W. Kamau Bell dissects systemic inequities—from Hollywood’s limited Black A-list roles (e.g., Denzel Washington’s constrained archetypes) to boxing’s corruption (fragmented sanctioning bodies like WBA/WBC) and tech-driven gentrification (San Francisco’s $15M+ homes, Apple’s $60B reserves). He critiques capitalism’s exploitation of labor (Walmart’s $3B potential loss from fair wages) and institutional racism (CIA’s 1980s drug operations in ghettos), proposing universal therapy and equitable public resources. Bell contrasts Obama’s cautious reforms with urgent needs like Ferguson, while Rogan suggests community centers to curb systemic neglect. Their discussion ties personal struggles—like Tiger Woods’ fame-induced trauma—to broader societal failures. [Automatically generated summary]
I've talked about this a little bit before that it used to be you only knew the shit that you knew that was directly in front of you that you want information you either sought out or your friends brought to you.
But now on Facebook and Twitter, people are like finding out about Ray Rice who were like, I didn't know there was a thing called the NFL. You know what I mean?
Like everybody's getting everybody's shit so that the NFL has had domestic violence for, you know, since the dawn of the NFL and not that it's...
Any worse than regular society, but they've had it.
But now it's at the point where people who never were paying attention to the NFL are noticing it.
Also, people are going and looking through the past of a lot of these different guys.
I think whenever you're dealing with a bunch of super athletes who are also involved in an incredibly aggressive sport, and you add in head trauma, repeated head trauma, and a lot of them, like Ray Rice has said, that that's how he was raised.
I had a history professor on yesterday, Thaddeus Russell, who explained that exact same thing, how all these different cultures integrate into society and they're considered non-whites.
Well, it was also, his take on it was the unique aspect of America, is that America was the country that had...
This Puritan value system, like these people came over and they had this really repressive value system, very repressed society, but they also had slaves.
And the slaves didn't accept any of that, and then they became part of the culture, radically influenced the art, radically influenced the language.
I mean, this is one of the most unique things about America, is the African-American influence, and the Western Africans integrating into this really fucked up, Puritan, very repressed society, and then you see in America, like...
90% of all entertainment comes out of here.
A massive amount of innovation comes out of here.
A massive difference in the way we speak English as opposed to the way English people speak English.
There's so many variables that came out of that.
And it makes you think, like, how much of...
Kind of bringing it all back to the Peterson thing of beating his kids.
How much of the way human beings live our lives is based just on the momentum of the people that came before us?
Whether it's his parents that beat him, or some fucking weird...
Puritanical society that you just unluckily were born into?
And I lived in the, I swear to say the North, but I lived with my mom in the North, so I didn't know, that wasn't a thing in the North that you couldn't say what.
So I didn't know, and I felt really, like, tricked.
Like, I felt entrapped.
Like, nobody, give me a list of rules of how it works here in the South, and I won't do those things.
Well, kids, when they're starting to sort of find themselves, when they're starting to establish their own identity, one of the first things they do is immediately try to challenge the way you discipline them and the way you...
Like, my daughter loves doing that.
I'll say to her, hey, come on, we've got to go do something.
We have to go, they did that, and I'm going to try to do something one better.
And I think...
Specifically the culture of athletes is that if you're a professional athlete, you've probably been coddled since you were in high school and you've been given a different set of rules to live by so that somebody who grew up with Ray Rice who maybe came out of the neighborhood may not be doing the things he's doing because they work at fucking Walmart and they're not allowed to tell people what the fuck they think all the time and they're not allowed to do those things.
But Ray Rice as a professional athlete, as a star, is living by a completely different set of rules.
I was on an airplane, it was really funny, and there was this guy and his wife, and they were in front of us, and the guy was going over the golf score, and the woman had like a golf visor on, so I guess they probably both played golf.
And the guy was going over there and he goes like this.
Yeah, you didn't even have your man weight on you.
You didn't have shoulders yet.
You're suddenly one of those famous people on the planet.
I understand why on his side, as a kid who was a nerd and went to Stanford and his dad just made him play golf forever, that he was like, I think I'd like to have sex with lots of women.
I just never had that chance.
And I know I got married and that was probably a dumb idea.
So, just the idea that you're lifting weights to keep your body strong, but in doing so, sometimes you create all this tension, and then that tension fucks up your feel for where the ball's going.
And I would imagine a guy like Tiger started getting pretty buff.
You know, there's a lot of that in how you knock a ball around on a golf course as well, right?
Last night I did Largo, and I had the other comics backstage when we were talking.
But I think it was because I wanted to do that because there was a lot of industry people out there, and I just didn't want to focus too much on the fact that, like, oh, this is just my career.
That, for some reason, some fucking suits decided they should take it from the very profitable FX and move it to FXXXXX, which nobody even was informed was a real channel.
Well, you, you know, you were known for being a stand-up comic, and then all of a sudden you hear, oh, FX is doing a show with Kamau Bell, and it's being produced by Chris Rock.
And what you did, I thought, that was really unique is you tackled some pretty interesting subjects and some things you never see discussed, like rape jokes.
I mean, you had that thing with Lindy West, is that her name?
And coming from the world of stand-up, and also the world of doing the solo show that got me the thing, I had friends helping me, and I had people who helped me, but it was ultimately, it was my words were the thing that were coming out of my mouth, and my ideas.
People could say, you should do this.
And I'd be like, oh, think about it.
But when you're in that meat grinder environment, especially when it became daily, there's so many people who are sort of yelling things at you.
And at some point, if you can't top their idea, you sort of go, I guess we'll do that.
Or if somebody goes, like I just said this yesterday, somebody will be like, oh, you know what?
I was thinking we could do a cold open.
Well, I don't really want to do a cold open because that's just not the kind of show I want.
Well, I think if we have a big guest on, we'll do the cold open.
Well, I don't really want to do that.
Well, I asked the guest.
He wants to do it.
Okay, I guess we'll do it.
And then the guest shows up and you go, we're doing this cold open.
He's like, I don't want to do it.
And you go, oh, but we already bought the whipped cream.
And suddenly in this position of like, why are we doing this?
There's this machine of television and this machine that suddenly you're just...
It was like a meat grinder and either I was putting the meat in the grinder or I was the meat for the grinder.
And in that format when it was daily, a lot of days I was the meat.
But he had to, from everything I read, Comedy Central didn't want it.
But he was in a position where he wasn't being told he was the face of the network.
And that all the pressure was on him.
Because he had South Park and he had all the other stuff on Comedy Central, whereas on FX... On FXX, they had one night of original programming that included me when it was like The League or It's Always Sunny or Jim Jefferies.
Every other night, it would be like somebody would be at home watching a Mad About You rerun and enjoying it.
And then suddenly a black guy would come on screaming about the events of the day.
If you're watching a rerun of some sitcom from the 90s and you're enjoying it, which you can, and then suddenly I come on screen and I'm basically the opposite of that.
I'm a guy who's talking about right now.
I'm not talking about what happened in the 90s.
And I'm a black guy and you're just watching a bunch of white people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan talk about, well, how are we going to get to the coffee shop if we don't bob it up?
And then I come on there talking about homophobia.
It's a hard transition, whereas if there's a network that's programmed where I'm a part of the package, then things will segue one into the other.
And that I thought was an interesting approach of your show that you don't really see too much when it comes to controversial issues.
Like a guy who instead of pretending to be the expert in everything, the voice of reason, you kind of laid back and asked questions and tried to piece it together on the spot.
The Man on the Street stuff we did was always the stuff people responded to the best, in addition to the debates we did.
But when I would go in the street and talk to people, and we would make comedy out of what we were talking about, whether we agreed or not, just out of me talking to them about whatever the issues were.
And that stuff, I always felt like my comedy, it doesn't work if I pretend to be the smartest guy in the room.
Right.
People say I'm smart, which sometimes when people say that, they go, you're smart.
Yeah, so it's become a thing where unless you live there for 40 years and own your property, old people are being kicked out of apartments they've lived in for their entire lives because landlords are turning their buildings into condos, and it's really a big deal there.
You know, that's a big thing about it is it's not about kindness and love and understanding so much as about pushing their idea what kindness, love, and understanding should be.
And if you disagree, you're a fucking male pig, patriarch, asshole, white privilege, piece of shit, dying of fire.
No, but I think people don't realize, and that's what the show was trying to do, that people get caught up in like, I'm a, for example, my friends, I have militant black friends who are like, militant black is the thing, and they sort of ignore the gay rights side of it, and suddenly somebody starts talking about gay rights, like, no, that's not important.
It's militancy, black militancy.
And then there's gay people who are like, no, no, no, immigration's not important.
And so people get caught in their lane.
And the show and my life is about, all of us on the right side of the issues need to get in the same hot tub together and figure it out.
There's a very famous story about a guy, I don't know if you heard this one, a few years ago.
He was a newscaster, and he was a gay guy that was in the closet.
He was on, like, Oklahoma TV or some shit like that.
And, you know, one of those, thanks, Bob.
All right, today's top story.
You know, one of those fucking weird guys.
He woke up with a dead guy next to him.
They had been doing crystal meth all night and having gay sex, and the guy had a belt around his neck, and the guy had this asphyxiated while doing autoerotic asphyxiation, and he passed out.
They passed out together in this hot tub.
So he woke up, you know, in the hot tub, methed out, doing pills with a blue guy next to him with a belt around his neck.
It's funny, one of my favorite things about San Francisco, and just favorite things I ever saw in San Francisco was, so, gay community, crystal meth has been a problem in the gay community.
There was a billboard in San Francisco, like on the bus shelter, like in the gay neighborhood where I had to, I used to take the bus from there because I'd hang out.
And there was a billboard and it was a guy, like all it was, it was a billboard that said don't do crystal meth or something.
And the image of the billboard was a guy, I'll just do it like, so it's like you're standing over his shoulder and he's doing this.
Yes.
And it was implying that he was getting fucked in the ass and didn't know it because he was on crystal meth.
It was like, he's got this horrified look on his face, and he's got his shirt off, and it's from the perspective of like, oh, some guy is fucking him in the ass.
I mean, I think it gets a lot of credit for that, and I think that it can be, but I also think that if you, like, the comedy crowds get attention for being smart, I think that can be true, but it's also, you can also walk into a San Francisco club and be like, where did these people come from?
You know what I mean?
Tourists.
Tourists, but there's also just a lot of, like, you know, I don't want to try, bridge and tunnel.
There's a lot of, like, people coming into San Francisco.
I mean, unless we want to storm the streets and get all, like, Ukraine in there, the concentrated wealth makes it damn near impossible.
Because the first, not the first wave, but when I moved to San Francisco in the 90s, there was the dot-com, the first dot-com bubble, and they tried to gentrify the mission.
And back then, what they were doing was tearing down stuff and building new things.
The neighborhood flexed on them and said, and the mission's a historically Latino neighborhood, and the neighborhood flexed and said, no, you can't do this.
And I don't know how they did it, but they stopped them.
But now, the money is so much bigger, and the bubble didn't burst, and it's Google money, And Facebook money, which is going to last for the end of time, time being 10 years from now, but that the money's so concentrated that, and they're now being sneaky about how they gentrify.
They don't tear the buildings down.
They make the buildings look like they're the same buildings.
So you just go, you just suddenly, you don't know that the neighbor's gentrified, but then you go, man, there sure are a lot more wine bars around here than there used to be, but they don't look like that from the outside.
But they've kept the outsides in such a way that it's more invisible.
But yeah, there's the Google bus in San Francisco.
All the Googleites used to live in Mountain View down by Palo Alto.
But then Google just did this thing that's become very controversial.
They have a free bus that will take you from certain San Francisco neighborhoods straight to Google.
So that the 25-year-old people who work at Google can live in the cool hip city, but then get to work for free.
But what that does is that every stop on the Google bus line, it changes the neighborhood.
Because people want to live next to the Google bus line, and so then suddenly neighborhoods that, like it would have been a poor neighborhood or a struggling neighborhood, people are buying the property there and renovating things and then pushing the other people out of the neighborhood.
So in a sense, the Google bus, which is good, because it keeps cars off the highway, and it also helps Google out because people get on the bus and start working right away.
So when people go, it's great, we have free Wi-Fi!
No, that's so you can work...
So it takes cars off the road.
It keeps people from living in places they don't want to live, but it changes the neighborhood and kicks people out of the neighborhood.
It's a very super controversial thing that San Francisco is dealing with right now.
The concentrated wealth artificially inflates the values of everything around it, which means people who've lived there forever suddenly are being told, you can't live here anymore.
If you say capitalism unchecked, Capitalism, I feel like, unless you sort of go, hey, maybe we should keep an area for people who've lived here.
We shouldn't allow people to get kicked out of their houses.
Old people should never be kicked out of their houses if they're paying the rent that they agreed to pay when they moved in 800 years ago.
That's the things that have to be...
People should be allowed to buy whatever property they want to buy that's for sale, but it's also a thing where you shouldn't make it easier on those people and harder on the people who actually don't have the ability to go live somewhere else.
Yeah, and it's not nice, but for $600 a month, it's nice!
And I think about that, and there's no way anywhere in the Bay Area that she could ever...
We talk about her moving out there, and I'm like, I'm not making that FX money anymore.
We have to figure out, I've got to get something else going before we can move you out here, because you're not going to find anything for $600 a month.
They're all very nice, but like San Francisco, it's thick with it, the Bay Area, because it's temperate, and we have social services for those people, and that is a good thing.
And I lived in a neighborhood where I knew all the homeless people, and they were all pretty cool.
There was rarely a time when I had a problem with it, you know?
And they just do their thing.
And you know what's also great, the hidden benefit of homeless people?
In San Francisco, there's a culture, if you walk out of a restaurant and you have leftovers, and you don't want to eat them, you just put them on a trash can, and you blink, and they're gone.
Well, yeah, and I think, I don't know for sure, but from what I heard in the Bay Area, when Reagan was governor, he opened up the doors in the hospital.
America's probably number one issue is mental health issues.
To take it back to the football player thing, the NFL Rookie Symposium should involve sitting down with a therapist and talking about, okay, you're about to make a lot of money and you've had everything in your life, but let's try to figure out what in your past is going to lead you to make bad decisions in the future.
I think it's something that the people that are involved in the sport, from high school to college coaches to everyone, it's something that's not addressed, but it's one of the most difficult aspects of competitive athletic sports, combat sports as it were.
Yeah, so I think that just the realities of dealing with being a combat athlete or any sort of explosive athlete, you're dealing with physical contact on a regular basis, call it whatever you want.
It's hard to be a functional member of a calm, staid, normal society on top of doing that at the same time.
Yeah, and just especially like you're saying, To me, I always think about the fact that these guys, again, it's like the professional athletes have been since high school, now since 7th or 8th grade, been sort of, the rules have been changed for them.
And they've been coddled, and you don't have to go to class.
Yes, and what I ran into on my shows, because I didn't grow up wanting to, because I've read both the late night books that Bill Carter wrote, all those dudes grew up wanting to be late night talk show hosts.
Like Conan and Kimmel, Letterman was their hero, and Carson was their hero.
I didn't grow up that way.
I grew up...
Chris Rock was my hero.
You know what I mean?
Like, I want to be a stand-up...
And he had a show on HBO that I was like, I want...
Look, I don't agree with a lot of the social justice warriors and their tactics and the professional victim mentality that a lot of them portray, but...
The point is, like, really whiny, overly sensitive, super progressive, aggressive people.
I think, though, that it opens up the dialogue and forces people to, even if you're communicating about it in a way where you're defending your position, that conversation gets, like, a perfect one, a perfect subject is, this subject is coming up a lot lately, where a lot of feminists are trying to push the idea that if a person has sex with someone that's been drinking, that it's rape.
Always?
Yes, they're saying you can't consent, including men.
They're saying a woman having sex with a drunk man, she's raping that man, because he's not able to consent because he's drinking.
Not only that, there's a giant spectrum of what intoxication is.
Also, it takes away a lot of responsibility where you are forced to be responsible for your actions if you're driving.
You're forced to be responsible for your actions if you engage in a violent activity.
But somehow or another, if you're drinking and someone has sex with you, you were raped.
The same amount of intoxication that you would be liable for driving, liable for violent actions, now you're not liable for your actions.
It seems ridiculous.
And it also, it discredits women in a lot of ways because you're saying that they're not capable of forming their own decisions and deciding that they want to have a couple of drinks and fuck some guy.
I mean, it's not always a negative thing, and that's the problem with broad strokes, like painting with broad strokes.
In introducing this dialogue and discussion and making people angry about this debate, they are bringing up the very real situation of people drugging people and getting people drunk and having sex with them, which is disgusting.
People don't hear you when you say, I'd like to talk about racism in America and just see if we can finally...
Nobody wants to hear that.
I love when there's people sometimes so far, because the right is filled with people who are so far on the right and are always barking and people don't get a lot of attention.
The left has historically been ashamed of that.
Like, we don't want to get too loud.
And so for me, it's like, we need a couple of those people who show us where the middle should be.
You know, who are so far, okay, we don't want to do that.
But by going to the parks and sitting out and getting your bongos out and knitting for justice or whatever and feeding people and giving out books, now that is in the...
People on the right will say income inequality in the 1%, not realizing that they've adopted the speech of the left.
And so that means sometimes you have to have a tantrum To get some attention.
And I think coming from historically black people, we are used to like, okay, we need to have a tantrum.
Sometimes that tantrum is inventing rock and roll.
And sometimes it's a million man march, you know?
It's just that's the nature of getting attention in America as an oppressed group.
But the point is that these movements that you see like in New York City where they're clogging the streets, that could easily happen at the White House.
Yes.
That's fucking terrifying for them.
If a million people just stormed the White House and tore it to the ground, you know, stomped to death, all the fucking Secret Service agents were holding their heads up to the camera.
Well, no, not—I mean, you know, ISIS is doing a good job of recruiting people right now with some Hollywood-style videos, and, you know, if somebody in America picked up that ball, you know, I think that's what the White House is afraid of right now, is that clearly ISIS, or ISIL, whatever you call it, is recruiting from here.
But at least it's like, it's stirring the pot here in a way.
Nobody thought Al-Qaeda was recruiting from, it was like, oh, going to get American people to do it.
Every now and again there was one, but this is like actually, there's a sense that they are recruiting.
Like there was that, in that video that they released, there's the one shot of like a cell phone video of somebody driving past the White House and shooting video of the White House, which everybody can do.
But the fact that it was in the ISIS video is like, oh shit, it implies something.
But yeah, I think we could do that, but the only way that happens in America is you have to make it seem legitimate and you have to make it sexy.
That should not be a thing that he got to the White House door.
It should have been, I'm over the fence.
Oh, my God, the dogs are eating me.
Oh, well, this didn't go well.
It reminds me of that scene in Casino when they talk about Ocean's Eleven, the most successful Vegas heist robberies, and it's only people who got to the door.
I mean, I don't think in our lifetime, I don't know, if we're going to ever see some sort of a crazy million group of people that are storming the government like we saw in Egypt, like we saw in Libya.
If more things happen in America and we think it's a direct result of mismanagement, misgovernment, corruption, what have you, and people die and Chicago's blown off the face of the map, some ugly shit could go down.
I mean, I'm not trying to take people's guns away, but when has a cache of guns stopped the government from taking anybody down, if they wanted to take them down?
Well, as I understand it, as I was taught in high school American history class, when they wrote it, they were like, this will just set the country up for about 20 years, and then we'll come back and look at this.
Right.
Like, this is just the, we're done with the British, we gotta make sure they don't come back, so we need militias just in case they show up again.
But this is just to get us started.
Right.
And it became sacrosanct.
It became like, this is the, it became another chapter of the Bible.
Like, I was black church, Methodist church, Baptist church.
So, I can't help but retreat to that sometimes when the shit hits the fan.
Like, you know, oh, Jesus help.
Like, but I don't expect him to walk through the door.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm not...
I don't believe that there is a guy in heaven looking down on me.
But I do like to think of the universe as being a place where...
Where if you live a good life and have order, that things will work out for you.
And so, and certainly I will retreat to, you know, I like to think that, it makes me feel comforted to go, thanks God, but I'm not going, before we get started, let's have a prayer.
You know what I'm saying?
It's culturally, God has been cultured, I've been cultured with God.
And it doesn't, and it seems to have worked out, but I don't want to go to church.
Well, I think it is that, but it's also, those people, they go there because that's the place where they're permitted to have it, but they're living it the whole year.
Sometimes they're just dressed like a furry in their house, you know what I'm saying?
But then that's the year they go, it's like Christmas, we're allowed to hang the lights and do all the shit, and it's just fun!
But then some people also carry, they have a cross on their wall, you know?
I don't think there's much difference ultimately between a Spider-Man poster on your wall, then a cross on your wall, if that's the thing that you're focused on, you know?
There's certainly, and I live in San Francisco where people are hyper-focused about their version of their life.
Like, I want to live my life this way, I want to go to this coffee shop, and I go to this bar, and I do leather things on the weekend, and I go to the Folsom Street Fair, and that, to me, it's like, that's your religion.
That's the thing that makes you feel better about the world, and that's how you put order on the world.
But you're not, and your God may be that, you know, that I'm going to live the best gay lifestyle I have or that I'm going to be the best, you know, whatever.
There's all, we all have gods.
We just don't want to put that word on them.
So for me, my God is actually, I put the word God on there because I don't want to be a hypocrite and be like, I'm like, basically when I went, when I met my wife, she was in religious studies major or she was in graduate school for that.
And I was like, I did the thing that everybody says, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual.
She's like, that's full of shit.
You know, take a, what do you believe?
And I was like, I guess I believe in God.
But it's like if you say that, people start to get quiet like, you guys are getting quiet right now.
But there's a, I mean, certainly there's, that's the thing, and I feel very comfortable in not, because I'm not trying to convince you guys, I feel very comfortable in not being able to prove the thing that I sort of walk around with.
But I believe that we all, that there are things that we put in our, and I'm not, this isn't even criticism.
It's just there are things that people put in their life, like I don't believe in God, and then you see that they spend, whatever you're spending the most time doing that you feel like is making you a better person, that's your God.
The reality is, I've seen way more fucked up shit doing psychedelic drugs than anybody has ever described in the Bible.
You know, if you go to heaven and it's just a guy with a harp and angels and St. Peter's really at the pearly gates and the floor's made out of clouds, like, that would be so normal in comparison to, like, a DMT trip.
He's, like, sort of, me and a friend of mine talk, he's kind of like a surrogate dad, like Denzel Washington.
I don't know him, but in the movies, there was a period of my life where, like, I felt like Denzel was helping me figure out.
He's the last black actor in Hollywood who is sort of carrying the baton for this is how to be a black man.
You know what I'm saying?
And that's an important thing to have in the black community, especially when you grow up like...
I know who my dad is.
I've met him several times.
I'm fucking around.
I know him.
I used to visit him in the summer.
But I didn't grow up with my dad in the house, and so I found surrogate dads in places In entertainment, who I felt like this is a person I should try to be like.
Bruce Lee was a surrogate dad of mine, you know, that just showed me that, again, helping me learn a moral code and giving me an example of how to be an adult and how to be a man.
There's a thing about movies and, like, having someone who maybe even is an unrealistic depiction of a human being, like, so moral and ethical and powerful and strong, but that can be empowering if you want to be like Denzel Washington.
When I was in that movie theater, I was acutely aware, first of all, that we were the only white people in there, and I was also acutely aware that every fucking ad for every preview, every movie, was white people.
It was all white people, and I was like, whoa!
But being in that position, having that perspective of being a white person in an all-black movie theater, I was like, Whoa!
And being high as fuck made me super sensitive to it.
And there was only one white guy that interacted with a black guy in all the previews.
And it was Jonah Hill in some fucking goofy-ass movie about playing a babysitter where he brings the kids and talks to this black doorman and he's talking to them in this really fucking depressing slang.
And then the black guy says to him, like, you're a bad motherfucker.
I'm like, what?
What world is this taking place in?
And it was so bizarre.
Then, Planet of the Apes plays, and everyone in the movie is white except the bad guy who's a black guy who fucking forces the drugs to get into the monkeys, and then the monkeys go loose and take over the world.
When it's a stone face like that, and then slowly people laugh at it, like slowly the audience starts to, they're not laughing with it, they're laughing at it.
That happens in San Francisco sometimes, and people are like, they're actually like, no, we're laughing at you, movie.
For me, I remember the time I off, I remember where I just felt like, why'd you just let me down?
It was Steve Martin in the movie with Queen Latifah, and some sort of thing where she's the blah, blah, blah, and he's the blah, blah, blah, and together they got the blah.
And the trailer's just her being a very outsized version of a black woman and him being a very narrow version of a white guy.
And in the middle of it, Steve Martin, one of the greatest comedians of all time, He was in the Comedy Hall of Fame, does the thing where he walks through a black club all gangstered out in a jersey, and he's walking like a quote-unquote black guy.
Well, it's also you're never dealing with things from a neutral point, because you're dealing with things from the repercussions of all the other shit that you've seen already before that.
Yeah, and the thing is, as has been stated by many people, is that in this country, most people watching those trailers that you saw aren't going, these are a bunch of white people in these trailers.
They're going, there's a bunch of people in these trailers.
But then if you show the trailer for Friday After Next, then it's a bunch of black people in those trailers.
Because white is considered to be normal in this country.
That's the...
White is the default.
It's like on the census, which if you pull up the census form, the first category on the race category, the list of races, is white.
So it's not alphabetical.
It's just, okay, white.
And if you're not that, what else are you?
And it's like, white people are busy.
So it's that white is considered the default.
And when people say things like, I've talked about this before, People magazine is about white people for the most part.
But Essence says it's a black magazine.
Right.
And I feel like white people, one way to sort of put less racism in the world is white people have to start putting white on their magazines.
They have to start, if white people got more comfortable with talking about their whiteness, it would make the rest of us not look crazy when we talked about our ethnicity.
But sometimes when I go, as a black man, people go, why do you have to?
Because some white people, it wouldn't fly because white, when people, historically in this country, when people identify themselves as white, it's the Klan or it's the Nazis.
And I feel like good white people like yourselves have to take whiteness back.
And over there, they're like, it's okay to hate Arabs.
That's different.
But...
But in this country, white became this invented concept, and the reason why white power is hard for people to take is because white people already got the power.
When Cain Velasquez's tattoo says brown pride, it's because brown people don't feel like they've got enough power, and it's a way to invoke a feeling of power, and invoke the thing that brown people have been shit on, and I'm going to take the power back.
Black power came out of black people going, we're tired of being shit on, so we're going to say black power.
Like, think of a movie with Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman and just load it up with the greatest African-American stars ever in a fucking giant blockbuster, like Quentin Tarantino-style movie, just gigantic, huge fucking blockbuster movie.
I was flipping past the channels and I flipped past the country music channel and I stopped because it was a video that was playing on the country music channel, except there was black people in it.
And I was like, whoa, what's going on here?
There's black people in this country video?
Darius Rucker.
That's exactly it!
And I thought that was so funny!
I'm like, oh, since a black guy's singing it, we can throw a black couple in this country music video!
And Denzel Washington is in these movies where, for example, he was in the Pelican Brief, and it's one of those movies where him and Julia Roberts should end up banging, and they don't.
They don't.
And I don't know whose decision that is, but it's like George Clooney, no matter what movie he did, it ends up at the end with him kissing the girl and then the credits rolling.
There's clearly a thing that he's walking a path that I don't want to be caught up in a thing where he's still holding the baton of blackness in a way or another that people after him don't have to hold it.
What I was talking about- You know, like, he's not going to do that movie unless that dude gets murdered by Oprah at the end.
My problem with Tyler Perry movies is that there's not enough black filmmakers out there making movies to not make him look like that's the definitive story of black people.
And so it's frustrating when people go, that's it, right there.
That's the version of it.
And you go, if there was other filmmakers, if Spike Lee was still a, like, I mean, he's a viable filmmaker.
But if there was, like, there was a point in the 90s where black people started directing movies, you thought, oh, we're going to have a lot of major black movie directors.
For example, I can't go, I don't have an opinion on Tyler Perry movies.
You'd be like, come on, man.
Right.
But you can go, I don't have an opinion on what he's on.
And you'd be like, I guess he doesn't.
He just maybe doesn't think about it.
But I have to, as a black person, reckon with Tyler Perry.
I'm glad he's employing people.
He certainly employs more black actresses than anybody else.
And if you're a black actress in Hollywood and your version is getting beat by Idris Elba in a movie or or the the Christian mom who finally meets a man and has a girls club or whatever the shit is that he's doing.
I've not only I've not seen any of them, but I get you go.
I think I'll do the thing where I play the woman who has a who's a single mom living in the hood, trying to get a better opportunity versus Idris Elba going upside your head for 90 minutes.
You know, I.
So I appreciate that.
I used to be very, like, fuck Tyler Perry about it, but I just sort of...
I think you can't be that guy without being, and I say this in the best way possible, a hustler.
You can't have gotten to the point that he's at without making time to do as many things as you can do.
Because somebody was living out of his car and doing plays in Baptist churches or something.
Was he?
Yeah.
The things he did in movies started out as plays that he did in community centers and Probably church basements, and he'd build them up to a thing that you'd go to the Apollo and see a Tyler Perry play.
Like black theater, because it's like urban black theater.
You started getting tweeted when I was involved in this conversation with a lot of people about racism and Jon Jones.
And you were chiming in about it.
And that was a weird conversation.
Not...
Not because the idea that people being racist against a young fighter, like when you see a guy that's doing very well and has a lot of success, and then you see a lot of blowback and people criticizing him, I always wonder, like, what is it that they're criticizing?
They're criticizing his personal life, his behavior, like, what is he doing that's so terrible?
What is it?
How much of that is racism?
And when I said, how much of that is racism...
Holy shit, did people get mad.
I said, I wonder, how much of that is racism?
And then I also said, I think he'd be more popular if he was white.
And people were like, so you're saying that we don't like him because we're...
People made these big jumps and big conclusions.
I'm saying, are you saying that he wouldn't be more popular if he was white?
Because I think that's ridiculous.
Because there's more white people than there are black people, and white people tend to associate...
I saw that, and that's why I chimed in, because I was like, I felt like, oh, Joe is experiencing something that I experience all the time in these discussions.
And that's why I sort of reached out like I was trying to reach and go, hey man, I know what's happening here.
They saw it on print somewhere, and then it was on the cover of a bunch of different news outlets saying, Joe Rogan attributes Jon Jones' lack of success to racism.
Well, a similar thing, much smaller, happened to me recently.
I wrote...
I saw it.
BuzzFeed.
BuzzFeed reached out to me and said, do you want to write a thing about lack of diversity in late night?
And they're like, you may be over-talking about it.
I go, no, I'll write a thing about it.
I got things to say about it.
And my thing was, it's true.
I noticed you can't say it's not white in late night.
White in male.
Because they wanted to make it white.
I was like, no, it's white in male.
Let's be real.
And...
But my thing is, I'm not worried about late night.
We need to stop focusing on getting diversity in late night, and the rest of us need to do what we always do, find our own projects and create our own way.
The way that this is a reaction to late night talk show, that you're like, I want to just talk.
I don't want to have to do a skit.
And then the Hollywood Reporter says, W. Kamau Bell, their headline was, it's time for a black host in late night.
Yeah, I'm not saying, but it's definitely like he's, you're black, you're better than everybody, and you didn't come up the way we want you to have come up into this sport.
I mean, I just, I feel like that was the thing that I, when I first heard about Jon Jones, was that there was this, the myth was created Like, you know, he learned from watching YouTube videos.
And people kind of don't like when, this is the thing we talk about, like with young Cassius Clay, when somebody is so young and so much better than everybody, and then you put the black thing on top of that.
He might have got that if he was white and so much better than everybody.
Yeah, and I think that MMA at this point, I feel like if I ever made sort of fuck you money or money, I would open jiu-jitsu gyms in the ghetto to train the next generation of black MMA fighters because I feel like there's guys in there who could be...
MMA is a very white sport right now.
Now, black guys historically have been fighters like professional boxers, but professional boxing got so corrupt that the strongest, toughest black guy now plays for the NFL. He's not a boxer.
He's not a heavyweight.
I don't think they'll be a black heavyweight champion really ever again.
He's the guy that got famous recently because there was some crazy fuck who was on the internet who was talking all kinds of crazy shit to him, and so he met him in a boxing ring and beat the shit out of him.
But I think the problem is it's the same thing we talked about earlier.
You come out of the bad neighborhood.
They learn you're an athlete.
They don't teach you how to be a good manager.
You're signing with a boxing manager, Don King, who's just like, just sign this blank piece of paper.
I'll take care of it.
So, it's a recurring process that happens in that thing, whereas at least if you go to the NFL, you get a contract.
You get an actual thing that we're going to pay you this much.
Now, it's not guaranteed, or if you go to the NBA, you get a guaranteed contract.
Or, my theory is that a lot of those dudes go, instead of going into a boxing ring and getting my brains beaten out, I'm just going to hang out with the best basketball player in town and be in his posse.
It doesn't pay as much, but at least I'm not getting ripped off.
And so I don't want him to fight that guy because if he loses, then we lose all our things.
So it's not what's good for the sport.
It's what's good for the bottom line and the dollar.
And what the...
And so, therefore, it leads to corruption.
It leads to, like, things that happen where, why aren't these fights happening?
And also, the thing with Don King, you know, he, Tyson will tell, you know, I'm sure you've probably talked to Mike Tyson before, that Don King became the biggest promoter because he was ripping everybody the fuck off.
And so, there's no central authority to rule over and say, we have to clean this up.
He's just working, I think, for the 76ers until that kicks in.
And I think that Michael Jordan sort of established the modern NBA of like, you know, get a money manager and get a guy who protects your things and don't invest in stupid shit.
A guy like Mike Tyson grew up in Brownsville, poor as hell, and then all of a sudden he has hundreds of millions of dollars.
He's got tigers.
Charlie Murphy came on my podcast and told a fucking story about Mike Tyson, about showing up at Mike Tyson's house and Mike Tyson is on the front lawn playing with a tiger.
I don't think they're looking at it in terms of this long-term thing.
I think there's less people that are getting involved in boxing, first of all, because more people are getting involved in MMA. That's one thing that is definitely happening.
Because not that football's not hard to do, but you could be a great football player and never have the courage to be able to step into a ring on your own in your underwear and go toe-to-toe with a guy.
I see where you're coming from, but I really honestly don't think that it's coming from a point of like, okay, we've seen the future, this is where this ends up, let's not do this.
No, I'm not saying the future, but I think there's a sense that if you're a kid, if you're a kid who's 6'3", 250, and you go, man, do I want to be a basketball player like LeBron James or Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant?
I ran into him in Vegas a few years back, and I was listening to him talk to some fans, and he was slurring his words and could barely put a sentence together, and I was like, damn, I remember when Terry Norris was the champ!
He'll use roughhouse tactics to push them out of their game.
And he's just aware.
He understands what to do.
Boxing is one of those things where, if you look at it on...
Like, if you don't have any education in boxing and you watch it on television, like, well, this guy's trying to hit this guy and the other guy's faster so he can't hit him.
No, there's footwork involved.
He's doing movements that get you to react and he's anticipating your reaction and then giving you another thing to think about and then when you react to that, you're going to step here and he's ready with an overhand right.
And these things are all, in his mind, these are all foregone conclusions.
But to a young guy, he's just going to use his speed.
But you don't ever get a chance to use that speed.
He's already on you.
He's already making you move and dance to his rhythm.
He's the marionette.
You're the puppet.
And you don't realize it until it's the 10th round.
Well, this was like a guy who had, like an ex, it was in Philadelphia, this guy was an ex-boxer, had fought Sugar Ray Leonard, like that was his big story.
It lost to Sugar Ray Leonard, which is no...
No, this was a long time ago.
Yeah, I don't remember his name.
But he was a...
I would recognize...
Yeah, he fought Sugar Ray Leonard in Philly at the Blue Horizon.
Like, everything they're doing, they're all fucking wailing their arms all goofy, and they're not throwing their hips, lifting their feet up when they punch, and no one's correcting them.
Well, MMA has done it in a way where, like, if you organized an event, like, you call it the WFO, whatever the fuck it is, And you decided to have an event and you say, this is my WFO world champion.
That's a world champion.
That's what the WBA does for boxing, the IBF, the IBO. There's all these different organizations.
WBC. UFC is the thing.
It's like the NFL Super Bowl champion is the fucking NFL champion.
Whenever you have nets around the building where you work to keep people from jumping off the roof, because there's so many fucking people jumping off that you need nets.
Because that drives me nuts about not just cell phones, but about people that drive Priuses and shit and say, I'm helping the environment, I'm being socially conscious.
Hey, you're also driving a fucking box filled with conflict minerals.
Every fucking lithium-ion crystal in that came out of a fucking mine in the ground in Africa, and it's likely a child that might have been pulling it out.
Like when I go to pay, when I went to go try to buy a new phone and they said it's going to be $700, if I thought that that $700 was actually going to a living wage for somebody, maybe, I don't know if I'd buy it, but I would think about it, but I know it's like you're just making up a price.
Isn't there also, like, when you look at the amount of profit that Apple has made, and Apple has something like $60 billion in the fucking bank, like, how much would you have in the bank if you paid people more money to make those phones, and you made them in America, and you made less profit, but the people all made a living wage?
If they paid everybody like $12 an hour, they would make like $3 billion.
It's not like, how much profit do you need to make?
And at some point, and I get that you're allowed to set the price wherever you want.
I feel like I'm talking to my dad in my head right now.
But we all have to agree we live in a society that we're not individuals living on our little islands, but I think corporations treat it like we are all our own little country.
Well, there's a reason why there's something like a minimum wage and that we all kind of agree there should be some minimum wage is because corporations have no fucking soul.
No.
They're just about money.
They're about bottom line.
In fact, their duty to their shareholders is to increase their bottom line and they have to make more every year.
And the government should want you to be able to actually not just live for yourself, but also be married and afford to have a few kids, because that all feeds the economy.
When you start talking about minimum wage, the fucking quote-unquote economic experts...
By the way, here's what I've noticed.
Most of them aren't rich.
The people that fucking chime in on these discussions...
I've had...
Deep conversations with these people, like back and forth for a long time, but I know zero about economics.
And so when I've said, hey, I just think that people should be able to live on the amount of money that they make during the week, and people come up with all these reasons why that's bullshit, and all these reasons why that's bad for business, and all these reasons, and I eventually, in the conversation, I get to, how much do you make?
What do you do?
Do you run a business?
No, none of them run bucking businesses.
They all have this idea in their head that America is filled with people, and I've read this quote somewhere, I forget who to attribute it to, that think that they are about to become a millionaire, and they want to make sure that there's no laws in place, they're going to fuck them over once they become a millionaire.
No, it's the reason why people vote against their own personal interests, because I'm going to vote with the, and I'm not trying to But I'm going to vote with the Republican Party because they don't want taxes.
And one day I'm going to be rich and I'm not going to want taxes.
Even though it's like, well right now some taxes might help you.
You know what I mean?
Like it would help your community and your neighborhood.
Because people think that, everybody thinks they're one, not everybody, but a lot of people think they're one lottery ticket away from being in the 1%.
But it's weird how the Republican Party is a party that supports big business unequivocally, yet they're more supported by lower income conservative people.
Well, they also think that T-Rex might have been, like, vulture-shaped or vulture-colored, like, bright red-faced and black-bodied because they think that he might have been, like, intimidating because they think he was more of a...
They think it was more of...
Instead of a predator, he was more of a carrion eater.
He probably stole food away from somebody else who killed it because his body's all fucked up.
That's a weird thing, a comforting thing that I like about a lot of these internet-based, tech-based businesses.
They seem to be very ethical and moral.
Like, they seem to have a connect, like Google especially, Google and a lot of these companies, they're way more open and way more intelligent about their approach to ethics and morals than a lot of, like, other corporations.
Yeah, but I think it's probably like if, you know, I don't know, if Walmart is way over here is not ethical, moral, some people would say that Facebook is here.
They wouldn't say it's like all the way up to the other side.
How's the weird thing when you go to Google search something and it shows you all sorts of other shit that you might be interested in on the right-hand side?
And in some ways you're saying, yeah, people say we're giving up privacy, but people are willing to give up privacy if it comes with a coupon and some free stuff.
But the real problem is that we didn't know that the government was able to read your emails anytime they won.
These workers could just download your dick pics, send them off to each other.
If Edward Snowden is telling the truth, obviously I don't know, but he said that there's people in his office that were downloading emails from ex-girlfriends and shit and sharing photos and stuff.
I had a CIA guy in here, former CIA director of operations, whatever the fuck he was.
Really nice guy, but I played him, this guy Michael Rupert, talking about how they were selling drugs.
He was a former LA narcotics officer who...
He literally caught the CIA selling drugs in black communities, and was addressing the director of the CIA at the time, who got fired right after this, and I played it for him on the podcast, just watching him try to...
Dance around it.
I let it go after a while, but I didn't even get into Gary Webb or any of the cocaine plane that had been to Guantanamo Bay twice.
It crashed with tons of cocaine in it.
In Mexico?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of evidence that the CIA might have been involved in some form, or someone in the CIA. I mean, absolutely.
Yeah, you can't, you know, I mean, every now and again, there's a Rick Freeway Ross, but there's not, that's, that was the guy that I had on the podcast.
And one of the times that I had him on was he discussed how he got into a connection with this guy who was directly sending the profits to the fucking Contras.
I mean, the whole Contras and Sandinistas thing in Nicaragua, which was the Oliver North scandal that was on television, was all out of Freeway Ricky selling the coke.
I mean, he taught himself how to read in jail once he was arrested for that, and then found a loophole in the argument that got him arrested for three strikes, because it's supposed to be three different charges.
And he got two different charges was one time he was arrested.
And that doesn't count.
It's a three strikes law.
So they had to let him out.
He was going to be in jail for the rest of his life.
He figured that out on his own after he learned how to read in jail.
Yeah, no, and I feel like, again, as a person who sat in a lot of black barbershops in the basement of churches, I'm like, yeah, you don't get to tell me.
I don't believe in a lot of conspiracy theories, but to me that doesn't feel like a conspiracy theory.
That feels like, well, of course, how else would you get cocaine and crack in the ghetto unless somebody was greasing the palms to make that happen and that person worked and that was the government.
Well, not only that, if I was sitting around the government and I was sitting around with a bunch of...
Military industrial complex leaders and everyone's you know going over how to make money you go um You guys aware how much coke is getting sold in this country?
Yeah, it's a lot of code.
We're not gonna stop that Okay, they're gonna always so who's gonna make this money?
Do we want the the fucking Colombians to make the money or should we just make the money?
Yeah, we should probably make the money Yeah, not gonna stop coke But I feel like, I don't know if they even have the we're not going to stop at conversation.
I feel like it's like a new stock thing.
Hey, Coke's making a lot of money, let's invest in that.
I don't feel like it gets to the, hey, we can't stop the people from, you know, I don't think it's that godfather discussion where like, they're animals anyway, let them destroy themselves.
I think it's like, oh, that's making a lot of money.
So, Oakland, like a lot of cities that are thought of to be black cities, are over-policed and underserved, you know, because people...
To me, it's a structural institutional racism problem.
For example, and we can talk about it or not talk about it, but so that if a guy walks down the middle of the street saying, like sort of being a teenager who's a loud guy walking down the street...
A white teenager might get told, get the fuck out of the street.
And the guy goes, I'm not getting out of the street.
Dude, grab him, put him on the corner.
Don't do that shit again.
But a black teenager who walks on the middle of the street and goes, I'm not getting out of the street, ends up dead.
Is my opinion on that situation.
Things that would be sort of like, if you're white, they would be like, alright, we're not going to make a big deal out of this.
That when you're black, it can end up in your death.
Because of the approach to policing black people in this country.
I'm not going to necessarily say cops are the problem.
Cops, the way black people are policed, is a symptom of the fact that the cornerstone of America is racism.
And everything we built was on that.
And that's why people, you know, when you want to have the reparations discussion, it's like, you know how we got a lot of cheap labor in this country.
Like, you know, how do we get to be the richest country in the world for a while?
Because we had a 400-year head start on the labor.
You know what I mean?
Like, people weren't being paid to build this country.
I think that when the cornerstone of this country is founded on racism and the people who police the country are trying to protect the country's reputation and name, that means a lot of times they use racism as a part of how they police the country.
I think that you can't say affirmative action in this country without saying people go, oh, then a white man won't have a job!
But actually, you have to jumpstart the process.
For me, I literally said this earlier.
If every black person in this country was given therapy, because I feel like being black in America, you have a mild form of PTSD or a severe form of PTSD, depending upon where you live.
And you guarantee that the schools in the inner city were good, that they were well-funded public schools where you could get where you could be.
You may not get a good education here, but this is a place where good education happens easily.
And that's not true of most schools in the inner city.
And if you said and if you made it friendly for major grocery stores to be in the inner city so that, you know, you've been in a poor neighborhood.
You're like, that's the grocery store, you know, where it's not a major chain grocery store.
It's a 99 cent store that also has fruit.
You know what I mean?
It's like that you said that if you made it so that it was friendly for those companies to move there.
Because a lot of the gentrification happens.
It's like people know their neighborhoods being gentrified when the 99 cent store closes down and a Whole Foods opens.
And like, oh, finally, we have, oh, but we can't afford to shop there.
No, I think that the only hope that we have of that is that You know, there's a...
Professional sports, I look at that, like, the money that is being made in professional sports, like, there are some of these guys, a lot of these guys are going to go broke, but in a hundred years, we'll be dealing with the Jordan Foundation the way we're dealing with the Rockefellers, you know what I'm saying?
Magic Johnson, that at some point, I hope that some of these people who have this, like, fuck you money, can actually figure out a way to pour it back in, but they can't necessarily...
Like, charter schools, like, Jalen Rose has a charter school...
Specifically in Detroit to go, I need to help jumpstart this situation myself.
But it's hard to rely on individuals to do that.
And until America goes, it's in our best interest to make poor neighborhoods better and easier.
And I'm not just talking about black, just in general.
Poor neighborhoods better.
It will make a better country until the government feels like that's an important thing.
And also...
You know, we have this one president, Barack is pretty good and pretty liberal, but we don't know what the next one's going to look like, and then the next one's going to look like, until the country sort of as a whole goes, you know, that we get to that tipping point where we need to, we should, all the schools should be good.
I always think in terms of what is the number one resource that we have in America.
It's not natural resources, it's human beings.
And wouldn't America be stronger if there were less people that were losers?
So what's the best way to make less people losers?
Work with children.
I think they should have community centers, and any poor neighborhood should have a place where kids can escape that's really well-staffed with people that are excellent counselors, people that are teaching sports and martial arts, and places where kids can work on their studying, they can have computers to use to access books and all kinds of other shit, so that they have a place where they can get in away from the crime.
And just that alone will stop a lot of fucking crime.
And it'll give kids a place where they have a home away from home.
They have something.
So if their parents work during the day and they don't want to go home and just stare at the walls, they have somewhere to go to.
They have people that they can look up to that can help them, counselors.
You're giving people more of a chance to be a successful human.
When you do that, you're strengthening the country.
That people don't take it, they don't take it seriously.
And I think that that's the, until people go, oh, if stronger communities lead to a stronger America, there should be things, like you said, there should be things that are just taken for granted.
Well, that's the federal government trying to fuck with people.
That's what it is.
Not only that, they're arresting people that are using these federal parks, like they're smoking weed in states where it's legal, but they go to the park and they spark up a joint in a state park and then the federal government comes in and arrests them.
However, his administration in the DEA has prosecuted a lot of fucking people in states where medical marijuana is legal.
The other thing they do, which is really cute, is they arrest people, they take all their weed, they take all their money, and then they say the case is pending.
And they just have to sit there.
They don't do anything about it, but they stole $500,000 from them and a million dollars worth of weed, and they're just sitting there waiting to find out whether or not you're going to go to jail.
And some of them do.
I have a friend who's gone to jail because of it.
I know several people that have gone to jail during the Obama administration for selling medical marijuana that's legal.
So he's kind of full of shit when it comes to that.
For me, the thing that actually caused it over and over again was every time there was Troy Davis, the guy who was on death row in Texas, who people were like, the evidence says that he didn't do it.
I remember on Twitter, people were like, say something, Barack, say something.
And people were like, well, it's not his jurisdiction.
Every time there's an issue that falls squarely on the head of black people in this country, and Barack sort of tippy-toes around it or doesn't address it head-on soon enough, I feel like he, that's why we elected a black president.
That's why black people went out to vote, is because we wanted somebody who had our back.
And every time he doesn't, and he can't fix problems, I don't expect him to fix things, but when it takes him four days to talk about Ferguson, and as he says, he didn't want to say anything too quickly, or he didn't want to say, because he didn't want to be seen as putting his thumb on the scale of justice, I'm like, oh dude, that's why I elected you.
I wanted your thumb on the scale of justice.
And that's because, again, we need to jumpstart the system.
And so for me, the stuff like that with the sort of the...
And again, yes, if he talks about Trayvon Martin, people go, but I'm going, yeah, well, that's the job.
The job is to get yelled at sometimes.
The job is to have a hard week because you take a good stance.
You know, it's, like I said, getting out of New York and, like, sort of the haze has been lifted and the storm has passed over and I feel like, oh, I've just gotten back into stand-up again.