W. Kamau Bell critiques U.S. exploitation of Puerto Rico—$80B debt, higher shipping costs—while questioning statehood’s feasibility due to systemic barriers. On United Shades of America, he shifts from Obama-era "mixtape" segments to deeper dives, avoiding white supremacists but exposing ideological divides like Trump’s policies harming Latino families. Bell advocates reforming the Electoral College and gerrymandering, proposing a new party focused on jobs, schools, and safety over partisan rhetoric. His work highlights how systemic failures—prisons, debt, and media narratives—undermine real progress. [Automatically generated summary]
Tom Morello probably has more problems because he's trying to like, I'm starting a band with Chuck D and the guy from Cypress Hill, and I'm also releasing a solo, and I'm also on tour with the E Street Band.
Like, that's a lot of problems.
Whereas Zach's like, every now and again I'll go out with Rage Against the Machine and pick up that big check.
Other than that, I'm going back to LA. I mean, you know, so for me, there's a level of money you can get where you can sort of just turn the volume away.
The guy from Calvin and Hobbes is another dude.
Like, you know, the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes was the biggest comic strip at that time.
People loved it, people worshipped it, and at some point after 10 years, like, I'm done, and hasn't been seen since.
My goal is to get to that place of, like, there's some, I don't know what the number is, but I feel like there's some number where you go, okay, that's the number where I can put it in the thing, in the index things, and it sits there, and it just, yeah, I'll be going.
And maybe still, like the thing is, every now and again you sort of pop up to go, hey everybody, but I don't have the need for the attention part of it.
It's like, you know, I like the work I do and I don't want to do the work I like to do, but I don't have any need for the star part of it.
For a project I worked on, I actually met Oprah for this thing, and there's a whole team of people who are like, it's like 40-year-old white women who feel like they're in the Israeli army.
Like, we will take you down if we need to.
And then Oprah floats through the room like this happy beam of light, and they're like the ones who are like, no, we'll take care of it if it's a problem.
Well, I remember I went to Houston like six months after Hurricane Katrina, and there was a ton of people that had to move, that were stuck there, that were piled up together in houses, like many families in small houses.
So yeah, so you first sent out that link and then people said no and then he said it and now the doors are open and now they're taking pay.
Yeah, Lakewood's doors are open We are receiving anyone who needs shelter and let's be clear There was apparently somebody tweeted out that there was like all the mosques in Houston had opened their doors already and we're talking.
I think that's the fact that, and it's because the whole God thing is caught up in our government, so there's people in our government who feel like, yeah, this helps me out.
I can't be mad at him because I'm trying to be like him.
All that happened during the Reagan administration.
That's when they first started bringing in those right-wing evangelical people and making them a part of the Republican Party and a part of the campaigns.
Yeah, I mean, yes, but not any, I mean, just like, I'm caught up in the storm.
Like, you know, it's not like, it doesn't always come to me, but somebody was like, I did something and somebody was like, another CNN fake news journalist, and I was like, hold on, I'm not a journalist.
I'll take the fake news part, but I'm not actually a journalist.
Yeah, yeah, so I mean, I get caught up in it, but I think, yeah, I mean, but it's not, I don't, it's not coming to me the way it's coming to other people, but.
I mean the bigger thing for me is that when I took the job at CNN is that a lot of because I live in the Bay Area so a lot I was like what are my friends gonna think?
You know CNN is not as much as the right wants to say they're the liberal news media to my friends They're not the liberal news media, you know, so what is it to your friends?
Very middle of the road probably leaning to the right CNN leans to the right?
Yeah, and I'm not, there are lots of perspectives at CNN, and CNN doesn't tell me to make it, they don't tell me to do anything other than what I'm doing, I want to be clear about that, but I'm saying the perception from people, I think it's funny, like some people see it as the liberal news media, and then I have friends who see it as maybe the center, but definitely, but also, or leading to the left, or leading to the right, and I'm just like, well, you know, I'm in there, and I'm not doing anything different because I'm there.
Sunday nights is the best night to be on the news, because news things don't happen, but we've been bumped for the Orlando Shooter, which our episode was in Florida that week.
I was like, yeah, take us off the air.
I don't want to be looking like, look at how fun it is in Florida!
I think a lot of people thought that when Trump got into office, he would stop with all the insult tweets and stop with all the stuff that made him a popular person.
Yeah, but I think that, I mean, again, I know people who are like, maybe it's time to have some thoughts and an agenda.
Oh, for Obama, you mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I read an article that said, I didn't read the article, but the headline said, to be honest about this, Obama, the thought is that he's going to come back in the fall to help rebuild the Democratic Party.
And I feel like, we don't know if we're going to be here in the fall.
Why are you waiting?
Why put that off?
Things are happening now.
Yeah.
Now I get he's playing like that Star Trek chess where it's three levels and things are happening and he's seeing things I can't see and he sees the Matrix, but I feel like, you know, I just feel like I'd like to see you before the fall, even though the fall is only like two weeks away.
I mean I hope it's I mean is I I guess I'm a I I will say this I I think my party affiliation is Democrat But I'm not somebody who's like repping the Democratic Party.
I don't these people sometimes think I am just because I'm Against Donald Trump, but So, I would say this, that I hope that that person is somebody whose name we don't even know yet.
Because I feel like the thing that happened with Obama is he came out of nowhere.
And I think if you go to the usual suspects, with the way that Kearns Bruce Kearns set up, you're doomed.
If the Electoral College is still in place in four years, then we're doomed if we go to the usual suspects.
Well, Obama might have come out of nowhere, but a lot of people were looking at him like, this guy, here you got this guy, Harvard-educated, very articulate, good-looking, smooth, calm.
Whether you agreed with him or not, and I certainly didn't agree with everything he did, he felt like a grown-up who was making thoughtful adult decisions that sometimes I disagreed with, but I knew he had thought them through.
Well, and also, one of the most important things about being a president is the president sort of sets the tone for the rest of the country.
Like, he represents the country.
Now, when the president represents the country and he's talking shit about people bleeding from plastic surgery and, you know, fake news and yelling about this, and then saying things that are just absolutely not true, that turn out to not be true, and it's like, and you have to, like, look at it, and then you vet it out, and you go, well, he's fucking lying?
Most of, as we know, most of communication is nonverbal.
Yeah, so the fact that he doesn't have to even if it sounds like he's saying the right thing if it's not landing with the people He's talking about the right way like if he says you know I support the blacks or whatever it is It's like if it doesn't feel like that to the blacks then it's not it doesn't mean anything Well people know when you're saying something from the heart versus when you're saying something for damage control like Charlottesville Like when he came out after Charlottesville and said that people are behaving badly on all sides on all sides Did you got a Nazi that ran over a crowd of protesters He hit
Well, I am of the belief that Non-violence is always the answer and that running around with masks on hitting people with bike locks We're showing up with sticks and bats and the shit that people are trying to do I think although their heart and their mind might be in the right place when you show up with with Bulletproof vests on and helmets and sticks people see that and that is an act of aggression and the Opposition is going to show up in turn with something similar or worse
it escalates Well, I think the problem is is that I was in Berkeley I said in the weekend at the no hate in the Bay Rally that was supposed to that you know that Whoever said they were gonna show up alt-right people I don't they're also be names white supremacists, right?
They were gonna show up like 4,000 people showed up by you know somewhere between three three and four thousand people on which side Mostly on the side of not the alt-right.
But it was like, the side who was like, not in our streets, this is Berkeley, we don't play this shit, was way bigger than the side from the white supremacy alt-right side.
And as many people pointed out, there's more arrests than a Raider team.
That's not a lot of arrests.
And sometimes you get arrested because they're like, let's just get you the fuck out of here.
Or this is a safety issue.
So it's like 13 arrests.
Some people were injured.
No deaths, thankfully.
But if you look at all the mainstream news reports, it focuses on those people, the Antifa or the people who are the Black Bloc anarchists, who were there to fight with people.
And I was there.
There was old people there.
There was young people there.
I had a friend who was like, yeah, I got an alert on my phone that said that there was tear gas.
And I was in the rally like, there's tear gas?
Like, he's in the middle of the rally.
CNN or the San Francisco Chronicle was like, there's tear gas in Berkeley!
And he's like, there is?
And all that stuff got overplayed.
And I was there.
My wife was there.
And it was a very beautiful day, despite the reason why the day had come together.
Well, and also having someone with a perspective that would go to that rally and say, look how many people are here that believe in equality, that believe in unity, that believe in peace, that just want to support this idea that the community is filled with way more of those people.
What concerns me is that those people, when they're wearing the bike masks or the masks and the fucking vests and the knee pads and all the shit, that's where you get those assholes in Charlotte that showed up with guns.
Like those guys that were open carrying in Charlotte with bulletproof vests on, walking on the street, showing trigger discipline with their finger on the outside of the gun.
And many of them dressed in military garb, so they looked like they were part of the military or looked like they were part of law enforcement.
That was the real problem, too.
Some people were confused and thought they were part of law enforcement.
And I think the thing about Antifa, I would say this, too, is that the reason why Antifa even has a room to exist is because people in those communities don't think they can count on the police.
Because there were two other protests in Berkeley that erupted in violence because the police were standing by watching it happen.
They didn't go in and break it up.
And that certainly happened in Charlottesville, too.
Because how the fuck could the mayor have enough time to be paying attention to every single issue that the police have to deal with when he's dealing with every single issue the mayor has to deal with?
There's an article that somebody wrote, and this kid was born in Tijuana, lived in Arizona, and got arrested for drunk driving and spent a year in those camps.
You know, look, he was raised in America.
He was essentially an American.
Right.
Even though he was born in the wrong patch of dirt for some people.
Yeah, that the law is not applied equally to everyone.
We know that if you have money and privilege, you can get out of situations, but that other people who don't have money and privilege can't get out of it.
There's the other perspective is where the resource is going to come from to actually reform someone how much effort does it take and Individual cases are different and some people really are just Habitual criminals and there's nothing you can do about it And if you do release them and they continue to do a crime or they they hurt somebody That they didn't have to like where does the burden lie there,
but I you know, I think Norway I believe is the country Jamie likes to look it up that the longest prison prison sentence you can get is 20 years you Prisoners live in like one-bedroom apartments like they you know, they have TV they have and the whole thing is like and this is San Quentin has this to there's rehab programs I talked to inmates who said that and then after 20 years in Norway,
they talk to you and go Are you ready to go back outside like they don't let you out automatically, but they sort of check back in with you And so if you're not like the guy who shot up the those people in Norway, he's probably gonna get out again, right, but the whole idea is that Yeah, small percentage of prisoners served more than 14 years Wow Yeah, but the thing is, they're in there, like in San Quentin, I talked to inmates who said, in most California prisons, the rehab programs are AA and Jesus.
There's prisoners who learn how to code right now.
So when you come out, there's lots of other programs I can't even think of.
But there's yoga in San Quentin.
Because it's the Bay Area and so there's all these things in the so that when you come out You are a more fully formed human being so that you have you have job skills You've you've done restorative justice programs You've helped other inmates who came in to do restorative justice programs so that when you come out It's not that it's easy to get to be paroled from prison,
you know But when you come out you're more prepared for the world as opposed to guys in other prisons in California Who get out who have just been like doing rehab and Jesus and have no way to interact with the world Yeah, and just feel like they've just been punished, being isolated and locked in a cage.
And as a lot of those guys say, they go in there for one crime that's not a big deal, and they learn how to be better and badder criminals in prison.
Because you have to sort of like, California has like levels of prison.
I think level four is the worst, or maybe level five.
But anyway, so everybody sort of starts out at a level four.
So if you are in prison in California for something, you know, shooting a gun in the air, you're there with murderers.
And then you have to survive that and hopefully graduate to San Quentin.
But if you're in there with murderers, you have to survive that.
And so a lot of guys become bigger, badder criminals because they're surrounded by bigger, badder criminals.
And so, to me, like the whole, I mean, you know, the, you know, and there's a lot of money that's already in prisons that's not being used well.
The prison, you know, private prison system, like we are selling, private companies are selling, like they have to keep the prisons full because they're running a prison for profit.
It's like we need to keep the beds full.
It's not about rehab and rehabilitation.
It's about we need to keep the beds full because we are a corporation running for profit.
Yeah, which we, you know, and that was like, you know, we're, again, we're demonizing like one case.
Same thing with Berkeley.
There's a picture that was on, I think it was in the San Francisco Chronicle, of an antifa, I'm going to go, antifa, black, black, I don't know, like with, like with, like a, like a gas bomb and, and surrounding that person is journalists taking pictures of him.
Well, anytime there's some sort of a gathering, you're always going to have people in that gathering that act out, try to get more attention than they deserve, or that get caught up in the whole group movement.
There's always this sort of gigantic mass...
Of people that will cause people to behave, some people, to behave in a way that's uncharacteristic.
If I said get him, they'd be like, I will write my congressman.
You're right.
We should start a petition.
And that's real.
And I think the thing is that everybody responds differently.
The thing that happened, I'll say specifically in Berkeley, was that there's a sense that these people brought violence to Berkeley the last two times they came.
And people respond differently to threats of violence.
Some people respond with the non-violent thing.
Some people respond to, I won't go to the park that day.
But don't you think there's also a real issue in you I mean you got to find out what is actual hate speech and what is like Someone like Ben Shapiro who I think is just a conservative guy Who's very articulate and doesn't promote hate at all and he's extremely reasonable But there's a lot of people that equate him even though he's an Orthodox Jew a lot of people equate him with being a Nazi and they try to silence him from speaking Like, when you do that, I think it becomes a giant issue.
And I think you've got to let people talk.
And if you disagree with people, I mean, as long as they're not out there promoting violence or promoting negativity or promoting some sort of a, you know, anything that it's abhorrent.
But if you let someone talk, and then if you have someone that disagrees with them, have a debate.
Have a debate and have everybody be peaceful and civil with each other.
I mean, I think the problem is that line of what hate speech is, and I just talked to somebody from the ACLU on my other podcast about the whole hate speech thing.
I don't know if he changed it permanently, but yeah.
So there's a precedence for this, is all I'm saying.
There's a precedence for some sort of like, the country needs me because it's so divided.
Yeah, motherfucker, because you divided it.
This is how the game works.
So I would say the thing about Ben Shapiro, and I've only seen a little bit of his work, but I know there are people on that side who it's an ideological argument.
And ideological arguments sometimes can be filled with hate.
So I don't know Ben Shapiro.
So that sometimes is like, well, yeah, you're just making an ideological argument, but it ends with me having to move out of America.
But the problem is that now there's a whole movement associated with things that maybe Ben looks to be a part of, so that if he shows up, people don't know that he shows up going, I'm not bringing violence, but there may be violence traveling around with him.
I don't know, but it's a thing that whenever we would see, I think now we're calling it Antifa, but there would be, I mean, this happened, there were some Black Lives Matter protests in Berkeley, and some black, black anarchists, it's described the same way, wearing black, all covered up, and they were like, and these people showed up, so I don't know if they were Antifa, and were like, great, now we can loot!
And people stood in front of stores going, no, no, no, we're not doing that.
We're not doing that.
This has nothing to do with you getting into the Verizon store.
There's people who support Antifa because they feel like, well, we need somebody who stands up to this, but there's not people who support people beating people up randomly.
So yes, Al Letson and other people stepped in.
The thing about the Berkeley and the Bay Area is that people don't get, they think it's all one thing.
Like, that it's all some sort of, like, lefty, like, socialist, blah, blah, blah.
And the thing about Berkeley is it's not that.
The Bay Area's not that.
It's a lot of different people who feel like, who are on some version of the left, but they don't all necessarily agree with each other, and they let a lot of shit go.
Like, it's not, like, you know, so that can be the naked guy who walks through town.
Like, that doesn't mean we all support people walking around naked, but we're like...
But it also means that during Obama's reign, I lived in San Francisco, there were libertarians set up on corners with big huge pictures of Obama with Hitler mustaches painted on him.
And we're all like, huh, all right.
It's like, you know, as long as you don't want to start a fight, do your thing, man.
And that's what people don't get who have put this whole lefty sort of whatever libtard thing on Berkeley.
It's not one thing.
It's not.
It's where it's a lot of things at the barriers.
It's where all the freaks sort of end up.
We're like, I don't feel in my life that I'm understood.
And he wrote the Bush torture memos that said, you know, if you do some waterboarding, this is not a direct quote, but he wrote the memos that said that it sort of outlined how to do enhanced interrogation techniques.
So I think that, you know, Ann Coulter can come speak at Berkeley anytime she wants to if there's this thing about, like, I'm not going to encourage violence.
But the current thing is because when Milo was going to show up, There was the fear, and he had seen it happen before, where he was targeting students, either undocumented students, he was naming students during his stage thing who were undocumented or trans, and there was fear, like, that's promoting violence.
Well, Charlottesville to me was so representative of the times that we're in because all these white guys with citronella candles they got from Home Depot.
It's like, what in the fuck?
Why don't you guys like carry Whole Foods bags as well?
They know the history of the fact that if we show up carrying torches, it means something different than if we show up wearing headlamps or carrying our phones.
And yet they know that if you're a black person walking through the streets of Charlottesville and you see that coming your way, and you're invoked by images of America's past, where that was like, that equaled death.
Because back then, the torches were for your house.
You know, the torches were for you.
They were not just showing strength.
And they know that.
And that's why when people go, it's just free speech, it's like, we have to stop acting like that.
She was just like on the phone, there's a guy walking on the street with a torch.
But the idea is that...
That didn't alert her because it was just some guy walking under the torch, but it's specifically the context of night time, a group of hundreds of white guys carrying torches walking towards people.
I feel like it's the same thing as live action role play.
It's like they're meeting up online and then they probably meet for the first time when they get there.
You know?
And I think it's also just really, you know, it's really indicative of, like you said, the times we live in, that they think they can get away with this and then get surprised when they get fired.
Like, they think that, like, oh, we'll just do that and then we'll go to Applebee's.
You know, like, it's just like, no, dude, we can see you.
Which is why when the president goes on both sides, maybe there were people, and a lot of people said this, maybe there were some white people who were like, yeah, I do feel like my rights are being a little bit trampled on and I really want to show up.
The minute you hear people chanting like, oh, whatever the anti-Semitic things they were saying, you've got to go home.
Well, he's seeing people open-carrying with military outfits on, walking with these folks.
He's seeing these people walking down the street with torches.
And he doesn't have some sort of an articulate response to that where he's saying, like, look, ladies and gentlemen, this is not being inclusive.
This is not like stepping up and saying that what we need to do is come to some sort of an understanding and be at peace with each other, which is what America should be.
He used to be more articulate, which is really weird.
I don't think men should do anything when they're 70. I really don't, because I think they're old, their dick doesn't work anymore, their fucking skin's falling off their face, their back starts to hurt, they're cranky.
I just think when you get to be that age, you should just shut the fuck up.
There would be days when he wouldn't wear a jacket.
He would just wear a button-down shirt and a tie.
Bush's thing was he always wore, W. Bush always wore a full suit.
And Obama was like, I'm still the president.
I'm just hot in This is the thing that's so stupid.
There's many people on the left who had big, huge disagreements with Obama that we weren't able to express effectively because we were too busy defending his birth certificate.
A lot of the stuff he did was business as usual president stuff.
Like, you know, using the military and nations and killing innocent civilians that didn't need to be caught up in war.
You know what I mean?
Like drone shit.
Yeah.
We were supposed to get out of Afghanistan.
It's just regular president shit that his first...
I drank all the Obama Kool-Aid the first time around.
Hope and change.
A lot of the hope and change was about not being a president as usual.
Also, I don't think he really...
The thing that Trump does really effectively, the thing that George W. Bush did really effectively, Republicans do a good job of that.
They really know how to use the bully pulpit to really push their things through.
Not that Trump has really done anything to push things through, but he knows how to be a bully from the pulpit.
He hasn't really passed any major legislation.
But Obama, because he wanted to be an adult and he really wanted to be a unifier, and I think a lot of that comes literally from the fact that he's half black and half white, that he has existed in more than one world.
I felt like there were times where it's like, dude, you are an effective speaker, you could really push through single-payer healthcare in a way.
At least the debate on it.
So we don't settle for Obamacare.
I think that he didn't...
I've never talked to the man.
I've never met him.
I feel like I'm the only black person associated with Hollywood who's never met Obama.
It'd be nice to be able to tell my kids, what was the first black president like?
I have no fucking idea.
That he didn't use the full force of his presence, because he was a rock star.
And I feel like that could have pushed some things through, or at least got us to debate things.
Even Obama going, when they asked him about gay marriage, he was like, I've evolved on that.
He had nothing to do with legalizing marriage equality, but the president saying that made a lot of people go, huh.
Maybe I'm ready to evolve.
You know what I mean?
I don't think he used the full force of his bully pulpit in the way that I... I always said I wanted him to drive the presidency the way George W. Bush did.
Do you feel like when someone gets into office, they realize how complex the inner workings of the federal government really are, and then they just kind of abandoned a lot of the ideas that they wanted to push when they got in there?
Like, remember when Obama had that Hope and Change website that had all the stuff about whistleblowers?
And now whistleblowers are going to be protected under the Obama administration.
And then as soon as he got in office, he was worse on whistleblowers than anybody.
And then he removed that section of the Hope and Change website.
They deleted it after the whole, you know, the Edward Snowden thing and the Bradley Manning thing, Chelsea Manning thing.
Yeah, I think usually, we're not saying that with this current president, but I do think that's the thing where they get in there and suddenly people go, because as part of this, you are the most powerful individual in the world, but also the train is going this way.
It's already left the station.
So I do think that you're not going to get really an ultimate revolutionary mindset in the president's seat.
You just want somebody who's reasonable.
You know what I mean?
You're not going to get somebody who's...
The Alicia Garza from Black Lives Matter is not going to be the president as much as I think she'd be great at it because it's just not going to end up with somebody who actually has a revolutionary mindset.
So then if you start out there, then when you put those people in there, then they, you know, I don't know what the pressures of the office are.
I'm sure they're amazing, but it automatically leads you to capitulate, you know?
Apparently for Trump, there's extra time in the day.
But I do think, and I want to be clear, because I know people listening, when I say revolutionary mindset, I mean single-payer healthcare is a revolutionary mindset.
Every American has the right to healthcare.
Every American has the right to send their kids to good public schools that are well-funded.
These are things I think that are, when I say revolutionary mindset, I don't mean setting things on fire.
I mean like Revolutionary ideas that every person in this country deserves.
And I think that those people aren't going to be in the driver's seat of the White House.
Well, utilizing the resources that we have because of the fact that we pay taxes, a tremendous amount of money goes to the federal government with very little recourse.
There's no audit.
You don't get some sort of machine that tells you exactly where your tax dollars went.
I mean, I think we should all have that conversation.
And I just think that the way it's structured right now, the amount of power that corporations have, the amount of power that special interest groups have influenced the president, the amount of just the sheer money in politics with lobbyists.
And, you know, there's this one community outside of Washington, D.C. It's one of the richest communities in the world, and it's all lobbyists.
I mean, these are just people that are using and selling influence.
I also believe I can help spread a better message and use my resources to help people, but I'm in show business.
I know activists, and I know how hard they work, and then I sometimes use my resources to help those people out and donate money, but I'm in show business.
I'm in Kevin Hart's career.
Like, I'm not Kevin Hart, and I have a lot of respect for Kevin Hart.
I think he's amazing.
But it's like, I have to sort of remind myself and other people, like, yeah, I'm not...
Sometimes people put the word activist next to my name.
I'm like, activist is actually a job.
I don't have that job.
I mean, I do things that are engaged in activism, but my tax form says comedian, you know?
Every teacher, even at private schools, but certainly public schools, put their paycheck back into the school because they go, the kids need, we're trying to teach a learning thing and we don't have the stuff and they can't afford it.
So every public school teacher I've ever known used some of their check to go back into the school.
Yeah, and then, you know, we were talking about it before we got on, but there's all these, like, you know, there's, like, religion is a good way to make money, but then there's all these, like, motivational speaker type people.
I mean, if you, for example, were like this weekend in Berkeley, I'm doing the Joe Rogan motivational speaking training seminar, I'd be like, I'm gonna go see what Joe's talking about, because there's clearly a thing you've done, and you could be like, I want to know how this all happened.
How do I get my own podcast studio?
But there's a lot of people out there who are sort of not...
They can't be a religious leader, because that does require some work, and you've got to develop a new take on Jesus, which is hard.
But they are doing this thing where they just are motivating people based on the fact that they've read motivational books.
And so he's done all the substances he can do and all the combinations, and he's had all the new houses, all the cars, and then you wake up in a room like, what does this mean?
And somebody's like, I got a new take on Jesus for you.
I don't think that anybody can get through what Bieber did and be any better than he is.
I think it's insane to think that you could take a child and not have them go through the normal developmental shit that we all go through, not being liked and trying to get people to like you and dating a girl and getting your heart broke and getting in a fight and getting in arguments and not having any money.
Yeah, I didn't, by the way, I didn't have that opinion until like maybe about five or six years ago.
I'm like slowly starting to develop that, like realizing that when you see someone who's young and stupid and doing dumb shit, like, oh, their fucking brain's not even ready yet.
That's why it's really sad when you talk to someone who's 50 who doesn't know anything about the world, doesn't read, doesn't pay attention, isn't watching documentaries.
It's a new way that people are like, I didn't know you could do that.
And then it makes other people...
So I think Trump has done that to the presidency, where it's like, we thought there was just the process of natural selection, ended up with somebody who at least had a through line of an idea.
Because if you don't agree with Bush, George W. Bush, or you don't agree with Clinton, you at least knew there was a through line of an idea.
And I think with Trump, there's not the belief that there's a through line of an idea.
Like, that one that he had that really set a lot of people back, like, just a couple of months into his presidency, where he went on this, like, 70-minute rant and just, you know, rallied about fake news.
And people came out of that going, what in the fuck was that?
Was that the one in Phoenix, or...?
Was that recent?
No, I'm talking like way early.
One of the first ones that he did.
I remember I got texts from friends who were Republicans who were like, this is not good.
This is a guy who's way more related to Bieber than he is to any other president, as far as, like, he's surrounded by people who have told him, good job, good decision.
I mean, there's the insanity of, like, first of all, there was the fake Time magazine cover that was in his golf courses.
I mean, that's insane.
That's insane.
We've all taken the fun fake magazine cover.
We don't put it up and make people think it's real.
The Potomac River near the 15th green is shown during round three of the senior PGA championship at Trump National Golf Course on May 27th.
2015 report about a factually inaccurate plaque featured at Donald Trump's Northern Virginia Trump National Golf Club has resurfaced this week in light of the president's controversial remarks about the violent weekend in Charlottesville.
In the New York Times story, they questioned him about it, and he says, no, I talked to historians who said it was a very blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He, it's in the, uh, see, no, uh-uh, no way.
Nothing like that ever happened there, Richard Gillespie.
So to me, it's like, this is, again, this is where the press...
Forget the fake news media, the fake news.
This is where the press really fucked up, is by entertaining him through the election season without really making a hard effort to go right at the truth of the matter.
Like, people thought, again, I think people were seduced by the idea, well, it's...
And also, they were using he was born in Kenya as a way to promote a lot of conspiracy theories that were connected to him.
That if you start to buy the, it was a fake birth certificate because his parents, when he was born, knew he was going to be the first black president.
So they got him a fake Hawaii birth certificate.
And then you attach a lot of things to him that illegitimize his presidency.
Because if Trump had said, I don't agree with Obama's policy on this and this and this and left all this stuff behind, then yeah, let's run for president.
But he didn't really want to be, that's the thing, he didn't really want to be the president.
You don't think so?
No.
I think he, yeah, I don't think he could have anticipated that he was running against 16 people or 15 people who just couldn't, who should have all been the clear, like, you know, any of them should have been like, well, my Jeb Bush, but none of them had enough personality to top him.
I just hope it's not the people whose names I already know.
I hope it's not.
People talk about maybe Biden.
Can it not be somebody...
Maybe I just like the thing about there was decided about Obama the black thing was exciting for me personally But the fact that he was under the age like he was in his 40s That was exciting like it was like a president who had actually who you know and life had life And and also was still had a lot of life ahead of him.
Yeah, they did he would now that he's done He's still like a young a young old man You know that he was that he had done things you had probably done.
He was like, yeah, I did a little coke He probably played video games.
The reason why he became such a pop culture president, because he would say, I listen to Jay-Z, and you're like, I believe he probably does.
You know what I mean?
It just felt like he felt like somebody who was connected to us in a way that Trump, he's not one of the people.
Than right now from politics and from, like, I've never felt like the president is more disconnected from the people of the United States either.
And the people that support him, boy, they're so, I've never seen that before either.
The type of people that are, like, really into Donald Trump being president.
You know, just everything that he says, they hang on every word, they turn everything into a positive, they spin everything, they hashtag MAGA. It's really odd.
And it feels to me like it's very much a, you got Obama, we get him.
It feels like they were sick of the love that Obama got.
Even though by the end, I mean, Obama got a lot of love, but it wasn't as fervent by the end, you know, but I mean, until the end, then he got fervent right before he left.
But it's a real sort of like a lot of that love of Trump comes from, it's real like, it's like wanting to spite liberals, like, you know, ha ha ha ha.
Like, you don't care if Trump does something that's bad for you if it hurts a liberal's feelings, you know, like you just want somebody who is hurting Hillary, you know what I mean, or hurting the liberals.
It's not about what's good for you, because if you're looking at what's good for you, this is not good for you.
Well, it's also like getting some sort of a reasonable conservative that someone would step up right now would be very interesting.
It would be very interesting if you could find someone who's a reasonable conservative who knows how to debate and can form a sentence and can respond under pressure.
What Trump also brings to the table is he's like this ominous sort of character.
It's like a Mardi Gras float that walked into the room.
It's a lot to deal with.
It's a lot to deal with.
Yeah, and I think that the problem is that there's all these people who are trying to position themselves as the Trump alternative, but then if you dig too deep into their records, it's like, well, they really support all the things Trump supports, but they're just not out loud racists.
So it's not an alternative.
I think both parties...
You gotta be looking for new people.
I feel like in the 80s, it felt like the NBA just went to Africa and grabbed tall people.
They were just like, we need to find some new people.
And they got Dikembe Mutombo and Hakeem Olajuwon.
And they were just like, we need to go.
And I feel like if I'm the Democratic Party, I'm scouring the United States of America for people who nobody's...
Is there a city comptroller somewhere who's got a good speaking voice?
Let's go get that dude.
I feel like you can't be looking at the regular halls of power.
Those of us who don't think he should make it through four years in the White House, or hope that he resigns or gets impeached, can't take it for granted that that's going to happen.
I don't think we can...
So, is he going to make it through four years?
History says yes.
Most of them do.
There's not a point at which...
The impeach thing...
And also, the impeach thing doesn't necessarily get you out of office.
I think the reality is that after four years, this is the thing, if he does last me four years, that he gets to the end of four years like, I don't want to do this again.
Yeah, but I do think that like if it's a fact you really cuz like you know it certainly has there's a reported of like Ivanka's brands are down You know like the thing people are not they thought this is gonna help that stuff right if it's not helping that stuff and at the end of four years and it's I think he could leave because he's annoyed by it all but he'll have some big speech about I've done what I came to do, and I think I've really drained this way.
He'll just say he did, and his people will be like, yay!
I think there was some initial speculation that he was going to be good for business, and then there was some sort of a rise in the Dow because of that.
They've been owned by a Chicago-based real estate equity firm, Equity Residential, since 2005. Now, Trump Place will remain on the condominium buildings 200, 220, and 240 Riverside Boulevard, which neither Equity Residential nor Trump own.
The problem is, again, they may make it after Trump that it's a legal thing.
All these things were just what had been done and what people assumed would always be done.
The one shining grace of Trump is that it exposes We think that it's more complicated to become the president, and more complicated to be the president, and that there's more restraints on the president than there actually are.
So now that we know that, maybe, but when Trump leaves eventually, forget Republicans and Democrats, it's on the benefit for the entire world that the president can't launch nukes.
I'm not making this a Republican or Democrat, it should be a couple more people than just one guy.
There's all this stuff that happens in the law where they're like, we've I've never actually asked that question because nobody thought that was a question that should be asked!
Like, nobody ever thought that a president would think to do that, you know?
So there's all these sort of things where it's like there's no, you know, he could sign a thing and then the Supreme Court would have to be like, is this okay?
Now, the question is, why didn't you do something about it before McCain?
Again, you don't have any jurisdiction in that way, but you could have used your bully pulpit more effectively if you thought he was a criminal before this.
The part of it that should be good is there are many people who are in prison, again, like we talked about earlier, for things where you're like, The rest of your life.
You know what I mean?
There is a good side to this, but we thought that they would only be...
But a lot of times it's like friends and colleagues and the way I would pardon people.
Yeah, most granted clemency by Obama have been convicted on drug charges and have received lengthy and sometimes mandatory sentences at the height of the war on drugs.
That's the scariest thing about that Jeff Sessions asshole.
He wanted to bring that stuff back and bring back Just Say No and start arresting people for pot.
I feel like even if you had a 45-year-old Republican president They would be more open to things than the 71-year-old Trump, or any 71-year-old Republican, or any 71-year-old Democrat, just by the nature of the fact that, for the most part, 45-year-old Republicans don't care about where people go to the bathroom.
Well, it does if it's an incredibly wise old person who's learned a bunch of things and has control of their ego and is a person who really wants to make the world a better place.
I don't even remember where I saw it from, because when I looked it back up, like, it said there was no real history of him using drugs, but some people have had rumors that maybe he was doing, like, fen-fen and whatnot in the 80s or something like that.
When he was doing that whole thing with Hillary, and then it was revealed that Hillary, when they were running for president, was on New Vigil, or Pro Vigil, which is a narcolepsy drug.
So they give it to fighter pilots to keep them awake.
It was essentially originally created as a performance-enhancing drug, but they needed some sort of a reason to medically prescribe it to people, so they went, uh, narcolepsy?
I don't know if it's his actual truth, but it's MSNBC. Fun fact, in 1982, Trump started taking amphetamine derivatives, abused them, only supposed to take two for 25 days, stayed on for eight years, really.
Dr. Joseph Greenberg diagnosed him with metabolic imbalance, which we have never heard about again.
Greenberg was later publicly shamed as someone who provides uppers to rich people in Manhattan, a metabolic imbalance, if true.
It could be electrolyte insufficiencies, anaerobic imbalances, acid imbalances, an assortment of related disorders that could have serious health consequences.
Yet his other doctor, Dr. Harold Borenstein said he had been Trump's doctor since 1980 and never mentioned the metabolic imbalance found by Greenberg.
But that would make sense, because if you see how much energy he had when he was doing the campaign against Hillary, god damn, the guy never got tired.
Because, you know, your show is a very unique show on CNN, and it seems like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you have a lot of creative leeway on that show.
Yes, that's the thing about the show that has been such a...
It's been so cool because, you know, I've had a career where I was, like, sort of in the trenches, you know, for a long time, just trying to figure it out, and didn't think I'd ever get this opportunity.
And the way that I got there was not some way that made any sense.
But now I sit in a room, I just had a kickoff meeting yesterday, and it's a room full of people like, what do you want to do, Kamau?
And, you know, it's like, I feel super hashtag blessed to be in that position.
Yeah, because it's like, it was not something that five years ago I wasn't like, you'll probably end up on CNN. And also to be at CNN, that wasn't like, none of these things were on my like...
So after my show, Totally Biased, that Chris Rockett, our executive produced, I didn't have a job, didn't know what I was going to do.
We were in New York.
And that was on FX? On FX and then FXX. And then get the FX out of here.
So yeah, it was on FX. Now FX is a legit channel, but my show helped launch FX and didn't do a good job, so that's why the show got canceled.
I'd started to take meetings like general meetings and I ended up at a and it was all with sort of news organizations like little online like I thought it wasn't like Entertainment channels.
It was all these news things that thought like you could do something here with your thing and nobody had a real idea And I went to CNN and met Jeff Zucker had the like a 15-minute meeting with Jeff Zucker where he was like had 18,000 TVs on and Gave me a news quiz.
He's like you pay attention to the news I go.
Yeah, and he gave me a news quiz to see if I paid attention to the news Really?
So, then, they had been pitched a show by this company, All Three Media, now Main Event Media, called Black Man White America, where a black man travels around to white spaces in America.
That was the premise.
And they told me that, and I was like...
I wouldn't want to do that.
I don't want to do it if I could travel to more than just white spaces.
And they liked that idea.
And then the guy, Jimmy Foxx, he hates when I tell the story because he realizes now it was not the best idea.
So then he changed it to United Shades of America and then we pitched the Klan episode.
And also when we got there, we got there during daylight, so we had to be there for two or three hours while they did all their rites, while I talked to them and interviewed them, they did rites and rituals, and then it ended with them setting the cross on fire.
Yeah, you can see up there, they mostly kept their hoods on, but one guy took his hood off so you could see his face.
People ask me, why would they want to be on TV? Because everybody wants to be on TV. We talked to a bunch of different Klan groups, or the producers did.
Most of them didn't want to be on TV, but there was like three or four that did, because they thought they were spreading the word.
It's like, I'm not telling you what I believe, but they believe that the Bible doesn't think that the races should mix, the Bible doesn't, you know, all these things that people quote out of the Bible.
The Bible's talking about donkeys.
And they believe that America is a white country founded by white people and that That the people who, like the black people and the Mexican people, and eventually the Catholics and the Jews, although I guess they're cooler with Catholics now, they used to hate the Catholics, should get to leave, go back home.
And the whole America is for white people is the whole white, is just a different way of saying the white ethnostate thing that a lot of the people, a lot of the alt-right and the white nationalist movement say.
And so, you know, they think that this is, you know, they think America, they think the whole idea of America is that it's for whites only and that the rest of us need to go home.
To be standing there with these people in the woods, in Kentucky, looking into the eyes of madness while they're wearing satin sheets over their head with holes poked out for eyes.
We got there, I got out of the car, and there's a line in the show where you can hear me before you see them.
I'm going like, And that was really me saying this was not a good idea.
That was not me making a joke because I see a phalanx of them and they're all standing there in detention and right when we got there the guy who was in all blue was like immediately goes into a rant about Ferguson it was in 2014 so it was all about Ferguson and how black people how to police themselves and the white man is gonna da da da da da while at the same time they don't advocate violence because it's clear that at some point they were told if you talk about violence the FBI will be here every weekend you know So they're like, we don't advocate violence.
We advocate self-defense.
We don't hate black people.
We just love our people.
But also black people can't.
Look what they're doing in Ferguson.
That shows that black people aren't whatever, blah, blah, blah, aren't the equivalent of the white man.
And so I had to, so when we first started shooting, there was just like, this guy was just going off and I just sort of was like having to take it.
And wondering, is this going to be the next three hours?
This guy just yelling.
And the producer stepped in and said, alright everybody, we've got to check the camera for a second.
And we slowed it down, and then we set up chairs, and we sat down and started talking.
And from that point forward, they were so excited to talk about Did you guys hug it out?
I said to the crew, I was like, do not take any pictures of me hanging out.
But we didn't use that on camera because we couldn't show their faces.
But yeah, so it was like, they were like...
There were two different groups.
There was one group who was okay talking to me, and then there was another group who every time we stopped down, they would go away.
They would walk away.
And one of them was this blonde woman.
The one who was in red, when she took her hood off, she was like, I mean, she looked like Britney Spears at 18. Like this blonde, you know, as we've sounded earlier, maybe I don't know what a pretty white woman looks like, but she was But she was a brawn.
She had red fingernails.
And she was wearing a red thing because she's fourth generation Klan.
Well, I just felt like, if I could just take you to LA, there's a whole life for you away from Kentucky where you would have a, you know, like, I could make a lot of money off you, kid.
And you're born into the Klan, and there's not enough black people in your community for you to go, well, that's weird, because these black people are fine.
Because in this part of Kentucky, there's not a lot of black people.
There are some, because black people are everywhere, but there's not enough for these people to interact with.
And you're told to avoid that black guy who works at the Home Depot.
About you know if we could get the if you get people out of these circumstances, I think they would change but I But the momentum of the input of the environment that you're in it just gets so People get so wrapped up in and caught up in it and it becomes how they think and it's you don't want to stand out from the group You don't want to be ostracized and there's a fucking cross.
It's not gonna light itself But they were really excited.
And I was like, obviously, I don't agree with you guys.
And I said, hopefully at the end you'll let me leave.
Which I was kind of joking.
And also, at the whole time, I was like, I don't know.
What if this is a setup?
What if I'm here to talk to these 15 guys and then a hundred Klan members run out of the woods to take down CNN? You know, this is before fake news Trump.
But I was like, I don't know.
So the whole time I was there, I also felt like this could go bad at any time.
Because when we pulled in, there was a guy holding like a rifle.
And we told him no guns.
And he was like, well, I don't believe.
I'm going to bring my gun.
And so it just felt like this could turn.
I'm...
I'm not going to do anything to turn it badly, but this could turn bad.
And so it felt like it felt the whole time when I was making jokes with the Klan, as people go, how could you make jokes with the Klan?
I was actually using self-defense.
Like I was like, because if you're making people laugh, they generally, and I wasn't making them laugh at my expense.
I was just making them laugh about, well, that's weird.
Why do you burn this?
You know, that it actually felt to me like I could gain control of the situation.
It's like your life experiences are benefited by the fact that you're surrounded by lots of different That is really interesting when you put it that way.
Well, it's also the fear, you know, the fear of the other when you're not around them.
I think if you're around people all the time that are all sorts of different people, you find assholes that are white and cool people that are brown and you just sort of go, oh, they're just humans.
Well, I mean, I think it's the whole thing about, like, we have fear of the unknown, and somehow our fear of the unknown is the fear that somehow that unknown thing is going to hurt us or affect us in some negative way.
I mean, you know, when Obama first went into the White House, you know, I would have lost money on marriage equality, gay marriage.
I would have lost money.
Like, I was like, that's not going to happen.
You know, I would have put 50 years, you know what I mean?
Well, you're getting this weird opportunity to be, again, like I'm saying, you're you.
I know you, so when I see you on TV, I'm like, oh, that's you.
That's not normal for a television show.
You notice when people take on the host of, whether it's The Tonight Show or one of those kind of shows, they automatically become this different thing than they usually are.
They become like the host of And for me, the reason that is, is because there's not a ton of these shows out there.
Right.
So there's not like, it's like, oh, Kamau got that show.
It's like, talk shows, the minute I got totally biased, suddenly I'm seeing articles about The Tonight Show, you know, Late Late Show, and totally biased.
Wait, what?
And then I'm being compared to those people, and I'm being judged against, like, well, Last Night Fallon lip sync with Justin Timberlake, and Kamau talked to Laverne Cox.
That's not the same thing.
Yeah.
That's what I didn't like about that, is that people were suddenly defining me against that thing.
And I would look at that show and be like, that's not me.
And I had friends who would watch that show and be like, that's not me.
And then we'd write things for the show and I'd say things like, I don't believe this.
Or I don't feel as passionately about this as this show makes me think I feel about this.
Because we just have to get the show done.
Whereas with this show, I can go, no, I'm not saying that.
I don't think it's a good way to have meaningful conversations.
Giant groups of people and everybody's clapping.
So you're trying to like play to them to make a good point.
So you're not necessarily expressing yourself like what are the real thoughts going on in my mind as much as you're just trying to like get those hits.
I live in Berkeley, so I'm not even available to audition for things.
But this, I'm like, yeah, it's this or versions of this.
But the thing was, basically, in my mind, it was based on the Bourdain model and Morgan Spurlock's work and even Michael Moore's work.
Those things are about them.
When you watch Bourdain, it's about this person.
And if you like Bourdain, you'd watch him do anything.
It's not just about where he's going.
It's about, I just want to hang out with this dude for an hour.
And so I feel like with United Shades, the more it becomes that, I just want to hang out with Camille for an hour, then that's the show I want it to be.
Yeah, so it was like, I got to make the version of the show I wanted.
Well, at the same time, I'm talking about the history of Chinatown and doing all those other things, but it ended with me, the last line is like, you know, I really learned a lot this week.
Who am I kidding?
I just wanted to become friends with Shannon Lee.
You know?
And because I'm a comedian, I can do that.
I don't have to sort of have some sort of, like, you know, this...
And I sort of...
Sometimes the people who write, like, because people will write parts of the show, and they will write it, like, the way journalists would do it.
What happens is they will write a version of the script, and then I will get that, and then sometimes I will pull whole sections out, and then once we get into the VO booth, it's me and usually a couple other comedians, like Ethan Berlin, Ron G, this season's going to be Dwayne Kennedy, who will then be on the phone together in the VO booth and riff other things out.
So it's great to actually be able to hire, because I was clear with CNN, I need to hire comedians on this show.
It can't just be me and the news people or the TV people.
Anchorage, when I was there, one of the first things I saw when we were driving the rental car to the hotel was a group of people standing on the corner holding up signs saying, Honk for Equality.
And all these people were honking as they drove by.
And there was all these people with purple hair and shit.
That's why I'm glad we went to Barrow, because Barrow, I loved it, and I was like, I'll never come back here again.
There's no way, unless I was doing something.
So for me, that's what is fun.
People liked that episode a lot.
Sometimes people think the show is just me talking to scary people, but most of the show is just me talking to people that I've never talked to before.
Yeah, and so we did an episode about, we said, let me see something with Muslims, but it's like, well that's a big topic, but we went to Hamtramck in Dearborn, Michigan, It's a super small town, the highest percentage of Arabs and Muslims in America, like 30% Arabs and Muslim in this town.
And it's like a sleepy suburb where you just happen to see lots of women in hijab walking around.
But you sort of feel like, is this right?
You know what I mean?
This just seems weird.
It's just a sleepy suburb outside of Detroit, or inside of Detroit.
There's Hamtarricks in the middle of Detroit.
And it's just this small town that happens to be, because of The Ford factory.
It's one of the things that happens a lot with immigrants.
The Ford factory was okay hiring immigrants back in the day, or Muslims back in the day, so the Muslims were like, everybody come here!
And so then it became a very populous Arab Muslim town.
And then I got to sit down with a woman, her name was Reema, and I just got to ask her all the dumb questions about Islam.
And all the dumb questions about hijab and burqas and how that works with feminism.
Can you be a feminist and a Muslim?
Can you be a feminist and a woman who's wearing a burqa?
And she's like, yeah, you can.
It's a choice.
So I think that And then we got to talk about, well, what about in Saudi Arabia?
And they go, the government of Saudi Arabia does a lot of shit that's wrong, and they use Islam as a way to justify it, just like the way the American government does a lot of shit that's wrong and says God and country.
You know, it's not about the religion, it's about the expression of the religion.
So, you know, for me, it's like, to be able to ask those dumb questions.
We got to go to Standing Rock, in the middle of Standing Rock.
If you just can decide to have your business go through my land and dig a fucking pipeline that may or may not poison my wells, if everything goes wrong, what is public land?
And then I said to this one guy, I'm like, well, what do you do if it gets really, really cold?
Go to the hotel down the street.
Oh, alright.
You know, like, it's just like, I was in this whole, like, native, you know, like, we go to a restaurant.
You know what I mean?
So it's like, and it was, that was one of my favorite episodes, because, again, I get to sit and ask all the dumb questions that I have and other people have.
And sometimes I ask dumb questions that I kind of know the answer to, but I feel like we need to ask the dumb questions.
Yeah, the Dakota Pipeline was extremely disturbing, because it was one of the clearest examples of money over rights, money over land ownership, money over everything that we're going through with this thing.
And it's this thing where, believe me, Even though I had gone to San Quentin and filmed, I went to San Quentin and filmed the show.
I walked in with the co-warden or the junior warden, I don't know who he is, and Sam, and he was like, we walk in to the yard, and he's like, how do you feel?
And I'm like, because we're walking into the yard, and it's all just inmates doing sit-ups and push-ups and hanging out, playing basketball.
He goes, how does it feel?
I go, it feels kind of like walking to a neighborhood that I don't know anybody.
Like, you know, like one of those neighborhoods where you're like, I need to be careful here.
And then as I was saying that, some guy goes, love your comedy, bro.
And I go, oh, it feels pretty good.
And that's exactly how it happened, and we left it in the show.
And then from that point forward, it was just like, if you sort of close your eyes, it was just talking mostly to black men who've had a lot of life experience and been through a lot of shit and who have learned a lot from what they went through and have done therapy and self-actualized and educated themselves and all these types of things.
But then you realize, they're never going to leave.
They have a lot of experience, a lot of wealth of knowledge, a lot of skills, and they're never going to leave.
And so for me, it was like...
I can do more here.
So I went back.
We screened the episode there.
It was the most tense screening I ever had because I was like, what if they hate it?
But they were like cheering and clapping and gave me a standing ovation at the end.
And so I went back and hosted this talent show.
And again, I went back still like, but what if this time?
And they're like, ah, come on!
And they make fun of me because I didn't know how to play, what was it?
It was Pinochle.
Yeah, they played Pinochle in prison.
I know how to play.
And they were like, a black man doesn't know how to play Pinochle?
Him and this kid who was a chess genius, they're sitting down, this ex-con and this chess genius, sitting down playing chess in their head in front of me.
And it reminds me, it's like the autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X said, there's all this wisdom in the hood that these can be mathematical geniuses.
These can be the people who cure cancer, but they're not being put in positions where they can actually take advantage of this.
Yeah, and also mistakes, like whatever mistake you make when you're a young person, whether it's selling drugs or shooting a gun in the air for your third offense, there's certain mistakes that automatically disqualify you from any personal growth for the rest of your life.
Like, that's it.
You are now contained and incarcerated, and there'll be no growth.
And the thing is, it should be a really small list of things that disqualify you from society for the rest of your life, especially at 18. There are things, but it should be a pretty small finite list.
Yeah, if we if we like sort of put you in therapy and educate you you're still gonna be a monster We should still be working on these people, but it's certainly not inefficient It's not for the betterment for society that we've taken this huge pool of people out of the prison system And as and you know, this is the thing Black people are like 12% of the American population.
We're 40% of the American prison population.
Somewhere around there, please Google it, make sure.
But it's not because we're doing 40% of the crime.
Black people do crime, but we're over-sentenced a lot of times.
We're not getting proper representation.
There's like the three-strike laws.
So it's like something that a white guy in Nebraska does, a black guy does in California, something that's in prison for the rest of his life.
You know what I mean?
There's unequal application of the law, which ends up putting us in prison at a higher rate.
Like, they didn't do any sort of big background check.
And there was a huge article he did a couple years ago, like a year or so ago, about being a prison guard.
And I mean, if you read it, it's like...
The things you can get away with when you are the prison guard and the ways in which you can treat people at this prison in Louisiana, it's a nightmare.
It's like $80 billion, some sort of crazy figure of debt.
And it's just because the U.S. has used Puerto Rico, it's like the ATM. We sort of did things there, and because it wasn't a state, we didn't have to do it the same way.
But it is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life.
And I was there, the showrunner, Donnie Jackson, he'd been there before.
He's like, there's houses for $25,000.
And I was like calling my wife, we don't own a house in California, we should buy a house!
It's such a fun, beautiful place that has been exploited by the United States of America by not being a state and not being an independent country.
But for me, it's like being in a foreign country but your cell phone works.
Like so it's like so you get all the like different culture and new food and and you get all the like You know the people speak Spanish So if you speak a little bit of Spanish you can get by it's a super diverse place So like I as a guy's married to a white woman with a couple mixed-race kids We don't feel like we stick out there, you know, we're just sort of like and the weather was I was like I I was I want to I want to go back so badly Really?
You loved it, huh?
unidentified
I loved it and I don't like stuff Do you think you could live there?
I think if I was all said and done, I think I could be like, I think at this point it'd be hard, but I certainly think, if my life was an East Coast life, maybe, because there's a lot of people, a lot of Puerto Ricans who live in New York who have houses in Puerto Rico, but then I also feel weird because I'm not Puerto Rican, like, am I a gentrifier?
Am I making it better?
Am I screwing you?
Am I buying this house for $25,000?
Is that helping you or is that actually fucking you over?
I mean, it's weird, because last season when the show went off the air, I felt like I could tell that people didn't, sort of the talk about the show had gone away.
Well, just like, you know, when your special comes out and you're walking around town, more people may recognize you.
You know, like, more people are like, ah!
And then when your special's not out, it's not, you know, sometimes the volume gets turned down.
But with this, like, I still walk around and it's like the show is still on the air.
People are still talking about the show when they see me.
There's a sense of, like, Like they really feel the show in a very deep way like I hear from people like families watch the show together and like, you know, and I didn't make it for that reason so it so it feels like the show We the first season show Obama was still in office So I felt like that was like the mixtape and the first season was like the out the second thing was like the album and so I feel like now like people are looking for the show in a different way so it feels like I Knowing that, I have to make sure the show steps it up a notch.
I feel the pressure to make sure that we don't...
I don't want to make the show like, which white supremacist is he going to talk to this season?
Well, you also, you're part of this giant discussion, whether you're a comedian or an author or a journalist, you're part of this giant discussion, which is human culture.
And I think we need people that are articulate and thoughtful on all sides.
We need to, like, figure out that there's going to be all styles of humans that Different things that people are interested in, but what's gotta be, like, the most important thing about being an American is respecting all the other styles of human, all the other ways people think, whether they're conservative or whether they're liberal or whether they're, you know, whether they choose to, whatever the fuck it is.
You want to live off the land in Alaska or whether you want to be in Manhattan and I mean, you know, whether you want to be in Alabama or whether you want to be in Berkeley.
I don't know, though, because I think the response to it has genuinely energized people to look at the surroundings, look at politics, look at the way we're governing this civilization, the way that we're interacting with each other.
I mean the people that are responding to these people walking down the street with fucking Home Depot candles and screaming out anti-semitic slurs or whatever the fuck they're doing that has sort of energized people in That don't agree with that to sort of like step up and try to understand how the fuck is this still going on in?
2017 like who are these people that we didn't know existed because you live in Santa Monica Yeah, you know that you don't you're not around any of that everybody you You know is pretty left-wing.
Who are these people?
What part of us is represented in this ugly aspect of our culture, whether it's people that hate white people or people that hate black people or people that hate Jews?
What is this?
Why is this still here?
What has failed that this still exists?
And I think these conversations are a big part.
I mean, what you're doing by doing your show is you're, you know, for millions of people, they get to tune in and they get to just, like, hear the words and it adds layers to the way they understand human beings.
I was talking to a woman yesterday who was a public school teacher, and she was saying, or had been a public school teacher, and she's talking to other public school teachers about there are kids...
Who go to school every day, who are born in this country, you know, they may be, they're from the Latino kids who are born in this country, their parents are undocumented, and they go to school every day afraid that their parents are gonna be kicked out of the country, and not knowing what that does to them, and now somebody's like, why didn't you do your homework?
It's like, you're like, because I have a lot going on right now.
Why do you seem so sullen?
Why you got an attitude problem?
You know what I mean?
Trump doing all that up there filters down to some kid in a public school classroom who gets in a fight and then they expel him because he's like, he's got an attitude problem.
People don't think enough about how this is affecting regular-ass people.
I mean, when you were a kid, when I was in grade school, I remember kids saying, I want to be president someday, and other kids going, wow, this motherfucker's reaching for the stars.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, wow, you know, and how difficult would that be?
But, you know, but then again, I grew up, I remember, like, growing up, I remember when Reagan was in office, and I remember all my family being like, ugh.
There was a lot of people that were like that when Reagan was in office, which is so weird, like the whole revisionist history thing that happened after he was dead.
I think a lot of times with those marches, the hardcore people start first, and then I might show up Saturday afternoon, hey guys, we walked this whole...
There's an old expression that comes to gambling and it also can be applied to weight loss and a bunch of other things in life that you get better the same way you got sick.
Like with gambling, you can't just win it all back.
You gotta slowly try to chip away and get back.
And then with weight loss, you can't just lose all that weight.
It doesn't happen like that.
How long did it take you to get fat?
Well, guess what?
It's going to take you a similar amount of time to lose that weight.
And I think for our culture, it's going to take a while to sort all this out.
And I think we also have a problem that the actual operating system that we use, this whole representative government that was set up back when you had to take a letter by horse to get to people.
And it creates a lot of red tape and it creates a lot of bureaucratic inefficiency that I think if we had no government right now and we're trying to structure a government, the last thing we would do is have one person with an incredible amount of power that could also launch the nukes and pardon criminals.
People that are mathematics professors, that understand economics, people that understand geography and understand cultural differences, people that really understand healthcare, that really understand Understand all the different things we're dealing with.
And we wouldn't make the Supreme Court a lifetime appointment.
You would go, you know, you get it for 20 years and then you move on.
That's crazy.
Yeah, you don't, you don't, and we wouldn't, there's no, this is the thing I don't think Democrats focus enough on unless they're doing it behind closed doors.
Like, in California, by the time the polls close, they tell you who won, because they're like, we know how California voted.
So then I become a person who's like, what's the point of me voting for, you know, it's like, you know, so for me, Electoral College, and then...
Gerrymandering where the whole thing where they get to sort of they divide your neighborhood up into a way that sort of benefits the you know those are the things that are really That's why it's scary about who comes after Trump because as long as the Electoral College exists it automatically sort of tips the country to more sort of Right-leaning direction,
you know and and now which is maybe fine except when the right becomes Trump You know like you know if it's it's different if it's President John McCain, which I'm not a huge John McCain fan But I feel like at least there's a through line, you know where so for me it's like The electoral college is never—that's why the left has to fight so hard.
And I feel like if Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer aren't in meetings right now, like, we gotta fuck this electoral college up, we gotta take it down, then we're sort of losing the plot of how this works.
And politicians would have to work way harder instead of going, well, I'm not going to go talk to people up and down California, because that's already set.
We've got to stop all this divisiveness, and I think that's one of the issues that comes along with people.
I mean, there's people that have intercity competition, right?
Fuck Chicago!
You know, like, people get We get in these teams.
When it comes to the United States of America, when it comes to being the president, I genuinely think that we have to look at ourselves as one group of humans.
Because the thing is, this is one thing I'll say about United Shades.
When I go to the South Side of Chicago, we did an episode about gangs and gun violence, and gang violence in the South and West Side of Chicago.
And I did an episode of Appalachia, mostly about coal and the coal industry and how it's dying.
And even people there know, yeah, it's dying.
When Trump comes, a lot of them cheer.
But what they're cheering for is jobs.
They're not cheering for coal, necessarily.
If you said, we have other jobs for you, they'll take those jobs.
Now, they do have pride in the culture of the coal culture because it's about their life, but it doesn't have to be that.
But all I'm saying is people in Appalachia who voted for Trump, people in Chicago who voted for Hillary, are all just worried about jobs and better schools for their kids.
But when we break it down to this left, right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it starts to change the conversation when really there is a party, and some people would say it's the Green Party, but you could form a party around those ideas and not where these other parties have gone.