Trump Changed How Politicians Speak w/Stephen Dubner | Joe Rogan

As a person who performs it and also as an audience member, when I'm an audience member and someone's killing, I'm letting them think for me, right? I'm not even thinking. I'm just like letting them take me down a trip. Say like David Tell. David Tell was at the improv the other night. We worked together and he was fucking amazing. I mean like one of the best sets I've seen from him and he's always been amazing but God, he was on fire. And we were all, it was me, my friend Owen Smith and Tony Hinchcliffe, we were sitting in the back room and we were watching Dave and we were in a trance. We were just laughing. We were letting him think for us. You know what I'm saying? Like he's doing all the thinking. We're just on a little ride that Dave's taking us on this ride. And as an audience member I recognize that. There's a mass hypnosis. There's a thing that happens where we all get into this mindset and if someone has like really well crafted material like David Tell and they take you on that, you let them. You're like we, Mitch Hedberg is going to take us on a ride. You know what I mean? You think the same thing happens when a politician is speaking? That's a good question. For sure Trump has a lot of elements of stand up comedy in his routines for sure, 100%. If you watch his most recent speech where he's making fun of Joe Biden saying 150 million people were killed with guns and he's like, and I looked at the first lady. I mean he's literally doing stand up. Who does a very good job by the way? I looked at the first lady and I'm like where are all these bodies? Where are all these 150 million people? What's half the population? Like they just let him say, nobody talks to him. He's like, hello Idaho. And you're like, you're in Iowa. Oh, like he's doing stand up. So someone took it and they made a video saying Donald Trump at the Apollo and so they put him doing this speech with audience reaction from people watching stand up comedy and laughing and a laugh track over it. And it seems real. It seems like he's a comic. What about Bernie? Bernie for sure is a powerful speaker, but I don't think he's that funny. I mean he'll say a funny thing every now and then. Right, but are they the same? He's more serious. When you talk about like going along for the ride, like they're doing the thinking for you is such an interesting idea. Bernie is a trustworthy person. People trust him. They see him up there. He's not polished, right? The thing about Bernie, it's like when he's saying things, there's ums and there's us and there's, you know, and his hair's all fucked up. Yeah, but Trump's not polished either. It's a different kind of polish. What do you mean? Trump is a polished performer. Yeah. Like he, he's like a comic doing scat, you know, it's that, that, that, you know, it's like, yeah, I'm telling you, that's exactly what it is. It's an amazing, it's an amazing thing. He's like filling in the blanks, loading up his weapon for the next line that he's going to throw and call crazy Hillary, lock her up. It's standup. It's basically like he's doing standup. That's why Biden is so fucked. He's so fucked because he can't talk, right? He has a really hard time talking. He keeps screwing things up and he, and it's a real bad horse to bet on because he's an older guy. You're still a Bernie guy at this moment? I love Bernie. Right. I love the guy. I love what he represents. Yeah. Like, I don't know if he's going to be able to get anything implemented, but I love what he represents is a man who wants to do good for people that don't have much. That's a sentiment. There's a, there's a quality to that that I think helps us as a community, as a community of the United States. If we have this agreement, hey, let's see what we can do. Let's see what we can do to balance things out and to, for the downtrodden, for the people that are hurting, concentrate on them. And he's made that a huge priority of his life and always has. And to deny that it's like, look what he's trying to do. I don't know if he can get any of this shit passed. I don't think anybody knows until he gets in there. But the idea is we're saying we want better for people who don't have much. That's what he stands for. And you can call it democratic socialism, but it's an idea. The idea is like helping people, just helping people, helping people you don't even know. What's in the world a little bit better place for the working person? What's then the corollary? What's the Trump idea and why did it succeed? A bunch of pussies out there trying to ban free speech. A bunch of pussies out there. Come on. America's number one. Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. There's also, he doesn't talk like a politician. You know, he talks about China. You go to them, listen motherfuckers, we're going to charge you 25%. Everybody's like, yeah. More stand up. It's more stand up, right? It's way more entertaining. He's the most entertaining. Forget about value judgment of who he is as a person. Without a doubt, the most entertaining president that's ever lived and not even close. There's not even a close second. He buries all of them and he drags them into his fight. Even Hillary is now talking differently about other people. She said about Bernie. Nobody liked him. She would have never said that. Before Donald Trump, she would have never uttered those words. His victory over her is deep in her DNA now. And she's starting to exhibit some of his patterns. By saying nobody ever liked him, how could you say that? What kind of crazy, of course millions of people like him. They're voting for him. Millions, millions of people could say nobody liked him or nobody liked him in the same way. Come of course, of course people like him. And then they started writing, I like Bernie. This hashtag, I like Bernie, started popping up. That behavior is a direct reaction to her getting pounded on by Donald Trump through the entire campaign. All right, so let me ask you this. You've talked to a lot of people from all different realms in here, right? If we can agree, let's say, that being entertaining is not a great prerequisite or qualification for being president, if we can agree on that, which seems pretty easy. Yes, very easy to agree on. What can be done, whether it's in the political sphere, the media sphere, putting something in the drinking water to let people, to encourage people to have a little bit more of what you're after, whether it's compassion, whether it's understanding, whether it's balance, whether it's moderation. In other words, why is the entertainment force winning right now? And if you don't like that notion, what can be done about it? Well, the entertainment force, for whatever reason, is being portrayed through Trump only. See, he's not a politician. He's a guy who's a media star, and he's been a media star for decades. He knows how to manipulate the media. He knows how to sit on the Letterman couch and kill. He's been doing it for a long time. He's very comfortable being in front of cameras. None of those people have those kind of skills, and nobody thought of it as a skill. They thought of a politician being able to do their politician stuff. When this guy's calling you crazy Ted or lion Ted or lion Hillary, he just makes up names for you, sleepy Joe. I mean... And I'm smiling because it's funny, because he's good at it. He's funny. He's good at it. Here's the problem. You shouldn't have a goddamn popularity contest to see who controls thermonuclear weapons. That's fucking stupid. It's stupid. They'll allow people to vote based on a popularity. But it's the system we've got. So that's what I'm asking you is what now? Well, the system's only a couple hundred years old. I know. Or even this kind of. I mean, the way that these elections are. Because I don't think it was... I mean, if you look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates, those were actual debates with two people. It took for hours and hours and hours. It has evolved a lot. But I mean, let's say that you're not happy with the way it is. And there's a lot of people, even there are people who like Trump quite a bit on some dimensions who are very troubled by other dimensions. So there's a lot of people out there who are open to like, no, let's try to adjust the thinking. Let's try to change our minds. Let's try to not be influenced as much by what we're being influenced by. Do you have any pointers? The real problem that we're having is this tribal battle of left versus right. And the strongest voices on the left, the loudest voices, and the most extreme oftentimes are the worst representations. And the same with the right. The loudest, most extreme team members. They're the people at the front of the line, fuck it, we're gonna kick their ass. Like, is that guy with me? Am I on this team? Fuck. Are we in a war now? We're in a war with the left. I think that's what it is. And there's also these ideas that we have that are cemented in stone that if you're a left wing person, you believe in X, Y, and Z, this is your doctrine if you're right wing. But most of us have like a little bit of this. Maybe you believe in the Second Amendment, maybe you believe in the First Amendment, maybe you think that maybe we should incorporate a lot of things we do with the fire department and do that to schools and do that to housing and do that to make sure that all the stuff's covered, make housing like an important part of a civilization, like for everybody. We did a piece, a Freakonomics Radio piece a year or two ago called America's Hidden Duopoly and it was about the Democratic and Republican Party basically acting like Pepsi and Coke, right? They kind of divide and conquer the market and they've built an industry that is incredibly valuable. The thing that's amazing to me is this, Trump won the presidency as the Republican that the RNC most wanted to get rid of. Bernie last time around was the Democrat that the DNC wanted to get rid of. They lost by getting their candidate Hillary in. This time Bernie, who may very well become the candidate, is again the party that the DNC is out to get. So what does it say that you've got a duopoly? The machines running the system that we kind of let ourselves get manipulated into buying. Like you said, I've never understood. My mom and dad were Democrats for a long, long time. Typical Catholic, okay, maybe not so typical because they were former Jewish Catholic, typical Catholic working class, big family, meat and potatoes issues, no brainer that they're Democrats, okay? And then, but my mom as a devout Catholic, she started the local right to life chapter in upstate New York where we lived. New York state had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. So she was fighting that fight early. When that happened and the Democrats lined up against, in favor of legalized abortion, she switched parties. Everything else about her was still mostly Democratic, but she had to become a Republican. Because of life. And that's another powerful one that gets integrated into the right. And it happens to all of us though. We take, there's one issue that kind of sets people off and then they have to join the team that they may, you know.