Stephen Colbert
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
That's right, the Pakistani company Axe Act was selling fake college diplomas, which explains where Bin Laden got his degree in women's studies. Luckily, Pakistani authorities arrested the Axe Act CEO, charging him with illegal money transfers, forgery, and fraud. No doubt he'll represent himself in court. I hear he's got like 20 law degrees. Well, I for one, I'm glad they caught the guy.
Darknet Diaries
142: Axact
Charging people hundreds of thousands of dollars for fake degrees is appalling. I believe that fake college should be free.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I will tell you, it's it's relaxing for me. That's that's what I want to do on a Saturday afternoon. If I've if I've got a moment and I've got it to myself, especially if there's a farmer's market in town or something like that, I want to go get a. pork belly and just start marinating that or start, you know, you know what? I've got some brioche. I've got eggs.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I've never done an almond bread pudding before. Let's try that with me with the crispy top. Ooh, I'll make a cartouche on the top and sort of steam it in a bain-marie first and I'll take it off. And ooh, what about a bourbon caramel? So like I get and I don't what drives me crazy sometimes is that then I don't eat it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Right. I love process. I love one thing becoming another thing. Well, it's kind of like doing the show. You get there in the morning and there's, I don't know, maybe nine stories that are generally dominating the conversation over the last 24 hours. We have good pitches on six of them and three of them then dominate the monologue because we've boiled it all down.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
We've taken – that's why I like the show Chopped because they take – You have these baskets at the beginning of the show where there's like – you have octopus and licorice and you have smoked salt. Here, make an entree or whatever. That's what doing the show is like. And kind of you have to love process to do a show on a daily basis. And that's related to – food for me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
One thing becomes another thing with a little care, a little love, and a little imagination. And I find it incredibly smoothing. Smoothing. It's also smoothing. It's also bloating. But it's also incredibly soothing to me. And then I'll just try to go give the food away.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I would say often. Well, I'm experimenting. I'm imagining what it's going to be like. Sometimes it doesn't work. Things don't always work out, Terry.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Yes. When I was a kid, my, you know, again, 11 kids and also Catholic, so, you know, no meat on Fridays. We had so many Mrs. Paul's or like Gorton's fish sticks. I think it was Mrs. Paul's fish sticks growing up. And my mother, her idea of making you fancy. And I'm sure she saw this too.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
the serving suggestion on like on the back of the package with some partnership with Campbell because it would take a can of Campbell's condensed tomato soup and you would just heat up the condensed soup and ladle that over the fish sticks as the sauce.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
No, no. No, that's if you're making soup, not if you're making a delicious remoulade.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Oh, exactly. Exactly. I'm a creature of pure sodium by the time I was 10.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
But, you know, that also, this is the thing that even I, as a child who just would eat anything you put in front of me, spaghetti with ketchup.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Oh, my God. We got that all the time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I'm like, I don't understand what's happening. But I would, of course, have to eat it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And it would be steamed with vinegar.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I can't speak to your experience because that's your experience, but certainly for the business that I'm in, this is one of the more normative jobs you can have because you know where you're going and you know when you're coming home. And the hours may be long, but at least you can plan your life.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I'm not in Sarajevo shooting Game of Thrones.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Unless they want to cast me. And then to hell with all of this TV stuff. I'm a star.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I don't think because our – or I'll just speak for me. I don't think because of who my father was, was I expected to be a model child. I think the same – I mean, first of all, I think we were all 11 children in the family. I think we were all held to the same standard. I think I had a slightly different relationship with my dad than my other brothers and sisters did because I was the last. They –
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
They used to say, I can't believe dad took you to the carnival. Like, dad hates carnivals. Or I can't believe dad went to the beach with you or something like that. But my father had a sense that, you know, this is his last bite at the apple. And to do those fatherly things with me. Because my father died when I was young. It's not so much I was held to a standard that I had to match him.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
It's that when your parent dies when you're young, they become Olympian. Or there's something much larger than life, which of course is how a child sees their parent. But you never get to move beyond that. So as you get older, they also get larger.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
So as your view of the world or what you believe is asked of you to be an adult, at least for me, my father inflated ahead of me and became even grander in a way. If there was any standard placed on me, it was placed on me by myself. My mother was not asking me to be a certain person because of who my father was. I did it to myself because of the person I perceived my father to be.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And I actually don't think I'm very far off. I think he was an extraordinary man. But I think that's self-imposed on my part.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And for me, because I wanted to know my father, even though I was robbed that ability to move beyond the childhood view of him, because I wanted to know him, I grabbed onto the little things that I did know about him. For instance, my father's idea of fun was to read philosophy. He really, would enjoy sitting down with Jacques Maritain or Léon Blois or other French Christian humanists.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And so that's what I read. I read a lot of books. I knew that he had lived a life of the mind, so that's what I wanted to do. It was important to be smart. My father was a dean, an assistant dean at Yale Medical when he was 29. He was a full dean at 31. at St. Louis. And so he was this academic superstar, which I never was, but he was this academic superstar and a deep thinker.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And I aspired for that in hopes of knowing him. And often it was religiously based. He was Jesuit educated and my mother and my father both profoundly dedicated to their Catholic faith in different ways. My father more intellectually and my mother more sort of mystically in a way, though she also read a great deal, but more Dorothy Day.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And I think I was most influenced by the little bit I knew that I used as a thread to pull on to try to understand him. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Sure. Conan was there. Jimmy Fallon was there. Chris Rock was there.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Well, first, if I could just back up just slightly here, I'm willing to talk about my own faith if my guest asks me about it. I don't like to proselytize. And I'll make any jokes about the Catholic Church. You know, I don't – they deserve a lot of them. And I am deeply Catholic in that it is combed into my being, but I don't know how deeply devout I am.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I know people who are really deeply devout and I wouldn't want to – I just don't want to confuse myself with someone who is a very devoted Catholic, a devout, I mean. But I have become friends with Father Jim Martin over the years, who's sort of like the Broadway priest in New York. And he's the editor of America Magazine. And he was the chaplain of the Colbert Report on the old show.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And, you know, we've become dear friends over the years. And he just wrote me one day. I actually got the email right before I went on stage at the Late Show one night saying, hey, the Vatican has asked me to put together a list of like 20 comedians because the pope wants to meet with some comedians. Would you mind helping with that? And I was like, yeah, sure. Sure.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
So I put a list together of 40 comedians. They sent me back a list of 15 or 20, something like that. Like they'd made their selects of my selects and with a few of their own. And Jim Gaffigan and I called everybody on the list and we said, hey, we don't really know what this is about, but the Pope wants to meet comedians.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
because he thinks that comedians do something valuable in society and he just wants to meet us. Now, I thought we were going to go to Rome and like hang with the Pope. I don't know why I thought that. I thought that maybe we'd like sit there and we'd have coffee or tea with the Pope and he would ask us some questions, then we would get a photo and leave.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
It turns out that these were comedians from all over the world. It was like from 60 countries. And the pope had a meeting in the Apostolic Palace with us. There was – I think altogether it was like 110 comedians. And we all didn't know what was going on. And we all sat there and the pope came in and he gave –
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
A beautiful speech about comedy that we did not understand at all, that we read later, that was about how – Because it was in Italian? It was in solamente in italiano. And it was about how comedy, I think, eases people's day. And it is like the social lubricant.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And it's okay to make fun of God and the church and the pope and all that kind of stuff as long as, like, you do it with a smile and there's some intention to make people feel better. And what struck me was – It's like your philosophy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Yeah, I would like to think so. And what struck me is that we're in this room, which is about the size of the Sistine Chapel. And it's actually down the hall from the Sistine Chapel. And it's more Rococo than it is, you know, late Renaissance. But it's beautiful. It's like you're in another Sistine Chapel. And we're all sitting there in our Sunday best, as it were, waiting for the pope to come in.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
But comedians are all iconoclasts. We're all people who have a pretty jaundiced view of authority. And I know that some of the people there weren't Catholic or weren't meaningfully Catholic, at least by their own description, anymore. And the minute the pope came in, we all leapt to our feet. Like, the iconoclasm went out the door.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
We all just leapt to our feet and started applauding and, like, screaming. I thought, wow. That's the effect the Pope has on 110 comedians. Like it was it was it was almost like an autonomic response because you've spent all this. It's like the location. It's the it's the red shoes. It's the white outfit. It's all the it's all like the guys with the sashes around you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
The Pope's gentlemen who all look like butlers and everything. We were all I was sort of shocked that we we all kind of gave into it immediately. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I did. I did. I memorized something in Italian. I went up and I said, you know, Sancte Padre, you know, Holy Father, my name is Stephen Colbert, and I am the reciting – I'm the voce recitante. I'm the reciting voice for your memoir, Life, because he had released a memoir of his life in the spring.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And I had gotten a call from my manager to say, baby doll, you're not going to believe who wants you to do their audio book. Right. And I'm like, who? And he goes, just guess. I'm like, I don't know. Barbra Streisand. No. And he goes, the f***ing Pope. And I go, does it pay? And he goes, you better believe. So anyway, so he negotiates with the Vatican for my contract. And I read the Pope.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
So I just said, I read your book. You know, I thank so much. I was reciting voice for your book. And he said, ah, I kind of used his hand to guide me to the side. So that was it. That's all I got. It wasn't that. It was very nice. And he gave me a rosary. We all got rosaries blessed by the Pope.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Well, most of the book is comfort food.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I've got so many in there. It's probably the red rice. You know, growing up on the coast of South Carolina, just anywhere in the South, there's so much red rice. And it has its roots in Jolof rice of West Africa. But it's super... jammy and a little spicy and salty.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And I had it almost every day growing up at Stiles Point Elementary School on Michael Drive on James Island, South Carolina, which is still there. And there were just barrels of it being cooked every day by those lunch ladies. And I never got tired of it. And right before this book, I actually found a way to make it based on an Alison Roman recipe.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
that I said, ooh, that sauce she's making for the pasta actually has the flavor I remember as a child from this red rice. And I tried it and it worked. And that discovery of being able to get that flavor back from my childhood, those carefree years is what that rice gives me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And that's what COVID did. We were back there in Charleston on that island with our families, with the people who had taught us to make these recipes. and made these for us when we were children, and with those ingredients from that field and that creek. And it was a terrible time that had in it this gift to us for us to slow down, go home, and remember.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Which we had been so afraid to do, or at least I had been afraid to do, because I was so nervous the first time Evie was on that she wouldn't have a good time. It's actually made it to air, her going, oh, my God, you're trembling. I'm like, I'm afraid this is going to be a bad experience for you because I'm bossy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And an enormous amount of work, and I just could not be more – I could not have more admiration for the people who do this for a living because we had no idea what a huge undertaking is to do all these books. A lot of detail in a cookbook. Oh, my God. Three years to do this.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
You really do. It makes a difference.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Six ways to Sunday. It went through us. We'd make it many times. And then through our niece, Lucy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
Our niece, Lucy Wickman, was fabulous. She helped test it, everything.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
And then all of that would go on to Chris Styler, who is a professional test kitchen, essentially. And he would say, is this what it's supposed to look and taste like? And we'd go, no. And then he would say, then you need to rewrite this recipe. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Billie Eilish & Finneas / The Colbert Cookbook
I would say often. Well, I'm experimenting.
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