Name: Senator Chris Murphy SHOCKS Adam
Uploaded: 2025-10-26T13:01:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Senator Chris Murphy SHOCKS Adam' from TAFS Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Senator Chris Murphy SHOCKS Adam' from TAFS Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-26. Transcript available.

You talk a lot about loneliness, it's been like a topic that you've been
highlighting.
And I saw somewhere that you wanted to have a minister of loneliness.
I didn't want to have a minister of loneliness.
I saw that.
But first of all, that's English.
We have secretaries.
It might have been characterized as a minister of loneliness.
No, I have proposed that you should have an office at the White House and the
federal
government that thinks about how policies make it easier or harder for people
to connect
to other human beings.
And is it just one guy sitting there?
No, not one guy.
It was going to be a committee.
I'm not saying it was going to solve the problem.
I just think that you should have some place where you talk about the fact that
the thing
that matters most to us when it comes to our happiness is not our job or our
career, how
much money we make, but our relationships.
And it's a little weird to me that we spend no time in government talking about
how our
policies increasingly make it hard for people to find companionship.
So yeah, there was a headline that was like, "Chris Murphy wants the government
to help you
make friends."
That sounds like a bullshit use of government power, but it is true that we
should probably
think more about the way in which government is making it harder for people to
connect with
each other.
Did you ever think about who you would make the minister of loneliness?
There's no minister of loneliness.
I was thinking ex-tentacion, but he's dead.
Jeb Bush would be good.
Jeb, he seems like a nice guy.
Do you ever please clap?
He seems like a nice guy.
Oprah?
Oprah?
I was looking up good ideas for minister of loneliness.
Apparently, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has been very open about his struggles
with depression.
Yeah.
I'm open for applications for this position that doesn't actually exist and I
haven't
proposed.
I could do it.
Yeah.
You could do a hat.
I'll do that and Ambassador of Brazil.
And do the show.
And the show.
Jewish YouTube talk show, Ambassador of Brazil, Loneliest Man in America.
But when I, the first time I ever wrote anything about loneliness was like this
short little
article called "The Politics of Loneliness," basically saying the government
should pay attention
to how lonely people are today.
I had more feedback to that article than maybe anything else I had written
because in their
daily lives, especially parents, are seeing how catastrophic it is that we
spend, in some
instances, 50% less time with friends than we did just 30 years ago.
And that has consequences for our health, for our politics.
Yeah.
A lot of those folks who showed up on January 6th were pretty lonely, lonely
people.
They didn't have any friends?
I mean, some of them, I imagine.
Come on, dude.
Come on, dude.
Some of them, I imagine, had some struggles.
They're losers.
Some struggles.
Some struggles socially.
You're saying they're absolute losers.
You're saying that loneliness, that when you feel lonely.
I heard some popular guys were there, too.
When you feel lonely, you feel sad, but then you feel angry and you're looking
for an outlet.
Well, I think beyond loneliness to me, I think it's a seminal issue of our time,
genuinely.
Yeah.
But I think that it needs to be viewed as a symptom, perhaps.
Data will tell you that people have been retreating from companionship since
another seminal
event, which is the invention of a smartphone.
I think it was trending that way.
Yeah.
And I think it fell off the cliff when people were at home for two years.
No, 100%.
I mean, so I experienced it as a human being and as a parent, and I saw the
damage it did
to my kids and their friends.
And so when we wrote the sort of COVID rescue bill right after Biden was sworn
in, I really
spent all my political capital pushing for one thing, and it was a fund for
summer camps.
Yeah.
Just to put as many kids as we could that summer of 2021 into summer camps,
especially as many
poor kids as we could who had really been home alone.
And their families were dying.
And their families were sick or their parents were essential workers.
So they, you know, the kids were home alone.
Their grandparents died.
Right.
So that's all I was focused on was like, get kids into summer camp.
Yeah.
So it's a, and I remember talking right after the pandemic to these
kindergarten, first grade
teachers who are getting kids back from the pandemic.
And they were just like, we will never be able to make up for the lost time
that like a
three, four or five year old lost.
A third of your life.
Social is it.
Right.
They basically showed up at school without basic socialization skills, which
meant they
couldn't learn.
And they were just behind without really the ability to catch up their entire
career.
And that's the reality for millions of kids in this country.
Yeah.
So I think like the way we discuss a lot of these problems is like we're
trimming leaves
and that we, there's something at the trunk.
And I, I think like when we talk about in cells or like when we talk about
basement dwellers,
or we talk, we, we, we're talking about people that are kind of squeezed out of
the economy,
like that labor can't absorb, you know, the economy can't absorb labor at the
same rate
that it used to.
And we're talking about people that have kind of been squeezed out of society
by various
circumstances.
And like, I think it's like a little bit like we're just addressing the, you
know, the result
and we're not addressing like, you know, kind of human way or like a, you know,
moral way,
you know, like what people have, what has led people here, you know?
But don't, but don't you think it goes even deeper than that?
Yeah.
I mean, I do think that there's this transition that happens from the middle of
the century
to later in the century where, you know, we cared much more about our neighbors
and the
community and the common good.
And we eventually got taught that really the only thing that mattered was
profit and efficiency
and our personal achievement.
And we started to sort of separate as a, as a, as a culture, as we became
obsessed with our own
individual achievement.
This is not helped by kind of like the self-help revolution where we're told
that if you're
feeling bad, what you need to do is just retreat into yourself instead of
joining with others.
And we just over time become a culture that is, that is really self obsessive.
And, and we don't see as much health, personal health in socialization.
And so I think you, and then you layer smartphones and the pandemic on top of
that, that cultural
shift that happens and we're screwed.
So we need China, we need China to take it, take Twitter away.
I don't know that China, yeah.
I think Xi.
So just say it to him right now when he's watching.
Xi, just come over and take the phone away.
It would be much better if it, if it went away, but it will be replaced by
something else.
So the only solution here ultimately is for, I hate to say it, but for
government to come
in and say, here are the rules, right?
I mean, here's who can be on social media.
Here's how kids can interact with it.
Here's what it can deliver to kids.
Give at least young people a fighting shot so that they're not addicted when
they become 18.
You've been in Congress 20 years, the legislative branch 20 years.
Yeah.
Right?
And the perception of that as an institution is that it's decayed or crumbled
in that period.
Does it feel that way for you as someone that goes to the office there?
Like, does it feel like it's, you know?
Sure.
Very rarely pass legislation.
Much more of my life now is about critiquing the other side than sitting down
and actually
passing things that make people's lives better.
How does it feel like, as a guy, like to be part of like something like that?
Do...
Yeah, it feels, yeah.
It's not what I signed up for.
Do you feel like we suck?
Well, I mean, I...
A couple years ago, I mean, I really deliberately decided to bend over
backwards to try to get
in those rare rooms where the deals get cut.
And I did that for a handful of years and I got good at it.
And for that period of time, whether it was on the gun bill...
Oh, the cigar place?
You go to the cigar...
Those things?
Back room?
Yeah, there are legitimate still back rooms in that place.
And you do cigars?
No cigars.
But there's booze.
Booze?
Yeah.
And you and McConnell are like, this is...
McConnell was not in any of the rooms that I was in.
But no, there are still places, they're much more rare, where deals get cut.
And I decided to very deliberately try to get in those rooms for a period of
time.
And then Trump got elected and those rooms completely disappeared.
And it felt like the job was just to try to protect democracy.
But yeah, I made the decision to be more purposeful about that work because the
job was feeling
pretty empty.
Do you feel like it's the hardest era?
You know, like in the NBA they're saying there's a lot of debate between the eras?
Like Jordan versus LeBron?
No, there was an era...
Do you feel like you're playing in the hardest era?
There was an era where senators were getting caned over the head, right?
Was that...
Yeah.
I would argue that...
Have two senators ever hooked up?
Or like congressmen or anything?
Sure.
Really?
Of course.
People that were married.
They got married.
They met at congress?
I think this is right.
I think...
Sonny...
Right?
Who?
Sonny Bono?
Sonny Bono and Mary Bono.
Oh.
Right?
Oh, and he died in the skiing accident.
I got you, babe.
Yeah, that's a song.
That's a song he did.
You gotta make a movie.
This is a movie.
It might be.
Do you like romantic comedies?
Yeah.
What kind of movies do you like?
What kind of movies do you like?
What kind of movies do you like?
I kind of lost all...
I can't like sit through more than about half an hour these days.
Yeah.
So...
So you like TV shows?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just...
You don't have...
Zero Day.
I just started that on Netflix.
What's that?
About Ben Laden?
No.
It's about like a...
Robert De Niro...
Yeah.
A cyber...
Cyber attack.
Sick.
Yeah.
No.
All right.
I want to kind of get into some...
Like the bigger kind of existential questions.
Like, it's breaking.
Yeah.
Right?
Do you think...
Can you...
Can you fix it?
Is it really?
I know you're gonna say yes.
But like actually like...
It must be impossible.
Yes, you can actually...
It must be impossible.
You can actually fix it.
Right?
So...
What is the first structural thing that you would...
That you would like change about the government?
Okay.
So you're not talking about how do you defeat the sort of slide to totalitarianism.
We're talking about how do you fix the actual...
There's shit that just...
Project of democracy.
There are a ton of things in the rules that are implemented that fuck shit
working in
the legislative branch or the executive branch now and like...
So there are some things that you can do internally.
Right?
So I am a believer that the Senate should be a majoritarian institution,
ultimately a place
where 50 votes passes a piece of legislation so you can't blame the minority.
Should the Senate even exist?
Yeah.
It seems kind of bullshit.
Yeah.
I think the Senate should probably still exist.
Wyoming gets as much as California?
That's not fair.
Well, we decided...
Right?
The founders decided to make it really hard to pass legislation in this country.
To free the slaves.
Right?
No.
And the design...
The design was...
The design was likely to make it hard to free the slaves.
But they didn't have toilet paper.
But the design was also because they believed that a faction could very easily
corrupt a single
parliamentary system and transition democracy into autocracy.
So by setting up a really complicated system of government with two houses and
a president,
they thought it was actually protective of democracy.
And I think 250 years into the experiment, you have to come to the conclusion
that they
were right, no matter how inefficient having a house in the Senate and a
presidential signature
is.
But haven't we seen, especially during the McConnell reign, like it kind of be
a bottleneck?
Yes.
Which is why ultimately you should get rid of the filibuster and allow for 50
votes in the
Senate to be able to pass something.
But really, the foundational reform is the way that campaigns are financed.
And you've got to pass a constitutional amendment to do that.
And I think the only way the Democrats are going to be able to interest people
in this country
in saving democracy is to be really specific about what we're going to change.
And I think that requires either a constitutional amendment or a constitutional
convention to
essentially allow the legislature to ban private money, corporate money, lobbyist
money,
anonymous money from politics.
I think if you did that, that's probably the most sort of significant bomb on
the system.

Senator Chris Murphy SHOCKS Adam

You talk a lot about loneliness, it's been like a topic that you've been
highlighting.
And I saw somewhere that you wanted to have a minister of loneliness.
I didn't want to have a minister of loneliness.
I saw that.
But first of all, that's English.
We have secretaries.
It might have been characterized as a minister of loneliness.
No, I have proposed that you should have an office at the White House and the
federal
government that thinks about how policies make it easier or harder for people
to connect
to other human beings.
And is it just one guy sitting there?
No, not one guy.
It was going to be a committee.
I'm not saying it was going to solve the problem.
I just think that you should have some place where you talk about the fact that
the thing
that matters most to us when it comes to our happiness is not our job or our
career, how
much money we make, but our relationships.
And it's a little weird to me that we spend no time in government talking about
how our
policies increasingly make it hard for people to find companionship.
So yeah, there was a headline that was like, "Chris Murphy wants the government
to help you
make friends."
That sounds like a bullshit use of government power, but it is true that we
should probably
think more about the way in which government is making it harder for people to
connect with
each other.
Did you ever think about who you would make the minister of loneliness?
There's no minister of loneliness.
I was thinking ex-tentacion, but he's dead.
Jeb Bush would be good.
Jeb, he seems like a nice guy.
Do you ever please clap?
He seems like a nice guy.
Oprah?
Oprah?
I was looking up good ideas for minister of loneliness.
Apparently, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has been very open about his struggles
with depression.
Yeah.
I'm open for applications for this position that doesn't actually exist and I
haven't
proposed.
I could do it.
Yeah.
You could do a hat.
I'll do that and Ambassador of Brazil.
And do the show.
And the show.
Jewish YouTube talk show, Ambassador of Brazil, Loneliest Man in America.
But when I, the first time I ever wrote anything about loneliness was like this
short little
article called "The Politics of Loneliness," basically saying the government
should pay attention
to how lonely people are today.
I had more feedback to that article than maybe anything else I had written
because in their
daily lives, especially parents, are seeing how catastrophic it is that we
spend, in some
instances, 50% less time with friends than we did just 30 years ago.
And that has consequences for our health, for our politics.
Yeah.
A lot of those folks who showed up on January 6th were pretty lonely, lonely
people.
They didn't have any friends?
I mean, some of them, I imagine.
Come on, dude.
Come on, dude.
Some of them, I imagine, had some struggles.
They're losers.
Some struggles.
Some struggles socially.
You're saying they're absolute losers.
You're saying that loneliness, that when you feel lonely.
I heard some popular guys were there, too.
When you feel lonely, you feel sad, but then you feel angry and you're looking
for an outlet.
Well, I think beyond loneliness to me, I think it's a seminal issue of our time,
genuinely.
Yeah.
But I think that it needs to be viewed as a symptom, perhaps.
Data will tell you that people have been retreating from companionship since
another seminal
event, which is the invention of a smartphone.
I think it was trending that way.
Yeah.
And I think it fell off the cliff when people were at home for two years.
No, 100%.
I mean, so I experienced it as a human being and as a parent, and I saw the
damage it did
to my kids and their friends.
And so when we wrote the sort of COVID rescue bill right after Biden was sworn
in, I really
spent all my political capital pushing for one thing, and it was a fund for
summer camps.
Yeah.
Just to put as many kids as we could that summer of 2021 into summer camps,
especially as many
poor kids as we could who had really been home alone.
And their families were dying.
And their families were sick or their parents were essential workers.
So they, you know, the kids were home alone.
Their grandparents died.
Right.
So that's all I was focused on was like, get kids into summer camp.
Yeah.
So it's a, and I remember talking right after the pandemic to these
kindergarten, first grade
teachers who are getting kids back from the pandemic.
And they were just like, we will never be able to make up for the lost time
that like a
three, four or five year old lost.
A third of your life.
Social is it.
Right.
They basically showed up at school without basic socialization skills, which
meant they
couldn't learn.
And they were just behind without really the ability to catch up their entire
career.
And that's the reality for millions of kids in this country.
Yeah.
So I think like the way we discuss a lot of these problems is like we're
trimming leaves
and that we, there's something at the trunk.
And I, I think like when we talk about in cells or like when we talk about
basement dwellers,
or we talk, we, we, we're talking about people that are kind of squeezed out of
the economy,
like that labor can't absorb, you know, the economy can't absorb labor at the
same rate
that it used to.
And we're talking about people that have kind of been squeezed out of society
by various
circumstances.
And like, I think it's like a little bit like we're just addressing the, you
know, the result
and we're not addressing like, you know, kind of human way or like a, you know,
moral way,
you know, like what people have, what has led people here, you know?
But don't, but don't you think it goes even deeper than that?
Yeah.
I mean, I do think that there's this transition that happens from the middle of
the century
to later in the century where, you know, we cared much more about our neighbors
and the
community and the common good.
And we eventually got taught that really the only thing that mattered was
profit and efficiency
and our personal achievement.
And we started to sort of separate as a, as a, as a culture, as we became
obsessed with our own
individual achievement.
This is not helped by kind of like the self-help revolution where we're told
that if you're
feeling bad, what you need to do is just retreat into yourself instead of
joining with others.
And we just over time become a culture that is, that is really self obsessive.
And, and we don't see as much health, personal health in socialization.
And so I think you, and then you layer smartphones and the pandemic on top of
that, that cultural
shift that happens and we're screwed.
So we need China, we need China to take it, take Twitter away.
I don't know that China, yeah.
I think Xi.
So just say it to him right now when he's watching.
Xi, just come over and take the phone away.
It would be much better if it, if it went away, but it will be replaced by
something else.
So the only solution here ultimately is for, I hate to say it, but for
government to come
in and say, here are the rules, right?
I mean, here's who can be on social media.
Here's how kids can interact with it.
Here's what it can deliver to kids.
Give at least young people a fighting shot so that they're not addicted when
they become 18.
You've been in Congress 20 years, the legislative branch 20 years.
Yeah.
Right?
And the perception of that as an institution is that it's decayed or crumbled
in that period.
Does it feel that way for you as someone that goes to the office there?
Like, does it feel like it's, you know?
Sure.
Very rarely pass legislation.
Much more of my life now is about critiquing the other side than sitting down
and actually
passing things that make people's lives better.
How does it feel like, as a guy, like to be part of like something like that?
Do...
Yeah, it feels, yeah.
It's not what I signed up for.
Do you feel like we suck?
Well, I mean, I...
A couple years ago, I mean, I really deliberately decided to bend over
backwards to try to get
in those rare rooms where the deals get cut.
And I did that for a handful of years and I got good at it.
And for that period of time, whether it was on the gun bill...
Oh, the cigar place?
You go to the cigar...
Those things?
Back room?
Yeah, there are legitimate still back rooms in that place.
And you do cigars?
No cigars.
But there's booze.
Booze?
Yeah.
And you and McConnell are like, this is...
McConnell was not in any of the rooms that I was in.
But no, there are still places, they're much more rare, where deals get cut.
And I decided to very deliberately try to get in those rooms for a period of
time.
And then Trump got elected and those rooms completely disappeared.
And it felt like the job was just to try to protect democracy.
But yeah, I made the decision to be more purposeful about that work because the
job was feeling
pretty empty.
Do you feel like it's the hardest era?
You know, like in the NBA they're saying there's a lot of debate between the eras?
Like Jordan versus LeBron?
No, there was an era...
Do you feel like you're playing in the hardest era?
There was an era where senators were getting caned over the head, right?
Was that...
Yeah.
I would argue that...
Have two senators ever hooked up?
Or like congressmen or anything?
Sure.
Really?
Of course.
People that were married.
They got married.
They met at congress?
I think this is right.
I think...
Sonny...
Right?
Who?
Sonny Bono?
Sonny Bono and Mary Bono.
Oh.
Right?
Oh, and he died in the skiing accident.
I got you, babe.
Yeah, that's a song.
That's a song he did.
You gotta make a movie.
This is a movie.
It might be.
Do you like romantic comedies?
Yeah.
What kind of movies do you like?
What kind of movies do you like?
What kind of movies do you like?
I kind of lost all...
I can't like sit through more than about half an hour these days.
Yeah.
So...
So you like TV shows?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just...
You don't have...
Zero Day.
I just started that on Netflix.
What's that?
About Ben Laden?
No.
It's about like a...
Robert De Niro...
Yeah.
A cyber...
Cyber attack.
Sick.
Yeah.
No.
All right.
I want to kind of get into some...
Like the bigger kind of existential questions.
Like, it's breaking.
Yeah.
Right?
Do you think...
Can you...
Can you fix it?
Is it really?
I know you're gonna say yes.
But like actually like...
It must be impossible.
Yes, you can actually...
It must be impossible.
You can actually fix it.
Right?
So...
What is the first structural thing that you would...
That you would like change about the government?
Okay.
So you're not talking about how do you defeat the sort of slide to totalitarianism.
We're talking about how do you fix the actual...
There's shit that just...
Project of democracy.
There are a ton of things in the rules that are implemented that fuck shit
working in
the legislative branch or the executive branch now and like...
So there are some things that you can do internally.
Right?
So I am a believer that the Senate should be a majoritarian institution,
ultimately a place
where 50 votes passes a piece of legislation so you can't blame the minority.
Should the Senate even exist?
Yeah.
It seems kind of bullshit.
Yeah.
I think the Senate should probably still exist.
Wyoming gets as much as California?
That's not fair.
Well, we decided...
Right?
The founders decided to make it really hard to pass legislation in this country.
To free the slaves.
Right?
No.
And the design...
The design was...
The design was likely to make it hard to free the slaves.
But they didn't have toilet paper.
But the design was also because they believed that a faction could very easily
corrupt a single
parliamentary system and transition democracy into autocracy.
So by setting up a really complicated system of government with two houses and
a president,
they thought it was actually protective of democracy.
And I think 250 years into the experiment, you have to come to the conclusion
that they
were right, no matter how inefficient having a house in the Senate and a
presidential signature
is.
But haven't we s