Bassem Youssef
speaker
1,048 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard 5 Jun
Bassem Youssef’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And then 2011... Like I had a friend of mine who was also a YouTube partner. It was something new at the time. He said like, let's do something on internet. Let's do something. I said like, I want to do John Stewart. It's like, do Ray William Johnson. John Stewart will not work.
Yeah, it was in there.
Depends on which side.
Did something happen or what?
Depends which side of the equation you are. Because for a lot of people, it's a conspiracy. It's American made. It is the Muslim Brotherhood. It's the Islamists. It is Israel. It is everything else other than people. Oh, but it's a pure revolution. It's a pure... I think we put too much weight on conspiracies.
I think it is normal human behavior that then become, get maybe used or abused or taken advantage of by other powers and then the conspiracy starts. But at the time, The Arab Spring didn't start in Egypt, it started in Tunisia. Bouaziza, a fruit vendor, burned himself up, like the American soldiers who did that a few days ago, and that kind of sparked protests in Tunisia.
And Ben Ali was a dictator in Tunisia for about 20 years, and they removed him. So suddenly it was kind of like a domino effect. So then Egypt started, and it just took 18 days. And, you know, people, hindsight is 20-20. Saints said, like, you know, just Mubarak became like a burden on the military, because the military are the real rulers of the country.
You might have a president that kind of like have certain powers, but at the end of the day, when the military sees that a certain president is like too much of a burden, too much of like a... So they cut him off. And Mubarak is the leader of Egypt. At that time. He was there for 30 years. 30 years.
And it's a joke that I say also, like, Mubarak was a president for 30 years.
It's like, we're still warming up, baby. And I tell them, like, we need to plan ahead. We need to plan our vacations, our careers, our jail time. It's just like, we need to... So we had kind of like the shortest, nicest revolution, 18 days. And we thought, oh, 18 days, we can change the country in 18 days. So, but of course we were naive and we had this kind of hope. So Mubarak was removed.
There was an interim period by the military, took it for one year. Then they did elections. Muslim Brotherhood came to power. They stayed for one year, and then the military removed them. And in these three years, my show started. It started by kind of like a YouTube video. It became famous overnight. Overnight. Five to six videos, boom, went out.
And at that time, I was waiting to get my clearance to go to Cleveland. I was accepted in a fellowship as a pediatric heart surgery in a hospital in Cleveland.
And I said, all right, I'm just gonna do a couple of videos, maybe I'm gonna put it in the internet, and maybe after a year or two, after I come back from the fellowship, somebody will come, hey, why don't you write a show that looks like Jon Stewart? That was my mind. Took five weeks. I had my first contract of television, and overnight, The exposure.
And over the next two, three years, I had 30 to 40 million people watching every episode. A lot of people are like, wow, that's too much.
Because it means that there are 30 million people who have an opinion about you.
It's toxic. It's toxic. It's unnatural. It's unnatural. When people started to recognize me in the street and take pictures, I was awkward. It's like, why do you want to have a picture with me? Why? Why is it? Because I didn't feel that I'm worthy enough to be like a reward for someone to have a picture. And I didn't understand it.
I was actually, I was kind of an ass sometimes because people thought it was arrogance. No, it was confusion. And I remember like my director and my producers and people around, they always saw me in a very bad mood. It's like, why are you not enjoying this? It's like, because this is not natural.
Because at a certain point, you are human. And people kind of the adoration and the fun and the love comes because they see you saying stuff because you do your job basically. Political satire is basically us making fun of politicians in the media. And a lot of people have really strong opinions about politicians in the media.
So we came that, we articulate that and we give it to them and we make them laugh. So for them, we made a great job. So why don't you do more? But you are limited. And at a certain time, you can't. And at a certain time, you're afraid because we're humans. Because you're afraid about like, if I continue speaking up, not like something will happen to me.
I'm kind of like maybe have some protection because people see me. But what are the people around you?
Showing 801–820 of 1,048 · page 41 of 53
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