(upbeat music) - How do you find humor when the world is changing?

The anxiety and stress is high and social media is no longer about baby pictures but conspiracy theories.

In this episode of "Traverse Talks," part two of our interview with Ted Tremper, an award-winning writer, co-creator of the TV series "Shrink," and once producer on "The Daily Show."

He'll talk about humor, media literacy, if that's the right word we should call it, and his thoughts on the state of politics.

(upbeat music) We had a moment at my home where my husband's trying to work at full capacity like there's no pandemic at home - Yeah.

- with two children under the age of 10, who are doing virtual schooling.

- Oh my goodness, yeah.

(Ted laughs) - And then I come home, right?

I have a Zoom meeting, he has a Zoom meeting, my one kid's got speech therapy and we all just lost our shit.

- Yeah.

- And I was like, "What are we doing?"

- Yeah.

- Why are we trying to live like the world is normal?

Like, does it matter - Yeah.

(laughs) - if she gets a 4.0 this year?

They're gonna have to redo all this crap.

And I'm like, "And what is our bosses?

Are they gonna fire us right now?"

- Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Basically, you know, a lot of the world right now is having their own different there are no rules, no promises moments.

And ideally, the lesson that we take out of this is we are much stronger when we depend on each other and acknowledge absurdity.

- Yep.

- You know?

And where humor comes into it is finding a building block to be able to laugh at each other and on ourselves to realize like, we really are all in this together, and on every level, every household, every neighborhood, every city, every state, every, you know, this country, we're really all in this together.

- But Ted, we're really sucking at it.

(Sueann laughs) - Yeah.

Well, then it's funny, 'cause I think media literacy is a really fascinating thing.

- Yep.

- And my friend Daniel Campbell Smith, who's a brilliant writer, tweeted the other day, (Ted laughs) something along the lines of 2006.

Don't trust anything you read on the internet.

Parents in 2016, facebook.org says that Hillary created AIDS.

(Ted laughing) That's the interesting thing, you know, and I sort of accidentally quit social media following the election, my girlfriend and I went to Belize and we didn't have any internet.

And I didn't check social media for two weeks and realized I was way happier.

(Ted laughs) It's a few different things.

I would rely on the smartest people that I knew to inform me as to what was going on, and then I would sort of look at kind of weekly roundup of what is the big news this week.

So I was still sort of staying informed, but I wasn't going down any rabbit holes.

And I was relying on people who I knew were sort of fair and balanced.

I've been lucky enough to have friends who are sort of saying and insane on both sides of the political spectrum.

I think that's really important because then you can sort of use all of those to counterbalance each other.

But the terrifying thing as everyone I think knows is, you know, the erosion of truth and the erosion of a communal truth, I think, is the scariest threat that the United States potentially has ever faced.

- Right.

- And I remember being at "The Daily Show" and there's a brilliant editor named Eric Davies.

And this was just after the man who currently occupies The White House had announced his candidacy and we were doing some kind of interview piece and Eric stopped the tape I brought back and he goes, "Do you ever notice that people aren't ashamed anymore?"

And I was like, "What do you mean?"

And he'd been there for years.

And he's like, "Well, it used to be that like, when you would catch somebody in a lie or believing something that wasn't true, that they would sort of get flummoxed and embarrassed that they believed something that was demonstrably false."

But now people just say, "You're lying, you're wrong, and this is right."

And what he was describing, and he was the first person that I knew to really isolate it was fake news.

This notion that you get to choose your reality, despite every single piece of actual evidence pointing you towards the contrary.

You know, one of the things I hope that we get from the Biden Administration is not only complete transparency, I'm obviously not a part of his cabinet, but really the first thing I would do is do a listening tour of all of the places that 45th president won and really get to the nuts and bolts of not only why they believe the things that they believe, what are the kind of underlying causes?

And not in a pandering handholding way, but really just listen to these people.

When I was at the 2016 Republican National Convention, they were so happy that they had somebody who they felt was representing what their values were.

The irony was I don't think that that man represented any of their values.

I think that what they saw and what they continue to see him is a man from the TV who can come and solve all of their problems.

And I think the reason they saw that is that that guy is one of the most brilliant con artists/salespeople that has ever existed in the history of media.

But certainly, you know, in the 21st century and into the 20th century, you know, the notion that a reality show could turn him from, by all accounts, a catastrophically, unsuccessful businessperson into someone that people would believe was brilliant.

And this is the irony is I do believe that he's brilliant in many ways.

I think he's the best brand salesperson of all time.

And I think that if you look at a lot of what his upbringing was, he was raised in a church where essentially, even if you lose, you still say you win.

You know, and what that breeds is somebody, not only is sort of so exceptionally interested in not only winning, but in one's own self-interest, that you'll do anything to one, cover your own end, and two, invent any kind of reality you need to, so that you did win.

And if you say the phrase media literacy, you're implying that people are either media literate or they aren't.

And what I think that we need to realize is the techniques that oddly specifically, you know, Russia is using to trick people, are so brilliant - Yep.

- that it is perfectly acceptable, that somebody would believe these different things.

- Oh yeah.

- Because oftentimes, they play on such an emotional level that it is impossible to not have a reaction to them.

- Yeah.

This all seems like we're also talking about coping strategies.

- Oh yeah, yeah.

- And like, Ted, seriously, I know that there's a point where even humor can't touch these, it seems like it's inappropriate and can't touch these things 'cause they're so deep and scary, and that people are using them as coping strategies in a way, because it's too painful - Yeah.

- for their minds to accept.

- Well, there's two things that I would say to that.

One, I can't remember the Greek philosopher, but there was a Greek philosopher who said that comedians are the most dangerous people in society because they can change your mind without you realizing it's been changed.

- Oh.

- One thing that I really love is the power of humor and the other is the George Orwell quote, "Every joke is a mini revolution."

And I think that where humor can be essential and it dovetails back to what we were talking about with personal tragedy.

If you can find humor in anything, that's a kind of energy that you can use as a propellant.

I think that the two most, you know, sort of powerful fuels that we produce ourselves are anger and joy.

If you can convert anger into energy, you can get a heck of a lot done.

And if you can convert joy into energy, you can do a lot effortlessly.

You know, I worked at "The Daily Show" from Trevor Noah's first day in 2015 until the 2016 political conventions.

And what I noticed during that time, and certainly in the fallout after the election, was people on the more conservative side and to the farther right, had been really, really upset with turning on their TVs and feeling like they were being attacked and they were being made fun of, and they felt like their kind of rejoinder to that was to support somebody who, you know, a lot of their platform was based off of telling them that they were right, to hate the media.

- He made them feel good.

I mean, it's understandable.

- Yeah, it's understandable.

I think there's a very reductive way of looking at that where, you know, someone could listen to this and hear two ostensible liberals talking about, you know, the plight of conservative America.

But I don't think that at all, I think that, you know, I'm in a situation where my perspective is much more about, you know, my sort of hierarchy of needs are met.

I am very lucky insofar as, I mean, I'm unemployed, but I am on unemployment.

I have food in my freezer.

I have a girlfriend that I love very much who loves me.

I have a dog that's the center of my life.

I live in an area where the chances of me being killed in my sleep are relatively low.

I know I can pay my bills this month and next month.

If you look at research studies of people operating from scarcity mindsets, scarcity is such a powerful psychological tool to get us to make impulse-driven decisions that if I'm a person who you take away any of the needs that I have that are currently filled, I would become desperate and any human being would.

So I think that really the challenge of the 21st century is trying to get a better grasp on, one, how we can help people on a community level, on a friendship level, on a, you know, municipal level, on a state level, on a federal level?

But then also, how can we, as people, continue to seek out where our blind spots are?

And I mean this also from the left looking right.

On the "Silverman Show," we interviewed a guy who was a straight up neo-Nazi, who had gotten out of that ideology and was sort of dedicating his life to getting other people out.

Looking at these people and rather than canceling them is obviously, it's super easy for me to say this as a mostly straight white guy, that we shouldn't cancel people, we should be looking to take the lessons that they've learned and get them out of the ideology that they believe and to have them want to bring other people with them.

Looking at people who believe things that are objectively destructive to our society.

And by that, I mean, you know, anti-vaxxers, people who are conspiracy theorists, who are not listening to reason on both sides.

And there's all of this I should say, is divorced of political ideology, having a coming together where we're able to try to establish an objective set of facts that we can all sort of play a game with and have a honest discussion with is the most critical thing I think going forward.

'Cause right now, we're not playing the same game.

- No.

- Or we're playing the same game, but we don't have the same rules.

And you can't base a society on that.

- Oh, no.

(upbeat music) You know, you mentioned earlier about a failure.

I heard you in an interview that we'll also talk about how we need to fail more - Oh, yeah.

- in order to become better creators of our crafts.

- Yeah.

- And so what would you say to people, you know, 'cause people look up to the president and he will not acknowledge failure even with the selection, but yet that's how you grow.

How do you encourage people to accept failure?

- I think it's important to delineate between sort of creative failures and personal failure.

And I think that, you know, I came up through the Chicago improv scene and one of the most important lessons in improv is that you should fail bravely.

And what that means is taking risks on stage.

And, you know, the Del Close's metaphor for improv is that you jump out of an airplane and you build your parachute on the way down.

(Sueann laughs) So I think that that's extraordinarily important from a creative perspective, because if you're not taking risks, not only is that gonna be boring to any perspective audience members you have, regardless of the medium, it's gonna be boring to you.

If you're not challenging yourself, if you're not taking risks, if you're not making the work exciting, then it can become quite boring.

And I mean that in every medium creation, cooking, drawing, it truly doesn't matter what you're doing.

If you're just doing something you have done before, that's mass production, that isn't art or creativity.

As it pertains to sort of personal failure, I think that one needs to engage with life in a way that is divorced of fear.

- Oh.

- And by that, I don't mean that one should be foolhardy and make decisions that you know are wrong.

It's something I always used to ask my dad.

My dad is just brilliant and stoic guy that I would ask him basically, "How do you know what's a good risk?

Like how do you know what a good risk to take is?"

And my dad is very brilliant insofar as he will never actually give advice.

He will always ask questions that will lead me to a satisfactory answer.

He would never claim to sort of use Aristotelian teaching, but he definitely does that.

And anytime I ask advice like that, he'll always just laugh at me and say, "You'll know when you know."

Or as it pertains to risk, I think the question that you should be asking yourself is will I regret not making this decision?

You know, and I think that that's what a lot of what death teaches you early on is, oh, I can't live this life again.

It doesn't seem that I can.

You know, will I regret making this decision one year in the future, five years in the future, 20 years in the future?

- Yeah.

- And I think it's also important to sort of constantly check the gauge by which you're making that decision.

'Cause if you find you're making a lot of decisions that lead to you sitting at home alone, watching television, instead of asking the person that you're enamored with, if you wanna have a date or not going to join an intramural softball team, because you're afraid that you will drop a ball, et cetera, et cetera.

Always looking at that gauge as well.

- Yeah.

- You know, there's so many different truisms.

I became more or less addicted to like self-help and quotes in my late teens and early 20s, which I think is, by and large, served me well.

And there's this great, I think it may have been Lama Ceriados, who is this guy from Long Island, who went and studied, I think in Tibet and became a Dzogchen meditation master.

And I think he was looking at a raffle ticket one day and the phrase must be present to win was on it, which is a sort of laughably, a very Buddhist phrase.

But I think that that to me, it's two things, it's that, must be present to win as sort of on a daily level.

But then also, this notion that truly 99% of your life is just showing up, - Yeah.

- is showing up to your life.

And I think, I mean that in terms of saying yes to every single possible opportunity that you have to socialize is a great way forward, just because, you know, you're... - You don't have much time.

- Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a lot of it.

But now getting older into my, I guess, mid 30s... - You're so cute.

(Sueann laughing) - Everybody says that.

I always feel like I grew up very fast, I think.

You know, so when my mom, she was basically on the verge of death from when I was eight till 12.

And you know, when she got healthy again, her big thing was, "I need to teach these kids to be independent.

So if this disease comes back and kills me, I'll know they're okay."

- Oh.

- So we learned to do taxes, we learned to cook, we learned to do laundry.

We did absolutely everything that we needed to do.

The Dalai Lama, there's two kinds of selfishness.

There's why selfishness and foolish selfishness.

Foolish selfishness is sort of, you know, stealing money from people, that kind of stuff like that.

Why selfishness is basically you are doing good for other people, so that way, it will make you feel better or give you peace of mind.

- Yeah.

- So in this case, my mom's sort of why selfishness was knowing that at any moment, she could die again and that she could die a peaceful death knowing that we would be okay if she knew that we were independent and could take care of ourselves.

- Oh my goodness, I love your mother.

- Oh, it's very great.

I found an email from her, her name is Paula D. Tremper.

And it was a thing called Paula's rules on it.

And it was basically like 12 rules for living.

And I ended up engraving it onto a piece of wood that we have in our house.

And it's very funny 'cause I swear to God, every time I look at it, I'll see one there that I swore was not there before that speaks perfectly to the moment that I'm living in now.

- Oh my goodness.

What are some of your rules for living?

- Oh goodness.

I think, be open to having your mind changed, I think is very important.

I think, be fearless in acknowledging when you have made a mistake or when you're wrong and apologizing.

I think, be curious at all times.

You can't be curious and closed off at the same time.

One of the most important lessons I learned was at WSU, this notion of Mill's marketplace of ideas, that we're better as a society, if all ideas are welcomed into a marketplace where people are allowed to choose kind of what they believe.

But I think part of being a good patron of that marketplace is to go there every day with an open mind.

Because generally, if you are asking yourself, how is this making you feel?

You know, 'cause it's sort of the notion of ideas being like viruses, being memetic, they can infect your mind and they can make you very sick, and that's divorced of ideology.

So if you are becoming a friend of yourself and looking at how your mind is affected by what you're consuming, you might find yourself angry all the time and not know why.

And then if you look at what you're feeding your mind, oh, this is all poisoned.

(both laughing) You have your answer right there.

- Yeah.

- You know, I think that, you know, that's very important.

- What other ideas do you have about life?

- Oh, goodness.

- Maybe a couple more.

- I think owning a dog is a very good idea (Sueann laughs) or having things in your life that will remind you how silly life is and whether that's children, whether it's dogs, whether it's, you know, very young people or very old people, (Sueann laughing) having people in your life that provide you with perspective.

- Nice.

- That almost without exception, no problem is so big that it can't be laughed at, you know.

- Nice.

(upbeat music) I had a programming director who once said, "Yeah, go ahead and try things.

But if you think you're gonna get fired, you probably shouldn't say it, but here's what's happening is you're gonna go off a diving board and you don't know if there's water in the pool or not.

And we'll find out, - Yeah, yeah.

- when you're in it."

And it takes a certain type of personality to be comfortable with failing in front of thousands of people.

- Sure.

- And still kinda like, "All right, I'm okay with that."

- Yeah.

And I mean, the other part of it now is things are so vitriolic online that not only are you failing in front of thousands of people, but if you say the wrong thing, people will literally threaten to kill you.

- Yes!

- You know, I've had multiple friends who worked for late night shows, who for whatever reason, one of their jokes, you know, that they tweet is taken out of context.

And that becomes the grist for the Breitbart or Fox News pretend outrage.

And if they didn't have as good a bosses that they have, could destroy their life, destroy their career.

There's a wonderful book that Jon Ronson wrote called "So You've Been Publicly Shamed."

- That sounds good.

- You know, as comics, it's interesting because I think it takes a fair amount of bravery just to get on a stage and try to tell jokes to strangers, period.

But now, with Twitter and everything, it's interesting.

My friend, Zack Bornstein is quite famous on Twitter now.

And like he's received probably more death threats than any president in American history, you know?

And it's literally for jokes.

He laughs it off 'cause I think he has to.

But yeah, I mean, we're sort of in this brave new world where anything you say, one, it can't go away, it's there forever.

Two, it can become the sentence that you said that defines your digital existence, that you can never erase.

And three, once that initial tidal wave of outrage crests, people go away and they don't want to follow up and figure out why you said such a thing or what the context was, like nobody cares, they just move onto the next thing.

- Yeah, so Ted, what does this do to the creative process and to creative people?

- I think part of the reason why people become so sort of entrenched in their beliefs is the punishment for curiosity on either side is generally either such a vitriolic rebuke that you need to seek out the comfort of people who believe exactly what you believe or believe even more extreme things than what you believe, - Wow.

- or you just won't say anything.

And I think that, you know, a lot of what the social dilemma talks about is, you know, if you are able to trigger an emotional reaction, you know, people will consume more.

You will immediately get their attention.

If I'm somebody, and this is nothing against the trans community at all, but if I'm some guy in Kansas, who's never met a trans person in my life and who asks some question about, you know, why is it a big deal, X, Y, Z?

Because this person is genuinely curious, that unfortunately can be misconstrued as, you know, being bigoted, being close-minded.

The problem that we have and even the way that I'm parsing this out, sort of speaks to me trying to not make a mistake, which I'm sure that I am, is there's very, very, very little room for nuance and for actual discussion on social media, because of the anonymity and because of the perceived barrier between human being and another human being.

It affords one sort of ability to write off that interaction.

- Yeah.

- Whereas every single trans person that I know, if a good-hearted person had breakfast with them and was asking them all the questions they've ever wanted to know about being trans, I don't know a single trans person who would not engage with somebody who was genuinely and good-heartedly curious about what their experience is.

- Yeah.

I think we need some safe places for that.

- Yeah!

Well, that's actually a really good point.

It's like, you know, speaking of failure, like we kind of don't have a public forum by which we can get things wrong anymore.

- Yeah.

- You know, I actually think Reddit is the closest thing we have.

- I love Reddit.

- You can ask questions there anonymously and... - Community will answer, or they'll suss it out.

- Yeah.

- They'll suss out if you're genuine or not.

- Yeah, exactly.

And I think one thing I will say of Americans in general is very few Americans I've met, and obviously, this is coming from a very privileged point of view of being, you know, pretty ostensibly, non-threatening mostly straight white guy, (laughs) is that I've never met a person who I can't genuinely engage with and ask questions about what they believe, regardless of what it is, where they haven't taken the time to explain it to me.

'Cause generally, I think it's a human drive to sort of want to be understood.

- Yeah, and I think they feel you and your integrity.

- Yeah.

- I mean, I think it's a product, my mom was a Democrat, my dad is a Republican or was (laughing) until 2016, but I grew up in a household of people believing opposite things and it was never a big deal.

- You could navigate it.

- I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that there is a culture war going on right now.

And I'm very happy that I don't think that everyone has enlisted yet and I don't think that people should.

I think we need peacekeepers on both sides to remind people that on a 30,000-foot level, it's okay for us to disagree, but what we really can't do with very few exceptions is vilify people or extol people into becoming heroes who are quite objectively villains.

I'm thinking about the murderer in Wisconsin who now has gotten $2 million bail and has gotten out.

That's somebody that, you know, I don't think that Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan or any other famous Republican would've seen that guy and said, "Yeah, he's got it, right?"

- "He's on our team."

- And oddly, I don't think that most Republicans would either.

I think despite what, you know, every Republican that I know and most lawful gun owners that I know would be very upset that someone took an illegally purchased firearm and killed two protestors.

That is the exact opposite of what the second amendment ought to stand for and what their beliefs stand for.

And it is a true fact of specifically the 24-hour news networks, you know, and social media obviously takes the same page out of their book is if it bleeds, it leads.

You know, if there is a story that is sensational, that will capture people's attention and you know, and we'll cut to a squirrel water skiing in the last 30 seconds to make you feel, you know, like you don't wanna dive off a building.

But you know, the thing that terrifies me the most is we actually do have quite a few things to be actually very scared about.

And the problem is when people started hating each other when things were going well, that was pretty scary.

But now that we actually do need to fight a common invisible enemy, meaning COVID-19, the fact that that has become a cultural issue.

I saw a Dr. tweet the other day, like the idea of politicizing wearing a mask is tantamount to politicizing using toilet paper.

You know, it's a very basic hygiene issue at this point.

- "Hey, Ted, don't tell me what to do."

- Yeah, exactly.

The profound irony of this whole thing is I truly and honestly believe Trump would have won this election if he had merchandised masks, if he had sold MAGA masks or Four More Years, or Make America Great Again, Again masks, he would have won this election.

I think the death toll would be 10 times lower.

And you could have pointed to some kind of effort to actually curb 1/4 million people dying.

If you were able to acknowledge a mistake, I think not merchant.

One, also, he could have made millions of dollars, but I think looking back, if you were able to admit mistakes, not merchandising mask wearing, I think it would be the biggest mistake of his presidency, from his perspective.

Yeah, I should say, as you're editing this, any political thing that I do, I try to either caveat it by saying, "I don't know anything, or I'm just a guy or I'm very stupid, or pointing out that the problems exist on both sides."

'Cause what I don't want is for somebody to hear what I'm saying, presume that I'm just a very sort of liberal guy who's condemning one side or the other.

I think these are all macro level issues that need to be addressed.

- And you don't want death threats.

- I mean, I'll take them.

I don't want them.

(Sueann laughing) Well, I don't know.

- Is that how you know you made it?

- That's how you know you've made it.

Well, actually, I think the case could be made that the way that you know you've made it now is that somebody threatens to kill you, (Sueann laughing) which is very sad.

It's very sad.

How funny is that?

That's something that nobody ever tells you about making it is that people are going to try to kill you or threaten to kill you.

- Well, you got 50 death threats today.

You made it.

- Yeah.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

- Wonderful.

Thank you, Ted.

- So lovely talking to you.

- You too.

- Anytime you want me, I will come back.

- Oh, thank you so much.

- All right, take care.

- Bye.

- All right, bye.

(upbeat music) - That's writer and co-creator of the TV series "Shrink," Ted Tremper and WSU alum, go Cougs.

Thank you so much for listening to "Traverse Talks."

This wraps up our first season, and I hope you learned something new and enjoyed the guests as much as I have.

Much thanks to producers Greg Mills and McKayla Fox who came up with this idea and kept it going through the pandemic.

Assistant Mia Hunt, digital assistance from Matt Caramera, and interns Grace Arnis and Morgan Elsie.

And a big thank you to the members of Northwest Public Broadcasting.

This is "Traverse Talks," I'm Sueann Ramella.