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