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The reason that I did that piece on Planned Parenthood,
I'm 55 years old, but when I was coming up,
there wasn't, you know,
it's very strict about talking about sex
to your children and stuff.
And you know, my mom got sick and my dad,
my dad didn't wanna talk to me about sex,
you know what I'm saying?
So just to let you know
that there's a lot of girls out there that's like that,
you know, that don't freakin' know
what's going on with their bodies
or what's going on with sex.
There's a lot of men out there that are becoming men
and don't know about stuff.
And that place provides that type of information.
You would not know how much they saved my life,
so much that I have them in my trust.
That's how much I believe that that service
[audience applauds]
needs to be one of the most important things.
You know, we already got our rights taken away.
We can't get our healthcare taken away also.
So all the men that's in here,
yo, fight just as hard as the women, okay?
You got sisters, you got aunts, you got...
This is a real, real war, you guys.
This is a real war.
And I hate to say it, and even if it's funny,
but "Handmaid's Tale" literally started off with
"they took our rights first-"
[Audience Member] Yes!
"And then Congress took over that."
Like, literally, let's not sit here
and watch some obvious shit happen.
Let's [beep] fight!
[audience cheers]
Yeah, let's go!
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I've been thinking about the term
people of color came out, POC.
I loved it.
I thought, "oh my god, this is so incredible.
It's gonna unify us.
It's gonna bring us together.
It's gonna make us stronger."
And then I start to see
that people of color was sort of working,
but it was excluding Latin people even more.
Like, I started to see
that Latin people were not being included,
that we were actually less included.
So I started having beef with the New York Times
because I was like, "there's no Latin stories.
Where are Latin stories?
Where are your Latin journalists?"
I mean, there were no names there.
I mean, I was looking for those names,
but you could only see it
when they were, like, showing the Yankees, the sports pages,
you know, and I'm not gonna, you know...
So they got upset with me 'cause I was upset at them.
And then they called me up and said, "John, you're so wrong
because we've got about 10% more people of color."
I said, "that's fantastic.
That's so awesome.
That's my dream come true.
How many of those people are Latin?"
None!
Now they have maybe 1% or 2% journalists
at the New York Times, but it's not enough.
You know, I don't wanna be reading
about Latin sofrito recipes written by Heidi.
[audience laughs]
And the term people of color is cool,
but not if it's excluding Latin people.
I mean, we're half of the people of color.
People of color are 40% of the US population
and we're 50% of that POC,
but we're less than 1% of the leads in movies
and television and streaming,
less than 1% of the stories being told,
less than 0.something-1% of the executives.
And I'm starting to think, like,
do we have to get more aggressive?
Do we have to get more assertive about ourselves?
Do we have to start, like, boycotting, picketing,
obviously calling, hunger strikes?
What do we have to do to make this change?
Because it's gotta happen in my lifetime.
It's gotta happen before my kids get old
and, you know, before I pass.
It's gotta change now.
Should we make the Puerto Rican Day Parade, like, longer?
[audience laughs]
Go up every street?
Make the Puerto Rican Day Parade for a month?
Do we cancel "Hamilton?"
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The reason why I wanted to have this conversation is
over the past two and a half years,
I don't know if you felt this during COVID,
a lot of us were at home,
a lot of people were going through uncertainty,
I had a lot of friends that lost their jobs.
And there is this deep angst within a lot of us, I feel it,
with my friends, my generation.
They're hitting an age
where life is starting to choke them out.
They're hurdling through time.
People are getting married.
People are trying to buy their first home.
People are trying to have a little bit of a nest egg
to have some sort of financial cushion
to cover school, healthcare, aging parents, et cetera.
And the way salaries are now,
you have to 10-X your money.
And so what happened during this period of time
is a lot of the financial cable hot take podcast people,
advertently or inadvertently, were giving their takes
and people at home were listening to them
and go, "well, clearly he's smart, he's smart,
he's a venture capitalist.
Why don't I take an active position in my betterment
and do what he does?"
The difference is, and what I was telling Mr. O'Leary was,
you're at a different tax bracket than them.
You can take the losses and retail can't.
And unless you give up your whole position,
like I said, you show me yours, I'll show you mine,
"this is my net worth,
this is what I'm being paid,
this is how much I'm investing,
this is how much of my personal money I'm investing,"
we don't know.
And what that does to the millions of people that listen,
it creates a lot of risk and damage,
and I feel for those people
because they get left holding the bag
and they get left behind.
So I hope people remember
that the next time they watch any of these shows
or these podcasts, they have to keep in mind,
"hey, we'll never know what their position really is,
so maybe I need to to take what they say
with a grain of salt."
[audience murmurs in agreement]
Do you understand what I'm saying?
[audience applauds]
Because if it was actually,
hey, put your money in an index fund,
85% index fund, 15% bond or whatever,
what our dads told us,
there wouldn't be any of these shows.
There wouldn't be any of them!
Squawk Box, CNBC, they wouldn't exist.
So they have to have this ecosystem
that continues pumping them out.
And I just can't help but think it's one of two things.
There's the white knight thing,
that they think they have good picks,
but they're so ahead of the game that even if they lose,
they'll never lose the shirt on their back,
so even when they're wrong, it won't really affect them.
Or number two, they don't care, which is even scarier.
And that's why I said, "listen, man, leave that shit alone.
Just shut up and 'Shark Tank'.
[audience laughs]
I think 'Shark Tank' is great.
I think it's very entertaining and you can keep it there
and retail investors don't get hurt."
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I wanted to ask you, you know,
you mentioned that you worked for Barack Obama,
you know, with the Office of, like, Public Engagement.
How has that changed the way
that you do political satire now?
Oh, interesting.
That's actually pretty timely.
So it changes it in a couple of ways.
There's a show that was on TV.
It might still be, I don't know it.
It was a cable news show,
so a little different than this obviously.
But I want to say this took place in, like, 2010.
So I worked in, as you mentioned,
I worked in the Office of Public Engagement
at the White House.
That's essentially the outreach office.
And I was the President's point person
on sort of three areas,
young Americans, that was one bucket,
then Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, second bucket,
and third bucket was artists.
And so there was something called the Dream Act
that would've provided a pathway to citizenship
for a bunch of undocumented folks
who basically came here as kids.
Their parents or relatives brought them here.
Many of them didn't even know they were undocumented.
That bill ultimately failed by five Democratic votes,
and the vote for that bill was the same day
as the vote for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
That ended up getting repealed,
so it was like one successful, you know, thing
and one really heartbreaking thing if you're a progressive.
And I remembered, like, in the lead up to that vote,
I was at my desk in my office and it was like, you know,
you see these, like, glamorous pictures of the White House
and obviously the Oval Office.
My office was, like, eight of us smashed into a room.
Desks were touching.
And so we were just like this the whole day.
And you work late most nights.
It was like 10:00, 10:30.
This pundit was on cable news,
talking about how she wasn't exactly sure
if the Obama administration was serious
about tackling the Dream Act.
And then the rest of it was just this cynical analysis
of why, by her assessment,
Obama probably wasn't serious about the Dream Act.
I'm watching this thing,
like, it's playing in my office,
when I'm literally [beep] working on the Dream Act!
So I was like, "you gotta be outta your mind, lady."
Like, there's a whole team of us that are working on it!
So cut to, like, three weeks later.
I happened to be on the train up to New York
and she was on the train.
[audience jeers]
And there are all these ethics rules
when you work at the White House.
Like, don't do stoner movies at the same time.
You have to wait for that.
But also, like, you're not allowed to talk to journalists
unless you get clearance from the communications team.
But I sort of justified it
by, like, "I have a prior relationship with her"
'cause, like, we know each other from TV stuff.
So I just went up to her and I'm like,
"look, I saw your episode on the Dream Act.
I just want to let you know we are seriously working on it.
We're really hoping that it'll get passed."
And she just looked at me and went,
"yeah, I mean, I don't know, you know?"
Like, no, but I'm telling you!
Like, I'm telling you that...
So anyway, cut to the afternoon of the vote.
It failed by five Democratic votes.
The very long-winded story gets to the point
where I felt really upset
that somebody who had a built-in audience
that clearly cared enough about the Dream Act
for her to do a whole segment on it,
instead of doing what she could have done,
which is, "hey here are five Democratic senators
who need a big push
and if you call their office,
if you protest in front of their field offices,
if you really engage with them, you might change their minds
and we might actually get this thing passed."
Instead of that, she chose to shit on the easy target,
which was the White House.
I obviously have a fair amount of bias here
'cause that's where I worked.
But the big takeaway for me was I wish there was a way
to still, in her case, inform,
but, in our case here, to really make people laugh
and do the satire and do all the stuff
in a way that doesn't make you feel like shit
when you turn off the TV.
So that's my big hope for this week
is I hope we can make people laugh,
make the dumb jokes, engage everybody,
but at the end of the day,
I hope that you leave the audience
and I hope you turn off the TV
feeling like maybe you can be part of a solution
in a way that you didn't know was possible.
[audience cheers]
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