Good news, peeps! John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is coming back this weekend! The show has been on hiatus since last November, I think. He only had to do one show in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, so… I’m looking forward to the new shows. To promote the new season, Oliver has done a slew of new interviews, even speaking to outlets like the New York Times and Politico. He also covers the new issue of Rolling Stone, and I’m just going to excerpt from the RS interview here, because it’s really long and detailed and John can talk and talk (bless him). You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

His “F–k 2016” segment: “We’d already planned the demolition, because it had already been a really bad year in many ways. It had been a f–king awful election campaign, humanity at its worst. And Prince died, and everything else. It was supposed to be a separate story after whatever we did at the top of the show, but it turned out to have direct connective tissue, so we did one story for 30 minutes, and then blew it up and walked away….We did the actual explosion the day after the election. I was so dead inside emotionally that I didn’t flinch – because I didn’t really care [laughs]. “Hmm, maybe a piece of something smashes into me and kills me. Would that be the worst thing?” I mean, he’d been elected less than 12 hours ago, so you’d think, “Yeah, I’d like to blow something up and see if I feel anything.” So it wasn’t bravado, it was total nihilism.

He was really upset about Brexit: “Yeah. I was furious. So I was not that surprised. At the moment when those first election returns came in, it was like muscle memory of watching the Brexit results all night thinking, “I know how this story ends. I think I know where we end up.”

Xenophobia in small-town Britain: “That’s why calling a referendum was such a myopic decision. That was an incredibly reckless, arrogant, self-serving move, to call a referendum and then not to energetically campaign to find a way to avoid what you’ve just set in motion. Not to have any sense of the depth of either xenophobia or resentment for European bureaucracy. It was a terrible idea from the get-go, as is proved by the fact that [David Cameron] is not prime minister anymore… I had my producers and researchers trying to find any argument to the contrary, to work against my prejudice of going into this thinking, “This is a terrible f–king idea.” And the researchers – who are incredibly nuanced in their thinking; very rarely does anything come back in black and white from them – returned saying, “There’s really nothing there. This is jumping off a cliff blind.” It was clear it would be a catastrophic decision for Britain and anyone in its immediate vicinity. To have that knowledge, and then to watch six hours of electoral returns come in through the night, just watching your country set fire to itself – it was pretty bad.”

On Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”: “It’s just a framing device, an ear-catching phrase, but it’s nothing new. The content of what she’s wrapping a bow on is something that everyone has been bearing witness to. We’ve had 18 months of feelings over facts. The only thing that’s remotely new about it is the location that it’s coming from.

Whether news shows should interview Conway: “In general, it’s very dangerous to keep the old campaign architecture around with this presidency, to have an eight-person panel on CNN debating whether or not he said something. “Did he or did he not do this thing we watched him do?” There’s actually serious harm in that discussion. And, yeah. I really don’t see the point of talking to Kellyanne Conway because her language jujitsu is so strong. You know she can look you in the eyes and tell you the opposite of what you just saw happen, and she will be more confident in her answer than you are in your question.

He’s not a citizen, he’s here on a green card: “Again, normally, you would think, “I’m probably not going to get deported, presidents have big jobs, they’re not that petty.”…So, believe me, that is something that is wrapped around my head…It’s amazing, yeah, and, again, normally you could curtail the paranoid part of your brain with logic. And you can’t do that with the same ferocity because that logical part of your brain now tells you the chance is nonzero.”

[From Rolling Stone]

There’s a ton of other stuff, about becoming a father and his wife’s difficult pregnancy and how he’s too British to consider early retirement and a lot more. He sounds like he doesn’t want to even talk about Emperor Baby Fists on his show, but he knows he has to, so that’s what he’s going to do, at least partially. This is one of the ways that Oliver seems to be lacking, versus someone like Jon Stewart in the heyday of The Daily Show: Jon Stewart appreciated the nuances of the daily news cycle, and as much as he served as a critics of our political system, he also served as one of the greatest media critics around. John Oliver doesn’t really do that. Again, his show is weekly, not daily, and that’s not really the format. But still, I would love to see him devote a long-form segment to media criticism in the age of Baby Fists.

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Cover courtesy of Rolling Stone, additional photos by Getty.