The Daily Show: Ears Edition

One of the reasons I wrote the book was because I wanted to equip ordinary people, good people, good faith actors, decent people with the skills and the rhetorical tricks and techniques to push back against the bullies and the bigots and the authoritarians and the gaslighters.

And I have a whole chapter in the book about how you deal with what I call gish gallopers, people who just want to overload you with BS.

So I'm trying to equip people with the skills to say, you know what? When I'm confronted with someone who lies or cuts me off or tries to talk over me or gaslights, I have the skills, I have the rhetorical techniques going back centuries to be able to say, no, no, we're going to speak out.

It's a disclaimer I have at the very start of the book. I can barely win an argument with my wife. I argue for a living and it's been a long time since I've won an argument at home.

Best selling, Win Every Argument

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Written by Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou's a poet laureate. That part. She wrote porn.

But that's not what Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It's pornography.

It's almost like Kim Jong-un did a Jedi mind trick on Trump. You know, Trump was like, yes, I will stop military exercises and I will also pick you up from the airport. It'll be fun.

Sex and power are interdependent. They are interconnected. There is power in sex and power can be sexy.

Infidelity has never been a gender-equal proposition. Men have practically had a license to cheat...and women have faced dire consequences...

What it tells you is that women have basically behaved by virtue of the dire consequences of what could happen to them: ostracism, pregnancy, destitution and even death. And so once she has more economic independence...she may be more...you may learn more about her desire than you actually have learned about her throughout history, which has been her compliance.

The argument is an age-old argument that says men are biological creatures in perpetual motion in search of an outlet. They can't control themselves and it is the woman who has to be his border, his boundary, and his full stop, right?

I wrote 'The State of Affairs' because I think that we need a new conversation for the oldest sin.

Can you imagine if somebody threw up trying to read Dickens while they get miles in?

This book says we need to face all of our poor and recognize that we have something what Desmond, who's an author out of Princeton, called poverty by America, not the poverty in America, but the particular kind of poverty by America that's unnecessary and abolishable because it makes no sense in the richest nation in the world.

I love this book. It's a beautiful work of introspection.

I feel like I know now how your mind works.

I mean, it's, what I felt is that it starts off, there's a love story which turns into a murder story which turns back into a love story.

Yes, the love story, by the way, is with his wonderful wife Eliza who is really the hero maybe of the book.

Yeah, no, I mean, she did a huge amount and I wouldn't be here in good shape without her.

In 2015, the women's team brought in 6.6 million dollars and the men's team only brought in two.

I was feeling this immense amount of gratitude like wow, we women had finally made it, you know, and what what I realized when I walked off stage is that's like basically the emotion that women are granted to feel when they are given an award, this idea of just being grateful.

So for me writing this book and trying to unpack some of these moments in my life that taught me things. I mean that night is when I dedicated and I promised myself that I would dedicate myself for the rest of my life to fighting for equality whether it be equal pay in my sport and in my for my team but also for every woman in every industry because this is a fight that is necessary and it's not necessary just because women deserve it. It's necessary for all people everywhere, right?

I said good question, but only if you ask every male speaker you've hired if his message is applicable to women too.

And so too can we as women be the salvation of what's happening in our system right now.

Of course, Scott McClellan just written a book called What Happened?

It's a pretty remarkable audiobook.

Being evasive's not the same as lying in bushes!

As I entered the Oval Area, I ran into... Scooter Libby!

What Happened Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.

I'm still working on that. I'm pretty sure I didn't, but that's one of the great mysteries is how do we know we're here?

I say in my book, we might understand reality like a dog understands a television screen. There's no concept of the greater reality that's producing the image that the dog sees, that we see.

I don't go to church, but I believe that the greatest worship of what some people call God's creation, which is the world and life, and what atheists just call creation, the greatest worship of that is being fully engaged in your life, in the moments of your life, in all of its emotional reality.

None of us know that this isn't our last day. No one in this room, no one on this earth knows this isn't their last day. So, who do you want to be on your last day? Be that person on every day.

And if you're not sufficiently terrified, life isn't going to be sufficiently miraculous and vice versa. And so that to me is how one lives one's life.

the problem is y'all aren't reading Beloved as a black horror story.

read Beloved, but read it from the mind standpoint that this is a horror.

First of all, I love this book. I love, love, love this book.

The illustrations for this book are beautiful. When I was looking through it, they're very emotive, and it actually made me think of looking at a memory.

I love the use of the color pink in the book. Is that where you add in like the softness or was it because it was a classic like girl color and she's a dancer? Like what was the choice to use that color?

There were a couple of different reasons. So the main character is a dancer. She loves ballet. Typically when I work on a book, I usually assign a color to a character and try to use that to build a palette. And specifically in this book, we're in her world. So everything is that color pink. I wanted it to be a symbol for sweetness and innocence, but also in color psychology, pink is associated with gentle love and care. And that's everything that I want for this girl.

And so I think like that's when I was looking at this, I was like, this is a book for children. A lot of people that make a lot of money, my therapist included, who make a lot of money trying to show adults how to love and care for themselves. And I'm just, is there like a grown up version of this book? Can we call it like still big? And then there's just a bad bitch at the bottom. Like that's all I'm saying. Just still big, bad bitch at the bottom.

He's dealt with drug addiction Publicly, he's written about that in a book.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian, Pulitzer prize winning author, whose most recent book is An Unfinished Love Story, personal history of the 1960s.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, most recent book, An Unfinished Love Story, Personal History of the Sixties.

Last book I read was Where's Waldo?. So I did you find him? And I never found him. And that's why I stopped.

John Favreau and Tommy Vietor, they're founders of Crooked Media, host of Pod Save America, authors of Democracy or Else, How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps, and Bakari Sellers, CNN political commentator and author of The Moment.

John Favreau and Tommy Vietor, they're founders of Crooked Media, host of Pod Save America, authors of Democracy or Else, How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps, and Bakari Sellers, CNN political commentator and author of The Moment.

The book was great. It's based on a book by Leanne Moriarty.

She wrote Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers.

Also been made into buzzy shows.

And yeah, it's, I think the reason people really connect to it too is that it's about a family.

And a family that is not perfect and every family has those idiosyncrasies and you kind of watch this family fall apart and come back together and sort of everybody has to like come to their own truth throughout the course of the show and in that they get stronger. I don't know.

And you've talked about Thinking Like a Monk, your New York Times bestselling book.

Just look at The Giving Tree. The tree is female-coded and acts as a caregiver to the human male character. That motherly tree gave that boy everything. Shade, apples, even wood to build a home. And what did he do to pay her back? Turned her into a key of furniture.