Why Jon Stewart Retired from The Daily Show | Joe Rogan

Hey man, I miss you. I miss you on TV right now. I really do. This is a perfect time for you. It's kind of crazy that you're not hosting that show anymore. But there's so many people doing that. You know, I was, I really did burn out. Like I felt like it's just redundant. You know, the nice thing for what you do is you get to curate and kind of be more active in to follow your own rhythm for it. I was really tied to that rhythm of the 24 hour news cycle. Right. And how fucking redundant it is and how cyclical. And at a certain point I was like, I don't know what else to do with this. And so I didn't want to stay just because I could. I just done it long enough. And so I thought, well, let me just, it was just time. I thought like the audience needed a fresh perspective. I needed a fresh perspective. Like I just, I just felt John, like I was more, I was more mad about shit than, than inspired. You know, I appreciate that you decided to go out at the literally at the very top, but it seems like, especially right now, like John Oliver is killing it and Trevor Noah is doing your show. And it's like, this is, this is the, there's so much to mock. It's almost like an overload and doing real commentary on politics today. In my opinion, it's almost like you're doing commentary on pro wrestling. Like this is a rig game and you're on here pretending like this shit makes sense. Yeah. It's really is. Right. Well, it's also because that's the economic system that's been set up around politics is the very same that Vince McMahon set up around wrestling. You create, I mean, it is a kind of, you know, kayfabe. It's a sort of like, there are characters, you know what it's like when you're trying to produce something every day, you're going to go with kind of a boiler plate structure. So you're going to say, all right, our show revolves around, you're from the right, you're from the left, whatever comes in, we're going to filter it through that. We're going to keep it produceable, but it starts to, like you say, it becomes, you know, authentic. Same thing would happen to me sometimes with like, I'd be doing shows and you would know you weren't necessarily feeling the outrage of something or that the commentary was going to be as spicy or as deep as you might want it, but you might kick it up a notch anyway, because it was performative. And I always had to fight that instinct to not, to not give into the gravity of like, what was expected of me. Well, it's such a tightrope to walk because you're commenting, you're doing comedy on something that's actually serious and it's great to mock the ridiculous aspects of it. But really like, if you're doing the daily show right now, like we really are in a legitimately troubled time. Like it's not, it's not like a troubled time of 10 years ago or eight years ago. Like this is a real troubled time. No. And I think as that builds up, it becomes harder and harder. But I can recall, you know, people, people will say sometimes, and look, I think there's a certain nostalgia that people view my time on the show has. And I'm not being so delicate. I just mean, you know, when you walk away from something, I think a kind of nostalgia about how, you know, I took a fair amount of shit while I was there. And but the point is like Charleston happened when I was hosting that show, Ferguson happened. The Iraq war happened. 9 11 happened like Jesus. These types of things were always and what would happen is you started to feel like you were expected to say something profound about it and you knew that you didn't really have that in you at times or just that's a bar that was beyond, you know, you really did just want to help your staff get through it more than than anything else. And so these events would come up and the weight of feeling like you had to say something meaningful in that moment for people, because that's the role that either they had, you know, let you know that you had in their lives or that the show kind of took on, you know, became kind of difficult to navigate because the shit is so cyclical. Like man, I could go back and do you my 10 war on Christmas bits here when that shit would flare up. But like at a certain point when things like Charleston happened where Eric Garner like I had nothing in the tank, like all I could do was stare into the camera and just express sadness and helpless. It's like, you know, it is it's infinite rage at a certain point. You rage against it, but over a period of 16 years, if you feel the thing you're raging against grow stronger, right, and kind of collapse on top you and you not make it way nobody likes to piss in the ocean. Yeah, or you like it. But at a certain point, if that's your job, I think it. I think people began to look at the show like it was supposed to change things. And and that's a hard that's a hard place to be for for a comedy show.