♪ anchor: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." jeffrey: good evening. charlie is traveling and i'm jeffrey goldberg of "the atlantic." we begin this evening with politics. president trump's approval numbers continue to drift downward even among the previous loyal base that won him the election. according to a new cbs news poll, only 36% of americans support his performance so far. the trump administration continues to endure heightened scrutiny over ties with russia as robert mueller's investigation begins to ramp up. voters have gone to the polls today in georgia's nationally watched special election in the

vacant house seat. joining me now from washington is shannon pettypiece, a white house correspondent for "bloomberg news." welcome. can we turn right away to one of the president's most recent tweets? i want to read it to you. it refers to the north korea crisis. "while i greatly appreciate the efforts of china to help with north korea, it has not worked out. at least i know china tried!" is there any reaction to this extraordinary tweet? as a foreign-policy person, i have to say, you very rarely see a president writing off the most important diplomatic intervention we could possibly imagine, china getting north korea under control, and saying, oh well, that is all she wrote, moving on? shannon: right. taking to twitter, more evidence

that world war iii will be announced on twitter with this president publicly communicating with other countries on twitter as a main means of contact at this point. i think a few things stood out from the tweet. number one, who could have guessed that in a few months, china would be unable to reign in north korea. it is not like this is an issue that just started. and two, this opens up the door, your whole north korea strategy was about convincing china to be able to intervene here and strong-arm north korea into doing something and now you are essentially writing that off the table with this tweet. saying, they gave it their best shot and it did not work out. now what is your north korea strategy? that is your big question now. it is a thing people will focus on. if you're saying china hasn't been working, what comes next? is it military intervention? which is obviously the biggest

concern of a lot of people. jeffrey: we hope that in the white house there are a lot of discussions about ok, where do we go on north korea policy? what we know about the white house is there is a lot of discussion, particularly at the topmost level of polls and poll numbers. how are people in the white house and in particular the president dealing with some of the low poll numbers we are seeing? shannon: well, they like to cherry pick the polls that make them look good. they are always looking for a poll that makes them look better. among those who have been with the president for a long time, they have told me in the past that they are not really concerned about the poll numbers. they see that the president got elected with low approval ratings and very high unfavorable approval ratings, and still became president despite the numbers that they see now and despite what may happen in 2018. they are still confident if the election were held today, even with the bad numbers, he would still get elected because hey, he got elected as a very unfavorable candidate.

jeffrey: right. go to spicer and his future. is he going to be moved off of the podium permanently? and the larger question for any white house correspondent is, does it even matter anymore? we don't have a great deal of communication between this white house and the press corps anymore. shannon: i think he will be moved off the podium when they can find someone to replace him. they have been trying to find someone to replace him for quite a while now. that has been out there. but you cannot replace your spokesperson unless you have someone else to take the job. i do not think he is leaving the white house. i know from people close to the president that the president has a lot of respect for him and loyalty because he knows that sean spicer has taken big arrows for him and is out there defending him. i don't think he will leave the white house. if anything, i think he will take on a behind-the-scenes

communication-strategy role. that could potentially be even more influential than the spokesperson role. as far as whether or not it matters, i suppose that depends on who replaces him. in the white house, it is never a completely transparent and friendly and jovial relationship between the press and the spokesperson. whoever replaces him, i think there will continue to be tension. jeffrey: thank you for this update. i appreciate it. ♪ mark bowden is here, a national correspondent for "the atlantic," a magazine i know something about. he wrote the cover story for the july-august issue of our magazine. it is called, "how to deal with north korea." he is an author for the 1999 book, "black hawk down" and his most recent book is "hue 1968: a turning point of the american war in vietnam." welcome. >> thank you. jeffrey: i'm glad you are here.

your cover story this month is about the seemingly impossible challenge north korea poses to u.s. policymakers. we learned of the tragedy of the u.s.mbier, student imprisoned on false and ridiculous charges, however you want to frame it, and it -- was somehow catastrophically injured and we do not understand how, in his north korean prison, and died yesterday here and i want you to talk for one minute about what you think might have happened, why this happened, and what it could mean. mark: that is an outlaw regime. they are very dangerous, as the coverstory tries to make clear. but they are really petty. the real outrage, i do not know exactly what happened to the kid but he apparently was taking a poster off a wall.

jeffrey: if that is even true. mark: even if that is true, he got 20 years of hard labor or something. obviously something awful happened to him and we do not know what it was. there is a good reason why the state department advises americans not to travel to north korea. jeffrey: we could be looking at a ban now, outright. there's not much we can do. we discourage people from going there already. i guess the ban would be a symbolic gesture. jeffrey: will the spring is closer to war with north korea? mark: no. jeffrey: why? mark: because this is the kind of thing that happens between nations, it prompts diplomatic protests and i guess at its height, withdrawing foreign officers from another country. since we don't have any diplomatic relations with north korea, there is not much we can do other than express our outrage. jeffrey: it strikes me that you are not surprised by what has happened in this instance.

i'm wondering if that lack of surprise comes from your knowledge of this regime? mark: i think it does. north korea has been a dangerous player for a long time. they sunk a south korean ship a few years ago, killed 70 or more of the sailors on board. leveled a south korean island, they practically leveled it and killed a lot of people. they have never acknowledged or don't believe that the korean war has ended. they view the united states and south korea as active combatants in a continuing war. i think people get lulled by time into thinking these hostilities do not still exist. jeffrey: barack obama told donald trump that this is your most important crisis, the unsolvable one, the one with nuclear weapons in play.

do you agree? mark: yes, it is definitely the most dangerous place in the world. jeffrey: talk to me about what makes today -- as you pointed out, we have been in crisis with north korea is going back to the early 1950's. why is it more dangerous today? mark: two reasons. one is, the north koreans are getting ever closer to holding -- to building an icbm, which is what they would need to deliver a weapon to the united states mainland. they are presumed to have already built nuclear weapons to ride on a missile. we know they have nuclear weapons. that exists as a kind of threshold for the threat they pose to the united states. frankly the second factor is donald trump, the fact that he is basically adopting a contrary position to just about everything president obama did, and i think obama's policy of strategic patience in dealing with north korea does not sit

well and does not seem to in his tweets, and i think he is playing with fire. jeffrey: twitter is not known as a platform for strategic patience. mark: right. someone asked me, how can you justify saying he seems to be ignorant of the long history of the standoff with north korea? what i can definitely say is there is no evidence of any real understanding of what is going on there. anyone who deliberately is inflaming the situation, it seems to me, is working directly counter to a sane policy. jeffrey: so in reading this piece, which i think is the definitive piece, and i am biased, on the current crisis, you come to the conclusion that there are no good options, but you do delineate four options. could you very briefly take us through what we are facing? mark: the most obvious one is we

have the military capability, as does south korea, to completely destroy north korea's economy. jeffrey: we could wipe it out. mark: take the threat away. another possibility is ramp up the pressure on them and target things like a nuclear test site and nuclear reactors, the nuclear missile launchers. and really make damaging blows to their infrastructure, which presumably, you could ramp that up and hopefully get them to back down from the pursuit of these weapons. jeffrey: that seems like a slippery slope. mark: oh, yeah. all these are bad options. north korea will obviously interpret any attack that the united states makes probably in the worst possible light. it is very hard to launch a limited attack that does not look like them like a full on attack. jeffrey: how do you calibrate that when you're doing with a paranoid hermetically sealed regime?

mark: they have been anticipating an american invasion for the past 60 or 70 years. and the third option is decapitation or that appeals in a hollywood way, where you go in and take out the leadership of north korea. virtually impossible to do just because of the nature of that totalitarian state because of the degree of security around kim and people around him. it would require someone or in -- someone in his inner circle to betray him. therey: and that is under the center that if you remove him -- mark: that you would get something better and you might trigger the exact thing you are trying to avoid because he is the linchpin of their whole state. if you attack him, you could kick off the war you are trying to avoid. the last option, also undesirable, is to realize, i think it is inevitable that they will build nuclear tipped icbm sometime in the next four or five years.

essentially hoping that by continuing to apply diplomatic pressure, and to make it clear that any attack by north korea not just on the united states, but on our allies, would prompt a massive and immediate response, it would essentially the positionun in of committing suicide if he were to attempt that. jeffrey: the homicide of los angeles or honolulu or soeul in tokyo. mark: sure. jeffrey: you are not kidding when you say there are no good options. mark: no, they are all terrible. jeffrey: but you know as well as i do that it is not actually tenable to have an unstable, hostile, bellicose anti-american regime with the capacity to deliver your a nuclear weapon to los angeles or san francisco, or any other american city. how could any american president go to the american people and say we will just live with these

crazy people and yes they can kill us, but after they kill us, we will kill all of them? that does not seem like a politically viable -- mark: it is not something any american president will ever say, but i think that is where we will end up because i don't think there are any other alternatives. other alternatives is to get china and russia to apply enough pressure on north korea. which come up until today, they have been reluctant to do. jeffrey: let's give it south, if hue, 1968, pivoting back in time. i wonder if this book, in researching the book, it helped you understand the limitations of american power, the limits that we have trying to dissuade regimes be don't like from behaving in ways we do not want to see them behave? mark: vietnam is the classic example of limitations on military power. we were in overwhelmingly

superior military force and yet, we were not able to use that force to accomplish the goal we set for our selves. that goal was to protect and build a democratic society in south vietnam. we have seen it again and again, the net states tries to use military force to accomplish these his weeping goals in afghanistan and iran. jeffrey: before there was a fallujah. mark: exactly. number one, it came at a time, i do not know if it would be the same today, when racism and arrogance led us to deeply underestimate the capability of the viet cong and north the vietnamese, and nowhere is that more eminent than in this battle, which took the united states command by surprise. jeffrey: the united states won the battle but the moment where you and walter cronkite thought that we lost the war. give us one minute if you could boil down 600 pages to one minute, give one minute on why

this was pivotal beyond the military meaning of what happened? mark: in large part because in the united states, president johnson had been selling this war to the american public of something that could be easily one. -- easily won. in fact, westmoreland came back to washington at the end of 1967 and gave a speech at the national press club where he said this board is almost over and we are moving into the final phase and we will begin bringing american troops home next year and then, not more than two months after he made that speech, 10,000 north vietnamese and viet cong take over the third-largest city in south vietnam and launched simultaneous attacks on 100 cities. jeffrey: they knew but they weren't listened to. mark: that is right. in the case of hue, the city was taken, taken with almost very minor resistance. general westmoreland denied it

had been taken, even though he had a report that told him it had been. jeffrey: ultimately, the united states won the battle but it convinced the american people there was no winning the war. mark: not just the american people, but the south vietnamese people. the celfin amines come all or whatthe vietnam war, they call the american war, they are trying to align themselves with the victor. they do not want to be on the wrong side when the power game is over, and so the attacks on south vietnam, the taking of hue, i think you murdered a great deal of the confidence the south vietnamese people had in the saigon government. jeffrey: the book is "hue 1968." the magazine is "the atlantic." i recommend people read both. mark bowden, pleasure to have you. mark: thank you. ♪ jeffrey: we continue now with

foreign policy. for the first time in quite a while, our country and leaders are questioning the underlying assumptions that have governed foreign policymaking since the end of world war ii, especially as they concern what america 's role in the world should be. here to discuss these challenges are, from washington, richard fontaine, the president of the center for new american security. here in new york is gideon rose, the editor of "foreign affairs magazine," and david miliband is here, president of the

international rescue committee, just returned from visiting south sudan and uganda. i am pleased to welcome them all to the program. thank you for being here. there is the whole world to cover in the next period of time. we will get right to it. david, i want to come to world refugee day, which we are honoring or celebrating today. is it celebrating or marking? he's a diplomat and knows all the diplomatic words. i want to come to the question of north korea. barack obama told donald trump, as i mentioned to mark bowden, that this is the biggest problem an american president will face in this time. do you agree and where is this going? do you see this going to confrontation? >> it is the greatest danger but i do not think we should ignore what is going on elsewhere. scope forlenty of

conflagration of a dangerous kind. i think the four options that mark bowden sets out, he rightly says none of them are attractive. i think donald trump did stumble on something important when he said he was willing to talk to the north koreans. the tragedy is, if we are now in a situation. jeffrey: invite him to the white house? >> yes, invite him to the white house. the north koreans now cannot be rewarded for the kind of behavior -- the appalling death of the american citizen. and the most troubling thing is not that the chinese will not talk to the north koreans, it is that the north koreans feel strong enough that they don't even want to talk to the chinese because that speaks to a sense of isolation and even an irrationality. people like me have said, don't asmiss the regime irrational. if they are not willing to talk to the chinese, you begin to doubt your own view of the rationality. richard, does the death

yesterday of this young american student, does this horrific incident, does this pushes closer to a confrontation? >> i think it is one more sign of the retaliate, both at home and what they are willing to do to foreigners who visit the country, including americans. i don't think it changes the geopolitical calculus all that much. the north koreans obviously pose a danger with the nuclear missile programs. there remained no good military options, as discussed before. if anything, it will stiffen the spines of those in washington who are looking for what else there is to do about the problem ly north korea, name sanctions and determines and things like that. jeffrey: i want to get to that, but just one moment. in washington, in the circles you travel, are there any people saying, yes we need to go for a preemptive strike into something dramatic? not even right now, but in the window between now and when they

might be able to deliver a nuclear weapon to america? is --hink what this does the short answer is no. no one is talking about, really, the possibility of a strike, unless there was an imminent thing we could detect. given the proximity of seoul to the dmz and the artillery and chemical weapons, and the human scale of conflict in the south, there simply is no good military option. that said, the president already tweeted today that he thinks he has given up on the notion of china solving that crisis before us. that is the refreshing corrective that will get us to a better policy going forward. jeffrey: in your living personification of the foreign policy establishment, is there a broad consensus that the paradigms that mark bowden lay here, that there really

is nothing to do except wait, contain, and hope for the best? >> yes. jeffrey: thank you very much. >> there tend to be two kinds of problems in international affairs. one is the problem that everybody knows what to do about them but they cannot do it because politics get in the way. classic example is the peace process. you could design a peace process that would ultimately work. so could you or i, but we just can't. the other type of problem is no one knows anything about how to deal with it. pakistan and north korea, permit examples. -- perfect examples. no one has a north korean policy. nobody has a good pakistan policy. these are problems that no one really knows what to do. all the options are terrible and the best you can hope for is jolly the situation down the road a little bit without blowing it up, while trying to make it better as much as you can and lay the groundwork for more stuff down the road. he will never get a north korean solution. maybe you could get an interim

agreement, the way richard haass talks about. with north korea, there is no solid answer. any kind of solution would be a disaster and incredibly risky. nobody seems to want that, but nobody has a good way to make the problem go away either. jeffrey: place this in the context of a trump foreign-policy doctrine, and then i will pivot to the question of, is there a discernible trump foreign-policy doctrine? gideon: so, right now, this is a very strange period in history. not only will books be written about this period after the fact, but it is just very odd to live through. right now, america does not seem to have a coherent foreign policy and strategic doctor to the trump administration running the country and running american foreign-policy, has not said anything and the policies are some things that are radically different from the past, some things that are the same

and they have foot flopped on something things and no one knows what is going on. there are actions but no necessarily coherent articulation into a strategy. at the same time, the government is going on. there are very few appointments that have been made for this administration. they are note, even staffing the government, so how could they possibly run things? the jobs are being filled. people are in place doing the various assistant secretary jobs at the state department or the deputies job, but they are either career bureaucrats, so what that means is everything is going on autopilot and everything is basically rolling forward without anything changing. so you have no foreign policy but the same foreign policy continuing until further guidance. jeffrey: richard, why don't they fill these jobs? richard: they got a late start because so much of the transition work had not been done or was discarded after the victory in the election. unlike the clinton campaign, they had not done extensive planning that they might have done.

and then, the pentagon is starting to roll out jobs. the state department is doing a massive reorganization and we -- and relook at it\ s bureaucracy and postponing things, and then you have the talent pool issue, that a large number of those who would be political appointees in a more mainstream republican administrations from the foreign-policy rank-and-file, came out in opposition to the trump campaign last year. and so are ineligible to go in. they need to find individuals -- jeffrey: ineligible or unwilling even if someone wanted them? richard: both but in eligible. if you look at those, who for letters opposing trump, i don't think a single one has entered the trump administration. jeffrey: would you go in? >> i would never say never, but being one of the signatories,

i'm not standing by the phone. jeffrey: so, you would say never? >> yes, but it all depends on circumstances. i think there is a compulsion to serve the country if you think you can do something good but the circumstances would have to be right. you would have to be in the service of a policy you feel comfortable pushing. >> think we have known for some time that the administration is skeptical of multilateral engagement. one other thing is becoming clear. >> you still need people to engage in bilateral engagement. such as ambassadors. >> we do, but we know there is skepticism. it is bringing a sense of a vacuum. i think something else has become clear within the last couple of weeks that is significant. that is about the value the president places on military action in its foreign-policy tools. we see that in response to afghanistan and in a range of areas. richard holbrook warned of the militarization.

withoutmilitary action an endgame, all the world posse trouble spots, we know that unless you have a vision of the credible, legitimate sharing a political power as the announcement over the last week that effectively all power and respect has been transferred to the pentagon. it is something the pentagon has never wanted. it has always argued -- jeffrey: does that make you feel better or worse? given the specific circumstances of the trump foreign-policy? >> the good news is the general's led by the secretary know the costs of war and the dangers of war. the bad news is they don't have the tools come later in foreign-policy or in the development side or in the humanitarian side, at their disposal. they will get a huge increase in the budget at the state

department is not just understaffed but unstaffed. seeing a budget threatened with the cut. jeffrey: is this the least idealistic administration when it comes to foreign policy that you have seen? >> you have to go back to see the lack of that content. the president comes in with an intuitive sense of the element of the national order. it is to be bolstered by u.s. power and it made america a victim rather than a great beneficiary so that alliances do not necessarily crude oil interests but countries get rich on the back of our protection. the system creates jobs overseas and not at home, a fools errand

at home, not necessarily part of what the united states should do. the difference is not everyone in the administration believes in those principles and they are really inconsistently manifested in the policy. jeffrey: nikki haley speaks in different ways than donald trump speaks in a number of different ways. go to the question of idealism. in your interaction so far, as a worldwide leader in the cause of solving refugee crises, what are you seeing that is different? the obama administration was not overly idealistic. david: the sense of victimhood about the united states that the administration projects. it is a sense the u.s. is a victim of national order, other crises, economic weakness. that stands in a stark contradiction to uganda and south sudan last year, a painful and pitiable sense among some of the poorest people in the world, they were saying we must go back until mr. trump that we have got a million refugees who are

arriving and we really need america to sort out the civil war. what i sense around the administration is they have awed into an argument that america is a victim of economic and medical -- jeffrey: everyone is trying to game us. david: not just trying but everyone has an you no longer have the tools and the ability and the willingness to go out and sort other people's problems. that comes to me very strongly and this is slightly over the top that it is almost a sense of projecting national humiliation. those of us were not americans who observe the country see that whatever the difficulties the country has been in, the idea that you have been humiliated by the rest of the world, which sees the u.s. and anchor of the global system, just feels out of kilter. gideon: it is really strange because it is a must as if the president does not see himself as the head of the government or the united states as the head of a global order.

he talks about the international order and international system not in the way previous presidents have like madeleine albright's indispensable nation rhetoric. donald trump does not care about running the world. he does not care much about running the american government or when he talks about rod rosenstein and other officials, he talks about it as it is something other than him and you say, wait a second, you signed off. he seems to talk about the international oil -- order in the same way, as if it of something the united states impose on it rather than something that we created to get the most out of cooperative relationships with allies. it is very odd. >> our friend famously referred to the foreign policy establishment as the blob and there are so many figures. thank you for being here. >> thank you. >> thank you. ♪

charlie: aziz ansari is here. his second season of "master of none" is here. friday calls the show a collection of loosely connected vignettes. it has earned a peabody and an emmy award and here is a look.

>> that is really good. aziz: i told you. aren't you glad you expanded your culinary horizons beyond italian? >> yes, you're right. aziz: indian food? >> i don't really like it. aziz: i was kidding earlier but crazed curry people, definitely racist. i am not a curry person to time not defined by the flavors my people enjoy. what do you call chinese people, soy sauce people? charlie: i am pleased to have aziz ansari back on the program. things are going well for you. aziz: i think so. charlie: a second season suggests things are going well. when you pitched this, what did you tell the people at netflix?

aziz: we just said we want to do a show about me based on my observations from stand up, and we did not really tell them too much. the show evolved because we had a long break between the time we pitched the show and the time we did it. in that time, we got another season of "parks and recreation." we got a half order of 13 episodes and that was unexpected. we had that time to marinade on what the show is. we went through some versions that were probably little more standard versions of the show and we kind of pushed ourselves to come up with stuff a little more ambitious. charlie: is it easier because you are drawing from your own life experiences to write it? aziz: it is but at a certain point, what i hit now is i'm kind of tapped. i am still a single guy living in new york. there is only so much i can write about that.

this season, we did some things that were interesting where there was an episode called thanksgiving where it was a lot about one of the other actors who plays one of my friends, denise, and it was about her experience dealing with her sexuality and coming out to her mother and it was really fun to do someone else besides myself. another episode where i am not really in it and one person is a taxi driver and one person is a deaf woman who is a cashier and the third person is a doorman. we spent a long time interviewing people in these professions and interviewing deaf people and learning about the experiences. it was a fun challenge to try to do what we do with me with other people. charlie: does that its point the success of the show? that you try to learn what it was like with the spirit of other people? -- experiences of other people?

aziz: i think that is a core element of the show, a genuine curiosity we have the first season has an episode about our parents and that one took off. it came from a real place of alan and i being curious about the struggles of our parents and their journey here. charlie: in season one, what did you want to accomplish other than to establish character? aziz: i think we wanted to just make a show that we thought was good and met our own standards and what it ended up doing went far beyond expectations. you know, the show got a lot of press and stuff. just the idea of someone that looks like me being a romantic lead in all this stuff, it was not stuff we thought about at all. people are like the show is so diverse and me and alan are like, when we have lunch, that is diverse. [laughter] we don't think about that. we have a guy playing a version of alan and we are doing this

together, to us, it is not diverse. that is just our lives. charlie: when you think about sexually explicit stuff, do you stay away from that? as much is that as you can? aziz: we write whatever is interesting to us. in the first season, there were scenes that were a little more sexually explicit. we had all thing, we did the episode called mornings about a long-term relationship and you saw different mornings and you saw how the sex became boring for this couple and how something like, when they would have sex on the chair at something at first, it was very exciting amended came routine. it was fun to write it and then we filmed it and i was like, what have i written? this season, kind of no sexually explicit stuff. the main romantic arc my character meets this woman, it is kind of more internal and emotional and was kind of really

inspired a lot by these films i was watchingilms i a lot, and kind of trying to show an internal drama. the second half of the second season, when it gets to my character, it is kind of about him exploring this relationship. in the beginning, he is trying to find that connection and doing that episode about being on a dating app, but really, i think it is just about this guy you know, trying to do what i think me and alan are trying to do, trying to find a connection to someone and he finds it and it is a woman and he does not know what to do. charlie: people are fascinated by a driven by the idea of, can i find a connection that somehow broadens my network of people and broadens my sense of belonging? wherever it is, people are looking to belong and have some way of feeling that they are not alone.

aziz: and i think alan and i were talking about this recently. as we get even in our 30's, we just feel it, ok, how many more times will i feel that really strong connection with someone? even with all the dating apps and stuff, you just feel like, how many times am i going to feel that magic? charlie: it does not slow down. aziz: at a certain point, i have met all my friends of friends of friends, where my going to find this thing? that idea was powerful to us, to make it like, ok, he finds this connection but it is with someone really unavailable and what do you do if you finally find this and you are so excited by it? charlie: you spent a month alone in italy? aziz: about two months. i did with the character did and i went to a small town where we ended up filming. i did not know anybody. i took like three weeks of italian classes with the teacher in new york before i went.

but i was not very good p when you learn in those kind situations, you speak very formal and people make fun of you as soon as you get there. but i did not know anybody, i had a couple friends of friends. i worked in the past a shop that you see in the opening -- pasta shop that you see in the opening of the show and the restaurant in the episode. i just kind of learned how to make pasta and speak italian better. also, i really did it in the beginning for research for the show but it ended up in something really valuable for me, the real person, as well, just to live somewhere else besides new york nla for a little while and be out of that environment. i just realized how much time i spent in new york and l.a., two very crazy places. it was nice to live somewhere small where no one knew who i was. charlie: the same cast of characters you can always find an playoff of.

aziz: there, i did not know anybody and when we do the episodes there, we did not use any of the characters from the first season. in the first episode, it was a bit of a challenge. it was like, we are not bringing back any of the characters. it is in italy, mostly italian, and i feel like we pulled it off. the second one, my best friend of the show, arnold, comes and visits me. in real life, the guy who plays arnold is one of my best friends and he came and visited me. when he came, i was like, come and visit me for a week and i am sure something will happen that we could put in the show. sure enough, we went to sicily together and we're driving around and we saw a very small alley and the gps is like, turn in this alley and i was like, i don't think we can do this. a truck went through and i was like, all right, we will be fine and sure enough, we got stuck. charlie: how do you pull off

doing this and stand up at the same time? aziz: i don't whatever i am doing the show, i don't do stand up. the only standup i did, i hosted saturday night live so i did a month of standup before that. i knew the monologue was going to be heavily watched. snl's really big right now. it was going to be the day after the inauguration of trump and i knew it was going to be a big show. i had no material. the other material i had put in the special. i really have to to start from scratch and start figuring out what the set was. i started going to comedy clubs as much as i can. just trying to write and figure out what my take is on it. it is hard to write about it as everyone is talking about it and you want a unique take. it was very high pressure. i did not go anywhere for christmas holiday or anything. i just ate in new york and i would do seven or eight cents a night, trying to keep working

and get in shape. charlie: you do that in a month. aziz: yes but it is a long time and actually not that long. i don't know. it was hard. but i worked really hard and got in shape. charlie: doing standup is too hard on its own and doing a series is too hard on its own, and the two might get in the way of each other. aziz: the series is all-consuming p ryan pretty much in every scene of the show except for the episode i am not in. i get there in the morning and i leave, i get there at 7:00 and i leave until 8:00 or 9:00. to do that and then say i would hit the clubs for the rest of the night, i would go nuts. when i do stand up, i cannot kind of do it. i have to get upset. charlie: all the people i know who are successful are obsessed. aziz: anyone who is good at anything is obsessed. with standup, there is no, ok, i will do one set. let's say i ditched "master of

none" at 6:00 and then went out at 7:30? i would want to do it again and say, is that going to work again, do i fix the other thing, and i would keep going until late in the night and i would not sleep well and i would do a horrible job on "master of none" the next day. i keep them separate. charlie: what role has chris rock played to you? aziz: he is like a mentor/wise uncle/hero. many roles. he is one of the smartest people i have ever met. there are few creative people i have met in my life, and i am lucky to have met a lot that i look up to a lot, and he is one of the people i really trust and listen to and i think is smarter than a lot of people. charlie: what kind of advice would you give you? he knows the world that you are trying to be the best at. aziz: he told me a great thing

when i was getting ready for snl. he texted me and i would send him audio files of sets and one thing he told me early on is, you know, this will be the biggest standup set you ever do. the thing he said was be big and seize the moment. charlie: this is what he told about your success. taste, theeat funnyverlooked part of artists. do you agree with that? aziz: i do. i thought that was smart and i read the piece. it is me and alan's taste. we pick the font. we are very hands-on with the music and the wardrobe and

everything. when you are overseeing a show like this, i mean, i guessed some people are not as particular on everything, but alan and i are hands-on. the people we hired we really trust and we try to make sure everything is done for a reason and we are pretty specific. charlie: do you get back to south carolina? aziz: not really. my parents now live in north carolina. they live outside of charlotte. i go back and see them every now and then. charlie: are they surprised by this at all? not that you are successful but that it is comedy? i mean, would they have looked at you as a kid when you are growing up and said, he is the funniest kid on the block? he is the funniest kid now? aziz: i think they would say i liked making people laugh and i was always comfortable public

speaking. i'm a being five or six and making speeches. and not being scared of it. that it's a pretty crazy thing to think about when you hear about how in general people are very terrified of public speaking. imagine being a little kid and not having that fear at all, it is very weird, i think. yes, i think a career in entertainment is so unexpected matter who you are. there are some people who are like him when they are four, they are four, they're like, i want to be an actor. when you grow up in south carolina, your dreams are much more muted. charlie: this refers to something you said earlier. there is unlikely to be a third series here. aziz: i don't know. as soon as i started to doing interviews for the second season, people are like, when is the third season? i'm like, hey, man, i just finished this. leave me alone. i do not want to say it is unlikely there will be a third season. i just think right now i need a break and i would love to just have some experiences.

you know, i only want to do that show when i am inspired and feel at my notebook is full of ideas. when a started doing the show, i had so many ideas and a used a lot of them in the series. i would not want to do a third season unless i felt it was as inspired as what we have done. we joke around and we are like, we would love to do a "master of none" season when we are 70 years old, that would be great, or a few years from now, when we are married and have kids, and observations about that. it is tough for me right now to think of 10 episodes to have the depth that we have done about a single guy trying to find a connection while he is eating around town. i'm kind of tapped at the moment. charlie: i hear you. many comedians have come here and talked about it and said, why did you stop at three or four or five or whatever the number might be, and they always say because i was repeating myself, because i did not have anything new to say. the best will come and say that and they will take a time off to

do a movie or something else and then come back or continue to make movies or some other aspect of the entertainment world. aziz: yes. "master of none" is the most fun job i ever had or ever will have, maybe. i am proud of my best friends and my entire immediate family. my brother works with me every day and my family comes and i get to sit there and laugh with my dad. it is such a unique experience. charlie: what does he think of it? aziz: he loves acting. i never knew that until recently, that he tried to start a drama program in his cool in india when he was in high school and stuff and they did productions and stuff. but he is a very funny guy and loves making people laugh. he loves acting on the show and stuff. when we have moments like winning the emmy or things like that, obviously, your parents are proud.

to be integral to the success of it, it is a unique thing. charlie: how comfortable do you feel speaking out on political issues? not a need or not a need or an obligation, but how much a sense that it is something you feel you have to do? aziz: i kind of just, i feel it when i feel it. i wrote an op-ed for "the new york times" at one point about islamophobia, and i did that because i knew if i did that, a lot of people would get hold of it. it is one thing i have done in my career that people have come up to me wasn't anything, an op-ed for "the new york times," a comedian, it is unique that hit so hard to did not know how much it would resonate. i thought maybe it would get spread around among people who look like me. but people from all walks of life come up to me and say i

read that and it was really cool you wrote that. in that moment, it felt like i needed to do that and i'm glad i did. as far as "master of none" and in my standup, i think it has to come from a genuine place. when i did the bit about islamophobia in the monologue for snl, i thought that was a funny bit and i thought it made a good point and i thought i should do it. but i would never want to do something if i did not have like a real inspiration behind it, you know, i mean, "the new york times" op-ed was coming from a real place because all right, this is my parents, and i'm in this unique position and it felt like the right thing to do. but i never just write political material because i feel like i have to. i feel like i write it when i am inspired to. thanks so much for having me. charlie: thanks for joining us. see you next time. ♪ ♪

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alisa: i'm alisa parenti from washington, and you are watching "bloomberg technology." the state department says the u.s. remains open to discussions despite russia's decision to cancel talks. russia canceled meetings in response to a new round of u.s. tensions. washington says they will remain until russia honors its agreements related to ukraine and crimea. the department of homeland security says there is evidence that russians targeted election systems in 21 states last year. the states were not identified, but the affected states are said to be aware. bloomberg reported last week that russian hackers hit systems in as many as 39 states. democrats say they have a better chance of winning dozens of republican house seats in next year's midterm election.