-It's nice to have you back on the air.
You returned from a little bit of a break.
I know you don't really ever take a break.
-No, we work through the breaks.
We were planning some ridiculous stories for later this year.
-Yes. And I think --
no one works harder than you or your staff.
And so it's very hard to catch you on vacation.
-Yeah. -Sometimes I will see you
and I'll think, "Oh, you didn't have a show last week."
Maybe you'll be refreshed, and you just always look exhausted.
-No, yeah. [ Laughter ]
That's something to do with work
and I do have resting exhausted face, anyway.
[ Laughter ]
People do -- even when I come back from vacation,
sometimes people will go, "Everything all right?
It's tough right now, isn't it?"
Well, this is three days on a beach.
-You never -- [ Laughter ]
-Okay. -As you say,
you never stop working, but what you do lose
when you're on a break is the outlet to process the news.
-Yeah. -I know even when we have
a couple weeks off, that is the hardest part for me.
Can you appreciate being unplugged from the news at all,
or do you just miss being able to talk about it?
-It's nice in general.
It's nice to unplug from something that's poisonous.
But the problem is, when there's poison around,
you kind of want to know what's happening.
So, no. It feels reckless and irresponsible to say,
"I won't concern myself with the fact
that America is destroying itself.
I'll surprise myself three months later
to see what's happened."
No, so, it's nice to have an outlet again.
Do you struggle? -I -- well --
What I found -- I do. -Really? Do you?
-No, I mutter to myself
a lot more when we don't have the show.
-Oh, really? -You know, because this is my --
this is like a very polite way
to do what would just be muttering
if I didn't have a TV show.
-Yeah, it's a very erudite mutter
that you vomit into a camera. -Yeah.
-So you just walk around -- -I just walk around town --
-"Why was he at an omelet bar?" [ Laughter ]
-Here's the thing. And you know, you guys
obviously do stories that are sort of longer tales
as opposed to just talking about what happened yesterday.
-Right. -What happened yesterday,
if you have a week off,
you don't have to pay that much attention,
because by the following Monday,
nothing that matters -- nothing that happened matters anymore.
-That's it. That is the sense where time has kind of changed.
-Yeah. -And it used to be that you
could assume that if something happened in the week
that you're still in, it would have a place in people's memory.
Now, 72 hours is a long time. -Yeah.
[ Laughter ] -So often we find ourselves
saying, "Oh, and he did this at the start of this week,
this human week." -Yes.
-This actual week that we started on Monday.
And so, yeah. There's a lot -- generally we don't talk about
anything in the week that doesn't happen
kind of Thursday night, Friday. There's no point.
-You know, it's nice -- you do provide a nice service
in that obviously things are crazy here right now.
You do remind the world that other places are crazy.
-Yeah, but that's a tough sell, though. That's the problem.
So it's difficult when you're doing international stories
on the show, like last year, we wanted to do a show
about the Brazilian election and it's a tough sell to say,
"I know things are rough in America right now,
but we need to talk about Brazil."
And you can kind of feel going, "Not [bleep] now we don't."
[ Laughter ]
It's like saying to someone whose house is on fire,
"There is a house on fire three streets away."
Any other time, I would give a [bleep] about that.
But my possessions are burning.
So it's tough to kind of say, "we need to talk about Brazil,"
and not have that sense of "Do we?"
-Yeah. -Do we definitely?
-You talked about Brexit last night.
Obviously, you have a connection to that.
-Yes, yeah. -Do you feel like that's a story
that people here have any sense of exactly how insane it is?
-Well, you can -- Broadly, you can get a sense
of how insane it is, just from being secure in the knowledge
that it's [bleep] crazy what's happening.
Now, as you go into actually what is happening,
the details of it are so absurd
that it kind of exacerbates the insanity,
but it does take a long time to understand.
To understand exactly why Northern Ireland
and the Northern Ireland border is so critical here to this deal
that isn't actually a deal, it's a deal just to get to
an interim period to get to the deal --
It's fun to understand all of that if you are into masochism.
[ Laughter ]
But you can just reassure that what Britain is doing
is driving itself off a cliff.
They are "Thelma & Louise"-ing themselves off a cliff.
-The next cliff opportunity we have here
seems to be the 2020 election. -Yes.
-That seems to be a good cliff opportunity.
-Yeah.
That's definitely a good time to look over the cliff.
"I don't know, we somehow lived through the last one.
Maybe we can fly."
[ Laughter ]
-Yeah. [ Cheers and applause ]
"We're going to live forever!" -Exactly.
-You -- Obviously, one of the things --
I mean, and a lot of people are announcing
and cable news is certainly doing a lot of coverage
of 2020 already. How do you feel about that?
A little early? -It's a little early, right?
Because the bar is pretty low now.
Whenever anyone announces for president, I just go,
"Sure, fine. Yeah. Add it to the list."
You're fine. Kamala Harris, great.
Bernie sanders, great.
A tortoise walking across
an abandoned Wendy's parking lot,
has he got an exploratory committee?
You would work, as well. [ Laughter ]
The bar is so low. So all they're going to do now
is just announce they're running for President
and then go raise money.
So there is not much to see there.
-Yeah. -So, yeah, it's dangerous
I think giving it too much attention right now
when there is plenty of other [bleep]
that we should be looking at.
-What about this idea of you want to --
you know, you can get caught up in the everyday
of what's happening with this presidency.
You don't want to get complacent.
You don't want to get desensitized to the idea
that madness is happening.
But you also don't want to be screaming
and yelling all the time.
Like, how do you find a balance there?
-I mean, I don't know. That's --
I mean, that's a kind of existential question, isn't it?
How do we all seek happiness right now
that isn't, at its root, fraudulent?
[ Light laughter, audience "ohhs" ]
Oh, God, that was a truly depressing "ohh"
from the audience. [ Laughter ]
"Listen, we're just trying to
have a night out in New York, dude.
I didn't come here for nihilism."
[ Cheers and applause ]
-They were like, "John Oliver is on.
He's gonna give us an update on Brazil."
[ Laughter ]
-"Now he's saying we're all dust in the wind of history."
Yeah, it's difficult. It's difficult.
I think that the problem is that at the moment, like,
not only with Trump, who is president,
so you have to pay attention to him
like you would pay attention to a bull in a china shop.
But also, the new candidates, it's a --
it kind of shows that we're concentrating too much
on personalities right now,
which is hard to criticize
when those personalities are in the White House.
But we do have systemic problems underneath them.
So I can't really get excited about new candidates yet
because it's 20 months away from the election.
-Yeah, it's a long time away. -It's a long time.