Episode 425 - Baratunde Thurston

Episode 425 • Released September 18, 2013 • Speakers detected

00:00:00Guest:Lock the gates!

00:00:09Marc:Alright, let's do this.

00:00:10Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?

00:00:11Marc:What the fuck buddies?

00:00:12Marc:What the fuck nicks?

00:00:13Marc:What the fuckstables?

00:00:14Marc:What the fuckineers?

00:00:15Marc:What the fuckanots?

00:00:16Marc:What the fucksters?

00:00:17Marc:How are you?

00:00:18Marc:I am Marc Maron.

00:00:19Marc:This is WTF, my show, my podcast.

00:00:23Marc:Thank you for listening.

00:00:24Marc:I appreciate you being here.

00:00:26Marc:God, what episode are we on?

00:00:28Marc:What episode is this?

00:00:30Marc:Number 425.

00:00:31Marc:That is the episode number 425.

00:00:34Marc:I had no idea...

00:00:37Marc:that I would do 425 of these, that I would have 425 conversations with different people.

00:00:43Marc:It's astounding.

00:00:45Marc:We're coming up on our four-year anniversary.

00:00:47Marc:It's amazing.

00:00:48Marc:I just had no idea that this would be what I would be doing, and it would be so fucking great.

00:00:56Marc:Is that crazy?

00:00:58Marc:Life is strange, man.

00:01:00Marc:You never know what the fuck was going to, you just don't know what the hell is going to happen.

00:01:04Marc:You can sit there all day long in your head and think like, all right, I got a plan.

00:01:08Marc:Here's what's going to happen.

00:01:09Marc:Here are the options of what's going to happen.

00:01:11Marc:This is how it's going to go down.

00:01:13Marc:And boom, you're living outside.

00:01:16Marc:who knows you know god forbid but you know what i'm saying you just don't know all the things that i do in my brain to somehow insulate or protect myself from surprises basically that's it seems like that's what our brains do it's a it's it's a surprise stifler i spend a lot of time in my head just uh working the angles so i don't get caught off guard holy shit where's my car where are my shoes i can barely remember my name

00:01:43Marc:I mean, obviously, that's, again, a stretch, but why don't we look on the other side?

00:01:48Marc:I'm fucking done.

00:01:49Marc:It's over.

00:01:50Marc:What?

00:01:51Marc:I'm doing a show out of my garage, and I'm talking to Baratunde Thurston today?

00:01:57Marc:Yes, that's what happened.

00:01:59Marc:That's the way it went.

00:02:01Marc:I'm sitting here in my garage doing my job.

00:02:05Marc:425.

00:02:06Marc:It's not even an anniversary or anything.

00:02:10Marc:It's just a hell of a number, isn't it?

00:02:12Marc:baratunde thurston is on the show he's a writer uh he's written several books four i believe and the uh the one that uh i think the latest one is how to be black so there will be a little of that talk i know how much uh some of you like or hate

00:02:31Marc:when I talk race with somebody who I've decided is an authority on race, but I think if somebody writes a book called how to be black, I'm entitled to ask a few questions.

00:02:42Marc:Also a very funny guy who was an onion writer who wrote about politics for years.

00:02:45Marc:Great guy, great conversation.

00:02:49Marc:So look forward to that.

00:02:51Marc:Can I say this?

00:02:52Marc:I'm going to be in Rochester this weekend on Saturday at the Rochester Fringe Fest, Saturday, September 21st.

00:02:59Marc:I'll be there with Nate Bargetzi.

00:03:02Marc:I'm thrilled to be working with that guy because you know how much I love him.

00:03:06Marc:The following Tuesday, September 24th, I'll be at Just for Laughs 42 in Toronto, Ontario, doing one show there at the Queen Elizabeth Theater.

00:03:14Marc:And please go get your tickets for the Los Angeles Podcast Festival at LAPodcast.com.

00:03:20Marc:Go do that, will you?

00:03:22Marc:You want to update on the second season of Marin?

00:03:24Marc:I think I can start doing that.

00:03:26Marc:I think I can start telling you what's happening a little bit.

00:03:29Marc:I'm at work every day.

00:03:30Marc:I am at work.

00:03:32Marc:I go to an office with five or six other guys, and we sit there and we try to build my life as a fiction for the show Marin.

00:03:40Marc:What's going to happen the second season?

00:03:42Marc:I can tell you a little bit.

00:03:43Marc:I can tell you that

00:03:45Marc:we've come up with some very funny stories.

00:03:48Marc:Most of them are sort of founded in my life.

00:03:51Marc:I can tell you that the mark that you will see in the second season of Marin is a little bit more successful than he was in the first season of Marin, but not so successful that he feels successful necessarily, but he's successful enough to struggle with that success.

00:04:06Marc:Is that is that enough of a hint for you?

00:04:08Marc:I think we're going to see more Judd Hirsch as my dad.

00:04:11Marc:I believe we will see some more Sally Kellerman as my mother.

00:04:15Marc:But, you know, we're a little far out from casting month or two.

00:04:19Marc:So I can't make any promises.

00:04:20Marc:I believe you will see some more of of Josh Brenner as as my assistant.

00:04:26Marc:I believe these things will happen.

00:04:28Marc:And obviously some podcast guests.

00:04:30Marc:I know the stories are good.

00:04:31Marc:I know they are funny.

00:04:33Marc:The ones that were crunching, the ones that were breaking are funny.

00:04:37Marc:Very excited to be doing the work.

00:04:39Marc:I'm also excited to be doing stand up.

00:04:41Marc:How about a deaf black cat update?

00:04:43Marc:All right.

00:04:43Marc:So where were we when I last left you?

00:04:47Marc:Oh, I trapped him and I brought him to the vet and I was going to go pick him up.

00:04:51Marc:He stayed at the vet over the weekend.

00:04:54Marc:Some of you saw the picture I tweeted of Def Black Cat post-vet.

00:04:58Marc:He hung out.

00:04:59Marc:They filled him with fluids.

00:05:01Marc:They shot him up with morphine.

00:05:02Marc:They gave him some antibiotics.

00:05:04Marc:They drained and scraped the abscess off around his eye.

00:05:10Marc:They gave him a few stitches.

00:05:13Marc:And they put him in a cage.

00:05:16Marc:And my doc said, that cat is a wild cat.

00:05:19Marc:And I said, hell yeah, he's wild.

00:05:21Marc:And they cut his balls off.

00:05:22Marc:He still had his balls.

00:05:25Marc:He's been out there six or seven years.

00:05:26Marc:I haven't seen any kittens.

00:05:27Marc:I haven't seen any new feral cats.

00:05:28Marc:I don't know how hot.

00:05:30Marc:a deaf cat is to other cats i don't know if he picks up on all the signals necessary to get himself laid but i imagine all you need is a good sense of smell and uh and a and a good powerful attitude to get laid as a cat and sight helps as well you need to know where you're putting it so the deaf black cat story

00:05:53Marc:has engaged people.

00:05:55Marc:And so I brought him home, and he was pretty tweaked out.

00:05:59Marc:He looked a little exhausted in the cage, and I felt bad.

00:06:02Marc:Here was my issue, is that, all right, this cat is a wild fucking animal.

00:06:06Marc:There's no doubt that this cat is wild as shit.

00:06:09Marc:and there's no keeping a wild cat in the house with my cats.

00:06:13Marc:He would just freak out.

00:06:14Marc:Then I thought, well, maybe he needs to go in the garage for a few days, or maybe he could live in the garage.

00:06:18Marc:But then I remembered these wild-ass cats when I trapped them when I first got them, all four of them in my apartment in Astoria, Queens.

00:06:26Marc:I would go to bed at night.

00:06:27Marc:They would hide under couches, behind stoves, anywhere they could not...

00:06:32Marc:be seen or heard by me, they would stash themselves.

00:06:36Marc:And then as soon as I went to bed, there was just a cat party out there.

00:06:40Marc:They destroyed a couch.

00:06:41Marc:They destroyed some books.

00:06:43Marc:They destroyed some pillows.

00:06:45Marc:You know, a cat that doesn't want to be somewhere and you make them be there.

00:06:49Marc:If there's shit around for them to express their anger, they will certainly do that type of art for you.

00:06:56Marc:So I asked the doc, I said, well, look, what am I going to do for follow-up here?

00:07:01Marc:He said, look, we gave him antibiotics out of the last two weeks.

00:07:03Marc:You just got to let him go and hope for the best.

00:07:06Marc:So I let him go.

00:07:07Marc:Once he realized the cage door was open, I'd never seen an animal move that quickly.

00:07:13Marc:It looked like he was shot out of the cage and just ran down the steps onto the patio and into the bushes.

00:07:21Marc:I mean, like shot out.

00:07:24Marc:I haven't seen him since.

00:07:27Marc:I haven't seen him since Monday.

00:07:29Marc:I'm talking to you on Thursday morning.

00:07:35Marc:I did get a nice email, a nice cat story.

00:07:39Marc:You know, some of these emails, I read them and I get choked up and...

00:07:42Marc:But this subject line is just, hey, Mark, just listen to your story of the deaf black cat.

00:07:50Marc:Felt I should share my cat story.

00:07:52Marc:My friends made me get a kitten six years ago because they thought I was a depressed alcoholic, lonely fuck up and needed some love at home, which they couldn't give me.

00:08:02Marc:Well, I am a depressed alcoholic fuck up, but that's another story.

00:08:05Marc:Anyway, my cat is a fat orange bastard who I love to death.

00:08:09Marc:When I moved to California from Texas, assuming all of California equals Santa Monica slash San Francisco, huge mistake.

00:08:16Marc:California away from the coast might as well be Oklahoma.

00:08:19Marc:And I mean that in a derogatory Bible thun per bigot sense.

00:08:22Marc:Obviously not everyone is like that, but sometimes I need to vent.

00:08:25Marc:Bakersfield is a shithole.

00:08:27Marc:The cat, his name is the dude, stopped eating for a week.

00:08:30Marc:I fat bearded Indian guy took him to the vet.

00:08:34Marc:The vet said he needed to keep him in observation and give him antibiotics and IV fluids.

00:08:38Marc:I fat bearded 33 year old Indian guy started bawling, not manly quiver crying, followed by a steely gaze, but full on wailing.

00:08:48Marc:They told me I could call slash come in any time in the night and check on the cat.

00:08:52Marc:So I called 12 times ish.

00:08:54Marc:Went to see him at 6 a.m.

00:08:56Marc:with an old shirt and a toy.

00:08:57Marc:Bald again.

00:08:59Marc:Missed work.

00:09:00Marc:Laid in bed wondering how much of a horrible person I was to have let this cat fall sick.

00:09:05Marc:Did I mention I'm an alcoholic?

00:09:07Marc:The next day when they released the cat, the vet told me he needed my help getting the cat out of the cage.

00:09:12Marc:The duder was very unhappy.

00:09:14Marc:Growling.

00:09:15Marc:Hissing at everyone.

00:09:16Marc:Wouldn't let anyone touch him or even try.

00:09:18Marc:But he let me.

00:09:21Marc:The minute I put my hand in that cage, he stopped growling and nuzzled.

00:09:25Marc:It was utterly overwhelming because for whatever reason, never in my life have I experienced anything like that.

00:09:32Marc:That kind of blind trust in an emotional fuck up like me.

00:09:36Marc:Maybe the clinical view is that I am my cat's key to survival or whatever.

00:09:41Marc:Maybe I'm making a huge deal out of it, but it killed me to feel that I am worthy of trust and love."

00:09:48Marc:Anyway, just wanted to share that with you.

00:09:51Marc:Love your podcasts.

00:09:53Marc:Listening to you has helped a lot in my recovery.

00:09:56Marc:I still struggle daily, but got to keep plowing on.

00:10:00Marc:Cheers.

00:10:02Marc:And I'll leave his name out of this because it's very specific.

00:10:07Marc:But that is a very sweet email, man.

00:10:10Marc:Yeah, you can't underestimate the power of the unconditional love of animals.

00:10:16Marc:Or with cats, the occasionally conditional love of animals.

00:10:26Marc:I'll let you know if Def Black Cat shows up.

00:10:28Marc:All right?

00:10:28Marc:I'll let you know.

00:10:30Marc:And now I think it's only fair that we talk to Baratunde Thurston.

00:10:36Marc:Now, what do I say?

00:10:41Guest:Baratunde?

00:10:42Guest:That's perfect.

00:10:43Guest:I'm proud of you, Mark.

00:10:44Guest:Baratunde?

00:10:45Guest:Baratunde.

00:10:46Guest:You did it.

00:10:47Marc:Yeah.

00:10:48Guest:You're already ahead.

00:10:50Guest:Wait, what did you get?

00:10:51Guest:Oh, I get so many things.

00:10:53Guest:I get...

00:10:55Guest:Bartholomew.

00:10:57Guest:Bartholomew?

00:10:58Guest:Bartholomew.

00:10:59Guest:Tundra.

00:10:59Guest:There's a whole... Tundra?

00:11:01Guest:There's a whole chapter in my book that's just about the name.

00:11:03Guest:I get Barry, Bartuna.

00:11:06Guest:Which book?

00:11:06Marc:How to be Black?

00:11:07Guest:How to be Black, yeah.

00:11:09Marc:Well, I mean, and what does that cover?

00:11:10Marc:Why do some black people have names that are difficult for us white people to pronounce?

00:11:15Marc:It's... We never got the 40 acres.

00:11:18Guest:Yeah.

00:11:19Guest:So...

00:11:19Guest:That was it?

00:11:21Guest:It's an incremental retribution.

00:11:24Marc:So it was a generation of black parents saying, I'm going to connect him to the real shit.

00:11:29Marc:Exactly.

00:11:31Guest:So what is the genealogy of Baratunde?

00:11:34Guest:So Baratunde is a version of Babatunde, which is a Nigerian name from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

00:11:40Guest:It means father or grandfather returns.

00:11:44Guest:And my mother was a huge fan of her grandfather.

00:11:47Guest:And I took a while to show up.

00:11:50Guest:Right.

00:11:51Guest:So it also, in the book that she and my father found it in, it meant one who was chosen.

00:11:56Guest:Right.

00:11:57Guest:And that was important to her because she had a bunch of miscarriages before I arrived.

00:12:02Guest:And they're like, finally, this kid is here.

00:12:04Marc:Yeah.

00:12:04Marc:Let's do it.

00:12:04Marc:So this is the one that made it.

00:12:06Guest:Yes.

00:12:06Marc:Do you have brothers and sisters?

00:12:07Guest:I have one older sister, Belinda.

00:12:08Guest:Belinda.

00:12:09Marc:So they had one.

00:12:10Guest:Yeah.

00:12:10Marc:And they wanted another.

00:12:11Marc:One more.

00:12:11Marc:Kept trying.

00:12:12Marc:There you go.

00:12:13Guest:Different fathers though.

00:12:15Marc:Was this book, now do you, is Nigeria, is there any connection in Nigeria?

00:12:21Guest:Yeah, they read it in a book.

00:12:23Guest:That's it.

00:12:23Guest:That connection was literary.

00:12:27Yeah.

00:12:27Marc:So the genealogy part.

00:12:28Marc:There is no genealogy.

00:12:31Marc:Too much effort there.

00:12:32Guest:Yeah, because you could have been from several places, theoretically.

00:12:35Guest:A lot of people, a lot of Nigerians get very excited when they first meet me.

00:12:40Guest:They get confused.

00:12:41Marc:And then they start talking to you in Nigerian.

00:12:43Marc:And there is nothing.

00:12:44Marc:Yeah, where do you meet Nigerians?

00:12:46Guest:They're everywhere.

00:12:47Guest:Nigerians are a massive population.

00:12:49Guest:They've kind of taken over.

00:12:50Guest:In New York?

00:12:51Guest:Are they the ones that are selling the watches?

00:12:53Guest:A lot of people sell watches in New York.

00:12:55Guest:I'm not sure which heavier group of African immigrants is hard on the watch selling in Times Square.

00:13:01Guest:You haven't done that research?

00:13:02Guest:I haven't.

00:13:02Guest:That's part two.

00:13:04Guest:Who's selling me these watches?

00:13:06Guest:The sequel to Had to be Blacker.

00:13:09Marc:Yeah.

00:13:10Marc:So what do you do, man?

00:13:12Marc:I mean, the last time... I know you're a writer.

00:13:16Marc:I know you're at The Onion in an oversight capacity as a writer.

00:13:22Marc:I know you've written some books, but the last time I saw you, you were like, I'm doing a thing with the tech thing.

00:13:27Marc:I got some big ideas.

00:13:29Marc:Here's a card.

00:13:30Marc:This is an example of something we're thinking about.

00:13:32Marc:I have no fucking clue.

00:13:34Guest:That's a great question, man.

00:13:36Guest:So I've been doing stand-up for a long time, about 11 years, and that's one of my core things.

00:13:42Guest:Now, wait a minute.

00:13:44Guest:All right.

00:13:44Guest:So you've been doing stand-up.

00:13:46Guest:Stand-up.

00:13:46Guest:11 years.

00:13:47Guest:Yeah.

00:13:47Guest:Started in Boston.

00:13:48Marc:Okay, with the Merman crew?

00:13:50Guest:Just after the Merman crew.

00:13:52Guest:Mike Kaplan.

00:13:53Marc:Mike Kaplan, Comedy Studio.

00:13:54Marc:Rick Jenkins, that whole... So you were of the Mike Kaplan generation.

00:13:58Marc:Yes, sir.

00:13:58Marc:The Smarty Pants generation.

00:14:00Marc:Yes.

00:14:00Marc:The people that were heavily educated... There you go.

00:14:03Marc:...and decided, like, why not try this?

00:14:05Marc:I've got a backup plan.

00:14:07Yeah.

00:14:08Guest:Yeah.

00:14:09Guest:Okay.

00:14:09Guest:Yeah.

00:14:10Guest:Fine.

00:14:10Guest:All right.

00:14:11Guest:And so what I'm doing now since leaving the Onion is I started this company with two other Onion alums called Cultivated Wit.

00:14:19Guest:We're taking this idea of humor and technology and creativity and throwing it into a big pile.

00:14:25Guest:Okay.

00:14:26Guest:And saying, what can we do at the intersection of those things that's interesting?

00:14:29Guest:Yeah.

00:14:30Guest:Okay.

00:14:30Guest:So we're building some secret app stuff that's going to be amazing.

00:14:34Guest:Secret apps.

00:14:35Guest:When we release that.

00:14:36Guest:Baratunde's got secret apps.

00:14:38Guest:Secret apps, baby.

00:14:39Guest:He is the chosen one.

00:14:40Guest:No, one who was chosen is a big difference.

00:14:42Guest:A lot less pressure.

00:14:43Guest:A lot less pressure.

00:14:44Guest:One who was chosen.

00:14:45Guest:Yeah, there could be a thousand chosen ones.

00:14:47Marc:With one who was chosen, there's just expectation.

00:14:49Marc:With the chosen one, you better not disappoint.

00:14:51Marc:There's certain death.

00:14:52Guest:Yeah.

00:14:53Marc:You don't know what you're chosen for.

00:14:54Marc:You just know you were chosen.

00:14:55Guest:Yeah.

00:14:56Guest:Okay.

00:14:56Guest:All right.

00:14:57Guest:So this is this vague app.

00:14:58Guest:So we have some app notions.

00:15:01Guest:One project that we're working on that's not a core thing, but we're partnering with people is to do a satirical location-based racism app.

00:15:09Guest:that would tell you how racist the area around you is based on all kinds of data from social media, from the government.

00:15:15Marc:Could you maybe do it to the point where you can actually have it voice sensitive to someone talking to you?

00:15:21Guest:That's a great new feature to add to the roadmap.

00:15:24Guest:Thank you, Mark.

00:15:25Marc:Voice recognition of racism without the actual language of racism.

00:15:30Marc:That's just the tone.

00:15:31Marc:Right.

00:15:32Marc:Wow.

00:15:32Marc:Yeah.

00:15:33Marc:I mean, as a joke, it would be.

00:15:34Guest:No, no, no.

00:15:35Marc:I would think that if you really tried to engage that technology, you'd be racist.

00:15:38Guest:There you go.

00:15:39Guest:It would blow up in your face.

00:15:40Guest:You'd become that which you despise.

00:15:42Guest:Yes.

00:15:42Guest:And then we've been working with companies to help them, organizations, use humor in the way they deal with people, in the way they deal with their audiences, with their customers.

00:15:52Marc:So whose team are you on, man?

00:15:53Guest:I'm on my team.

00:15:54Guest:Okay.

00:15:54Guest:I'm on the team of truth and freedom.

00:15:56Guest:Okay.

00:15:57Guest:And then the big thing that we just pulled off our second version of is this thing called Comedy Hack Day.

00:16:03Guest:And it's not hacked from the comedic sense.

00:16:04Guest:It's hacked from the technology developer sense.

00:16:07Guest:Okay.

00:16:07Guest:Software developers, comedians, designers to build funny apps in a weekend.

00:16:12Guest:They all come together.

00:16:13Marc:Yeah.

00:16:13Marc:You want me to judge that?

00:16:14Guest:Yeah.

00:16:15Guest:Actually, Kamau was one of our judges.

00:16:17Guest:Yeah.

00:16:17Guest:So we pulled that off in San Francisco at Twitter's headquarters.

00:16:20Guest:The winning app was made by these kids from Stanford.

00:16:23Guest:Yeah, of course.

00:16:24Guest:The app is called Citation Needed, and it basically lets you validate the bullshit you tell your friends that they don't believe, and you've just made it up.

00:16:34Guest:You can quickly basically create a clone of a Wikipedia page, which says the thing you just said about the thing that you said it about.

00:16:41Guest:So you're like, oh, Margaret Thatcher was in the KGB?

00:16:44Guest:I don't believe it.

00:16:44Guest:So you're helping people lie.

00:16:45Marc:Yeah.

00:16:46Marc:Oh, good, man.

00:16:47Marc:That is the future.

00:16:48Guest:And there you go.

00:16:49Guest:Yeah.

00:16:49Marc:There you go.

00:16:49Marc:The future is to get as far away from the...

00:16:52Marc:organic and the human as possible and insulate everybody in a cocoon of snark and bullshit.

00:16:59Marc:There you go.

00:17:00Marc:Well, good.

00:17:00Marc:I'm glad you're helping.

00:17:01Marc:You're so welcome, Mark.

00:17:03Marc:You're so welcome.

00:17:04Marc:Where did you come from?

00:17:05Marc:D.C.

00:17:06Marc:Oh, yeah?

00:17:07Marc:Yeah.

00:17:07Marc:Yeah, I grew up in D.C.

00:17:08Marc:Was your family in politics?

00:17:11Guest:Not exactly.

00:17:12Guest:Well, it depends on how you find politics.

00:17:13Guest:My mother was an activist.

00:17:14Guest:So yes, not like electoral politics.

00:17:17Guest:In the street, waving signs, taking over radio stations.

00:17:20Guest:Pan-African.

00:17:21Guest:Oh, okay.

00:17:22Guest:Right, right, right.

00:17:23Guest:The fist.

00:17:24Guest:Hippie stuff.

00:17:25Guest:The fist.

00:17:25Guest:I got an Afro rake right here.

00:17:27Guest:If there's an icon of the type of politician you are, she was the fist.

00:17:30Marc:This right here with the comb.

00:17:32Marc:I got an Afro rake.

00:17:33Marc:What?

00:17:34Guest:Where did you get that?

00:17:35Marc:A black fan gave it to me.

00:17:39Marc:Mailed it in or handed it to me?

00:17:41Marc:Bonafide Afro rake.

00:17:41Marc:Wow, that's beautiful.

00:17:43Marc:She's a black fan in Utah, so she's alone out there, bro.

00:17:46Guest:That might have been her only black power pick available within a thousand miles, and now you have it.

00:17:52Marc:I guess they still make them.

00:17:54Guest:Yeah, I actually carved one of those out of wood one summer.

00:17:58Guest:I was that dedicated.

00:18:01Marc:Where?

00:18:01Guest:Where did you do that?

00:18:02Guest:I did it at some summer camp.

00:18:05Marc:Was that your protest?

00:18:08Guest:Protesting this tree.

00:18:10Guest:Yeah, man.

00:18:10Guest:Mine now.

00:18:11Guest:So you grew up in that environment?

00:18:12Guest:Yeah, I grew up in the 80s DC and saw the neighborhood go through that change.

00:18:18Marc:So that was the African flag period.

00:18:21Guest:Yeah, red, black, and green, everything, Poor Righteous Teachers, Grand Nubian, Fight the Power, all that.

00:18:29Guest:And we were basically crack, and D.C.

00:18:33Guest:crack was a little deeper in the politics.

00:18:36Marc:There's heavy crack around D.C.

00:18:37Marc:I guess the center of power, the bad shit around the center of power really has to go over the top.

00:18:45Marc:They have a lot to prove.

00:18:46Marc:There you go.

00:18:47Marc:Those are the people that say they're going to fix this,

00:18:50Marc:Fuck you.

00:18:53Marc:Fix it across the street, asshole.

00:18:54Marc:Yeah.

00:18:55Guest:Yeah.

00:18:56Guest:So, yes, I grew up there with mom and my older sister.

00:18:58Guest:Yeah.

00:18:58Guest:Where was the old man?

00:19:00Guest:The old man was killed.

00:19:01Guest:The old man was killed when I was six.

00:19:04Guest:Didn't know him very well.

00:19:05Guest:He was shot in a drug deal.

00:19:07Guest:And I have a set number of memories of him, like six of them.

00:19:13Guest:Yeah.

00:19:14Guest:And what are they?

00:19:16Guest:Off the top of my head, I probably won't hit all six.

00:19:20Guest:I wrote about him in the book because there was like a moment, but one was drinking beer with him in his pickup truck.

00:19:26Guest:He was a construction worker.

00:19:27Marc:At five?

00:19:28Marc:Yeah.

00:19:29Marc:Good dad.

00:19:30Marc:Disgusting.

00:19:30Guest:Driving, drinking beer, and giving his young son the opportunity to drink beer.

00:19:36Guest:There's a good example.

00:19:38Guest:That was great.

00:19:39Guest:He was doing it perfectly.

00:19:42Guest:There was a time he got me a big bag of... Weed?

00:19:45Guest:Oh.

00:19:46Guest:I didn't know how far we were going to go.

00:19:49Guest:No, that was the limit.

00:19:50Guest:That was the limit of the direct bad influence.

00:19:53Guest:Big bag of toys.

00:19:55Guest:I remember the moment my mother told me he was dead.

00:19:57Guest:I remember going to hang out.

00:20:00Guest:He had a huge family.

00:20:02Guest:They weren't together.

00:20:03Guest:No, by the time I came along, he was no longer living in the house.

00:20:08Guest:For good reason, I guess.

00:20:10Guest:Yeah, definitely good reason.

00:20:12Marc:Your mom was protecting the brood from the bad.

00:20:15Marc:There you go.

00:20:16Marc:Right.

00:20:16Marc:There you go.

00:20:16Marc:Yeah.

00:20:17Guest:So he loved me a lot, but he wasn't a great guy.

00:20:20Guest:Yeah.

00:20:21Guest:But he had this massive family.

00:20:23Guest:And I'm not in touch with any of them at this point because we were so severed.

00:20:27Guest:I was a kid.

00:20:28Guest:I didn't know.

00:20:28Guest:And my mom, we lived elsewhere, and I didn't know the names of anybody.

00:20:32Guest:But I remember being at this house party, and I was in the basement with a bunch of other kids.

00:20:37Guest:I was definitely the youngest.

00:20:38Guest:To me, they were grownups.

00:20:39Guest:They were probably early teens.

00:20:41Guest:And they were playing a little game with me where they would tell me to stand up.

00:20:45Guest:And then they grabbed my belt from behind me and yanked me back down.

00:20:48Guest:Yeah.

00:20:48Guest:And then they tell me, oh, go over there and get that thing.

00:20:50Guest:And they have fun at my expense.

00:20:51Guest:That was the point.

00:20:52Marc:And I did not like them.

00:20:54Guest:Maybe that's why I'm not in touch.

00:20:55Guest:Those are your memories.

00:20:56Marc:That's the basement memory.

00:20:57Guest:And then finding his death certificate.

00:21:00Marc:Really?

00:21:01Marc:When did that happen?

00:21:02Guest:That was when I was somewhere between sort of 8 and 12-ish.

00:21:07Marc:Do you carry his name?

00:21:09Guest:No.

00:21:10Guest:No, I carry my mother's last name, Thurston.

00:21:12Guest:His last name was Robinson.

00:21:13Marc:Right.

00:21:14Marc:Yeah.

00:21:14Marc:And there's no desire to go dig up that side of the clan.

00:21:19Guest:Not really.

00:21:20Marc:Yeah.

00:21:20Marc:No.

00:21:21Marc:I guess that makes sense.

00:21:23Guest:I mean, at some point, I am curious, but it's not one of those things like, I got to solve the mystery of my father's family.

00:21:30Guest:And if I meet them, that's cool.

00:21:33Guest:I'm not against it.

00:21:34Guest:I'm not like, stay away from me.

00:21:35Guest:I don't have restraining orders out against a whole group of people.

00:21:37Marc:You just made sure you didn't have the same name.

00:21:40Yeah.

00:21:40Guest:That wasn't my choice either.

00:21:42Guest:You're a kid.

00:21:42Guest:You don't pick your name.

00:21:44Marc:Well, it sounded like your mom did the right thing by you guys.

00:21:48Marc:She did great.

00:21:49Marc:That was the reason?

00:21:50Guest:Yeah.

00:21:51Guest:I think the reason was a couple.

00:21:54Guest:My father was one piece, but also the way my mom was raised wasn't great.

00:21:59Marc:she didn't have the greatest she had a terrible relationship with her mother yeah and I think a lot of her efforts in raising me and my sister we're trying to fix the things that weren't done well with her was it interesting though I mean I I've wondered about this and I understand it on a sort of personal and and you know diseased relationship way you know why do good women end up with these fuckheads

00:22:24Marc:You know, it's just very interesting to me when you hear stories of anybody whose mom sort of like, you know, did the right thing by their kids, obviously, to get them out of the potential, you know, shit.

00:22:36Marc:How does she end up with that guy in the first place?

00:22:38Guest:Well, a lot of times that guy doesn't start off as that guy.

00:22:41Marc:Oh, they're very charming, I guess.

00:22:42Guest:Yes.

00:22:42Guest:I mean, some of the most heinous dudes are the most charming.

00:22:47Guest:Yeah.

00:22:47Guest:Or they don't start off.

00:22:48Guest:You don't got to tell me.

00:22:49Guest:Yeah.

00:22:50Guest:I feel like you've ever experienced with some of this.

00:22:53Guest:So yeah, I don't think anyone ever seeks an abusive relationship.

00:22:57Guest:Right.

00:22:57Guest:It happens to you.

00:22:59Guest:And then sometimes it happens so slowly that you just wake up one day and you're like, whoa, I'm in a situation here.

00:23:06Guest:Right.

00:23:07Guest:And then leaving that situation becomes dangerous and risky and where's your housing?

00:23:12Guest:I mean, I'm not saying this is exactly my mother's situation, but I've seen enough through her example and other friends.

00:23:18Guest:It's never...

00:23:19Guest:I want a bad guy.

00:23:21Guest:Oh, I got a bad guy.

00:23:22Guest:Why do I have a bad guy?

00:23:24Marc:I've got a bad guy and two of the bad guy's kids.

00:23:27Guest:How the fuck did that happen?

00:23:28Guest:That's rarely what people set out to do with their lives.

00:23:31Guest:Surprise.

00:23:32Guest:So you grew up in the shit then?

00:23:34Guest:I grew up in a piece of the shit.

00:23:37Guest:There were many more shitty neighborhoods than the precise one I grew up in.

00:23:42Guest:I think I had a protective bubble, largely my mother.

00:23:46Guest:around me yeah so a lot of things that happened to friends around me just missed happening to me and i wasn't in the roughest part of dc like what kind of things happen these so just i mean when you look at the group of friends that i grew up with the ones who ended up in jail the ones who ended up dead uh i was not i never went to jail yeah right i never i got harassed by cops

00:24:08Guest:Right, just because.

00:24:09Guest:Right, just for being at the time and space that I was being, not necessarily for doing.

00:24:14Guest:I never did take up selling drugs.

00:24:17Guest:Yeah.

00:24:17Guest:Right, I never, not once.

00:24:19Guest:Yeah.

00:24:20Guest:So that was good.

00:24:21Marc:But you were aware that these were choices that were being made and it was happening to you when you were in high school, you were old enough to see the shit go down.

00:24:28Guest:And the timing of it was-

00:24:30Guest:Elementary school, I lived right in this neighborhood, Columbia Heights in D.C.

00:24:34Guest:It's a totally different neighborhood now.

00:24:35Marc:It's very shiny, like so many newly shined neighborhoods.

00:24:39Marc:They moved them out.

00:24:40Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:24:41Guest:People are like, oh, wow, it's nice to live close to things.

00:24:43Marc:I'm coming back.

00:24:44Guest:So it's kind of the opposite of white flight and money flight.

00:24:48Marc:Well, that's happening a lot all over, but I always wonder where do the displaced people go?

00:24:52Marc:Out.

00:24:53Marc:They keep going first.

00:24:54Marc:They just keep going away.

00:24:55Marc:Underground.

00:24:56Marc:There are tunnels.

00:24:57Guest:Yeah.

00:24:57Marc:Is there an underground population?

00:24:59Guest:Yeah.

00:25:00Guest:Yeah.

00:25:00Guest:It's like in the Matrix where they're like Zion and there's a big rave.

00:25:04Guest:Those are the new black neighborhoods?

00:25:05Guest:Yeah.

00:25:05Guest:It's just all raves all the time.

00:25:07Guest:Everybody's shirtless.

00:25:08Guest:It's hot, but no one cares.

00:25:09Guest:And nobody ever sees it.

00:25:11Guest:Yeah.

00:25:11Marc:Yeah.

00:25:11Marc:It's completely secret.

00:25:12Guest:But I hear the music is amazing.

00:25:14Guest:They're doing shit.

00:25:15Guest:It's the best, most innovative.

00:25:17Marc:It's real underground.

00:25:18Guest:They're pushing the envelope, you know?

00:25:19Guest:How do you get entrance into these things?

00:25:22Guest:You just get invited.

00:25:24Guest:Yeah, you can't knock on a door.

00:25:25Guest:Okay, so Columbia Heights.

00:25:26Guest:Yeah, so I lived there, and then my mother moved us out, moved me out.

00:25:31Guest:My sister's nine years ahead of me, so she left the household much sooner than I was nine years old when she went off to school.

00:25:38Guest:And we went out to Tacoma Park, Maryland, which is right on the border of D.C., and that was...

00:25:43Guest:Much chiller.

00:25:44Guest:We had a yard.

00:25:45Guest:That was new.

00:25:46Guest:It was quiet.

00:25:48Guest:That was new.

00:25:49Guest:Those sirens going constantly, people yelling at each other.

00:25:51Marc:And there wasn't people on the stoop or in the street.

00:25:53Guest:Not right there.

00:25:54Guest:I mean, right down the block, though, was a street called Maple Avenue.

00:25:57Guest:And that was an epicenter of all sorts of urban economic activity.

00:26:02Guest:That's a very nice way to put it.

00:26:05Guest:Yeah, drug dealing.

00:26:06Guest:But you managed to stay away from drugs?

00:26:08Guest:Yeah.

00:26:08Guest:Yeah, I did.

00:26:08Guest:I did.

00:26:09Guest:Did you try it?

00:26:11Guest:I tried drugs later, so I didn't drink through college.

00:26:15Guest:I was kind of nervous about drinking because I just generally liked my life.

00:26:21Guest:I thought I had a pretty good deal here.

00:26:23Guest:I managed to navigate or be navigated through some crazy scenarios.

00:26:27Guest:Come out relatively unscathed.

00:26:29Guest:That's cool.

00:26:29Guest:Why fuck it up?

00:26:30Guest:Why fuck it up?

00:26:31Guest:And I'm happy.

00:26:32Guest:I can have fun.

00:26:33Guest:You can identify happiness.

00:26:34Guest:Yeah.

00:26:34Guest:So I thought drinking might ruin it.

00:26:37Guest:Right.

00:26:38Guest:And I don't know what I would be like when I got drunk.

00:26:40Guest:So through college, I actually didn't drink.

00:26:43Guest:I first got drunk after college.

00:26:46Guest:Actually, right when I turned 21, some friends that I worked with on the newspaper, they took me out.

00:26:50Guest:We had one of the Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong comedy studio.

00:26:55Guest:So that was the first time.

00:26:56Guest:And then it was like a year or so later.

00:26:57Marc:That's a hell of a baptism.

00:26:59Guest:Yeah, because it's so sweet.

00:27:00Marc:Yeah, through the big straws.

00:27:02Guest:It's drinking liquid candy.

00:27:03Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:27:04Marc:And then you are dead.

00:27:05Marc:Well, how'd you navigate all this shit?

00:27:06Marc:I mean, if you were, you know, because you did all right for yourself, it seems.

00:27:11Marc:But I have to assume that the struggle was different than what I might have experienced.

00:27:14Guest:Yeah, so partly, and I really can't overstate the mom thing, she kept me very busy.

00:27:19Guest:Yeah.

00:27:20Guest:Like a lot of extra programs and stuff.

00:27:22Guest:Like what?

00:27:23Guest:Like what were your interests?

00:27:23Guest:So I was in school and academic achievement was expected from my sister, you know, for my mother, for my sister and me.

00:27:31Guest:Public school.

00:27:32Guest:Public school early for the first half and then switched over to private school in seventh grade.

00:27:37Marc:Now, what were your interests?

00:27:38Marc:Because you're kind of a tech geek now.

00:27:39Marc:I mean, were you, you know, because I've talked to people that, you know, you make assumptions about people's environment.

00:27:46Marc:But I mean, were you sort of like some kind of nerdy little kid?

00:27:49Guest:I wasn't.

00:27:49Guest:I was a nerd.

00:27:50Guest:I was a nerd with friends.

00:27:52Marc:Yeah.

00:27:52Guest:All right.

00:27:52Guest:So I was able to like skate the line a little bit.

00:27:54Guest:I wasn't an outcast.

00:27:55Guest:But is it all black school?

00:27:57Guest:The first school I went to, Bancroft Elementary, was all black and Latino.

00:28:01Guest:There were two white kids in our class.

00:28:02Guest:But you found a crew of black nerds?

00:28:04Guest:Yeah.

00:28:05Guest:In fact, there was a club.

00:28:06Guest:One of our teachers, she knew some of the Tuskegee Airmen, like the original superheroes.

00:28:13Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:28:14Guest:And she started this air and space club.

00:28:16Guest:in our public elementary school in like 1987.

00:28:19Guest:Yeah.

00:28:20Guest:So I joined that.

00:28:22Guest:Yeah.

00:28:22Guest:And we went to the Air and Space Museum.

00:28:24Guest:We just talked about space a lot and like read books.

00:28:27Marc:And you got that resource of DC right there and it's all right there.

00:28:30Guest:Yeah, the museums are all free.

00:28:31Guest:Amazing.

00:28:32Guest:So it was, I mean, just looking back on that, like that's not normal today.

00:28:35Guest:You know, schools have so little resources.

00:28:37Guest:This was a public school right down the block.

00:28:39Marc:With a teacher that took interest.

00:28:40Guest:With a teacher that took interest and made things happen.

00:28:42Guest:That's what it takes.

00:28:43Guest:And I met Tuskegee Airmen when I was maybe 10 years old.

00:28:45Marc:Really?

00:28:46Marc:Yeah.

00:28:46Marc:Did they wear their outfit?

00:28:48Guest:I think they had a lot of medals and stuff on.

00:28:50Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:28:51Marc:Because they were alive.

00:28:52Marc:Most of them, I think, are some of them maybe still alive.

00:28:54Guest:I don't know.

00:28:55Guest:Very few now.

00:28:55Guest:Right.

00:28:55Guest:Very few now.

00:28:56Guest:My mother was, I mean, this is a much bigger deal to her.

00:28:58Guest:Yeah.

00:28:58Guest:Because she knew what it meant.

00:29:00Guest:I'm like, old guys with medals.

00:29:01Guest:Yay.

00:29:02Marc:Yeah.

00:29:02Marc:I flew planes.

00:29:03Guest:Exactly.

00:29:03Guest:I want to maybe do that someday.

00:29:04Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:29:05Guest:So it was things like that.

00:29:06Guest:My mom put me in the Boy Scouts.

00:29:08Guest:It was an all-black Boy Scout troop.

00:29:09Guest:Right.

00:29:10Guest:She put me in extra academic schooling.

00:29:12Guest:There's a program in D.C.

00:29:13Guest:called Higher Achievement Program.

00:29:15Guest:Right.

00:29:15Guest:And the point is, if you show any kind of promise, we're going to throw more schoolwork at you and make you even more prepared.

00:29:22Guest:Right.

00:29:22Guest:To prep you to go to a prep school, to go to college, to do something with yourself.

00:29:26Guest:And that's to take it out, right?

00:29:27Guest:Yeah.

00:29:27Guest:That is one ticket out.

00:29:30Guest:It's certainly the one that's predominant right now.

00:29:33Guest:There's another ticket out, which is like, fix everything.

00:29:35Guest:Yeah.

00:29:35Guest:Super expensive, super slow.

00:29:37Guest:It takes a lot of extra thought.

00:29:38Guest:What do you mean fix everything?

00:29:39Guest:Well, I mean, the ticket out should be that you don't have to get out.

00:29:43Guest:Right.

00:29:45Marc:I get it.

00:29:46Guest:So that's what I'm talking about.

00:29:47Guest:Yeah.

00:29:47Marc:So the broader socioeconomic governmental solution was not something you could bank on.

00:29:53Marc:That wasn't available for my elementary school teacher.

00:29:57Marc:It's not clear that it's available for anybody anymore.

00:30:03Guest:Yeah, she kept me super busy.

00:30:05Guest:I mean, I think that was a big part of my mom's program.

00:30:07Marc:But you were motivated, obviously.

00:30:08Guest:Yeah, I mean, the motivation comes from, I don't know, maybe there's some genetic thing.

00:30:13Guest:I assume there's just part of this you're born with.

00:30:16Guest:Part of it, your environment, which is my mother, is like, you're going to do this.

00:30:20Guest:And this is the minimum standard.

00:30:23Marc:How do you sort of like in your mind frame the idea, you know, this is coming from me, a white guy, and I think it's- I don't see color.

00:30:31Marc:No, I know you don't.

00:30:32Marc:Of course not.

00:30:33Marc:None of you guys do anymore.

00:30:34Marc:I definitely see color.

00:30:36Marc:Color blindness is ridiculous.

00:30:37Marc:I don't see that.

00:30:38Marc:I don't see color either.

00:30:39Marc:You're just a guy who lived in a black neighborhood to me.

00:30:44Guest:That's just something physically wrong with my eyes.

00:30:46Guest:I can't see color.

00:30:47Marc:No, but I mean, is there a part of you that feels that you somehow...

00:30:52Marc:Because one of the things that Chris Rock differentiated early on in a defining comedy bit was that there was really several different black experiences culturally.

00:31:02Marc:And that there was a real difference between the black experiences of the black middle class and the black lower class.

00:31:09Marc:Now, do you frame it in your mind that way that you somehow escaped something?

00:31:14Yeah.

00:31:15Guest:I definitely feel like I escaped the worst version of what I statistically should have experienced.

00:31:25Guest:Right.

00:31:25Guest:Like no jail, no death, no severe violence.

00:31:29Guest:Right.

00:31:29Guest:There were some fights.

00:31:31Guest:Right.

00:31:31Guest:But no weaponry.

00:31:33Guest:Right.

00:31:34Guest:Right.

00:31:34Guest:And even with the police harassment, like I'm here.

00:31:38Guest:Right.

00:31:38Guest:There's no photo of my banged up face.

00:31:40Guest:And that's not true.

00:31:41Marc:You're not on the videotape.

00:31:42Guest:And I'm not in prison.

00:31:44Guest:Right.

00:31:44Marc:Right.

00:31:44Guest:Like, I escaped that math.

00:31:46Guest:Right.

00:31:47Guest:And by rights, not by rights, but by wrongs, probably I should be, given the time and place I was born in the D.C.

00:31:54Guest:and whatever.

00:31:54Guest:So, yeah, there's an escape mentality in that sense.

00:31:57Guest:It's like, whew.

00:31:58Guest:Yeah.

00:31:59Guest:Wow.

00:31:59Guest:Right.

00:32:00Guest:I beat the odds.

00:32:01Guest:Yeah.

00:32:01Guest:Right.

00:32:02Guest:And so there's a level of...

00:32:04Guest:victory i guess or relief associated with it but it's a sad relief because you know a that could have been you and b it's still happening to people right every day yeah yeah and it's happened to people who were like right next to me when i was growing up and it's happening to kids and young men today so that is a sour

00:32:25Marc:So were you motivated intellectually early on to deal with that somehow or to reckon with it because of where your mother came from and because of what you were experiencing yourself?

00:32:38Guest:Yeah.

00:32:38Guest:I mean, one of the things that was big in our house was some kind of service.

00:32:42Guest:Yeah.

00:32:43Guest:I remember we went- Was that a religious thing?

00:32:45Guest:No, it wasn't.

00:32:46Guest:So religion was-

00:32:47Guest:kind of an open thing in our house.

00:32:50Guest:My mother, I was baptized Catholic.

00:32:53Guest:Really?

00:32:53Guest:It wasn't because we were super Catholic.

00:32:55Guest:It was because the Catholic Church does a lot of good in terms of social justice and poverty, and they hooked my mom up.

00:33:03Guest:When my older sister was in a Catholic school and my mom could barely pay the tuition, they let her work it off.

00:33:08Guest:They let her answer phones or cook dinners or do some creative payment scheme.

00:33:12Guest:And she was like, yo, I'm down.

00:33:15Guest:Way to help me out.

00:33:16Guest:And so there were some really good priests at Sacred Heart.

00:33:19Guest:Was she brought up Catholic?

00:33:20Guest:No, she was brought up Baptist.

00:33:22Marc:So she just switched gears when they showed up for her.

00:33:24Guest:Why not?

00:33:25Guest:She switched gears when she was in her late teens.

00:33:28Guest:She got sick of white Jesus imagery.

00:33:30Guest:Yeah.

00:33:31Guest:And she got sick of missionaries going over to Africa to save people.

00:33:36Guest:Yeah.

00:33:36Guest:And to her mind, and actually probably in early teens, she's like, what's wrong with how they worship?

00:33:41Guest:Why do you have to go tell them to do something different?

00:33:43Guest:The language of referring to people as heathen.

00:33:45Guest:She was just offended by it.

00:33:46Guest:They were just out there to franchise and consolidate.

00:33:48Guest:Yeah, and maybe, I don't know, she just wasn't down with that.

00:33:51Guest:Yeah, no, that makes sense.

00:33:52Guest:So she dropped out, she opted out of that.

00:33:54Marc:But why Catholicism?

00:33:55Marc:I mean...

00:33:56Guest:once again the school well i get it but i mean it's still white jesus and uh and so and then that church the catholicism was a community connection and a community resource much more than it was a religious was it a black church it was heavily black and latino given the neighborhood yeah um and then i started i remember i switched to an episcopal church because it was right across the street nicer or it's closer yeah

00:34:21Guest:They both have incense.

00:34:23Guest:I was like, this is pretty much the same thing.

00:34:24Guest:Robes, scarves, incense.

00:34:27Marc:Right.

00:34:27Marc:But no, the community thing is an interesting thing.

00:34:29Marc:And I don't think it's talked about in terms about.

00:34:32Marc:I mean, I remember that came out politically for a while with faith based initiative.

00:34:36Marc:You know, to sort of displace and subcontract, you know, some government responsibility onto these organizations that were doing it anyways, which seemed a little a little dubious, given that it was under the Bush administration that that sort of got pushed.

00:34:50Marc:But I think that people really forget, especially and I'm doing stuff on in my act now that, you know, that that is where that shit happens.

00:34:57Marc:You know, there's no practical solution to poverty on a governmental level that's got any teeth to it.

00:35:02Marc:But these these churches are out there in the street and it's there.

00:35:06Marc:It's part of their gig.

00:35:07Marc:You know, we're going to feed you.

00:35:08Marc:We're going to help you do what you need to do.

00:35:10Marc:So that so that's interesting.

00:35:11Marc:So all right.

00:35:12Marc:So your mom switches over to that.

00:35:13Guest:Yeah, so then I switched to Episcopal.

00:35:15Guest:Right.

00:35:16Guest:Because I'm like, I want to walk less.

00:35:17Guest:Right.

00:35:19Guest:And she also was going through her own spiritual evolution.

00:35:25Guest:She was Buddhist for a while.

00:35:26Guest:I remember going to Buddhist temple with her.

00:35:29Guest:Numb you over and get cash.

00:35:30Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:35:31Guest:I was chanting that with my mom.

00:35:33Guest:Tina Turner style?

00:35:35Guest:She's a huge, she was a huge Tina Turner fan.

00:35:37Marc:I wonder if that's what inspired her to do that.

00:35:38Marc:Because then I think that Tina did that.

00:35:40Guest:She definitely did.

00:35:41Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:35:42Marc:And it was kind of popular in, I think, the early 70s.

00:35:44Marc:That's where it sort of hit.

00:35:46Guest:That would have been the sweet spot.

00:35:47Guest:I've only talked about it.

00:35:47Guest:Right?

00:35:47Marc:Yeah.

00:35:48Marc:I talked to one other cat who grew up in that, Liam McEnany.

00:35:51Guest:Yeah, I know Liam.

00:35:52Guest:In fact, we're doing a show very soon ago than tonight.

00:35:55Guest:All right.

00:35:56Marc:So how does this inform the young Baratunde brain to whatever, to sort of intellectually actualizing the fight?

00:36:04Guest:So partly, there was always, we worked with a soup kitchen from the earliest years I can remember.

00:36:10Guest:Wow.

00:36:10Guest:As a kid.

00:36:11Guest:As a kid.

00:36:12Guest:Several days a week.

00:36:13Guest:Service.

00:36:13Guest:We go work in McKenna's Wagon, this van that drives around D.C.

00:36:16Guest:and serves people out of a place called Martha's Table.

00:36:20Guest:So that was predominant.

00:36:21Guest:Sidwell Friends School, which is the school I switched to out of the public school, community service baked in.

00:36:27Guest:You've got to do something.

00:36:28Guest:It's a great thing.

00:36:29Guest:Every week you're doing something.

00:36:31Guest:When I went up to Cambridge, I taught computer literacy classes, take my nerd stuff, teach in the projects there.

00:36:37Marc:But it was part of your wiring.

00:36:39Guest:Yeah.

00:36:39Guest:Because it was so early, it became its nature.

00:36:43Guest:It's like, oh, I get up, I do this.

00:36:44Marc:Because I wasn't brought up with even the idea of that.

00:36:47Marc:It wasn't until I got into sobriety that the idea of service as something nourishing to your soul was even a possibility.

00:36:56Marc:And even then I fought it.

00:36:57Marc:I was like, I got to set up chairs.

00:36:58Marc:I don't want to make the coffee.

00:37:00Marc:But once you learn about it, about the sort of the...

00:37:04Marc:The the gratitude is really a like a soul nourishing thing to to behave in a selfless way.

00:37:12Marc:Yeah, but it's not I don't think it's innate.

00:37:15Marc:And I and I think that do you think that because I've always wanted this only because I don't have any direct experience of it when there's a community that is really up against itself.

00:37:25Marc:that the need for, you know, for those within that community to sort of guarantee the survival of the community and also just to deal practically with the media problems.

00:37:34Marc:Do you think that that that drive towards services is something you see more in a black community?

00:37:40Marc:that is a great question i'm thinking about it i'm not sure i mean because i know that churches are churches and they go out and they do a thing and like everybody get on the bus we're going to go do the thing but it seems to me that when you're dealing with a community in crisis almost chronically that you know if somebody doesn't step up and act right or you know whether it's for jesus or whatever you got to learn that shit for your own survival and also for the survival of the you know

00:38:05Guest:the community yeah i mean i'm wondering for me it's always it's been it was less like oh all the black people do this right then like my mom does this right and she fit the mold in many ways and she broke it in a thousand others right so this i'm not sure if this is fitting or breaking well i think you have an issue with with characterizing all black all the black people anyway maybe a mouth challenge yeah

00:38:31Marc:That there's something that, you know, people like Al Sharpton is not for everybody.

00:38:36Marc:Clearly.

00:38:36Marc:That is true.

00:38:37Marc:That is a true statement.

00:38:39Marc:But but but to white people, they're like, well, he must be speaking for.

00:38:43Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:38:44Marc:Yeah.

00:38:44Marc:No, he had that job for a long time, too.

00:38:46Marc:Yeah.

00:38:46Marc:There was a rotation for a weird guy to get that job.

00:38:49Marc:loud it helps to be loud and wear a suit somehow or another you know jesse jackson sort of deteriorated and that you know al just stepped in he's a little younger a little younger more energy a little more dodgy though really at some level yeah but all right so then after you you learn this you know this idea of service i mean that is really what propelled you yeah i mean what was your first incarnation in terms of how you were going to educate yourself and in what you decided what was important

00:39:15Marc:I mean, I know you ended up in comedy, but I see the kind of books you read.

00:39:18Marc:I mean, you wrote a book on politics, and you obviously- Yeah, that was a comedic collection of essays.

00:39:23Guest:But still, in order to think about it- Yeah, no, I mean, partly DC does it to you because you're overexposed to a certain type of politics just living there.

00:39:31Guest:heavily, excuse me, conversation in the house.

00:39:35Guest:My mother didn't talk down to us or baby us.

00:39:37Guest:She's like, here's what's going on.

00:39:38Marc:But you were talking about issues and how they were being legislated.

00:39:41Guest:And we were talking about, so we would go to African festivals or black history specials every Martin Luther King weekend.

00:39:50Guest:We'd go to Malcolm X Park for things.

00:39:51Guest:It was part of the social fabric.

00:39:54Guest:And one of the other things she kept me busy with

00:39:57Guest:was this rites of passage program called Ancobia.

00:40:01Guest:This was a group of black folk from the 60s that in some ways never left the 60s.

00:40:09Guest:And they're very Pan-African.

00:40:10Guest:They spell African with a K. Yeah, sure.

00:40:12Guest:Sort of take that back.

00:40:13Guest:And they're trying to bring the values, in this case, of West Africa and kind of impose and embrace them in the community here.

00:40:19Guest:What were those values?

00:40:20Guest:So there was a lot of... This program was about the coming-of-age process.

00:40:23Guest:Yeah.

00:40:25Guest:Yeah.

00:40:44Guest:The books weren't written for 12-year-olds.

00:40:46Guest:Right.

00:40:46Guest:No.

00:40:46Guest:But we're reading this and we have assignments and we're taking notes and we're being told about various African religious and spiritual belief systems and we're drumming and we're dancing.

00:40:56Guest:And there was a very explicit attempt to say you have a bigger history than the one you may be being taught.

00:41:03Guest:Yeah.

00:41:03Guest:And you have a bigger legacy to inherit if you so choose.

00:41:06Guest:That was motivating.

00:41:07Yeah.

00:41:08Marc:Is that something that you latched on to in a real sense?

00:41:12Guest:What it did for me was it balanced things.

00:41:16Guest:Because my mom put me in that program exactly when I started going to Sidwell, which was the opposite world.

00:41:22Guest:That is a private school, children of World Bank officials and senators and now presidents.

00:41:29Guest:And I think she had some fear that I would get too disconnected.

00:41:34Guest:by going into that world, too disconnected from the values that she raised me with, too disconnected from the community that we lived in or just started to leave and went to Tacoma Park.

00:41:42Guest:So this was a way.

00:41:44Guest:And also, she was very, my mom, I haven't even thought as much about this recently, but the absence of my father was never a big deal to me because I didn't know.

00:41:54Guest:Kids just know.

00:41:54Guest:You don't know you're poor.

00:41:55Guest:You don't know anything because it's just life.

00:41:57Guest:But to her, it was like this little boy needs grown men in his life that I can trust.

00:42:03Guest:Right.

00:42:03Guest:right and this program was a big part of that she had a like a phalanx of dudes that were all trying to help me out there was james west who taught me how to play cello and bass and how to do photography he was a hustler like he had six jobs at least yeah and we would always there was nathan who worked in a bookstore right get

00:42:24Guest:books from nathan yeah they were pepe and pinky these latino dudes who ran the bike shop yeah and they told me how to ride a bike yeah and and then all the dudes from the program the boy scouts like she outsourced your whole child your whole your father fatherhood was definitely outsourced it was like a task rabbit type of situation on top of it yeah yeah so i know in hindsight i had no direct no specific father but had a lot of positive male

00:42:50Guest:role models who were doing things they had jobs and they were creative people they were artists you know and they lived right there yeah and my sister knew them and they were cool with her so that i'm sure was a big part of this whatever subtle or subconscious motivation uh that i had but in in terms of the the sort of pan-african and and the the uh you almost um

00:43:12Marc:That movement in as a Jew, you know, I know that, you know, I know the Old Testament.

00:43:19Marc:I know Eastern Europe.

00:43:21Marc:I know there was a Holocaust and stuff.

00:43:22Marc:And I know that's good.

00:43:23Marc:Yeah, I'm very aware of all this.

00:43:24Marc:I believe it happened.

00:43:26Marc:The Holocaust.

00:43:26Marc:Great start.

00:43:27Marc:Yeah.

00:43:27Marc:But, you know, what what connection does that do for me?

00:43:30Marc:I mean, I don't necessarily think about it.

00:43:32Marc:I'm wondering, you know, in terms of.

00:43:34Marc:It's sort of a religion thing, but it's also a cultural thing.

00:43:37Marc:And I feel I identify with the history of that.

00:43:39Marc:I find pride in that there were these generations.

00:43:42Marc:But you don't wear it.

00:43:43Guest:Right.

00:43:44Marc:I don't wear it right.

00:43:46Marc:I don't know what it has, how it's defined my sense of self.

00:43:52Guest:So here's what happens when you are an above average achieving academically person in a black community.

00:44:00Guest:You got a lot of pressure.

00:44:01Guest:Yeah.

00:44:01Guest:Right?

00:44:02Guest:It's on you.

00:44:02Guest:Like, you're the one or the ones.

00:44:06Guest:The one who was chosen?

00:44:07Guest:Maybe.

00:44:08Guest:Maybe.

00:44:10Guest:And so, like, being in the gifted and talented program, like, there's a lot of messaging to little black kids who do well on tests.

00:44:17Guest:Yeah.

00:44:17Guest:And who do well in school.

00:44:18Marc:What are those messaging?

00:44:20Yeah.

00:44:20Guest:Keep doing it.

00:44:21Guest:This is from the community.

00:44:22Guest:This is from the community.

00:44:24Guest:Whether it's scholarships telling you that you're special just by signaling like, hey, there's opportunity here.

00:44:29Guest:We got one.

00:44:30Guest:This guy's going to make it out.

00:44:32Guest:Don't let this kid go.

00:44:33Guest:Right.

00:44:34Guest:And it's a ton of pressure because you see what's, even if you're too young to know the scope of it, you see the block around you.

00:44:40Marc:But what about the other side of that, which is the more dug-in elements of the community accusing you of tomming or anything else?

00:44:49Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:44:49Guest:That's definitely there.

00:44:50Guest:I remember when I went to Sidwell and there was one year of overlap where I lived on Newton Street in Columbia Heights and I went to Sidwell.

00:45:01Guest:And I remember coming back, when you stop going to the school that all your friends go to, it's a huge, it's a dramatic, traumatic experience.

00:45:10Marc:And did you have to wear an outfit too?

00:45:11Marc:No, no uniform.

00:45:12Marc:Thank God.

00:45:12Marc:You didn't have to walk back to the neighborhood wearing your blazer.

00:45:16Marc:I wore the same BS.

00:45:17Marc:Maybe we should set up Sidwell.

00:45:19Marc:How'd you get in and what is that place?

00:45:21Guest:So Sidwell Friends School is a private Quaker-based school.

00:45:24Guest:The Religious Society of Friends helped found it.

00:45:27Guest:A lot of wooden furniture.

00:45:28Guest:Yeah.

00:45:28Guest:Yeah, not anymore, though.

00:45:30Guest:They're really, really fancy now.

00:45:31Guest:I don't know how much woods is on the campus now.

00:45:34Guest:I see what you're doing there.

00:45:35Marc:I was trying to move just past it.

00:45:36Marc:Yeah, we can go right past it.

00:45:39Guest:So Sidwell was founded in the late 1800s, and Nixon sent his daughter there a long, long time ago.

00:45:46Guest:Bill Clinton sent Chelsea there.

00:45:48Guest:She was two years behind me when I was there.

00:45:50Guest:The Obama family have sent Malia and Sasha there.

00:45:54Guest:And the deal with the school, there are a lot of private schools in D.C.

00:45:56Guest:Yeah.

00:45:57Guest:and some of them are attached to religion some of them are more conservative yeah sidwell because of the quaker thing is a more liberal school quakers are abolitionists quakers are pacifists quakers believe there's that of god and all of you you don't need a preacher to tell you where to find god and i think nixon was a quaker that's right yeah that's right so when you have a school founded on those principles

00:46:16Guest:Community service being baked in is a totally natural thing.

00:46:20Guest:And so what happened was when I graduated elementary school, there was a junior high school down the block that I was supposed to go to.

00:46:27Guest:It was called Abraham Lincoln Junior High.

00:46:29Guest:It was a terrible, terrible school.

00:46:32Guest:Low performance, lots of violence, bad facilities.

00:46:35Guest:My mom was like, you're not going to that school.

00:46:37Guest:What generally happened for the kids who were at Bancroft with me, who were doing the gifted and talented thing, the air and space nerdy thing, you apply for special permission from the D.C.

00:46:45Guest:government to go to Alice Deal Junior High across town.

00:46:49Guest:My mother had in her mind that, well, your older sister went to some private school.

00:46:54Guest:She went to the Catholic school.

00:46:55Guest:She went to a magnet school, Benjamin Banneker.

00:46:57Guest:She went to Duke Ellington School for the Arts.

00:46:58Guest:You should also have some kind of private school experience because I don't want to be playing favorites.

00:47:02Marc:Yeah.

00:47:02Guest:Between you two.

00:47:03Marc:Oh, so that's how she framed it.

00:47:04Guest:And she's like, you're not going to the school where kids get stabbed.

00:47:07Guest:Right.

00:47:07Guest:There was also that.

00:47:08Guest:Yeah.

00:47:09Guest:So what happened is we went on this little tour.

00:47:10Guest:It's like a college tour for junior high school.

00:47:13Guest:And I visited three schools.

00:47:15Guest:One was called Georgetown Day.

00:47:16Guest:One was called Green Acres.

00:47:18Guest:Yeah.

00:47:19Guest:And one was called Sidwell Friends.

00:47:21Guest:I didn't know anything about any of these schools.

00:47:22Guest:Yeah.

00:47:22Guest:Before I went there and I spent a day and I interviewed.

00:47:25Guest:So you take a test.

00:47:26Guest:Yeah.

00:47:26Guest:You go through an admissions committee, just like college, you interview with someone, and then they say, hey, you have the right to spend a lot of money on seventh grade.

00:47:33Guest:Yeah.

00:47:34Guest:People give you that right.

00:47:35Guest:Yeah.

00:47:36Guest:And then we also, in parallel, scholarship applications.

00:47:41Guest:There was a group called Project Excellence that funded programs like this.

00:47:44Marc:So your mom was on the post all this shit.

00:47:46Guest:Yeah.

00:47:47Guest:And she was not going to let you- No, there was no way.

00:47:50Guest:There was no way that we were going to be failing.

00:47:53Guest:Yeah.

00:47:53Guest:At things.

00:47:54Guest:In fact, there was no way we were going to be average.

00:47:57Guest:Like just not getting in trouble and doing okay wasn't enough.

00:48:01Guest:My sister, like I said, she's nine years ahead of me.

00:48:03Guest:We used to trade notes later in life.

00:48:06Guest:That's a big distance.

00:48:07Guest:You lose some of the knowledge.

00:48:10Guest:Our mother would try the same tricks on us, and my sister didn't always loop me into this.

00:48:14Guest:Yeah.

00:48:15Guest:And part of what happened is we were good kids.

00:48:18Guest:We weren't out on the block.

00:48:19Guest:Right.

00:48:19Guest:We weren't slinging, whatever, trying to sell trees.

00:48:23Guest:And you get into whatever petty trouble, but there's no criminal stuff.

00:48:27Guest:My mother, it didn't matter to her.

00:48:28Guest:Whenever we got into any kind of trouble, she would be so disappointed.

00:48:31Guest:She would take it as a sign of disrespect.

00:48:34Guest:And we're both like, yo, we're good kids.

00:48:35Guest:You're lucky.

00:48:37Guest:Look at where we live.

00:48:38Guest:Yeah.

00:48:38Guest:do you know what renee's up to do you know what james is up to do you know what dashawn is up to like and for her it didn't matter so there wasn't uh there was no allowance there was no reprimanding though just massive disappointment no there was there was reprimanding there was spanking there was all there was punishment but i think what happened is there was no curve yeah right she had an absolute idea right right of what we were supposed to be doing what we were capable right a little trouble is the same as it didn't matter what the other

00:49:05Guest:kids were up to right right i am your parent and guardian i set the rules i set the bar so that was also motivating right because you knew that what your friends might get away with that's not gonna fly with mom right yeah she was it so you get you got in on sidwell got into sidwell chose that one um the green acre school was a little too weird they had a basketball game that i attended when i visited they lost 50 to 2 yeah i felt like i couldn't

00:49:34Guest:That was bad for me.

00:49:34Marc:That was just too much to live with.

00:49:36Guest:It was like, okay, I'm already leaving my community.

00:49:40Guest:I can't wear that too.

00:49:42Guest:Come on now.

00:49:43Guest:Let me at least stay in the D.C.

00:49:45Guest:city boundaries.

00:49:47Guest:And then that first year, when you get yanked out of that community, you're adjusting on both sides because you still live in the same house, but you don't have the same social life as all the friends that live around you.

00:49:58Guest:You're taking different buses.

00:49:59Guest:Yeah.

00:49:59Guest:leaving way earlier coming back way later because there's just so much more to do right at a private school have fields and labs and teachers yeah uh and it's amazing and books actually a real school yeah exactly it's like what school should be so we're doing school yeah yeah

00:50:15Guest:And then on the Sidwell side, I'm new to that world.

00:50:20Guest:And there are kids who've been there their whole lives and they've got more money.

00:50:23Guest:Their parents have these jobs that I don't know anything about.

00:50:26Guest:They got both parents.

00:50:27Guest:They've got cars.

00:50:28Guest:And the demands are much higher.

00:50:31Guest:And this is where those extra programs helped out.

00:50:33Guest:Right.

00:50:33Guest:Because it's like, okay, if I didn't have the higher achievement program, I couldn't have made it at Sidwell.

00:50:37Guest:Absolutely.

00:50:38Guest:Yeah.

00:50:39Guest:I mean, maybe mentally I was capable of it, but I don't think I just would have to practice.

00:50:42Marc:And what did you feel that you had to do to prove yourself there?

00:50:46Marc:I mean, what was the biggest obstacle?

00:50:48Guest:So in the first year, the biggest obstacle was cultural.

00:50:52Guest:I remember there were these twins, white dudes, blonde hair, blue eyes, just like Aryan dudes.

00:50:59Guest:Yeah.

00:51:00Guest:They weren't Aryan dudes, but they were like this model.

00:51:02Guest:Right, sure, sure.

00:51:03Guest:In some ways, I had been trained to be like, that's the devil right there.

00:51:06Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:51:06Guest:Watch out.

00:51:07Guest:yeah and they were taunting me for the way i spoke because i spoke you know more colloquially i asked people questions i had a little ebonic situation going on and i knew like my mother taught us how to speak appropriately but when casually yeah what's the point of overdoing it yeah right i'm not on a job interview i'm 12 right

00:51:28Guest:and these kids like oh you're gonna ask me you're gonna break out your axe and ask me a question and everybody was laughing we were sitting on a field right on wisconsin avenue we're under a tree yeah god i haven't thought about the specifics of this day in so long and the the being on stage like that being called out shamed yeah like that right terrible feeling yeah yeah and gotta think on your feet yeah so i walked over i just kicked him yeah

00:51:53Guest:No joke then.

00:51:54Guest:No, no, there was no wit.

00:51:56Guest:There was a foot in his ass.

00:51:57Guest:That took a while.

00:51:58Guest:Yeah.

00:51:59Guest:And I kicked him with all my might.

00:52:02Guest:Uh-huh.

00:52:02Guest:And I was a pretty good kicker.

00:52:03Guest:He used to play soccer.

00:52:04Guest:Yeah.

00:52:04Guest:So he was a soccer ball.

00:52:06Guest:And the teachers didn't appreciate that.

00:52:08Guest:I was brought in for a talking to and-

00:52:10Marc:But did it have the sort of jail yard effect?

00:52:14Marc:They never, ever taunted me again.

00:52:18Guest:And I remember the other, what else?

00:52:21Guest:I mean, there was also a lot of transitions, like girls and acne.

00:52:26Guest:Those things are happening at the same time, too.

00:52:27Guest:So I'm not sure.

00:52:28Guest:I was like, is this because it's a new school?

00:52:30Guest:Is it because my body's fucking going haywire here?

00:52:32Guest:It was because I like booty now.

00:52:35Guest:What's going on in my life and in my brain?

00:52:37Guest:So that first year was making new friends, figuring out where I fit in this school.

00:52:46Guest:Was this the first time you really had to deal with this many white people at once?

00:52:49Guest:Oh, I've never seen so many white people.

00:52:52Guest:I really physically hadn't seen.

00:52:54Guest:I've never been that close to that.

00:52:56Marc:I mean, I don't think that's something any white person can really understand.

00:53:00Marc:You know, because, like, you know, for your whole life, you're brought up with the idea that, you know, this is a white people's country, white people's world.

00:53:07Marc:They're the enemy most of the time.

00:53:08Marc:You know, when white people end up in black situations, you know, either they're trying to sort of get over or they're just nervous.

00:53:15Marc:Yeah.

00:53:15Marc:But, you know, here you are.

00:53:16Marc:It must be like enemy camp on some level.

00:53:18Guest:It was weird because, I mean, my mom's workplace, she worked in a government office.

00:53:23Guest:But even then, a ton of black people.

00:53:25Guest:I mean, D.C.

00:53:25Guest:is a black city.

00:53:26Guest:And it was even blacker back in 1989 and 90.

00:53:30Guest:So that was culture shock.

00:53:32Guest:Just the race of the neighborhood the school was in.

00:53:36Guest:Everything was new.

00:53:37Guest:Everything was a little scary.

00:53:39Guest:But I would say that seventh grade year was the adjustment year.

00:53:44Guest:And then I hit my stride.

00:53:48Guest:And I was a friendly dude.

00:53:49Guest:It's not like I had a lot of aggression.

00:53:51Guest:I mean, if you were going to taunt me and put you in shame.

00:53:53Marc:You were going to stand off.

00:53:55Guest:Yeah, I didn't have that kind of stuff to prove.

00:53:57Guest:I wasn't on some valiant mission.

00:53:59Marc:You weren't quoting Pan-African literature on that.

00:54:02Guest:Well, actually, yes.

00:54:06Guest:Actually, I was.

00:54:08Guest:And that is the side effect.

00:54:09Guest:Well, not even the side effect.

00:54:12Guest:It's the direct result of a mother sending her little black boy to an elite private school and Afrocentric camp every Saturday.

00:54:22Guest:Those wires get crossed.

00:54:23Guest:Right.

00:54:23Marc:But so you kind of utilize it for your identity.

00:54:26Guest:Yeah, no, it made me more unique.

00:54:27Guest:Yeah.

00:54:28Guest:Because what we had as a part of the Oncobia program, it was like a fraternity.

00:54:32Guest:You had to do certain things.

00:54:33Guest:You had to wear an African medallion all the time.

00:54:37Marc:The country of Africa in the colors.

00:54:38Guest:The country of Africa, the red, black, and green.

00:54:40Guest:So we had to wear that every day all the time.

00:54:44Guest:I had to explain that.

00:54:46Guest:We're like, what's up with Africa?

00:54:48Guest:But you didn't take it off.

00:54:49Guest:No, of course not.

00:54:50Guest:And it's not because of the house.

00:54:53Guest:There was no shame around it.

00:54:54Guest:Now you're about to learn some stuff.

00:54:56Guest:Here's what's up.

00:54:58Guest:How'd they take to it?

00:54:59Guest:I think they admired it.

00:55:02Guest:Because it just made me different.

00:55:04Guest:It's one of these little, in a school, kids can be horrible.

00:55:07Guest:But if you're different enough, it's actually kind of cool.

00:55:10Marc:Yeah, if it's not different enough to where they can mock you, but it's different enough to where they're like, wow.

00:55:14Guest:Oh, there's some respect there.

00:55:16Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:55:17Guest:And then the other thing that was early on, there were these Black History Month music review showcases that happened every year at Sidwell.

00:55:25Guest:There was a guy who ran the music society called Ricky Payton, dope composer.

00:55:29Guest:He worked with everybody, essentially.

00:55:31Guest:And he would orchestrate this, and then some kids' parents who worked at Howard University would write it, and there were auditions.

00:55:37Guest:for this play slash musical slash educational review and one of my friends black friends marcus he would he had been my buddy he was like assigned to me when i was like you take care of this little new black boy you've been here your whole life showing the ropes yeah so he said yo we should go audition for this thing i was like okay yeah i'm gonna do what you say and i got the chance to sing and like perform and the room was like yo who is this kid yeah and i was like yo what just came out of my mouth like

00:56:04Guest:so that was that also helped a lot it gave me another place yeah oh i can perform yeah i can dance i can sing i can remember lines really well i can do the stage thing and like have a presence yo so even so the confidence that i lacked with like girls and interpersonal thing was totally there on stage and that helped i said well a lot because every year the girls not with the girls there were no there were no girls no girls

00:56:30Guest:There were no girls.

00:56:31Guest:There were girls that I wanted to be my girl, but there were no girls.

00:56:35Guest:And so I did the books thing.

00:56:37Guest:I did the arts thing.

00:56:39Guest:I did track and field.

00:56:40Guest:I was always doing a sport.

00:56:41Guest:And I had a job.

00:56:43Guest:I worked.

00:56:43Guest:What were you working at?

00:56:45Guest:I worked at the Washington Post in the copy aid stations, like an internal mail room.

00:56:49Guest:You deliver memos.

00:56:50Guest:You answer the phones.

00:56:51Guest:A lot of faxing was going on back then.

00:56:53Guest:Sure.

00:56:53Guest:Cutting faxes and whatever.

00:56:55Guest:I had that job for several years.

00:56:57Marc:Was that because you had an interest in the journalism?

00:56:59Guest:Yeah.

00:56:59Marc:Now, let's talk about this issue because it sort of fascinates me about...

00:57:05Marc:I worked with a black dude on the air for a year and a half, and he was a real political guy.

00:57:14Marc:But I was always sort of like the whole idea of getting flack from your own for excelling.

00:57:24Guest:Yeah, for achieving.

00:57:25Marc:That to me just sort of blows my mind.

00:57:27Marc:I mean, I get it intellectually, but it's a real thing.

00:57:29Marc:Yeah.

00:57:30Guest:Um, when I, that overlapping year when I lived in my old neighborhood and went to Sidwell, I remember getting off the bus and I ran into a friend and he was like, oh, you go to that white school now.

00:57:40Guest:You're all white now.

00:57:42Guest:And it was, it wasn't the harsh, like you've totally sold out, but there was the expectation.

00:57:47Guest:Like he had already planned for it.

00:57:49Guest:It's like people say like the market, like the price has been built in.

00:57:53Guest:Like he was like, oh, I'm going to expect Veritune to become this thing.

00:57:56Guest:And yeah.

00:57:58Guest:After that, there's occasional commentary and heckling from people, but I did not have the worst of it, partly because we moved.

00:58:09Guest:And so the kids, and I spent all my time at school.

00:58:12Guest:I would get to school at like 7.30 in the morning, and I wouldn't leave until 7 or 7.30 in the evening because I was doing extracurricular stuff, and I would go straight home, homework, watch the news, go to bed.

00:58:23Guest:Mm-hmm.

00:58:23Guest:So there wasn't a ton of opportunity to be called out as an Oreo or a sellout or talk in white when you're around a whole bunch of people who are in that world.

00:58:32Guest:Right.

00:58:33Guest:So occasionally you might come across another community.

00:58:36Guest:There was a time when...

00:58:38Guest:Kids that I grew up with got into a beef with one of the kids I went to school with at Sidwell.

00:58:45Guest:All black.

00:58:45Guest:Everybody was black.

00:58:46Guest:This was a private school black kid.

00:58:48Guest:Gets into beef with public school black kids.

00:58:50Guest:And I don't know what he did.

00:58:51Guest:I don't know what he said.

00:58:52Guest:I don't know if he just looked at somebody wrong or disrespected somebody's girl.

00:58:55Guest:But there are like between 10 and 20 kids on campus looking for this dude.

00:59:00Guest:And they're running around, where is he?

00:59:02Guest:Where is he?

00:59:03Guest:And that's a frightening situation.

00:59:07Guest:Right?

00:59:07Guest:that's not ideal yeah yeah this kid's in trouble yeah and they roll up on me and i'm like oh now am i about to be the target yeah of their rage and this magic moment happens one of them he's like you're baratunde all right yo he's cool and

00:59:27Guest:Where's that other bastard?

00:59:29Guest:And it was like Lord of the Rings when the wraiths are looking around and they're like, oh, you're good.

00:59:36Guest:And they move on to another target.

00:59:38Marc:Well, I mean, the real test of self there is like, let me help you find him.

00:59:43Marc:That I didn't do.

00:59:44Marc:Good.

00:59:44Marc:That I did not.

00:59:45Guest:I'm not going to throw him under the bus.

00:59:46Guest:That would have been a bad end for him.

00:59:48Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:50Guest:So being called out as being white or selling out or what have you,

00:59:55Guest:It's a part of the experience of going to the type of school I went to and of having this, like, parent that I had, this achievement mentality.

01:00:02Guest:But it was never an overwhelming enough thing that, like, oh, this kills me.

01:00:07Guest:What's happening inside of me?

01:00:08Guest:I didn't really affect.

01:00:10Guest:It didn't make me stop what I was doing.

01:00:12Marc:But as somebody who grew up in that and somebody who's put some thought into it and written a book, a humorous book on how to be black, I mean, how much of that pull...

01:00:21Guest:is still dangerous i think it's very dangerous i think it's very dangerous the problem when you make it pop culturally cool to not do right or to do terrible yeah to destroy yourself right that's that's bad right and shaming achievement

01:00:47Guest:It can only be bad right there.

01:00:49Guest:I mean, there's always going to be some time.

01:00:51Guest:And I think there's some there's some inescapability of this across all kids.

01:00:56Guest:Right.

01:00:57Guest:Nerdy kids are going to get it.

01:00:58Marc:Sure.

01:00:59Marc:Yeah.

01:00:59Guest:And then you just even me to jocks and nerds and there's a kid.

01:01:03Guest:Yeah.

01:01:04Guest:So those circles are OK.

01:01:06Guest:But when you're playing with the fire, that is the situation in the black community.

01:01:10Guest:Yeah.

01:01:11Guest:It's extra dangerous.

01:01:12Guest:Because it's not just that you're going to be not doing as well as you could.

01:01:19Guest:It's that you could be sucked into a world of hurt that's going to set you back for the rest of your life.

01:01:26Guest:If you get into that criminal justice system, you're tagged.

01:01:29Guest:You're done.

01:01:30Marc:And you could be doing it just out of peer pressure or to prove something.

01:01:34Guest:And when you're at the age, we're all social beings.

01:01:37Guest:We're all in a pack mentality.

01:01:39Guest:But teenage boys...

01:01:42Guest:You're playing with some real volatile stuff there, like a sense of belonging and being part of a tribe or a club or a gang or a crew.

01:01:51Guest:That survival is much more important than some long-term ideal that you can't see when you're 14.

01:01:56Marc:Yeah, and I guess it's a conversation that is discussed by intellectuals, and it's obviously...

01:02:02Marc:And it's obviously something that all teenage kids deal with, but it just seems that the schism around that it's heightened.

01:02:09Marc:Yeah, because they're there.

01:02:11Marc:There's such a, you know, the struggle, you know, there is a sort of built in.

01:02:18Marc:Like like, you know, I don't I don't we don't necessarily need to talk about, you know, broad, you know, African-American issues just because you're here.

01:02:27Marc:But but but there it just seems that that there is a built in segregation to the idea of the black community intentionally.

01:02:35Marc:I mean, and maybe I'm speculating, but it seems that with that mindset that there is no the traction of the idea of not seeing color lines or or having, you know, fully integrated society is not necessarily trusted.

01:02:51Marc:Right.

01:02:51Marc:On either side.

01:02:52Guest:No, that's, and there is, one, I mean, the reality of how integrated our society is is much lower than we like to talk about.

01:03:01Guest:We're actually not very integrated.

01:03:03Guest:No, I never see it.

01:03:04Marc:Like, you know, I go to, like, especially at Boston.

01:03:06Guest:I mean, you spend... I spent 12 years in Boston.

01:03:08Marc:Right, you know, like, I went to school there, and I've never been in a more segregated city.

01:03:15Marc:I mean, it's to the point where you're in Boston for four years doing college, and you're like, where are they?

01:03:20Marc:Yeah.

01:03:20Marc:I mean, where are they?

01:03:21Guest:And as a black person, I felt that.

01:03:24Guest:It's scary, dude.

01:03:25Guest:And then one day you stay on the orange line too long.

01:03:28Guest:You're like, I found them.

01:03:29Guest:My people.

01:03:30Guest:Mattapan.

01:03:33Guest:West Roxbury.

01:03:35Guest:JP.

01:03:35Guest:Yeah.

01:03:36Guest:Good to meet you.

01:03:37Guest:Yeah.

01:03:37Guest:But you got to go.

01:03:38Guest:You got to hunt for it.

01:03:39Guest:It's wild though.

01:03:40Guest:Boston is such a weird, weird, weird city.

01:03:42Guest:Someone who grew up in D.C.

01:03:44Guest:with a lot of black people.

01:03:45Guest:Black people in power.

01:03:46Guest:Yeah.

01:03:46Guest:Politically.

01:03:47Guest:Yeah.

01:03:47Guest:Boston made no sense to me.

01:03:48Guest:Wait, you have one black city council member?

01:03:52Guest:For Mattapan.

01:03:53Guest:Yeah, but it's considered a progressive city.

01:03:56Guest:Well, yeah, and so are progressive in certain ways.

01:04:01Guest:Liberalism has a lot of flavors in America.

01:04:03Guest:You can feel really good about yourself.

01:04:04Guest:Yeah, they have Cambridge.

01:04:05Guest:It's over there, the people you want to talk to.

01:04:07Guest:And it can take the form of justice for people overseas and animals.

01:04:13Guest:And I read these books and I listen to these radio stations, but it doesn't mean you socialize across lines.

01:04:18Marc:Well, that's interesting.

01:04:20Marc:That boutique liberalism is really what it is because you're still speaking to and having done...

01:04:27Marc:you know, liberal talk radio, you're dealing with moneyed interests who are trying to sort of placate their guilt by being involved, you know, sometimes more and sometimes less in certain causes.

01:04:38Marc:But the broad scope of it, in my mind, is like, you know, if you're a liberal, there's only one question you have to answer is do you give a shit about poor people in any real way?

01:04:47Marc:Yeah.

01:04:48Marc:And, you know, usually the answer is like, why the animals are like, it's not it's not what it's about.

01:04:53Marc:Yeah.

01:04:54Marc:The fragmentation of that thing and the idea that, you know, liberals are always like, why are the right?

01:05:00Marc:Why do they have so much cultural momentum?

01:05:01Marc:Because they're all on the same page.

01:05:03Marc:It's not a good page, but they're consistent.

01:05:05Guest:Right.

01:05:06Marc:They're shamelessly self.

01:05:08Marc:They're shamelessly careers.

01:05:09Marc:They're shamelessly narrow minded.

01:05:11Marc:And they're shamelessly, you know, about the movement of capital.

01:05:16Guest:I think, however.

01:05:18Guest:The I this overstated the unity of the right.

01:05:21Guest:Yeah, like, oh, they're all on message on the same page.

01:05:23Guest:They're actually not on the same page.

01:05:24Marc:No, no.

01:05:25Marc:I mean, the organization of the right and their ability to message properly to people that are angry enough to vote against their self-interest economically and lead them.

01:05:35Marc:Yeah, no, no, I get it.

01:05:36Marc:I'm talking about the people in charge.

01:05:38Marc:Yeah.

01:05:38Marc:But I just found that, you know, with liberalism, there's a very weird sort of thing because like I started to ask myself, well, you know, how many rich liberals?

01:05:45Marc:They don't want to pay their taxes either.

01:05:47Marc:Yeah.

01:05:47Marc:Nobody wants to pay their taxes.

01:05:49Marc:So, I mean, how are they still connecting themselves to the liberal idea if they're still hiding money and not doing their civic duty or doing anything?

01:05:58Marc:Single source coffee.

01:05:59Marc:Yeah.

01:06:01Marc:That's what I'm saying.

01:06:02Guest:The tie that binds, man.

01:06:03Marc:It's a boutique write-off.

01:06:05Marc:Yeah.

01:06:06Yeah.

01:06:06Marc:So what drove you to write the book?

01:06:11Marc:I mean, that was your biggest seller, right?

01:06:13Guest:Yeah, yeah.

01:06:13Guest:The book I did before that, the books I did before that were all self-published.

01:06:17Guest:So this is the first book with a publisher not named Baratunde Thurston.

01:06:20Guest:Right.

01:06:20Guest:And that was a big deal.

01:06:22Guest:What drove me to write it was an opportunity that presented itself.

01:06:26Marc:And you wrote this, this was recently, but maybe before we get to that, so you ended up at Harvard.

01:06:31Guest:I did.

01:06:31Marc:So it all paid off.

01:06:32Marc:Yeah, I applied, got in, I didn't just show up.

01:06:33Marc:Right, no, you're like, I think I deserve this, look at me.

01:06:37Guest:It was my understanding that you allow a few of us in every year.

01:06:41Guest:I didn't want to go.

01:06:43Guest:The Sidwell experience was good.

01:06:45Guest:I learned a ton of things.

01:06:46Guest:I also learned it's exhausting being my type of person in that type of situation.

01:06:52Guest:A student of color.

01:06:54Marc:Who's obsessive.

01:06:55Guest:Who is in this dominant environment.

01:06:59Guest:You're constantly doing some kind of battle.

01:07:01Guest:everything's a battle because you're someone's challenging rhetorically just out loud like you're right to be there oh you didn't qualify to be here someone's asking someone wants to touch your hair someone wants you to explain all your people the assumption that you're on some sort of free ride yeah like there's all there's it's the extra it's like overhead yeah right it's this extra burden that like any like kid of color a poor kid in an elite private institution it's the same routine like everyone who's lived that life recognizes what i'm talking about it's like all right after your sideshow

01:07:31Guest:You're a sideshow, you're a novelty, but there's also- That's a better word.

01:07:35Guest:You're still suspect in some way.

01:07:40Marc:Yeah, because look at the rest of you.

01:07:41Guest:Yeah, and that's- So you just have a lot more explaining to do it.

01:07:46Guest:Yeah.

01:07:47Guest:Or draining.

01:07:47Guest:Yeah.

01:07:48Guest:So it's emotionally.

01:07:49Marc:It's extracurricular defensiveness that you don't.

01:07:51Guest:It's an extra class hours that are not accounted for.

01:07:54Marc:Right.

01:07:54Guest:And then for college.

01:07:56Guest:Yeah.

01:07:57Guest:When you're like, oh, am I going to re up for this?

01:07:59Guest:Yeah.

01:07:59Guest:And go to New England.

01:08:01Guest:I don't.

01:08:02Guest:What is this?

01:08:02Guest:New England.

01:08:02Guest:Yeah.

01:08:03Guest:Yeah.

01:08:03Guest:I had visions of Massachusetts with like needles on the shore.

01:08:08Guest:Yeah.

01:08:09Guest:And like dead whales rolling up and just like racists everywhere.

01:08:13Marc:Well, that might be true.

01:08:14Guest:Yeah.

01:08:14Guest:And yeah, I think I saw something in the news about some biomedical waste, and it just locked in my head, like all the beaches.

01:08:21Marc:It wasn't the Mayflower.

01:08:23Marc:It wasn't the first one, the first column.

01:08:25Guest:Biomedical disease needles.

01:08:27Guest:Not the state house.

01:08:29Guest:No, it was nothing.

01:08:30Guest:It wasn't the beautiful trees turning.

01:08:32Guest:It was like a bunch of white people, a bunch of races.

01:08:35Guest:It was cold, and there were needles on the beaches.

01:08:37Guest:Why would I want to do that?

01:08:38Guest:So I visited Morehouse.

01:08:41Guest:I was like, maybe I'll go down here.

01:08:42Guest:Howard and other black schools.

01:08:45Guest:And what happened is I had a friend who, another black kid who was two years ahead of me, he went to Harvard.

01:08:50Guest:He said, I think you should check it out.

01:08:52Guest:And only because it was him.

01:08:54Guest:And we trusted each other deeply.

01:08:56Guest:I was like, okay.

01:08:57Guest:And so when we did the college tour, we hit New England and visited Harvard and I actually loved it.

01:09:03Guest:I was like, I think I could do this.

01:09:04Guest:It's beautiful.

01:09:05Guest:You go in that gate and you're in your quad.

01:09:08Guest:And then what I basically found was

01:09:11Guest:I got a lot of the boot camp, a lot of that.

01:09:15Guest:My first tour was Sidwell.

01:09:17Guest:Yeah.

01:09:18Guest:And in Harvard, I could focus on some other things a little bit.

01:09:21Guest:I knew who I was.

01:09:22Guest:Yeah.

01:09:23Guest:I wasn't threatened by people feeling threatened by me.

01:09:25Guest:Yeah.

01:09:26Guest:Or feeling like I didn't belong there.

01:09:28Marc:But there must have been less of that.

01:09:30Guest:Yeah.

01:09:33Guest:I don't know if there was less.

01:09:35Guest:Because in some ways it's the same type of people.

01:09:38Guest:It's a more diverse environment politically, but it's still pretty liberal.

01:09:42Guest:Not just the state, but the student body.

01:09:45Guest:There's more people.

01:09:45Guest:You have top people from all kinds of schools, which creates their own little weird environment.

01:09:50Marc:And also from other countries.

01:09:51Marc:You have the aristocracy of many great nations.

01:09:55Guest:All kinds.

01:09:56Marc:They have delivered their scions to- Their first and second and third borns.

01:10:00Marc:Yeah, because someone's got to run the country.

01:10:02Guest:That's right.

01:10:03Guest:So you train them here and they know how to bankrupt back home.

01:10:05Guest:That's right.

01:10:05Guest:Exactly.

01:10:07Guest:It's the way the world works.

01:10:08Guest:It's all been planned.

01:10:09Guest:Yeah, it has.

01:10:09Guest:All this has happened before.

01:10:10Guest:That actually has been planned, I think.

01:10:13Guest:Yeah, so it was easier-

01:10:15Guest:at Harvard than the Sidwell thing.

01:10:18Guest:I was also older, right?

01:10:20Guest:And so maybe more stable emotionally.

01:10:22Marc:And what'd you study over there?

01:10:23Marc:Philosophy.

01:10:24Guest:Really?

01:10:24Guest:Really.

01:10:26Marc:Okay.

01:10:27Marc:Is that all right?

01:10:28Marc:Yeah.

01:10:29Marc:I'm impressed because I have a lot of books I don't understand and maybe we can run through them.

01:10:34Marc:What'd you focus on?

01:10:35Marc:Who was your guy?

01:10:36Marc:What'd you write your papers on?

01:10:38Guest:I ended up in a lot of metaphysics with a guy named Derek Parsons.

01:10:42Uh-huh.

01:10:42Guest:I did a whole tutorial on Kant's critique of pure reason, which is maybe the hardest thing I've ever read.

01:10:49Guest:Just trying to get through all that.

01:10:52Guest:The whole language.

01:10:52Marc:But what compelled you in that direction as opposed to English or anything else?

01:10:57Marc:Because philosophy, it's a bitch.

01:10:58Guest:Yeah, well, I showed up wanting, I was always a math and science kid at the Air and Space Club.

01:11:03Guest:I wanted to do computer science.

01:11:05Guest:I was big on internet things before getting to college.

01:11:08Guest:Were you there with Zuckerberg?

01:11:10Guest:No, he's younger.

01:11:11Guest:I think he's five years behind.

01:11:14Marc:So he missed out on that.

01:11:15Guest:Well, he missed out on me, too.

01:11:16Guest:Okay, all right, all right, all right.

01:11:19Guest:So I thought computer science and math.

01:11:21Guest:Those are going to be my majors.

01:11:22Guest:Engineering, all that stuff.

01:11:25Guest:A high school teacher said, you should take a philosophy class when you get there.

01:11:28Guest:Like, my senior year.

01:11:29Guest:So...

01:11:30Marc:Who was this high school teacher?

01:11:32Guest:Her name was Erica Berry.

01:11:34Guest:She actually was a Spanish teacher for a very long time who became an English teacher.

01:11:40Guest:So I had her for English.

01:11:42Guest:And she was a great English teacher.

01:11:43Guest:I think she might have been a better English teacher than a Spanish teacher.

01:11:46Guest:Although I never had her for Spanish.

01:11:47Guest:I'm just going to make that up.

01:11:48Guest:So you trusted her?

01:11:49Guest:I trusted her.

01:11:50Guest:And I went through the course catalog.

01:11:52Guest:I saw Intro to Philosophy, Philosophy 3, taught by this dude, Anthony Appiah, who's an African dude.

01:11:57Guest:Yeah.

01:11:57Guest:And so my intro to philosophy was this like African born scholar, Anthony Appiah, Ghanaian specifically.

01:12:04Guest:And I loved it.

01:12:06Guest:And I loved it more than computer science.

01:12:08Guest:What about it?

01:12:09Guest:I liked the arguing.

01:12:10Guest:I liked the digging.

01:12:11Guest:I liked a lot of it was in groups.

01:12:14Guest:You're in a group with other people because it's too much to figure out all by yourself.

01:12:19Guest:And so you're like, well, I think it's this and I think it's that and I think it's this.

01:12:21Guest:And you hash it out.

01:12:22Guest:I love that.

01:12:23Guest:Yeah.

01:12:23Guest:And I loved, there was a lot of metaphor.

01:12:27Guest:And the philosophy that I focused on at Harvard was analytic philosophy.

01:12:33Guest:It's very logic driven.

01:12:36Guest:It's very like you can decompose the argument into little pieces.

01:12:39Marc:So that satisfied the math brain.

01:12:40Guest:Exactly.

01:12:41Guest:And the computer brain.

01:12:42Marc:Right.

01:12:42Guest:It wasn't the existential or continental philosophy with the Kierkegaards and the Nietzsche's.

01:12:47Guest:I didn't do...

01:12:48Guest:much of that.

01:12:49Guest:I did almost none of that.

01:12:50Guest:That's a whole wing of philosophy that I'm pretty blind to.

01:12:53Guest:That was more poetic.

01:12:54Marc:Yeah.

01:12:55Marc:So you were into the sort of classic logic.

01:12:58Guest:Let's break this down.

01:12:59Guest:And if there's a brain in a vat, what happens?

01:13:02Guest:Is that a person?

01:13:03Guest:If you get dissolved through a teleportation, is that you on the other side?

01:13:07Guest:Have you been killed and reborn?

01:13:08Guest:Does it matter?

01:13:09Guest:Yeah.

01:13:10Guest:So I love that stuff.

01:13:12Guest:I can go there, and that was a ton of fun.

01:13:15Guest:I didn't do a thesis, though, and I didn't go to grad school because I didn't ultimately care that much about these hypothetical problems.

01:13:22Guest:And I got to be grounded still.

01:13:23Guest:I'm still largely nonfiction.

01:13:26Marc:But it somehow gave your brain some structure that you dug and gave you a little space.

01:13:32Guest:And it was still with words.

01:13:33Guest:That was the other thing.

01:13:34Guest:I didn't know that I liked words.

01:13:36Guest:Yeah.

01:13:37Guest:Really until the high school newspaper.

01:13:38Guest:Yeah.

01:13:39Guest:And then college, I was like, I love words.

01:13:42Guest:Yeah.

01:13:42Guest:I had no idea.

01:13:43Guest:I thought I loved numbers only.

01:13:44Guest:Numbers and like letters between numbers.

01:13:46Guest:Right.

01:13:46Guest:And some complex math formula.

01:13:48Guest:I got to college, and I was a good writer, according to the school.

01:13:53Guest:Yeah.

01:13:53Guest:And I was like, oh, I could.

01:13:54Guest:That's a good school.

01:13:55Guest:Yeah.

01:13:55Guest:And so I did the newspaper.

01:13:57Guest:I was like, I wrote for the newspaper, and I'm writing these weird philosophy papers.

01:14:00Guest:I did stuff on the theater stuff, and I wrote...

01:14:03Guest:A comedy newsletter.

01:14:04Guest:I started writing a satirical comedy newsletter my freshman year of college.

01:14:08Guest:Playing with words.

01:14:09Guest:That was amazing.

01:14:11Guest:And it took a couple of hoops for me to finally figure that out.

01:14:15Guest:Philosophy was a big part of that.

01:14:17Guest:Because I could paint with these words and I could attack with words and I could sort of

01:14:21Guest:and I didn't know you could do that.

01:14:24Guest:For me, words was like boring English papers and history papers where you're basically retelling events or trying to ruin good literature by overanalyzing.

01:14:32Marc:But once you strip down grammar into equations, right?

01:14:37Guest:Well, yeah, and it was, even it wasn't,

01:14:39Guest:For me, it was less about grammar to equations and more of how can I shift sideways to understand what's really being said here?

01:14:48Guest:Can I substitute in something I do understand for something I don't and write it in those terms?

01:14:54Marc:Right.

01:14:55Guest:And so I threw a lot of jokes in my philosophy paper.

01:14:58Marc:Yeah.

01:14:58Guest:Because it just made it easier for me to understand.

01:15:00Guest:That's what jokes are for.

01:15:01Guest:Yeah.

01:15:01Guest:I made references to things that were native to me.

01:15:04Guest:And I didn't know, I guess before that, I didn't really know you could do that.

01:15:09Guest:Uh-huh.

01:15:10Guest:And not that I didn't have permission to, I just hadn't figured it out.

01:15:12Guest:I hadn't seen it.

01:15:13Marc:You hadn't noticed it.

01:15:14Guest:Yeah.

01:15:14Marc:You hadn't done the right readings.

01:15:15Guest:So that's so the philosophy really showed all that.

01:15:20Guest:And it was like, I just I just like arguing, too.

01:15:22Marc:Yeah.

01:15:23Marc:Well, I mean, that sort of sets the brain up for a lot of stuff.

01:15:25Marc:I mean, that's usually, you know, you're either going to go into philosophy, which means you're going to teach.

01:15:29Marc:Right.

01:15:29Marc:Or you're going to go on to to to utilize that framework for law or for whatever medical ethics, whatever the hell you're going to get into.

01:15:37Guest:And it's all the ability, if you can get to the heart of what someone like Kant is trying to say and feel like you really grasp it, you can parse anything.

01:15:47Guest:Yeah.

01:15:47Guest:Did you get there?

01:15:51Guest:My memory is fuzzy on that.

01:15:54Guest:There might have been a moment?

01:15:55Guest:There might have been a moment as I was walking into a building and I looked up and I saw this bird.

01:16:00Marc:I was like, I get it.

01:16:01Marc:Oh!

01:16:01Marc:Oh, it was right there.

01:16:02Marc:Flew away with the bird.

01:16:04Guest:A brief moment of insight.

01:16:05Guest:Yeah.

01:16:06Guest:But sometimes, I mean, shoot, some people go their whole lives and don't even have that.

01:16:08Marc:Yeah.

01:16:09Marc:I mean, that's amazing that you were able to parse it.

01:16:12Marc:So, so you realize that you could use this to cut, you know, like with your wit and with the idea of, of being able to sort of break things apart that you were able to do what a satirist is supposed to do.

01:16:23Guest:Bam.

01:16:24Guest:Got it.

01:16:24Guest:And philosophy was the training.

01:16:26Marc:Right.

01:16:26Marc:To sort of like get to the core of it.

01:16:28Marc:And then once you get to the core of it, if you want to shit on it or you want to elevate it, you've got the structure.

01:16:35Marc:There you go.

01:16:36Guest:Okay.

01:16:36Guest:That's very true.

01:16:37Guest:So, yes.

01:16:38Guest:Okay.

01:16:39Guest:I wrote the satire newsletter.

01:16:40Guest:I wrote a humor column in the newspaper while I was there.

01:16:43Marc:It was good.

01:16:44Marc:Did you do any lampoon stuff or no?

01:16:46Guest:No, I didn't.

01:16:47Guest:And it was, that was a, that was an interesting choice because when I showed up at college, I didn't know that I cared about comedy.

01:16:55Guest:Right.

01:16:56Guest:I was a very politically active kid.

01:16:59Guest:I knew I liked journalism.

01:17:01Guest:Yeah.

01:17:02Guest:Um, my older sister was a journalist.

01:17:03Guest:You want truth and justice.

01:17:04Guest:Yeah.

01:17:05Guest:I was, I was a little righteous.

01:17:06Guest:I was actually a very serious kid.

01:17:08Guest:Yeah.

01:17:08Guest:You know, and I was a lot of protests and stuff going on too.

01:17:12Guest:Yeah.

01:17:12Guest:So the humor for me came out of the news first.

01:17:16Guest:I was paying all this attention to the news and I wanted to help inform my classmates through this newsletter in a fun way.

01:17:23Guest:So there was a translation of real information.

01:17:26Guest:That's where my comedy started.

01:17:28Guest:And by that point, there was a timing when you try to do the lampoon.

01:17:34Guest:usually right when you show up.

01:17:36Guest:And I had chosen the newspaper, which is the Crimson, they're mortal enemies.

01:17:41Guest:And they play pranks on each other and steal each other's stuff and you just don't, it's like a line you don't cross.

01:17:45Marc:I think you're attacking something, I mean, there's a broader type of satire.

01:17:53Marc:I mean, to do...

01:17:54Marc:to do sort of cutting, witty journalism along the lines of Mencken or Hunter S. Thompson or anybody who's still considered a journalist but pushes the envelope on it.

01:18:06Marc:It's different, I think, a little bit than broad satire.

01:18:09Marc:Yeah.

01:18:10Marc:And I think that from what little I know about the Lampoon, they may hit some notes.

01:18:15Marc:But PJ O'Rourke's another example, although he ended up sort of on the wrong side of things.

01:18:19Marc:But I could see how the tradition didn't appeal to you.

01:18:23Marc:I mean, journalism is more compelling.

01:18:25Guest:The basic truth is they weren't very funny.

01:18:29Guest:And that was just, I mean, everything goes through phases.

01:18:32Guest:I'm not saying the Lampoon itself isn't a funny place.

01:18:34Guest:I'm saying when we were there, it was pretty understood amongst at least my group of friends, this isn't that fun.

01:18:39Guest:Right, but also it doesn't seem like you wanted to get into show business necessarily.

01:18:43Guest:Yeah, that definitely wasn't... My ideas about what I was going to do after school was journalism.

01:18:47Guest:Right.

01:18:48Guest:Was something in technology.

01:18:51Guest:Yeah.

01:18:52Guest:Or teaching.

01:18:52Guest:Yeah.

01:18:54Guest:And I had a journalism summer internship.

01:18:56Marc:Right, because it seems like the Lampoon Cats.

01:18:58Marc:I mean, if there is a Harvard club out here... Yeah, write scripts.

01:19:01Marc:Right.

01:19:01Guest:That...

01:19:02Guest:That whole future didn't occur to me until much later.

01:19:05Marc:Right.

01:19:06Guest:And I'm sort of in that zone now.

01:19:08Guest:Right.

01:19:09Guest:But when I was 18, that was not the future I saw for myself.

01:19:12Marc:So you're in that zone now.

01:19:13Marc:What, have you given up?

01:19:15Marc:No, no.

01:19:17Marc:What happened to you, man?

01:19:19Marc:I lost something, by the way.

01:19:21Marc:Yeah, I got it.

01:19:21Marc:Sounds like it.

01:19:22Marc:Yeah, California will do that to a man.

01:19:24Guest:I don't even live here.

01:19:25Marc:Yeah, well, see, out here for a couple of days, everything's gone soft.

01:19:29Marc:Yeah, too many burritos.

01:19:30Marc:Yeah.

01:19:32Marc:So, all right, so what informed this book?

01:19:34Marc:Yeah.

01:19:35Marc:I mean, because this seems to be sort of, this was what you were working towards on some level.

01:19:43Guest:In many ways it was.

01:19:44Guest:I mean, it's like I've been training for this moment.

01:19:46Marc:Yeah.

01:19:46Marc:And all that training has led to- But what was the moment that sent you over the edge outside of a lifetime of whatever your lifetime is that you thought this would be the angle?

01:19:56Marc:Because it's a one-line pitch on this, right?

01:20:00Marc:Yeah.

01:20:00Marc:So what was that?

01:20:01Guest:So that was-

01:20:03Guest:It was about the timing more than anything.

01:20:05Guest:Yeah.

01:20:07Guest:I had worked in the corporate world and done things there.

01:20:10Guest:As what?

01:20:11Guest:I was a consultant, an analyst.

01:20:14Guest:I did forecasting of business revenues.

01:20:16Guest:I thought of products that communications companies could do.

01:20:19Guest:It fed my tech, logic, entrepreneurial brain, and I left that for comedy and for justice.

01:20:25Marc:Doing stand-up.

01:20:26Guest:Doing stand-up and also political blogging.

01:20:28Marc:What inspired you to do comedy necessarily?

01:20:31Marc:Yeah.

01:20:32Guest:Well, I knew that I was funny in one format.

01:20:34Marc:Right.

01:20:35Guest:Like email.

01:20:36Guest:Hilarious email newsletter.

01:20:38Guest:Yeah.

01:20:38Guest:I could kill it on email.

01:20:39Guest:Yeah.

01:20:40Guest:And you never hear a boo.

01:20:41Guest:Yeah.

01:20:42Guest:So that was great.

01:20:43Guest:And I knew I liked the stage because I had been doing shows.

01:20:46Guest:Yeah.

01:20:46Guest:You know, even through college, I did musicals and things.

01:20:48Guest:but it was a friend, Derek Ashong is his name.

01:20:51Guest:He's a cool dude out there doing all kinds of fun stuff.

01:20:54Guest:He said, I'm going to do an open mic at a comedy club in Boston, and he never did it.

01:20:59Guest:But he said it, and it put this weird thing in my head.

01:21:02Guest:And I had loved comedy, and I loved the writing, and my now ex-wife, then girlfriend, who was a musician, and doing her thing.

01:21:12Guest:She was out in Harvard Square playing the guitar and doing the Tracy Chapman style thing.

01:21:15Guest:Yeah, sure.

01:21:16Guest:She never knew me in college.

01:21:19Guest:I met her right after I graduated.

01:21:20Guest:So she knew this guy who worked in a corporate world.

01:21:23Guest:Yeah.

01:21:23Guest:But clearly had some other stuff going on.

01:21:25Guest:And I was pitching her jokes and like, look at this last year, two years ago.

01:21:29Guest:I'm like, this is my little peacock dance.

01:21:31Guest:I'm flashing my feathers.

01:21:32Marc:She was your audience.

01:21:32Marc:Yeah.

01:21:33Marc:Yeah.

01:21:33Guest:And she said, well, why aren't you doing this anymore?

01:21:35Marc:Yeah.

01:21:36Guest:And in many more words and more cutting than that, but also more loving than that.

01:21:40Marc:Yeah.

01:21:40Guest:You need them sometimes to- It changed the direction of my life.

01:21:44Guest:There was one phone call in December 2001.

01:21:45Guest:9-11 was very recent and obviously in everybody's head.

01:21:49Guest:And she had asked me, the question she asked was, do you like performing more or writing more?

01:21:56Guest:And I went through this whole thing, well, on the one hand, on the other hand, blah, blah.

01:21:59Guest:And she said, well, you're not doing either.

01:22:01Guest:You sell out.

01:22:02Guest:Why not?

01:22:03Guest:Yeah, yeah.

01:22:04Guest:And I had a great excuse.

01:22:05Guest:I was like, money.

01:22:06Guest:Yeah, yeah.

01:22:07Guest:That's why I need to make it.

01:22:08Guest:Yeah.

01:22:09Guest:So I can pay these loans on all this great education.

01:22:11Guest:Yeah.

01:22:11Guest:And once I get free of all that and become financially independent, I will have the luxury of pursuing my art.

01:22:17Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

01:22:18Guest:And she called bullshit.

01:22:19Guest:yeah and she said no end to that one either you will keep redefining financial freedom and get stuck there wanting bigger things and more of them yeah and you won't come back or you will come back and you'll suck yeah because it'll be too long that's right you wouldn't have written in five years 10 years 15 years take so just do it yeah so i started writing again every week i brought back that newsletter i took a stand-up comedy class in boston with who steve kalishman i don't know

01:22:45Guest:He teaches in the Boston Center for Adult Education.

01:22:48Guest:He writes, last I know he wrote for Men's Health.

01:22:50Guest:He had a column there.

01:22:52Guest:And I came to New York every Tuesday.

01:22:54Guest:I lived in Boston.

01:22:55Guest:I commuted to New York every Tuesday for a comedy writing workshop with these dudes, John Abood and Michael Colton.

01:23:01Guest:And they had a business called Modern Humorist.

01:23:03Guest:Everything but get on stage.

01:23:05Guest:No, no.

01:23:05Guest:So this was, yeah.

01:23:07Guest:Well, the getting on stage was at the end of the comedy thing.

01:23:09Guest:Sure, sure.

01:23:09Guest:So all that fed.

01:23:11Marc:But you needed to learn.

01:23:13Guest:Yeah.

01:23:14Guest:You had a brain like that.

01:23:15Guest:Basically, all these things were.

01:23:16Guest:You couldn't just watch a comedy.

01:23:19Guest:I didn't know that that was even possible.

01:23:21Guest:To just go to a club and be like, hey, put me.

01:23:23Marc:Oh, okay.

01:23:24Marc:It's not like I had a stand-up.

01:23:25Marc:Who were the comics that moved you?

01:23:26Marc:I mean, did you have guys?

01:23:28Guest:Yeah, I mean, I grew up watching a ton of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and some Red Fox and a lot of Whoopi Goldberg and a lot of Garrison Keillor actually was a huge influence.

01:23:39Guest:Audio, we did a lot of audio stuff like road trips and listening to tape.

01:23:43Marc:Your mom was standing in PR.

01:23:44Guest:Yeah, and old radio dramas, old radio comedies, and a lot of British TV shows, British sitcoms on PBS.

01:23:52Marc:So you had a head full of it, you just didn't know how to get up on stage.

01:23:55Guest:Yeah, not as me.

01:23:57Guest:I knew how to get up on stage from a performing perspective, but not being baratunde saying here's what I think.

01:24:03Marc:Yeah, so how was that first time?

01:24:05Guest:Oh, the first time was perfect.

01:24:07Guest:The first time, I cheated the class.

01:24:11Guest:We were supposed to all do our first performance at the end of the class at the comedy studio in front of our friends and family and whoever happened to show up that night and didn't know it was newbie night.

01:24:21Guest:But mostly it was a friendly crowd.

01:24:24Guest:I was like, I'm not going to make that be my first show.

01:24:26Guest:I'm going to get one in before then.

01:24:28Guest:So I went to an open mic at a Chinese food restaurant over by Fenway Park.

01:24:32Guest:It was actually in a Howard Johnson.

01:24:33Guest:Yeah.

01:24:33Guest:It was like all the comedy venue cliches in one place.

01:24:37Guest:Chinese food restaurant inside of Howard Johnson by a ballpark.

01:24:40Guest:And I went up there and I did four or five minutes and I killed.

01:24:44Guest:I was like, I'm a god.

01:24:47Guest:I am so good at this.

01:24:48Guest:And then we had to do a practice set in the class

01:24:53Guest:And I bombed.

01:24:55Guest:And what was the difference?

01:24:57Guest:I was overconfident.

01:24:58Guest:I got lucky.

01:24:59Guest:I was raw instinct.

01:25:01Guest:No technique.

01:25:03Guest:Just animus.

01:25:05Guest:Just coming out.

01:25:06Guest:And a lot of natural stage ability was there.

01:25:09Guest:But how to present it in my voice and what was that voice?

01:25:12Guest:Who knew?

01:25:13Guest:Yeah.

01:25:14Guest:So the show that we did, the big show that we did is our graduation show.

01:25:17Guest:I did well.

01:25:18Guest:Yeah.

01:25:19Guest:And Rick Jenkins and I talked after.

01:25:21Guest:He said, hey, you did pretty well.

01:25:22Guest:You want to do that again sometime?

01:25:24Guest:I was like, yeah, I'd love to do that again.

01:25:25Guest:So he gave me a date, I don't know, two months out.

01:25:27Guest:Oh, God, I remember that.

01:25:28Guest:I was prepping and prepping and prepping.

01:25:31Marc:For five minutes.

01:25:32Guest:Yeah, for five minutes.

01:25:33Guest:And I was working out in any other place I could, but mostly like, I want to go back to the comedy studio and do my thing.

01:25:38Guest:Yeah.

01:25:39Guest:So that's where the stand-up started.

01:25:43Guest:Yeah.

01:25:43Guest:It started because I was like, I have the page and the humor and the satire stuff there.

01:25:47Guest:I have the stage persona, which is just a character mostly.

01:25:52Guest:Can I fuse them?

01:25:53Guest:Mm-hmm.

01:25:53Guest:And that class in the studio kind of gave me a shot.

01:25:57Guest:And the New York thing, the structure of that class was really cool.

01:26:01Guest:It was a workshop.

01:26:02Guest:So every week they were trying to expose you like, oh, there's different ways to do this comedy thing.

01:26:06Guest:It was their way of making money, honestly.

01:26:07Guest:They were like charge people to do this comedy workshop.

01:26:10Guest:But I still got a ton out of it because they brought in the editor of The Onion at the time, Carol Kolb.

01:26:15Guest:And she talked about what the onion was and how it worked.

01:26:17Guest:And then they brought in Patrick Borelli to talk about stand-up comedy.

01:26:20Guest:They brought in Michael Schur, who was running Weekend Update at SNL at the time.

01:26:24Guest:They brought in every week somebody represented some different flavor.

01:26:27Guest:I'm like, here are the worlds that are available to you as a comic.

01:26:29Marc:Well, that's important.

01:26:30Marc:Because when kids ask me now about stand-up, I'm like, just don't put all your eggs in that basket.

01:26:36Marc:There's five guys that are going to make a good living at that at any given time period.

01:26:40Marc:I mean, if you learn how to write jokes and you learn how to, I mean, there's a lot available here.

01:26:45Marc:Exactly.

01:26:45Guest:So I got before, it wasn't like I learned that 10 years into stand-up.

01:26:50Guest:I learned it at year zero.

01:26:51Marc:Well, that's good for a brain like yours.

01:26:54Guest:There's a career here.

01:26:55Guest:Yeah, I can do stuff with this.

01:26:57Guest:So that's how the stand-up thing started.

01:26:59Guest:And I think to get back to your question about the book and this aha moment, the time at The Onion was the first time that I had one job that kind of captured all the things I love to do.

01:27:12Guest:I could do the politics thing.

01:27:14Guest:I had my own political blog with a friend called Jack and Jill Politics, and we were killing it there, but it was wittysome, but it wasn't like comedy, comedy.

01:27:22Guest:It was like a black-oriented U.S.

01:27:23Guest:political blog, let's get this done.

01:27:26Guest:There are issues at hand.

01:27:28Guest:Exactly.

01:27:28Guest:I had my stand-up thing going on, and I'm climbing those ranks.

01:27:32Guest:Tony V was a huge mentor.

01:27:34Guest:Tim McIntyre up in Boston and Cambridge that were helping open doors.

01:27:39Guest:Jonathan Gates gave me some great advice really early on.

01:27:42Guest:Which was?

01:27:42Guest:It takes 10 years to be patient to find your voice and figure out what you're doing.

01:27:47Marc:That's a lowball number.

01:27:48Guest:Yeah.

01:27:49Guest:The other thing he said, the things you hear that you know are true are the things you have to experience to believe it.

01:27:55Guest:I think in this case, it worked both ways.

01:27:57Guest:He's like, look, don't,

01:27:59Guest:bullshit, like talk about the things you know.

01:28:02Guest:If you try to be somebody else, the audience will smell you out, they won't go with you, they won't believe you, you're done.

01:28:10Guest:So don't try to be, if you're a newsy, nerdy guy, be that.

01:28:14Marc:If you're gonna be a truth guy, be a truth guy.

01:28:15Marc:If you're gonna be a clown, then that's other things.

01:28:17Guest:Then be a clown, and love the clown, and embrace all that.

01:28:19Guest:Don't try to lie by being something you're not.

01:28:25Guest:That was cool to hear very early.

01:28:27Guest:So the Onion thing it gave me, I was the web editor.

01:28:30Guest:So I oversaw all this digital stuff.

01:28:32Guest:And what are we going to do on Facebook?

01:28:34Guest:And how does the website look?

01:28:35Guest:And how can we be funny on an iPhone?

01:28:38Guest:So beyond just putting the articles on an iPhone screen, that's not that interesting.

01:28:43Guest:Tweeting a link to an Onion headline isn't that interesting.

01:28:46Guest:How do you push the envelope?

01:28:47Guest:That was cool to think about.

01:28:48Guest:My little strategy nerd brain loved that.

01:28:51Guest:And the comedian in me loved it too.

01:28:53Guest:Then it was, oh, you have this political stuff.

01:28:56Guest:Okay, and I ran the election coverage in 2008.

01:28:58Guest:That was the main job.

01:29:00Guest:Pull that together.

01:29:01Guest:War for the White House.

01:29:02Guest:Integrate what's being done.

01:29:04Guest:Come up with new features, new ways to be funny.

01:29:06Guest:We did map jokes.

01:29:07Guest:We did Twitter jokes.

01:29:08Guest:We started blogging and created these blogger characters to cover the campaign from a ridiculous point of view.

01:29:14Guest:That was kind of cool.

01:29:15Guest:And I got to do the comedy.

01:29:18Guest:It's obviously a comedy institution.

01:29:20Guest:So I learned.

01:29:21Guest:I got to be around some of the best, funniest people that I've ever worked with.

01:29:25Guest:And the book was a way to keep doing that kind of integration narrower for me.

01:29:32Marc:Well, that sounds amazing, man.

01:29:34Marc:It sounds like it was quite a journey.

01:29:36Marc:Are you going to do another book?

01:29:37Marc:Someday.

01:29:38Marc:But you're okay right now.

01:29:39Guest:For now, I'm good.

01:29:40Guest:Now we're doing the- We're doing the cultivated wit thing.

01:29:42Guest:We're trying to innovate in comedy and digital and create new forms of all this stuff with the hackathons and the apps and the- Well, good for you for not limiting yourself.

01:29:53Guest:And maybe there will be some, the thing that I didn't do through the lampoon and kind of pursue the-

01:30:01Guest:the storytelling for screen, there's a possibility of that.

01:30:05Guest:There's never any guarantees that that works out.

01:30:07Guest:I have enough people in this business to know.

01:30:09Guest:Yeah, no, you just keep swinging.

01:30:11Guest:Don't hang your hopes on that.

01:30:12Guest:Not on show business.

01:30:13Guest:I got a lot of hooks to put my hat on.

01:30:14Guest:Also, I wear a hoodie.

01:30:15Guest:Yeah.

01:30:16Guest:Well, you're covered.

01:30:18Guest:Thanks, Baratunda.

01:30:18Guest:Thank you so much, Mark.

01:30:20Guest:It was great.

01:30:20Guest:It was a pleasure.

01:30:22Marc:That's our show, folks.

01:30:27Marc:I hope you like that.

01:30:28Marc:I hope we learned.

01:30:29Marc:Good guy.

01:30:30Marc:Funny guy.

01:30:31Marc:Very bright guy.

01:30:32Marc:Enjoyed that chat a lot.

01:30:34Marc:Hope you did.

01:30:35Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.

01:30:39Marc:Get on that mailing list.

01:30:40Marc:Get the app.

01:30:41Marc:Get that free app.

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01:30:47Marc:Only the most recent 50 are available for free.

01:30:52Marc:Deaf Black Cat, I'm waiting for you.

01:30:54Marc:Boomer lives, as we all know.

01:30:56Marc:I'll see you in Rochester.

01:30:57Marc:I'll see you in Toronto.

01:30:59Marc:See you back in L.A.

01:31:00Marc:I'm around.

01:31:00Marc:I'll see you at the L.A.

01:31:01Marc:Podfest.

01:31:03Marc:Oh, boy.

01:31:04Marc:I'm going to go inside and be nice to my fiancé and see if that works.

01:31:13Marc:Boomer lives!

01:31:14Boomer lives!

01:31:23so