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So I made a bet with a gentleman by the name of Jalen Bronson. He's a basketball player for the we call them the New York Knickerbockers. He's a point guard for our New York nicker Barers. He and I made a bet about two months ago. His bet was, if the New York Giants lose to the Philadelphia Eagles in the regular season, I have to wear a Saquon
Barkley Eagles jersey to Madison Square Garden. I accepted this bet, even though this bet is in inevitability, like the Giants suck, Like the Giants won three games this year, and the Eagles are in the Super Bowl. And that was It's not like that surprised me. It didn't sneak up on me. Like when he asked me. I was thinking in my head, like, but the Giants suck. But I didn't say, like, give
me points. I just went like ooky. And so Saturday night, this Saturday night, I went to the Knicks game in a Saquon Barkley Eagles jersey and an Eagles bucket hat. And I was in my home arena booed relentlessly and by the way, like not just in the arena, on the street, like walking by pretzel guys who were like you chuck. So that was my weekend. So good luck in the super Bowl.
Oh question over the hand back? Yeah, over name.
Yeah, how did you find your interview character? Some guy just like like skid on the floor when you want to sing.
It what you say?
Oh, this never.
Happens by all. So I just walked backstage. I'll speak loudly because I'm not where the might know.
But they said that you're very excited today because today you just found out that you would become an American citizen.
That's alive.
That's all right, that's a crazy it's a crazy day.
That's about that.
You.
That's good that the best, right.
Worst interview ever just wouldn't leave. Yeah, it's a crazy experience to become a US is on the same day you're suposed to interview Bill Murray. So I guess that's a it's been a long day. I had to go for an interview. They asked you like a hundred questions. It's questions which I bet none of you could find answer. And I have to memorize how many colonies there were and there was like a state and who's the president right now? It was very difficult.
Now I'm going to bring out somebody right now who has also been through a lot. He is a correspondent on the show. But he hurt his foot. Yeah, he heard his his fife. He tripped on a curb. So I'm going to bring him out now, very slowly, but I want you to give him encouragement. Michael Consto ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, all right, hold on, you want to see.
Here's my favorite thing about this. His crutches are my height.
I'll tell you what I mean.
How are you feeling?
I really did a number on my ankle?
Do you want to tell the story? So can I? Can I tell? Michael was like an actual, like real kind of world class athlete, to be honest, like it's kind of unusual for comedy, Like he has a functioning body and face.
Uh.
So when he came in, I thought this was Michael was like a world class tennis player, and so I thought it was that. Yeah, and it was. I fell off a curb.
My wife and four year old went skiing. I was in charge of the two year old, so I took her to a water park. No one else got injured except for me. I was the only one not doing anything, and I fell on a curb.
And I'm at that age, John, people.
Were at the age where if I had fallen on a curb, I would no longer be working in show business.
Well and also selfishly, people came over to check on me.
I thought, they're really checking on my child. So you had your child, you had my child with me and she was she was crying, but she was more crying like how did you fall on the curb?
Anyways, it was a cry of disappointment. You you're okay now?
So are you x rayed? A broken not x rayed? I know, super swollen. I also have to host this week.
And I just I get annoyed that you get so much attention on Mondays.
So I wanted to hurt myself.
But you you played collegiate soccer.
I did play collegiate tccer, but I will not to be self effacing. It was in the eighties when talcer, I mean the level we could still use our hands. It was really at that point in American talcer was more like elevated kickball. What made you want to do any entertainment, at least TV.
Well, there's like the bullshit answer of you know, it's important to question societal's rules, And there's the real answer, which is I'm the youngest of four kids. I'm still
trying to get my parents' attention. My mom tells the story that we would sit at this dinner table in Michigan and when the sun would go down this the glass door would become reflective and I could never sit in this one seat because I would just stare at myself the whole time, like and I was like, well, yeah, that's because you guys never looked at me, so I had to stare at myself.
I love comedy. Holy shit, do I love comedy. We get to make people laugh.
Once your guard is down, we can maybe sneak an important message in maybe not. It feels good to laugh for once you feel present moment when you're laughing. There's very few rules in comedy. If I say something brilliant, it's like, holy shit, he's an excellent journalist.
If I say something stupid, it's like relax. I'm a comedian. It's like.
It's amazing that people get mad when comedians say things that are truthful and not as mad when politicians do. This is just such a wonderful I grew up in an Annabur, Michigan, which is a wonderful Midwest town of sensibilities of both sides, very educated, and I just think it just fits perfectly for me, and I'm thankful for that, and also how I ended up here. Holy shit, this is like there's very there's very few places like this of late night.
I told you when we first met, we came in today. There's no show. There's no show.
There's a blinking cursor on a blank computer, and we create the show.
We meaning me, I write the show. No, there's two. There's a lot of people. But it's very fun.
And here's the thing it's also fun is that no matter how today went, tomorrow there's a show too.
So we'll be back.
Because we've already paid for him with our somebody. I'll keep going to the hospitals. You know, it's important to remember who the real heroes are. So my favorite thing out of all that sort of Indy five hundred pit stop trying to keep the car on the road was and I'm not even sure where who said it, but they just go you want some duct tape on that old electricians, old electricians trick. I'm like sure. For those of you who watched the show for many, many years,
you will know. This is the second time that I have going for physical comedy cut myself to the point right in its stitches. When did we do it? The last time? It was a Marguerita blender with me and Oliver and I hit it down and like just drew blood and Oliver couldn't have been happier. I've never seen anything like it. He sat there gleefully watching and that was more of an artery. I was just spurting everywhere. And at one point he yells at me, it's just a flesh wound.
Stop making such a big deal of it.
That's not good. I'm probably gonna need to go to the hospital.
And as for you, Stuart, and you're visibly visibly injured hand. That's a genuine problem. That's a genuine problem. That's that's yep.
We better hard up this because I am bleeding out.
Mother John, let's it toss it in he can, he can swap himself down. You're fine, You're fine.
Thank you all very much. Fire. There's really there's no dignified way to do this really is there? Oh and by the way, the story that I'm going to tell my wife and children when I get home very different than the one that.
There.
I was on fifty falf intention an old woman being hounded by thugs and Bulgarians. I swung my fist.
Was there ever a moment of empathy did stuck out with you at one of those rallies? A moment of empathy that stuck out with me?
Something like?
No, that is a good question. I you know what, there is one of the last route, one of the well not even like this last election cycle. I went to a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and it was terrible weather and we were talking to people in the morning, and as I was talking to people, there's this guy who dresses in a brick suit suit. It's a bespoke suit that looks like Trump's wall, and he has a
handlebar mustache and he dresses like the wall. And he's one of the first people in line, and Trump often brings him up on stage, so he's a mini celebrity there. And he started hounding us at this rally, and he was streaming and he was saying, fuck these guys. Don't talk to these guys. These guys are fake news. And to be fair, he's right, but he sort of trolled us for hours that day. He literally took out a phone and he stuck it into a wall. He's obsessed
with wolves to try to capture something. Our crew was on a smoke break and he wanted to try to capture something to get them in trouble. And it was a long, hellish day of filming, and it was a snowstorm, and so we rushed to the airport and we got snowed into Green Bay, Wisconsin for the night because we usually try to leave, and so we stay in Green Bay.
And the next day we all leave on different flights and I go to the airport alone and I show up at the airport and my flight is delayed three and a half hours, and who is there but bricksuit man. And this is the Green Bay Airport, so nobody else is there. And he looks at me and he says, do you want to talk? And obviously I'm like, no, I don't want to talk. This is a nightmare. And this is before I'm with four security guards and real talk.
Security protocol has changed since the story but I sat down with him, and for the first half hour, I'll sort of feeling each other out. But then once we got past this fear one his fear that like I got a camera crew trying to catch him, and my fear that he's trying to have some sort of gotcha moment me as well, we started talking about shit. I started to learn about him, he started to learn about me. I asked him about things that I thought were bs
about Donald Trump. He was open and vulnerable things and the weaknesses he saw in Donald Trump. Like there wasn't a middle ground that we found, but there was a softening in those relations. And I'd like to tell you that like bricksuit guy was crazy and he's not. He was a smart guy. He was an ideological guy. He was a conservative guy, more libertarian, loved to be a shit poster on the internet, but he wasn't an idiot. We talked for three and a half hours, and as
we walk we literally get on the plane. We walk, We're talking all the way up to get on the plane and I show my tickets to the ticket taker and she goes, oh, you're in an egxer row, And I'm like, oh, and I'm like, she says, do you accept the responsibilities of being the EXI row, and I say, yes, I do. And then I turned to Bricksuitka and I say, I hope this freaks you out, and then you know what happens. He laughs, And to me, that is that is the whole thing. Like he wasn't offended, he didn't
take it personally. He found humor in that moment. And I'm like, I find optimism in that. I don't know how to recreate three and a half hours in a Green Bay airport with a nemesis of yours, but I know that, like there's a softening when you remove the cameras, when you move the fear that this conversation isn't just transaction for a gotcha moment, but an actual conversation about the things that you care about and things you're unsure about.
I think that kind of vulnerability, that kind of uncertainty, is paramount in any kind of situation that you you hope to find any kind of humanity or common ground, And so I think that is there. I don't. I think we live in a media environment that cultivates that situation, but I think we are humans that necessitate it, and so that has not been erased by Donald Trump, but it has been pushed to the sides of the conversation.
And so if we can find a way to allow that conversation to not exist only on the periphery, but somewhere in our own lives, I think we're going to get through that cool because of then, Yeah.
What do you say to your critics are saying that you're being white on the fascist message system?
Oh, I tell my critics, shut up, You're a fascist.
No.
So I do appreciate that because I understand the desire, but like I'm very big on and I know it's annoying, but specificity and nuance, And I think if you cry fascism at every administrative overreach, even the ones that are constitutionally okay, you will find yourself out of fascism bullets when the time really comes to remind people of because you will. I think what the media has done over the last ten years is cry wolf to the point
where they numbed everybody. It was an anesthetic and it got to where what was the thing they litigated throughout this campaign? He's a fascist, He's a terrible person. Democracy is on the ballot. Guess what lost at the bat If you told us democracies on the ballot, well, democracy got its ass kicked by a majority vote. So I'm very cautious about when to know, Like, yeah, hopefully I won't do it the night after Crystal knocked. I'll get it. Like, but it's like when do you put your dog down?
Like it's one of those things, like you're not quite sure. But I do understand how annoying that is.
I was just wondering, you know, how do you maintain a sense of hope and levity when times.
How do you keep laughing? Right? How old are you? I'm nineteen years old and the world's already beat the shit out of here, and that it's always the young dudes that are like, I have a quick question. I'm nineteen years old when hope is gone, when the darkness slowly creeps down. Uh, I'm sixty one, so I'm already an injury time Like so I'm I'm I'm good. I'm actually weirdly always optimistic.
We go.
I think maybe that is the horizon of history. I came up at a time in the sixties where we had all these great leaders and we killed all of them, every single one, and then we went to Vietnam and law and then Watergate, like shit was just unraveling. So I do think it gives you a sense of oh, it's always a mess, like and and what that makes you realize is, oh, so it's just it's just that's
the game. We buckled down. You gotta lunch pail it, and you carry through like you're nineteen, like you'll someday when you're sixty one and people be saying like, how do you maintain optimism and be like, you have no idea what it was like when I was a kid, Like you will be that guy to be able to say, like, you think it bad now and obviously, look it is.
These are tenuous times and maybe even we'll talk a little bit about that on the program, and I I'm a terrible times good thing, no, But because part of the issue is, like you just want someone to talk to you like you're a human, like you're an adult, not like they're like it's a work, not like it's they're they're spinning you or any of those. That's my
biggest complaint with all of this. Nobody expects perfection. Everybody knows that the obstacles and all the things that are going to be thrown in front of us are going to be arduous. That's life, Like, it's life is hard, you know, but you just want someone to not bullshit you when what you know, you see and hear is what you've see. Like, that's all that that you can really do. But how do you maintain So you're nineteen? So are your friends optimistic or pessimistic? Or do they
not talk about it? Or are they just on discord being racist? What is going on?
God?
I mean, I think a lot of people are pessimistic. I mean, how do I maintain optimism?
Yes?
I try to laugh. I watched the Daily Show.
You Yeah, so here's the only thing I would say. I'm glad you do that. But really we write it for eight year olds, so nineteen is a little above our pay grade.
But is it? I do?
I do remember nineteen? Like that age, there is a certain existential anxiety that creeps in because the world does listen.
It feels out of control. You probably know more about it now than we did when I think one of the things that's probably harder for kids now is you are the amount of information that you absorb is probably, but I would imagine hopefully your brains will evolve to you know, because when I was a kid, like TV happened and everybody's like, that will run, don't sit in front of the TV and eat and just watch TV.
And now you'd be so happy if your children would do that, Like you'd just be like, don't send pictures of your dick to people like.
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