What an amazing time to be alive.

What an amazing time to be watching the news and having conversations about the news

and consuming all kinds of bits and pieces and opinions from hither and thither,

like a little bowerbird pecking around the internet and social media,

trying to figure out what's true and what's not.

But also what an amazing time to be susceptible and vulnerable to stridency, to misinformation,

to what aboutism, to people trying to distract us from what really matters,

jangling keys in front of our face in order to get us to look over here instead of remaining stable

and calm and even keeled.

The only way we can do that is by having conversations that resonate with all of us, conversations

that make sense to all of us, conversations that are difficult, conversations that are important,

conversations that are a little bit uncomfortable.

Today on the show, what a wonderful man, what a funny man, what a warm-hearted man. Michael Ian Black is a comedian extraordinaire. He's got a new book about what it means to be a man. It's basically a letter to his 19-year-old son who's going off to university. And it's a meditation on masculinity, essentially. So I wanted to talk to him about that, about our political moment,

which I should just address before we move on. The current state of things in the United States

is that the President is refusing to concede even though he clearly lost the election in a number

of states. He is claiming that there was electoral fraud. There is no

evidence of electoral fraud. There are a lot of online rumours. I've seen people who I even

respect spreading either uncorroborated or out of context misinformation about dead people

voting, which when you actually do the fact check and you go back to the

sources and you look at CNN in the New York Times and places which for all of their mistakes

and for all of their ideological blindedness are not about pumping out outright lies.

When they actually dig down and they ask the state election officials what is going on,

...