When Trevor Noah stepped down as host of The Daily Show a couple of years ago, it didn't even occur to Ronny Chieng that he could be capable of taking over that seat. But now that he's been sitting in as guest host as part of a rotating group of correspondents he finally feels like he deserves to be there. "I think I get how to do it," he says. "And I've done it like 20 times now, so it's definitely possible for me to do it."

In his return to The Last Laugh podcast, Chieng discusses the process of putting together his third stand-up special for Netflix, Love to Hate It, which includes material about possibly becoming a father, how the internet is destroying male brains, and making "MAGA friends" in Hawaii. He also talks about grabbing the "fearless mantle" from heroes like Jon Stewart, being the first late-night host to joke about the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, and how he thinks The Daily Show will evolve when Donald Trump takes back the White House in 2025.

It might surprise Daily Show fans to hear Chieng talk about being friends with Trump supporters in his new special. Even though, as he explains, they are mostly "Hawaii MAGA," which means they are "constantly battling between the Aloha spirit and whatever's happening on Twitter," as he puts it to me.

But Chieng's personal politics can be hard to pin down. He's quick to point out that he hails from the "extremely conservative countries" of Malaysia, where he was born, and Singapore, where he spent his early childhood. "The more I'm in America, the more I feel like you could probably classify me as an a-----e comic politically," he jokes, adding that overall he's a "pretty centrist dude."

"I think good comedy is always a little bit countercultural," Chieng says, citing comedians like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor. "If you can do that authentically, meaning you're not just being countercultural for the sake of it, you're actually, authentically a little bit countercultural, and you can back it up, and you can justify it, and you can make jokes about it from a real place, I think that's what good comedy is."

Chieng's impulse to express unpopular opinions in his comedy, or say the thing that no one else is willing to say, is something he shares with Stewart, who has become a mentor of sorts since returning to The Daily Show as weekly host on Monday nights at the beginning of this year.

Calling Stewart a "master of the medium" who not only "knows what he wants to say" but "knows what America needs to hear," Chieng says he's learned a lot from watching Stewart make his comeback. And he's continually impressed by Stewart's refusal to "pander" to his dedicated Daily Show audience, whether it was criticizing Joe Biden in his first show back as host or admitting that he thought comedian Tony Hinchcliffe was "funny" after he delivered a slew of racist jokes at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally in October.

"I don't think comedy should be pandering to anyone. And if it can describe reality authentically, I think people get behind it," Chieng says. "I think the job of a professional comedian now, whether you're on The Daily Show or not, is knowing how to not overreact to other people's overreaction. And I hope I live up to the fearless mantle that my comedy heroes have, because the people I admire in comedy are fearless in comedy."

All of this led Chieng to become the first late-night host to find a way to joke about the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, even before Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged. "The cops just need to narrow down their list of suspects to anyone in America who hates their health-care plan and has access to guns," Chieng joked on the show as the manhunt was underway, adding, sarcastically, "Should be solved in no time."

"You don't want to be tasteless when you're doing comedy, at least we don't want to be, so what's the path forward?" Chieng says now of the discussions that the staff was having behind-the-scenes that day. Since the story was all anyone was talking about, both online and in real life, they felt like "to not talk about it" would be to make The Daily Show feel "irrelevant" to viewers.

"It took us a while to figure out the pathway in," he added. "What happened is awful. It's a tragedy, and shouldn't happen to anyone, and we don't condone it at all. But we go back to our basics, which is making fun of how ridiculous the coverage of this horrible incident is in the news. We're trying to satirize the climate in America that led to this and not make fun of the incident itself."

Heading into the next four years, Chieng says he doesn't think The Daily Show will "hold back" on Trump, despite the types of legal threats that have already led certain news organizations to preemptively bow down. "I don't ever feel like we hold back, but I also think we have good taste," he says. "So we go hard with good taste. You can't do a political satire show and be scared of the political consequences of satire, so I don't know how else to do it."

Chieng also doesn't buy the idea that Trump 2.0 is going to crack down on satire in a way that will put comedians in real danger once he takes office. "People might talk a big game, but I think when it comes down to it, I don't think that will actually happen," he says. "But hey, man, January is around the corner, I could be completely wrong and I'll be calling you from jail or ICE detention or something. So maybe I'm wrong, but we'll see!"