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thank you so much for having me on bbc hardtalk. it is a great pleasure. i think it s fair to say, bassem, a lot has happened in the last seven years or so since you left your home country, egypt. when you consider your life today, how much emotional pull does your home country have on you as you sit there in california 7 well, much less than in the past. i think this was an interesting journey for me. the past ten years, i have gone into changes in my life that i have never thought i would ever go through. i was a heart surgeon, and then i found myself hosting the biggest show in the middle east and then having to leave all of that behind and come to reinvent myself and start all over again in a country that is not mine, performing to an audience that s not mine, with a language that s my second language. so i m kind of like, i m in a place now that i m kind of like looking forward instead of looking back. well, i m sad to say i m going to make you look back a little b ....
it s time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i m stephen sackur. the world s autocrats do not like to be laughed at. now, that is a political reality my guest today, bassem youssef, understands all too well cos he made his name and won an audience of tens of millions with a satirical comedy show during egypt s popular uprising more than a decade ago. but that revolution quickly morphed into authoritarianism, and youssef fled to the us, taking his gift for comedy with him. did he and do we still expect too much from political satire? bassem youssef in los angeles, welcome to hardtalk. thank you so much for having me on bbc hardtalk. it is a great pleasure. i think it s fair to say, bassem, a lot has happened in the last seven years or so since you left your home country, egypt. when you consider your life today, how much emotional pull does your home country have on you as you sit there in california? well, much less than in the past. i think this was an interesting jour ....
grew up in or charity you have long supported. they are very different. if you are episcopalian you kno exactly what we are talking about. if you get in to the sierra clu and protect the sierras, you ge it too. everywhere in this country formally respectable organization seem to have gone off the deep end. have you listen to national public radio recently? npr was always a little nutty, but in a familiar, nonthreatening kind of way. the public radio station ran niche cultural programming most of the time. the celtic music hour or bluegrass show. for decades public radio s most popular feature was something called car talk. remember that? a show where two italian mechanics from boston argued about the relative merits of fuel injection. they gave you free advice on ho to fix your honda. and then in the morning on driv time all npr stations aired the news from washington. there was the morning edition i the morning. there was all things considered on the trip home. and tim ....
border crisis like they did when trump was in office. todd: biden s family scandals, new emails showing hunter biden may have been trying to profit off of his family name more than the white house and the media want to admit. a bombshell new report. carley: you are watching fox and friends first this friday morning. todd: the white house accused of rushing to clear out the russian that is the haitian migrant camp because it makes the biden administration look bad. carley: upland black lives matter protest may have been the motivation behind the sudden scramble. reporter: there may be no one left in the camp by the time the blm protesters get there and the administration is in a mad rush to clear out the horrific optics of the third world conditions they were living in. lay satirists suggest 3000 remain now. and official telling the washington examiner, quote, they don t want them riled up at the time of the protest, that comes to fruition. 1400 haitians back to hait ....
what is your view? is it the end of humanity or a bit more of a benign force? well, it could be somewhere in between, i would say. i mean, ithink, like a lot of people, so i ve toyed around with like the chat bots and things, and things like that, chatgpt. we d actually, we d wrapped on this latest series of black mirror and then, and then the next month chatg pt came out. one of our episodes is quite timely. there s a sort of ai generated imagery thing going on in one of our episodes. but i toyed around with chatgpt and you sort of type in like, come up with a black mirror storyline, or something like that or, say something in the style of philomena cunk, or something like that, and it will do, it will spit out something that at first glance you get a kind of sudden spike of dread and think, that s it, i m out of a job, this thing has replaced me, because it looks convincing. but that s really. where we re at at the moment, that s really what it s doing, it s jus ....