Club Shay Shay - Roy Wood Jr. Part 1

Transcript

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Speaker 9 Why did you turn that shot that tequila shot down on New Year's? It was too close to the Don Lemon firing. Yeah, yeah, Don Lemon.
And Don used to get drunk the right way and can keep it journalistic.

Speaker 9 And, you know, they always drinking on New Year's Eve. Yeah,

Speaker 9 you know, Andy Cohen, Anderson Cooper. I don't know if I want to drink with you.

Speaker 9 I don't feel safe. Now, if I go into CNN offices and my name is up there, I'm on the mural in the hall.

Speaker 9 We good. I pull up.

Speaker 9 All my life, been grinding all my life. Sacrifice, hustle paid the price.

Speaker 9 Want a slice, got the roll of dice. That's why, all my life, I've been grinding all my life.

Speaker 9 All my life, been grinding all my life.

Speaker 9 Sacrifice, hustle, paid the price. Want a slice, got the roller dice.
That's why, all my life, I've been grinding all my life.

Speaker 9 Hello, welcome to another episode of Club Shayche. I am your host, Shannon Sharp.
I'm also the proprietor of Club Sheche.

Speaker 9 Stopping by for conversation and a drink today, the master of observational comedy, one of America's most respected cultural commentators.

Speaker 9 Forbes declared him one of comedy's best journalists, a fan favorite, an Emmy Award-winning correspondent, an Emmy Award in Writers Guild of America-nominated producer and a writer, an award-winning host.

Speaker 9 He's entertained millions as a consistent figure on television and radio for more than two decades, an internationally known comedian who makes you think a dynamic force and entertainer, a famed actor, acclaimed television personality, accomplished entertainer, thought-provoking journalist, a beloved philanthropist, an author, and a father.

Speaker 9 Please welcome to the show, Roy Wood Jr.

Speaker 9 I pro-Shakes act. How about that intro? You read it like you rehearsed it.

Speaker 9 I just like to give people, when people come on my show, I really like for them to receive their flowers because sometimes I don't know if they've heard it or they realize what they've done.

Speaker 9 Because a lot of times when you're in it, you don't sit, you're not cherishing it. because you got to get to a destination and you're on the journey.

Speaker 9 So you don't get time to reflect like, damn, man, I did all that, man. I did a lot of stuff in a very short amount of time.
So I want someone, I want you to hear what we think of you.

Speaker 9 I think smelling your own flowers feels arrogant. So that's why I never really stopped to do it.
Really? Yeah. It's the idea of, yeah, you did that, but you could do better.
You could do more.

Speaker 9 You can show me anything I've done and I'll show you where the mistake was. I mean, you watch gang tape.
Yeah. You had four touchdowns and they gave me, ah, but the one I dropped.

Speaker 9 That's the way you remember. And so for me, a lot of it is just being rooted in how can I improve, man.
And so, you just don't look back at it because you're just trying to

Speaker 9 just get better.

Speaker 9 Last time somebody offered you a drink, you turned it down. I mean, normally when people come on club Shay Shay, we toast with, I don't know.
Oh, I drink with you. Okay, now I'll drink with you.

Speaker 9 This is this, this you gotta understand. This is an understood drinking show.
You got liquor in the decoration,

Speaker 9 so it's understood. Let me ask you a question.

Speaker 9 You know, cognac, you understand behind cognac, how it's made.

Speaker 9 which one is it's in France. Cognac.
Cognac has to be made on the special street in France. In the cognac region.
It has to be the first two years, the cognac, it has to originate in that region.

Speaker 9 Okay.

Speaker 9 In order for it for it to be a cognac. Now, a whiskey or a bourbon or a wine could be in California.
Same with tequila, got to come from this section of Mexico. It's not otherwise.
It's whatever.

Speaker 9 Okay. This is a combination of an uni blanc grape and a petite champagne.
So the origin of this is a grape from that region, and no artificial colors, no added sugar. So, you don't get that burn.

Speaker 9 You'll be able to taste, smell, and taste

Speaker 9 the notes, the marshmallows. Let me know what you think.
Yes, sir.

Speaker 9 Oh, that's smooth, sir. That's very

Speaker 9 changed my pose.

Speaker 9 That's smooth right there. This is way better than the shit I was drinking at FAMU.

Speaker 9 We were drinking EJ, boy. Were Were you on the budget that pay out? Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. We had $20, and we would go down to Jack's liquor, pay a homeless person $5 to go in there and get us $15

Speaker 9 or whatever you could come back with, sir. We'll take it.

Speaker 9 Hey, I'm going to do you right, young bloods.

Speaker 9 He go in the liquor store 10 minutes and be walking around, come back out with some E and J and some Stole.

Speaker 9 And $4 change.

Speaker 9 Like you're doing good.

Speaker 9 Let me ask you a question. You did say that, you know, when you're working, you don't do, do, you know, you don't drink on the job.
Why do you turn that shot to Kiva shot down on New Year's?

Speaker 9 Oh, you talking about the CNN? Yeah.

Speaker 9 So, you know, they always drinking on New Year's Eve. Yes.

Speaker 9 You know, Andy Cohen, Anderson Cooper, and everybody was drinking. They had us out there.

Speaker 9 It was too close to the Don Lemon firing. Yeah, yeah, Don.
And Don used to get drunk the right way and could keep it journalistic.

Speaker 9 And I felt like at the time, I'm going to just be real, if we're being blunt, I'm new to this network. This is my, I'd only, we, I think we'd only been on there 10 episodes yet.
Okay.

Speaker 9 We ain't even got the re-up for the next 10 episodes.

Speaker 9 I don't want to drink with y'all.

Speaker 9 I don't want to, I don't want to be that comfortable yet in this space when I don't necessarily know my place within the hierarchy. Also, journalism.

Speaker 9 is way more caddy than Comedy Central or like any entertainment, just the world of journalism, like any TV station,

Speaker 9 way more caddy than a cable show or a sports locker room or whatever job you work at, reality TV, what have you.

Speaker 9 It's a lot of caddiness, it's a lot of whispering, it's a lot of

Speaker 9 behind-the-backing going on, right? And so, I don't believe at any place that I work where I didn't create it that I'm safe. Wow.
So,

Speaker 9 I'm the host of a show on a Saturday night. The show we do now have I got news for you.
It's a remake of a British show.

Speaker 9 And if you look at political satire in Britain, the host is the least important part of the machine. Wow.
It's the co-hosts that are stars, the guests that are stars.

Speaker 9 The host's job is just to keep everything on track.

Speaker 9 You're kind of a Vanna White, Kiki Shepherd. With respect to those two, I've met them both.

Speaker 9 Your job is a little bit more just stay in the middle. Well, if I'm just stay in the the middle, then I'm the most replaceable.
Yes.

Speaker 9 Without changing the machine that you've built. So

Speaker 9 I don't know if I want to drink with you, motherfuckers.

Speaker 9 I don't feel safe. Now, if I go in the CNN offices and my name is up there, I'm on the mural.
You know, you and the gym say they got the mural with all the niggas that done a good job.

Speaker 9 It'd be me, Abby Phillips, maybe Jake Tapp. If I'm on the mural in the hall, we good.
I'll pull up. But I'm new here.
I don't know y'all. I'm not going to be just on TV drinking like that.

Speaker 9 What did you learn from the Don Lemon fire? He had been there for 17 years. He'd been, I mean, he'd been held in very high esteem.
He'd done a great job. I think he does a great job.

Speaker 9 What did you learn? Because I think he said something about the fired because I think he said, like, Nikki Haley is pastor prime. And maybe they used to.
Well, that's what they said.

Speaker 9 But was that the reason?

Speaker 9 But they say and what the reason might be is two different things. I think if you really look at it, knowing what we know now about

Speaker 9 now that we're post-Jimmy Kimmel,

Speaker 9 I think that a lot of, and even Amber Ruffin and her beef with the White House Correspondents Association with them pulling her off the dinner because they wanted her to be both sided with her jokes.

Speaker 9 I think that what happened to Don Lemon was really a precursor to some of the media censorship that we see starting to happen now where

Speaker 9 you have particular organizations that are going to, you know, try and make a particular headroll or settle a lawsuit with the administration, all in the sake of making sure that the messaging is a little more centrist and a little bit more on brand for whatever will benefit the company's bottom line.

Speaker 9 I think a lot of what Don Lemon was starting to say at that network. And keep in mind, this is also after Don had gotten into it with Vivek Ramaswamy on the air.

Speaker 9 And they were told, hey, keep the questions over here. But Don was like, nah, the meat is over here.

Speaker 9 I learned a lot, you know, really

Speaker 9 in a lot of ways, man, you know, because, you know, the Don Lemon firing also showed me what the network, what CNN at that time, under that leadership at the time, was

Speaker 9 trying, the way they were trying to turn the network into, oh, let's be a little less liberal. Let's try and be a little bit more centrist.

Speaker 9 Don, if you start getting out of line, we're going to put the heavy hand on you. And I couldn't see all of that from the outside at the time.

Speaker 9 And, you know, when Don got fired, Don got fired the same week as Tucker Carlson, which was also the same week I did the White House correspondence dinner.

Speaker 9 And I probably, I am probably, I went harder at Don than I should have at that time. And we tight work now.
And to Don's credit, because he was the one who reached out to me.

Speaker 9 And we talked a little bit about it. And he goes, here's what you're not seeing.
Here's what's not, here's what you need to be more.

Speaker 9 He filled in the picture for me. Okay.
You know, I wrote a joke with, you know, with one eye, you know, covered up. And so when I look at media now, and then now being on,

Speaker 9 I guess, kind of the inside of the network, it's hard to say that I'm in the inside of CNN. I work on a Saturday, bro.
Don't nobody be there. Right.

Speaker 9 You've been in the building all the morning.

Speaker 9 I can steal shit. Don't nobody be there.

Speaker 9 You know, you be in a building, just a motherfucking cubicle. They just got all these shit.
Just you that's the value position. Yeah, yeah.
I'm retired from stealing. But,

Speaker 9 but, yeah, but I think Don's firing showed us years ago, three, four years ago, where things were starting to head when we're talking about the idea of how much freedom of speech do journalists really have.

Speaker 9 But I think the thing is for me, if I turn into the weather channel, I expect to see the weather.

Speaker 9 If I turn into this channel, because they're trying to be something, Fox makes no bones about what they are, about who they are.

Speaker 9 When you watch their network, you're going to get what you expect to get. Yeah,

Speaker 9 but you also got to remember that a lot of these media habits were developed under two terms of Obama.

Speaker 9 So the idea of this being a liberal-leaning thing, well, it's the popular thing right now. So we're going to lean into what's popular.

Speaker 9 And then when that's not popular no more, then you start figuring out how to rejigger your network because people's tastes change. People's political influences change.

Speaker 9 And we have to stop thinking about corporations and media companies as these entities that have some sort of heart or have some sort of degree of sense of responsibility to the public.

Speaker 9 Nah, big dog, we're here to make money. We need eyeballs so we can sell soap.
I had an acting coach said the real shit to me. She said, You are a soap salesman.

Speaker 9 Your job is to be so good that people don't change the channel when the commercial comes on so they can be reminded to buy soap. Wow.
That's it. That's it.
So

Speaker 9 if we're here to sell soap, then they're going to constantly change. Like even the type, like if you look at what we have on our show, on my show now on Saturday nights,

Speaker 9 we had on

Speaker 9 Republican rep Mike Lawler. We had Tim Burchett.
Like these are not good people in my opinion.

Speaker 9 Or these are not people who have voted in the interest of the public, in my opinion.

Speaker 9 And we have them on.

Speaker 9 I don't know if these are the same people I would have been able to talk to if I worked at Daily Show, if I was still at the daily show or if those are the type of people that we would have had on as a guest at the daily show but i know for what we're trying to do on our side

Speaker 9 we trying to talk a little bit and joke a little bit with both sides i know a lot of people got a lot of opinions because they say you don't you shouldn't platform no no assholes no crazy opinions and stuff like that but that's what we choose to do have you have you come to the point, come to the realization to say, you know what?

Speaker 9 I'm going to have to change my way of thinking. I'm going to have to be more open-minded.

Speaker 9 Because in the past, ain't no way I could have sat down and had a conversation with you guys because we are so far for what I believe in and what I think is in the best interest of the people.

Speaker 9 But because of this time, as you mentioned, things are changing now. The tides are changing.
The winds are blowing in a different direction.

Speaker 9 Do you feel that, you know what, you had to change your thinking?

Speaker 9 I think I've had to change my degree of tolerance,

Speaker 9 but I don't think it changes my opinion.

Speaker 9 I think one big thing that I would love to see happen in media is that there's less conversations with pundits and political influencers and more conversations with constituents. Oh, okay.

Speaker 9 And the people who so you like the town hall setups. Yeah, but even more man on the street.
Like I love what Don Lemon's doing now. Don Lemon out there.
Take a look at the man on the promotion.

Speaker 9 Yeah, he's out there in the mix. No security either.
Don, get you a

Speaker 9 in a tight shirt

Speaker 9 to protect your brother.

Speaker 9 But the idea of just, well, Trump's the president, so I guess I gotta

Speaker 9 explain to me why I should not have slavery in my museums. Please tell me.
It's the African-American History Museum. History means encompassing the entirety or as much as you want to encompass.

Speaker 9 History. Yeah.

Speaker 9 Because they're trying to frame it as history. It's their story.
It ain't even his. They.

Speaker 9 story. It's their story.

Speaker 9 You know what I'm saying? So I'm not going to sit and listen to you explain to me why

Speaker 9 this doesn't matter. I don't know how much

Speaker 9 calm and collected conversation

Speaker 9 you can have with somebody that's that steadfast. If we're talking policymakers

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 folks that are like political pundits on either side of the issue, right? Because everybody got their talking points. Correct.
And they're not deviating.

Speaker 9 But if you talk to a voter, most people are single-issue voters. Most people are voting on things that affect them directly, fiscally speaking.
But we didn't see that in this last election.

Speaker 9 People voted against their best interests, and now they're having revisionist history. Okay, and so then would you be more inclined to talk to them? Because I feel like

Speaker 9 we would rather talk to the folks that influence those voters rather than just going and talk to, go talk to the Latino for Trump who just got deported.

Speaker 9 Some Some of them they talked to and they said they still wouldn't, they still wouldn't have voted for Commonwealth. Exactly.
I'm looking at the farmers. The farmers, farmers for Trump.
Now,

Speaker 9 China just signed a deal to get soybeans from someone else. They're not buying our soybeans.
And now, you know,

Speaker 9 we hate socialism. We hate welfare.
Well, they call it welfare when it refers to us, but they call it subsidies when it refers to somebody else.

Speaker 9 Now they're about to get subsidized, about to get bailed out. Everybody's for it.
Just like the banks.

Speaker 9 I'm like, hold on, I thought you didn't, I thought you didn't like when somebody got something for nothing. Yeah, that's different.
That's different. That was the blacks.

Speaker 9 I'm a good white American. It's supposed to happen to me.
I'm white. I mean,

Speaker 9 that's the biggest magic trick that rich people pulled is getting poor white folks to think that they were one of them.

Speaker 9 They bought it. You're not.
They bought it. You're not.

Speaker 9 I think that you have a better chance of having conversations with people

Speaker 9 who vote than members of the media. If we're talking about trying to change the country in any way, you know, I don't know how much we gain anymore from, let me have a sensible conversation with you.

Speaker 9 We bring them on on CNN. We're going to crack these jokes on your ass.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 if embarrassment works, cool. If not,

Speaker 9 cool.

Speaker 9 But the idea of,

Speaker 9 I can't remember who it was or why it was, but Obama had like a beer, what it was called, the Beer Summit, or Obama sat down. Oh, yeah, when the police officer and Henry Louis Gates.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and Gates had been on Obama's neck. Him had to have a smile.

Speaker 9 So this idea of let's all sit down and kumbaya, okay,

Speaker 9 maybe.

Speaker 9 But I just think both sides, I think we're in a race right now to see which side can activate their voters more.

Speaker 9 The apathetic voters. Yes.
I don't think he flipping people right now. Yeah, people.

Speaker 9 People that have decided,

Speaker 9 there's nothing that he can do to turn them off. And I'm not so sure there was anything that she could have done to turn them on.
You ever met anybody in despair, though, bro? Like,

Speaker 9 legitimate hopelessness to the point where they have no choice or they feel they have no choice, but to buy a lie. And then the embarrassment of saying that you're wrong was too great.

Speaker 9 So you have to buy the next lie and the one after that. So of course a farmer is never going to come out right and go, yeah,

Speaker 9 I didn't know that this was going to happen because they're going to get slapped in the face when I told you so to go in. And they too scared of the embarrassment.

Speaker 9 And I'm not going to be the one to tell liberals,

Speaker 9 yeah, you shouldn't be mean to the people that are suffering who voted for Trump. Well, they're suffering too.

Speaker 9 You passing law, like if the administration is passing laws that make you feel a certain kind of way, yeah, yeah, I'm going to hate on you for voting for them. So I get where that comes from.

Speaker 9 Get that shit out your system. I think there's a lot of behavior policing.
I just think we're six months,

Speaker 9 not even,

Speaker 9 you know, we are.

Speaker 9 We're almost a year into

Speaker 9 what's going to be, you know, another three years of this. So you got to figure out a way once you're past getting all that yelling out your system.

Speaker 9 Now that you're broke and now that you need some help on your farm, then you come back into your hey, how can I help you?

Speaker 9 But I think that most people would rather buy a lie because it's more calm, it's more peaceful, it's Matrix blue pill.

Speaker 9 You know,

Speaker 9 it's easier to exist

Speaker 9 in

Speaker 9 the calm of

Speaker 9 being wrong.

Speaker 9 Because being right means that you have to admit that you were wrong.

Speaker 9 How many people are willing to do that?

Speaker 9 Freedom of speech as we currently, as we once knew it, is that only in the Constitution? Is that something that's going to be, is going to be able to stand the test of time?

Speaker 9 Because it looks like we're getting closer and closer to there is no such thing as freedom of speech.

Speaker 9 It's changing.

Speaker 9 I don't, I don't like, I would have told, if you'd asked me a question a year ago, I'd have been like, oh, freedom of speech is fine. You can say whatever you want, whatever you want.

Speaker 9 We'll see. I can tell you this much: they're not going to touch the comedians.

Speaker 9 You don't think so?

Speaker 9 The comedians have too much influence over the

Speaker 9 ideology of voters.

Speaker 9 Chappelles and the Schultz's and the Gillis's of the world, the 85 Southers of the world,

Speaker 9 you know, comedians,

Speaker 9 you start trying to lock them up.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 9 Because they got the streets more than any politician does. And if you look at what happened with Jimmy Kimmel,

Speaker 9 that was one of the things where a lot of comedians,

Speaker 9 they didn't necessarily go at the administration, not all of them directly, but a lot of them sat and was like, yo.

Speaker 9 That's not cool. Yeah.

Speaker 9 I don't f ⁇ with Kimmel, but that's not cool.

Speaker 9 We're getting on a slippery slope here. And then Kimmel's ass was right back on the air in under 72 hours.

Speaker 9 And all them demands that those TV station networks made and demanded that Kimmel do, they folded on that shit.

Speaker 9 I don't think that, I think the administration for sure is stress testing, but honestly, you're not going to need to suppress anybody's freedom of speech if you control the messaging.

Speaker 9 Why do I need to, yeah, say whatever you want. I just won't book you on this show.
So I hope you're YouTube tight. I hope you got numbers over there.

Speaker 9 If the Nexstar merger goes through and they gain control of almost 80% of local television stations, ABC-affiliated TV stations, then they control the messaging. Right.

Speaker 9 And I speak as, and I have a degree in broadcast, and I've worked in broadcast, and I worked in radio. So I'm not just talking out my ass.
Absolutely.

Speaker 9 These stations are given national stories to carry. You can watch the local news in one market, and two-thirds of the stories, Oliver, John Oliver did a story on this years ago.

Speaker 9 Two-thirds of the stories in that market are airing in every other market. So they can dictate what they feed you.

Speaker 9 So you can have your freedom of speech, but eventually, y'all, freedom of speech, it's going to be you on the corner, like one of them blow-up dogs. Like, you ain't.
Who's going to hear you?

Speaker 9 Who, who's going to? So

Speaker 9 you remember what it was, Roy, when we was growing up? You go to

Speaker 9 the grocery store, and there's a man,

Speaker 9 Jesus, he's coming, and he's standing on the soapbox, and he's coming. He had the literature, and he's passing out.
It was just him by himself. And you looked at him like he was crazy.
You did.

Speaker 9 You looked at him like he was crazy. So I don't think freedom of speech is one thing.
I think suppression of messaging. is something that's a little bit more of a prevalent issue to me.

Speaker 9 And then when you start with AI, you start with disinformation, and you're confusing people who are too lazy to sit and go and do a double check or search. Freedom of speech is irrelevant.

Speaker 9 If I got the messaging unlocked and you're dumb enough to believe it and run with it,

Speaker 9 we scroll and we look at everything through

Speaker 9 headlines, man. Right.
Clicks, whatever the headline read, okay, that's it. Okay, so you get a journalist who decides to tell the truth or press the issue on air like Don Lemon.

Speaker 9 You just yank him off the air and put somebody else in who they do.

Speaker 9 Who you want to do your bidding.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 it would require

Speaker 9 humanity to truly advance.

Speaker 9 It would require a level of fiscal self-sacrifice that I do not believe most Americans

Speaker 9 are prepared to make.

Speaker 9 You know,

Speaker 9 I talked about this

Speaker 9 a couple hours specials ago, but like, it's like fire ants, right? When there's a flood and a fire ant mound gets flooded, this was happening in Texas during some hurricanes.

Speaker 9 The fire ants all form a ball

Speaker 9 and that joint floats until it gets to dry ground. Now, while it's floating, it's constantly rotating.
So the nigga on the bottom.

Speaker 9 They get some fresh air, too. Just fresh air.
And they rotate back down to the bottom. But periodically, some of them cats is going to drown.
Yes. There has to be some sacrifice.

Speaker 9 But the colony survives. Yes.

Speaker 9 And so, if we're talking about people fighting against an administration or fighting against public ideology, then it would require more people all running up against that same buzzsaw.

Speaker 9 And in some degree, you know, a lot of people are hesitant. I don't necessarily believe that blind sacrifice is the only way to make progress.
I think that there's,

Speaker 9 I think that there has to be a multi-pronged attack. But when you ask the question of is freedom of speech under attack, yeah, they stress testing.

Speaker 9 This year is stress testing just what we can get away with.

Speaker 9 You know, Charlie Kirk's,

Speaker 9 Charlie Kirk's widow is suing. I forget the network or suing ABC.
Yeah, it's ABC or the View. Somebody.
For like 40, 400 million. I don't know the number.
I don't want to get sued either.

Speaker 9 Just telling you what I heard. Yeah.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 the idea of the media being policed down to the comma,

Speaker 9 that's how we're going to get you. We're not going to say you can't say anything.
We're just going to go, ah, technicality, want my money. And what's a corporation going to do?

Speaker 9 A corporation ain't finna take this to trial. Right.

Speaker 9 Sorry, we admit no wrongdoing. You admit that we did nothing wrong, and we wash our our hands.
It's 60 minutes, Trump, $16 million.

Speaker 9 It's easier to settle. So now, if you're going to say anything bad about me, I'm going to tax you.
But you still got freedom of speech. Right.

Speaker 9 Now, if you're the company that just had to pay out, let's just say Charlie Kirk's widow wins the money, she get the bread.

Speaker 9 Well, then the next time there's anything sideways or politically charged that needs to be said on a show, y'all are going to get called into that meeting before the show.

Speaker 9 Like, hey, motherfucker, y'all, but shut the the yeah.

Speaker 9 All we're gonna say is this: here's your words, here's your words, and here

Speaker 9 freedom of speech, though, right? Right.

Speaker 9 So, I think that you create an atmosphere where the media is scared to touch on anything because they know that there's a fiscal consequence, and the employees are scared to touch on anything because there's a fiscal consequence.

Speaker 9 And the only thing you're going to be left with is comedians and podcasters because they're the ones who don't give a fuck. They already been broke, they already done slept in their car.

Speaker 9 So threatening them with unemployment, the comedy, stand-up comedy is literally committing to unemployment for three to five years

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Speaker 9 Pay you nothing. And I'm going to give you two chicken wings and if you get booed you don't get the chicken wings

Speaker 9 so you're not that group of people right you're not gonna scare and i believe that group of people will always have the highest of respect from the voting from the voting body and i think that they will continue to be the most influential characters in politics that's why politics that's why podcasts became so prominent in the last election yeah this episode is brought to you by prize picks the hard-hitting football action is even better with prize picks.

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It's good to be right.

Speaker 9 This is, but we're headed down a real, and it ain't even slippery. It's just jet ski.
It's just downhill.

Speaker 9 Because when you look at it, if you can't say anything negative about the president, we're headed to Russia. We're headed to China.
We're headed to North Korea.

Speaker 9 We're headed to the, because, and I think that's kind of the direction that he was, he's like, you shouldn't be able allowed to say anything negative.

Speaker 9 Yeah, but that's not just, it's not just about the president. It's negative about anybody that supports his mission as well.
Correct.

Speaker 9 So that's where it's going to, and that's why I brought up the Charlie Kirk widow situation. And it's not just her.

Speaker 9 There's also all of these other public officials that are going, oh, well, you said something about me. Well, maybe I can get a little bit of money too.
So do you make it illegal to say the thing?

Speaker 9 I think we are going to eventually be in a situation in this country where patriots are going to have to choose between their leader and the founding fathers in the documents they wrote up.

Speaker 9 And we're going to see which one wins. Well, black folks just along for a ride.
This don't concern us.

Speaker 9 I mean, it does, but we ain't got no say.

Speaker 9 This is just watching white folks fight. Right.

Speaker 9 That's really what politics is. Well, it looks like the Supreme Court and listen to Clarence Thomas, like anything that's been written can be challenged.

Speaker 9 It just seems like anything that is, he's saying it's not law. So it's nothing gospel.
Nothing is gospel within the

Speaker 9 god.

Speaker 9 So then if Clarence Thomas say nothing is gospel, and he can go well we can go back and look at any decision I thought supreme meant lad that's it that's it done boom we never talking about this again right

Speaker 9 so if they can undo Supreme Court rulings at what point can they go you know what maybe we need to redo some of these amendments

Speaker 9 yes yes that's coming

Speaker 9 it's all stress testing

Speaker 9 everything right now is stress testing and there's really nothing you can do about it because they got a 6'3.

Speaker 9 It's like when you date a girl and then you're trying to see how dumb she is and see what you can get away with.

Speaker 9 Okay, you ain't gonna go with me on that.

Speaker 9 You treat all your women good. Okay, that's fine.
My bad. My bad.
You know what you do?

Speaker 9 I'm gonna not call her for two days and see if she gets mad. And if she don't trip over you, not calling for two days, you know, you got a two-day window.

Speaker 9 I'm talking too much. My bad.

Speaker 9 I'm sorry about that.

Speaker 9 Where are you on National Guard in the city?

Speaker 9 Where Where are you on the National Guard with the?

Speaker 9 On the what?

Speaker 9 Why would anybody be for that?

Speaker 9 Where are you on

Speaker 9 wasting niggas' time?

Speaker 9 But you know, look, D.C., they say, man, D.C. is as safe as it's ever been.
I ain't getting carjacked. I ain't getting the same thing.

Speaker 9 Did you see the footage in Chicago of the brother on a bike just riding past the National Guard? They walking down Miracle, I think it's called Miracle Mile, Garden Mile, whatever it is,

Speaker 9 the nicest guard. Yes, yeah.
Fuck crime crime is down here

Speaker 9 but you won't go to south shore with that nonsense will you no

Speaker 9 you're not and so like you're not gonna go mlk and 55th with it are you

Speaker 9 you're not so stop acting like this isn't something this is some big ass theater man i feel bad for the national guard soldiers bro right Because like people get mad at the guard, like they the police.

Speaker 9 I'm in the National Guard. You signed up one weekend a month, two weeks a year to fix a tank and get some college education.
My own behavior.

Speaker 9 And the problem is that the National Guard dressed in the same camo as the SWAT and the police.

Speaker 9 So we're just as mad at them as that because they are being used as

Speaker 9 so you believe this is a political theater? Absolutely.

Speaker 9 And I do not like the fact that people who have taken the oath to die for this country are being told to walk past a fucking lid's on Michigan Avenue to make sure nobody's stealing fitted caps.

Speaker 9 Because that's what's happening in Chicago right now. And I think that using our military for that purpose, it's backwards is dumb and stupid.

Speaker 9 All of the ICE stuff is backwards and dumb and stupid, just in general. But the idea of having that presence, it should also tell you

Speaker 9 just how easy it is to get

Speaker 9 the public opinion of people. because yeah, DC is the safest it's ever been.
But you know what else make people safe?

Speaker 9 Parks

Speaker 9 and sports, literacy programs. Jobs.
Yes.

Speaker 9 And you know what that stuff needs? Money.

Speaker 9 So the same money you use to pay a whole platoon, you could have done more literacy with the second and third graders. You get kids.
There's statistics here.

Speaker 9 My ministry is literacy, youth literacy, and sports. Right.
Because in Birmingham, those are the two things that have really helped to turn around some of the crime in the city.

Speaker 9 You get kids reading on grade level by the third grade, they're less likely to be hungry or homeless, they're less likely to end up in jail. So you want to stop crime, start way down there.

Speaker 9 So don't tell me that this is fighting crime. Okay, cool, but is this the only way to fight crime?

Speaker 9 It's silly and it's nonsensical, man. And it's theater and

Speaker 9 it's inviting open government harassment to the point where it potentially becomes normalized.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 that's not good. You know, they're talking about the guard in Portland.
They're talking about the guard and National Guard going on tour. Like, these are regular folks.
Are they still in LA?

Speaker 9 I don't know because they never stay with the story long enough.

Speaker 9 They show you the guard there. They never show you them leaving.

Speaker 9 And that might be an indictment on the media, but

Speaker 9 I don't agree with it.

Speaker 9 The short answer is: I think it's stupid to deploy soldiers. Your military to police your own citizens.
To police your own citizens.

Speaker 9 I'm interested to hear what you have. How

Speaker 9 we

Speaker 9 are the, I guess

Speaker 9 I GDP is through the yin-yang. Why do we have the mass shootings that no other country has?

Speaker 9 Why? Because we don't have the mental health care.

Speaker 9 All these other countries we be comparing ourselves to got jobs and got some health care and less shit for citizens to stress and worry about.

Speaker 9 They also don't have nearly the degree of conspiracy theorists and people dealing with all types of mental health issues and isolation, which in and of itself, even the most sane person can be broken down if they're isolated long enough and that's what COVID did that's what a lot of remote work did which by the way that's that's the that's like one of the few things that Trump and Elon was talking about I was like all right I give you that one get your ass back to work why they don't want to go back to work

Speaker 9 because man you people it's for a lot of people Your office is the only place you see people.

Speaker 9 Yes.

Speaker 9 You at home by yourself, and then you work at a computer by yourself, then you get fired over Zoom, and then you come to the grocery store and shoot me. That's fucked up.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 I ain't do nothing to Doug, the one fired you. Go to the building.
It did. How you calling? Shoot Doug.

Speaker 9 Roy, how you calling him? Shoot the people that you work with. Stop.

Speaker 9 There's a lot of mass shootings because they can't get to the people they want to kill.

Speaker 9 It's some good cognac.

Speaker 9 Why?

Speaker 9 Let me ask you this. How do you call in sick to work and you work from home?

Speaker 9 Sitting in the bed right there, man. You got the.
Roy, you can't get nobody sick but yourself.

Speaker 9 But still. You wake up in your pajama by me.
I'm not optimum.

Speaker 9 I'm not performing at my optimum.

Speaker 9 You know, but I really do think that

Speaker 9 America has a unique set of circumstances where

Speaker 9 there are a million different ways your life could be shit shit in this country, and there are a million different solutions that are not functional.

Speaker 9 And you can at some point have a degree of hopelessness, and taking a gun and killing strangers might be your only way of, as you believe, sensibly trying to,

Speaker 9 I don't know, alleviate that pain or to be seen.

Speaker 9 That's the real crazy thing about shootings now is that we don't even righteously be naming the shooters no more. Like, it used to be a time,

Speaker 9 and it sounds like a joke, but I'm not.

Speaker 9 Like, there used to be a time where if you shot a bunch of people, they would say your name, they would read your manifesto, and like it would be, it would be news for multiple days.

Speaker 9 It could be a shooting at noon that don't make the six o'clock news.

Speaker 9 It could be a shooting at six that don't make the 10 p.m. news

Speaker 9 because we don't care. So, the idea of

Speaker 9 absolutely

Speaker 9 even in murdering people, you're still an unknown

Speaker 9 because it's such a norm.

Speaker 9 And I think that comparing America to other countries is one of the most backward.

Speaker 9 There's no other country like America's 50 fucking countries all connected.

Speaker 9 So we do have a lot of different. Man, in Switzerland, they get Switzerland the size of Delaware.
Shut the f ⁇ up.

Speaker 9 It's not the same. They're probably like 95% Swiss.
Yeah, and they all ride bikes, so that helps your health and your mental health.

Speaker 9 You can't get people to ride city buses in most cities that have decent transportation because I want my car. So they're just more stressors and there's less solutions in this country.

Speaker 9 And I think that's why mental health is so problematic. And just, and it's not just mass shootings.
I mean,

Speaker 9 a lot of domestic violence in this country and violence against women,

Speaker 9 it's all rooted in a lot of the same causations, you know? And so a lot of the crime is rooted in that. And I think that's a big reason why

Speaker 9 crime here is so different.

Speaker 9 That's why we have more people in prison than any other place on earth.

Speaker 9 More people on probation. than any other place on earth.
With probation set up, I think with 2 million in the prisons, four,

Speaker 9 maybe 5 million people on papers.

Speaker 9 And probation don't mean you're free. It's set up

Speaker 9 to make sure that we got you.

Speaker 9 And I say that as somebody that did three years of federal probation. Like that's not, it is not set up in any shape, form of way to encourage you or to make you better.

Speaker 9 I'm here because we just ain't figured out. how to put you in there.
Right. But I'm going to watch your ass.
And the moment you give me a chance,

Speaker 9 I'm gonna put you in there. I'll tell you what, this is what I'm gonna do then.
I'm gonna make you president in 28.

Speaker 9 You're gonna be the president. Everybody out of prison, but murderers,

Speaker 9 rapists, chamolet. Okay, get back to me.

Speaker 9 But non-violent in prison? No.

Speaker 9 So the weed,

Speaker 9 you open the doors for them. Absolutely.

Speaker 9 I legalize cocaine.

Speaker 9 Damn.

Speaker 9 Who's it killed?

Speaker 9 I mean, you got the fentanyl in it, but that ain't okay. You caught a bad batch.
I'm sorry. Damn, Roy.

Speaker 9 If we're talking about putting people in jail,

Speaker 9 bro, there was a story we tried to do on the daily show

Speaker 9 that didn't get done, but

Speaker 9 there are owners of private prisons who are suing the states they are contracted to imprison people in

Speaker 9 because they don't have enough prisoners because the state got lax on some of their laws and decided to be more lenient on incarceration.

Speaker 9 So you have a state government that goes, all right, we ain't going to put as many people in prison. But the private company running the prison goes, nah, motherfucker, you promised us

Speaker 9 80% capacity at all times. We at 50% capacity.
Go catch some niggas and bring them and put, or reimburse me for the people that are not in here.

Speaker 9 And the state can't afford to do it. So they're locked up in court right now.

Speaker 9 Bam.

Speaker 9 Almost everybody in this country,

Speaker 9 you're a commodity to someone else.

Speaker 9 And,

Speaker 9 you know, if you're making me president,

Speaker 9 the first thing I'm changing is incarceration.

Speaker 9 I got very lucky, bro.

Speaker 9 I had a probation officer that actually cared about

Speaker 9 how my life ended up.

Speaker 9 Couple that being at FAMU and the faculty and the staff. So my pops used to teach at FAMU, my mama FAMU, my auntie, FAMU.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 it was enough folks in the faculty like, all right.

Speaker 9 We're going to bring you close and hold you close and make sure you don't slip up again and get expelled. But I think that the idea of recidivism in this country

Speaker 9 is pretty non-existent.

Speaker 9 It's all setting you up, got your stuff. So my last year of probation, I was in, so I stole credit cards when I was in college.
I know you're thinking cocaine trafficking. No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 9 Normally credit.

Speaker 9 College kids, credit cards or phone cards. You remember they used to do the phone cards? MCI 1800 Collette down, down, down the center.
You know why I didn't do that?

Speaker 9 Because I thought phones was traceable and they were recording the calls and they'd do a voice match and catch me. So I knew people who was running the shit.

Speaker 9 So I had a work study in the campus post office. I steal credit cards at the post office.
Damn.

Speaker 9 Take them to the mall, buy shit, sell it on campus for half price. I get caught, and this is to my point about recidivism, right?

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 I had,

Speaker 9 it's too late. I can say it's enough statute of limitations.
So when you're on federal probation, you're not supposed to leave the state ever.

Speaker 9 You leave the state for a birth of a child or the death of a, they got like a family tree of here the dead people you can go bury. Mom, grandma.
Yeah, exactly. My cousins, nah, I don't know.

Speaker 9 Nah, nah, nah, nah. Stay your ass in Florida.

Speaker 9 My last.

Speaker 9 My first two years of stand-up, my PO was like, if you come back that night, you can go anywhere you want.

Speaker 9 So I could get away as far as Atlanta and get back and get a little travel permit for that type of stuff. And then my last year, I was given, this is year three, same year.

Speaker 9 I started doing stand-up after I got arrested because of the depression or whatever. And so

Speaker 9 that third year, I graduate college and I want to move back to Birmingham. And he goes, well, if you move to Birmingham, you got to transfer your supervision to the Birmingham Federal District.

Speaker 9 You can't stay in the Florida Federal District. Now, mind you, at this point, my PO knows me.
We got good rapport. I got a job.
I'm wearing a golden corral. Everything's straight.

Speaker 9 I'm traveling with anywhere within eight hours of Tallahassee. I'm coming back, you know, every two, three days.

Speaker 9 You get a travel permit for up to nine days at that time.

Speaker 9 I go, cool. Well, I want to move home because I'm done in Tallahassee.

Speaker 9 I call the Birmingham division to get my probation transfer, and I'm explaining to the woman what I am, what I do, blah, blah, blah. Here's how we've been doing things in Tallahassee.

Speaker 9 Sir, I don't give a fuck what's been going on down there. You report here and you transfer here.
You ain't going nowhere but Jefferson County. I'm like, fuck, I can't even go to Tuscaloosa.

Speaker 9 And she was like, no, you can't.

Speaker 9 It wouldn't give me a reason. I got two years of paperwork that say I'm doing the right thing.

Speaker 9 Pour into me.

Speaker 9 Pour into these people.

Speaker 9 You treat people in this country who've made a mistake like they're irredeemable.

Speaker 9 So they start acting that way. Right.

Speaker 9 But if you pour into them, you might just get a couple of decent folks out of it, and recidivism might actually work. I had to stay in Tallahassee another year, bro.

Speaker 9 I started Ricky Smiley that same year. Ricky leaves the radio station in Birmingham.
Ricky is like my comedy OG. We're both from Birmingham.

Speaker 9 And Ricky was the first person from the crib to make it in any capacity. So you saw Ricky and you go, all right, I can do it.

Speaker 9 Because he wasn't like Bo Jackson or Charles Barkley or, I mean, Arsenio Halls from around that way. Like, those people were just such God status.
Right.

Speaker 9 You ain't going to be Bo, but oh, fuck, Ricky.

Speaker 9 huh, maybe I can

Speaker 9 get the internship at 95.7 in Birmingham while I'm still

Speaker 9 under the supervised probation in Florida,

Speaker 9 which means every nine days I have to drive from Birmingham back to Tallahassee

Speaker 9 to run my piss, to verify residence,

Speaker 9 to do all my regular check-ins. So essentially, my first year

Speaker 9 in Birmingham was just a year-long visitation permit from Florida

Speaker 9 because the Birmingham district would not give me any flex whatsoever.

Speaker 9 So when I say I'm lucky, man, I really do feel that.

Speaker 9 I remember, like, I feel like

Speaker 9 there's parts of our court system

Speaker 9 that they don't show.

Speaker 9 They show you cop-catching

Speaker 9 criminal. They show you courtroom TV show.

Speaker 9 There's never been anything on that I'd ever seen about probation officers.

Speaker 9 That's why I was trying to do that little comedy sitcom about probation officers because it really is social work to a degree.

Speaker 9 You know, and it's a lot of POs that for no reason will violate people who don't deserve to be violated.

Speaker 9 And then at the end of the day, probation is even more dangerous because it's your word against a single person who may just have a grudge against you today.

Speaker 9 And they can go, ah, he was late to work, he ain't serious about employment, Your Honor. I would recommend that they go back to be locked up.

Speaker 9 And then you go on for whatever the rest of your sentence was supposed to be.

Speaker 9 Just like that.

Speaker 9 They don't show

Speaker 9 that part of

Speaker 9 recidivism in this country. And it's something that I think

Speaker 9 would help to change the public perception of criminality and and the idea of making a mistake and then you're redeeming yourself and you do it that's why i'm i talk about it out in the open anyway right because cats need to know like your mistake ain't your destination that's a stop

Speaker 9 and i wish more people would show that and talk about that but they don't you try to make everybody out to be this irredeemable character and that's how society starts treating you after a while

Speaker 9 you know but I

Speaker 9 don't know, man. I just, I was, I was really, really blessed, man.
I was really blessed because my pops died when I was 16.

Speaker 9 And I just started getting guidance from just random guardian angels. You know, my book, I call it The Man and Many Fathers because it just really was random people that just popped in.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 But I wasn't seeking that out. It just, it happened.

Speaker 9 You have your comedy. You're one of the few.
And Chappelle,

Speaker 9 rock rest his soul paul mooney carlin with these

Speaker 9 could could blend politics and comedy and make it a smooth seamless transition chappelle is unbelievable at it rock is unbelievable at it mooney and carlin is unbelievable you have that gift did you choose did that aspect of comedy did it choose you or you chose it

Speaker 9 i think it chose me

Speaker 9 because everybody can't blend that everybody can't tie that in a nice bowl like that roy

Speaker 9 i opened for dick gregory um oh dick

Speaker 9 i forgot about him

Speaker 9 i don't know man it was it was a while ago it was at one of the bridge crossing jubilees in uh selma for bloody sunday memorial and um

Speaker 9 I just sat on the dais and just watched him just oscillate between pain and funny. And he kept him distinctly separated until the end.

Speaker 9 And like, just, I know I'll never be able to do that partly because of the era

Speaker 9 he came up in. His scars are different from mine.
I ain't got no scars compared to Dick Gregory's scars.

Speaker 9 So the reservoir of pain from which he was able to mine from and pull from, it's deeper, it's more rich.

Speaker 9 But, you know, I came up, you know, shadowing my pops. You know, my pops, he was a civil rights journalist.

Speaker 9 And so my dad in the 40s and in the 50s, he was pretty much any radio station he got hired at, he was the first black.

Speaker 9 And he gets to Chicago and he co-founds with a couple other gentlemen the National Black Network, which at its time was the first black syndicated national news service.

Speaker 9 A collective of black reporters all pooling their stories together and then sending them out on the wire to other radio stations, to other black radio stations to air so that there could be some sort of cohesive message and sense of community about stories that were relevant to black people.

Speaker 9 Soweto, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, anything pretty much like from South Africa and riots in the 50s

Speaker 9 to about Rodney King.

Speaker 9 My pops covered it. Wow.
Was there with a tape recorder, covered it. Did call-in shows,

Speaker 9 community awareness shows. And so

Speaker 9 when I was a child, I would ride with my pops to the radio stations in the morning. So my parents didn't get back together until I was in the third grade.
So I got sent to Birmingham every summer.

Speaker 9 Before that,

Speaker 9 me and my mom were still living in Memphis. We weren't even in Birmingham yet.
And every summer, first grade, second grade, third,

Speaker 9 I'm with my pops all summer and I'm just shadowing him to speaking engagements. and he's interviewing Jesse Jackson and

Speaker 9 Farrakhan just

Speaker 9 sitting and breaking bread with all of these you know deeply rich political people and white folks too he sat down with George the old George Daddy Bush way back in the day like he he interviewed them all and so

Speaker 9 I remember when I was 15, I got a learner's permit and I used to drive my pops down to Montgomery. He had a talk show at Alabama State.

Speaker 9 And so he would do a Saturday morning call-in show at Alabama State. And I would just sit in the cut.
I'm on the Game Boy, and you think you're not absorbing this shit.

Speaker 9 But he's just taking call after call from the community and offering solutions, offering a pulpit for people to voice their grievances, allow black people to feel heard and seen.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 I get to college and I'm like, man, I want to be Stuart Scott.

Speaker 9 I'm going to talk about this heavy shit. Right.
Because that's all I came up in. And then on top of that, you live in Birmingham.
Everything is black. It's a 75, 70, 75% black city.

Speaker 9 School was predominantly, every school I went to was predominantly black. I went to the black-owned boys and girls club.
I went to the black church, black boys, everything black.

Speaker 9 Then go to black ass fam you.

Speaker 9 Everything black.

Speaker 9 So I was like, well, I just want to analyze the world. But once I hit my 30s, man, and then when I had my son,

Speaker 9 switch flip.

Speaker 9 I don't know what happened, but you start looking at the world like, oh,

Speaker 9 okay. Through a different lens.
Yeah. I mean, you also have to remember, man, you know, my comedy, when I first started, I was 19.
I ain't had shit to talk about.

Speaker 9 I was talking about book buyback and your roommate eating your food and

Speaker 9 marching band jokes. Nobody, like,

Speaker 9 that was my wheelhouse. That's what I, that was the easiest thing.
You write what you know. And then as you get older.

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Speaker 9 And you start taking a longer look. You have different experiences.
And then somehow I essentially became my dad. Like, this is how

Speaker 9 you tried to avoid it, but you couldn't help it. Can't.

Speaker 9 This is how,

Speaker 9 like, entrenched, and I've told a story before, but I'll tell it to you because I'm sure you don't know it.

Speaker 9 Like, when I tell you my pops was, like, entrenched in bettering black people, that's all he was dedicated to. That's all that mattered to him.

Speaker 9 One of the reporters he hired at WVON in Chicago was a dude named Don Cornelius.

Speaker 9 And so Don was a police officer. And he pulls my pops over.
And my pops trying to get out the ticket, go, you got a nice voice.

Speaker 9 Which I don't know if that's not how I would get out a ticket. That's all I'm going to say.

Speaker 9 He gives Don his card. Don hit him back a year later and Don started working at the radio station as a reporter.
And that became Don Cornelius' entry into the world of media.

Speaker 9 Now, at some point in the midst of all of that, he does his homework on Don Cornelius does his homework on television and Dick Clark.

Speaker 9 And he comes back to my pops and a couple of folks and goes, yo, give me a couple thousand. Give me some money.
I'm going to shoot a pilot for a show that I think could be dope.

Speaker 9 I'm gonna call it, I'm gonna call it Soul Train.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's just gonna be Dick Clark got American dance stand. Why can't we have black people dancing? So my pops was one of the people that gave Don Canillius the front money.
Seed money for that.

Speaker 9 To shoot Soul Train. Wow.
Don Canillias goes, shoots Soul Train pilot. Can't sell that.

Speaker 9 Nobody will buy it. Nobody will air it.
He can't put no ads on it. So he ain't got his money to pay people back.
My pops comes to Don

Speaker 9 and he goes, Hey man,

Speaker 9 it's been a minute. When the fam get my money back, right?

Speaker 9 And Don goes, Well, I'll tell you what, instead of giving you your money back,

Speaker 9 why don't I make you one of the producing partners in Soul Train?

Speaker 9 I think this could go a long way, Roy, and I think it's going to be a good investment, and I think it's going to be something that really changes the culture. To which my father replied,

Speaker 9 Motherfuck, don't nobody want to watch dance for an hour.

Speaker 9 Give me my fucking cash.

Speaker 9 Don Cornelius. Broke the ball.

Speaker 9 But if your dad had talked to

Speaker 9 you wouldn't, but see, then if he'd have talked to my Roy, you wouldn't have,

Speaker 9 you wouldn't be Roy now. I understand that, but I tell that story to prove the point of just how

Speaker 9 focused my father was

Speaker 9 on

Speaker 9 black America.

Speaker 9 He was, he grew up in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1930s. My grandfather, who I never met, got snatched up when my dad was four, never came home again.

Speaker 9 So you know what that is.

Speaker 9 Moved to Chicago with his mama. No head of household, no male head of household ever again in his life.

Speaker 9 So you grew up in the streets like that with a single mom, and then you see every single atrocity that you can name.

Speaker 9 Your friends murdered, assassinated,

Speaker 9 people that you broke bread with, people that you covered in the 60s. One of the most trying decades for black folks.
The heart of the civil rights.

Speaker 9 And then a motherfucker come to you and go, hey, what if black people be dancing?

Speaker 9 People like, get the f out my face.

Speaker 9 You don't understand what's happening out here. But the truth of the matter is that Soul Train was right on time because black people needed a release.

Speaker 9 We deserve that.

Speaker 9 But my pops couldn't see the vision, man. He couldn't see it because he was just so entrenched in the problems.

Speaker 9 Your comedy and going back and studying it, you said something very interesting and I never even thought of it until you said it.

Speaker 9 You said nobody gave a damn about the vice president until a female got the woman got the job. And then all of a sudden, the vice president, who really is a figurehead, all she does is break the tie.

Speaker 9 If there's a 50-50 tie in the Senate, she'll break it. But that's really, that's not.
She'll show up at a middle school way.

Speaker 9 That's really

Speaker 9 their only job. Yeah.

Speaker 9 But now I've never seen a vice president get as much criticism. President Biden is the president.
And it seems like everything that he got wrong, it was her fault. And she had to take the brunt of it.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I mean, it's a better question for a black woman, but the ones I've talked to have been like, that's what we've been trying to tell you.

Speaker 9 I don't think that,

Speaker 9 I don't think Kamala got a fair deal. And she talks about that a little bit in her book.
I haven't finished it.

Speaker 9 Is it 107 Days? She breaks down the whole run of what happened. You know, like,

Speaker 9 I don't even think we talked about a vice president.

Speaker 9 Who's the boy that shot the one in the face? Cheney.

Speaker 9 Dick Cheney shot somebody in the face. He He was like, all right, we got to talk about him.
Dan Quayle couldn't spell a word back in the 80s. Like, all right, we got to talk about him.

Speaker 9 But, you know, no, I don't think that Kamala Harris got,

Speaker 9 I don't think she got a fair deal in her election run.

Speaker 9 Whether you love her or not, whether you voted for her or not, the idea of,

Speaker 9 hey, motherfucker, here's something real quick.

Speaker 9 Y'all gave her the ball

Speaker 9 on her own two-yard line with no timeouts pull a john elway go down the field and win the game in in the drive in 1986 yeah

Speaker 9 yeah and then when you don't we go you terrible it's all your fault

Speaker 9 ain't no no wonder she's been laying low yeah all this time

Speaker 9 damn yeah

Speaker 9 did the

Speaker 9 Black said, well, you know, when President Trump, his first term in office, man, the money was flowing. We got them stemming.
Everybody, the unemployment was down. Hey, man, we were jiggers up.

Speaker 9 Hey, man, we were, hey, man, we were doing.

Speaker 9 Unless you're flipping Bitcoin with them, you ain't making no money with Trump right now.

Speaker 9 But that's what

Speaker 9 they said. The black

Speaker 9 they did so much better under President Trump than they did President Bush. Just the average black voter.
Yes. Okay.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I could go with that. Like, I understand that.
Like,

Speaker 9 that just goes back to what I was talking about earlier, man. Politics is personal.

Speaker 9 I give about the world for if I'm hurting. But if somebody broke bread with me when I was down, I ain't going to never forget that.

Speaker 9 Think about when you was down

Speaker 9 and

Speaker 9 who was there for you and who gave you a dollar or who gave you a bite of eight burgers, split the pizza with you.

Speaker 9 There's an undying loyalty. to people like that that extends well beyond politics, especially with black folks, because most people don't help us.
So I could get why Trump giving you a STEMI.

Speaker 9 But it was Congress, the Democratic Congress, that passed out those actions. Okay, I ain't got time for the facts.
I ain't got time for the facts.

Speaker 9 You talk to me about facts?

Speaker 9 Trump name on the check. That ain't enough for me.

Speaker 9 That was enough for you, harm. But that goes back to the idea of most people don't want to know truth and facts and information.

Speaker 9 So if you can figure out a way to attach yourself to the lie and they buy it,

Speaker 9 you won. Yes.

Speaker 9 We got to like

Speaker 9 politics is getting to a place where

Speaker 9 I feel like liberals are constantly trying to,

Speaker 9 well, no, no, no, that's not what it was. That's not what it was really, actually.

Speaker 9 There's no effective way to deliver a will, actually.

Speaker 9 You just got to tell your lie.

Speaker 9 Make your lie bigger than their lie because that's what's selling right now. But that's not ethical.

Speaker 9 That's ethical. And I think, but I think that a lot of people still believe that there is a way to win ethically.

Speaker 9 And I think that if you can win unethically, then govern ethically, then maybe there's a way to run that back. But

Speaker 9 you're not going to get

Speaker 9 black folks or poor white people to understand, well, actually, Congress, if you understand the disbursement of checks and how things are actually allocated.

Speaker 9 All I know is that I was broke and somebody in government gave me that money, and the president is considered the head of government. Therefore, the president gets credit.

Speaker 9 Period. I don't care that Trump had his signature added to these checks.

Speaker 9 And that's the truth. It is that.
But you're trying to get, you're trying to permeate people with truth. who don't have the time or the patience or the desire most of the time.
Correct.

Speaker 9 We're smart people.

Speaker 9 We're very smart people. I'm not going to call them dumb.

Speaker 9 Just impatient. And you're starving and you're hurting.

Speaker 9 And so you figure out ways to sell a lie.

Speaker 9 This administration has done

Speaker 9 a brilliant,

Speaker 9 brilliant, like they've shown you the blueprint of how to get people to believe blindly.

Speaker 9 Folks saying, go Trump as they're getting loaded into the ice van.

Speaker 9 What kind of that's a level of dedication in four generations of farmers are starting to lose their farm.

Speaker 9 They're going to go belly up because nobody's buying their soybean, nobody's buying their wheat, nobody is buying their products, and they're about to lose because they can't pay for that farm equipment.

Speaker 9 They can't pay for that fertilizer, and they have all those crops.

Speaker 9 They can't sell.

Speaker 9 I think that I will say this.

Speaker 9 I think that both sides stand to gain more of a political advantage by activating passive voters,

Speaker 9 but you're definitely not going to flip anybody without empathy. And I think that what we've seen right now in this country over the last year or two, there is no empathy from liberals to Republicans.

Speaker 9 It's very much around and find out you got what you deserve.

Speaker 9 Don't call black women.

Speaker 9 Okay, cool.

Speaker 9 But then the plan, if that's the play, then the plan needs to be how do you activate all the other people who don't believe that the party doesn't have a plan.

Speaker 9 And I think that's the part that that's the solution that nobody's presented. You can't keep writing letters and reprimanding the president,

Speaker 9 you know, and vice versa. You're not going to get sympathy from Republicans to liberals? No.

Speaker 9 I mean, D.L. Hughley said it best when he was talking about how people were, there was no sympathy

Speaker 9 the way the George Floyd jokes flew in comparison to the way that people were telling jokes about Charlie Kirk. Well, you're never going to get those people.
Right.

Speaker 9 You're never going to get the empathy. Or Trayvon Martin.

Speaker 9 People

Speaker 9 had the Trayvon Martin costume. They had the Skittles and they had the stuff and it was funny.
Correct. And so

Speaker 9 with everything that happened with Charlie Kirk, the expectation of empathy from

Speaker 9 liberals from that side, it's an unrealistic expectation. You may want the empathy, but there are a lot of people who still forever are going to feel some kind of way.

Speaker 9 And I think that a lot of those feelings people are going to carry to their graves.

Speaker 9 And I don't know if there's a policy that any Democrat could flip that's going to flip a moderate Republican without losing

Speaker 9 without losing some liberals. Yeah.
Because there's a lot more morals

Speaker 9 on the Democratic side. And so when you've got morals and you need to let go of some of your morals to reel in some of the Republicans, I think you stand to lose more,

Speaker 9 you know, Democrats. So I don't know.
It's a rock and a hard place. Where are you on protest? I'd go to Canada, but I'm a felon.
They'd be tricked.

Speaker 9 Every time I go to Canada, I got to fill out a gang of paperwork and promise I ain't going to skill nothing.

Speaker 9 Man, you still on paper? No, but Canada don't care. Like, yo, it's a lot of countries.
When they find out you did dirt in America, they think that you like the master criminal.

Speaker 9 They think you that French from Netflix.

Speaker 9 What are they, Lupin? Lupine?

Speaker 9 Lupin?

Speaker 9 I forget the brothers. I try to use actors' real names because then that's how black people just call you that forever.

Speaker 9 But yeah.

Speaker 9 What do I feel on protest? Yes. Because you see how I think it was Pastor Jamal Bryant.
He asked, you know, look here, since Target is getting rid of that DEI, don't worry about it.

Speaker 9 Let's not go to their thing. And it's done, it's killed their stock.
Yeah. So there's still power in the protest.
Yeah, absolutely. There's still power in voting with your dollars.
Yes.

Speaker 9 All of this is a form of protest.

Speaker 9 It's all fiscal. That's why any corporation, like if you look at what Target did

Speaker 9 during George Floyd, and it's like, oh, well, we will have the programs and the initiatives and we will hire blacks and we will study why we are racist and we will read Dr. Ibram X.

Speaker 9 Kindy will read your book. Tell me why I'm a racist cracker, Ibram X.
Kindy. Like, and it wasn't just Target.
All of these companies made all of these promises and we're going to do the thing.

Speaker 9 And then an administration came in and said, we're going to f up your cash if you don't stop fucking with them niggas.

Speaker 9 And then it's a business decision. And it always was.
Yes. Because four or five years ago, it was, if you don't show us that you don't care about black people and DE and I,

Speaker 9 we gonna f ⁇ up your cash.

Speaker 9 And now all these, these companies, man, they getting stuck up from both sides.

Speaker 9 That's what ABC and Disney dealing with with the Kimmel fiasco. How do we play the middle? Yeah.

Speaker 9 If you, you better let go of Jimmy Kimmel or we're going to mess up your merger.

Speaker 9 Paramount CBS. Oh, y'all.
Y'all aired a clip of me kind of edited but unedited.

Speaker 9 All right. Well, watch this.

Speaker 9 You're going to pull that 60 minutes report and you're going to give me $60 million,

Speaker 9 or I'm not going to let your merger go through, and I'm going to f up your cash. Yeah.

Speaker 9 It's all a heist, bro.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 I'm not,

Speaker 9 I think the failure we have made

Speaker 9 as black people

Speaker 9 is thinking that corporations have

Speaker 9 humanity.

Speaker 9 I was about to say morals.

Speaker 9 You can manipulate them. Yes.
And you can have the upper hand and you can gain leverage and you can get what you want and it can help advance society and make the world a better place.

Speaker 9 But just know that the only reason they probably did it

Speaker 9 was because

Speaker 9 you had the gun to their head.

Speaker 9 It's not a coincidence when you look at the increase, the death of DE and I.

Speaker 9 and the increase of black women unemployment in this country.

Speaker 9 Because it's not just necessarily black women that were hired to run whatever DEI initiative for a company, but a lot of those black women were hired under the guise of this program.

Speaker 9 Even though you were perfectly qualified,

Speaker 9 we put your hire under this umbrella with this grant and paid you with this initiative instead of just leaving it.

Speaker 9 I think that that part of it is,

Speaker 9 I think protests are effective. I just don't think think that we should continue to assume companies to be

Speaker 9 as quick to kowtow

Speaker 9 they're not

Speaker 9 protesting was easier back in the day like we talk about sit-ins and all of that that's because it was just jimmy's diner right like yeah you can shut down jimmy but to effectively protest something now

Speaker 9 yeah they got they got 1500 3 000 stores yeah and you connected a million that's why i knew white folks wasn't going they was going to fold on that Bud Light protest.

Speaker 9 They were like when Bud Light had the trans actress, yeah, and they were all, oh, we ain't drinking Bud Light, and they were shooting the cans and shit.

Speaker 9 You know how many different liquor brands are run by Anheuser-Busch?

Speaker 9 M-Bill.

Speaker 9 It's like 20, 20 or so brands.

Speaker 9 Are you really that dedicated?

Speaker 9 You're not. You're not going for it.
Did you get the, speaking of protests, did you get the

Speaker 9 George Zimmerman

Speaker 9 paper protest email when that happened? I don't have email, so no, I wouldn't have. What the fuck?

Speaker 9 I don't have email. Okay.
Jordan has email. My sister has email, so they'll send it to me in a textbook.
That's fair.

Speaker 9 Like Bill Murray.

Speaker 9 You know, Bill Murray just got a phone with an answering machine, and he checks it every day. Okay.
And that's how he gets gigs.

Speaker 9 No, there was an email. I don't know if this was true, but I got this email.

Speaker 9 It was supposedly a paper company was funding George Zimmerman's defense fund at the time. And we got an email and it said, boycott this paper company.

Speaker 9 And it was like 30 different brands of paper and picnic and plates and cups and forks. Don't buy none of this shit.
Don't buy none. It was like 20 different toilet tissues.

Speaker 9 And I wanted to reply to the email. Well, how am I going to wipe my ass?

Speaker 9 What am I going to get out of my hands? Well, you got to give me alternative options.

Speaker 9 I say that to say the idea of protesting is something where you have to be much more steadfast than

Speaker 9 what I think our ancestors had to be.

Speaker 9 Because there's also a serious degree of convenience.

Speaker 9 With a store like Target, I live three blocks from a Target in New New York City

Speaker 9 and walk past it and it's like, fuck, I know it's in there. Yeah, I need that shower chicken.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I do think that protesting is,

Speaker 9 it's still effective, but I do think that there is a degree of,

Speaker 9 I don't want to say a lack of unity across our race, but there's definitely people who are just going to, but I'm not with that. I ain't doing that.

Speaker 9 People forget the Montgomery bus boycott was a year, like it was a long time, like it wasn't three weeks and then the way folks fold it. It was carpools and

Speaker 9 it was different. And the sanitation boycott that they had down there.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 People actually think it like was like a no, it was a long, long period of time. Well, that's also because a lot of boycotts now are

Speaker 9 top of the news cycle and then they fall off

Speaker 9 and nobody else is talking about it after that. But, you know, you hope Target does the right thing.
But there's a lot of companies that have backpedaled. Let's get to your career.
Dating scene now.

Speaker 9 Because you was once married. We're going to talk about your.

Speaker 9 We weren't married, but we moved like we were. Oh, you weren't officially.
No, no. But we made,

Speaker 9 we were solid. So we moved like that.

Speaker 9 So what's the dating scene now for

Speaker 9 Roy Wood Jr. now? I work, bro.

Speaker 9 I've been single. So in other words, you tried, so that's what you tell them at work now.
Because they say, well, you want to, if you wanted to find time, you could find time.

Speaker 9 You find time for your son.

Speaker 9 That's my son.

Speaker 9 You know that what it is that what they tell you? Yeah.

Speaker 9 I have

Speaker 9 I have met,

Speaker 9 I've been blessed.

Speaker 9 I'm blessed now with the eyesight to know when it is a good woman. Okay.

Speaker 9 And I've met one or or two,

Speaker 9 but I also have enough sense to know of what it is I'm trying to build right now. Right.

Speaker 9 And I think what I underestimated in being single again was

Speaker 9 the idea of

Speaker 9 also quitting my job at the same time. I quit Daily Show around the same time.
Yes. And

Speaker 9 I didn't know what I was going to do next.

Speaker 9 And I still have a family to support.

Speaker 9 Together or not, we remain a family. Right.
We remain a unit. You remain the most important person in my ecosystem because you're helping me raise the boy.

Speaker 9 So there's certain things that have to be provided for.

Speaker 9 So,

Speaker 9 yeah, I'm going to work right now.

Speaker 9 And back to what you were talking about at the top of this, man.

Speaker 9 About the flowers.

Speaker 9 I can't stop to smell them because I got to keep

Speaker 9 going.

Speaker 9 If I stop, the wheels come off of all of this. Right.

Speaker 9 And I don't know if that's a pressure that men put on themselves unnecessarily, but it don't change the truth. It is.
Because you feel you have a sense of responsibility. But it's the truth.

Speaker 9 People are calling on you. Yeah, it absolutely is.
So

Speaker 9 I need to be in a space where I can never again

Speaker 9 be waiting on someone else to choose me, which is what happened at the daily show. Yes.

Speaker 9 So to get in that space requires a level of focus and work as the industry that I love starts to change and crumble.

Speaker 9 Oh, I'm going to do daily show, and then I'm going to get me a late night show. Now, no more you ain't

Speaker 9 late night show where this is the last licks. Yep.
Jimmy Fallon, Kimmel, them the last licks. That's it.

Speaker 9 Ain't nobody else coming in and doing, I don't know what's going to be next, but it ain't going to be that.

Speaker 9 Land CNN, cool.

Speaker 9 Write a book, cool. Sell two TV shows, write a movie, cool.

Speaker 9 You just start putting pots on the stove, pots on the stove. How many irons can you have with the fire? I don't know, but I can tell you that figuring out taking one off

Speaker 9 to put in a relationship. and not being sure if that's going to work and knowing that if any of these other pots fail,

Speaker 9 bigger ecosystem that I have a higher responsibility to first suffers.

Speaker 9 Son will never suffer. My son

Speaker 9 is my only child. So

Speaker 9 you're going to be straight. Now, I can't do this alone,

Speaker 9 but

Speaker 9 it's hard when you're grinding, man, and you're trying to figure out relationships because you almost need someone to just merge in with you in traffic. This idea of stop and courtship and it's...

Speaker 9 It's a merger, huh? I've never dated under this degree of industry pressure before.

Speaker 9 And I don't know how to handle it because I don't have anything

Speaker 9 to recreate. Last time, like when I met my son's mother, I was sitcom.
It just got canceled. I'm on ESPN for free two days a week, praying that that gig leads me to get another college gig.

Speaker 9 Shout out to Sports Nation and Jamal Hill, his and hers. Bermani Jones used to put me like just praying one of them 3 p.m.

Speaker 9 ESPN shows hit and give you something else how much of what your father how your father was to you has rubbed up on you to how you are to your son

Speaker 9 not a lot

Speaker 9 maybe

Speaker 9 Maybe how I am to women

Speaker 9 maybe some of that. So for perspective, I'm the ninth of, I'm my mom's only child.
I'm the ninth of 11 kids. So your dad had a lot.
Yeah. Of fucking.

Speaker 9 So is that what caused the separation between your dad and your mom? Yeah, to a degree. Yeah, a little bit.
I got two younger halves. You do the math.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 I think how my father carried himself professionally

Speaker 9 was

Speaker 9 what rubbed off on me.

Speaker 9 I care about black people. I use humor to try and tell our stories and to humanize our experiences to educate people who wouldn't have otherwise paid attention to what we're going through.

Speaker 9 Period, full stop.

Speaker 9 And if you look at the body of work that I've built over the last decade, it will support that thesis.

Speaker 9 Where it comes to parenting, my boss wasn't around a lot

Speaker 9 because he was out working or he was with his other family. You know, one of the toughest things I had to,

Speaker 9 you know, if you bring it back to the breakup, right?

Speaker 9 You start thinking about

Speaker 9 what your responsibility is to your child and how you plan to

Speaker 9 build him up. What values am I going to give him?

Speaker 9 And one of those things has to be how he treats women. Well, he's going to learn that from seeing how I treat women

Speaker 9 or how people treat his mother. Whatever that dynamic is, I'm oblivious to it.
So I can only be concerned with

Speaker 9 it. Correct, with my side of the equation.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 the more I looked at love and the more I looked at

Speaker 9 how to show my son love, my parents didn't sleep in the same room.

Speaker 9 Truth of the matter is, we in Memphis, I'm wilding out. There's no man in the house.

Speaker 9 My mom reconciled with my pops to make sure there was somebody in the house to knock my ass out when I started jumping bed.

Speaker 9 In exchange, free rent, take the money you save, put yourself through law school so you can get out of this situation. And that's what my mama did.
That's what my mom worked on.

Speaker 9 That's what her focus was grad school, degree, degree, degree.

Speaker 9 But most nights, my pops wasn't home.

Speaker 9 And so when I started thinking about the life I wanted to construct for my son, and I started thinking about,

Speaker 9 well, damn, if I'm going to show him love, where the f did I see it?

Speaker 9 What the fuck? What was my example of love?

Speaker 9 You had a roof over your head, you had food on the table. Yeah, but a lot of men think that's enough.

Speaker 9 That's how, in the black community, that's how we go. Clothes on your back, food in your belly, roof over your head.
What the fuck else? That's love. I pay the cost to be the boss.

Speaker 9 You remember Denzel

Speaker 9 when he told his son that very story? I lived that.

Speaker 9 And so the more when I had my son, the more I reflected on it, the more I realized that the best example of love I had was with my pops and

Speaker 9 his other woman.

Speaker 9 It's the best example of love. He loved her.
For whatever issues he had with my mom, it wasn't love.

Speaker 9 But when I really sit and think about

Speaker 9 how he treated that woman,

Speaker 9 that's who he was out with. He brought you around her.
To be around my younger brothers. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 he had how many kids with this other woman? Two. I had two younger halves.
Yeah. So he had two with you.
My older half siblings, we were never really that close. We're cool now.
Okay.

Speaker 9 But in terms of every day seeing them, the two youngers, I saw them. On the rig.
On the rig. Okay.
He scooped me up. My pops would scoop me up from soccer practice.
Go scoop them.

Speaker 9 We go to Dairy Queen. Stuff like that.
Wow.

Speaker 9 And so

Speaker 9 I had to call my two younger brothers and talk to them about

Speaker 9 what was life like. And this is a conversation I've never wanted to have with them.
But I got to have this conversation if I'm going to be better to my son.

Speaker 9 Hey, man, walk me through what pops was like. at your crib.
On the nights he didn't come.

Speaker 9 He wasn't with you, your mom. What was he?

Speaker 9 Damn.

Speaker 9 And they described a man I never met.

Speaker 9 So, so I don't. You got an opportunity to see him when he was with your mom.
So when they're explaining to you, I mean, he was home, he was at the dinner table, he read stories, checking home. What?

Speaker 9 Going to their games, bro. Oh, my God.

Speaker 9 My pops never did that.

Speaker 9 And so,

Speaker 9 that, man, bro, that had to hurt.

Speaker 9 But you don't unpack it. Imagine being 38 in the delivery room, unpacking that shit in real time while you're holding your newborn.
Because these are things I've never had to consider.

Speaker 9 I've never had to consider showing him love because I ain't had no kid.

Speaker 9 But now I have a kid and I go, well, damn, he needs love. Okay, well,

Speaker 9 I am here. I didn't learn it from my pops.
So, who did I? My Aunt JP and Uncle Rick, they love each other really.

Speaker 9 Like a couple, but I ain't around them on a regular.

Speaker 9 My pops is buried next to that one. She died three years before my dad.
My dad

Speaker 9 got his and hers

Speaker 9 plots. Plots.

Speaker 9 And we didn't even know he was being buried next to her until we were walking the casket up the hill.

Speaker 9 That's love. You can be mad about it or you could be sad about it, but you can take the game and figure out how to apply that

Speaker 9 to your child.

Speaker 9 A woman he came home to every night.

Speaker 9 So, if nothing else, it gives me a blueprint of what I should be looking for and what I should want out of a woman and what I should want within a relationship.

Speaker 9 She loved his funky draws, he loved hers.

Speaker 9 And that wasn't the case at our crib, and that's just what it was. Was your mom when your father passed? Was your mom still alive? Yeah, yeah, my mom's still alive right now.
So

Speaker 9 you have to look at, and I and I really didn't unpack all of this with my mom, but

Speaker 9 you have to look at at it as

Speaker 9 I've looked at it. You're in Memphis, you're in law school, or you're in grad school at the time.
I'm a latchkey kid, bro.

Speaker 9 We got there, we almost set the apartment complex on fire in the third grade and almost got evicted. So I'm wild.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 you just live with this man and y'all just become roommates. And you become whatever shell of yourself to get through this.

Speaker 18 If you've got a thirst to put the world on notice, Sprite's for you.

Speaker 18 Whether you're shooting a masterpiece on your phone, filling notebooks for sketches, or turning your bedroom into the booth, keep going. Obey your thirst.

Speaker 9 Sprite.

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Speaker 9 Knowing that your son at least has a checked in balances. And on the behavior side, it was right.
It worked. But like, one of the hardest things I have to do,

Speaker 9 because I follow my two younger brothers, like, love them. Love them to death.

Speaker 9 I follow them on social.

Speaker 9 Father's Day,

Speaker 9 Pop's funeral day, Pop's birthday.

Speaker 9 I usually don't go on social on those days.

Speaker 9 Because they're talking about a man that you never knew. Never knew.

Speaker 9 They posted pictures with this man, and

Speaker 9 these are old school Polaroids that's got the date at the bottom.

Speaker 9 I can look at the date of the picture and tell you whether or not the heat was on at our house because my parents was arguing and pops had pulled, you know. so

Speaker 9 the idea that

Speaker 9 i can even learn what type of father i could be from watching through his lens he was damaged

Speaker 9 you were damaged and you sought comfort through women and sex

Speaker 9 and you were superb at your job top of your game

Speaker 9 Correspondence dinner, when I got done, a bunch of black journalists who were there at the correspondence dinner came up to me and were telling me about

Speaker 9 how my pops gave, he was there, they were, their first job was working for my dad. Five, six people,

Speaker 9 people who used to work at

Speaker 9 National Black Network, which eventually became A-U-R-N, American Urban Radio Network.

Speaker 9 That company exists because of my fucking pops and the other people he co-founded with. And they came up to shake my hand and tell me, thank you.
And like, that was a level of respect that

Speaker 9 I don't know if I'll ever do anything as valuable as that. So, you still

Speaker 9 can be mad at this man, or you can learn from it. Because either way, you're still going to be in his shadow.
Yeah,

Speaker 9 I didn't go by Roy Wood Jr. till he died because I knew it fucked with him.

Speaker 9 So, it was the only thing,

Speaker 9 it was the only thing that I knew just fucked with me. But he gave,

Speaker 9 did you, but did you think for a second, Roy? That was. He gave you his name.

Speaker 9 He gave you his, he didn't give it to the others. Give me your time.

Speaker 9 Your name. Touche.

Speaker 9 But the idea of,

Speaker 9 I remember I came home the year, but it had Roy Wood. He go, your name is Roy Wood Jr.

Speaker 9 And I just didn't want to, like, I just hoped that like people didn't know

Speaker 9 or would assume that I wasn't related.

Speaker 9 And then when he died, he died my senior year of high school. And I was like,

Speaker 9 all right,

Speaker 9 I'll carry it now. I'll carry the torch.

Speaker 9 So you did grow up with some level of resentment towards your father? A little, but it didn't. It came out after I had my son.
Because you start, you have your child, bro.

Speaker 9 And then you start thinking about

Speaker 9 everything you're going to do with your son. That your father didn't do with you.
And then you realize

Speaker 9 he never did it with you.

Speaker 9 And you're like, damn.

Speaker 9 The one thing he did give me that I did appreciate, he made sure that I knew who he was and what he stood for. And that's through

Speaker 9 being able to shadow him and be around him.

Speaker 9 But you're only getting half of a person when they get you at work, when you get your parents at work. But I'm grateful for that.

Speaker 9 And I try to do that with my son. You know,

Speaker 9 I don't take him everywhere. He knows I do comedy.
He knows I'm on TV in some capacity. His classmates' parents

Speaker 9 telephone game gets back to him about, oh, his dad is just a thing.

Speaker 9 But,

Speaker 9 you know, I try to give him a degree of space away from all of this. Also, because it's politics and it's funky, and I just don't want him

Speaker 9 be young. You deserve to be young, you know, be young man.
But

Speaker 9 I don't think that resentment gets you anywhere if you have issues with your father. I think you literally have to look at who the man was

Speaker 9 and just

Speaker 9 pick the little pieces.

Speaker 9 Get rid of the rest.

Speaker 9 You remember when you was a kid, your mama cooked something you really didn't like, and she put stuff in there, you just pick out the pieces.

Speaker 9 You pick out the stuff that you like out of the dish. My mama put bell peppers in her tuna, and when when I tell you, I used to pick them little bell peppers, and she mince them up real.

Speaker 9 My grandmother did that with hamburgers. She put onions in the hamlet in the meat.
She mixed it in the onions.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Yeah. But that's why I'm grateful, bro.
I'm grateful that I had so many men that just that God put in my life that poor knowledge of poor game, be it once, be it multiple times. Like that was,

Speaker 9 I think that's where i really learned how to love

Speaker 9 was like just being in reflection of

Speaker 9 taking my own experiences out of it when have i seen a man

Speaker 9 be kind and soft with a woman

Speaker 9 okay

Speaker 9 there

Speaker 9 all right take the note all right cool i need to make sure i feel that with her

Speaker 9 And then I can better identify whether this is somebody I should be with.

Speaker 9 And that helped. It really did, like, I hate to say it, but having that conversation with my younger brothers, it helped me immensely in being able to love my son.

Speaker 9 But let me ask you, did you, when you talk to her, and people say, you know, communication,

Speaker 9 you know, be honest,

Speaker 9 be honest, be transparent. When you, I don't know if you did or you didn't, when you talked to your uncle or you saw people that had been married and that had been in love,

Speaker 9 does that better help you understand or

Speaker 9 paint a picture of what you should be looking for in a mate that you could potentially be your wife?

Speaker 9 My uncle Derek, he lost his wife,

Speaker 9 this is in the 80s,

Speaker 9 drunk driver. He heard the crash from his house and it devastated him.
And I remember going to my Aunt Mary's funeral and seeing my uncle cry over the casket.

Speaker 9 And he had, you know, he had about a five, ten year stretch after that because he's also ex-military. You drop in some PTSD in that mix along with grieving as a widower.

Speaker 9 He had a rough stretch. Yes.
I just say that. He had a really rough stretch that he came out of.
And seeing what he became without her helped me understand what she was

Speaker 9 to him.

Speaker 9 That's love.

Speaker 9 And I think through those painful moments, you're able to mine something

Speaker 9 that's beautiful, man. I'm not,

Speaker 9 you know, we all wish we could have got a better hand with our parents. I don't care what kind of parents you got.
You wish they was more this

Speaker 9 or more that.

Speaker 9 But, you know, what really helped me was going on finding your roots and

Speaker 9 learning so much new information about my dad and the idea that, oh,

Speaker 9 I get it. You lost your dad.
You ain't had no game. Nobody gave you game.
I was about to say that.

Speaker 9 Then

Speaker 9 you get a debilitative injury in high school. My pops got hit by a car chasing behind a girl that just broke up with him.

Speaker 9 Hip replacements for the rest of his life. Walk with a limp the rest of his life.
How do you think that informed his opinion of women?

Speaker 9 What do you think walking with a limp did to his confidence for the rest of his life?

Speaker 9 And how he viewed women?

Speaker 9 I don't know.

Speaker 9 There's a lot of questions that are just, that will forever be unanswered because most of the people that can answer them from his side are dead.

Speaker 9 Because I was going to ask you, I was going to like, because a lot of times we learn how to love through how we were loved.

Speaker 9 You know, your dad, and I was going to ask you, I said, did you ever talk to his,

Speaker 9 did you ever ask your dad, how was his father to him, your grandfather to him, and so forth and so on. So it would probably give you a better picture of how.

Speaker 9 But you was like, you know what? I don't know a whole lot about this fatherhood. I just know I want to be a better dad to my son than what my father was.
That's it. That's it.

Speaker 9 I don't know how this thing is going to shape out,

Speaker 9 but I do know that. I'll start with that base level thing.

Speaker 9 I will be present and I will, you know, and for the life of my relationship with his mother, you know, it was. I was going, like when I traveled, hey, I'm sorry, I got to go.

Speaker 9 But I would explain why I'm going, where I'm going, what I'm doing. And I still do that to this day.
Even when we broke up, sat them down, walked them through, hey, here's what's happening with that.

Speaker 9 But just so you know, me and her ain't got nothing to do with me and you. Everybody's still good, cool.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 but that was a lot of that was a lot. That's heavy.
You got a newborn, you quit the job, and you just broke up with

Speaker 9 the mother of your child. That's a lot going on.
Well, he's about six or seven at the time of the breakup, but it's still a lot. Yes.
And so

Speaker 9 there is a pressure.

Speaker 9 There's a pressure of providing that

Speaker 9 I don't think men talk about enough,

Speaker 9 and I don't think women necessarily

Speaker 9 don't care, but they have their own battles as well.

Speaker 9 They got their own workplace challenges as well. So, I understand you got your issues, but I'm over here fighting this fire over here.
Good luck with your fire.

Speaker 9 I think that

Speaker 9 like I remember some nights watching my son sleep when he was younger,

Speaker 9 And I would be up at night and just be walking around the house and

Speaker 9 to that flower moment where it's like,

Speaker 9 I live in New York City, bro.

Speaker 9 I live in New York City.

Speaker 9 I have a solid job.

Speaker 9 My family is fed. They're sleeping safe.

Speaker 9 I remember when I came to New York in 1999

Speaker 9 and I was here for three days, and I could only afford one meal because I needed the rest of the money for tolls to get back to Alabama.

Speaker 9 Praying that somebody at the comedy club would offer me a wing or a fry

Speaker 9 so I could eat that day.

Speaker 9 And now I'm in this city, and I got furniture, I got a job, my picture on phone booths, I got an hour special coming out, and I'm watching my son sleep peacefully

Speaker 9 with none of the cares that I had.

Speaker 9 And it lasts for about 20 seconds. And then the next thought is, how the am I going to keep this all together?

Speaker 9 And that's the impulse that drives me. That's the impulse that gives you everything you read at the top of the show in my intro.

Speaker 9 And I don't know if that's for better or for worse. Do you sleep good? No.

Speaker 9 I suffer the same thing because I can't turn my mind off.

Speaker 9 I wake up immediately, and there's 20 ways this could go wrong. Yep.
There's 30 ways this other thing could go wrong.

Speaker 9 But if I can control it

Speaker 9 and be in charge of it, I realize what I lack is control. I'm a control freak to a degree.

Speaker 9 I need opportunities that are

Speaker 9 afford me that.

Speaker 9 I'm thankful for CNN?

Speaker 9 But it is a network.

Speaker 9 All TV shows end.

Speaker 9 One day it will.

Speaker 9 Hopefully, I'll see it coming or I'll have time.

Speaker 9 But in case I don't,

Speaker 9 you have something already. You've already got a book.
You have a garden planted and something else is about to sprout. Let me get this YouTube shit straight for 2026.

Speaker 9 I already know what I want to do. Get this book right, sell that book, get a script on that.
And that way I know my son can continue to sleep comfortably.

Speaker 9 That drives me.

Speaker 9 And I know some people will consider that unhealthy, but

Speaker 9 if it's gotten you more successful every year than the year before since 1998,

Speaker 9 doing something right. Doing something right.

Speaker 9 What have you learned about money?

Speaker 9 That it's just money.

Speaker 9 It's not going to make you happy.

Speaker 9 There's definitely a peace of mind you need to have with it.

Speaker 9 I'm probably a little reckless,

Speaker 9 but

Speaker 9 I think my recklessness comes from stupid shit like ubering when I could have walked.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I was just saying.

Speaker 9 It's like eight blocks.

Speaker 9 I don't feel like it. Nigga, come get me.

Speaker 9 I'm on the corner. Yeah, but I don't have a lot of vices in that regard.

Speaker 9 Like, even with women, it's not like I'm spending a bunch of money on a million dates and going to exotic locations and shit like that. I don't wear jewelry.
Right.

Speaker 9 I get nice sneakers every hour. You got some unions.

Speaker 9 Hulu paid for these. Oh, okay.

Speaker 9 Buys.

Speaker 9 You're crazy. No.
When I get an hour special, they allocate money for wardrobe. I spend it all on a shoe.

Speaker 9 Ankle up.

Speaker 9 Ankle up. I got it.
It's already in the closet. I know what I'm going to wear.
With the shoe,

Speaker 9 you're going to pay for that.

Speaker 9 So I don't,

Speaker 9 you know, my relationship with money is, I would say it's

Speaker 9 decent.

Speaker 9 I'm not rich in the least, but I'm blessed. And,

Speaker 9 you know, I am the family member that family members call,

Speaker 9 which in a way is. It's a huge responsibility, though.
It's a blessing and a curse. It is.

Speaker 9 It is.

Speaker 9 But I've always,

Speaker 9 me, I've always wanted that. I was the baby.

Speaker 9 And my brother had a serious injury. And so I took on the responsibility.
And I remember telling my grandmother on a deathbed that I got it.

Speaker 9 My sister, we and my sister, my sister's here right now, and she had a conversation with me. She was telling, I had this conversation with my grandmother in June.

Speaker 9 My sister had the very conversation with my grandmother in April. I didn't know about it until she told me.
She said, Shannon, Granny, like one of my cousins was in the room.

Speaker 9 And she asked my grandmother,

Speaker 9 hey,

Speaker 9 what's going? She said, hey, Mary, what's wrong? And my grandmother said, I'm dying.

Speaker 9 And I don't want to leave y'all.

Speaker 9 My sister.

Speaker 9 Say, Granny, it's okay for you to go. I'm going to be okay.

Speaker 9 Spanky's going to to be okay, which is my brother. Shannon's going to be okay.
Shannon's going to make sure mama's okay. Everything's going to be taken care of.

Speaker 9 I didn't know, Roy, my sister had this conversation with my grandmother in April. I come back along in June.
The guy's doing a story because I'm going into the Hall of Fame that August.

Speaker 9 So he's following, he's following me around. We go to the old house.
We go to the old high school. When we get back to the

Speaker 9 nursing home, the

Speaker 9 retirement facility, my grandmother is crying uncontrollably. So I stop the guy and I go in and she's crying and I hold her in my arms.
I look at her.

Speaker 9 I said, Granny, I said, so I already knew what it was.

Speaker 9 I said, Granny, it's okay. I got it.
I said, you and Papa, y'all did what y'all were supposed to do.

Speaker 9 I got Libby. I got Spanky and I got Mama.
Don't even worry about it. A week later, Roy, she was gone.

Speaker 9 She needed her baby to tell her

Speaker 9 that he had it.

Speaker 9 Once I told her, I let her mind be at ease.

Speaker 13 My sister called me.

Speaker 9 She said, Shawn, she's gone. I said, for real, Libby?

Speaker 11 She said, yep.

Speaker 9 She told my sister and my mom, because my sister would go up there every day, feed her, bathe her. That's not a responsibility.
My sister did that for two years every single day.

Speaker 9 We'd go up there, make sure she ate her food, make sure she had a blood, change her clothes, do everything.

Speaker 9 Stay on top of them folks.

Speaker 9 About

Speaker 9 five o'clock,

Speaker 9 my grandmother said, Libby,

Speaker 9 you and

Speaker 9 Alice, y'all go, that's my mom, Mary Alice, name after mom.

Speaker 9 She said, y'all go home. Man, I can't get no rest with y'all here.

Speaker 9 She sent them home probably around 5, 5:30.

Speaker 9 They called my sister at 6.

Speaker 9 How was that? Libby, Miss Mary, go.

Speaker 9 Man, so to hear you say that the responsibility of your siblings and the family, you're who they call,

Speaker 9 I know what that's like. I've lived that life for the last 30 years.
My only beef is that,

Speaker 9 and I understand this because

Speaker 9 my mom used to think I was asleep, but I could listen to her making the money calls at night.

Speaker 9 Hey girl, it's Joyce. I wouldn't call you if I needed, blah, blah, blah.
So I understand

Speaker 9 the courage it takes to admit you need help. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 9 But nigga, don't wait until the tow truck is at the house.

Speaker 9 He done got it. He done got it.
You do you owed on the fucking car for two months, nigga, and now the tow truck is outside. And now I'm trying to Venmo a n ⁇ named Keith.

Speaker 9 And it's like, hey, yeah,

Speaker 9 he out here right now. He want to talk to you.

Speaker 9 What do you want to talk to me about? And he got my car. Meanwhile, I'm on the phone with you.
And then there's somebody talking to me, yeah, three minutes.

Speaker 9 We're going to, the shot is live in three minutes. Come on back over to the set.

Speaker 9 I'm at work and I'm like literally Venmo. There's times on the daily show where I've just said a Venmo input.
Well, yes, Trevor Noah, I tell you what's going on with the Republicans. Like

Speaker 9 that part of it, I don't like, but I understand where the hesitancy comes from. I wish, man,

Speaker 9 I wish I'd have had that like luxury of that like last

Speaker 9 conversation because prostate cancer is what took my pops.

Speaker 9 And my pops,

Speaker 9 when you're 16, you don't even know what you're supposed to be asking, bro.

Speaker 9 And cancer, like the last year of cancer is just such a nasty, terrible thing.

Speaker 9 My pops became very mean, like very

Speaker 9 just angry.

Speaker 9 Which I just wrote out, I ain't take offense to it. I didn't do shit to you today.
You're just snapping. All right.

Speaker 9 You're in pain, I guess. Whatever.

Speaker 9 I remember

Speaker 9 the last conversation I had with my dad.

Speaker 9 I remember

Speaker 9 We watched Jeopardy. That was always...

Speaker 9 We'd watch Jeopardy. My pops would watch local news because he was mentoring a lot of the anchors on the local affiliates.

Speaker 9 So he would watch everybody's anchoring and then call them and give them critiques or whatever. Yeah, give them feedback.
After feedback, we watch Jeopardy.

Speaker 9 And we're watching Jeopardy, and I make him a baked potato, and I give it to him. He takes a nibble.

Speaker 9 After about an hour, he gives it back. He ain't really touched it, appetite gone.

Speaker 9 And he looks at it and he looks at me and goes, I did all right, didn't I? And I look at the the baked potato. Yeah, you did all right.

Speaker 9 You know, I'm lying, but all right.

Speaker 9 Next day I come home, he's in hospice in my older brother's crib.

Speaker 9 And so,

Speaker 9 you know, for the most part, I live my life after that. I didn't go visit him every day because it's hospice.

Speaker 9 And a lot of the time in the hospital, when I was there,

Speaker 9 it would be a lot of the other women.

Speaker 9 So if my mom's was there,

Speaker 9 and then it's some side shit,

Speaker 9 that's weird.

Speaker 9 You know what I'm saying? So

Speaker 9 I would go solo, and that became weird.

Speaker 9 About a month later, he dies, and we're at the funeral, and we're walking away from the we're leaving the buried, we're going back to the limos or whatever.

Speaker 9 And my older sister, Brenda,

Speaker 9 she comes up to me as we're walking down the hill and she's like, Of all my siblings, all my half siblings, she's like the most spiritual and Jesus and God. And the scripture says,

Speaker 9 You know, daddy loved you. And I know you may not have always felt that, but daddy loved you.
And no matter what, just remember, he did the best he could.

Speaker 9 And that shit hit me like a fucking

Speaker 9 a mat truck, bro. Like,

Speaker 9 he asked me, I did all right. He wasn't asking about the baked potato.

Speaker 9 He was asking me how he did with

Speaker 9 raising me.

Speaker 9 And I missed the fucking window, bro.

Speaker 9 Not only did I miss the window, I told him he did all right.

Speaker 9 Because he probably thought I was talking about how he raised me. I was talking about the baked potato.

Speaker 9 And so.

Speaker 9 Had you had that window, the window

Speaker 9 that he left open,

Speaker 9 had you knew, what would you have told him? I don't know, but I wouldn't have let him off the hook like that.

Speaker 9 Even in the situation, the tradition he was in.

Speaker 9 There's a soft way

Speaker 9 to let him know he could have done better.

Speaker 9 Well, it's not even to criticize.

Speaker 9 It's more questions than anything.

Speaker 9 I never thought about that. I said, damn.

Speaker 9 I never thought about what I would have asked or what I would have said.

Speaker 9 I don't think I had

Speaker 9 the wherewithal or the scope of knowledge. Keep in mind, I'm born, my parents are separated.
I'm born in New York. My parents are separated within a year.
My mom moves to Mississippi.

Speaker 9 My whole mom aside from Clarksdale. Okay.
So she moved to Memphis to go to school and be close. So she got the babysitter network with her siblings, right?

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 I grew up never knowing my father other than the dude who come to visit once a month. And I go see him for a month in the summer through third grade.

Speaker 9 So the idea of a father was just this nigga's a guest star and me and my mom a sitcom.

Speaker 9 Me and my mama the star. Daddy, just a neighbor who come in and wave from time to time.

Speaker 9 Then when we move in together in Birmingham, y'all don't really sleep. Y'all ain't in the same room.
We don't do any family functions other than breakfast. Sunday breakfast was sacred.

Speaker 9 But outside of that,

Speaker 9 You're not home. Everybody work different schedules.
He's a morning radio man. He gone before I'm up for school.

Speaker 9 And by the time I come home from school, he back out at night to do his jazz show and then hit the bars and, you know, socialize, hit the lounges and all, and drink some of it. Like, he

Speaker 9 out there. Right.
So we never kept the same clock. Okay.

Speaker 9 So I'm not even crossing you in the hallway for you to give me game.

Speaker 9 Just off the nature of our schedules.

Speaker 9 So you take something like that, and then it becomes, oh,

Speaker 9 need to be around more. Because

Speaker 9 I've learned and like I tried doing like mentorship programs and stuff it's not

Speaker 9 I'm not the right person

Speaker 9 literacy sports I'll give money to mentor because what I found at least what I believe is that

Speaker 9 male guidance it's these microscopic moments that happen It's not a full three, four hour day, let's go bowling, let's go, where you might ask something or not.

Speaker 9 You just have to be around. And then, the moment your child shows a window of wanting some knowledge, you jump in.

Speaker 9 And so, the weeks I have, my son, I schedule my life differently.

Speaker 9 We getting that meal. I might go back out in these clubs and tell my jokes tonight, but first set it's not going to be till nine because I want you in the bed at 8:30 and we're going to talk.

Speaker 9 Babysitt will pull up 8:25, I'm out the door.

Speaker 9 But the idea of just not being around as much as I can, I'm trying to fight that, bro, because I don't want to be a guest star in his fucking sitcom.

Speaker 9 That's my biggest fear with my son, is that I become the dude that's always going, oh, we provided.

Speaker 9 And then he the one sitting here with you talking about motherfucker I want at the time.

Speaker 9 So the only way to create that is to work like a psychopath at building something from the ground up for yourself that you control, that is not susceptible to corporate mergers, that's not susceptible to an administration leaning on your supervisors, getting them to fire you.

Speaker 9 That takes time. So I'm sorry, I can't go on the date you want me to go on with you.
I can't be present in the way you want

Speaker 9 because this is paramount right now. It won't always be that way, but that's what is because I know on the other side of this is growth and freedom, man.

Speaker 9 And I know I can do that.

Speaker 9 This concludes the first half of my conversation. Part two is also posted, and you can access it to whichever podcast platform you just listen to part one on.

Speaker 9 Just simply go back to Club Sheter profile, and I'll see you there.

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Club Shay Shay - Roy Wood Jr. Part 1

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More episodes from Club Shay Shay

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