January 27, 2025 • 82 mins
Journalist, author and host of MSNBC’s All In, discusses the heated political climate and finding a way to flourish.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Of Course Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This
classic episode was produced by the team at Pandora.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, this is on paid Bill.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
This week's QLs classic features journalist, author, and host of
NBC's All In with Chris Haes. We discussed politics, We
discussed hip hop, We discuss the Upper east Side. Originally
released on July fourth, twenty eighteen, Enjoy, We'll hold.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Your hand through the process. It's good.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
Yeah, it's all good s.
Speaker 5 (00:33):
Suprema roll Call, Suprema Suprema Roll Call, Suprema S Suprema
Roll Call, Suprema S sub Suprema.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Roll Cruse is here. Yeah, explain the fear, Yeah of
why panic? Yeah, I hear in the rear mirror.
Speaker 5 (00:54):
Suprema Sun Sun, Suprema roll Call, Suprema So Supreme roll Call.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
The world's a mess. Yea, these are the days.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Yeah, to be all in.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah with the Sugar Network.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
Suprema, Suprema roll Call, Supreema, Suprema Roll.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Called Ivanka Trump. Yeah, opens Embassy. Yeah. Film at eight pm.
Yeah on MSNBC.
Speaker 5 (01:25):
Roll Call, Supreme Son, Son, Suprema Roll Call, Suprema Son Sun, Suprema.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Roll called, pay Bill. Yeah, And here's my stick.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
Yeah, you know it's time, yeah for politics.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Super Suprema roll called Supreme roll call.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
It's been a while, yeah since I had the rhyme. Yeah,
I'm sitting here, Yeah, just watching the time.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Ro Suprema son set Suprema roll call, Supremat Suprema roll
Supremeau Suprema roll call, Suprema Sun Sun Suprema roll call.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Now see, it wasn't that bad, not not too bad,
not too bad.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Okay, listen quest of Supreme brus.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Wait, can I ask a technical question about our theme? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (02:26):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Do you not hear any time it's the third person's
turn to Ryan normally to you when Fante is here?
Do you not hear the sound of parking? Uh?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
That's just on the track, literally really literally every time
in the background noise.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
All right, Well, the next time we do the theme song,
I guess when we recorded the recordings fucked up? Remember
remember when the engineer Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6 (03:01):
And in between if you if if nobody's rhyming, you
can hear your guide in the background's leaking through.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Right, But at what point was I in a car
reverse driving to here? Yeah?
Speaker 6 (03:18):
That parts in your head? It is not or it's
a harmonic of something that's happening. It's not in my head,
my stroke. Can we run the team all the time?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
We're doing it all yeah, yeah, Hello, I always hear it,
and I'm like looking at you guys, like do you
not hear it?
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Do you not hear it? So we have to do
this all over again.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Play the theme again. We're doing Yes, this is the
first time we're doing all new themes. No, you listen
to it without without us singing that.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
Yeah, just listen to it.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Okay, nothing there, Suprema.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
I can't believe I'm doing this on my own show.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Okay, course comes in, YadA, YadA, okay, okay, So then
this is what a mere speaks. Yeah, and then I
say something else and then here comes to set up
and then the punch line. Shout out to Mark Kelly
(04:17):
and Angry. They sound great on this.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Right, Well, the drums just drumm themselves. The drummer.
Speaker 7 (04:23):
Second, yeah, yeah, you can hear somebody. Yeah he' somebody
talking all right. Now wait here comes the third one.
You ready, here we go.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Someone's parking the car. Oh right, hear it? Yeah, it's feedback, feedback.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Somebody out that that sounds like a right, now we
can lower it.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Someone backing up a goddamn delivery whatever are you you
you lower the volume? Yeah, I'm just saying that someone
was backing that thing up. Okay, looking over for the
led the small ship slide. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, this
is a very deep political episode already, yeah, already, thanks
(05:10):
for pointing out the horrible engine delivery trucks.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
And I don't know.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
I was like, did I make the theme in the car?
I don't know, it just it just happens every time. Hey, look,
we have a guest, Ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Welcome to another quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
We got Sugar Steve or the Sugar Network explaining to
our guess how powerful his network is.
Speaker 6 (05:33):
Well, the long story short of what we're talking about
is this new feature that Instagram has which yes, allows
you to interview somebody on this on your live story
where you're on the top and they're on the bottom.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
But we we have a guest. We have we have
double Bill. We're double Bill today unpaid and Boss Bill.
Uh and our guest today, Ladies and gentlemen. Uh, he
is a journalist.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Some say that he's the co leader of the Liberal
media along with with Rachel Maddow Bronx Native Hunter College
and which is actually a high school, Yeah, which is
weird stupid. Yeah. No, it's a wonderful school. I used
to live right near it. It's great. Host of one
of my favorite MSNBC shows, and of course after this
(06:19):
election cycle, my station channel always stays on MSNBC. UH
all over Chris Hayes and probably author of the best
liberal spleen uh book of Our Imbalanced System. I have
to say, well written. I feel like it's almost uh
(06:43):
to date myself, uh a cliff Notes. Cliff notes to
people who are like sort of on the fence of
you know, like those people that ask like, well, they
must have did something, and this is the best liberals
plain book. I actually when I got it, and I
(07:03):
got it like three days ago, I didn't think I
was going to get through it in time for the
for the the our interview today.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
But it's that you read I got that was sort
of by design that people would My favorite thing that
people say to my two favorite bits of feedback from
the book. One is that people were like, oh, I
sat down, I read it once sitting or I got
through really quick. And two is for the for people
that are you know, I don't think the audience for
the book. I don't think it's people that are hardcore,
(07:31):
like you know, Blue lives matter and Black lives matter,
you know. And I'm not gonna way, I'm gonna boycott
the NFL because Colin Kaepernick is kneeling. Yeah, yeah, Like
it's gonna be hard to reach those folks. But there's
a huge swath of people, particularly white folks, that I
think are generally sympathetic but also like that kind of
they must have done they they did something right. There
was a reason was it? Did he really? And the
(07:55):
book is an attempt to try to walk people through
kind of some of the reality of what it's.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
It's it's it's well, it's well executed. Anyway. I haven't
said his name, I haven't said the office name. Let's
see how long it's going. Can I get to ten minutes?
Steve finishing?
Speaker 6 (08:13):
So one night I was on Instagram and I was like,
I'm gonna play.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Wait, ladies and Tom and please welcome colony in the nation.
Uh and our friend Chris Aes to.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
Course love the free Thank you, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Right before we get all into that.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Yes, Steve, we really don't have Well, we had a guest,
that's your relationship.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
It's taking me ten minutes to explain who he is.
Speaker 6 (08:37):
So the feature just just came out recently a few
months ago, and I was just messing around with it
one night and I was super high and I was like,
I'm going to be Chris Hayes and I'm going to
interview motherfucker.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
So I started, you can invite people?
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Does it just? How? Does how does that invite request
show up on someone's account?
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Like you two have to mutually follow each other right.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Following We should make that happen, by the way, Yeah,
I should.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
Find you can either invite them where they can invite you,
and it's obvious something pops up and you, you know,
you both have to be cool with it. You can't
just somebody's screen. Well you can do that too, there's
no way. Maybe you have to be verified special shut
the ship down. Yes, verified people can just your.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
Phone check mark you have.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, there's there's a list of people that I'm following
that are following me that I can talk to Illuminati
and then if I want to interview Erica I can
also search for her name. I have an option that
lets me search for a name, press her and if
she accepts, and.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
She accepts, and then you go and then you go
live and anyone.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
And people watch. It's a voyeurs. People watch each other,
interview each other. So Steve is taking us actually to
the next level. I got to a few hundred people knowing,
you know, and then network.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
And you find it unnerving to watch in real time
how many people are watching.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Meaning what how few people are watching.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
I find something bizarre like we'll do a Facebook live
before the show, and my whole life, in a weird way,
gets you know. We get the ratings every day at
four fifteen, and at MSNBC we get a spreadsheet and
it matters a lot, like what kind of numbers you're doing?
It it resonates aroound the building, you know, So in
a weird way, a lot of my professional life is
oriented towards this number. And I find something unnerving about
(10:31):
the instant feedback as you're talking of, like seeing the
numbers go up and down, like it's some kind of
like say, absolute extremist version of let me perform in
the way, what will maximally maximally get people to what
am I doing?
Speaker 2 (10:49):
What am I doing? Part? It's most people will probably
sit for a good eight nine seconds, right, And I
noticed that. I mean one time I had a very
magical movement happened on my feed where it's like at
an actual DiAngelo rehearsal.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Well, yeah, I did one of those two with common No,
I'm just saying that.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
It was like even even at a DiAngelo rehearsal for
the Roots Picnic, like you know, my numbers went to
ungotly like four figures and then about fifteen minutes later
it went down to like three hundred, which you know,
maybe it is kind of ridiculous to but the thing
(11:34):
is that your people.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
I was at that rehearsal, it got kind of boring
as it went on. Yeah, wait, it was uh huh.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
That doesn't happen.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
It just drifts like it was like it was all
hitting and then everybody sort of just went for a
walk and it kind of went away.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
And the Yeah, but I mean I think just the
the the the art of or the the task of
watching someone have a conversation.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yeah. Plus, I mean one of the things that I learned,
one of the kind of crash. Course. Realities of this
job is keeping people's attention is hard. That's it's work
to keep people's attention, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
So Okay, as as a fan of of uh, what
was the show an HBO? Okay, I'm gonna take the
long Scenic Route Star Dumb and Dumber. Not Jim Carrey,
the other one.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
Jeff Bridges.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
He's show an HBO about Okay, all right, So when
you're on the air, is there a do you have
a an ear piece in which there is a producer
like okay, now ask about this and then.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
So we Yeah, so you're you're always passionate to the
control room through what's called an I F B. Right,
So you got an earpiece, and there's a really wide
spectrum of how active the control room is in that
in questions. In my case, almost never. I would say
a few times a week the control room will say,
(13:07):
will suggest a question, but it's it's very rare, partly
because I get I get super annoyed. It just feels
like backseyt driving. It's like I like, I'm at the wheel,
so don't tell me to make a left here. I
know I know what I'm doing. That Other people have
different feelings about that. That's my feeling about it.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Does that depend on the relationship you have with your producer?
Speaker 4 (13:30):
I think it does. It depends on you know, the
different shows have a different balance between how host driven
and how producer driven they are. Different hosts have different
levels of comfort of asking questions in the moment, Like
some want questions pre written and prompter to go through
that they've already done through like a process. Some don't
want anything imprompter. They just want to kind of think
(13:51):
in the moment, which is usually the way I am, Like,
I kind of know what I want to ask, but
I want to be One of the things I think
that happens is if you script it too much, kind
of like this though you don't listen right, Because one
of the things that can happen is if you've got
your idea about question one, is this in question two?
And you ask question one, what you're doing in your
head is okay, uh huh, yeah, now I'm on question
two as opposed to wait, what are they saying?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Gay?
Speaker 4 (14:14):
But but I think it varies a lot the person,
the person I talked to the most, which is the
line producer on the show, who's the person who keeps time,
which is a key part of the whole. You know,
she's the drummer, right, she's the drummer for the show.
So we got to figure out, you know, we got
to bring things in at certain moments, and we got
to hit our marks to make a show. Because it's live,
it's a zero sum. You go long here, you got
(14:36):
to go short here, you go, you got to cut
something here, and she's the one with cues a minute,
got to get to break. Okay, we're over.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
So I'm not certain if All In is the type
of show that deals with real time this just then,
but certainly or surely with the time that we're living in,
especially with yeah, you know who behind it? Will that
can happen anyway? Even this morning, Like you know, Alie
(15:03):
Jackson had an entirely different show plan and.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Then she got four thousand pages probably of transcripts.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
And then she got of this just in.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
Yeah, and then it's.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
How how much on your game? Well, I know you
have to be on your game, but how annoying is
it that at any moment the world can fall apart
and you have to be fluid and explain and knowledgeable and.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
It can be it's both. I would say it's invigorating
and thrilling in its own way because there's a certain
adrenaline to it when something happens at seven fifteen and
it's like, Okay, we're making decisions. What's okay, this is
the new A block, then what gets kicked out? Then
A goes down to B, then B gets killed? Or
do we keep the guests there and they move to
see or do we move like and you're making all
these decisions very quickly. One of the blessings and I
(15:51):
imagine it's actually this way on the Tonight Show that
there's a bizarre blessing of having a live show at
eight o'clock in that we don't have an option not
to do it right, Like if news breaks is seven fifteen,
whatever happens in those forty five minutes, the show comes
(16:11):
on air at eight, and there's there's something weirdly relieving
of stress about that, because if it was like, no,
it has to be perfect, we can let's wait till
eight twenty five to make sure that it's perfect. Is
that Mandy Patinkin, Hey, Manny Patinkin all just so wow,
that's the most wild thing that happened to me in
my life.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, we just got up
the anti randomly walks in a room star of Homeland.
Yeah yeah, come on here, you want to be a
part of it? Oh well we're we're yes, no podcast?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Hey this and I'm good. How are you this?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Man? It's good to see you again.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Awesome, very enough to meet you.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I have a podcast and Chris Is from M S
n b C is the host of it.
Speaker 8 (17:24):
Yeah, I don't know who I am, right, yeah, all right,
thank you.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
Oh it's a copy of my book. Yeah, absolutely, that
would be my great pleasure. All right, right, thank you man,
You're a legend. You're a legend. Literally, that was the
fucking best thing that ever just happened.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Thank you for being on chatting with Sugar. Can I
tell me the particular story when you wait?
Speaker 4 (17:58):
Can we interrupt your on ours?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yes? Wait, hit me.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
I was working on a musical and man Pittinking was
going to be in it, and he uh came and
sang and delivered and told all these stories about his
mother and he's a very fascinating human being.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I could talk about him for a long time.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
But that was an awesome cameo in quest Love Supreme
only on Pandora Sugar Network.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Fucking many Pink was amazing. So we gotta get him
to sign some ship. No, we can't, we can't.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
We know he has to remain I mean, he didn't
get Dangelo to sign yeah just ship though he did,
did he?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah? He said it's more.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Then he walked Wait what was the question to I
can't remember.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
It was a print something probably it was more R
and B.
Speaker 9 (18:44):
And then he went to get cigarettes and never came
back like that all right.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
So man, he's so what's the right word, like he
is so entirely himself. Oh yeah, I mean that I
you would expect that, but that that was what I
expect Mandy Patinka to be like.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah that wow, that's that was great. You're the host
of the show now, so.
Speaker 9 (19:10):
You kind of just got and something crazy happens in
the middle of a show and then and I lose control.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Yes, you were just talking about how you how you
reacted in the moment improvisation, and you got all flustered.
You were like, he's he's the host of my show?
What was that's questioned?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
What was your very first uh journalist assignment? Like, what
is what is the road that leads to you having
your own show, And isn't there an internship that leads
like did you work at a newsroom?
Speaker 4 (19:42):
And I came up a sort of a weird way
and and in a way that doesn't really exist anymore,
partly because the ecosystem I came through has all died
off a little bit. I graduated from college and I
was really into theater and mooch Chicago with my then
girlfriend now wife. And what in Chicago's super cheap. I
don't know if any of you have ever lived in Chicago,
(20:03):
but it is a great place if you're twenty two
and broke, because it's so much cheaper than New York.
It's so much cheaper than La The Winner sucks. But
there's a lot of people in Chicago doing a lot
of really cool stuff because people pay nothing for rent.
And there's like people playing shows in the abandoned buildings
and doing theater and photography. And I was there doing
(20:23):
theater and also freelance writing and started writing.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yes, sorry, what'd you major in that?
Speaker 4 (20:27):
Just I majored in philosophy. Yeah, I major in philosophy.
I was doing theater and I was I started writing
for the Chicago Reader, which is like the alternative weekly there.
It's like the Village Voice Washington, DC City paper like that.
And I started freelancing and got had more and more
success doing that, started writing for more publications like online
liberal publications. I got a job at a lefty magazine
(20:51):
called In These Times. I then got hired by the Nation,
and then my wife got a job in Washington, d C.
Clerking on the Supreme Court. In two thousand and seven
we moved to watch Washington, d C. She was clerking
for Justice Stevens, which was an amazing thing to see
up close. And I became the through complete accident, the
(21:11):
long time Washington bureau chief of The Nation magazine David
Korn left to go to Mother Jones three months after
I moved to DC, and they're like, oh, we needed
to be a new bureau chief, and the interviewed me
and they gave me the job. And from that I
started appearing on television as a talking head punch of
the Yeah, I'm the Washington bureau chief of the Nation,
So what do you think about? And this was in
the sort of last year the Bush administration, in the
(21:32):
two thousand and eight campaign and the financial crisis and
all that, But.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
How often does that happen? Usually don't you have to
like work your way up the ranks out of paper?
Speaker 4 (21:40):
And so yeah, it was. It was a bunch of
accidents and timing was perfect, timing, timing, And I think
the fact that I had a little I had a
background in theater, I had acted, I had a little
bit of a performance background. I like to talk. I
think that was. You know, you have we try people
out on TV all the time, and talking on TV
is a very specific and weird skill that is different
than talking. It's different than being an interesting person. It's
(22:03):
just a weird skill. You sit in a room, you
stare into a camera. You don't have any of the
physical cues that come like right now, we're all looking
at each other like you're not in your head when
I say something, which is a nice encouragement I keep going.
But you don't have that in it in a TV studio.
It's it's a weird and alienating experience.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Oh you're saying, even that's more different than this that
what we're doing right now. Oh yeah, yeah, I feel
like this exposes everything about me. Whereas I'm better tweeting
and typing thoughts than this than I am because I
have to think about.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Things and edit.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Where I'm even two years into this, I'm not. I
feel like I'm not fluid at all, and.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
Well that I would disagree with that, but I would
say that it's really interesting ask Bill people have. People
have different experiences of how they you know, how they talk,
and how and how easily that kind of that form
of communication comes to them. And I think I had
a sort of aptitude for it. And so what was
I started getting booked more and more as a guest. Eventually,
(23:03):
in twenty ten, I was asked to guest host a
show for Rachel. That was a huge deal. I went
down to New York a day early. I read off
the teleprompter as practice. I was nervous af the I
was so nervous, and then I did it and it
went well and it rated well. And then I started
(23:24):
guest hosting more and more often. And the more I
guest hosted, then I moved from that to a weekend show,
and from the weekend show to an evening show. So
it was it was a very strange route because I
came through kind of liberal lefty magazine alternative weekly journalism
on the print side. I was a writer, always a writer.
I didn't have any TV background. I didn't intern at
a local station. I wasn't a news anchor at a
you know station des Moines or you know. People moved
(23:46):
from smaller markets to bigger markets. I came in this
completely different direction and kind of had to learn TV
as I went.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Wow, Oh, Chris like you, yeah, to learn TV as
he went, so did I, Chris?
Speaker 6 (24:00):
So, what what percentage of your current job is journalism?
What percentage is performance?
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Let's say it's a great, great question.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I only ask great questions.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Your Instagram channel is amazing. The eight Hour Extended Mandy
Patinkin interview, The Ring Cycle, the uh you know, look,
I try to I basically am consuming things all day
and I'm trying to report every day, which means that
I'm constantly in contact with a bunch of different people
(24:35):
in different areas. But you know, the staff is, you know,
we're got twenty five people to make an hour of TV,
and so much of it is taken up with just
getting that thing on the air. If we had a
I would love it if we had a newsroom where
we were sending people out. You know dozens of reporters
to do enterprise journalism every day. In terms of what
(24:56):
I'm doing, I think it's a combination. I mean, you
kind of can't say to create the performance part from it,
because if the performance part isn't there, then people are
not gonna watch. But the interviews, you know, my favorite.
We had someone on last night. We had a political
reporter wrote a great piece about basically the Trump administration
burying a report that came from their own administration about
(25:18):
the toxicity levels of certain chemicals and water. And they
were like, let's not release this, it'll freak everyone out.
And my favorite moments that happened on TV are when
I'm learning something live in the moment from the interview,
because that feels like I'm making discovery. So we talked
to this reporter. She was great. I learned from her.
I learned things I hadn't learned even in reading her piece.
And I try to get as many of those moments
(25:39):
as I can in the show, where as opposed to
some pre rehearse thing where I throw a lob and
you dunk it that I'm actually like, we're actually reacting
to each other and I'm learning things in real time,
so all right, similar to the comedy world where.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Save news of the world. All right, all right, so say,
as of this cycle or this us speaking right now,
Kanye opinions are like a thing right now in the
comedy world where Kanye is so crazy or even just
let's go you know years ago where it was always
(26:20):
OJ jokes, that sort of thing. With the way that
your particular channel runs, if everyone is telling the same story,
is that just with the thought in mind that there's
no one watching this show concurrently, like nine hours in
a row, and that you just have to refresh and
(26:40):
me tell the story again. And I'll take Stephanie Ruhl's
take on it and Halle and so but what is there?
I mean, I don't want to say a competition thing. No,
are you guys dreaming of like Okay, I'm gonna this
is gonna be my Bob Wood.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
Word totally moment or you know, my Harbernstein.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
I would say this, it's going to play me in
the movie when I bless this story open.
Speaker 4 (27:05):
Well, you know, it's a balance between the two. So
there's two competing impulses. I think one is you don't
want to run the same show over and over and
repetition is a real problem, and it's a real challenge.
And there's I think partly we can't think of it
as Okay, someone's watching the network for four hours, because
it's a little like ten ten wins here in New
York City, right, like traffic and weather together every twelve minutes,
(27:28):
because people are just cycling through, and so it's like, well,
I already know the traffic and weather. It's like, well,
you other people are coming to it. We got to
tell them what's up. So there's a little bit of that, right,
So a certain amount of repetition. At the same time,
you do want to distinguish the shows. And the real
hard part is and you know, I say this about
TV all the time, which is that plants grow towards
the light. And what I mean by that is you
(27:49):
can have a garden in your backyard and you can
plant everything all nice and spaced out, and if you
come back six months later and light is only hitting
one part, all of the plants have grown over here,
and the light is ratings attention, what people are paying
attention to. And so what will inevitably happen is people
chase the stories that they feel like there's the most
juice in that there's the most attention in, and that
(28:11):
leads to a certain inescapable level of redundancy about what
the stories of the day are not always defensible. I
think sometimes that there's certain myths get embedded in people's
heads about what people are interested in. There's a little
bit of a bubble that can happen, which is that
you work in this building where the TV's on all day,
so you're constantly looking up at cable News and you're like, Oh,
they're talking about x X is the thing we should
(28:32):
talk about. So I actually try to keep the TVs
off in my office for that reason. Okay, precisely because
I don't want to. I just don't want to be
overly influenced by what everyone in cable news is talking
about all the time, because then you can have a
kind of self fulfilling prophecy about that. But it's a challenge.
We have a bunch of meetings throughout the day in
which the production staffs of the different shows actually huddle
(28:54):
and talk about what their respective rundowns are and try
to make sure that we're not all doing the same show.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
So without being too bias towards whatever my cable news preferences.
I think there was. I was in a waiting room
and an airport once, and that's probably the longest I've
(29:20):
been in a place in which Fox News was constantly running. Well,
they did some weird thing where Fox News was on
this television, but then behind me was CNN in the
same room playing at the same time. Yeah, it was well,
it was like one of them large like waiting room things.
(29:40):
And so then it finally hit me why Fox News'
ratings is how it is.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
One.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
I didn't know that they exploited women, uh that much
to that level. It's like practically every journey, even if
it's with a mail journalist, there's always a leggy, thy,
stiletto heeled, young blonde uras And I was like, oh,
this is why everyone's watching. Like I finally got it,
(30:12):
because in my head, I'm like, people can't. I know,
people want to accept the reality that accept I mean,
I feel as though of the three, the big three networks,
that you guys tell the truth of what's happening, regardless
of what it is, but is there Because there was
a point where a lot of my favorite shows were
(30:35):
getting pushed to the side, like suddenly Roland didn't have
his show in the afternoon, and the Daily Shoe like
a whole bunch of ms and I was fearing that,
oh God, they're trying to they're feeling the pressure of
Fox News, Like will they adjust or I didn't know
(30:56):
if it's new management, But how do you feel year
that one day there will be the hammer comes down.
It's just like, Okay, people aren't here for the truth anymore,
and we gotta you know.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
I actually I sort of experienced this in reverse because
when we launched the show in twenty thirteen, interest in
politics was at a real low point. I mean, Barack
Obama's just been re elected, Congress is in the hand
of Republicans. There's this kind of stalemate, you know, and
people just were like, eh, I'm kind of done with politics.
I think the I think Barack Obama's re election particularly,
(31:31):
was like, Okay, that's the end of that chapter, right,
like the.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I can go on with life.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
Yeah, Like we had George W. Bush and then like
this crazy insane financial crisis and also this crazy insane campaign,
and also we elected the first black president and then it
was like, is he going to get re elected? And
then he did, and it was like, okay, well we've
got a sort of narrative arc here that was a
dangerous for years of extremely yeah, but people a lot
of people checked out, and we saw it in the numbers.
I mean, so my experiences, I've been doing the show
(31:59):
for five years, twenty thirteen, we started twenty thirteen, fourteen fifteen.
Those were lean years, and that's when a lot of
those shows were getting canceled. And I think it was
a combination of there was new management that came in,
but also everyone was kind of struggling trying to figure
out what gets people's attention. I mean, you remember the
missing plane thing, right when the plane went missing, and
that was that became this running joke, understandably because it
was insane how much cable news covered it. But people
(32:22):
were covering it out of desperation because it was it
was the only thing rating. It's like, you couldn't you
couldn't get people to.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
Do we have a fine at plane?
Speaker 4 (32:31):
No, No, No, it's crazy. Okay, yeah, that's one of
those for where did we end up up on that files? Yeah,
like where we end up on the plane? I know,
I know there was it was missing.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
But and they thought they found it that they right.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
So what's happened instead over the course of our trajectory
on the show is that we now have We've got
form four times as many viewers as we had, you know,
back in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, the lean years, and
my feeling, I feel like, if the viewers are there,
we're there. But TV's fickle. I mean, TV's rough. It's
(33:08):
like it's like the restaurant business in New York City.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
So you don't even feel secure in your position now
as a anchor.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
I feel pretty I feel them. I will say this,
I feel the most secure I've ever felt like I
have a contract. I'm going to be there through you know,
through twenty twenty you know, barring something completely unforeseen, and
and I feel as secure as've ever felt. But I
have also I also understand that it's a crazy business
and you know people things blow up all the time,
(33:42):
and things get canceled to get moved around. It's just
the nature of the business. And you got to kind
of be a little at peace with that, otherwise you're
going to stress yourself out all the time.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Normally, well, we kind of worked our way backwards, but
I always started your beginnings. Can I just ask one
more question before we go backwards?
Speaker 6 (34:05):
And speaking of like fickle and TV and stuff, Trump fatigue.
So I'm kind of a news junkie, or I was,
and now I'm kind of like I have Trump.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
You've hit You've hit your point.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah, I stopped.
Speaker 6 (34:18):
That's interesting and well it's sort of correlated with the
beginning of chatting with Sugar.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
So I don't really do anything anymore except that.
Speaker 6 (34:25):
But but no, in all seriousness, though, do you get that?
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Do you have that? Or are you getting that? Do
you fear having that?
Speaker 4 (34:34):
Yeah? I feel it sometimes, I think, you know, there
are times where it feels a little like being trapped
in a dysfunctional or toxic relationship or a toxic household.
Like I've been very lucky in my life that the
people that are closest to me, I haven't had to
deal with people very close to my life that are
(34:55):
really toxic personalities.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
People do.
Speaker 4 (34:57):
People have parents that are toxic personality, They have partners
that are you know, siblings, Like people deal with that,
They deal with that all the time. I'm very lucky
my loved ones, aren't you know, aren't like that? I
feel like I have this weird experience of it now
because so much of my day is dominated by the
President of the United States and what he's doing, and
and yeah, I think I have some craving to get
(35:19):
outside that a little bit. We just we actually just
launched a podcast that called whise is Happening, where I
get to have kind of longer conversations with people and
outside of the specifics of the daily news cycle that
tends to be so driven by the President. And partly
I think that's because that's nurturing a need I have
(35:41):
to talk about, yeah, talk about other stuff. I mean,
just just to talk about you know, I've been trying recently.
I just found myself so trapped in the news cycle
just for my job that I've been trying to like
read more books and I just you know, read novels.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
And but don't you think, like I listened to all
your podcasts on the way in, and as far as
you try to get away from them, they all circle
back to Trump and what's going on now, Like the
conservative one, it's all it doesn't matter. Yeah, as far
out as you go, you always get sucked back into
that thing.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
Like that's a good point it was like the Middle.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
East, and it was all about like but then it
was like Kushner, what's going on in the Middle East?
Like totally one of them.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Yeah, no, And I think as we go further, I
think we want to try to push to go further
a field. Part of it also is, I mean, the
funny thing about that, right, this comes back to this
question about, you know, the plants growing towards the light.
So I was like obsessively looking at the podcast numbers
last night because I'm a crazy, compulsively addicted junkie.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Sounds like me, Yeah, this is I stopped looking at
my Metacritic numbers like three months ago. But yeah, at
one point, man, like, well that's sick. I do it too.
It's terrible.
Speaker 4 (36:48):
Yeah. Authors, Man, you talk to authors, they sit there
just hitting refresh on the Amazon ranking and it's like.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Even give me a start with that ship.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
Yeah, it's crazy. So I was looking at it last night,
and sure enough, we put out three episodes and one
of them is one is very explicitly about Trump and
how he fits into conservatism, and lo and behold that's
the best performing one, right, which, which which is not
that surprising because the even if there are people I
think like yourself, and I think that's not an uncommon experience,
(37:16):
a sort of fatigue. There's also just this insatiable desire
to try to understand.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
But it also felt like the most relatable. Sorry, it
felt like the most relatable. The one about conservatism too
very black and white to me. It was like, this
is the guy the guy you had on was Yeah,
it was very explicit about what it felt very clear
to me.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, is it hard to not insert your personal beliefs
into a situation and being neutral because the thing is
that this is the first time in which I'm seeing uh,
being neutral being a dangerous thing. I mean, I guess
(37:57):
I would. You're not neutral? Yeah, I mean no, I
know that, But I'm just saying that. Is it the
days of you know, you not knowing where Walter khank
this this may take a while, Walter Cite. Yeah, with
(38:18):
Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings or whatever, right, the days
of just asking a question and you you know, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
I think that the model that we have, that I
have is that I'm not neutral, that I have a
set of beliefs in a worldview that people know and
are familiar with. But we try really hard on the
show to be what I would say would be fair,
and to be open minded, to not take cheap shots,
to not to not just tell ourselves things that feel good,
(38:50):
to not be hacks. Right, So that, oh, well, this
Republican was accused of sexual harassment and ergo, that person
is terrible, and we're going to do a hip piece
segment on them. And then the next day this Democrat
was accused of sexual harassment. Like, we're just going to
keep that out of the show, okay. Like the other night,
for instance, half forty minutes before we went to air,
(39:11):
Eric Sneiderman, the New York Attorney General, there was a
piece in New Yorker, devastating, horrifying piece in which he's
alleged to be this just sort of psychotically disgusting abuser,
I mean with women in his piece. Yeah, Ronan's piece.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yiks, Ronan does man.
Speaker 4 (39:27):
People on the record, women on the record talking about
this horrible physical and verbal abuse from him. And it
broke at seven twenty and I was like, this, we're
doing this in the show because Eric Snydermann's been on
our show and it's important that this we don't you know,
if you were a Republican, we do it. IF's a Democrat,
we do it. So there's a level which like we
(39:48):
have our worldview, but we also are not just out
there trying to play for a team, which is really
important to me, like that we are good faith arbiters
from the perspective of a set of values as opposed
to a perspective of one of two tribes or one
of two colors, or one or two teams.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
But like when you were coming up, we're fairly the
same age, like you were saying, I feel like Peter
Jennings and Dan Rather they're all like trying to be
the face of neutrality and try to present both things.
When did you decide to really define yourself as being
liberal because like your Wikipedia page it's as a liberal commentary.
It's like it feels like that's something you're very proud,
yeah or whatever.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
Well for me for it started, I mean it went
the other way. So people people that come up through
TV have to be neutral, I think as they come up,
because if you're the you're reading the news in Des
Moines or in Broward County or wherever you got it.
That's the way the business model works, and then if
you know, you work your way up past that and
you're doing other stuff. For me, I started as just
(40:46):
a writer writing for explicitly ideological publications where everybody knew.
So the Nation magazine and In These Times and Chicago
Reader are a certain extent like they were places where
that was just part of the social contract with the reader,
like the reader understood they're getting yeah, yeah, And I
think you know, I read a lot of a lot
of different stuff from different ideological corners that I really
(41:09):
like because to me, the big, the most important thing
is just to be honest and upfront and not be deceptive. Right,
So the the sort of sneak attack that kind of like, oh, well,
this is just when you're smuggling stuff in and you're
not telling him as opposed you're saying like, hey, I'm
a conservative and here's why I think you know X
about the tax cuts or X about our cultural rot
(41:29):
of Hollywood or whatever it is that's interesting to me,
and I can I can engage with that. It's the
it's the it's the bad faith deception that I find
a little unnerving.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Well, actually, well, this could lead us into a colony
and a nation, which I always felt that the term
liberal was sort of a dog whistle turn that conservative
media has come up with, uh, when they describe a
journalist that considers black people, gay people, brown people, anyone
(42:09):
not under the white male, hetero kind of umbrella as equals.
Always felt as though that has been the sort of
dog whistle term of which you you there's there's a
great part of in chapter four where you really explain
(42:30):
that the genesis of the idea of white fear and
that the fear of losing knowing acknowledging that you have
an advantage and that one day it could be lost.
And I almost feel as that's where that falls under it.
(42:51):
So even I mean, I consider when I hear liberal,
I feel that that's the hidden the hidden four letter
word that I mean basically is you're telling the truth
right in my opinion, But of course, like the way
that we're programming built today that it's it's kind of like,
(43:11):
you know, you have to preference with you know, I'm
neutral and I'm that sort of thing. So like, how
do you feel when you hear that title?
Speaker 4 (43:21):
I don't, you know, it's funny liberal. I never feel
I don't feel like there's really a great term that
I feel like I want to embrace. Like liberal doesn't
feel quite right, progressa doesn't feel quite right, leftist doesn't
feel None of those feel quite right. I don't know
what the right term.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
Is, right. What does the Fox journalists call themselves?
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Oh, you know, they say they're unbiased or they're you know,
I think Sean Hannity calls them I think that's not true.
I think Tucker Carls and Sean Hanny, Laura Ingram, they
would all call themselves conservatives. I think they would say
that they were conservatives. I I think if I were to,
you know, my biggest commitment, I would And this is
a word that you I think sounds annoying if you
(44:02):
go around calling yourself this but an egalitarian. I mean,
I'm like, I'm really my worldview is really ordered around
equality and getting to equality and what a society with real,
genuine that took a quality seriously it would look like,
and what that would mean for full human flourishing. I mean,
you know, it's easy, I think sometimes to lose sight.
Everything gets so cramped of like what is the project?
(44:26):
Why are we as humans? Why do we build a
democratic society? Why do we do any of this? What's
the idea behind this all? And the idea is to
facilitate human flourishing. The idea is everybody has an opportunity
and a chance and is given the tools to flourish,
to do things they love, to do, things they enjoy,
to be in relationships that are fulfilling to them, to
(44:49):
go on vacations and play on the beach. I mean,
that's the vision here, and there's a bunch of questions
about how do you get that vision? But to me,
when we have hierarchies and categorical systems that put some
people on one side of the line and some people
on the other of it, whether that's through the way
the economy works or in the case of colony nation policing, like,
(45:10):
that's the fundamental thing that I'm taken with that I
think about, is are those hierarchies and that and getting
to a quality and sort of ways that we can
upend those hierarchies.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
When you were a kid, what were your aspirations as
far as what you thought you were going to do
as an adult when you were six or seven years old.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
Well, when I was six or seven, I probably wanted
to be a basketball player. To be honest, that did
not work out. I was like barely a high school
varsity basketball player, So I was a long way.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
But that philosophy degree from Brown.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
Yeah, yeah, Weirdly, you know, I knocked around the D
League for a bit. But No, I would say that
the two biggest things I thought about was something in
some kind of way of like, I think I always
wanted to perform in some ways. And then I think
I wanted to be I really wanted to be an intellectual,
(46:05):
even at a really young age, Like I wanted to
be a professor, you know, I want to be someone
who learned for a living and wrote books for a
living and you know, engage with other people about ideas
and that. I think I wanted to do that even
when I was really really young, I think seven eight nine,
probably I wanted to do that.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
That's weird because I feel like I was just forced
into that position, like forced intellectualism. No, I'm just forced
into the whatever, the teacher role that people expect me
to be. Then I was like, well what they what
did you?
Speaker 4 (46:39):
What did you want to be? No?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
I was I was going to be a musician, and then.
Speaker 4 (46:43):
From from from from real young from.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
The age of two. But the thing was is that
because did you come from my my my my family?
I came from a musical think think the Black Partes family,
So I came from that sort of environment. But now
that I think about it, it's either you're going to
be a musician and pursue and create art, which I
(47:09):
think I did. Yeah, but then I get equal amounts
of pleasure of studying other people's method of making art.
So it's like, would I rather you know, go batch
it crazy over watching other people make art and marvel
over it and figure out the process of value did
(47:32):
it versus me just doing it myself like my version
of it. And I actually think that the former is
what I gravitate towards. So really, uh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
I always think to myself, if I could be given
any power or ability in the world. I mean, the
honest and lay answer is probably dunk of basketball. But
if you put that, ah, you put that aside, like
really dunk, I mean like really, I don't mean like
they just get me over like you were like trained
(48:10):
for ten months and I mean like row down down,
but but that but I would say after that, the
number one thing would be to like write a great
song that to me seems like the ultimate superpower, like
to walk through Earth and being able to do that.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
See, that's weird. I'd rather discover a great song, like.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
In my mind I fascinating to me. Really, I know
somewhere and.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
It's like do I dream of Like, Man, I'm gonna
write a great song that's going to change people's lives,
and hey, it's me a writing song of the Year
and I'm holding my grammy. I don't have those dreams.
My dreams are, man, I know in that Prince.
Speaker 4 (48:48):
Fault, there's let's be in.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yeah, there's at least forty one songs at least of
those thousands. I know, at least there's forty one songs
that could change my life.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Gotta get to them like other people's just changed your life,
My life discovery.
Speaker 4 (49:06):
You're saying discovery as a bust of creation, and.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
You know what it was? Okay, So when I'll give
you example, So maybe a month before the Purple Raine
reissue came out, when quote, my connect gave me, uh,
whatever the whatever the final listening was going to be
of the extra songs that were making it. He sent
(49:31):
me a particular song he sent me we can funk
or we can fuck uh funk, and I can't describe
it to you, but in hearing it and knowing that
song already and heard it and it's different incarnations of
in boot bootlegology, at one point for a particular minute,
(49:55):
I was back to being that thirteen year old that
there's nothing like staring at the speaker discovering new music
and how it made you. It just brought me back
to fifty two to twelve, oh Sage Avenue and the
(50:17):
bowl a si My cereal bowl and the color television
with the set, you know, with the antenna. So yeah,
it's just like I don't know if maybe, and maybe
that's why I also obsessed over well, I've explained, like
watch me obsessing over Soul Train isn't necessarily about me
loving the show Soul Train, but more or less because
(50:38):
every episode does the synesthesia thing with me that I
can I know what happened this particular day. I'll make
it be silly shit, Like the most silliest one was
like Shalamar's first appearance on the show. Oh I love
that one. Shalamar's first appearance on the show in nineteen
(50:59):
seventy seven triggers off Ah, a can of of Pathmark
no frill spaghetti meatballs with the good stuff. Stop dismissing me,
Steve in my dreams, I'm just saying.
Speaker 4 (51:20):
No.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
But it's it's it just takes me to a magical
time in second grade at seven years old. And I
mean it might be silly, but maybe that's how my
memories are preserved. Yeah, So it's almost like I don't
I'm happy with, you know, the Grammys and stuff, but
(51:43):
maybe that's why they're in my bathroom.
Speaker 4 (51:44):
Like like I don't dream of my.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Own achievements more than I dream of preserving my memories.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
But I don't think that's I think you're talking about
what would be your best super superpower. He was said
to write a great song. I'm not sure that that's
answering that right.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
But that's the thing, like I never well, my whole
point was that I never had those dreams for myself,
more or less discovering other people's great songs.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
Right, and like putting part of taste makers and putting
people onto things. I feel like that's your other great
thing because we have tastemakers on this show all the time,
and that to me is always interesting is watching you
talk to those people because they can define the culture
and define music and define it.
Speaker 2 (52:22):
Don't even know if I'm gonna put see that's why
that's why Bill is here, Like Bill is my put
people on, right, But you're kind of just he's like
you're condo inspired though, or that he's old the point well, yeah,
but so you're but for you to be a to
be a teacher at such a young age, like.
Speaker 4 (52:45):
I just really liked you know, I was a kid.
I grew up in the Bronx in the nineteen eighties.
My my dad was a community organizer and my mom
uh stayed home with us and then she did arts
and education. So I was a real I was like
a middle class outer borough kid. I went to this
gifted program that was a Burrow wide gifted program, uh
(53:07):
in the Bronx in the eighties, which is a fascinating
group of people.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
Can you explain the because like a lot of us,
by a lot of us, I mean mean like I'm
still thinking of come out and.
Speaker 3 (53:18):
Yeah right or right, so yeah, pretty much it was
basically you look like one of the Bronx.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
And it's different because even now, like when I went
to see Michael McDonald in the Bronx, like, I was like.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
Wait a minute, people, you know the thing about the
thing about the first of all, there's a sound stuff
New York City. New York City is enormous. Each borough
is enormous. You're talking about a million and a half
people somewhere thereabouts. Now, the Bronx in the nineteen eighties
was in a bad way. I mean, my dad's community
organizing was basically focused on neighborhoods that were bordering the
(53:53):
neighborhoods that were literally burning from like the Bronx is
burning right, so arson disinvestment, huge spike in both in crime,
in drug addiction, all those things. He was doing communit
organizing in these neighborhoods that were sort of adjacent to those,
trying to kind of hold the line against this scourge
of disinvestment and flight that had taken place in the borough.
(54:16):
You know, the world that I lived in was a
really interesting world in grade school that I'm forever grateful
to because it was very multi racial. I mean, the
borough is probably you know, twenty five percent white.
Speaker 2 (54:31):
Maybe I never.
Speaker 4 (54:32):
Knew, Yeah, it's probably like it's seventy or eighty percent
black and brown. And so the program that the school
I went to, which was a borough wide program, you know,
you just got really used to being one of only
a few white people in spaces all the time in
school and classes, in dances and all in competitions and
all that stuff. And I think it was a really
(54:56):
good formative experience. And you know, for all of the
bronx Is Burning Warriors all that, you know, it's a
huge burrow with a huge working middle class. And these
were people whose parents, you know, owned a bodega, drove
city buses, worked as bank tellers, you know, you know,
had working class, middle class jobs and and you know
(55:23):
it was not a place with a lot of privilege,
but it was it was a fascinating and then culturally
explosive universe. I mean we were exposed. I was exposed
to well, you were you born? I'm sorry, I was
born nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
So after the hip hop explosion of.
Speaker 4 (55:40):
Yeah, so it wasn't like the you know, DJ Cool
Hirk like apartment party sort of formative years. But I
do remember my friend Kamal telling me that his cousin
was in a special ad music video and then showing
me the dance.
Speaker 2 (55:58):
Very good.
Speaker 4 (55:58):
I have a very live memory of that, but so
so yeah, and I think that it just was a
very What was interesting about my upbringing, and my upbringing
in the Bronx particularly was because of my parents and
their education level. And then we moved to this neighborhood
that was more affluent than the one that I grew
up in. And then I went to a Magnet High
school in New York City. That's where a bunch of
(56:22):
people in including Li Mel and Miranda a Moral Technique,
a whole bunch of different books, Bobby Lopez, who's you know,
got an egot and wrote Avenue Q and Frozen and
with his wife and all these really interesting talented people.
But because of that, I had a very interesting upbringing
in which I was exposed to, like the full spectrum
of American class status. So everything from kids in my
(56:47):
class who were in and out of homelessness, food stamps
or in housing projects, through people who had fifteen room
apartments on Park Avenue, from ages, you know, from the
time I was born to the time I wanted a
way to college. I had social interactions and saw patches
of life in each of those different worlds, and that
(57:10):
was really a huge part of I think my formative experience.
Speaker 2 (57:14):
I don't I don't condone bullying, but still the thought
of immortal Technique being the school bully to you and women,
well one of the most hilarious.
Speaker 4 (57:26):
As funny at the time.
Speaker 2 (57:27):
But yes, in retrospect, I think, but that I think
when I first met you and didn't know that you
knew Lynn, when you were interviewing this about Hamilton, you
two told me like, yeah, he used to throw us
in the trash can, which I was like, one of
his best stories. I'm sorry, okay for hip hop, for
(57:48):
hip hop versus like what what verse would you have
to study in high school?
Speaker 4 (57:53):
The thing they were always making people sing Bucktown. That
was the that was the thing. It was always singing Bucktown.
It was like people put people in trash cans of
making them sing.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
I'm sorry, I don't know why that's one hip hop crime.
I'll give him a past too. I'm sorry because I
want to do that to kids now say Bucktown?
Speaker 4 (58:16):
Dammit?
Speaker 2 (58:18):
Oh god, So leading leading to a colony in a nation,
why did you feel it was necessary? Two? Do you
see this as sort of a supplement to uh, Tanahse
coaches uh uh me against the Between the World and Me.
(58:40):
I'm thinking of Tupac me against the world, the same thing.
He knows what he meant.
Speaker 4 (58:46):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's I hope it's uh
I hope it's for a lot of people. I hope
it's a kind of gateway to a whole, a whole
massive literature from you know, Racecraft by the by Barbara
and Karen Fields, and Between the World and Me on
the Hazie to the Nudrum Crow by Michelle Crowe by
Michelle Alexander. There's a great book by James former Junior
(59:10):
that actually won the Pultzer this year. It came out
right around the same time as a Colony Nation called
Locking Up Our Own, which is about the politics crime
punishment in predominantly black neighborhoods and cities, which is a
really fascinating book, great book. The reason I wrote the
book was I've always been really interested in criminal justice.
I think the experience of growing up in New York
City in the eighties and nineties during the peak of
(59:31):
the kind of crime boom, I mean nineteen ninety three
or nineteen nine. Yeah, when I was thirteen I started
commuting down to Manhattan. You know, New York City's got
twenty four hundred murders a year. It's got about three
hundred and fifty last year. So and that's true. All
index crimes basically were the same, right, All index crimes
basically reduced by eighty percent from the peak in ninety
two ninety three when we were when I was a
(59:52):
thirteen year old walking around getting my starter caps jacked
like every other day.
Speaker 2 (59:57):
Whoa, you've been ki?
Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
Oh yes, yeah, we went to starter car.
Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
That's my brain went Okay.
Speaker 4 (01:00:12):
So I wanted to write about it, and I wanted
to write about I was covering, I was covering Ferguson,
I was covering Baltimore, Freddie Gray, I was covering uh,
some of the stuff that went down in Chicago even
before Lauwan McDonald uh and and our garner here in
New York. And wanted to kind of write about it,
and was kind of worried about I think I had
(01:00:32):
a moment of is this a book? Is this a
topic that a white man should write a book about?
And I think I came to believe that actually part
of the problem with the way I think, particularly white
people think about the system, even if they're sympathetic to
the aims of say, Black Lives Matter, is that it's
essentially like some other ancillary problem, Like that's a thing
(01:00:54):
that is a problem, Like it's a bad thing, and
I'm it's a bummer that happens, but I'm not implicated
in it. It's like, part of the point of the
book is like, no, you very much are we collectively
as a democratic society, but particularly as white majorities and
particularly as white voters, have created this system that puts
more people in prison than anywhere else in the world
(01:01:16):
in a per capita basis. It didn't just come about.
It wasn't handed down by you know, Moses, and it
wasn't the product of back room lobbyists. It was actually
voters going to the polls and voting for people that
ran really racist ads about getting tough on crimes and
crack you know, crack thugs and things like that. And
so part of the project of the book is to say, look,
(01:01:38):
you're implicated in the system we all are as democratic citizens,
and the system that we've built fails to live up
to the democratic aspirations and promises we have, and so
we should all be troubled by that, and we should
all be trying to unbuild that system. And that's that's
sort of the idea behind why I wanted to write
the book.
Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Well as far as the target audience to whom it
should hit, how do you how do you propose not
even reading not even reading your book per se? But
it's like, how do you even plant the seed in
(01:02:21):
people's minds, especially where we the times that we live
in now, where journalists aren't trusted that much. The idea
of fake news and liberal media is just oh, you're
just a liberal and you know, which is like instant
turn off. So it's like, how do you It's like, okay,
(01:02:43):
let me just save the people that are on the
fence now.
Speaker 4 (01:02:45):
And I think, you know, it's a good question. You know.
The hope always, I think when you're writing is that
you can speak to people, whoever they are, if they're
willing to give you a charitable read the book. It's
funny I'm watching now this sort of national conversation and
that started to click in a dear do you see
the thing about t I?
Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Today? No?
Speaker 4 (01:03:03):
You see this. I was on the way we are
t I got arrested because someone called the cops on
him as he was trying to get into his own
gated community in Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
Yeah, no, that that's it's real, because sometimes you don't
have your code.
Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
No.
Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
And someone was like, who's this dude?
Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
Right?
Speaker 4 (01:03:20):
And I think as we're having this natural conversation about
you know, there's a Starbucks incident, there's there's been a
bunch of this and I think it's been really really
he got arrested. There was an ap bulleton as I
was coming up here saying that t I got arrested
for breaking into basically bagging.
Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
It was on that damn. Even the cops come like,
oh you're t I.
Speaker 4 (01:03:39):
Yeah, well look I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:03:41):
That's horrible.
Speaker 4 (01:03:42):
Clearly they didn't thought of it. So, you know, the
book A Calling Nation like it starts and ends on
a question of when to call the cops. Like the
first the first sentence of the book is when's the
last time you called the cops? And the last sentence
of the book is recounting a story of me being
in Prospect Park and taking on my phone and considering
whether I should die no one one. And the reason
(01:04:02):
that I started and ended with that is because that
is a thing that you know, Ferguson or the police
shooting people might team abstract to a citizen like, well,
I'm not a cop, but people call the cops a lot.
You're You're part of the link in the chain, and
I think it's really important we're having this discussion right now.
We I think primarily white people, and I think people
(01:04:24):
that you know don't want to end up screwing people
over about like when should you call the cops? Right?
Should you call the cops because someone has been in
a Starbucks or two minutes or that people are going
too slowly on the golf course? Like I don't think so.
I think you should not call the cops. I think
you should not call the cops unless someone's life is
in danger. Basically, well, you know, if there is violence
(01:04:47):
imminent or that you witnessed, if there is a danger
that you're witnessing, she should call nine one one.
Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Short of that, I think a lot of the times
cops are used because people are generally just afraid of conference.
Speaker 4 (01:05:00):
ConfL like they don't want to say, oh they of course,
of course, it's so much easier. I mean, and that's
what you do my fighting for me, Like yeah. And
the first example I gave in the book is called
the Last time I did call the cops was one
watching a guy basically intimidate sort of threaten his girlfriend
on the street and screaming at her. And yeah, I
didn't want to go out there and be like, hey, you,
(01:05:22):
what are you doing?
Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
Get your hands off of her?
Speaker 4 (01:05:24):
Like George, I was like, no, I'm going to make
a phone call.
Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
There's also there's there's a part of the book in
which he explained that which I'm actually shocked at the
fact that you were explaining about you coming home from
a school dance and uh, you got accost it by
(01:05:56):
some undesirables come fugs, And somehow I was like wow,
Like that would have instantly changed my mind, because even
my even my head to this day, when I visit
my childhood home, I'm still looking for Big Reggie and
(01:06:17):
his cousin Lamar. Yep, Like I'm certain, and I hate
to say this, I'm certain they're dead by now, which
I shouldn't say.
Speaker 4 (01:06:25):
This, but no, it's still there.
Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
Even in getting out of my car, like as a
near fifty year old, my first thing I thought about
was Big Reggie Lamar might be down a black tig
Reggie hey Man. Taking someone's pack man money is some
big shit back in the early agies. So yeah, you know,
like that one incident at the arcade in my childhood
(01:06:52):
has almost scarred me for life where I'm always looking,
you know, shell shocked and the fact that that happened
to you, and I thought like, wow, at no point
were you just like dad, why the hell are we
up here? And I should be living this life of
you know, and I don't know if the P word
is a four letter word to white people to say
(01:07:13):
like privileged or anything, but like we don't have to
live here that like what why did you not ever?
Actually what made you it? You know, come to this
point of understanding if most people don't do.
Speaker 4 (01:07:27):
That, I think that yeah, there's a lot of you know,
we were scared all the time and we we got
And part of that was I think that was true
of every teenager in New York City at that at
that age, like you just that happened, you got jacked,
like run your loot, run your bus pass, you know, jacket, backpack, starter,
a cap whatever, you know. I think part of it
(01:07:49):
was at the same time that was happening the ethos
at my high school and at my middle school and
even in grade school. Although more when you're an adolescent,
you're thinkinking about.
Speaker 2 (01:08:00):
Like what's cool.
Speaker 4 (01:08:02):
Everything that was cool was urban. Everything that was cool
was emanated from communities of color, like like the center,
the center of gravity of everything culturally, of the worldview
of what we wanted to be, of the music we
listened to. Everything was it was non white, right, So
it there And I think there's ways that you that
(01:08:23):
can get real pathological and kind of fetishistic, you know,
in the in certain ways. But our experience of it,
I think was just that, Yeah, that was just part
of being in the city. But the city was great
and we were urban kids and that's what mattered, and
that was the kind of cultural world we inhabited.
Speaker 2 (01:08:39):
So do you that was just a part of growing
up in New York?
Speaker 4 (01:08:42):
Yeah, I mean it stressed me out a lot. It definitely,
like I spent a lot of time scared. I really did.
I walked around the city all the time. You know,
my brother tells this hilarious story because when I was
telling him about the book, he was talking about how,
you know, we would all work. Everyone wore jan sports
and the style was that you wore them like hitting
against your butt, like the with the you know, they
(01:09:02):
were all the way low on you, like the the
the loop was as big as possible, but that if
you were about if something was about to go down,
you would like preparatorily grab the straps and pull them
up to tighten because you were going to have to
book it and you didn't want to.
Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
Indiana, I'm having flashbacks right now, Like Bill, you're like
seven ft tall. Didn't matter, just.
Speaker 4 (01:09:31):
The moment, the moment right before was going to go
down was always like strap them up, like pull the
pull the straps on the on the jan sports you could.
Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
Book, so you couldn't book. So you you you thanks? Steve?
What justo? Yes, I get it.
Speaker 4 (01:09:58):
It's like when I say when I call my CA
wife boo and the millennials in my office, what.
Speaker 2 (01:10:06):
Book is much older than?
Speaker 4 (01:10:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
You you explained how you know? Because you're saying that
one point crime was at an all time high and
then suddenly it stopped. And now, as a New New Yorker,
I always wondered about that because when I first arrived
(01:10:31):
in New York City.
Speaker 4 (01:10:34):
When did you move here?
Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
Well, okay, i'd moved here in two thousand and nine,
which I mean gentrification. They're already taken over. But I'm
talking about when we as a group first started to
record up here. I mean, we would stay here, but
I mean I guess technically maybe I have lived here
for twenty five years and just haven't admitted it. Yeah.
(01:10:57):
But but the thing was is that when we first moved,
ironically on forty sixth Street where Hamilton is right now,
everyone kept complaining about like the Disney the disneyfied occasion
of Times Square, which I didn't know any better, Like
(01:11:18):
I didn't get that they were longing for what was
I didn't and I didn't even know that was there.
And I was like, wait, this is great, Like it
it's like a mall, and there's y Roger's Chicken across
the street, and there's the McDonald's over there, and there's
a movie theater, Like this is really awesome. And people
were like everyone complained about that happening. And then even
(01:11:39):
more recently and looking for homeless people, I discovered that
they've all been moved out of Manhattan, So why were
you looking for homeless people? I did. We did a
photo shoot in which they ordered way too much food
(01:12:02):
and the interns were about to throw like twenty boxes
of pizza away perfectly good. And I was like, nah,
let's let's get him to the homeless. But then it
was like a two hour search for Yeah, like I
found people in Brooklyn at a near a shelter, but
at forty second Street. When I was going through the
bus station, the cop was.
Speaker 4 (01:12:22):
Like, what's loft? I was like, I didn't do it, but.
Speaker 2 (01:12:27):
And I hit him. I was like, yo, I said,
I thought I'd come here with you know, the bus station,
but where the where the people at? And they kind
of laughed at each other like a joke, like in't
that cute? It said, noah, man, you ain't gonna find
nothing down here, And I was like what happened to them?
And he kind of leveled with me. He's a black dude,
(01:12:47):
so you just level with me, like, yeah, dog, they
don't want homeless the more like they up and like
past the Bronx like in Yonkers. And I was just like, oh,
so it wasn't because when people say those that's like,
you know, crime is going down in homelessness, and da
da da da da. You're made to think like suddenly,
like you know, there are more jobs and people and
(01:13:09):
less crime because people were more moral. But no, like
either people have been killed or thrown in jail or
just displaced and put Yeah, he explained about the one
way ticket system that I never knew about. There was
a period in I think two thousand and one where
if they put you on a plane or a bus
(01:13:32):
and someone's on the other side to get you, that's
how they got rid of you, which isn't necessarily fixing
the situation either.
Speaker 4 (01:13:40):
Yeah, there's two things about I think the way the
city changed. One is that it really did get less dangerous.
But then there's this ambient thing I talk about in
the book of just like seediness, and that was such
a part of what the experience of New York was,
which was a little related to the threat of danger,
but also just this kind of ambient thing of there
were squeegee men. It would come and there were a
(01:14:00):
lot of panhandlers, and there were people all the time
who were kind of like quasi living in subway stations,
and it had this feeling. You see a lot of
discourse about this around San Francisco right now, and they're
constantly writing about that like, oh, there's all these drug addicts.
It was all these homeless and New York City was
very much had that feeling to it, and it was
a real it was a real thing, and this sense
of like cleaning it up, which is very loaded politically
(01:14:22):
in terms of what it means and for whom, particularly
in Manhattan, right, I mean particularly it's like, well, we've
we're going to clean up Midtown, We're going to clean
up Downtown, clean up the financial district, clean up Brian Park.
That was all this very much kind of business oriented thing,
much more than you know, communities coming together because they
wanted it for their neighborhood. But one of the complicated
(01:14:42):
things about this, right is that folks who live in
neighborhoods don't love a bunch of people hanging out outside
of liquor store either. A lot of times, like it's
not always just this external thing of you know, the
business district or this power structure from outside. There's always
this is one of the things that James Warmer Junior
talks about in his book Locking Up Our Own is
(01:15:03):
like the internal dynamics of neighborhoods about who's you know.
Speaker 2 (01:15:06):
I'm sorry. Side note I kind of missed the neighborhood whino.
I haven't seen a good whino in about twenty years.
Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
Like you've been searching the wrong place apparently, ah Man,
I just missed the neighborhood whino.
Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
I'm sorry, Go ahead, Chris.
Speaker 4 (01:15:19):
So. So, there was a real transformation that happened in
the city and the experience of it, and that experience
was that was a very intentional thing that was done
by Giuliani and then Bloomberg Broken Windows. I write about
in the book, like this whole thing about how there's
a whole theory that there's a relationship between those two
things that if people are jumping turnstyles, it sends a
message to everyone else that lawlessness is okay, and then
(01:15:42):
you get lots of murder and that that was the argument,
and a lot of people it wasn't a bad faith argument.
I think people really believe that argument. But what ended
up happening is the city starts enforcing these low level
misdemeanor things, selling em and ms on the subway, jumping turnstyles, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 2 (01:16:00):
You can't tell eminem's on the subway.
Speaker 4 (01:16:01):
No more people, people, those little kids, people get citations
for selling emms on the subway every day and you're
setting their feet up on us or putting their feet
up or doing the showtime thing.
Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
Oh yeah, no more performances. Move up, move. Steve prevents
me from getting on the subway, so I would have. Actually,
I suggested that he and I take the subway down there,
and Steve has this thing in his mind where he
has to be my protector. It's not the most pleasant
place to be. You know, wait, celebrity, right if that's
(01:16:30):
I've been the subway with him and like nobody I
rode a celebrity with a tuxedo on with the rest
of the roots and no one bothered.
Speaker 4 (01:16:37):
Really, it was like Obama was Do you see that
instagram is instagram of the when the Cavs are in town.
Do you see that? Was pretty funny They got where
they were on the subway. They were on the subway
like it was like the whole Calves squad and taking
the subway to Madison's Square Garden when they were in
town to play the next and I forget what happened,
but Lebron is definitely on there. He's got a hoodie on,
and I think no one recognized I'm pretty sure no
(01:16:59):
one recognized them, but it was. It's a really funny
like there's there's a woman next to Lebron I think,
who's kind of like making a face because they're like
acting the fool a little bit right, and and and
she doesn't like them acting up. That has no idea
that she's next to like literally one of the most
famous people on earth.
Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
Right. See, let's think that's a squad of eight foot
black guys. And instead of me and you on the suburb,
it's a different thing, big steven little yeah, little mirror protection.
So where do you see? Do you see an end
of the this nightmare?
Speaker 4 (01:17:36):
But the thing is the nightmare ends.
Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
But if the nightmare ends, then we won't watch the news.
I'm not saying you yourself like, thanks, well, didn't let's
move us to like.
Speaker 4 (01:17:47):
The country for us?
Speaker 2 (01:17:49):
Yeah? Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 4 (01:17:52):
I don't know. I don't know the answer. I don't
know how it ends. I really don't. I think everyone
so you don't.
Speaker 2 (01:17:56):
Have a vision of your head of like, okay, so
you know you gotta check your phone every twelve seconds
to see.
Speaker 4 (01:18:02):
If Michael Cone got indicted. No he didn't. I'm saying
check my phone, dude. I'm like, really, actually, Manny Pettien's
come back and tell us he'll sing it.
Speaker 2 (01:18:15):
But do you have but do you sorry? I'm all,
do you have this vision of like all of them
getting arrested in slow motion?
Speaker 4 (01:18:27):
And yeah, I mean, look, I think everybody has their
own kind of fantasies about how it all ends. And
you know, I think there's some I feel like it's
going to happen. But I here's my can I my
my my thing about this, which is a little school
marmish but I'll I'll do it anyway, which is that
I think people want some deliverance. They want a White Knight,
they want a Dais X Machino. They want some way
(01:18:49):
to be rescued. They want the bad guys to get
carted away. They want Bob Muller to sort of ride
in and slay the dragon. And my thing about this,
which is the same theme of the book, is it's
just in a democracy, like it's just us, it's us
as citizens, it's we. No one's going to do it
for you the work, like that's just the way it works.
(01:19:09):
It's the hard thing about democracies is they they're fricking
They take a lot of exertion to make them work. Well,
you can outsource all that shit, you can say. I'm
you know, I trust these people in charge are just
going to do it. I'm going to show up to
vote or maybe even not vote, but at the minimum,
just show up and vote and be like okay.
Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
But so even in the hands of a storm.
Speaker 4 (01:19:30):
He's a lawyer, Mike Michae Lavanati. He's a great character.
Speaker 2 (01:19:35):
Your eyes at him, but do you not feel as
though he has traction?
Speaker 4 (01:19:38):
He's got traction, man, Dude, do your thing. Dude, I
don't like I don't begrudge anyone anything. Everyone's doing all
this stuff. I'm just saying the ending will. I think
the ending will be written by us collectively as a society,
as opposed to some squad of elliot ness untouchables that
bring down the ring. And even though even though I
think that there's a possibility that Bob Muller does, I
(01:20:00):
can dit a lot of people. Don't get me wrong,
I think they probably. I think people in the president's
circle definitely committed crimes that's already been established, but even
worse than we know. I just think that in a
deeper sense of will it be okay? The answer to
that question lies of us as opposed to do you
believe that Mahler is.
Speaker 2 (01:20:21):
All right? To compare this to like a police drama
instead of arresting the corner boy, okay, instead of arresting
the corner boy and his drug dealer boss, that Mahler
is actually trying to cast a widen est amongst anyone involved,
(01:20:43):
Like this is a bigger story, even bigger than Trump
being president.
Speaker 4 (01:20:46):
I think he has gone All indications from the outside
is that he has gone about this in both a
methodical way and in the kind of way that you
would attempt to go after or roll up in organize
crime ring. And I think that's been pretty clear. I
mean the stories, the craziest stories to me are the
international stories where you know, some oligarch shows up on
(01:21:08):
a private jet and Kennedy and gets off the plane
and it's like, excuse me, sir, with the FBI, come
with us and like search his phones, question on that
whole thing. And that's happened multiple times to multiple people.
They've got agents working overseas, so you know there's a
lot going on in that. I don't I don't know
what ultimately that will bear out, but I do have
a fair amount of faith in the in the diligence
(01:21:28):
with which they're approaching that job.
Speaker 2 (01:21:30):
I just don't know. Okay, So in your version, this
is my last question in your version of all the
presidents have been who's playing you in the movie? And
I'm slowly.
Speaker 4 (01:21:42):
Good, good, Who's who's playing you?
Speaker 2 (01:21:49):
There you go, ladies and gentlemen, Thank yoursees for hopefully
not to traumatize right now. I want we at Boss Bill,
Imday Bill and Sucer Steve. This is a Questlove Quest,
Love Supreme, only on Pandora. We will see you over
(01:22:10):
the next go around.
Speaker 4 (01:22:16):
H course.
Speaker 1 (01:22:25):
Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This classic episode
was produced by.
Speaker 4 (01:22:30):
The team at Pandora.
Speaker 1 (01:22:37):
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Of Course Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This
classic episode was produced by the team at Pandora.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, this is on paid Bill.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
This week's QLs classic features journalist, author, and host of
NBC's All In with Chris Haes. We discussed politics, We
discussed hip hop, We discuss the Upper east Side. Originally
released on July fourth, twenty eighteen, Enjoy, We'll hold.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Your hand through the process. It's good.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
Yeah, it's all good s.
Speaker 5 (00:33):
Suprema roll Call, Suprema Suprema Roll Call, Suprema S Suprema
Roll Call, Suprema S sub Suprema.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Roll Cruse is here. Yeah, explain the fear, Yeah of
why panic? Yeah, I hear in the rear mirror.
Speaker 5 (00:54):
Suprema Sun Sun, Suprema roll Call, Suprema So Supreme roll Call.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
The world's a mess. Yea, these are the days.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Yeah, to be all in.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah with the Sugar Network.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
Suprema, Suprema roll Call, Supreema, Suprema Roll.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Called Ivanka Trump. Yeah, opens Embassy. Yeah. Film at eight pm.
Yeah on MSNBC.
Speaker 5 (01:25):
Roll Call, Supreme Son, Son, Suprema Roll Call, Suprema Son Sun, Suprema.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Roll called, pay Bill. Yeah, And here's my stick.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
Yeah, you know it's time, yeah for politics.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Super Suprema roll called Supreme roll call.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
It's been a while, yeah since I had the rhyme. Yeah,
I'm sitting here, Yeah, just watching the time.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Ro Suprema son set Suprema roll call, Supremat Suprema roll
Supremeau Suprema roll call, Suprema Sun Sun Suprema roll call.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Now see, it wasn't that bad, not not too bad,
not too bad.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
Okay, listen quest of Supreme brus.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Wait, can I ask a technical question about our theme? Yeah?
Speaker 4 (02:26):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Do you not hear any time it's the third person's
turn to Ryan normally to you when Fante is here?
Do you not hear the sound of parking? Uh?
Speaker 3 (02:42):
That's just on the track, literally really literally every time
in the background noise.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
All right, Well, the next time we do the theme song,
I guess when we recorded the recordings fucked up? Remember
remember when the engineer Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6 (03:01):
And in between if you if if nobody's rhyming, you
can hear your guide in the background's leaking through.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Right, But at what point was I in a car
reverse driving to here? Yeah?
Speaker 6 (03:18):
That parts in your head? It is not or it's
a harmonic of something that's happening. It's not in my head,
my stroke. Can we run the team all the time?
Speaker 2 (03:27):
We're doing it all yeah, yeah, Hello, I always hear it,
and I'm like looking at you guys, like do you
not hear it?
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Do you not hear it? So we have to do
this all over again.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Play the theme again. We're doing Yes, this is the
first time we're doing all new themes. No, you listen
to it without without us singing that.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
Yeah, just listen to it.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Okay, nothing there, Suprema.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
I can't believe I'm doing this on my own show.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Okay, course comes in, YadA, YadA, okay, okay, So then
this is what a mere speaks. Yeah, and then I
say something else and then here comes to set up
and then the punch line. Shout out to Mark Kelly
(04:17):
and Angry. They sound great on this.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Right, Well, the drums just drumm themselves. The drummer.
Speaker 7 (04:23):
Second, yeah, yeah, you can hear somebody. Yeah he' somebody
talking all right. Now wait here comes the third one.
You ready, here we go.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Someone's parking the car. Oh right, hear it? Yeah, it's feedback, feedback.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Somebody out that that sounds like a right, now we
can lower it.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Someone backing up a goddamn delivery whatever are you you
you lower the volume? Yeah, I'm just saying that someone
was backing that thing up. Okay, looking over for the
led the small ship slide. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, this
is a very deep political episode already, yeah, already, thanks
(05:10):
for pointing out the horrible engine delivery trucks.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
And I don't know.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
I was like, did I make the theme in the car?
I don't know, it just it just happens every time. Hey, look,
we have a guest, Ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Welcome to another quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 5 (05:26):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
We got Sugar Steve or the Sugar Network explaining to
our guess how powerful his network is.
Speaker 6 (05:33):
Well, the long story short of what we're talking about
is this new feature that Instagram has which yes, allows
you to interview somebody on this on your live story
where you're on the top and they're on the bottom.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
But we we have a guest. We have we have
double Bill. We're double Bill today unpaid and Boss Bill.
Uh and our guest today, Ladies and gentlemen. Uh, he
is a journalist.
Speaker 5 (05:57):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Some say that he's the co leader of the Liberal
media along with with Rachel Maddow Bronx Native Hunter College
and which is actually a high school, Yeah, which is
weird stupid. Yeah. No, it's a wonderful school. I used
to live right near it. It's great. Host of one
of my favorite MSNBC shows, and of course after this
(06:19):
election cycle, my station channel always stays on MSNBC. UH
all over Chris Hayes and probably author of the best
liberal spleen uh book of Our Imbalanced System. I have
to say, well written. I feel like it's almost uh
(06:43):
to date myself, uh a cliff Notes. Cliff notes to
people who are like sort of on the fence of
you know, like those people that ask like, well, they
must have did something, and this is the best liberals
plain book. I actually when I got it, and I
(07:03):
got it like three days ago, I didn't think I
was going to get through it in time for the
for the the our interview today.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
But it's that you read I got that was sort
of by design that people would My favorite thing that
people say to my two favorite bits of feedback from
the book. One is that people were like, oh, I
sat down, I read it once sitting or I got
through really quick. And two is for the for people
that are you know, I don't think the audience for
the book. I don't think it's people that are hardcore,
(07:31):
like you know, Blue lives matter and Black lives matter,
you know. And I'm not gonna way, I'm gonna boycott
the NFL because Colin Kaepernick is kneeling. Yeah, yeah, Like
it's gonna be hard to reach those folks. But there's
a huge swath of people, particularly white folks, that I
think are generally sympathetic but also like that kind of
they must have done they they did something right. There
was a reason was it? Did he really? And the
(07:55):
book is an attempt to try to walk people through
kind of some of the reality of what it's.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
It's it's it's well, it's well executed. Anyway. I haven't
said his name, I haven't said the office name. Let's
see how long it's going. Can I get to ten minutes?
Steve finishing?
Speaker 6 (08:13):
So one night I was on Instagram and I was like,
I'm gonna play.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Wait, ladies and Tom and please welcome colony in the nation.
Uh and our friend Chris Aes to.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
Course love the free Thank you, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Right before we get all into that.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Yes, Steve, we really don't have Well, we had a guest,
that's your relationship.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
It's taking me ten minutes to explain who he is.
Speaker 6 (08:37):
So the feature just just came out recently a few
months ago, and I was just messing around with it
one night and I was super high and I was like,
I'm going to be Chris Hayes and I'm going to
interview motherfucker.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
So I started, you can invite people?
Speaker 4 (08:52):
Does it just? How? Does how does that invite request
show up on someone's account?
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Like you two have to mutually follow each other right.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Following We should make that happen, by the way, Yeah,
I should.
Speaker 6 (09:03):
Find you can either invite them where they can invite you,
and it's obvious something pops up and you, you know,
you both have to be cool with it. You can't
just somebody's screen. Well you can do that too, there's
no way. Maybe you have to be verified special shut
the ship down. Yes, verified people can just your.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
Phone check mark you have.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, there's there's a list of people that I'm following
that are following me that I can talk to Illuminati
and then if I want to interview Erica I can
also search for her name. I have an option that
lets me search for a name, press her and if
she accepts, and.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
She accepts, and then you go and then you go
live and anyone.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
And people watch. It's a voyeurs. People watch each other,
interview each other. So Steve is taking us actually to
the next level. I got to a few hundred people knowing,
you know, and then network.
Speaker 4 (10:01):
And you find it unnerving to watch in real time
how many people are watching.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Meaning what how few people are watching.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
I find something bizarre like we'll do a Facebook live
before the show, and my whole life, in a weird way,
gets you know. We get the ratings every day at
four fifteen, and at MSNBC we get a spreadsheet and
it matters a lot, like what kind of numbers you're doing?
It it resonates aroound the building, you know, So in
a weird way, a lot of my professional life is
oriented towards this number. And I find something unnerving about
(10:31):
the instant feedback as you're talking of, like seeing the
numbers go up and down, like it's some kind of
like say, absolute extremist version of let me perform in
the way, what will maximally maximally get people to what
am I doing?
Speaker 2 (10:49):
What am I doing? Part? It's most people will probably
sit for a good eight nine seconds, right, And I
noticed that. I mean one time I had a very
magical movement happened on my feed where it's like at
an actual DiAngelo rehearsal.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
Well, yeah, I did one of those two with common No,
I'm just saying that.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
It was like even even at a DiAngelo rehearsal for
the Roots Picnic, like you know, my numbers went to
ungotly like four figures and then about fifteen minutes later
it went down to like three hundred, which you know,
maybe it is kind of ridiculous to but the thing
(11:34):
is that your people.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
I was at that rehearsal, it got kind of boring
as it went on. Yeah, wait, it was uh huh.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
That doesn't happen.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
It just drifts like it was like it was all
hitting and then everybody sort of just went for a
walk and it kind of went away.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
And the Yeah, but I mean I think just the
the the the art of or the the task of
watching someone have a conversation.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
Yeah. Plus, I mean one of the things that I learned,
one of the kind of crash. Course. Realities of this
job is keeping people's attention is hard. That's it's work
to keep people's attention, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
So Okay, as as a fan of of uh, what
was the show an HBO? Okay, I'm gonna take the
long Scenic Route Star Dumb and Dumber. Not Jim Carrey,
the other one.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
Jeff Bridges.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
He's show an HBO about Okay, all right, So when
you're on the air, is there a do you have
a an ear piece in which there is a producer
like okay, now ask about this and then.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
So we Yeah, so you're you're always passionate to the
control room through what's called an I F B. Right,
So you got an earpiece, and there's a really wide
spectrum of how active the control room is in that
in questions. In my case, almost never. I would say
a few times a week the control room will say,
(13:07):
will suggest a question, but it's it's very rare, partly
because I get I get super annoyed. It just feels
like backseyt driving. It's like I like, I'm at the wheel,
so don't tell me to make a left here. I
know I know what I'm doing. That Other people have
different feelings about that. That's my feeling about it.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Does that depend on the relationship you have with your producer?
Speaker 4 (13:30):
I think it does. It depends on you know, the
different shows have a different balance between how host driven
and how producer driven they are. Different hosts have different
levels of comfort of asking questions in the moment, Like
some want questions pre written and prompter to go through
that they've already done through like a process. Some don't
want anything imprompter. They just want to kind of think
(13:51):
in the moment, which is usually the way I am, Like,
I kind of know what I want to ask, but
I want to be One of the things I think
that happens is if you script it too much, kind
of like this though you don't listen right, Because one
of the things that can happen is if you've got
your idea about question one, is this in question two?
And you ask question one, what you're doing in your
head is okay, uh huh, yeah, now I'm on question
two as opposed to wait, what are they saying?
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Gay?
Speaker 4 (14:14):
But but I think it varies a lot the person,
the person I talked to the most, which is the
line producer on the show, who's the person who keeps time,
which is a key part of the whole. You know,
she's the drummer, right, she's the drummer for the show.
So we got to figure out, you know, we got
to bring things in at certain moments, and we got
to hit our marks to make a show. Because it's live,
it's a zero sum. You go long here, you got
(14:36):
to go short here, you go, you got to cut
something here, and she's the one with cues a minute,
got to get to break. Okay, we're over.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
So I'm not certain if All In is the type
of show that deals with real time this just then,
but certainly or surely with the time that we're living in,
especially with yeah, you know who behind it? Will that
can happen anyway? Even this morning, Like you know, Alie
(15:03):
Jackson had an entirely different show plan and.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Then she got four thousand pages probably of transcripts.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
And then she got of this just in.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
Yeah, and then it's.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
How how much on your game? Well, I know you
have to be on your game, but how annoying is
it that at any moment the world can fall apart
and you have to be fluid and explain and knowledgeable and.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
It can be it's both. I would say it's invigorating
and thrilling in its own way because there's a certain
adrenaline to it when something happens at seven fifteen and
it's like, Okay, we're making decisions. What's okay, this is
the new A block, then what gets kicked out? Then
A goes down to B, then B gets killed? Or
do we keep the guests there and they move to
see or do we move like and you're making all
these decisions very quickly. One of the blessings and I
(15:51):
imagine it's actually this way on the Tonight Show that
there's a bizarre blessing of having a live show at
eight o'clock in that we don't have an option not
to do it right, Like if news breaks is seven fifteen,
whatever happens in those forty five minutes, the show comes
(16:11):
on air at eight, and there's there's something weirdly relieving
of stress about that, because if it was like, no,
it has to be perfect, we can let's wait till
eight twenty five to make sure that it's perfect. Is
that Mandy Patinkin, Hey, Manny Patinkin all just so wow,
that's the most wild thing that happened to me in
my life.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, we just got up
the anti randomly walks in a room star of Homeland.
Yeah yeah, come on here, you want to be a
part of it? Oh well we're we're yes, no podcast?
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Hey this and I'm good. How are you this?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Man? It's good to see you again.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Awesome, very enough to meet you.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I have a podcast and Chris Is from M S
n b C is the host of it.
Speaker 8 (17:24):
Yeah, I don't know who I am, right, yeah, all right,
thank you.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
Oh it's a copy of my book. Yeah, absolutely, that
would be my great pleasure. All right, right, thank you man,
You're a legend. You're a legend. Literally, that was the
fucking best thing that ever just happened.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Thank you for being on chatting with Sugar. Can I
tell me the particular story when you wait?
Speaker 4 (17:58):
Can we interrupt your on ours?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yes? Wait, hit me.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
I was working on a musical and man Pittinking was
going to be in it, and he uh came and
sang and delivered and told all these stories about his
mother and he's a very fascinating human being.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
I could talk about him for a long time.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
But that was an awesome cameo in quest Love Supreme
only on Pandora Sugar Network.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Fucking many Pink was amazing. So we gotta get him
to sign some ship. No, we can't, we can't.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
We know he has to remain I mean, he didn't
get Dangelo to sign yeah just ship though he did,
did he?
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah? He said it's more.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Then he walked Wait what was the question to I
can't remember.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
It was a print something probably it was more R
and B.
Speaker 9 (18:44):
And then he went to get cigarettes and never came
back like that all right.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
So man, he's so what's the right word, like he
is so entirely himself. Oh yeah, I mean that I
you would expect that, but that that was what I
expect Mandy Patinka to be like.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah that wow, that's that was great. You're the host
of the show now, so.
Speaker 9 (19:10):
You kind of just got and something crazy happens in
the middle of a show and then and I lose control.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Yes, you were just talking about how you how you
reacted in the moment improvisation, and you got all flustered.
You were like, he's he's the host of my show?
What was that's questioned?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
What was your very first uh journalist assignment? Like, what
is what is the road that leads to you having
your own show, And isn't there an internship that leads
like did you work at a newsroom?
Speaker 4 (19:42):
And I came up a sort of a weird way
and and in a way that doesn't really exist anymore,
partly because the ecosystem I came through has all died
off a little bit. I graduated from college and I
was really into theater and mooch Chicago with my then
girlfriend now wife. And what in Chicago's super cheap. I
don't know if any of you have ever lived in Chicago,
(20:03):
but it is a great place if you're twenty two
and broke, because it's so much cheaper than New York.
It's so much cheaper than La The Winner sucks. But
there's a lot of people in Chicago doing a lot
of really cool stuff because people pay nothing for rent.
And there's like people playing shows in the abandoned buildings
and doing theater and photography. And I was there doing
(20:23):
theater and also freelance writing and started writing.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Yes, sorry, what'd you major in that?
Speaker 4 (20:27):
Just I majored in philosophy. Yeah, I major in philosophy.
I was doing theater and I was I started writing
for the Chicago Reader, which is like the alternative weekly there.
It's like the Village Voice Washington, DC City paper like that.
And I started freelancing and got had more and more
success doing that, started writing for more publications like online
liberal publications. I got a job at a lefty magazine
(20:51):
called In These Times. I then got hired by the Nation,
and then my wife got a job in Washington, d C.
Clerking on the Supreme Court. In two thousand and seven
we moved to watch Washington, d C. She was clerking
for Justice Stevens, which was an amazing thing to see
up close. And I became the through complete accident, the
(21:11):
long time Washington bureau chief of The Nation magazine David
Korn left to go to Mother Jones three months after
I moved to DC, and they're like, oh, we needed
to be a new bureau chief, and the interviewed me
and they gave me the job. And from that I
started appearing on television as a talking head punch of
the Yeah, I'm the Washington bureau chief of the Nation,
So what do you think about? And this was in
the sort of last year the Bush administration, in the
(21:32):
two thousand and eight campaign and the financial crisis and
all that, But.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
How often does that happen? Usually don't you have to
like work your way up the ranks out of paper?
Speaker 4 (21:40):
And so yeah, it was. It was a bunch of
accidents and timing was perfect, timing, timing, And I think
the fact that I had a little I had a
background in theater, I had acted, I had a little
bit of a performance background. I like to talk. I
think that was. You know, you have we try people
out on TV all the time, and talking on TV
is a very specific and weird skill that is different
than talking. It's different than being an interesting person. It's
(22:03):
just a weird skill. You sit in a room, you
stare into a camera. You don't have any of the
physical cues that come like right now, we're all looking
at each other like you're not in your head when
I say something, which is a nice encouragement I keep going.
But you don't have that in it in a TV studio.
It's it's a weird and alienating experience.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Oh you're saying, even that's more different than this that
what we're doing right now. Oh yeah, yeah, I feel
like this exposes everything about me. Whereas I'm better tweeting
and typing thoughts than this than I am because I
have to think about.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Things and edit.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Where I'm even two years into this, I'm not. I
feel like I'm not fluid at all, and.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
Well that I would disagree with that, but I would
say that it's really interesting ask Bill people have. People
have different experiences of how they you know, how they talk,
and how and how easily that kind of that form
of communication comes to them. And I think I had
a sort of aptitude for it. And so what was
I started getting booked more and more as a guest. Eventually,
(23:03):
in twenty ten, I was asked to guest host a
show for Rachel. That was a huge deal. I went
down to New York a day early. I read off
the teleprompter as practice. I was nervous af the I
was so nervous, and then I did it and it
went well and it rated well. And then I started
(23:24):
guest hosting more and more often. And the more I
guest hosted, then I moved from that to a weekend show,
and from the weekend show to an evening show. So
it was it was a very strange route because I
came through kind of liberal lefty magazine alternative weekly journalism
on the print side. I was a writer, always a writer.
I didn't have any TV background. I didn't intern at
a local station. I wasn't a news anchor at a
you know station des Moines or you know. People moved
(23:46):
from smaller markets to bigger markets. I came in this
completely different direction and kind of had to learn TV
as I went.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
Wow, Oh, Chris like you, yeah, to learn TV as
he went, so did I, Chris?
Speaker 6 (24:00):
So, what what percentage of your current job is journalism?
What percentage is performance?
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Let's say it's a great, great question.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I only ask great questions.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Your Instagram channel is amazing. The eight Hour Extended Mandy
Patinkin interview, The Ring Cycle, the uh you know, look,
I try to I basically am consuming things all day
and I'm trying to report every day, which means that
I'm constantly in contact with a bunch of different people
(24:35):
in different areas. But you know, the staff is, you know,
we're got twenty five people to make an hour of TV,
and so much of it is taken up with just
getting that thing on the air. If we had a
I would love it if we had a newsroom where
we were sending people out. You know dozens of reporters
to do enterprise journalism every day. In terms of what
(24:56):
I'm doing, I think it's a combination. I mean, you
kind of can't say to create the performance part from it,
because if the performance part isn't there, then people are
not gonna watch. But the interviews, you know, my favorite.
We had someone on last night. We had a political
reporter wrote a great piece about basically the Trump administration
burying a report that came from their own administration about
(25:18):
the toxicity levels of certain chemicals and water. And they
were like, let's not release this, it'll freak everyone out.
And my favorite moments that happened on TV are when
I'm learning something live in the moment from the interview,
because that feels like I'm making discovery. So we talked
to this reporter. She was great. I learned from her.
I learned things I hadn't learned even in reading her piece.
And I try to get as many of those moments
(25:39):
as I can in the show, where as opposed to
some pre rehearse thing where I throw a lob and
you dunk it that I'm actually like, we're actually reacting
to each other and I'm learning things in real time,
so all right, similar to the comedy world where.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Save news of the world. All right, all right, so say,
as of this cycle or this us speaking right now,
Kanye opinions are like a thing right now in the
comedy world where Kanye is so crazy or even just
let's go you know years ago where it was always
(26:20):
OJ jokes, that sort of thing. With the way that
your particular channel runs, if everyone is telling the same story,
is that just with the thought in mind that there's
no one watching this show concurrently, like nine hours in
a row, and that you just have to refresh and
(26:40):
me tell the story again. And I'll take Stephanie Ruhl's
take on it and Halle and so but what is there?
I mean, I don't want to say a competition thing. No,
are you guys dreaming of like Okay, I'm gonna this
is gonna be my Bob Wood.
Speaker 4 (26:57):
Word totally moment or you know, my Harbernstein.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
I would say this, it's going to play me in
the movie when I bless this story open.
Speaker 4 (27:05):
Well, you know, it's a balance between the two. So
there's two competing impulses. I think one is you don't
want to run the same show over and over and
repetition is a real problem, and it's a real challenge.
And there's I think partly we can't think of it
as Okay, someone's watching the network for four hours, because
it's a little like ten ten wins here in New
York City, right, like traffic and weather together every twelve minutes,
(27:28):
because people are just cycling through, and so it's like, well,
I already know the traffic and weather. It's like, well,
you other people are coming to it. We got to
tell them what's up. So there's a little bit of that, right,
So a certain amount of repetition. At the same time,
you do want to distinguish the shows. And the real
hard part is and you know, I say this about
TV all the time, which is that plants grow towards
the light. And what I mean by that is you
(27:49):
can have a garden in your backyard and you can
plant everything all nice and spaced out, and if you
come back six months later and light is only hitting
one part, all of the plants have grown over here,
and the light is ratings attention, what people are paying
attention to. And so what will inevitably happen is people
chase the stories that they feel like there's the most
juice in that there's the most attention in, and that
(28:11):
leads to a certain inescapable level of redundancy about what
the stories of the day are not always defensible. I
think sometimes that there's certain myths get embedded in people's
heads about what people are interested in. There's a little
bit of a bubble that can happen, which is that
you work in this building where the TV's on all day,
so you're constantly looking up at cable News and you're like, Oh,
they're talking about x X is the thing we should
(28:32):
talk about. So I actually try to keep the TVs
off in my office for that reason. Okay, precisely because
I don't want to. I just don't want to be
overly influenced by what everyone in cable news is talking
about all the time, because then you can have a
kind of self fulfilling prophecy about that. But it's a challenge.
We have a bunch of meetings throughout the day in
which the production staffs of the different shows actually huddle
(28:54):
and talk about what their respective rundowns are and try
to make sure that we're not all doing the same show.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
So without being too bias towards whatever my cable news preferences.
I think there was. I was in a waiting room
and an airport once, and that's probably the longest I've
(29:20):
been in a place in which Fox News was constantly running. Well,
they did some weird thing where Fox News was on
this television, but then behind me was CNN in the
same room playing at the same time. Yeah, it was well,
it was like one of them large like waiting room things.
(29:40):
And so then it finally hit me why Fox News'
ratings is how it is.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
One.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
I didn't know that they exploited women, uh that much
to that level. It's like practically every journey, even if
it's with a mail journalist, there's always a leggy, thy,
stiletto heeled, young blonde uras And I was like, oh,
this is why everyone's watching. Like I finally got it,
(30:12):
because in my head, I'm like, people can't. I know,
people want to accept the reality that accept I mean,
I feel as though of the three, the big three networks,
that you guys tell the truth of what's happening, regardless
of what it is, but is there Because there was
a point where a lot of my favorite shows were
(30:35):
getting pushed to the side, like suddenly Roland didn't have
his show in the afternoon, and the Daily Shoe like
a whole bunch of ms and I was fearing that,
oh God, they're trying to they're feeling the pressure of
Fox News, Like will they adjust or I didn't know
(30:56):
if it's new management, But how do you feel year
that one day there will be the hammer comes down.
It's just like, Okay, people aren't here for the truth anymore,
and we gotta you know.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
I actually I sort of experienced this in reverse because
when we launched the show in twenty thirteen, interest in
politics was at a real low point. I mean, Barack
Obama's just been re elected, Congress is in the hand
of Republicans. There's this kind of stalemate, you know, and
people just were like, eh, I'm kind of done with politics.
I think the I think Barack Obama's re election particularly,
(31:31):
was like, Okay, that's the end of that chapter, right,
like the.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I can go on with life.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
Yeah, Like we had George W. Bush and then like
this crazy insane financial crisis and also this crazy insane campaign,
and also we elected the first black president and then it
was like, is he going to get re elected? And
then he did, and it was like, okay, well we've
got a sort of narrative arc here that was a
dangerous for years of extremely yeah, but people a lot
of people checked out, and we saw it in the numbers.
I mean, so my experiences, I've been doing the show
(31:59):
for five years, twenty thirteen, we started twenty thirteen, fourteen fifteen.
Those were lean years, and that's when a lot of
those shows were getting canceled. And I think it was
a combination of there was new management that came in,
but also everyone was kind of struggling trying to figure
out what gets people's attention. I mean, you remember the
missing plane thing, right when the plane went missing, and
that was that became this running joke, understandably because it
was insane how much cable news covered it. But people
(32:22):
were covering it out of desperation because it was it
was the only thing rating. It's like, you couldn't you
couldn't get people to.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
Do we have a fine at plane?
Speaker 4 (32:31):
No, No, No, it's crazy. Okay, yeah, that's one of
those for where did we end up up on that files? Yeah,
like where we end up on the plane? I know,
I know there was it was missing.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
But and they thought they found it that they right.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
So what's happened instead over the course of our trajectory
on the show is that we now have We've got
form four times as many viewers as we had, you know,
back in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, the lean years, and
my feeling, I feel like, if the viewers are there,
we're there. But TV's fickle. I mean, TV's rough. It's
(33:08):
like it's like the restaurant business in New York City.
Speaker 2 (33:11):
So you don't even feel secure in your position now
as a anchor.
Speaker 4 (33:17):
I feel pretty I feel them. I will say this,
I feel the most secure I've ever felt like I
have a contract. I'm going to be there through you know,
through twenty twenty you know, barring something completely unforeseen, and
and I feel as secure as've ever felt. But I
have also I also understand that it's a crazy business
and you know people things blow up all the time,
(33:42):
and things get canceled to get moved around. It's just
the nature of the business. And you got to kind
of be a little at peace with that, otherwise you're
going to stress yourself out all the time.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Normally, well, we kind of worked our way backwards, but
I always started your beginnings. Can I just ask one
more question before we go backwards?
Speaker 6 (34:05):
And speaking of like fickle and TV and stuff, Trump fatigue.
So I'm kind of a news junkie, or I was,
and now I'm kind of like I have Trump.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
You've hit You've hit your point.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah, I stopped.
Speaker 6 (34:18):
That's interesting and well it's sort of correlated with the
beginning of chatting with Sugar.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
So I don't really do anything anymore except that.
Speaker 6 (34:25):
But but no, in all seriousness, though, do you get that?
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Do you have that? Or are you getting that? Do
you fear having that?
Speaker 4 (34:34):
Yeah? I feel it sometimes, I think, you know, there
are times where it feels a little like being trapped
in a dysfunctional or toxic relationship or a toxic household.
Like I've been very lucky in my life that the
people that are closest to me, I haven't had to
deal with people very close to my life that are
(34:55):
really toxic personalities.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
People do.
Speaker 4 (34:57):
People have parents that are toxic personality, They have partners
that are you know, siblings, Like people deal with that,
They deal with that all the time. I'm very lucky
my loved ones, aren't you know, aren't like that? I
feel like I have this weird experience of it now
because so much of my day is dominated by the
President of the United States and what he's doing, and
and yeah, I think I have some craving to get
(35:19):
outside that a little bit. We just we actually just
launched a podcast that called whise is Happening, where I
get to have kind of longer conversations with people and
outside of the specifics of the daily news cycle that
tends to be so driven by the President. And partly
I think that's because that's nurturing a need I have
(35:41):
to talk about, yeah, talk about other stuff. I mean,
just just to talk about you know, I've been trying recently.
I just found myself so trapped in the news cycle
just for my job that I've been trying to like
read more books and I just you know, read novels.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
And but don't you think, like I listened to all
your podcasts on the way in, and as far as
you try to get away from them, they all circle
back to Trump and what's going on now, Like the
conservative one, it's all it doesn't matter. Yeah, as far
out as you go, you always get sucked back into
that thing.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
Like that's a good point it was like the Middle.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
East, and it was all about like but then it
was like Kushner, what's going on in the Middle East?
Like totally one of them.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Yeah, no, And I think as we go further, I
think we want to try to push to go further
a field. Part of it also is, I mean, the
funny thing about that, right, this comes back to this
question about, you know, the plants growing towards the light.
So I was like obsessively looking at the podcast numbers
last night because I'm a crazy, compulsively addicted junkie.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
Sounds like me, Yeah, this is I stopped looking at
my Metacritic numbers like three months ago. But yeah, at
one point, man, like, well that's sick. I do it too.
It's terrible.
Speaker 4 (36:48):
Yeah. Authors, Man, you talk to authors, they sit there
just hitting refresh on the Amazon ranking and it's like.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Even give me a start with that ship.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
Yeah, it's crazy. So I was looking at it last night,
and sure enough, we put out three episodes and one
of them is one is very explicitly about Trump and
how he fits into conservatism, and lo and behold that's
the best performing one, right, which, which which is not
that surprising because the even if there are people I
think like yourself, and I think that's not an uncommon experience,
(37:16):
a sort of fatigue. There's also just this insatiable desire
to try to understand.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
But it also felt like the most relatable. Sorry, it
felt like the most relatable. The one about conservatism too
very black and white to me. It was like, this
is the guy the guy you had on was Yeah,
it was very explicit about what it felt very clear
to me.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, is it hard to not insert your personal beliefs
into a situation and being neutral because the thing is
that this is the first time in which I'm seeing uh,
being neutral being a dangerous thing. I mean, I guess
(37:57):
I would. You're not neutral? Yeah, I mean no, I
know that, But I'm just saying that. Is it the
days of you know, you not knowing where Walter khank
this this may take a while, Walter Cite. Yeah, with
(38:18):
Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings or whatever, right, the days
of just asking a question and you you know, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:27):
I think that the model that we have, that I
have is that I'm not neutral, that I have a
set of beliefs in a worldview that people know and
are familiar with. But we try really hard on the
show to be what I would say would be fair,
and to be open minded, to not take cheap shots,
to not to not just tell ourselves things that feel good,
(38:50):
to not be hacks. Right, So that, oh, well, this
Republican was accused of sexual harassment and ergo, that person
is terrible, and we're going to do a hip piece
segment on them. And then the next day this Democrat
was accused of sexual harassment. Like, we're just going to
keep that out of the show, okay. Like the other night,
for instance, half forty minutes before we went to air,
(39:11):
Eric Sneiderman, the New York Attorney General, there was a
piece in New Yorker, devastating, horrifying piece in which he's
alleged to be this just sort of psychotically disgusting abuser,
I mean with women in his piece. Yeah, Ronan's piece.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yiks, Ronan does man.
Speaker 4 (39:27):
People on the record, women on the record talking about
this horrible physical and verbal abuse from him. And it
broke at seven twenty and I was like, this, we're
doing this in the show because Eric Snydermann's been on
our show and it's important that this we don't you know,
if you were a Republican, we do it. IF's a Democrat,
we do it. So there's a level which like we
(39:48):
have our worldview, but we also are not just out
there trying to play for a team, which is really
important to me, like that we are good faith arbiters
from the perspective of a set of values as opposed
to a perspective of one of two tribes or one
of two colors, or one or two teams.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
But like when you were coming up, we're fairly the
same age, like you were saying, I feel like Peter
Jennings and Dan Rather they're all like trying to be
the face of neutrality and try to present both things.
When did you decide to really define yourself as being
liberal because like your Wikipedia page it's as a liberal commentary.
It's like it feels like that's something you're very proud,
yeah or whatever.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
Well for me for it started, I mean it went
the other way. So people people that come up through
TV have to be neutral, I think as they come up,
because if you're the you're reading the news in Des
Moines or in Broward County or wherever you got it.
That's the way the business model works, and then if
you know, you work your way up past that and
you're doing other stuff. For me, I started as just
(40:46):
a writer writing for explicitly ideological publications where everybody knew.
So the Nation magazine and In These Times and Chicago
Reader are a certain extent like they were places where
that was just part of the social contract with the reader,
like the reader understood they're getting yeah, yeah, And I
think you know, I read a lot of a lot
of different stuff from different ideological corners that I really
(41:09):
like because to me, the big, the most important thing
is just to be honest and upfront and not be deceptive. Right,
So the the sort of sneak attack that kind of like, oh, well,
this is just when you're smuggling stuff in and you're
not telling him as opposed you're saying like, hey, I'm
a conservative and here's why I think you know X
about the tax cuts or X about our cultural rot
(41:29):
of Hollywood or whatever it is that's interesting to me,
and I can I can engage with that. It's the
it's the it's the bad faith deception that I find
a little unnerving.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Well, actually, well, this could lead us into a colony
and a nation, which I always felt that the term
liberal was sort of a dog whistle turn that conservative
media has come up with, uh, when they describe a
journalist that considers black people, gay people, brown people, anyone
(42:09):
not under the white male, hetero kind of umbrella as equals.
Always felt as though that has been the sort of
dog whistle term of which you you there's there's a
great part of in chapter four where you really explain
(42:30):
that the genesis of the idea of white fear and
that the fear of losing knowing acknowledging that you have
an advantage and that one day it could be lost.
And I almost feel as that's where that falls under it.
(42:51):
So even I mean, I consider when I hear liberal,
I feel that that's the hidden the hidden four letter
word that I mean basically is you're telling the truth
right in my opinion, But of course, like the way
that we're programming built today that it's it's kind of like,
(43:11):
you know, you have to preference with you know, I'm
neutral and I'm that sort of thing. So like, how
do you feel when you hear that title?
Speaker 4 (43:21):
I don't, you know, it's funny liberal. I never feel
I don't feel like there's really a great term that
I feel like I want to embrace. Like liberal doesn't
feel quite right, progressa doesn't feel quite right, leftist doesn't
feel None of those feel quite right. I don't know
what the right term.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
Is, right. What does the Fox journalists call themselves?
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Oh, you know, they say they're unbiased or they're you know,
I think Sean Hannity calls them I think that's not true.
I think Tucker Carls and Sean Hanny, Laura Ingram, they
would all call themselves conservatives. I think they would say
that they were conservatives. I I think if I were to,
you know, my biggest commitment, I would And this is
a word that you I think sounds annoying if you
(44:02):
go around calling yourself this but an egalitarian. I mean,
I'm like, I'm really my worldview is really ordered around
equality and getting to equality and what a society with real,
genuine that took a quality seriously it would look like,
and what that would mean for full human flourishing. I mean,
you know, it's easy, I think sometimes to lose sight.
Everything gets so cramped of like what is the project?
(44:26):
Why are we as humans? Why do we build a
democratic society? Why do we do any of this? What's
the idea behind this all? And the idea is to
facilitate human flourishing. The idea is everybody has an opportunity
and a chance and is given the tools to flourish,
to do things they love, to do, things they enjoy,
to be in relationships that are fulfilling to them, to
(44:49):
go on vacations and play on the beach. I mean,
that's the vision here, and there's a bunch of questions
about how do you get that vision? But to me,
when we have hierarchies and categorical systems that put some
people on one side of the line and some people
on the other of it, whether that's through the way
the economy works or in the case of colony nation policing, like,
(45:10):
that's the fundamental thing that I'm taken with that I
think about, is are those hierarchies and that and getting
to a quality and sort of ways that we can
upend those hierarchies.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
When you were a kid, what were your aspirations as
far as what you thought you were going to do
as an adult when you were six or seven years old.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
Well, when I was six or seven, I probably wanted
to be a basketball player. To be honest, that did
not work out. I was like barely a high school
varsity basketball player, So I was a long way.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
But that philosophy degree from Brown.
Speaker 4 (45:45):
Yeah, yeah, Weirdly, you know, I knocked around the D
League for a bit. But No, I would say that
the two biggest things I thought about was something in
some kind of way of like, I think I always
wanted to perform in some ways. And then I think
I wanted to be I really wanted to be an intellectual,
(46:05):
even at a really young age, Like I wanted to
be a professor, you know, I want to be someone
who learned for a living and wrote books for a
living and you know, engage with other people about ideas
and that. I think I wanted to do that even
when I was really really young, I think seven eight nine,
probably I wanted to do that.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
That's weird because I feel like I was just forced
into that position, like forced intellectualism. No, I'm just forced
into the whatever, the teacher role that people expect me
to be. Then I was like, well what they what
did you?
Speaker 4 (46:39):
What did you want to be? No?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
I was I was going to be a musician, and then.
Speaker 4 (46:43):
From from from from real young from.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
The age of two. But the thing was is that
because did you come from my my my my family?
I came from a musical think think the Black Partes family,
So I came from that sort of environment. But now
that I think about it, it's either you're going to
be a musician and pursue and create art, which I
(47:09):
think I did. Yeah, but then I get equal amounts
of pleasure of studying other people's method of making art.
So it's like, would I rather you know, go batch
it crazy over watching other people make art and marvel
over it and figure out the process of value did
(47:32):
it versus me just doing it myself like my version
of it. And I actually think that the former is
what I gravitate towards. So really, uh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
I always think to myself, if I could be given
any power or ability in the world. I mean, the
honest and lay answer is probably dunk of basketball. But
if you put that, ah, you put that aside, like
really dunk, I mean like really, I don't mean like
they just get me over like you were like trained
(48:10):
for ten months and I mean like row down down,
but but that but I would say after that, the
number one thing would be to like write a great
song that to me seems like the ultimate superpower, like
to walk through Earth and being able to do that.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
See, that's weird. I'd rather discover a great song, like.
Speaker 4 (48:29):
In my mind I fascinating to me. Really, I know
somewhere and.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
It's like do I dream of Like, Man, I'm gonna
write a great song that's going to change people's lives,
and hey, it's me a writing song of the Year
and I'm holding my grammy. I don't have those dreams.
My dreams are, man, I know in that Prince.
Speaker 4 (48:48):
Fault, there's let's be in.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yeah, there's at least forty one songs at least of
those thousands. I know, at least there's forty one songs
that could change my life.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Gotta get to them like other people's just changed your life,
My life discovery.
Speaker 4 (49:06):
You're saying discovery as a bust of creation, and.
Speaker 2 (49:08):
You know what it was? Okay, So when I'll give
you example, So maybe a month before the Purple Raine
reissue came out, when quote, my connect gave me, uh,
whatever the whatever the final listening was going to be
of the extra songs that were making it. He sent
(49:31):
me a particular song he sent me we can funk
or we can fuck uh funk, and I can't describe
it to you, but in hearing it and knowing that
song already and heard it and it's different incarnations of
in boot bootlegology, at one point for a particular minute,
(49:55):
I was back to being that thirteen year old that
there's nothing like staring at the speaker discovering new music
and how it made you. It just brought me back
to fifty two to twelve, oh Sage Avenue and the
(50:17):
bowl a si My cereal bowl and the color television
with the set, you know, with the antenna. So yeah,
it's just like I don't know if maybe, and maybe
that's why I also obsessed over well, I've explained, like
watch me obsessing over Soul Train isn't necessarily about me
loving the show Soul Train, but more or less because
(50:38):
every episode does the synesthesia thing with me that I
can I know what happened this particular day. I'll make
it be silly shit, Like the most silliest one was
like Shalamar's first appearance on the show. Oh I love
that one. Shalamar's first appearance on the show in nineteen
(50:59):
seventy seven triggers off Ah, a can of of Pathmark
no frill spaghetti meatballs with the good stuff. Stop dismissing me,
Steve in my dreams, I'm just saying.
Speaker 4 (51:20):
No.
Speaker 2 (51:20):
But it's it's it just takes me to a magical
time in second grade at seven years old. And I
mean it might be silly, but maybe that's how my
memories are preserved. Yeah, So it's almost like I don't
I'm happy with, you know, the Grammys and stuff, but
(51:43):
maybe that's why they're in my bathroom.
Speaker 4 (51:44):
Like like I don't dream of my.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
Own achievements more than I dream of preserving my memories.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
But I don't think that's I think you're talking about
what would be your best super superpower. He was said
to write a great song. I'm not sure that that's
answering that right.
Speaker 2 (51:57):
But that's the thing, like I never well, my whole
point was that I never had those dreams for myself,
more or less discovering other people's great songs.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
Right, and like putting part of taste makers and putting
people onto things. I feel like that's your other great
thing because we have tastemakers on this show all the time,
and that to me is always interesting is watching you
talk to those people because they can define the culture
and define music and define it.
Speaker 2 (52:22):
Don't even know if I'm gonna put see that's why
that's why Bill is here, Like Bill is my put
people on, right, But you're kind of just he's like
you're condo inspired though, or that he's old the point well, yeah,
but so you're but for you to be a to
be a teacher at such a young age, like.
Speaker 4 (52:45):
I just really liked you know, I was a kid.
I grew up in the Bronx in the nineteen eighties.
My my dad was a community organizer and my mom
uh stayed home with us and then she did arts
and education. So I was a real I was like
a middle class outer borough kid. I went to this
gifted program that was a Burrow wide gifted program, uh
(53:07):
in the Bronx in the eighties, which is a fascinating
group of people.
Speaker 2 (53:10):
Can you explain the because like a lot of us,
by a lot of us, I mean mean like I'm
still thinking of come out and.
Speaker 3 (53:18):
Yeah right or right, so yeah, pretty much it was
basically you look like one of the Bronx.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
And it's different because even now, like when I went
to see Michael McDonald in the Bronx, like, I was like.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
Wait a minute, people, you know the thing about the
thing about the first of all, there's a sound stuff
New York City. New York City is enormous. Each borough
is enormous. You're talking about a million and a half
people somewhere thereabouts. Now, the Bronx in the nineteen eighties
was in a bad way. I mean, my dad's community
organizing was basically focused on neighborhoods that were bordering the
(53:53):
neighborhoods that were literally burning from like the Bronx is
burning right, so arson disinvestment, huge spike in both in crime,
in drug addiction, all those things. He was doing communit
organizing in these neighborhoods that were sort of adjacent to those,
trying to kind of hold the line against this scourge
of disinvestment and flight that had taken place in the borough.
(54:16):
You know, the world that I lived in was a
really interesting world in grade school that I'm forever grateful
to because it was very multi racial. I mean, the
borough is probably you know, twenty five percent white.
Speaker 2 (54:31):
Maybe I never.
Speaker 4 (54:32):
Knew, Yeah, it's probably like it's seventy or eighty percent
black and brown. And so the program that the school
I went to, which was a borough wide program, you know,
you just got really used to being one of only
a few white people in spaces all the time in
school and classes, in dances and all in competitions and
all that stuff. And I think it was a really
(54:56):
good formative experience. And you know, for all of the
bronx Is Burning Warriors all that, you know, it's a
huge burrow with a huge working middle class. And these
were people whose parents, you know, owned a bodega, drove
city buses, worked as bank tellers, you know, you know,
had working class, middle class jobs and and you know
(55:23):
it was not a place with a lot of privilege,
but it was it was a fascinating and then culturally
explosive universe. I mean we were exposed. I was exposed
to well, you were you born? I'm sorry, I was
born nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
So after the hip hop explosion of.
Speaker 4 (55:40):
Yeah, so it wasn't like the you know, DJ Cool
Hirk like apartment party sort of formative years. But I
do remember my friend Kamal telling me that his cousin
was in a special ad music video and then showing
me the dance.
Speaker 2 (55:58):
Very good.
Speaker 4 (55:58):
I have a very live memory of that, but so
so yeah, and I think that it just was a
very What was interesting about my upbringing, and my upbringing
in the Bronx particularly was because of my parents and
their education level. And then we moved to this neighborhood
that was more affluent than the one that I grew
up in. And then I went to a Magnet High
school in New York City. That's where a bunch of
(56:22):
people in including Li Mel and Miranda a Moral Technique,
a whole bunch of different books, Bobby Lopez, who's you know,
got an egot and wrote Avenue Q and Frozen and
with his wife and all these really interesting talented people.
But because of that, I had a very interesting upbringing
in which I was exposed to, like the full spectrum
of American class status. So everything from kids in my
(56:47):
class who were in and out of homelessness, food stamps
or in housing projects, through people who had fifteen room
apartments on Park Avenue, from ages, you know, from the
time I was born to the time I wanted a
way to college. I had social interactions and saw patches
of life in each of those different worlds, and that
(57:10):
was really a huge part of I think my formative experience.
Speaker 2 (57:14):
I don't I don't condone bullying, but still the thought
of immortal Technique being the school bully to you and women,
well one of the most hilarious.
Speaker 4 (57:26):
As funny at the time.
Speaker 2 (57:27):
But yes, in retrospect, I think, but that I think
when I first met you and didn't know that you
knew Lynn, when you were interviewing this about Hamilton, you
two told me like, yeah, he used to throw us
in the trash can, which I was like, one of
his best stories. I'm sorry, okay for hip hop, for
(57:48):
hip hop versus like what what verse would you have
to study in high school?
Speaker 4 (57:53):
The thing they were always making people sing Bucktown. That
was the that was the thing. It was always singing Bucktown.
It was like people put people in trash cans of
making them sing.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
I'm sorry, I don't know why that's one hip hop crime.
I'll give him a past too. I'm sorry because I
want to do that to kids now say Bucktown?
Speaker 4 (58:16):
Dammit?
Speaker 2 (58:18):
Oh god, So leading leading to a colony in a nation,
why did you feel it was necessary? Two? Do you
see this as sort of a supplement to uh, Tanahse
coaches uh uh me against the Between the World and Me.
(58:40):
I'm thinking of Tupac me against the world, the same thing.
He knows what he meant.
Speaker 4 (58:46):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's I hope it's uh
I hope it's for a lot of people. I hope
it's a kind of gateway to a whole, a whole
massive literature from you know, Racecraft by the by Barbara
and Karen Fields, and Between the World and Me on
the Hazie to the Nudrum Crow by Michelle Crowe by
Michelle Alexander. There's a great book by James former Junior
(59:10):
that actually won the Pultzer this year. It came out
right around the same time as a Colony Nation called
Locking Up Our Own, which is about the politics crime
punishment in predominantly black neighborhoods and cities, which is a
really fascinating book, great book. The reason I wrote the
book was I've always been really interested in criminal justice.
I think the experience of growing up in New York
City in the eighties and nineties during the peak of
(59:31):
the kind of crime boom, I mean nineteen ninety three
or nineteen nine. Yeah, when I was thirteen I started
commuting down to Manhattan. You know, New York City's got
twenty four hundred murders a year. It's got about three
hundred and fifty last year. So and that's true. All
index crimes basically were the same, right, All index crimes
basically reduced by eighty percent from the peak in ninety
two ninety three when we were when I was a
(59:52):
thirteen year old walking around getting my starter caps jacked
like every other day.
Speaker 2 (59:57):
Whoa, you've been ki?
Speaker 4 (01:00:02):
Oh yes, yeah, we went to starter car.
Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
That's my brain went Okay.
Speaker 4 (01:00:12):
So I wanted to write about it, and I wanted
to write about I was covering, I was covering Ferguson,
I was covering Baltimore, Freddie Gray, I was covering uh,
some of the stuff that went down in Chicago even
before Lauwan McDonald uh and and our garner here in
New York. And wanted to kind of write about it,
and was kind of worried about I think I had
(01:00:32):
a moment of is this a book? Is this a
topic that a white man should write a book about?
And I think I came to believe that actually part
of the problem with the way I think, particularly white
people think about the system, even if they're sympathetic to
the aims of say, Black Lives Matter, is that it's
essentially like some other ancillary problem, Like that's a thing
(01:00:54):
that is a problem, Like it's a bad thing, and
I'm it's a bummer that happens, but I'm not implicated
in it. It's like, part of the point of the
book is like, no, you very much are we collectively
as a democratic society, but particularly as white majorities and
particularly as white voters, have created this system that puts
more people in prison than anywhere else in the world
(01:01:16):
in a per capita basis. It didn't just come about.
It wasn't handed down by you know, Moses, and it
wasn't the product of back room lobbyists. It was actually
voters going to the polls and voting for people that
ran really racist ads about getting tough on crimes and
crack you know, crack thugs and things like that. And
so part of the project of the book is to say, look,
(01:01:38):
you're implicated in the system we all are as democratic citizens,
and the system that we've built fails to live up
to the democratic aspirations and promises we have, and so
we should all be troubled by that, and we should
all be trying to unbuild that system. And that's that's
sort of the idea behind why I wanted to write
the book.
Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Well as far as the target audience to whom it
should hit, how do you how do you propose not
even reading not even reading your book per se? But
it's like, how do you even plant the seed in
(01:02:21):
people's minds, especially where we the times that we live
in now, where journalists aren't trusted that much. The idea
of fake news and liberal media is just oh, you're
just a liberal and you know, which is like instant
turn off. So it's like, how do you It's like, okay,
(01:02:43):
let me just save the people that are on the
fence now.
Speaker 4 (01:02:45):
And I think, you know, it's a good question. You know.
The hope always, I think when you're writing is that
you can speak to people, whoever they are, if they're
willing to give you a charitable read the book. It's
funny I'm watching now this sort of national conversation and
that started to click in a dear do you see
the thing about t I?
Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
Today? No?
Speaker 4 (01:03:03):
You see this. I was on the way we are
t I got arrested because someone called the cops on
him as he was trying to get into his own
gated community in Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
Yeah, no, that that's it's real, because sometimes you don't
have your code.
Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
No.
Speaker 4 (01:03:17):
And someone was like, who's this dude?
Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
Right?
Speaker 4 (01:03:20):
And I think as we're having this natural conversation about
you know, there's a Starbucks incident, there's there's been a
bunch of this and I think it's been really really
he got arrested. There was an ap bulleton as I
was coming up here saying that t I got arrested
for breaking into basically bagging.
Speaker 2 (01:03:35):
It was on that damn. Even the cops come like,
oh you're t I.
Speaker 4 (01:03:39):
Yeah, well look I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:03:41):
That's horrible.
Speaker 4 (01:03:42):
Clearly they didn't thought of it. So, you know, the
book A Calling Nation like it starts and ends on
a question of when to call the cops. Like the
first the first sentence of the book is when's the
last time you called the cops? And the last sentence
of the book is recounting a story of me being
in Prospect Park and taking on my phone and considering
whether I should die no one one. And the reason
(01:04:02):
that I started and ended with that is because that
is a thing that you know, Ferguson or the police
shooting people might team abstract to a citizen like, well,
I'm not a cop, but people call the cops a lot.
You're You're part of the link in the chain, and
I think it's really important we're having this discussion right now.
We I think primarily white people, and I think people
(01:04:24):
that you know don't want to end up screwing people
over about like when should you call the cops? Right?
Should you call the cops because someone has been in
a Starbucks or two minutes or that people are going
too slowly on the golf course? Like I don't think so.
I think you should not call the cops. I think
you should not call the cops unless someone's life is
in danger. Basically, well, you know, if there is violence
(01:04:47):
imminent or that you witnessed, if there is a danger
that you're witnessing, she should call nine one one.
Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Short of that, I think a lot of the times
cops are used because people are generally just afraid of conference.
Speaker 4 (01:05:00):
ConfL like they don't want to say, oh they of course,
of course, it's so much easier. I mean, and that's
what you do my fighting for me, Like yeah. And
the first example I gave in the book is called
the Last time I did call the cops was one
watching a guy basically intimidate sort of threaten his girlfriend
on the street and screaming at her. And yeah, I
didn't want to go out there and be like, hey, you,
(01:05:22):
what are you doing?
Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
Get your hands off of her?
Speaker 4 (01:05:24):
Like George, I was like, no, I'm going to make
a phone call.
Speaker 2 (01:05:33):
There's also there's there's a part of the book in
which he explained that which I'm actually shocked at the
fact that you were explaining about you coming home from
a school dance and uh, you got accost it by
(01:05:56):
some undesirables come fugs, And somehow I was like wow,
Like that would have instantly changed my mind, because even
my even my head to this day, when I visit
my childhood home, I'm still looking for Big Reggie and
(01:06:17):
his cousin Lamar. Yep, Like I'm certain, and I hate
to say this, I'm certain they're dead by now, which
I shouldn't say.
Speaker 4 (01:06:25):
This, but no, it's still there.
Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
Even in getting out of my car, like as a
near fifty year old, my first thing I thought about
was Big Reggie Lamar might be down a black tig
Reggie hey Man. Taking someone's pack man money is some
big shit back in the early agies. So yeah, you know,
like that one incident at the arcade in my childhood
(01:06:52):
has almost scarred me for life where I'm always looking,
you know, shell shocked and the fact that that happened
to you, and I thought like, wow, at no point
were you just like dad, why the hell are we
up here? And I should be living this life of
you know, and I don't know if the P word
is a four letter word to white people to say
(01:07:13):
like privileged or anything, but like we don't have to
live here that like what why did you not ever?
Actually what made you it? You know, come to this
point of understanding if most people don't do.
Speaker 4 (01:07:27):
That, I think that yeah, there's a lot of you know,
we were scared all the time and we we got
And part of that was I think that was true
of every teenager in New York City at that at
that age, like you just that happened, you got jacked,
like run your loot, run your bus pass, you know, jacket, backpack, starter,
a cap whatever, you know. I think part of it
(01:07:49):
was at the same time that was happening the ethos
at my high school and at my middle school and
even in grade school. Although more when you're an adolescent,
you're thinkinking about.
Speaker 2 (01:08:00):
Like what's cool.
Speaker 4 (01:08:02):
Everything that was cool was urban. Everything that was cool
was emanated from communities of color, like like the center,
the center of gravity of everything culturally, of the worldview
of what we wanted to be, of the music we
listened to. Everything was it was non white, right, So
it there And I think there's ways that you that
(01:08:23):
can get real pathological and kind of fetishistic, you know,
in the in certain ways. But our experience of it,
I think was just that, Yeah, that was just part
of being in the city. But the city was great
and we were urban kids and that's what mattered, and
that was the kind of cultural world we inhabited.
Speaker 2 (01:08:39):
So do you that was just a part of growing
up in New York?
Speaker 4 (01:08:42):
Yeah, I mean it stressed me out a lot. It definitely,
like I spent a lot of time scared. I really did.
I walked around the city all the time. You know,
my brother tells this hilarious story because when I was
telling him about the book, he was talking about how,
you know, we would all work. Everyone wore jan sports
and the style was that you wore them like hitting
against your butt, like the with the you know, they
(01:09:02):
were all the way low on you, like the the
the loop was as big as possible, but that if
you were about if something was about to go down,
you would like preparatorily grab the straps and pull them
up to tighten because you were going to have to
book it and you didn't want to.
Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
Indiana, I'm having flashbacks right now, Like Bill, you're like
seven ft tall. Didn't matter, just.
Speaker 4 (01:09:31):
The moment, the moment right before was going to go
down was always like strap them up, like pull the
pull the straps on the on the jan sports you could.
Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
Book, so you couldn't book. So you you you thanks? Steve?
What justo? Yes, I get it.
Speaker 4 (01:09:58):
It's like when I say when I call my CA
wife boo and the millennials in my office, what.
Speaker 2 (01:10:06):
Book is much older than?
Speaker 4 (01:10:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
You you explained how you know? Because you're saying that
one point crime was at an all time high and
then suddenly it stopped. And now, as a New New Yorker,
I always wondered about that because when I first arrived
(01:10:31):
in New York City.
Speaker 4 (01:10:34):
When did you move here?
Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
Well, okay, i'd moved here in two thousand and nine,
which I mean gentrification. They're already taken over. But I'm
talking about when we as a group first started to
record up here. I mean, we would stay here, but
I mean I guess technically maybe I have lived here
for twenty five years and just haven't admitted it. Yeah.
(01:10:57):
But but the thing was is that when we first moved,
ironically on forty sixth Street where Hamilton is right now,
everyone kept complaining about like the Disney the disneyfied occasion
of Times Square, which I didn't know any better, Like
(01:11:18):
I didn't get that they were longing for what was
I didn't and I didn't even know that was there.
And I was like, wait, this is great, Like it
it's like a mall, and there's y Roger's Chicken across
the street, and there's the McDonald's over there, and there's
a movie theater, Like this is really awesome. And people
were like everyone complained about that happening. And then even
(01:11:39):
more recently and looking for homeless people, I discovered that
they've all been moved out of Manhattan, So why were
you looking for homeless people? I did. We did a
photo shoot in which they ordered way too much food
(01:12:02):
and the interns were about to throw like twenty boxes
of pizza away perfectly good. And I was like, nah,
let's let's get him to the homeless. But then it
was like a two hour search for Yeah, like I
found people in Brooklyn at a near a shelter, but
at forty second Street. When I was going through the
bus station, the cop was.
Speaker 4 (01:12:22):
Like, what's loft? I was like, I didn't do it, but.
Speaker 2 (01:12:27):
And I hit him. I was like, yo, I said,
I thought I'd come here with you know, the bus station,
but where the where the people at? And they kind
of laughed at each other like a joke, like in't
that cute? It said, noah, man, you ain't gonna find
nothing down here, And I was like what happened to them?
And he kind of leveled with me. He's a black dude,
(01:12:47):
so you just level with me, like, yeah, dog, they
don't want homeless the more like they up and like
past the Bronx like in Yonkers. And I was just like, oh,
so it wasn't because when people say those that's like,
you know, crime is going down in homelessness, and da
da da da da. You're made to think like suddenly,
like you know, there are more jobs and people and
(01:13:09):
less crime because people were more moral. But no, like
either people have been killed or thrown in jail or
just displaced and put Yeah, he explained about the one
way ticket system that I never knew about. There was
a period in I think two thousand and one where
if they put you on a plane or a bus
(01:13:32):
and someone's on the other side to get you, that's
how they got rid of you, which isn't necessarily fixing
the situation either.
Speaker 4 (01:13:40):
Yeah, there's two things about I think the way the
city changed. One is that it really did get less dangerous.
But then there's this ambient thing I talk about in
the book of just like seediness, and that was such
a part of what the experience of New York was,
which was a little related to the threat of danger,
but also just this kind of ambient thing of there
were squeegee men. It would come and there were a
(01:14:00):
lot of panhandlers, and there were people all the time
who were kind of like quasi living in subway stations,
and it had this feeling. You see a lot of
discourse about this around San Francisco right now, and they're
constantly writing about that like, oh, there's all these drug addicts.
It was all these homeless and New York City was
very much had that feeling to it, and it was
a real it was a real thing, and this sense
of like cleaning it up, which is very loaded politically
(01:14:22):
in terms of what it means and for whom, particularly
in Manhattan, right, I mean particularly it's like, well, we've
we're going to clean up Midtown, We're going to clean
up Downtown, clean up the financial district, clean up Brian Park.
That was all this very much kind of business oriented thing,
much more than you know, communities coming together because they
wanted it for their neighborhood. But one of the complicated
(01:14:42):
things about this, right is that folks who live in
neighborhoods don't love a bunch of people hanging out outside
of liquor store either. A lot of times, like it's
not always just this external thing of you know, the
business district or this power structure from outside. There's always
this is one of the things that James Warmer Junior
talks about in his book Locking Up Our Own is
(01:15:03):
like the internal dynamics of neighborhoods about who's you know.
Speaker 2 (01:15:06):
I'm sorry. Side note I kind of missed the neighborhood whino.
I haven't seen a good whino in about twenty years.
Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
Like you've been searching the wrong place apparently, ah Man,
I just missed the neighborhood whino.
Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
I'm sorry, Go ahead, Chris.
Speaker 4 (01:15:19):
So. So, there was a real transformation that happened in
the city and the experience of it, and that experience
was that was a very intentional thing that was done
by Giuliani and then Bloomberg Broken Windows. I write about
in the book, like this whole thing about how there's
a whole theory that there's a relationship between those two
things that if people are jumping turnstyles, it sends a
message to everyone else that lawlessness is okay, and then
(01:15:42):
you get lots of murder and that that was the argument,
and a lot of people it wasn't a bad faith argument.
I think people really believe that argument. But what ended
up happening is the city starts enforcing these low level
misdemeanor things, selling em and ms on the subway, jumping turnstyles, YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 2 (01:16:00):
You can't tell eminem's on the subway.
Speaker 4 (01:16:01):
No more people, people, those little kids, people get citations
for selling emms on the subway every day and you're
setting their feet up on us or putting their feet
up or doing the showtime thing.
Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
Oh yeah, no more performances. Move up, move. Steve prevents
me from getting on the subway, so I would have. Actually,
I suggested that he and I take the subway down there,
and Steve has this thing in his mind where he
has to be my protector. It's not the most pleasant
place to be. You know, wait, celebrity, right if that's
(01:16:30):
I've been the subway with him and like nobody I
rode a celebrity with a tuxedo on with the rest
of the roots and no one bothered.
Speaker 4 (01:16:37):
Really, it was like Obama was Do you see that
instagram is instagram of the when the Cavs are in town.
Do you see that? Was pretty funny They got where
they were on the subway. They were on the subway
like it was like the whole Calves squad and taking
the subway to Madison's Square Garden when they were in
town to play the next and I forget what happened,
but Lebron is definitely on there. He's got a hoodie on,
and I think no one recognized I'm pretty sure no
(01:16:59):
one recognized them, but it was. It's a really funny
like there's there's a woman next to Lebron I think,
who's kind of like making a face because they're like
acting the fool a little bit right, and and and
she doesn't like them acting up. That has no idea
that she's next to like literally one of the most
famous people on earth.
Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
Right. See, let's think that's a squad of eight foot
black guys. And instead of me and you on the suburb,
it's a different thing, big steven little yeah, little mirror protection.
So where do you see? Do you see an end
of the this nightmare?
Speaker 4 (01:17:36):
But the thing is the nightmare ends.
Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
But if the nightmare ends, then we won't watch the news.
I'm not saying you yourself like, thanks, well, didn't let's
move us to like.
Speaker 4 (01:17:47):
The country for us?
Speaker 2 (01:17:49):
Yeah? Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 4 (01:17:52):
I don't know. I don't know the answer. I don't
know how it ends. I really don't. I think everyone
so you don't.
Speaker 2 (01:17:56):
Have a vision of your head of like, okay, so
you know you gotta check your phone every twelve seconds
to see.
Speaker 4 (01:18:02):
If Michael Cone got indicted. No he didn't. I'm saying
check my phone, dude. I'm like, really, actually, Manny Pettien's
come back and tell us he'll sing it.
Speaker 2 (01:18:15):
But do you have but do you sorry? I'm all,
do you have this vision of like all of them
getting arrested in slow motion?
Speaker 4 (01:18:27):
And yeah, I mean, look, I think everybody has their
own kind of fantasies about how it all ends. And
you know, I think there's some I feel like it's
going to happen. But I here's my can I my
my my thing about this, which is a little school
marmish but I'll I'll do it anyway, which is that
I think people want some deliverance. They want a White Knight,
they want a Dais X Machino. They want some way
(01:18:49):
to be rescued. They want the bad guys to get
carted away. They want Bob Muller to sort of ride
in and slay the dragon. And my thing about this,
which is the same theme of the book, is it's
just in a democracy, like it's just us, it's us
as citizens, it's we. No one's going to do it
for you the work, like that's just the way it works.
(01:19:09):
It's the hard thing about democracies is they they're fricking
They take a lot of exertion to make them work. Well,
you can outsource all that shit, you can say. I'm
you know, I trust these people in charge are just
going to do it. I'm going to show up to
vote or maybe even not vote, but at the minimum,
just show up and vote and be like okay.
Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
But so even in the hands of a storm.
Speaker 4 (01:19:30):
He's a lawyer, Mike Michae Lavanati. He's a great character.
Speaker 2 (01:19:35):
Your eyes at him, but do you not feel as
though he has traction?
Speaker 4 (01:19:38):
He's got traction, man, Dude, do your thing. Dude, I
don't like I don't begrudge anyone anything. Everyone's doing all
this stuff. I'm just saying the ending will. I think
the ending will be written by us collectively as a society,
as opposed to some squad of elliot ness untouchables that
bring down the ring. And even though even though I
think that there's a possibility that Bob Muller does, I
(01:20:00):
can dit a lot of people. Don't get me wrong,
I think they probably. I think people in the president's
circle definitely committed crimes that's already been established, but even
worse than we know. I just think that in a
deeper sense of will it be okay? The answer to
that question lies of us as opposed to do you
believe that Mahler is.
Speaker 2 (01:20:21):
All right? To compare this to like a police drama
instead of arresting the corner boy, okay, instead of arresting
the corner boy and his drug dealer boss, that Mahler
is actually trying to cast a widen est amongst anyone involved,
(01:20:43):
Like this is a bigger story, even bigger than Trump
being president.
Speaker 4 (01:20:46):
I think he has gone All indications from the outside
is that he has gone about this in both a
methodical way and in the kind of way that you
would attempt to go after or roll up in organize
crime ring. And I think that's been pretty clear. I
mean the stories, the craziest stories to me are the
international stories where you know, some oligarch shows up on
(01:21:08):
a private jet and Kennedy and gets off the plane
and it's like, excuse me, sir, with the FBI, come
with us and like search his phones, question on that
whole thing. And that's happened multiple times to multiple people.
They've got agents working overseas, so you know there's a
lot going on in that. I don't I don't know
what ultimately that will bear out, but I do have
a fair amount of faith in the in the diligence
(01:21:28):
with which they're approaching that job.
Speaker 2 (01:21:30):
I just don't know. Okay, So in your version, this
is my last question in your version of all the
presidents have been who's playing you in the movie? And
I'm slowly.
Speaker 4 (01:21:42):
Good, good, Who's who's playing you?
Speaker 2 (01:21:49):
There you go, ladies and gentlemen, Thank yoursees for hopefully
not to traumatize right now. I want we at Boss Bill,
Imday Bill and Sucer Steve. This is a Questlove Quest,
Love Supreme, only on Pandora. We will see you over
(01:22:10):
the next go around.
Speaker 4 (01:22:16):
H course.
Speaker 1 (01:22:25):
Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This classic episode
was produced by.
Speaker 4 (01:22:30):
The team at Pandora.
Speaker 1 (01:22:37):
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Laiya St. Clair
Questlove
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.