Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame | Lex Fridman Podcast #424

If I hate you, that's great, but if I have a story to support that hate, ah, that's even better.

Uh, one of your favorite words, "jihad." (laughs)

(laughs) That's my favorite hobbies.

(laughs)

It doesn't matter now who do you vote into power. They will not listen to you. They would listen to the people who paid them to be there. When the military came in, people were walking to me, like pointing their fingers, like, "Don't speak about Sisi. Don't speak about the army. Huh? We love you now, but don't..." They would like that. So I called Jon Stewart just like, "I don't know what to do." And he said the most interesting thing ever and said, "If you're afraid of something, make fun about the fact that you're afraid of it."

The following is a conversation with Bassem Youssef, a legendary Egyptian-American comedian, the so-called Jon Stewart of the Middle East, who fearlessly satirized those in power, even when his job and life were on the line. Bassem is a beautiful human being. It was truly a pleasure for me to get to know him and to have this fun, fascinating, and challenging conversation. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Bassem Youssef. Your wife is half Palestinian, and I've heard you say that you've been trying to kill her.

(laughs)

But she keeps using the kids as human shields.

Yes.

So have you considered negotiating a ceasefire?

Well, the thing is every day, every minute of the day in a married life is a negotiation. Everything can blow up into a full-scale war, starting from a simple sentence like, "Good morning, what should we do with the kids today?"

Mm-hmm.

"What should we do with that piece of furniture?" Any sentence can lead you to heaven or to hell in the same time.

So you do negotiate with terrorists?

Oh, yeah, yeah, 100%.

You must.

Yeah. And for her, I am her terrorist too, so (laughs) it's equal. (laughs)

(laughs) Terrorists on both sides. On a more serious note, when you found out about the attacks of October 7th, what went through your mind?

If I'm allowed to use a curse word-

(laughs)

... I was like-

As many as possible.

... I was like, "Oh, shit." Part of my standup comedy is I describe a situation where I was in a restaurant with producers, and there was a bombing two blocks away in Chelsea, New York, in 2000, 2016. And of course, this is the like, "Damn, what's gonna happen to us now?"

Mm-hmm.

And, and, and there's like two different reactions. There's like the white reaction, which is like, "Oh my God, I hope nobody is hurt. This is terrible. I hope everybody's okay." And there's the Arab reaction, "What's his name? What is his name? What is the name?" You know, because you know what's gonna g- come. It's kinda got, it's... I was scared what's gonna really happen in that area, and it's like, "Oh my God, it's gonna be horrible." And the way that it was reported, I, I didn't know how to handle this. So I basically, I went into hiding for a few days, three or four days, and I talked about Piers Morgan, uh, team talking to me two times, three times. I was like, "No, I can't. How can I even defend that? How can you defend the rape, the decapitated babies, and whatever?" And then I started kind of looking in the news a little bit, and then I started seeing people coming on the shows and saying things that I know as an Arab, as a Muslim, as someone from that region, that it's not true. But I didn't know how to s- how, what to say, how to say it. So I said, by the third time when they asked me, I said like, "Fine, put me on." And I went there. It was more of a (laughs) , figuratively speaking, a suicide mission. And (laughs) ...