David Remnick: In September, right after Jimmy Kimmel was suspended from his late-night talk show, Jon Stewart went on the air with a special episode of The Daily Show.

Jon Stewart: From Comedy Central, it's the all-new government-approved Daily Show with your patriotically obedient host, Jon Stewart.

David Remnick: The joke, of course, was that they'd done a full rebranding, and the high style of MAGA was on display. Flags flying, jet fighters soaring, the studio slathered in gold, and the desk is gigantic. Stewart, in a red tie, looks like he's going to lose his lunch.

Jon Stewart: We have another fun, hilarious, administration-compliant show.

[laughter]

David Remnick: He's so anxious, he's actually twitching.

Jon Stewart: Coming to you tonight from a real shithole, the crime-ridden cesspool that is New York City. It is a tremendous disaster like no one's ever seen before. Someone's National Guard should invade this place. Am I right?

[laughter]

David Remnick: That night was a real reminder of why, after 25 years plus, we still very much need Jon Stewart on the air. Compared to his early years on the show, the era of George W. Bush, this is a much more dangerous time for late-night and for speech and for America. Kimmel nearly lost his job over a remark about MAGA in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder. The head of the FCC threatens broadcasters in a tone that sometimes sounds a lot like a mob boss.

This administration supports free speech only insofar as it agrees with that speech. Stewart is not too far from the hot seat himself. Comedy Central is now controlled by David Ellison, the Trump-friendly CEO of Paramount Skydance. I sat down to hash this all out the other day with Jon Stewart at the New Yorker Festival.

David Remnick: Hello.

David Remnick: Jon Stewart.

Jon Stewart: How are you?

[applause]

David Remnick: I am so pleased to have Jon Stewart here.

Jon Stewart: Me too. I'm delighted.

David Remnick: This is a man of New Jersey. Can I hear it for.

[cheers]

David Remnick: That's it. That's it.

Jon Stewart: That's the appropriate level of respect. Few cheers, couple of boos, most people indifferent. I understand. I've lived there.

David Remnick: I want to begin by reminding you of what happened not long ago when Jimmy Kimmel was tossed off the air. You had to come up with a response to something very serious. I want to know if you-- By the way, you weren't alone. Colbert also did. John Oliver also. Was there any sense of coordination or conversation in how you would do this?

Jon Stewart: What? No. I don't even have their numbers. I don't know. No, we do have a text chain that goes along. I think everybody-- Look, we all understand that it's a luxury. None of us wrote a platform or any of those things. We also understand that it's a meaningful luxury and that there is a certain amount of strength of a society that is able to withstand the smallest of ridicule. When that goes away, when the leadership becomes-- The last time that that happened was I have a friend who did a show very similar to mine in Egypt, and he was exiled.

In America, we assumed that satire was settled law. To find out that it, along with Dobbs, were going to be revisiting what we considered stare decisis. I think it rattled everyone to some extent, but it also presented great opportunity. I don't know that we've had as much fun as we did that Thursday morning, coming up with all this stupid little shit that you see with-- I mean, including like gold pictures and red ties, and it gave us some purpose.

That being said, I want to be clear, the victims of this administration are not the comedians. We are a visible manifestation of certain things, but the victims are the victims, are the people that are struggling to have any voice and are being forcibly removed from streets by hooded agents. Those are the victims of this administration.

David Remnick: You say that this is not the issue, but look, I remember when Putin came to power in 2000, the first thing he did was take a program that was a satirical program about politics called Kukly, Puppets, off the air. People said, "Oh, he took the Puppets off the air." Within a couple of weeks, the news was off the air. Isn't it possible that this assault, however herky-jerky and back and forth it might be, is tantamount to something else?

Jon Stewart: Sure. When 7 million people show up in America on a weekend for anything, I mean, honestly, anything, you know something's going on, and this is-- They are attempting to graft, I think, an alien culture onto this country. We're not Russia and their history of autocracy or dictatorship or those things. That doesn't mean we're not going to be in some soft autocracy where news is controlled, but we have a lot of different avenues, and suppression creates opportunity and a populace that is thirsty for inspiration and leadership and morality and integrity and lack of corruption, that's fertile ground for that opportunity. Like, as bad as this is, and it's fucking bad. I knew it would be bad. I did not it was-- Think it was going to be flesh-eating dick cancer bad. Like, I--

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: That's an--

David Remnick: Yes, you know how bad it is? David Ellison-

Jon Stewart: That's my new boss.

Jon Stewart: -just bought Paramount.

Jon Stewart: Yes.

David Remnick: Not only does he, forgive me, own your enterprise, he could also affect it. He just hired Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Tell me what this means.

Jon Stewart: I wish you had mentioned that before I went into the dick cancer bad. This is not happenstance. This began with Richard Viguerie doing mail-in to try and get people to be conservative. This began with people buying AM radio stations and converting them to conservative talk radio. This began with Roger Ailes and the Nixon White House going, "We will never allow this to happen to a Republican politician again."

All of the institutions, by which I mean education and media and news and academia and all those things that we relied on as a solid tent post by which to build a decent society on, they were like, "Yes, no." They built a parallel universe of think tanks and education, and media, so that they could, at some point, just flip a switch and move us over onto that track. Because what do these institutions have? They are the reference point for our decisions. What do you do? You quote, "Well, there's a study done by--" You use data and scientific method and other things to try and make as informed a decision as you can.

If you're a political movement that believes that investing those institutions with authority is against your movement, the best thing you can do is build organizations that either tear down the credibility of those institutions or you build your own.

David Remnick: With respect, Jon, this is different. This is markedly different. It's one thing to have the Brookings Institution that was liberal, and then you have the rise of the American Enterprise Institute. It's one thing to have a liberal newspaper and then a conservative news. Fine, fine. In fact, all the better in some ways. What's going on now is different. With respect, you're going to face it potentially with Paramount and The Daily Show.

Jon Stewart: Sure.

David Remnick: What do you do?

Jon Stewart: You don't compromise on what you do. You do it till they tell you to leave. That's all you can do.

[applause]

Jon Stewart: That's all you can do.

David Remnick: I think the line that you gave before was, "I'm not giving in. I'm not going anywhere."

Jon Stewart: I think I'm neurotic, still. I'm not--

David Remnick: Your contract comes up in December. You're going to sign another one?

Jon Stewart: We're working on staying. Look, the other thing to remember is it's not as clear-cut as all that, the business--

David Remnick: In other words, if it's up to you, you're staying.

Jon Stewart: Oh, yes, sure.

David Remnick: Okay.

Jon Stewart: Yes, yes, yes, yes. It's up to me, I'm staying.

David Remnick: How do you think CBS News will be affected? Does evening news even matter at this point-

Jon Stewart: I don't know.

David Remnick: -in the media sphere that we live in?

Jon Stewart: We are projecting things that we do not know. The ecosystem has changed, the monetization of it has changed. I will tell you this. It is a different ethos. One thing we have to remember, and this is the hardest truth for us to get at, is that the institutions that we spoke about earlier have problems. They do. If we don't address those problems in a forthright way, then those institutions become vulnerable to this kind of assault.

Credibility is not something that was just taken. It was also lost. That is a part of this equation that has to be considered, and the Democrats have to consider that as well. There's a reason Donald Trump came to power, and that is that in the general populist mind, government no longer serves the interests of the people it purports to represent. That's a broad-based, deep feeling. That helps when someone comes along and goes, "The system is rigged." People go, "Yes, it is rigged." Now, he's a good diagnostician. I don't particularly care for his remedy.

David Remnick: Tell me why you think Trump won.

Jon Stewart: Because of that. Because of the dissatisfaction of an analog system in a digital world. The distance between how you feel about the world and the world has never been larger. We are victims of the circadian rhythms of social media. Social media is incentivized to what? Not connect us. I've seen the Facebook commercial. Yes, it's true, if you do like a certain cat, there will be other people that like that certain cat, and you will connect with each other. The purpose of social media is to keep you on its platform. That's it. They want you on that platform. They want you on there as long as they could possibly have you. The way that they have rigged our brains to figure it out is that outrage and anger and hate and hostility are much stronger drivers of engagement than anything else.

Now, on the flip side of that, we have a political system designed in the 18-- what?

David Remnick: 1789. [crosstalk] constitution.

Jon Stewart: It is designed as an analog-- What is the Senate? It's the cooling saucer of democracy. What's Twitter? The thing that makes you want to rip people's eyes out. You put those together, and it's not a good mix. He was able to harness the anger and catastrophizing of that as a way of taking over that other thing that we have.

David Remnick: You didn't find Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a good remedy for that in the election? That was called the setup line.

Jon Stewart: I thought they were great.

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: Look what's going on with Mamdani. You finally got a guy in New York City who is getting people to vote in the affirmative for his positions, who is inspiring people, and giving a certain amount of leadership. What does the general status quo of the Democratic Party do with that? "Guy is a communist." They go along with the caricature of this man. Look, we're in a bad situation. It's not just Trump. It's the passivity of the Democratic Party to stick with a status quo that most people felt was not working.

David Remnick: In January, about a week after Trump was inaugurated, you did a monologue on The Daily Show. God knows, it was critical of Trump. You didn't go after him so much as you went after a lot of his critics, or at least the more hypocritical and pearl-clutching ones. You seem to be saying that instead of crying wolf, calling him a fascist for every executive order was to his benefit.

Jon Stewart: I agree.

David Remnick: Do you think you underestimated how bad this would get?

Jon Stewart: No, I stand by it, because in that moment, that's how I felt. What I'm saying is the seeds of this destruction were not sown this year. They were sown by Citizens United. They were sown by "corporations are people". They were sown by a Democratic Party that thinks it's okay for their Senate to be an assisted living facility. Respectfully, I mean, I could kick the shit out of the Senate.

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: I don't mean this cynically. I mean this idealistically. I mean this as like, "We better get real about this very fast." It's coming from a perspective of having worked with our government to try and get certain things done. I was stunned by certain Republicans that would tweet out, "Never forget the heroes of 9/11 versus how they would vote for their medical care."

I was also stunned by the Democratic Party leadership's passivity and being told over and over again, "No, no, no, you have to go through regular order. When we have this congressional hearing, I don't want you to be confrontational. You have to be nice. Then what we hopefully will get to do is put the first responders and the victims of 9/11 will be able to put their healthcare into the transportation bill. Unless Mitch McConnell thinks he wants to trade that for the import-export tax that he really wants on Petroleum." I would go, "That's crazy." This is coming from a place of, "I've lived with this."

David Remnick: We're in the middle of a government shutdown.

Jon Stewart: Right.

David Remnick: Which is a different attitude this time than it was the last time.

Jon Stewart: That's right.

David Remnick: Does that make Chuck Schumer any braver now than he was before?

Jon Stewart: No. You can tell-- What Chuck Schumer's been told is, "You're losing, and people like your glasses to be higher up on your nose." What I'm telling you is, here's what they're doing with us now. The strategy is authenticity. Suddenly, people in Congress are cursing. Oh, and it seems so natural when Chuck Schumer curses. "This is a shitty bill." I'm over it all, man. I'm over it all. I understand why people wanted to blow it up and why it's so vulnerable to being taken over by a charismatic person that says, "I understand how this is done."

Even the shutdown, which I'm glad that they stood up for something. I still think the ACA is playing the Republican in the corporate game. It's basically just subsidies to insurance companies when what we need is health care. The ACA doesn't give you health care. It gives you subsidies to get a coupon that maybe you can take to someone, that then they'll give it to you, and then there'll still be a deductible. 40% of people in this country go without things like food because of their medical debt.

When the Democrats announce that they got the pharmaceutical companies to, out of the grace of their heart, allow us to negotiate the price on 10 different medicines. Only 10. That's a victory when we're subsidizing these motherfuckers by billions of dollars a year. No, no more. I'm done with it.

[applause]

David Remnick: I'm speaking with Jon Stewart, the comedian, actor, and host of The Daily Show. We'll continue in just a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

[music]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with Jon Stewart. Stewart was hardly the first political comedian on TV. On The Daily Show, he pioneered something new. He delivered some of the sharpest political analysis on television, interviewing serious newsmakers in a format that was also consistently hilarious. Stewart helped launch the careers of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and many others. In bringing journalism, or something like journalism to late-night entertainment, Stewart upped the game for the entire medium. I'll continue my conversation now with Jon Stewart.

We grew up in New Jersey, but I grew up with another comedian, Bill Maher. I used to play basketball in a driveway with him. He was a local celebrity.

Jon Stewart: There's nothing better than playing basketball with short shoes, I have to tell you.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Yes, you can post up on him.

Jon Stewart: We used to have a game at Garry Shandling's house. Literally. We were like, "I think Al Franken might be Pete Maravich."

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: Kevin Nealon would come by, and everybody would just be like, "What? No, you can't do that."

David Remnick: Yes. Bill Maher is the comic political voice of the notion that the biggest problem the Democrats have is wokeism. How do you respond to Bill's approach to the world?

Jon Stewart: I don't know if that's just Bill's.

David Remnick: It's shorthand for it. Wokeism is not something that enters your analysis of things for the most part.

Jon Stewart: No. There is a real pressure that people feel on issues that they don't quite understand, where they don't want to offend. It can have a censorious effect on discourse. I've seen it. The left certainly has their-- Like when someone says to me "pregnant people," I do go, well, it's-- I understand, but come on.

David Remnick: It doesn't make you crazy.

Jon Stewart: Yes, it'd be better to be like, "Pregnant women and Dave." You know what I mean? You don't have to do the whole thing. Yes, that gets a little out of control. The idea that that has the same effect on the world as a rich country that isn't able to give its people health care. That's where I take the exception.

David Remnick: One thing I would give them is the most politically effective-- So-called the most politically effective advertisement for the Trump campaign was the one about trans people. "She is for them, he is for you." That was extremely effective--

Jon Stewart: The answer to that commercial is simple as well. Yes, Donald Trump is for you if you are a convicted sex trafficker who should get transferred to a less bad prison because you're not going to name him. Donald Trump is for you if you have a jet that you will give him, and then-- Donald Trump is for you if you give billions to his campaign, and so he will allow you to bypass tariffs and not small businesses. My problem is they don't know how to fight that effectively. They do not realize the game they are playing. I don't think in my mind.

David Remnick: How do you mean?

Jon Stewart: There is a relentlessness of bad faith to the social media algorithm. I'm trying to think like-- Okay, here's a different analogy. If you go to a restaurant and the food is delicious, it's because they probably add a little extra butter or they throw a little salt in there, a little umami in there. Maybe they throw a little sugar in the marinara. You know what I mean? You eat it and you're like, "Wow, that's decadent and beautiful, and I would like to come back here." It's still within the realm of what we understand as the earthly tricks we play on each other. There are guys in lab coats who work for Kraft, who are figuring out how to take the gland of a beaver's anus and turn it into strawberry flavoring.

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: Then there's a bunch of other dudes that are checking the consistency of it, and they're designing it to get past the prehistoric reptilian wiring of your brain so that you no longer understand that two bags of chips and a quart of ice cream might not be good for you in the long run. Social media is that. What we do is we communicate, and we sometimes use hyperbole, and we sometimes use puns and satire, and toadies, and parody to convey something, and it's cheating a little bit.

Social media is ultra-processed speech in the same way that Doritos are food. It's designed to bypass the parts of your brain that keep you off it, that keep you from diving into those holes, from radicalizing yourself. That's what you're up against. They are designing these things in the lab to bypass our ability to collaborate and cooperate.

David Remnick: When did these guys get so bad? You remember years and years--

David Remnick: They've always sucked.

Jon Stewart: Ah, no, but wait a minute. We believed, or half believed that these guys, because they wore jeans and sneakers and they were cool and said things like, "Don't be evil," and so on and so forth--

Jon Stewart: Isn't that something someone evil would say? It's like Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is always going on about Satan. "Satan, it could be amongst us. It could be Greta Thunberg," and you'd be like-- or it could be a guy who runs a company called Palantir.

David Remnick: Wait a minute, you're forgetting the early part of these guys' career. Mark Zuckerberg is going to make it possible. Sergey Brin was going to make it possible. If you're sitting in the desert somewhere where you didn't have access to a library. Now you could reach Shakespeare on your phone. This was amazing. Everybody was going to be connected. This would democratize the press.

Jon Stewart: Yes.

David Remnick: They believed it. A large part of us believed it.

Jon Stewart: No. They all want to be the next guy. They all just want to be the next Musk. They want to be the next person. Look, we suffer from the same thing in that we're people. Everything that we have that's great can be weaponized against us. Like nuclear power is the-- As Oppenheimer once famously said, "What could go wrong?"

David Remnick: Jon, you've been on Rogan a couple of times.

Jon Stewart: Yes.

David Remnick: What did you think of that experience being on Joe Rogan?

Jon Stewart: I enjoyed being on Rogan. I think he's an interesting interviewer. There are right-wing weaponized commentators whose sole purpose is to manipulate things to the benefit of the Bannon Project or the Project 2025. Rogan's not that guy.

David Remnick: What is that guy? How would you describe him?

Jon Stewart: That guy is a curious comic who fell into this thing that got fucking enormous. Has opinions all over the political spectrum, but has tendencies that people on the left does not fit the aesthetic. He's a hunter--

David Remnick: In fairness, he's had people on who are Nazi curious. That's not good.

Jon Stewart: I mean, I've interviewed Kissinger. He was carpet bomb curious. I don't know what to say. It's very easy to castigate those where we're, like, "He had an opinion a few years back that's corrosive."

David Remnick: The difference is when he was carpet bomb curious, you didn't say, "Oh, yes, that's awesome." What happens with Rogan sometimes is he'll hear somebody that's on the dangerous end of the spectrum, and he'll just soak it in.

Jon Stewart: I think this is a great point. It's whosever job who thinks that that information is dangerous to fight to get their point of view out there to counter what they think is misinformation. You can't just deputize people to say he should have known better and he should have prosecuted that point.

David Remnick: The reality is, Jon, is that it might be my job or the New York Times' job, or even your job, but I don't have the audience that Joe Rogan does.

Jon Stewart: Then get it.

David Remnick: Yes, go get it.

Jon Stewart: Then go on that show. Then do those things. It's not acceptable to just say, "Well, I don't like what he does." Then do it better, beat them at their own game. It's not enough to just complain that that guy got a platform, and "Don't platform that guy." There's no one in this world right now that isn't platformed. My biggest frustration, honestly, with a lot of scientists is they all go, "RFK. He's so fucked up. That's terrible information." Oh, okay. What's the information? Nothing. Where are they? Get out there. Fight.

David Remnick: I got in trouble. I was giving an interview to a German magazine. I said I would interview Hitler, and I thought that was non-controversial. Is there anybody that you wouldn't interview?

Jon Stewart: It depends on what the expectation is also for the interview. Remember, a lot of what we're doing right now is we're falling into that trap that a good interview will solve the problem. I've been on the side of the good interview. I've been on the side-- I interviewed Donald Rumsfeld. I lost more sleep over that interview than he did over the entire fucking war. You know what he did afterwards? He wrote me a note saying, "That was fun." Do you have any idea how that still hurts? He wrote, "That was fun." I bet if we had known each other when we were younger, we would have been friends.

David Remnick: Ooh, ooh. Jon, what did you think of the business of comedians going to Riyadh and being paid a lot of money? What did you think of that?

Jon Stewart: I don't touch other people's money. It's hard, man. I want to fix my house. I want to operate with integrity, but I don't want to gatekeep. I don't go to the tree of hilarity and get visited by the fathers. I think a lot of comics who came out and really shit on those guys, I know a couple of them, and I know them actually to be like garbage humans. I would have preferred if they would have just come out, though, and said, "It's money," and not, like, "It's a way to start a conversation." Would you have started the conversation for $2,500? Then that's the difference.

Look, I worked for Apple. There's a lot of people who believe that Apple is exploitative in a way that's horrific. We all have our lines that we are willing to cross. We get into a problem when we're unforgiving in any way. We offer no grace. That doesn't mean that I don't have lines that I draw, that if people cross it, I won't do. I do try to not be so rigid in the way that I think society has become. If it goes back to that point--

David Remnick: Do you know where the lines are ahead of time?

Jon Stewart: No.

David Remnick: Because, as we started the conversation, you're facing a complicated situation at Paramount.

Jon Stewart: Sure.

David Remnick: You know what you won't do. If you see something else happening in the company, do you know where those lines are? Like with the news?

Jon Stewart: Yes. They've already done things that I'm upset about. Then if I had integrity, maybe I would stand up and go, "I'm out." Maybe the integrity thing to do would be to stay in it and keep fighting in the foxhole. I love a good argument. I love differing points of view in all facets of things. I also love grace. I've got people in my family that are to the right of Attila the Hun. When people tell me, like, "How can you platform that person on your show?" I go, "I platform my uncle every fucking Thanksgiving."

By the way, I love him. He's a three-dimensional human being who has qualities that I really admire, things about him. We've lost that. We've lost the ability to love people because we litmus test at every point in every single moment.

David Remnick: Jon, you've always struck me as an idealist, an American idealist. I remember around 9/11, you said the view from your place was the towers. Then you said, "Now I have a view of the Statue of Liberty."

Jon Stewart: It was a terrific terrorist.

David Remnick: That was a really idealistic thing to say about America in many ways, small and large.

Jon Stewart: I believe it.

David Remnick: You still do?

Jon Stewart: Absolutely. Absolutely. How can you not believe it? Because think of the amazing people that you see every day. Think of the quiet activism of living pleasantly. There's more good than bad. I always will believe that. I always will believe that the odds are in our favor. Always.

David Remnick: I'm talking with Jon Stewart, a conversation that was recorded at the New Yorker Festival. We'll continue in just a moment.

[music]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm David Remnick. Jon Stewart has always insisted that he's a comedian, a performer, not a journalist. A generation of viewers came up saying that they got their news from Jon Stewart. He was also funny enough that, at least early on, he was able to appeal to viewers who didn't always agree with his politics, which skewed distinctly liberal. For people who do agree with those politics, Stewart became a voice of authority, of reassurance in dark times. Back in 2016, some fans really implored him to challenge Hillary Clinton and run for president. Much more recently, the radio host Charlamagne tha God, who's become something of a Democratic power broker himself, suggested quite seriously that Jon Stewart get in the game for 2028.

Charlamagne tha God: He's a celebrity who actually knows what they're talking about. We've seen him get legislation and stuff passed before. We know where his heart is. He'd be somebody I'd like to see really get in the race and disrupt things in 2028.

David Remnick: I'll continue my conversation now with Jon Stewart.

You mentioned idealists in the Democratic Party and figures who are just not up to the task. You mentioned Mamdani, for one. Who do you see on a national level who has promise as a national leader that you could get behind?

David Remnick: You have 20 minutes.

[applause]

Audience Member: You.

David Remnick: Somebody just said, "You."

[applause]

Jon Stewart: Have we really gotten to that point? I do understand-- You know what is interesting, that's also a function of frustration.

David Remnick: A cry of desperation. You know what it is? Because I'm other. I'm none of the above. Years ago, I won a poll. It was most trusted newsman in America. The poll was like-- it might have been Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Diane Sawyer, and me. I'm, "None of the above." A dildo rolled in glitter could have won that poll. I have never, in the audiences that come into the show, seen them so thirsty for leadership and so the "none of the above." The Democratic Party is ripe for what happened to the Republican Party in 2016. Hopefully, it will be somebody who uses that power for good and not for self-aggrandizement and not for their own gratification.

David Remnick: I think Elaine once said to Jerry on this show that, "As someone on the fringe of the humor community, do you think Donald Trump is funny?"

Jon Stewart: Funny, ha-ha?

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: I think he has a performer's cadence, and it would be funnier if he didn't also control the army.

David Remnick: What's the gift? Because it's not nothing. There is something that works for him with an audience. What has he got?

Jon Stewart: He knows how to channel the frustrations of an audience. He knows how to read a room. He knows what the room is feeling, and he can articulate it back to them, and they understand it. There is an undeniable connection between him and his audience to the point where the normal rules of engagement don't apply. The Democrats, unfortunately, continue to be Wile Coyote in the ACME. They always think they got him. "Oh, if he's convicted of 34 felony counts, there's no way he'll win." "Oh, we got him now. He just got indicted on--" Every time Donald Trump just walks in and goes, "Meep, meep. Pew."

[laughter]

David Remnick: Then what catches the roadrunner? What puts an end to this?

Jon Stewart: What catches the roadrunner is to offer something other than not him. Is to offer something that's not just the negative. It's not just negative space. We are stuck in a pattern where the Democratic Party has bought into an agenda over 40 years that also bought into supply-side economics and the general neoliberal vision of how things go, and that the only way workers are ever going to get anything is you just got to unionize better. Just poor people need better lobbyists. They need a coherent vision. For whatever you think of Donald Trump, he presents to his audience a coherent vision. It's not one that I want to live in. It's not one that I think makes America great. It's not one that I think is even endemic to how America ever really was.

David Remnick: This is a question from the audience. "Jon and David, you've both been sounding the alarm about the state of American democracy since 2016. After nearly a decade of saying the sky is falling, do you think that people are hearing you at all?"

Jon Stewart: Why even write that as a question? Why not just, "Dear David and Jon, why don't you just die?"

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: "Why do you even get up in the morning?"

David Remnick: The thought occurs to me.

Jon Stewart: All day long with the democracy this and that.

David Remnick: You got an answer?

Jon Stewart: It doesn't matter. I control what I can control. It doesn't matter if people-- People can say, like, "Do you think what you do is effective?" I have no fucking idea. I just do what I have to do. If you don't develop a barometer for morality or integrity for yourself and let that inform how you live, then you're at the whim of what you think other people view you as. I have no control over that. I have no control over how people view me.

David Remnick: Do you think by going into other forms, podcasts in particular, you've reached different audiences? Do you think that you're reaching them in a different way?

Jon Stewart: I don't know. That's the thing about communication is I don't know. The only people I talk to live in my house. Do you get what I mean? People say, like, "What's it like to be on TV?" You're like, "It's like not being on TV." It's, you can see me, but I can't see you. I don't know how I affect you. You just don't know. I wish I knew, believe me. Maybe I don't. It actually could be hurting. I don't know.

David Remnick: What's it been like for you to think and talk about what's been happening in Gaza for the last two years? How have you been affected by it?

Jon Stewart: Super fun at Passover. It's a really fraught and complicated emotional issue, obviously, for a lot of Jews. Again, I try to speak as best I can, in my opinion, as honestly as I can. If that means upsetting certain people-- I'm always open to the conversation. I have very strong opinions about the horror of what I see over there on all sides. I'm on Team Human. I don't think that--

[applause]

Jon Stewart: Look, I grew up man as David. We were all David. Not remnant, obviously, but biblical. I think feeling like David became Goliath was a hard thing to counsel for myself. A lot of people disagree. Listen, you bring this up and immediately, "You’re ignoring-- in 1954, they really--" I get it. Right now, there’s death and sadness and starvation and horror. I don’t think it’s human. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how we can do that. It’s a failure of the world, and it’s a failure of humanity, and it’s the saddest thing that I can think--

By the way, the same shit's going on in Sudan and in the Congo and in all kinds of other places that don't have access to the kinds of information and light that we see. It's articulated with us, and it's going on in Ukraine. Like, this is it. This is all we got. If we can't figure this out, it's mindboggling.

David Remnick: This being life on Earth?

Jon Stewart: Right. You hate to get-- When you get to be older, you do start thinking like, "I won't be here--"

David Remnick: Your kids are in their late teens, 20s.

Jon Stewart: That I know about.

David Remnick: Yes.

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: Oh, no, you're right. That is right. Actually, those are the-- [crosstalk]

David Remnick: Do they watch you on TV?

Jon Stewart: No, they don't even watch me in the house.

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: Do you have any idea how hard it is to get them to look at you? It's very hard.

David Remnick: I assume if they were in this room, and I know my kids in this room would say half of this conversation is irrelevant because they're not watching cable TV.

Jon Stewart: Sure.

David Remnick: They're not necessarily reading magazine with 10,000-word profiles and gag cartoons.

Jon Stewart: You and I operate a Blockbuster kiosk inside a Tower Records. There's no question.

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: We're the guys out there who are like, "Extra, extra." Yes. No, they live in a completely different universe, and it gives me hope. I don't know how you feel about this, but, in the way that social media is like poison to me, I'm hoping that the human spirit and the ability to adapt and inure yourself to the new technology, that it won't affect them in the same way that I think it affects me, that it won't be as corrosive. I don't know that that's what it'll be, but I hope that.

David Remnick: Final question.

Jon Stewart: Sagittarius.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Your prescient. The Mets. What accounts for your love for the Mets?

Jon Stewart: I'm a loser, and losers love to lose. My family is from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and so my mother's side of the family were Yankee fans. My father's side of the family were--

David Remnick: That was my wife.

[laughter]

Jon Stewart: What happened was when the Dodgers left to go to LA, you weren't allowed to flip your allegiance. You just had to wait. When the Mets came, that was the-- It was really a birthright, more than it was.

David Remnick: As a Yankee fan, I wish you all the luck in the world.

Jon Stewart: D'oh.

David Remnick: Jon Stewart, thank you.

[applause]

Jon Stewart: Thank you. Thank you for this. That was lovely. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

David Remnick: Jon Stewart. We spoke last week at the New Yorker Festival, and I want to send a special thank you to our colleagues who put the festival together, including Katherine Stirling, Amanda Miller, Julia Rothschild, Nico Brown, Michael Etherington, and so many more. Thank you to all my colleagues.

[music]

 

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