and I go hard.

So I'm 17.

I realize I want to do stand-up instead of being like, oh, when I graduate, I'll whatever.

I was like, nope.

Like, I'm leaving high school.

I literally can't focus on anything.

I'm going to take the the train into New York every day, do open mics.

Then I start to get booked a little bit, not getting booked enough.

Don't want to have a day job.

Gonna live out of my car and just drive back and forth to coffee houses and just get paid enough to make it to the next town.

Like, and that I'm, I'm great with doing that.

And so, what I really have to keep in check now is,

I mean, that financial drop is a scary thing.

And when literally I was like holding my cat crying, being like, can I afford this cat?

I have to make sure my decisions, I have to triple check everything.

You know, I mean, I sent my girlfriend

like

talking points from today just to be like, is this genuine?

Is this, you know,

for this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, not like planned talking points, but, you know, like the advertisement or the

teaser for this.

I was like, I just, I need to make sure that I'm not going to.

You want to be genuine.

Yeah, and you don't want to desperately court people

just because it might get you an extra hundred bucks a month.

You know what really bothers me?

We've got to stay on track, but what really bothers me is I'll go someplace.

For instance, I was on with Samantha B.

Okay.

Okay.

And I did this big thing.

It blew up.

Oh, I remember that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Blew up everywhere.

I was a hero suddenly on the left and hated on the right.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

And I was like, wait, no, I haven't changed.

I've changed the way I talk to people because I think if we change the way we talk to people, we can find common ground.

Always.

And

we can live like that.

And it bothered me, and I checked in the interview all the time on myself.

Don't say anything that you're just you're, don't lean too far to appeal.

Speak how you really feel.

Yeah.

And that's really hard, but that's what people are starving for.

I know.

And it's like, I know how to write jokes.

If I wanted to write jokes tearing apart the left right now for a little while, I'd probably be like on the top of the right wing.

Like I would just be, I could sell out comedy clubs again.

And instead, what I'm doing is I'm,

I told my agent, I was like, I don't think I should headline for a while.

I want to go back to opening for people, which means I'm paying for, or I'm driving.

I'm driving on Sunday.

I'm I'm driving five and a half hours to do a gig for 100 bucks.

I haven't done that since I was 22 years old.

Wow.

But I don't have an audience anymore.

And I want to get on stage.

And I want people to listen to my podcast.

And so that's what I'm doing on Sunday.

I land, I go home from here on Friday.

I have one day.

I'm going to watch my friends fight.

And then I'm driving to like Palm Desert to do a bar gig.

Like these were the shows I used to do when I was 22.

I mean, I hate, I hate this because my father said this to me when I was, but he's like, you're going to be humbled and it's going to be so good.

I kind of feel that way.

It's going to be good.

I kind of feel like leaving Los Angeles, which seems like a silly thing to do now that I'm getting back into comedy,

is going to get me on stage for the right reasons again.

Instead of just preaching to the choir or being like, what does this audience want to?

You know, I went to, I had some great shows in LA, like the comedy store where my friends were running stuff.

And, you know, the comedy store is run by like edgy comics, like it's Bill Bird, it's Joe Rogan, it's those guys.

But all of the sort of like woke comedy rooms and stuff, my friend was going to introduce me to a booker of one, and I went in there and it was so interesting to me because club comics a lot of times get made fun of,

you know, for being generic or whatever.

Every time I played comedy clubs, it was an incredibly diverse audience: black, Latino, working class, whatever.

When you would go to these like woke rooms where they're just doing the pandery

left-wing jokes, it was all like white hipsters who could afford to see a comedy show like tuesday at 10 because they don't work the next day and i was like i'm not even talking like when i was on the left i wasn't even talking to the people i wanted to be talking to you know we would go drinking uh with like a bunch of writers for the nation and it was like all white people in Park Slope.

And I was like, oh my God, I'm literally not even getting to regular people.

And then you meet regular people and you realize that there's a lot of gray and a lot of them are like kind of conservative on this, kind of liberal on this.

And you can bring people together by being like, hey, we can both be,

you know, like if we're talking about torture, for example, instead of me assuming like a right-wing person, like you just want to torture people and a right-wing person assuming that I'm just like naive and want to like, you know, sing songs with a terrorist, we can go, well, what produces the information we need?

And let's look at that, right?

Like, I don't care the reasons.

Let's just look at, you know, will this get us intel?

And if not, torturing him proves, if statistics show that that gets us more valid intelligence, we do that.

And if torture does.

And I would think that also you would have to include in there, because,

you know, I'm for prison reform.

I'm not an execution guy.

Yeah, sorry.

And everybody would think that I would be.

And I'm not for torture.

And

the biggest shame on the torture thing is we say we don't do it, but we'll ghost plane you

to Saudi Arabia where they'll torture you for fun.

Yeah, 100%.

So that's like, that's so immoral.

Yeah.

So the moral thing has to go in there too.

But like, I would have never guessed that about you in 2008.

See, I'll bring it back to the question.

I would have never guessed that, you know?

And I'm like, look, I don't care if you want to get rid of the death penalty because you think it's too expensive or because you think it's immoral like if we agree on that let's just agree on that um you know we prison reform uh not torturing people that that isn't just because

you know i'm just like we're better than that and i'm delicate and i don't want to think about like sad things it's also because like well that could lead to extremism that does lead to extremism those guantanamo pictures will lead to extremists um

and then what the left does is the left won't criticize Islam at all because they don't want to be seen as Islamophobic.

And so you have one side that's ignoring part of it, and then you have another side that's ignoring part of it.

They won't set.

Islam is not a problem.

Not at all.

Islamicists are.

Not good.

Not good.

Right.

That's the problem.

And we don't have a

there is no vehicle that is popular yet that will say

that difference.

And if you don't understand that difference, before you join the conversation,

understand that difference.

Right, right.

So speaking of terrorism, my stand-up comedy career,

2008.

So yeah, I think that's the year.

I think these were going well then.

I think that's probably around when I met Robin.

I was starting to get on TV.

And like I said, things kind of flatlined.

Because I also played into, you know, I would go overseas and every interview or every write-up or review was comparing me to Bill Hicks and George Carlin.

And Bill Hicks and George Carlin was like middle fingers.

They would go hard.

So like I kind of played into that and I was like drinking more.

And I was, you know, I mean, the thing with comedy is a lot of times the more screwed up you are, the more revered.

I think that was another reason escaping and going into MMA and jiu-jitsu was so healthy for me because it was the first time where people like read a self-help book or like talked positively about themselves or were sober sober just because they were training not because they were alcoholics or degenerates and i didn't have a lot of those role models in comedy and because i have an addictive personality and a desperate need to be liked you know i mean when i got back into comedy last year

I immediately started drinking again.

I at one point was like, do I have to be depressed again?

Like all this positive work I did on myself was kind of gone because comics are like, you know, the screw-up clowns.

And so then what happened was I kind of flatlined with stand-up and got into radio, it turned it podcasting.

It just got more and more political.

And because I was touring less because I wasn't getting booked, you know, originally our show.

Citizen Radio.

No, before that, it was called.

Oh, interesting.

Drunken Politics.

Right.

Yeah.

Which shows.

So no one knows that.

Right.

Like,

how do I know that?

I guess it's simply, yeah.

But it's called what I was struck by is it's drunken politics and then

citizen radio.

Wow, that's such a microconnect.

Yeah, that right that describes exactly

the trajectory.

Yes.

Where it was like the reason the show was successful in the beginning, I believe, was at the time you either had political shows that were just preachy.

Or you had comedy shows that I was always the guy that a lot of places I would go.

I was I was either too dirty or edgy or funny for the political people and I was too political for the comedy people

so i had this manager at the time who i think we just got rejected for like a cnn pitch he was like why don't you start a podcast i don't know everyone's doing them and we were like all right and just did it for us was like yeah we can just be edgy and offensive and liberal

and

There was a need for that.

There were a lot of people who wanted that.

And what would happen was wherever I did my stand-up tour, our numbers would just shoot up.

So it was all these comedy fans.

So I would go to Australia and suddenly our Australian numbers were like through the roof.

But then when I stopped getting booked,

it was less comedy people finding us and more people finding us because of a Ralph Nader interview or a Noam Chomsky interview or whatever.

And then that audience, because it was less comedy people, they would be like, that offended me.

And me being like a white guy and self-hating and a dropout.

So kind of like a chip, chip, not a chip on my shoulder, but a soft spot for if I feel like I'm being done.

I will always assume I'm wrong, is essentially it.

I would just kind of apologize and be like, oh, I guess I am part of the problem.

And it just started to be more political and less funny.

And that's kind of when the trouble is.

I want to talk to you about this more, just this segment of your life more.

Yeah.

Because I think I can really, really relate to it in many ways.

But you weren't just

Mamby Pamby on this stuff.

I mean, I saw the Joe Rogan,

what is it, the Joe Rogan delusion?

Oh, the bad one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Man, I don't like you.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

And Joe, I thought, was being really reasonable, and I didn't really relate to you at all.

But that's who you were right before the flaming.

Yeah, well, a lot of that is comes from fear and defensiveness.

Certitude.

And so, yeah, and certitude.

So what happened was

I had done Rogan's show a couple of times, and it was great.

Great.

It was where I got like a large base of my fans.

A comedian makes a Daniel Tosh, a very successful comedian.

I automatically don't like them because they're successful.

makes the headline that I get that the left gets is Daniel Tosh tells woman in audience it would be funny if she gets raped.

That's not a funny thing to say.

That's not a joke.

There's no punchline.

There's no rules of three.

That's just telling a lady you hope she gets raped, which sounds horrible.

Now,

you know, I went back on Rogan's recently and we like rehashed everything.

It was great.

What he told me, and I didn't know this, the whole,

the way it went down was Daniel Tosh shows up at this club.

He goes, what do you want me to talk about?

Audience members yell something.

Some douchebag yells, rape.

And he goes, oh, right, because rape's so funny.

What can we talk about?

The shame, the stigmas, the makes like a pretty subversive, great rape joke.

Then woman in the audience goes, rape's never funny, heckles him.

He says that like dumb line, whatever.

But there was more to the story.

So I go on Rogan's show.

I have no idea Joe's mad at me.

I don't know that we have any, I didn't think we had any disagreements.

So I'm like, Even though I'm in this left-wing world, I'm very, I'm not expecting this.

Not only that, but I get stoned before I go on.

This is a little fun fact, not a lot of people know.

I get stoned before I go on, and I was sober for years.

I think I was sober for like three years at this point.

But I'm like, you got to get stoned if you're doing Joe Rogan's show.

Again, because I have no idea there's going to be any confrontation.

That clip of me on Rogan's show should be used as an anti-drug commercial where it should be me being like, this will be fun, smoking weed, and then cuts to 10 minutes later with Joe standing up going, would you rather be raped or murdered?

And then it cuts back to me with my eyes wide and bloodshot.

And then it just says, don't do drugs.

It was so scary.

But in that moment,

it was,

I had, for the first time in my life, I had money.

For the first time in my life, I was in what I thought was a stable relationship, someone who's not going to leave me.

And for the first time in my life, I had hardcore fans.

And when this was happening, in the very beginning, I just thought, like, look, I'm not suddenly like a pro-rape guy or a pro-rape joke guy.

I didn't think that that argument was going to escalate.

So when I was like,

you know,

kind of telling him like the rape statistics or whatever,

you know, we ended this big argument.

I'm stoned.

I'm stuttering.

Suddenly my phone's blowing up because all of his fans are tweeting me like, oh, you cook.

Like, I hope you get raped.

My Twitter literally got hacked and someone just wrote rape all over it.

My career has never been easy.

And it was just a nightmare.

So then the next day on our show

was sort of like this like moment where I had to choose.

I was like, well,

comedy,

I screwed it up.

Like I lost it.

All of my friends, Rogan, all these people I really looked up to, they don't like me anymore because I,

you know, at the time, really did think what I was saying was right.

I wasn't like Daniel Tosh should be censored or he shouldn't do comedy.

Everyone on the left was saying, you know, cancel Daniel Tosh.

But

I was like, look, I like comedy that goes after powerful people.

I don't want someone in the audience who was raped to feel horrible.

I still feel that way.

You know, I wouldn't make a rape joke to make it.

That's the problem with political correctness.

It appeals to all of us.

I don't want to hurt somebody.

No, you just feel decent.

Right.

Yeah.

But then it gets into this,

hey, you need to live over here in this ghetto, and we're going to build a wall because you think this or said this.

And you're like, wait, wait.

Yeah.

Wait.

Can you not use the word ghetto?

Right.

Yeah, but 100%.

Where it's like, again, we're digging for 10-year-old tweets from Kevin Hart instead of trying to like lift up this successful black guy.

And he, like Silverman, he had already apologized for it.

Totally.

Before it was a scandal.

Right.

And then now you have the people on the other side who were like, oh, political correctness.

And you're like, yeah, right.

Like Kevin Hardy.

He's like, no, why can't I say the N-word?

And you're like, well, that's not.

That's you being a racist.

Like, that's not good either, Right.

There are

two sides to all of this.

So that next day, like, I was like, I guess I got to go after Rogan because all of our fans were like, what?

Yes.

And

they were paying the bills.

And again, I didn't feel like I was selling out.

In my head, I believed it.

Well, I'm defending women.

I'm defending women and I'm defending myself.

And I was taken back and I was hurt and I was scared.

And I knew that audience wasn't going to leave.

So, then when you leave the show, who accuses you?

Who gives you a me too?

Yeah.

So, um,

we'll see how much I can like say about this.

Without my goal when I've done, when I've talked about this publicly, has been not to

crash women, right?

Yeah, okay.

Um,

so, but I also feel like I never,

I never really rightfully defended myself either.

I had friends.

I had a friend who spoke at the Women's March, was like a keynote speaker who called me after this happened and was like, you got to say something.

You got to defend yourself.

This is ridiculous.

Like what you were being accused of makes my job harder going after actual creeps, right?

And I didn't.

And I didn't for two reasons.

One, I was suicidal.

I had a girlfriend at the time who I'm not with anymore, but was very supportive.

But she was out of town when it happened.

And she had a bit of a jealousy problem already.

So I was like, oh, she's 100% going to break up with me when she gets home.

So I have no job.

I have no money.

People are conflating consensual one-night stands and literally like tweeting me that I'm a rapist.

And my girlfriend's totally going to break up with me.

She gets home

as I've been trying to figure out how to kill myself unsuccessfully

and

has my back.

Don't know why, but like completely.

I mean, of course I know why, like, because she knows me and knows I'm not that person.

And that's really what the only reason I didn't 100% kill myself.

So she also wanted me to respond.

A bunch of my very famous liberal friends wanted me to respond, men and women.

But I didn't respond because one, I was a coward and I was like, I cannot take any more blowback.

The fact that I'm alive right now and that I survived while like my ex was like going to see her family, I was like, if I respond respond and that triggers one more response piece or one more Jezebel thing, I was like, mentally I'm out.

So I just accepted that I was never going to do comedy again.

I accepted that I was, I mean, dude, I was walking around with a hoodie and sunglasses like I was accused of rape in LA.

Like I didn't want to go outside.

To this day, when I hand over my credit card

and someone says my last name or they recognize me, my first thought is that they're going to think.

And it's never that.

They're always like wonderful and nice, but that still happens to me.

Okay.

So the other reason I didn't say anything was,

and this may sound like old Jamie or like, you know, virtual signaling

feminist, whatever, but I also didn't want to be the anti-MeToo guy because there's a lot of really good stuff, like the Harvey Weinstein thing that happened.

This is the, this, this goes back to what we talked about earlier.

Yes.

There's, I was very anti-Trump.

In some regards, I still am.

I was never pro-Trump.

Right.

But in some regards, I'm not pro-Trump.

I'm pro-some of his policies.

And we have made me too sacred.

No, no, no.

Due process.

Due process.

Because I want Weinstein to go.

And Epstein.

I didn't cry when he was dead.

And Weinstein, I want to go to jail.

If he he gets away with it, that is a black mark on America.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

So, but there's a difference between that and a one-night stand and it was consensual rape or even just a false accusation.

Right.

That's a huge difference.

That should not be part of me, too.

And I still, but I've seen guys who have like...

gotten accused of stuff just suddenly turn into this just woman hating and i was like i can't do that like i had a joke about weinstein where i was like uh i probably can't say this um go ahead Well, I said,

I go, I hope Harvey Weinstein goes to jail.

I hope he gets raped in jail.

I go, I hope the guy who makes Harvey Weinstein suck his makes him do it for like a bit part in the prison play.

Yeah, you shouldn't have said that.

No, I know.

I was very aware of that.

I shouldn't have said it.

And so, yeah, very anti-Weinstein.

My line that I say, and I agree with this, or I still stand by this, is that if you,

because you have a lot of people go, all these false accusations are, you know, it's terrible for men, blah, blah, blah.

It's like, look, guys, calm down.

We still have it better than women, right?

There are still infinitely more women who do not get justice for their sexual assaults or their rapes than there are men who are falsely accused.

With that said, every time you falsely accuse someone or every time you conflate hookups,

not even drunken hookups, very sober, consensual hookups with rape, you're

diminishing the real making it worse for women.

It's like what's his name?

Smollett, right Jussie Smollett yeah yeah yeah

how could anyone support I'm willing if if that was true I'm willing to stand with him oh yeah but for that not to be true you're making it worse for everybody for everybody who actually has had a racist encounter like I can tell you that a lot of the people who reached out to me first were women who were sexually assaulted And they were like, this is insane.

What's happening to you?

And it's

a horrible thing.

Um, but it's like, of course they would think that.

Um, I mean, when Matt Damon publicly said that, hey, should we be treating Al Franken like we treat Harvey Weinstein?

And the next day Matt Damon is trending on Twitter like he suddenly was like accused of rape.

Like

if we can't have the conversation, it's it's bad for everybody.

But I think what's happening, I mean, where I can be sort of empathetic is, or where I try to be empathetic, is

women haven't had justice for a long time with a lot of these issues.

And I think when it finally started to happen, everybody was like,

here we go.

This is like our time.

But there's going to be the pendulum's going to swing the other way.

And then people aren't going to take real stories seriously.

Where they're going to be like, oh, is this like a Z's where it was like a date that like went wrong?

Or like,

you know, and that's, that's a scary thing for women, I think.

It should be scary for all of us.

Yeah.

I'm glad the men are learning that, like, you know, not to be creeps.

Oh, so what happened to me?

I'm so, this seems like I'm just dodging it.

So what happened was,

so actually, and people, a lot of the timeline, a lot of the stuff that was written just wasn't true.

We knew about what was going to happen

about these girls who were upset.

It was one girl who was upset before I left the show.

And

I was like, I was already in LA.

Um, my ex and I were already separated.

We were doing the show via Skype, she was still in New York, and I was like, Why don't I?

I'm like, I'm not having fun doing the show anyway.

I moved to LA.

Why don't I step down

and we'll get a co-host, and I'll give them a cut of like my money, um, and I'll still help.

I can produce it, whatever.

And so, that was the plan.

So, the

the uh so my like farewell episode was like this very tearful um thing where I'm like, I hope I helped people, whatever.

And and and and the girl was like, if he steps down, like, I won't do anything.

And

then the next day, she just went like just super hard.

And essentially what it was, was

I was in a marriage that wasn't working.

Um,

after 10 years or something, I finally caved and I cheated.

I had this like a fair.

I instantly think I'm like in love

because it was, you know, this young girl and she called me hot.

And I was like, I've never been called hot.

And, you know, and she was really cool.

And

she

helped us with the show.

We didn't have like a staff, but she approached us to, she approached me to work for the show.

We start working.

She starts working for the show.

Then she's like, I should come on the road.

I mean, it was like, this is the part I screwed up.

It was every cliche.

I should have had the guts to get out of a relationship that wasn't working or to keep a friendship

when it clearly wasn't a relationship anymore.

It was a partnership.

And that's where I screwed up.

That's the biggest mistake.

That is the one thing I will own up to.

And it's taken a long time because again,

Like my girlfriend's parents had to Google me.

They're the most wonderful people in the world.

They live here in town

You see the word sexual predator.

You see the word abuse.

That makes it sound like I put my hands on a woman.

That makes it sound like I did something without consent.

That is something that still shakes me when I Google me.

If anyone looks at this article, please click other things you see that are positive on my Google page.

It's horrible.

However, and also when a lot of the stuff you're accused of isn't true, you're like, how am I supposed to learn from this?

You know, if I if I drink and crash a car, I learn I need to quit drinking.

But I'm like, when I didn't even do do this, like, how am I supposed to become like a better person?

But the thing I screwed up was that.

So there's this whole affair.

I keep trying to end it.

I feel bad.

This is the first time I'm suicidal because I'm just like, I'm a terrible person.

Everyone thinks I'm in this perfect relationship.

Every progressive is like, all I want to do is be like you guys because we host this podcast and we're the cool progressive tattooed couple.

And, and of course I would screw it up.

Of course, after living out of my car and finally making money and finally having a career, I would find a way to screw it up.

You know, I used to joke that because my old podcast never took sponsors or because we weren't on CNN and because we were independently supported and made so much money just from individual sponsors, I was like, I can never get fired.

I'd have to like really screw up to lose this.

And I did it.

Of course I did it.

So I end this and I go, I would rather go back to a loveless marriage than walk around with this shame.

And I end it.

And man, I mean, this is the most I've said, but like looking back, like, I mean,

the woman I was having the affair with, like, said

while we were together, while I was trying to break it off, like, one day I'm going to write a book about this.

And in my head, I'm like, I'm not famous enough for that.

So, whatever, it's fine.

And so, then years go by.

And I was like, just in this partnership and this friendship marriage.

And we were recording the show, and the show was so popular.

And I was depressed, but I kind of thought I deserved it.

And

then what happens is uh

my ex-wife and I, it wasn't working.

We had a conversation.

We almost broke up and we decide to try

uh like an open relationship, but it's a don't ask, don't tell one, which essentially means that I have to sneak around like I'm cheating.

Um, and it's the same thing all over again.

And uh

and I wasn't allowed to do anything in New York.

So that kind of means means like I can just sleep around on the road, essentially.

And I'm also like, I'm a relationship guy.

I thought I was in love with my first one-night stand.

I don't like sleeping around.

I don't like one-night stands.

I'm like a dumb romantic.

My friend made a joke to me the other day where he's like, man, people think like

your dick got you in trouble, but he's like, it's your stupid heart that got you in trouble.

And I was like, kind of.

And so this article makes it sound like I was just cheating on my wife the whole time.

It doesn't mention that like we were in an open relationship and trying to do this.

So, the second

I go to my ex, I go, we have to say on the show that we're in an open relationship.

Cause I feel like a creep.

I feel like I'm like sneaking around at shows.

You know, uh, it's kind of hard to get a girl when they're like, Are you in a relationship?

And you're like, I'm in a secret open relationship.

Like, that sounds like you're lying and you're a scumbag.

And again, I was just trying to do everything like above board.

Yeah.

And

so we announce it on the show.

And I think it'll be cool because I'm like, the hardest things in my life I've talked about on the show.

And the thing that kept me doing that show, and the thing I get the most excited about when I'm doing this current show is when I can talk about my depression.

You know, when Robin killed himself, we talked a lot about suicide,

talked about addiction.

And so I'm like, you know what?

Open relationships are another kind of new, not really understood thing.

I'm sort of struggling with it.

Maybe this will be something that helps people too.

So we talk about it.

And man,

I spent so long being like hashtag believe all women if a woman's uh if a guy says a woman is like jealous or crazy he's like lying and being sexist and covering it up but man the like the week of that we announced we're in an open relationship even though it was years since I talked to the woman I had an affair with she goes on this like message board or something this some like feminist message board and was essentially like who's been wronged by supposed feminist Jamie Kilstein

And out of the

many women that I've slept with, found like one person that was like, he flirted with me on DM.

I've never sent like, I've never sent like a naked picture.

I'm like the one comedian in the world who has no like scandalous pictures out there.

He was on DM.

And then another woman said,

another woman said that I

She was like, he,

he, he, he threatened one of my male friends.

What's not mentioned is she told me that guy raped her.

And I go, do you need me to do something about it?

And she said, no.

And I said, are you sure?

That was it.

And then there was another woman who it made it sound in this Jezebel article like I slept with her.

We didn't sleep together.

We didn't sleep together because before we hooked up, she said,

She goes, hey, just so you know, like, I don't want to like sleep with someone on the first date.

And so I said, even if you change change your mind, like, well, whatever is happening, I was like, that's the line.

And we're not going to.

And we didn't because I'm not a creep.

And

she, and in this Jezebel article,

so she, she said something like, it was the first time I felt safe with the man or something that implied that when we were together, I was decent.

And then the Jezebel article goes, but weeks later, he called me a road

on his podcast.

And then Jezebel, our media, in parentheses, said Jezebel could not find this quote.

And it's like, right, because I'm not talking about like slaying road on my feminist podcast with my wife.

Like, that's an insane thing.

But even if all that's true, even if flirting while in an open relationship, having an affair,

and even if I did, this girl's a road, blah, blah, blah.

That's me being a jerk.

That's not rape.

That's not abuse.

That's not assault.

That's

a lot of people.

That's That's what a lot,

it's a mistake.

But that's it.

And that

because of who I was and because of

all the virtue signaling and the yelling, that

those accusations, there's nothing else there.

You can read the article.

I have been treated like I was accused of like legitimate assault and everything was gone.

And everything is, I mean, I almost broke when my girlfriend's parents found it because I'm like, it's like six years later or like six or seven years since the affair, three years since the article happened.

And it's like, yeah, my Wikipedia, like it still looks like I was just accused of like abuse.

What's amazing is,

you know, the

human mind,

forgetfulness is a good thing.

You know, time

makes all of our memories a little more soft.

And they just passed a law in the EU about the right to be forgotten.

And things like this: you know, what's on my page, what's on your page, what's on somebody's page, what they did when they were 16 years old.

You know what?

We change, and that we have a right to have those things not be lived every single day for the rest of our lives.

My

dad, who I love to death,

you know, I told him I was doing this show and I was like, I was like, yeah, we really like agree that like a lot of our rhetoric in the past was like toxic and we want to come together and teach people to like, you know, talk to each other like humans.

And my dad's like, that's so great.

That's so great.

And then did like a Google search of you and then like wrote me back like five minutes later.

I was like, I don't think you should do this show because it will take the worst thing you've ever said in context or out.

And same with me.

And, you know, if I want to get rid of, if I want to clean up my Google page, I either need to start getting gigs or it was like

$3,000, $5,000 like a month.

And like, you can hire people to do it.

And it's like, this is crazy.

You just did a podcast on

Epstein.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Tell me what your thoughts are on this.

I mean, my thoughts, look, I've never been a conspiracy guy.

I think that's how a lot of people feel right now.

Where all of my reasonable friends, I never thought 9-11 was an inside job.

I never, when I saw the Epstein news, I was suddenly like, did we even land on the moon?

Like suddenly I became every insane

caricature of a conspiracy guy.

And the what's crazy to me is watching like this monster of a man is somehow bringing the right and left together, where I think the one thing we all agree on, like some people think maybe it was Clinton, some people think maybe it's Trump, but suddenly for the first time in 2019, conservatives and liberals are both like, something.

Yeah, but like homeboy was murdered, right?

You know what I mean?

Like they're definitely.

Did you see the autopsy?

I saw, oh, about the broken neck.

I just saw that.

Okay, so it's he hung himself with paper sheets.

Yeah.

Paper sheets.

Yeah.

Broke his neck in several places.

The breaks are consistent with strangulation.

They can happen when you're hanging yourself, but with a paper sheet.

Not with that impact.

So I just saw a special forces guy post about that, about how the impact is much more aligned with some, with someone who got their neck broken.

Also,

I've been suicidal before, and I couldn't even read on the internet.

I couldn't even look up like a loopknot without being able to figure it out.

And I was like crying because I'm like, I'm not even going to be able to kill myself, right?

Like, let alone.

So like, I got empathy.

Like, it is hard work

to do that.

But it is, it's so scary.

And it's also one of those moments, it's bringing people together because everyone loves a conspiracy theory.

This is literally playing out like a movie.

But it's also one of those moments where I'm seeing conservatives be like,

if Trump or Republicans are involved, then like, I'm distant.

I'm out.

I see Democrats being like, if Clinton's involved, I'm out.

And it's one of those moments where it's not a liberal issue.

It's not a conservative issue, but it's like a powerful person issue, where it's when you see people have so much power that this guy has just been torture.

Like, I don't know if he's a liberal Democrat or conservative, I don't care, but he was just so powerful and so untouchable that he was torturing and literally had like an island where he raped underage women, allegedly, probably, allegedly,

and that he got away with it and that he had powerful friends on both sides of the aisle.

It's a lot of times.

times people can come together and realize that like, oh, it's the same people screwing over all of us.

And it's not, to me, it's not just that he did it and got away with it.

It's that he did it and then

got away with it to where he had special dispensation in the court system.

And then once he's in prison,

somebody from the outside can get in and kill him.

Yeah.

Somebody, I mean,

I mean, when Jeffrey Delmar was shivved, you're like, of course.

I get that.

And if he would have been shivved in general pop, you'd be like, of course, he was a child rapist.

But also, remember, this is different.

Yes.

And especially because Epstein was suicidal before.

So even if he wasn't this huge, I mean, he should have a ton of scrutiny because of who he is

and extra surveillance, but he was also suicidal.

He should have been on Suicide Watch.

It is

so creepy.

This whole story is so creepy.

So did you today?

I read on the radio

the verbatim text with an interviewer from New York magazine

with his Russian MMA fighter bodyguard.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

So this guy, I mean, when you read it, it is total broken language.

Look, I don't know what's saying here.

Okay.

And he's on the record in a 2015 interview that was on the record but never published.

So they have the transcript of what he said then.

Okay.

And then the reporter says, oh, well, now he's dead.

I can publish this.

And I want to see if I get more from him.

So he calls him up and he's like, Don't know what you're talking about.

And he's like, No, you said this, this, and this.

I never said, no, I never said.

And then the last probably two minutes of the interview are like, you're smarter than this.

Don't.

I don't have conversation like this on phone.

Whoa.

Be careful.

What are you saying?

It's like

it couldn't be more like a movie.

They inserted a generic Russian russian mma bodyguard right uh i i will say this i i was a little rose colored glasses when i was saying how this is

dividing tribalism

like tribes um i did the first episode i did on epstein when he got arrested um I had a couple liberals write in.

I had one even like cancel their Patreon membership because I lumped in Clinton with Trump.

And I think, and I would say to your listeners, to any conservatives listening as well, if you are so partisan where you have a,

I think you still have to say alleged, right?

Even though he's dead?

Alleged child rapist.

That if the dude on your team, if you find out that guy was friends with or knew him or knew what was happening and you're still going to be like, it's my guy, you know, like, this isn't like your favorite football team and you found out like the the owner has like gambling debts.

Like we have to get to a point where when something this horrible happens,

if it's a Democrat or if it's a Republican, we can show our values.

It's a human issue.

It's a human issue.

And it doesn't mean, look, just because Bill Clinton was on the plane with him and he has a history of fooling around,

that doesn't mean he even knew about child rape.

No.

You know what I mean?

And there's a different thing.

Very different.

Correct.

Very different thing.

Same thing, you know, people have said, well, Donald Trump had a party with him and cheerleaders at Mar-Lago.

Okay.

Were they high school cheerleaders?

Because if they were high school cheerleaders, that's bad.

It's a mighty big jump.

It's a very right.

So you don't want to condemn anyone on this, but you also...

You also, if it is your guy, if it is your side, if there is corruption, my side should be

truth, justice, and the American way.

Well, and I'm sure we're going to get more into this in the podcast, but that's that's one of the biggest problems now.

Like, we're not mourning the victims.

We're not mourning the women.

Instead, a lot of us are rushing to, how can we tie it to Clinton or how can we tie it to Trump?

And we just get excited and play Twitter like it's a video game when it's like, yo, there were were a lot of real girls who were hurt.

And we just get so frothing at the mouth and our heart racing where it's, can I pin it on the politician I don't like?

Does this fit my anti-Trump agenda?

Does this fit my anti-Clinton agenda?

Instead of taking a moment just to be like, wow, this is terrible.

What happened?

And it's, it's beyond to me, it's not just

what happened.

Yeah.

It's what apparently may be happening right now.

Who the hell has that kind of power?

How far off the scale?

I mean, I've never been a guy who's doubted our FBI.

I mean, current FBI.

You know, Jay Edgar Hoover.

That guy in a legal doubt.

Yeah, that's a different story.

But

in my general lifetime, I've believed generally the cops and the FBI, even though I know there are really bad cops, you know, blah, blah, blah.

I'm not sure now.

i have a friend uh uh patrick byrne he's the ceo of um

overstock okay strong libertarian kind of guy he does he he doesn't like clinton he doesn't like trump okay um

he has no horse in this race

but he found himself in the middle of the trump fbi investigation and the clinton fbi investigation and he's just come out and said uh

yeah,

I have some information that this was all politic.

All of this, both of these were just about politics

and not about the truth.

I know him.

I've pieced together enough of the Trump thing that I know of.

So he is in the center.

I can't figure out the Clinton thing yet.

He's not saying.

I think anytime there were just women involved, people were like, ah, Bill was there.

Yeah, no, but it was, this is

if this is true he says it's the biggest scandal in american history because it's it's about the justice yeah department

i i

is this who we are are we going to allow can we come together enough to go wait i don't care who goes down yeah that has to be cleaned up because if the justice department goes bad we're all screwed this is too much i mean and it was a problem i mean forget let's say clinton and trump didn't even know this guy when you look at how he was treated in the court systems in florida i think where

i mean they acted like he just got a jaywalking so here's one of the like leave jail to like do like work and so the system failed far before this like oh yeah hanging oh yeah it was already They were just like young foreign girls.

Right.

Didn't care about him.

And this is a powerful dude who's well connected and tied to, you know, anyway.

Who gets that kind of a jail sentence?

Okay, nobody.

No.

Nobody.

And the Russian said in the first interview,

police know all about it.

They would call.

I was supposed to bring him back at night, but they would call the night before and say, We're only going to check on you at 8 a.m.

tomorrow morning.

Wow.

And so I would drive him back at 6 a.m.

Wow.

I mean, he was talking about how the cops were coordinating with with him.

That's like the dad who has a kid and like after the divorce is trying to like make up for it and just be like, yeah, you can like drink when I go to bed.

And like, here's when I'm going to sleep.

That's, that's insane.

And again,

just to bring it back to social media, to bring it back to Twitter.

I mean, I'm glad that this is so,

so horrific that people are like not going to stand for it, you know, stand by it and are going to force the mainstream media to cover it, I think.

But I also think a lot of it's for the wrong reasons.

They just want their guy to go down.

You're an alcoholic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

I think, I mean, like,

probably.

Yes.

Here's the thing.

If you're questioning it,

probably pretty good.

Yeah, I should probably stay away from it.

I'm going to go stick with water.

I think starting in around 2003,

You know what?

Alcoholics are going to save the world.

It's going to be alcoholics that save the world.

Because we know where our bottom is.

Right.

You know what I mean?

I hit the bottom and I'm like, okay, I don't.

Right.

I'm going to go there.

Yeah.

And you know, if you're going to build it back up and you're going to not be as miserable as you were, you better build it on truth.

I hit my bottom on this culture a while ago and everything that's happening.

You have.

Yes.

Where's America's bottom?

Because they're scaring me.

It might be death.

I would say like the child rapist being pretend suicided in a jail cell could be like, could be part of it.

Could be part of it.

I love that.

Doesn't this scare you, though?

Rudyard Kipling wrote, he wrote this great poem about the gods of the copybook headings, which is an old-timey way of saying there are certain truths, you know, water will wet, fire will burn.

And this poem is all about how societies forget those things and deny that they're not true because they want the beautiful things the marketplace promises.

And the end is,

there are only four things that are true since social progress began: that the sow returns to her

mire and the dog returns to his vomit.

And it's, I can't remember the joining line, but it is

after.

After we pass through the time when

no man has to pay for his sins

and we deny everything, the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return.

Meaning

you'll go so far that it will be horrific things that wake people back up.

Yeah.

Is this horrific enough?

I mean, I think it is.

I think the problem is, one of the problems is,

again, social media kind of treats it like it's a video game.

So it's really easy to remove yourself

from what's actually happening, right?

So I know we're going to talk about this later, but if I was attacking you or attacking someone on Twitter, I didn't see you as like a person.

I saw you as a Twitter icon and a Twitter bio, right?

And I think a lot of times people do it as a defense mechanism where things can get so bad that they do treat it like a video game or they try to make it about them or they gossip about it or for me, like I make jokes about it.

I think that people are hitting their rock bottoms kind of individually.

I think that

liberals who saw that maybe trying to

cancel people who misspoke or mistweeted may have led to

Donald Trump, maybe part of it.

I think that a lot of Republicans are seeing how far extreme factions on the right have gone and they're kind of walking things back.

And I think that I hope that conversations like this and that people trying to reach out to both sides are kind of the AA meetings,

where we're trying to bring all of those kind of disenfranchised right and left in together.

Because the majority of people, you go online and you're like, we're all going to die.

You walk outside.

And it's just like birds chirping, people walking their dogs.

And you're kind of like, maybe we're okay.

You know, when I have a conversation with a conservative

in real life, it's great.

Three years ago, I would have assumed we would be getting to a fist fight.

I mean, I think I literally challenged Jonah Goldberg, that Jonah?

Yeah, Jonah,

to a fight.

And like, Huffington Post covered it.

It was only the front page of Huffington Post.

It was like me with all my dumb tattoos.

I think you would have won.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I would have won.

But

I tried to be like, he has size on me.

It's fine.

But like, that's where I was.

And, you know, did I really want to fight the guy or did I think it would get clicks?

Like, I thought it would get clicks.

Yeah.

You know, I didn't think he was going to fight.

I think we see each other.

I used to say we see each other's cartoons, but I think

you're right.

We see each other's avatars.

We're not people anymore.

We're just this little icon.

Yep.

And you have your team right next to you, you know, if you're L or if you're R.

And then the other team knows, well, they're the bad guy.

They're the ones to attack.

And maybe I've just been friends with conservatives for a little while.

So I still have like the, I'm in like the rose colored glasses phase.

But right now, I have had a lot more.

I mean, even my podcast, even the Patreon, I've had conservatives write in and be like, here's money.

I don't agree with you, but don't change for me.

And I've had liberals cancel because I'm like, was Clinton hanging out with, you know, child rape island guy?

And maybe that's just because those were the kind of liberals who liked me.

And, you know, I don't, I don't, because I, I really, I, I want you to come back at some point.

I just

want to go through the Bill of Rights with you because I bet you, I bet you you would agree with at least nine out of the ten.

Sure.

So what are we right?

So what are we arguing about?

What is it we're arguing about?

Because

I think

real conservatives, progressive, is a early 20th century idea that was going to take us without the revolution of 1918

to this utopian socialist kind of world.

Woodrow Wilson hated the Declaration of Independence and said the Constitution is irrelevant and doesn't work either.

I don't think the liberals that I know, they don't believe that.

They believe in the Bill of Rights.

Yes.

But neither party is actually standing up for the Bill of Rights.

And because of that, we're violating all kinds of stuff.

Yes.

And that's why it's not working.

I think so much of it has to do with conversation, with one, not talking to people who disagree with us, but two, in the way we talk about it.

Because we are in a sound bite culture with the news, we see it with the Democratic debates, right?

A bunch of people on the left got mad that Bernie Sanders was on Joe Rogan's.

It was phenomenal because it was a candidate having time to

talk about his views without just screaming and yelling in a 30-second soundbite.

I mean, you've done cable news.

I've done cable news.

You do not have a lot of time to talk.

And they, and if you get a question that you don't want to talk about, they tell you how to pivot it, you know, like that's what politicians do.

Like, well, we could talk about my island girl scandal, but what the people want to talk about is taxes.

And, you know, whatever.

They'll go into their BS spiel.

So it's the way we talk about things.

I think that

for me, being liberal, I

want people to have,

let's raise it this way.

When I list the things that I am for, Every conservative watching is probably going to be like who wouldn't be for that?

Right.

So like, I want people to have health care.

I don't want people to die because they get sick.

I want people to have access to food, to education.

I think teachers should make a living wage.

Pretty simple things.

I don't think we should attack countries unless we are in danger.

When those troops come back, however, even if I disagreed with the war, I think they should be taken care of.

I think we need to focus on mental health in this country.

You know, pretty generic, just like decent person things.

What I'm realizing in the conversation that doesn't happen

is that a lot of, I assumed that no conservatives wanted that.

So for example, it's insane.

So if you were against universal health care, my thought is you want people to die because I was told universal health care is the way.

And so I was like, well, I guess you just want kids to die.

After talking to conservatives, you learn it's like, no, they don't trust the government because the government screws a lot of things up.

So they don't want the government being in charge of their healthcare.

Not only that, when the government is the cop

and the robber,

who do you call?

Yeah.

When I have a private institution and they're screwing people over, I know I can call the government and the press.

But if the government, the press,

and the police are all that are running everything, there's no one to run to.

Well, so that's the problem, though, is that a lot of these private corporations haven't been held accountable.

I know.

But that's not capitalism or constitutionalism.

And this is what I'm talking about.

So if we realize that we have the same goals,

then we should be able to call out the left should be able to to call out the government and the right should be able to call these private corporations because both have taken advantage of regular people, right?

The health insurance company, when your only goal is profit for shareholders, you're not going to get the best treatment.

But when you're just leaving it up to the government and it's all covered in bureaucracy, you're also not going to get the best treatment.

So why can't the right and the left come together and be like, both of these people do not have our best interests.

What can we do?

How can we take the best from this and the best from that?

What will bring you back to this?

Will you come back?

And the invite?

Yeah, an invite.

And I'm there.

You're invited to come back.

Yeah.

I really

enjoyed this.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for this.

Thank you.

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