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