Roy Wood Jr. Gets Real About Fear, Fame, & Fatherhood

Please put your hands together for the very funny Roy Wood Jr.!

Hey, what's up?

I'm the black one.

Let's start.

The year that I was suspended from school, that's when I started doing stand-up.

I was at a low and I found something that was an outlet.

Now, 25 years into his career, Wood is in his prime.

He's a father to six-year-old Henry.

My next guest is a comedian, an actor, a daily show correspondent, senior campaign correspondent, Roy Wood Jr., everybody.

Roy Wood Jr.

Well known for his daily show appearances, he will be hosting this year's White House correspondents dinner.

CNN is set to premiere a new comedy quiz show called Have I Got News for You.

It's going to be hosted by Emmy Award nominee Roy Wood Jr.

I think my father would be proud, but I think he'd be even prouder if I go up there and make sure that I'm talking about something real.

Because when you have the microphone, you better have something to say.

You may not get it again.

This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

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All right, well, let's do this, Roy.

You ready to start your grind?

Stop.

See,

you like the women in life.

I heard you.

You like the women in my life.

Even if I tell you what the truth is, you're just going to stay on the fucking truth that you've conjured.

Wow.

We jump straight into it.

Welcome to the podcast.

Oh, wait, we're rolling.

Now I'm going to get texts from the women in my life.

Is that what you think?

Oh, man.

No.

What up, Roy?

How you been?

I'm good, man.

It's been a minute.

It's been too long.

We text, but we don't get to

this.

You know what I was thinking the other day is one of the things no one tells you about the relationships you'll form working in like an office is that you get so used to people being in your life, you take for granted that they'll always just be there.

Every morning,

I woke up and within a few hours of waking up, I would see Roy Wood Jr.

We would have conversations.

We'd talk about Donald Trump.

We'd talk about the news.

We'd talk about life.

But you just assume that those people

are going to be your village.

Yes.

And then you leave the village of work, and then the people are just gone.

Now, you know what's funny?

I still see David Kabuka in my neighborhood.

Yeah, but David's that guy.

David is the most, he's the most employed homeless person I know.

I'll see like daily show employees just out and about now.

And

in a weird way, it's,

oh should i speak as my friend do you remember

yeah i should speak yeah we have a friendship that's deeper than the building where we work but it's weird though right yeah it is weird it's like meeting your school friends on a weekend and a moment no no you're not your mom no but it's even weirder than that it's you you out of the school you finished school yeah i mean finished is one way to think of it you just you're just out

you're just out of school

do you know what i mean you're just out no it's weird because the people are still there and then you see them and they see you.

And you have like a moment of, I saw one of the writers from the show, Matt, Matt Coff.

I was in the park in Brooklyn.

That's Coffee's territory.

Yeah.

And I was walking around

and he saw me.

I didn't see him.

Hey, Boss.

No, and he went like, he's like, hey, Trevor, as he walked by, you know how he is.

He's like, hey, Trevor.

And my brain, I was busy doing something.

I was on a call, I think even.

And I carried on.

Then like four steps later, I was like, I know that voice.

Then I turned and he just carried on walking.

And then I was like, yo, Matt.

And he was like, hey.

I said, why did you keep walking?

He's like, oh, I don't know.

I figured maybe you're done with us.

It's a lot of folks who treat folks like that, though.

After the job is done?

I think it's an American thing, to be honest with you.

Really?

Yeah, I think it's an American thing.

It's transactional because work, this is the job.

And then at some point in your 20s, you just realize it's a revolving door of co-stars when it comes to professional relationships.

So you don't know if you have a personal relationship until you leave work.

And then it's truly like straight.

Like, you know, who I'm,

who oddly, I'm probably the close, who I see the most.

I won't say the closest, but who I see the most is Desi's husband.

Desi's husband?

Desi's husband, Gannon.

Me and him, we in a group chat with two other dudes from this show.

When I tell you, that's my dog,

I don't know, but I know part of it is also our boys are the same age.

So

we swap birthday party invites every year.

Okay.

And then me and Gannon became kind of like the at the adult gap, at the kid gather.

We in the cut, sipping something and just talking shit.

She kidnapped.

Yeah.

And

call Hain all the time.

Yeah.

I say Hassan a close second.

I see, I've seen Hassan a lot since I left the show, but

I don't know.

It's just, it's weird.

It's weird when you leave and just, you check in, and I feel like, you know, I love you.

You know, if you need me, call me.

But, like, I'm not going to

show up to any other people.

You know, the way you described it right now?

You sort of, you made it sound like prison and

being out and being in.

I know you didn't intend it that way, but your tone and your voice.

Was that your vibe?

No, your tone and your vibe made it feel like when we're in prisons like i mean we wore i mean you know me and i'm around and i'm it's the military it's it's the same we served i served you served yeah and then you

you you're you're retired your daily show retired and the people who are still enlisted hey is it all right good to see you and i'll check in on you when you need me to, but like the default of seeing you every day,

that was pre-con, I guess what I'm saying is that you have to, at some point, you have to try at friendship.

And maybe I'm just not a good trier.

No, I don't think that's true.

A lot of it is circumstantial.

Like a lot of sincere moments happen because we were working together.

Okay, here's what I think it is.

I think

because Americans have to be so nice at work.

Have to be.

Have to be.

I've worked in few places where people have to be as nice and fake as they are in America.

Right, you get an HR complaint.

Also, I need something from you sooner or later.

Yeah.

Whereas I find in South Africa and the little work i've done in like the uk and maybe like even offices i've seen in australia and stuff i think people are a lot more genuine so they don't have to be nice

you can just work together yeah you know what i mean you don't have to marry any of those reports thank you it's just keep it moving do you know what i mean you're not you don't have to be friends and you don't have to be nice you just have to get the job done yeah but then in america there's a fine line between not being nice and not being perceived as professional.

And so then you foster these sort of fake relationships with a lot of people because it's based on niceness.

And then when you're out, the people are like, oh, okay, I mean, that's done.

Whereas in South Africa, I find people aren't nice to everyone they work with.

I'm not saying disrespectful or anything.

Do y'all have like

cultural rules and faux pas at company parties?

Like an American party, like I was taught, if you go to dinner with your bosses, you don't, you wait for the boss to order alcohol.

If the boss orders alcohol, then you can drink.

Don't drink more than the boss.

If you're at a company party, Christmas party, don't get too tipsy.

Don't get too wild.

Don't get too touchy filly you're still at work even though it's a party even if it's a company oh yeah no with whatever this alcohol

so you don't wait to see if the boss is not having no i've never seen that no crazy it's a party crazy talk

want to move no because you're gonna you're gonna use that against me when we get back no you see no that's another thing no it happened at the party no absolutely no royal what happens at the party stays at the party no no why are you gonna bring those things up you start getting flirty and making out with some, like, you can't even, like, even

I've been to company parties where I'm conscious about who I'm talking to and for how long in the eyes of someone across the room clocking me talk to that one person,

especially if it's a single woman.

Especially.

Oh, you're talking five minutes.

All right, keep it moving.

If it's just

one-on-one,

you have to leave and come back.

You don't have an internal,

you don't have that countdown clock in your head when you're talking to another single person at a company event, a co-worker?

No, no, but again, we don't.

You're not going to make me feel crazy.

No, you're not careful.

I've had many jobs for a very long time.

You've had many jobs.

That should have been the book you wrote: The Man of Many Jobs.

You write about many fathers.

I was like, this man has had every say, but you know, it's funny, just listening to you say this now makes me realize

like you have a specific type of paranoia

that has served you well in the world, but it's also part of what I think I love about you as a human being.

Yeah.

You're not paranoid in the classic sense, like people being like, they're watching us.

And no, but what you just said, I time myself when I'm talking to a woman.

A single woman.

A single woman at a company function.

Where somebody else could get to whispering, yeah.

Yeah.

Every day at the daily show, when I'd walk in in the mornings, we'd do our morning meeting.

Everyone would hang out.

And then

Roy would go to his office.

And I remember I would go in, I'd walk past Roy's office, and I'd sometimes just like walk in and see what he was doing.

I've never felt like somebody

is hiding another life more than Roy.

You know, when you look at a person's computer screen,

it's work.

No,

one day it was coding.

Yeah.

Like literally, he had like a document up on like how to code, coding for beginners.

I was like, this man's coding.

Then a few weeks later, I come back, he's doing deep research on like K-pop and

like Korean music in general and K-dramas.

I come back a few weeks later, Roy's like doing, I'll be like, who is this man?

Video editing.

Yeah.

And I was like, who is this man and what is he doing in his life?

Graphics.

You're talking about the day when I was doing the graphics.

I was trying to build a graphics package.

I was learning Adobe

After Effects.

And just watching videos and just

how to, I want to know how to do this stuff because I also want to know when I'm getting screwed.

And that's also part of the paranoia.

That's the paranoia.

This is the paranoia.

The paranoia drives you to work even harder.

I do too.

Before I pay you, I must know exactly what I'm paying you for.

Yes,

I need to learn it.

I need to learn some degree of it because then when you tell me that it's going to take two days turn

to isolate a an image and turn it into a PNG and put a couple graphics behind it, I know that's a three-hour job, bro.

Because you've done it.

I've done it.

I know enough about it.

I'm not perfect.

I'm not, I didn't go to school for it, but I know enough of it.

So you're not going to fuck me.

I'm not going to allow that.

And so I also have worked too hard.

So yeah, there's certain parameters.

The interns, daily show interns, right?

So me and Ronnie Chang had an office in the furthest part of the building and was also the desk where some of the interns would be sat or whatever.

Well, come in, talk, whatever.

But you're standing in that goddamn doorway.

Don't you come in this office?

Stay all the advice in the world you want, anything you want to chat about, but you stand up.

You're standing at that goddamn door.

You're not coming in this office, and it needs to be two of you.

You've been a dad for a long time, bro.

This guy was born way before you had kids.

You fix your pants,

comb your hair, and it's not like some sort of like I know.

I'm sounding like Mike Pence right now, where it's on some, I can't be in the room with a woman.

The idea of

maintaining some degree of professionalism in a corporate space has just always been

just paramount to me.

So, I'm always thinking about

those interactions that I have with people and stuff like that.

Like, even when we would be on location and doing daily show shoots, and you've got the PA and it's the end of the day, and you're wrapping up, we're not riding in an Uber together.

I will get you an Uber.

Yeah.

absolutely we'll get you an uber but we're not riding wait so before the daily show had you ever been in a corporate environment as a as an employee of someone sort of i did morning radio for 12 years but i was on the talent side and so morning radio you know there's talent side is totally different from the sales side sales is the proper button down

but there's certain protocols within the building and like that's the only job i ever had where we had harassment training and harassment training

it's america that's how no

roy knows how to harass.

Have you seen him harass?

One of the best harassers you've ever come across.

This man will harass you, Roy.

Roy harassment Jordan man.

This boys are

good.

Yeah.

It would be so funny.

Because we always just assume these things.

Have you been for your harassment training?

He was like, I sure have.

Smack my ass.

Let me see how you do it.

You got your training.

Yeah, you do it real good, boy.

Wait, wait, wait.

Wait,

how long?

Because a certain friend of mine who I won't mention was telling me that they want to attend a course to learn how to fall.

Prendis people who teach people how to fall.

Okay, clown school and all that.

I don't appreciate it.

You know what, Roy, you've been roped into roasting me without realizing it.

So don't respond to anything this man says.

Clown school is impressive.

No, no, stop calling it clown school.

But it is.

There's a school that teaches you Pratt Falls.

Don't let this man have roped you in.

Steve O built a career.

He went to clown school.

I'm not saying anything.

You're harassing me right now without knowing it.

I'm not saying anything you're saying is wrong.

Okay, stunt school.

He's a stunt person.

He's

a school.

Yeah, so that's how we started.

We said, look,

wait, are you going to go to stunt school?

He said, no, no, no.

Then we said, okay, is it Jiu-Jitsu?

He said, no, it's sort of Jiu-Jitsu, Taekwondo, but they can teach you how.

But actually, there's people who teach you how to fall.

The Brazilian grapple.

I just want to learn how to...

Look.

You need to know how to fall.

You know this guy too?

You just need to know.

The one we're talking about, the one who's going to fall fall in school.

Well, I guess with the wrist brakes, you didn't need to learn how to fuck.

Your shit's fucked up.

How long was your harassment training?

And see, right there, I'd get a report.

A month from now, you made someone feel uncomfortable when you seen it.

Yeah, that's what it is.

That was a classic case.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

When I did radio, we had harassment training.

You got to remember, I did radio.

I came in 2001.

Two years later was the Janet Jackson Super Bowl.

Wow.

So decency.

See how you said breath?

Yes.

I said boob out.

Yeah.

You said I didn't do the course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You didn't do it.

You didn't take the classes.

He's never had a job.

He's been in training.

And so we took all of these classes on how to talk about the boob.

And then, well, FCC laws changed after the Janet Jackson thing.

So we had to learn.

formal new ways to talk on the radio.

And then on top of that, they added like harassment training and like proper workplace, whatever, whatever.

And I mean, we're talking like a decade before me too.

So that was just constantly drilled in.

And as a jock, I'm on the side of the building where, you know, everybody's like having sex with each other, drugs, like it's chaos.

But also, it happened outside the building.

So you could still do in the building, you could be completely appropriate, but outside the building is where

everybody, everybody let loose.

I mean, you know, you're talking the radio days of payola and people having sex with listeners, and you bringing rappers into the studio at two in the morning.

Like, I used to be at the radio station at three in the morning doing prep for the morning show.

Yeah.

And then we would just walk over to the control room.

It was all automated.

We would just go on the air.

No, Roy.

Do live radio at three in the morning.

Fuck it.

My boss sleep.

And if he up, it's because he's cheating

Cause he's fucking listeners.

So

I know you're not going to call.

Oh, man.

I know you're not going to check me right now.

Not when you're supposed to be in bed, married person.

So

what would the 3 a.m.

radio show be about?

Oh, we would just take calls.

We stopped playing music.

And

we would have people, I got to give a shout out to my man, Young Dill, because Young Dill was the one that was, he was supposed to work till midnight and he would stay.

And then we would just take calls from people leaving the club

or people headed to a booty call.

And just, you know,

that was it.

Yeah, that's that 3 a.m.

I did, I did three to six.

Yeah.

And it was the same thing.

How was the club?

Well, you know, how was the whatever?

Just what happened in the club tonight?

Or tell me about the person you're about to go fuck.

And that was it.

Or you'd be coming back from a booty call.

How was the booty call?

And then there was the occasional person who's working the early shift.

Yeah, there's always some going truck.

Yeah, there's always some beverage delivery food person.

Seafood.

Yeah, one serious person, five drunk.

Newspaper.

Yeah.

That was like the ratio.

One serious, five drunk.

No way.

Yeah, that's what it is on radio.

At that time or the next time.

Yeah, yeah.

You might get a trucker passing through town, some long haul guy, but for the most part, it's chaos and it was beautiful.

But at 9 a.m.

when the building woke up, you understood the corporate and how to speak and you wouldn't go flirting with no sales rep.

or anything like that.

And like, I don't know how radio is now, but black radio in the south at that time, you wanted your sales reps to be gorgeous or like a manly man because they out

in person.

You need a man to sell to men, and then you need women to kind of sell and be on the sensitive side.

And that's how you get a couple extra ad buys from people and stuff like that.

So that side of the building was the sexy side.

So they needed a video to watch to go, hey.

When you're out there, don't say nice titties.

You say appropriate breasts.

These are appropriate breasts.

Thank you for having your breast out today.

You know,

when I was thinking about you coming in today,

I was going through your life and I was like, man, this guy,

there's few people

I've met

who I feel like have lived a life that is more parallel than yours and mine.

Like everything about you.

You know, when you know someone, you know them by how they've interacted with you.

Very seldom do we know people by what they've done in life or what shaped them.

Like, I don't know about you, but I very seldom ask friends of mine random questions.

Yeah, like, how did you get here?

Or what influence did your father have in your life?

Like, these are not things I think most people ask the people.

And then it's only when you sit down and you look through someone's life do you go, I was like, damn, I worked with you at the daily show for seven years.

I didn't know that you and I both shoplifted.

I didn't know that you and I were both raised by basically like a version of the same mom.

I didn't know that you and I were both like children of the streets, you know,

just I didn't know that you and I, like it was just this crazy world to go, like, oh man, this is

yeah, this guy lived a parallel life to mine just in Birmingham.

We're both south, south, south, uh, you know, South Africa, south of the United States.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, once I knew you did radio and then the relationship with your dad was weird, like mine, I was like, oh, yeah, okay.

We're going to get along.

You talk about K-pop and programming.

You know what's funny?

You know what's funny about dads though?

It's like, and I mean, we'll talk a little bit about your book because, man, I love what you wrote.

I love what you wrote because it feels less like a book about your life and more like a user manual.

on how to become a father, become a person,

and even how to be a child i don't i know it's it's interesting we'll we'll we'll get into it as we dig into it but i'm just thinking back to what you what you spoke about um just a few minutes ago the paranoia the first thing i thought was like oh that's your dad like you studying the coding you going i'm gonna learn how to code so that if somebody's coding for me they they can't they can't me i'm gonna learn how to do this so that they can't scare me and your dad with the coupons would go like you your dad would check every single price of every single item in every single store before he left the house before he left the house and he would only buy the item from the cheapest who whichever store offered that item the cheapest so no matter how far they were no matter how far anywhere in jefferson county so we would drive grocery shopping would take three hours

you could just go to two stores and be done with it like a conventional person

You get a couple coupons and you just save money on these three items.

But if there's coupons that are being offered somewhere else, because in those days they did price matching.

Yeah.

So if I could bring the coupon in and prove to you that the crosstown got it for cheap, they'll give it to you.

So my pops would play that game everywhere in the city.

We would go to one store for produce, one store for meat, another store for dairy, and then another store for like just dried, dry goods.

And like that was,

that was the thing.

And he came home just smiling.

Did he beat the system?

Well, because in a way he did, but he didn't.

Because on the black side of town,

fruit was more expensive than on the white side of town

for

whatever reason you want to choose racism.

But if an apple costs a dollar on our side of town, and that same apple costs 85 cents on the white side of town, my pops is going to go buy the 85 cent.

apple from the white side of town and then bring coupons that are for the for this other store and make the white

to the white store.

No, to the white store,

yeah, to basically go, ha, ha, ha.

Now you got to give me all this shit for cheap because y'all charging because these other stores charging more.

So it's like, on the one hand, he saved money, but you spent money outside of the black neighborhood.

So did you really help?

Did you hurt?

You know what I mean?

So it's like one of those things.

Also, you spent way too much gas.

And, you know, my dad also bought a lot of like my dad would do shit like like a gallon of milk versus half a gallon versus a quart.

And we would stand there and I would have to figure out what is the cost per ounce average between these three volumes of milk to decide which one was the best buy.

There were times where it was cheaper to go to the white side of town and buy four quarts of milk than it was to buy a gallon.

And I would come home with four just cartons of milk.

Or we'd go get two half gallons over here.

But they got a deal where if you get two gallons, you get a third gallon free.

So, if you get three gallons for free, the per ounce average is lower than if you get the two half gallons.

So, this week we're going to get our dairy from over here, but we're going to get too much milk, more milk than you could ever fucking drink.

But we saved money.

But, did you know?

If you got more milk than you can consume before it expires, have you saved money?

Yeah.

But that's how my pops operated.

And he also bought a lot of things secondhand.

So, you know, my dad came up as a haggler.

So

he stayed in the pawn shops.

He stayed reading the one ads every Saturday and Sunday for like used camera.

My dad collected cameras.

Yeah.

So like vintage cameras,

vintage old school cameras and Lincoln, any Lincoln you could name.

My pops owned it.

He'd buy it used.

He'd get the engine redone a little bit, drive it for a year, then flip it when the blue book went up on that particular car.

My favorite story was in the book, you talk about how

your dad was so notorious for loving these cars he would get calls from dealerships when someone would drive in with a car yeah because they wanted to trade in their car they were thinking of trading in the car and then your dad would be there already like signing papers for a car that hasn't even been sold by the other person yet it ain't been inspected yet

Somebody is coming in to trade it.

Like, let's say you got a Lincoln Continental, like an 89 Continental.

That was his favorite one.

Suicide dose.

No, no,

he would keep it factory.

He would just add leather seats or whatever.

He would like to drink out the inside.

So, my pops, it'd be a it was Midfield Dodge, it was one of the places.

And Midfield Dodge would call my dad, hey, Mr.

Wood, we got uh, we got somebody down here bringing in an 89 Continental.

Uh, you're more than welcome to come down here and take a look at it.

And uh, before we add it to the inventory, if it's something that suits your fancy, and then my pops was like, keep them there

as he puts down four quarts of milk

And when I was old enough to start driving my pops everywhere, when I had like a learner's permit when I was 15, say, Boy, take me down to Midfield Dodge.

And we get to Midfield Dodge, and the owner of the Lincoln is inside doing their trade-in paperwork for whatever they're about to leave with.

And my dad is outside looking at this person.

Their shit is still in the car.

Babysitter

belongings.

Excuse me.

Yeah.

And my pops, but they would start haggling on the prices and playing around with that stuff.

So anytime my dad could save a dollar, he was with it because he was for sure somebody was

getting over on him somehow.

Right.

And you can't blame him because all he did, my dad was the first black.

radio whatever everywhere he worked for like a decade and a half.

Yeah.

So he used to be in a lot of distrust of just America, you know, and capitalism as a whole.

So anytime he could cut a corner and save a dollar, why buy it new when I know they're charging this, this, and this for it?

And this is a perfectly good Canon or Nikon right here.

And I could buy it from this person who I know is taking good care of it.

I know the track record.

My pops will go over people's houses.

We went to a lot of the newspaper was a wild time because you would just pull it.

It was like Craigslist.

Classified?

Yeah.

You just, it's just a stranger.

You're just going, yeah, come to my house.

I have items.

and then you just show up and then you're just in a person's house and my pops could tell by the way your living room was set up

whether or not he was gonna buy the camera from you or whatever.

How you take care of that space says a lot about how you take care of your items.

For him, the red flag was liquor.

If you kept your liquor in a nice

Little if you had a spot for your liquor, then that means you take care of nice things.

And so it was that, and it was always the television.

Like if the TV looked good and it was clean and like, not, you know, in those days, the TV would get all the dust on it, you know, the box TVs.

So if your electronics were dusted and your liquor was in a nice place in the house,

we're going to make a deal.

But if I come in the house and your shit's dusty, you don't even wipe your table.

I know you don't take care of that camera.

So I know that camera's full of bullshit inside too.

So I'm just

no.

Do you remember the conversations?

Sorry,

the conversations in the car going to make deals and the conversations coming back from making a deal.

I think that he and I talked about everything but me and my life.

Like, I don't know.

I just had one of them pops.

He's just, like, I felt like I just merged in the traffic.

Like, I said in the book, like, I never really spent time with my dad as much as I was just hanging along with him while his life was in progress.

Damn.

Come with me doing the thing.

with grocery shopping.

He never came to a baseball game.

He never came to kick it at the science fair or to see the thing.

Like my pops couldn't name a single teacher.

He didn't show up to no parent teacher conferences.

So like that wasn't his.

Now, to be fair, he was also spending three, four days a week across town with the other family.

So he was busy.

But there was also this degree of like

what I appreciated about the time I spent with my pops was that I always felt like a man.

He always treated me like a man when everybody else says you can and you ought to be careful.

Hey, come on with me.

We're driving to the thing.

I've never driven on the freeway before.

Ah, yeah, come on.

And that was it.

We're on the freeway to Montgomery, and I'm driving him down to Alabama State so we can do a radio show that morning.

So he was always talking about the news, the world, society.

He was quick to talk about politicians, local politicians, state reps.

He didn't like most of them.

He didn't care for most local politicians.

So there was a guy.

So there was a barbershop I used to go to in Birmingham called Pete Stone Style Shop.

And Pete Stone and my dad had a relationship from his time when my pops was embedded.

in Pete's platoon during the Vietnam War.

And so they were just still tight.

You know, I don't know what they saw.

You know, it's war.

Yeah.

And you both made it back.

You got a bond.

Yeah.

So

Pete Stone Style Shop is in the heart of the Civil Rights District.

It's a block and a half from the 16th Street Baptist Church.

So it's like, it's ground zero for black thought and black epicenter.

So

there would be on any random day on a Saturday in the style shop, my pops, the radio news DJ, the mayor would be there.

There would be a black state rep.

Any black mayors from any any surrounding suburbs would be there.

You would have community leaders and football coaches, and half of them weren't getting a haircut.

They were just in there.

It was like a meeting of the minds.

Like that's where the meetings happened.

That was the room was Peatstone Style Shop.

And so

there was a mayor.

at the time of a suburb of Birmingham named Larry Langford.

And so Larry Langford was the mayor of Fairfields, predominantly black suburb.

It's not,

it wasn't, he had gotten it.

They were doing decent enough as a suburb.

And

Lankford was getting ready to run for city council and all this other stuff.

And my pops and them are basically telling them why it could or couldn't work and all of that shit.

And

Langford had an idea at the time to build an amusement park.

He had done a traffic study because

Fairfield is between Birmingham and Mississippi.

Langford had done a, had conducted a traffic study of showing how much traffic was passing through Birmingham to get to Atlanta.

Atlanta was where you went, if you wanted to live a life and do, you know,

have some nightlife or go see a game or, you know, whatever.

And Lankford's thing was, we're losing all this money to Atlanta.

We could build some shit here.

So if we're losing money because of six flags in Whitewater, we can build an amusement park here in Jefferson County

and we can get the money.

And so he's trying to explain that.

and them motherfuckers laughed at him They're like it's you're not gonna build anything that can compete with Atlanta.

It's just not gonna happen and every Saturday for the next year and a half Larry Langford came in that barbershop and argued with my pops about

why it's gonna work and Langford had to grind.

This motherfucker had to go to every suburb, a lot of them predominantly white, because Birmingham is the city of Birmingham.

The way government works, you have a county commission that basically is all the suburbs together as a conglomerate.

And then you have the city of Birmingham.

But you really can't do shit unless the county is on board with it.

So to work the county, you have to work each individual commissioner and mayor and each individual suburb, see what their needs are, figure out a way to get them all to come together to agree that this thing that's going to be in your neighborhood, well, if it's so good, why has it got to be in your neighborhood?

Why can't it be in my neighborhood?

Why is it in your

so Langford is playing all of these angles, and that motherfucker got it done.

He got an amusement park built.

And

I say all of that to say, I just remember one day riding with my dad, like two years later, we're coming down I-20 through Bessemer, and we passed the sign for the amusement park.

And it's Vision Land.

That was the name of it.

That was the name of the amusement.

Yes, Vision Land.

Vision Land.

I had a vision.

He was wow.

Listen, this is black men in the 90s.

I mean, still.

They literally.

Visionland.

Yeah.

Hey, kids, you want to go to Vision Land?

Yeah, I had a vision for it.

We're doing it in Vision Land.

I had a vision for a land.

I called it Vision Land.

But you got to understand what Larry Langford did at that time, it was the equivalent to me,

it was the equivalent of Steve Jobs unifying the record labels under iTunes.

Oh, so this was impossible.

It's impossible.

Okay, yeah.

So you're driving down, you see the billboard for Vision Land.

Yeah, we're riding in the 89 Continental, and we pass by the Vision Land sign and my dad is driving and he

look and he looks up at

motherfucker did it,

which then starts a conversation about your dreams and your goals and what you're going to have to do.

And so every most conversations I had with my pops was about

the battle that's going to be out there for you at some point.

Huh.

It's never how was your day?

My dad could name him favorite foods, but you knew like, hey, Jesse Jackson's coming to town.

We're going to go backstage.

Right, right, right.

Democratic Prime Minister.

I think 88, he came to town.

He was backstage.

My pops back there doing interviews and Al Sharpton, everybody back there.

Just chilling.

And so then on the ride home, now see, that man, what you have to understand is, and blah, blah, blah, and the black man and the issues.

And so he was just very, talk to me like a regular ass partner.

Also, for context, my pops was old.

My dad was 63 when I was born.

63 when you were born.

Yeah,

when I was born.

He was one of them suave, I look 45.

I lotion myself every day.

No, but still, 63.

63.

Yeah.

I think my mom was like

30, 31.

Yeah, but still, man.

That's a.

So his ideology, I don't even, knowing what I know now as a man,

you're at 63, and at that point, you over 70.

You can't flip on your mind to have a conversation with no nine-year-old about nine-year-old things.

All you know is is struggle and saving money on milk.

And that's the values I'm going to give you.

You know, it's funny you say that because

your book,

to me, feels like, like, I know few people who do things

in a more methodical way than Roy Wood Jr.

Like you,

every day when I'll see you at the daily show,

It felt like you were an undercover cop.

But the cool ones, the ones who actually, you know what what I mean?

I'm working the case, Trevor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, and what I mean by that is, like, I've never seen Roy

write a joke for no reason.

And not that there's a good way or a bad way to write a joke, but I've literally, I've never seen Roy write a joke for no reason.

I would say to Roy, and you know how we are with comedy, like you and I, I would just say, I have a bit.

I'd be like, man, this joke, there's this thing that's making me laugh right now.

And I'm, you know what I mean?

Then I'll say to Roy in the same joking tone, I'd be like, anything you're working on?

And then Roy would turn to me, and I feel like my world would go black and white.

And Roy would be like, man, I've noticed how there's an insidious presence in the city that has changed public transportation.

And so

I'm thinking of doing a deep dive into why the cost of the subway and the bus has gone up over the past few years more than 175%.

And I'm trying to figure out what that means to society and why nobody's saying anything about it.

Then I was like, oh, is this a joke?

This is a joke that you're talking about.

This is where Roy's like, yeah, I'm going to to find the funny.

I'm going to find the parts of it that make it funny.

But I remember, because you remember, I just remember, I just met you as a human being.

Like, you just popped into my life out of nowhere.

You know what I mean?

To set the stage for you properly, you got to understand how Roy Wood Jr.

comes into my life as a person.

Tell me.

How it starts.

I'm starting on the Daily Show.

They've done the craziest thing ever.

They've gone.

We are getting

a South African person.

Just say African, because the South doesn't really help anyone.

Doesn't matter.

We're getting an African to replace Jon Stewarts.

The Jon Stewarts.

Okay.

Now we have to assemble a cast because everyone that was with Jon Stewart left.

The only person who stayed basically was Clapper.

Yeah, Jordan Clapper, and I guess Hassan, technically, right?

But of the legacy fee, everyone was like, oh, yeah, we're gone.

It's finished.

Okay.

Now they're like, you have to build a team around you, but we don't even know who you are.

So compliment you.

So I'm getting tapes.

I'm getting recorded.

I'm getting everything.

People are like, try this person, look at this person, try this person.

and then it was neil brennan who sent he was like if you are looking for somebody there are few human beings who are funnier and deserve it more than roy would jr wow i was like i don't know who roywood jr is wow and then somebody told me roy was performing at the comedy cellar so i go down to the comedy cellar i watched roy perform one of the funniest bits i've ever seen i still remember it till this day it was a bit about how gangs do they have like middle management in a gang yeah supervisors do they have supervisors because a gang is an establishment and he had this bit about like if you have an establishment you got to have middle management you got to have a supervisor so is there someone who goes to each of the gang members and critiques their swear but it's an amazing but it's phenomenal phenomenal joke right like a performance review in a game yeah

it was one of the funniest premises i've ever seen and i was like this is hilarious so i go immediately to the daily show people i'm like i found a guy they're like okay we're gonna audition him i was like no no i found he's the guy

forget the audition he's the guy they're like well that's not how this works because you're african i'm like whatever we just do the thing they're like no we have procedures here has you done sexual harassment

yes i have so so they bring so they bring roy in roy does the audition i mean he's roy one of the funniest people immediately everyone's on board but now we are jumping into a show that's starting in how long three weeks three weeks after we meet so now we already have to jump in as comedic friends, office mates, partners.

There's no onboarding.

There's no long getting to know you process.

Emerging on the freeway from the left.

That's exactly what it is.

It's merging instantly.

And the thing that got me about this guy was: I work with comedians all the time.

Comedians are never serious.

Comedians are everything is a joke.

Roy is like the antithesis of that.

It's like Roy starts from serious and then turns into the funniest human being you've ever come across in your life.

But every day,

every day, consistently.

Let's put it this way: in the first

five weeks that we worked together, if you had asked me who do you think here is going to shoot someone, I would have picked Roy

the first six weeks, but that's because I didn't.

There's a reason for my intensity, though, but keep going.

Okay, I'm glad you acknowledged it.

No, no, no, but I

no, here's what it is about Roy.

Here's what it is: it's like, first of all, I also didn't know who shoots people.

I like that.

This is before I like live.

Living in fact,

no, but you know what I mean.

You know what I mean?

No, no, what I mean is, like, you know, in time who shoots people in America.

You know, like, the vibe.

He didn't know the dead eyes, he didn't know how to, yeah, yeah, I didn't know American dead eyes.

No, I just went, This person from the movies I've watched,

this guy's gonna shoot people.

One day he's gonna come in, he's gonna say, Screw all of this.

No, but he'll shoot specific people.

Roy had that vibe, yeah.

Roy didn't seem like a shoot everyone kind of guy, yeah.

He had a okay,

all right, like he wrote numbers on the bullets, and then he would just tell you your number, but he wouldn't tell you what it means.

All right, four, I got you.

That's what Roy seemed like,

and every day I would meet this man, and I'd go, how does he transform?

Because

leading up to rehearsal, everything was serious.

We would get out there.

I remember the first show we did, the first jokes, it was about the Pope.

And Roy came on.

And,

you know, people were already like, the daily show is not going to work.

Our saving grace, the home run that everyone agreed on.

The Pope gag.

Was Roy Wood Jr.

People were like, man, I don't know about this new daily show, but that Roy Wood Jr.

guy,

they were like, man, this guy is.

And I remember telling the story, I was like, that was so funny.

And I was laughing.

I was like, that was amazing.

That was funny.

And Roy was like, we're going to do it again tomorrow.

Night before.

Let me explain the intensity.

So

for context,

2014, I had a sitcom end.

And Sullivan and Son on TBS.

It ran three seasons.

At the end of every season, myself, the star Steve Byrne, Vince Vaughan, we would sit with Steve Koonan, who at the time was the head of TBS.

And we'd have a little celebratory dinner.

And yay, see you guys next year, season two.

We do season two.

See you season three.

We do season three.

See you guys season four.

A week later, Steve Koonan leaves TBS

and the new person comes in, Michael Wright, and he cancels everything but Conan O'Brien.

And in my head, I'd already, season four has happened.

You planned your life around it.

And then it's snatched away from you.

Then

I'm adrift for a year and I'm doing ESPN.

I got a buddy from FAMU who I graduated journalism school with.

He was a producer.

He goes, hey, I don't know if you didn't know this woman, Jamil Hill, but she has a show that comes on at 2 o'clock with Michael Smith.

What you want?

So I'm doing all of these free spots on ESPN

for about a year.

I book a pilot with Jermaine Fowler.

for ABC.

It's Jermaine Fowler and Whoopi Goldberg.

Network loves it.

It's looking like we're going to go to series.

But it fought, and this story is as it was told to me.

I don't go back to Whoopi Goldberg and his asset, but as it was told to me, at the time, the view was going through a co-host change, and Whoopee was going through contract negotiations.

The contract for our sitcom was also with ABC.

ABC, as it was told to me, go to Whoopi and like, hey, what's up with the sitcom?

We doing the sitcom?

And Whoopi's like, well, what's up with the co-hosts?

Because the sitcom is the thing to do in addition to the view.

The view is the main thing.

So we got to get that straight.

And ABC was like, well, that's going to take a little longer.

All right, well, I guess we ain't doing a sitcom.

Take it away.

Two weeks later, Neil Brennan calls me and says that you want to see me.

No way.

And that he thinks if I can get to New York and do a set, and if you can see me do this set,

then it might be an opportunity to audition for the daily show.

Meanwhile.

So I get on the plane.

I go to fucking, I go to New York.

I've just had two short things get snatched away from me.

And the only reason I booked Sullivan and Son was because I was friends with Steve Byrne.

I'd been in LA seven years.

I hadn't done shit, bro.

Couldn't book nothing.

I just couldn't.

The city didn't work out for me.

So I was getting ready to move to New York anyway.

Then my girl at the time called me and told me she was pregnant.

So now

I got this set that I can do in New York, and I got a kid on the way.

And I'm doing fine on the road.

I did the road 15 years, so, but you don't want to keep doing that.

I don't want to do 45 weekends.

So, yeah,

every fucking joke, I'm not going to fuck up.

If this doesn't work, it won't be because I did not execute.

I ain't coming in here chuckling with nobody.

I ain't coming in here to kiki.

Nobody's an enemy, but I'm here to do the job.

I'm here to fucking demolish.

My audition, I was so proud of this.

My audition for the Daily Show,

there was a story about a black kid in West Virginia.

This is 2015, peak Confederate flag, Brie Newsome, climb the pole, snatch it down.

There was a kid, there was a black kid in West Virginia who had a Confederate flag tattooed.

And it was basically, oh, I'm black and I ain't tripping no Confederate flag.

And I pitch a chat between me and Trevor where I defend the black kid on the grounds that he's black in West Virginia.

He has to get a tattoo so he can survive the walk home.

It's camouflage.

Matter of fact, I'm going to go to West Virginia and rescue this kid.

And I roll up my sleeve and reveal a temporary Confederate tattoo.

that I put on myself

that morning

at a FedEx office.

I'm at a FedEx office at 7 o'clock in the morning, the morning of my daily show audition, printing Confederate flags

onto stickers

and fitting them.

Yes,

this one's too big.

I need to print another.

This one's too small.

I need to print another.

And using my graphic design skills, bitch.

Exactly how long it takes.

And I made a Confederate flag and I stuck that shit on my arm and I brought the cuff on my sleeve down.

I was like this the whole audition and then reveal that shit.

And so that's where the intensity came from.

Because I'm like, I can't lose this job.

This has to work.

And I got to feed this boy when he shows up.

So just every day became this intense, not only be funny, but what is the interesting thing about blackness?

Because that was the thing I was appreciative about was that,

dude, the first three stories,

it was police reform.

And then the second piece, and this is one I didn't think he was going to prove.

So it's the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March.

We've been on the air two weeks.

And you know how you're trying to figure out how black you can be in a space?

And I'm like, fuck it, man.

Ronnie Chain was the one that gave me the courage to pitch it.

I go into the pitch meeting in the field meeting.

I go, yeah,

it's the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March.

I think there's some comedy there.

We should go.

They go, you sure?

Yeah.

Not only we should go, we should talk to somebody in the nation of Islam.

See if you can book that.

And they're like,

like the field producers are like, okay, well, what's the angle?

I give them the angle on it.

And they're like, okay, because no matter what you pitch, it's got to go to Trevor and the producers.

And then they go, yes or no.

So we get into the pitch meeting with Trevor and the producers.

And we're like, yeah, there's this thing happening in DC with a lot of black people.

And it's scaring the whites who are in D.C.

And I just want to go talk to the white people and see why they're scared.

If you're not racist, why are you bothered with black people?

Just fellowshipping.

And Trevor's like, I like fellowshiping.

And Trevor goes, yeah, do it.

And it was one of the best pieces we did.

And it's one of those things where I'm like, okay,

i get to really dive into how i see the world and what the comedy of that could be and like the confederate thing and the audition and then when they send me a clipper on that ride along to start the season and then when that when the million man march piece got approved as my second piece out the door i was like okay this is a good i've

I called my girl.

All right, you can move here now.

We're good.

I think it's going to be all right.

And it's so funny how

we don't necessarily know other people's intentions, perspectives, and experiences while we're in the same space as them.

You know, there's always that,

I don't know, I don't even know where I read it first,

but it was a really beautiful passage that said, next time you see somebody in the traffic or walking in the street and they have a, you know, a scowl on their face and they look at you and you feel like they hate everyone, ask yourself, what is happening in their lives that's making them feel like that?

Because they're just you on another day.

Do you know what I mean?

And it's hard to think like that all the time because we think the world is about us as people.

And what's fascinating to me about this story is in my head, I was the one fighting for my life with the Daily Show.

And you were just killing it.

Like you, you, you're one of the most effortless comedians I've ever seen.

So every day I was going, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I don't know if this is going to work.

But thank God I've got Roy Wood Jr.

Little did I know he was in an office panicking, looking through the classifieds,

checking for other jobs.

Like, all right, let's see graphic design.

Just by the way, you know what I always wonder about, like, the butterfly effect in life?

Do you ever think to yourself that there's somebody out there who worked in that wherever you were, whatever coffee shop or Kinko's, whatever you were, yeah, wherever you were, and they're telling people, they're like, hey, man, you know that guy Roy Wood Jr.

He used to work on the, you know, that dude's a secret Confederate.

Yeah, yeah.

No, the FedEx, where he was.

Think about it.

If you saw, if you saw Roy Wood Jr.

printing out tattoos and putting them on himself, then putting it in his sleeve, and then you saw him on the day.

You'd be like, nah, you'd be like,

deep down,

I know who he is.

You go deep down, I know exactly who he is.

Bro, that shit was a struggle.

And I mean, shit, even just getting to New York once I got the job, the only reason I was able to move to New York is because I had Wendy Williams.

Wendy Williams, I auditioned for the show

and the Jermaine Fowler, Whoopi Goldberg thing dies.

About a week later, I get a call from Wendy Williams.

She was doing like a storytelling tour and wanted to open her.

So I'm on the road with Wendy, and then I get the call for the audition.

And then I have to ask Wendy Williams, can I have a day off?

Which you're not, yeah, you're not gonna, you're not supposed to, you get fired.

You're like, we just replace you.

You go do the audition, but you will be replaced.

You get all the days off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But Wendy goes, tell Trevor I said hello, and I'll see you tomorrow.

Knowing.

So the next 10 days that I worked with Wendy Williams, that was the fucking money to even get to New York to start the job.

Like, you just get blessed along the way, but you just start looking at like, I can't mess this up.

So I'm not joking around with y'all.

I didn't do no sets.

at the I didn't do any comedy.

Yeah, and the city was just like, you came to work

for that, those first three four months until i felt like i had a grasp on what i was doing that's part of why i lived close i lived when i first moved i lived four blocks from the building because i didn't even want to commute i don't want to think about shit i'm staying until 9 30 every night and i'm gonna watch i'm gonna watch and this i learned from you was

one day a week have try to have lunch with a different

cluster of people within the building

Learn the building, learn the people, learn all the jobs, because then you can learn what jokes are possible and then how fast a joke

can be flipped.

Because then now I know I'm not pitching something that graphics can, you're pitching a joke at 2.30 in the afternoon, it's too late.

We're already, we're doing, ideas are locked, so you got till noon.

So if you got an idea for today,

you need to serve that when you hit the building at 7:30 in the morning.

Like that, so understanding the logistics of the building and all of that, like that became the only thing that I wanted to like just get right.

And then I just figured everything else would take care of itself.

We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

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You know, I feel like

when I look through your life, I feel like you've

always been focused on hustling and surviving and getting something right and doing the right job and doing the job the right way and being in the right place and surviving.

And, you know, and then something flips.

when Henry comes into your life, your son.

Because your book, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but like, when I look at your book, you know, The Man of Many Fathers, the intention behind the book and the message behind it almost feels like your only goal now in life

is to be a good father.

And I mean, I even noticed this when I was with you at the daily show.

It's like there's a thing in you that

has become

focused.

You know, there's something in you that's just become about this thing now is everything in service of.

And I actually wanted to know, like, why, why the book?

Like, why, why the book and why the book about fatherhood and being a father and what being, you know, what your father meant to you and didn't mean to you, et cetera.

Like, why, why that and why now?

Because I didn't know my dad.

I don't think I truly knew him.

He also died when I was 16.

And then on top of that, we never talked a lot about his being and who he was.

Ground zero for it was COVID when I did finding your roots.

Like, I had an inkling about, like, all right,

am I going to be present enough as

a father?

But COVID 20 to 21 was kind of like the turning point because it's

I do finding your roots and then Henry and I, his mother and I, we break up.

And so now I'm out of the house and it's joint custody, okay, fine.

But in your head, you're like, fuck, I'm losing time.

I'm losing momentum.

You lose half the tuck-ins.

You lose half the chit-chats.

And, you know,

fuck, he's going to know something about it.

He's missing time to observe me.

All right, fuck, he's got to,

he needs to know me.

What if I die before he's 16?

He's not going to know me.

And then you realize how compartmentalized your friendships are.

Yeah.

You know, I got partners I've been tight with

since eighth grade, not a lot, but they only know so much of me because they're not in New York.

Yeah.

And then I got partners here who I work with, but they can't tell you nothing about my personal life.

They can't tell you about the nuances of me.

My son would have to go around to all these different folks and start piecing together.

And I didn't want that for for him.

So I was like, well, what if I just put something together?

He needs values.

If I'm gone tomorrow, what would I want him to know about me?

Okay.

Well, what do you know about your dad?

Hmm.

Shit, I don't know a lot.

Okay, well, then where did I learn all that stuff?

And then you start realizing that it was all these beautiful people that you got put in your life, either either for one day or for you know, flashing a pan or for a lifetime that influenced you.

And so then I do find your roots around the same time.

Finding your roots, I find out that my dad lost his father when he was four.

I did not know that.

It was never told to me.

I don't have much of a relationship with my father's side of the family.

I'm the ninth of 11 kids.

I'm my mother's only child.

I got a gang of half siblings.

We talk about

dad a little bit, but I don't know folklore.

I don't know cousins and any of that shit.

I got taken around my dad's side of the family twice before he died.

I don't know.

I ain't never seen you.

I'm sure you're a good person, but I just don't fucking know you.

So

sitting on Finding Your Roots, finding that out.

Then in that same episode, my dad walked with a limp.

He had a hip implant.

He had a prosthetic hip from when he was a teenager because he was trying to

a woman, he was in high school and a woman had just broken up with him.

And so he was trying to like, he was trying to get her back.

You're trying to get back to, you're trying to get your girl back.

You know, somebody pulled your girl.

Now you're trying to get her back.

And running behind her, like literally running behind her, got hit by a car.

And so Walt would have limped the rest of his life.

Walt would a prosthetic that had to be extended for the rest of of his life.

You're 13 when that happens.

What does that do to your psyche?

What does that do to you as

a human?

And how does it change your relationship with women

for the rest of your life?

How does it change how you see women?

How does it change how you see love?

With a daily reminder.

Yeah.

And you start treating people like they are disposable in that part of your life because you were disposed of

by a woman.

And granted, it's teenage love, but still,

rejection is rejection.

That's the most scarring, them the most scarring years for love, man.

So it gave me a different perspective.

So a lot of things that I was really upset about with him when my son was born, I'd already kind of started a process of letting him go.

But then once,

once he was,

once I did finding your roots, and then I was out of the house and not in a regular 24-hour status with him, there became this heightened sense of

now,

now, because I don't know what's going to happen.

He knows his mom's side.

He knows all of her.

He sees those relatives on a regular basis.

I'm closer with my two younger half-siblings than I am my olders.

I keep in touch with the olders, but not on some every year get together and eat ribs type shit.

We don't do it.

So, you know, when I go home to visit my mom,

some of my half-siblings may stop by the house, say hey to them.

You know, so you're aware,

but

there is nobody in my son's life,

there's nobody in my life who, in my absence, could accurately submit the man that I am to my son.

So I gotta write a book.

Yeah, but

you didn't just write a book, though.

You

You revealed yourself.

Because

I think we have two options when we write a book, maybe even three.

One is to write a story of how we wish to be perceived.

Another story we can write is how we are perceived.

And then the third option is to write about who we really are and how we think.

And what I found

most interesting about your story and how you wrote it was

you're grappling the whole time.

I don't feel like you figured out anything in a good way, by the way.

You know what I mean?

I don't read this and it's neatly tied up in a bow.

Yeah, I don't read about your relationship with your dad and go like, and then it all worked out.

You know, it's like, no, no, there's none of that.

Like,

it feels like this.

this gradual unraveling and this stripping.

And I don't think you can separate it from where the book starts.

Like you've got this great story where you talk about being in the airport

and

you bump into a fellow comedian.

He's buying a Father's Day card.

And

he basically asks you, are you getting a Father's Day card?

And you realize you've never bought a Father's Day card.

But what I found funny in that moment is like, you start talking about how limited Father's Day cards are.

You know, it's like best dad ever to the man who taught me how to fish,

you know, to my favorite camping buddy.

And then Roy's like, where's the one where it's like, I didn't really know you, but uh, if I did, I guess it might have been great.

Yeah.

Like, where's

and where the genuine ones?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, where's the genuine?

You know what I mean?

And

like from that moment, I was just like, man, we're in for a journey on this.

And so if this was the daily show, I'd be like, I'd like to talk to the greeting card industry to understand why

who writes the greeting cards and who sets up the narrative that fatherhood is always perfect and not stressful because like even with mother's day there's always we had our ups and downs yeah

but i but i think look if i was to guess i would say the reason for that is because

of what you've sort of written about is because most fathers don't have sentimental and i say most and i you know people like where do you get your numbers i'm guessing

probably the times we've lived through the times we're in but i don't know many people where they can truly say that their fathers have been sentimental with them.

So when you're buying your dad a Father's Day card, you're buying him Father's Day card because they've told you it's Father's Day for the most part, right?

Even a small minority as well.

Exactly.

But when you look at like moms and women, they've generally lived in a world of like actually expressing the sentimentality, the feeling, how they, you know, like, I'll give you a simple example.

When I was flying from South Africa back to New York, my mom said to me, I always go say goodbye to her, you know, before I travel.

And then my mom said to me, something that I was like, this is too beautiful for a human.

She said to me, please send me a picture of the first flower you see when you get to New York.

And I was like, damn.

It was such a like,

she said, please send me a flower

of the first picture you see in New York.

Now, I didn't realize how few flowers there are when she said that.

No, I genuinely did.

It was like land at Newark, drive in, drive.

You're like, man, there's no flowers.

But besides the point, it was such a sentimental, soft,

you know, it wasn't like, all right, kid, you go out there and you work hard.

You do your best.

You here?

Yeah.

You know?

I struggle with that with my son and making sure that that's not my default, you know, and just, you know, be a man.

You're like, oh, no, he needs a hug in this instance.

So give him a hug.

It's also made me more vulnerable with him

in the day-to-day.

Yeah.

And then

I had to,

there was someone that works for me that no longer works for me.

And in making that decision to sever that relationship, he was the first person I talked about it with.

Oh, wow.

He's nine.

But, you know, hey, man, how you doing?

Not good.

I had to.

Oh, wow.

This person not vibing.

And that's no different than you not getting along with somebody at the park and it gave him agency it gave him agency to ask questions if he wanted to ask questions about the thing and so that helps to bring us closer but you know i try to put some humor in the book and i feel like it's funny but i just also felt like it was the right time to write about These stories and these people because I think other folks could get something out of it.

Just in some of the values that I learned from certain folks.

And, you know, but it's not like,

that's why I struggle with calling it like a memoir.

Cause it's like, I don't know if it's full life and times.

And

I dabble in some entertainment stories, but I don't.

I kind of dabble in personal life a little bit, but it's all early stories in my personal life.

Everything else is just people I've met along the way and just odd jobs and stuff like that.

Well, you know, when you start off the book, it reminded me of something I learned in therapy.

I always used to think, and I think most of us think that we are most affected by the people who are in our lives.

We often take for granted that we can be affected most by the people who are not in our lives.

And I think there's a lot of men in the world and women as well, but I know a lot of men who will draw a lot of their issues and things in life to their mom.

Oh, my mom was like this, and my mom did this, and my mom did that.

And you'd be like, what about your dad?

Well, my dad wasn't really around.

So it wasn't, you know, he didn't really.

And only in therapy did I learn.

It was like, oh, no, no, no.

That's, you know what I mean?

That, that, that, that gaping hole, that absence.

That gaping hole there

taught you this.

Taught you this.

Yeah, you grew a limb because of that.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You, this missing

made you compensate in this way.

This not being there made you feel this way.

Do you know what I mean?

And it's interesting because

you do write in the book and you're very quick to say it in the beginning.

And in a beautiful way, you go, look,

my mom was my everything.

My mom built this world.

She's my rock.

My son, you know, the women in my life.

And you're like, that's a story for for another book.

But you're like, but right now I want to write this book about fathers.

And you explain it through the lens of your son.

But even in that moment, I felt like, I was like, damn, we take for granted

how

many people grow up and live in a world where their moms have to bear the burden of being both parents.

And so in a way, don't get.

the joy of being the full version of who they are.

Do you know what I'm saying?

It's just being one role.

They get robbed.

And also just being one person.

Yeah.

You get robbed.

That to the gaping hole thing, like that was part of it.

And it's weird because a lot of that I didn't even discover until I started writing.

Like, I don't even think some of that stuff came out in therapy.

So like the idea of

hustle, hustle, hustle, and do it myself

to a detriment, as you've often told me.

Like

the idea of doing, like, Trevor said to me sometimes, like, Trevor will just see me, like, post some random event that I've done or some shit.

And he'll just come, he'll come in my office.

You don't have to say yes to everything.

You can say no sometimes and just go home.

It's okay.

But my brain is still in

TBS, whoopie-gold bird, like

there's a trauma with that, right?

But even predating that, when I look at

there were times where my parents,

they didn't necessarily argue about money, but my pops could use money to manipulate the house, right?

So

if there was a week stretch or a two-week stretch, but he just ain't gonna pay a bill.

This is a man that is highly respected, and like his resume is bulletproof when it comes to what he's done for black Americans and what he dedicated himself to and what he destroyed his psyche to do for us.

But also, this nigga might not pay the gas bill tonight.

So you're going to freeze or you going to go walk the neighborhood and rake leaves so you can make the money

so your mom can go to law school or finish law school at that point.

I don't need her dropping out to get another job.

I'll go get it.

I'll work.

I'll figure it out.

So at minimum, how can I not be a burden to my mom?

Okay, well, money is always a burden in this house.

And once we move to Birmingham, I kind of talk a little bit in the book.

You become more sentient of your parents' stresses.

Yeah.

Definitely.

Somewhere in middle school, late elementary, middle school, you can look at them and go, oh, my motherfucker having a bad day today.

You're less selfishly involved in your own wants.

So

this idea of, damn, I know.

I know she'd be stressing about money because I see her body language when I ask for $10 for a field trip.

Yep.

I bet I'm going to put my Nintendo tapes in the paper.

I've been watching my pops long enough.

I know how to secondhand some shit.

I'm going to put a garage sale in the paper.

It costs $10.

Birmingham News just has something called Bargain Banana.

Anything under $100, they will put it in the paper for free.

So I would put my entire bedroom in the paper for free.

Saturday pick up only 9 to noon.

And I put a table out there, bitch, and I sit in the front yard with some Boston baked beans and just sell old toys and sell old Nintendo tapes or whatever.

And so this idea of becoming self-sufficient, that shit felt good.

So, you know, I was working, you know, they don't care about, they don't enforce child labor laws like that.

And what I peeped is that if I had a job that would only give me 20 hours, I could just go work temp service.

As soon as I leave this job, I'm going to go down to Labor Ready or Labor Finders.

They're going to get me outside into construction for $75 at a time when minimum wage was four and a quarter.

So that's good money.

You had a crazy list of jobs.

I mean, this man worked.

You were sweeping the parking lot outside

in West Inn at the time.

Right.

One day you went and worked at a, what was that, like a concrete factory?

Quick Crete.

Quick Crete.

Quick Crete in Columbia, South Carolina.

I will say that story is funny because

Roy, every story, Roy's like, I went in and I worked hard and I did my best and I stayed there.

And then Quick Crete, he's like nah man i'm out

the hardest i've ever worked is the quick crete factory in columbia south carolina bro i've never understood heat

and so you know what quick create is it's the fake it's the concrete the wet you add water

yes

There's a machine that's got all the quick crete powder and it comes down into a funnel into a bag No, but wait wait you got you got to set this up from the beginning because you have to understand how this man got there this is what makes it better for me because if you went to quick creed to get a job i'll go like oh well this is path of the course no the day the day starts with roy and a room of grown men 5 a.m 5 a.m

how old are you at this time bro uh early 20s 21 22.

yeah but this is while i'm on the road doing stand-up

so I'm doing stand-up in those days you had comedy clubs that would be six-day runs so in Columbia there used to be a club club, Comedy House Theater.

They would book the MC for a two-week run.

So, you're in town for 14 days.

They're there.

May as well get a part-time job.

Get a fucking job, but what are you doing all day?

You're special, man.

Roy, you're special.

Go get a job.

So, I would just go, you drive down to Labor Ready, you sign in, and if you got work boots, they put you on, you get staffed faster if you got work boots, yeah, if you got work boots.

And

a dude would just go all right wood jenkins turner y'all work in the quick creek van outside you go get on a van they drop you off at a fucking factory at eight o'clock in the morning it's already 90 degrees

and it's a big aluminum shed that's baking

and

and inside Just for and mind you, all I work is food service.

I work air condition.

But to work, to make quick money, the money's outside.

You got to sweep leaves you got to do the art so i'm outside in the heat and there's a big ass machine that's just pumping quick crete into a bag and then the bag falls off that nozzle and just goes down a conveyor belt and at the end of the conveyor belt you just lift this 10 pound bag of concrete and you put it on a um on a forklift pallet you stack that bitch eight high Somebody come in with the cellophane, wrap that bitch, forklift man come in, pick it up, take it to the truck, they put down a a new palette, wash, rinse, repeat for eight hours.

And I'm the bag man, and I'm just loading the palette.

And you think that this isn't a lot, but this

from shoulder height, 10 pounds from up high to down low.

One direction.

One direction.

This is called eccentric loading.

That's what that is.

And you're 20 and this is a grown man and they're yelling at you because you're not moving fast enough.

And

the powder's in the air and it mixes with your sweat.

So now you have concrete naps in your hair,

and you got a show tonight.

You still have a show to do.

So you get back to the room at 5:30 and you're just like washing concrete out of your hair.

Yeah, and then at seven o'clock tonight, you got to be on stage.

Man, the Confederate flag, crazy

14.

I did that job two days, and then they moved me to a church.

They were building a mega church, and we were just scraping spackle off the concrete foundation.

But that was so hard, so hot.

Like,

I've never worked like that in my life, but it gave me such an appreciation and understanding for construction and just blue-collar work in this country as a whole, man.

You meet some people, man.

You meet some really interesting people doing construction.

I think everybody in this country,

either food service or work outdoors for one year.

They should have everybody, every single person in this country, just on some mandatory,

you ain't going to get them to go to the military.

But I think everybody should do food service or work outside.

It's so funny you say that we had an episode with Tracy McMillan-Cottam.

Yeah.

And

she was saying that if she ruled the world, she would make it that everyone had to work in the service industry or everyone.

It's almost exactly what you're saying.

Yeah.

Because she drew a line between how we perceive other people in these jobs and whether or not we know what it's like to be in them.

Like when you told me

you, or when you, I mean, you told me, I read it in the book, but like how you worked in fast food and because you have,

I mean, what would the right word be?

A disturbingly intimate relationship with fast food.

Let me tell you something.

Roy Wood Jr.,

I would pitch food segments

every single week.

He's offshore there.

Every single week.

They would go viral.

Roy would say to me, Yo,

so I've noticed that Popeyes is launching a new chicken sandwich.

I think what we should do is we do it.

Then I go, wait, wait, wait.

What's Popeyes?

Oh, it's a chicken joint.

It's a chicken joint.

And then I'm like, oh, is it everything?

And Roy's the most detailed person I know.

So Roy won't just say to you, it's a chicken joint.

He'd be like, it's a chicken joint that started in the 50s, 60s.

And now down south, it wasn't the biggest.

You got Bojangles and a few other chains that have really been blowing up over that section.

And, you know, it's not that big on the West Coast, but over here, you got Popeyes.

And Popeyes is pretty big.

And Popeyes is normally known for their pieces.

They're not really known.

They're not like KFC and chick.

And he'd take me down this deep rabbit hole.

KFA is for sandwiches.

Popeyes is for

chicken.

Yo, KFC is for a full meal.

Yo.

With a mash.

This man knows life through the lens.

of fast food.

I don't know how.

I don't, you have the most intimate relationship with fast food.

We would do segments on the show, like, and I would just mention the McRib in passing, and then McDonald's would just send me like 20 McRib coupons.

Were you there?

You were there when Mountain Dew sent the Baja Blast

Tabasco hot sauce.

Yeah, we were talking about Baja Blast.

You remember when you made the,

you had like a, it was like a mafia style thing on your, on your social media.

Oh, the coalition.

It was the chicken wars or something.

Because, I think it was because Popeye made the burger.

Because Popeyes made the burger.

Roy did this whole thing.

Let me tell you something.

If someone should win a Pulitzer Prize for fast food analysis and like their writings and their thinking, I've always wondered, like, what,

not what is it about fast food, but you have this,

it's almost connects us.

Yeah, but it's something deeper than that, Roy.

There's something, there's something you're all an analogy for life.

So I,

the coalition was basically a drama involving chicken sandwiches plotting against Popeyes because Popeyes was fucking up the supply game.

Because the Popeyes chicken sandwich at the time was essentially a new drug.

And imagine how would all the old drug dealers get

with their clientele.

And this guy is getting off.

Moving into the new deal.

We got to kill him.

We got to kill him.

How do we take out Popeyes?

And so I sat during COVID and just did stop-motion animation with real sandwiches that I collected from all over the city and shot a drama and put it on YouTube.

And it connected with people in a way because I feel like each fast food,

there's

they have a personality.

Yeah.

There's a relatability.

This

fast food company exudes this type of person or you're this type of person if you eat this type of stuff.

So it's all very regional.

It's almost like college football in a way too.

Everybody's got a team.

Everybody's got somebody they love.

They got somebody they hate.

Yeah, but Roy, you know it way too intimately.

What I mean by this is like,

you can ask someone, if you said to someone, like, oh, who goes to KFC?

Who goes to, you know, In N-Out?

Who goes, they'll give you an answer.

Let me tell you, Roy,

if any of these companies need a consultant, they should come to this man.

I think you know things about the supply chain, the quality of the food, where the food has been sourced, how it's been sourced, what it's all about.

Like, in the most serious way you can imagine.

Yeah, they change suppliers, and then that affects the recipe.

Like even down to the water that they use to make biscuits, it can change

biscuits taste from different regions.

But it's the same shit with bagels.

It's just nobody thinks that it might also apply to the biscuits, but it does.

That's why fast food chains taste different in different regions sometimes.

I wonder when

When you think like this, right?

And then I think back to your dad,

it's interesting that you say, I didn't know him.

And yet, from my reading of you,

so much of you seems like a deep knowing of him.

Because I'm him.

And that's also a mind,

a mind fuck

is looking at yourself and going, oh.

I see.

I care about people.

Check.

Okay.

I figured out a way to use my gift to enrich and educate people.

Okay.

Check.

Healthy distrust of close relationships.

Check.

Damn, I'm just doing what he do.

I'm just a little funnier than him.

You know, I still have, I was looking at my phone earlier because I was trying to find this.

But it's like I will have like a random

premise

and then it's something that gets to a deeper thing, but I don't know how to make it

like

funny to me.

And like there's

there was a movie called

The Assignment with Michelle Rodriguez

where

a male hitman is turned, to get revenge on a hitman, a male hitman is turned into a woman.

Sounds familiar.

When was this a single man?

And so now the woman hitman is looking for the surgeon that turned her into a woman to reverse the surgeon to get or get revenge

and so

how this movie is 2018 2019 okay so a bigger conversation about transphobia like that movie in its core is to me

now how i get to the joke i don't know

but the challenge of that like that

that's the stuff that's the material that excites me.

But that's what I mean.

But this is what I mean about being your father's son, right?

And what your book goes through in so many ways is your dad was living this life.

Like, I love that you do the checking of the boxes.

And the natural question that it brings me to is,

how do you then choose?

You talk a little bit about auditing.

One of the most beautiful lines in the book, and I'll paraphrase it in case I get it wrong, but you basically say,

nothing makes you audit your relationship with your parents like having a child of your own.

Because when you have a child of your own, you then have to ask yourself what you want them to take of you.

But then you then have to ask yourself who you really are.

And in asking yourself who you really are, you have to ask yourself who made you.

that way.

What are the worst parts of you?

Exactly.

And how do you not accidentally infuse those things into the child unknowingly?

Which means you have to be conscious of the fact that something as simple as

saying I love you.

Pops didn't do that from the old school.

So he just buy you some food.

Like, it's like one of them old school black jokes where your mama come in, you hungry after she gave you a whooping or some shit.

Like that's...

That's what my dad was.

My dad was.

Educator and provider.

I'll tell you something that scares me to that point where I don't know if I'm doing what he did.

So my parents were separated

until third grade.

That's when my parents got back together.

So my mother and I lived in Memphis before we moved in with him in Birmingham.

My pops would come to Memphis once a month.

And he'd stay for a day and a half, maybe two days, but he would sleep half of that.

And

knowing what I know now, he wasn't sleeping.

You're older.

You're an older dude.

You want a nap.

I'm 46.

I want a nap.

This motherfucker was knocking 70.

So yeah, you want a nap and you drove three and a half hours and you work mornings and nights.

He did morning radio for five hours and then he did an evening jazz and talk.

He'd do a talk show in the afternoon and that would roll into a jazz show.

You're tired.

So yeah, just tired.

But he would always bring me a truck.

He'd bring me like a little toy truck from some truck stop or some shit or whatever.

And

play with the truck, but they were all forgettable toys, nothing that stood out.

And then fast forward,

I'd say maybe two years ago.

Let's just say second grade.

Well, my son was in second grade.

He's in fourth grade now.

Let's just say second grade.

First grade, it became sentient about me being gone.

Yeah.

you know because i because i because i'm i'm out i move out of the house so it's kind of a you know

dad where are you type thing and we're explaining to him the the dynamics of what co-parrington would be

and then i think that second grade i felt my relationship with him becoming a little bit more sentient and him missing me

like man where you been man i want to throw i want you know he wants to do the things he just wants to be with his pops and that would have held true even if i were under the same roof yeah but that

hurt

whoo

they never been missed by nobody

you know or no one's told you they've missed you okay

and so

this idea of all right well when i'm gone he needs to know why i'm gone So the relationship becomes a little bit more communicative

when I'm gone.

Yeah.

Here's a video or the thing, I'll send that to his tablet.

We'll FaceTime here and there, but I more so enjoy sending him,

perfect example.

He loves trains, transportation, planes, all that.

So if it's a city he's never been to, I'm first person POV camera from the time I get off the plane, show him the whole airport, shoot that nice seven-minute video.

break that bitch down into two minute chunks so I can send quicker.

And then I'll get on the train that that morning

I would we did 20 cities in 30 days through Canada last year and every day I rode mass transit in the morning to go get a paper and we just ride the train all day here's the train here's it so I look like a tourist which really used to scare me because now I look robbable

you know what I'm saying like my

you know my spidey sense is it's just yeah your paranoia is off the charts right I'm from the, at the time, the most murderous zip code in Birmingham.

Like, facts.

So my paranoia is justified.

That PTSD, that comes with you in a nice little knapsack.

So

I'll send videos and sometimes I'll bring a little toy, a little souvenir.

And now I rack my brain on when he's older.

Does he equate that to me trying to be connected?

Or does he look at it the way I look at the trucks?

It's just a fickle, lazy, huh, motherfucker.

That's an interesting, it's an interesting one.

But you don't know for another 30 years.

He ain't going to know until he has his kid, probably.

You know,

the thing yesterday was when we were discussing this episode, if you'd allow me, was

I knew I was not going to read the book and I didn't want to because I wanted to experience the book through you.

But I experienced a bit of you from him.

Then I remember saying, I don't think from this conversation, Roy has ever been a child.

yeah you never say that i said he's never been a child but what we find is what you've explained about kids and parenting is that kids if there's more than one sibling in a household they'll experience parents differently because children allow you a chance to reinvent yourself correct so you become whoever you want them to be i mean you want them to see as it goes having one child is the ultimate gift and curse because they experience you transforming in front of them so you can never have that one idea that you think they will have of you But what happened was, I think your dad, his practicality showed up in real life when you were growing up and in your life right now as a grown up.

Because when he was older, obviously, and you were younger, he understood that he didn't have time.

He wasn't going to see you as a 25-year-old man if you take the age gap.

So he knew that he had to be practical with you.

So what he had to do was he had to make you a father.

And your child made you a son because you are out here now.

You are are playing.

You are taking videos.

You are taking pictures of things.

You're looking like a tourist.

You want to be a child.

You want to hug him.

You want to show him that you love him.

So,

those are your gifts.

Those are the things that he left you with.

He made you a father.

Your son made you

a child.

And that's what you must take with you.

But often it happens that we want to live vicariously sometimes and we get fixated in the mistakes of others.

And in life, there comes that time where you equalize.

Now you understand why your dad had to take that nap.

at first you might have thought yeah he's avoiding me he doesn't want to be it now you understand exactly why

i've been wanting nap so after working at the quick street you understand

and and and and that's what i find whenever trevor and i have conversation we we get to that point where we like how do we reconcile our pasts and make peace with it and i think with this conversation right here from the little that i know of you and i'm sure there's a lot to find out is you are reconciling balancing the books.

You took the good, you discarded the bad, and you're infusing it now in your life.

And your dad lives through you and your son lives through you.

So I think that gap and that distance between what your dad could have been in your life and what you want to be in your son's life is visible in how you show up in your son's life.

That's beautiful.

Thank you for that.

Yeah.

I try now with him

to just be very verbal about feelings, sharing feelings.

To me,

to me, the main thing is love and how does that manifest?

How do you receive it?

Yeah.

Teach him how to receive it, teach them how to show it.

If I can do that,

I'm good.

Does he know how funny you are?

Funny, no, but he knows that he knows he is aware of what I do.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Does he know how funny you are?

I make him laugh.

Oh, that's what I mean.

Does he laugh at the jokes that I do on seeing it?

No, forget that.

I'm saying, does he know how funny you are?

How funny?

No, but I can make him laugh from time to time.

Okay.

Yeah.

No, because he's got a sense of humor, too.

Yeah, but that's what I mean.

That's one of the things that I think we take for granted is

this is what I felt when I was reading the book, right?

And I was looking, I was thinking of your dad, and I was going,

I think one of the greatest gifts of, one of the greatest acts of love that you've committed in this book is

You've processed your father through the most generous lens possible,

which is love.

You've got a man who had another family in the same town as you, and it wasn't a secret, but it still holds a bit of shame, you know, and you and your mom are fighting against this thing.

You, you, you, you've got this world where you're trying to cement yourself and have the things that you could have, but you don't have, and your dad's withholding them from you.

You know, he's not paying the gas bill because he's fighting with your mom, or he feels like you and your mom are up against him.

So he's going to make you both pay and not pay the gas bill or not pay the electric bill.

He's going to teach you both a lesson.

And you're like, no, but I'm on your side.

And he's like, no, you're not, boy.

You're not on my team.

You know what I mean?

Despite all of that, I read the book and I went, damn,

I felt for your dad.

I saw him as a human being.

I didn't see him

as a villain.

I didn't see him as a...

You spent so much time trying to give him the benefit of the doubt in a beautiful way, by the way, that I was like, damn,

what an act of love.

And I think what it got me thinking about, because I think so many people go through this is when your parents or when you are forced to focus on survival, we take for granted how many elements of living we put aside, you know,

love,

intimacy, fun,

joy, fiction, imagination, vision, just random things.

We focus so much.

Think about how many people have grown up and are growing up in worlds where the only thing they're allowed to think about is surviving.

So, your dad goes, Roy, I need you to be educated and I need you to know how to navigate the world.

And watch out for these white people.

Exactly.

But

I can't teach you joy.

And don't pay your taxes because they're taking the black man's right to vote away in 2043.

I'm just telling you, this is the type of shit we're talking about.

What are we talking about in the car?

Yeah, but

if you think of taxes.

But if you think about it, though,

if you think about it, though, he has to tell you that because

he can't tell you how to have fun because he didn't come from fun.

He didn't have fun.

Do you get what I'm saying?

So he's like, I need to teach you how to survive.

And I was thinking, man, it's so crazy

how that becomes

the thing that sort of we lose out on.

The way I was thinking of it was I was going,

We always have to be careful, especially if we're the next generation.

If you have the luxury of being the next generation that can move forward,

I think it's very crucial to remember in life that you are trying to survive.

But on the other side of survival, you need to remember all the luxuries you couldn't include in survival because those are the things that make surviving worthwhile.

Do you know what I'm saying?

You want to win the war,

but you want to win it so that you come back to your friends and family and laugh.

If you can't come back and laugh and enjoy it, that's exactly it.

Because otherwise, what was it for?

Like, what were you actually actually fighting for as an idea?

Did you get what I'm saying?

Yeah, it's like the whole point of it was for my son to be able to be relaxed and not have to think about

a million different things.

But how do you prepare someone for the world while also giving them agency to still be a child and making sure that

there's a balance in that, which is why I try to let him laugh with me.

Crack a joke.

You have the one thing, and this is more from my mom.

He

always has freedom of opinion.

You can share it respectfully, but like all of that, be quiet and stand in the shop.

No, you think this sucks?

Tell me why.

Break it down.

Get like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Give me the logic of it.

I still might not agree with you, but we can have, don't ever be afraid to bring something to me or to share something with me or talk to me about stuff.

And I think that those were the things where I think as parents, we are either the parent we wish we had or we're a carbon copy.

Of the parent we have.

Of the parent we wish we didn't have.

Yeah.

And

the right balance is somewhere in the middle.

But I mean, man, we laugh.

But you know what me and my son laugh at?

It's a lot of inside joke stuff.

Yeah, no, no, that's all comedy.

That's all comedy, if we're honest.

We watch Interstellar a couple times, and Matthew McConaughey's character's got that robot TARS that that he's always telling to do stuff.

So, if we're telling the other one to do something, TARS, I need you to go in there and get the thing,

Tarz, I need you to take a shower and get ready for bed.

Does not compute, and he'll say, does not compute.

Like, no, I just told you.

So,

that was it could be something as silly as that.

I told you,

you're an AI robot, yeah, but that's what I mean.

So,

funny, yeah, I think that the only piece of rage I really felt, like if it's about anger, because the other thing with finding your roots was that I also found out when my dad lost his dad at age four, per census data, there was no other male head of household in his life.

Oh, wow.

So as far as I know, it was just him and his mom.

Wow.

And if there was a man.

They wasn't on the papers.

Yeah, he was not official.

He wasn't official.

So that means at best, you and some fleeting stepdaddy, Mr.

Johnny, come over from time to time and give you a nickel, but not like a solid

household.

No quality time.

Yeah.

And so my pops grew up, you know, when his pops died when he was four, they left Atlanta and went to Chicago.

So you're growing up,

you know, you're growing up in Chicago during the boom and then

civil rights, you know, and then you off to covering Vietnam and every riot and every race war you can name as a journalist.

So

this idea of,

yeah, you can be mad, but this all has to be looked at strictly through the lens of

what did I learn and what do I hope for the boy to learn

and how did that thing affect me?

So you can leave out a lot of stories, but it wasn't

my daddy was mean or no.

Yeah, no.

It's like, no, you did the thing.

And here's how that day on that choice affected me.

You didn't pay the bill.

You didn't pay the power bill.

So I chose to work 30 hours a week in high school so that there would always be money in our back pocket because I'm never going to be cold again.

Ever.

I don't give a fuck what I have to do.

I'll never be as cold as I was that night.

And that's part of why I hate winter.

It's from that.

Like, it's the idea of,

I remember,

I remember I was on my way to a gig and the gig canceled on the way

and I didn't have gas money to get back because the gig was the gas money to get back to Birmingham and I had a quarter tank of gas and I go,

I'm going to let the engine run and keep the car warm,

you know, on and off every hour, get it down to an eighth, and on that eighth of a tank, drive into town, drive to the next nearest city, get a day job, work that day, get the check, and then make that money to drive back home.

But I got to survive the night and it's two degrees.

And so you just got to sleep in a cold car.

But there's a weird,

oh, I've been here before

that kind of kicks in.

You don't like it, but you know what you've been through.

So you know what you can push through.

And there's not a lot of people that I, that know that story.

I would even tell that story too.

So how would my son even know what he's capable of?

He needs to know what's in him.

I think all our kids do.

I think we owe it to our kids to share with them our pains, our struggles, our fears, our failures, but we present as perfect.

And then, a lot of us haven't even reconciled with any of that stuff.

So, your kid comes to you dealing with something similar, you don't even know how to help him unpack it

because you ain't

looked at it yet.

You hadn't looked at that idea of

how to move

when there isn't, when you aren't confident or what to do.

Hey,

I had to quit working with them.

I had to fire an employee, bro.

And it hurt my heart, but I had to do it.

And I'm here to tell you about it so you can understand the fragility of friendship.

That's what you hope the long run is from a conversation like that.

So, you know, you just, you don't know how it's going to all connect in the long run.

But,

you know, I just, I just share everything.

I just share as much as I can.

And

yeah, a lot of it does come back to being a good dad.

But I think it's just also about

having this story of,

you know, I also don't want to get too obsessed with

changing my behavior solely to influence his growth because then I'm not being me.

Yeah.

You know, I took him, so when I left Daily Show I took him with me to clean out my office yeah yeah you wrote about that because he needs to understand that none of these jobs are forever

none of this stuff is forever so you think he understood that not yet yeah

but I've taken him by CNN and he's come there and understood that he's he's old enough now to understand

the idea of this show and this show and how it connects.

He's Googled me once.

So, you know, like there's he's aware of what I do,

but

trying to take that,

trying to take that veneer off of what fame and stardom and all of that because he has no perspective on that, of course.

Kids don't care.

Yeah, they really don't.

But one day he'll figure out who Kai Sanat is.

He'd be like, Daddy, you ain't famous for shit.

KSI or somebody.

Like, you know, he'll see real fame and then it'll give him perspective.

But

yeah, I, I,

you need to know who I am.

And I'm, I'm, I'm thankful that my pops used to take me to the barbershop and these boring ass speaking engagements.

And

I would sit on the floor with him in the radio station while he did call-in shows.

I would just sit at his feet and he would take two hours of calls from the community.

No music, just talking to people.

Yeah.

Brother Wood, this would need to happen with the referendum.

And

you need a new city tax.

And at that, I'll pay for the education.

And my dad, you know, whether he was right or wrong, he, whether they were right or wrong, my pops would just be patient with people and hear them out and have conversations with them.

And so

you learn pieces of who your parents are when you see them doing the thing they love to do.

And so that's important that my son at least sees and sentient about it.

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It's funny when you talk about

breaking the curses, I often think about how

how impossible that can be sometimes.

You know?

And what I mean by it is this, like, we'll all talk about it, in the age that we're in now.

Everyone will go, you know, my family did this, and I'm going to be the one who doesn't do it.

And my dad was like this, and I'm not going to be that.

And my mom was like this, and I'm not going to be that.

And I will be the one, and I will be the one.

And then the great irony of it is, you'll end up being the one just from a different place.

Do you know what I mean?

And

reading through your book, I kept finding myself thinking,

maybe the great relief and release in life

is not only thinking we're successful when we break the curse,

but it's realizing that there's a whole lot of power in just naming the cage.

Do you know what I'm saying?

This is what it is.

Like, I feel like

you may get, because there's no real scale that'll tell us how far or how close you get to being the perfect dad.

But just knowing what the cage is that you're in because of your dad and being able to name it changes.

Like, it's not the exact same thing, but I mean, like, for me, like ADHD, knowing that I had ADHD changed my life, genuinely.

I didn't have to change everything about my life, but now I could tell you, I'd be like, oh, that's the ADHD.

Like, I just, I just know.

I just know, I know how my brain works.

I know at 1 a.m.

when I'm craving a chocolate, I know what's happening.

Before I would just go, I'm craving a chocolate.

Now at 1 a.m., I'm like, oh, hello, old friend.

Do you get what I'm saying?

And that's what I mean is like, I feel like that's where you're doing the work.

And that's where you and your son will benefit because you're naming the cage.

Yeah,

I think it all helps.

I don't think it's a book he'll read or appreciate for another 15 years.

I think he's got to be 20,

somewhere in there.

But I think he'll appreciate the results of the book because you might think the book is for him, but you might find you writing the book is what's been for him.

Yeah.

I don't know anybody who can write their their story honestly and not be forced to reckon with things that have happened in their life.

Correct.

Like, I tell everyone all the time, I go write a book about your life.

And they're like, who's going to read it?

I go, that's not, you shouldn't actually think about that.

Go and write a book about your life.

And

when you're writing it, you start to realize how much you don't even know about your own life.

You realize you don't even know your parents.

At all.

At all.

At all.

We know what our parents did.

Yeah, you only know them through them being in service to you.

Yeah, but you don't like know, like, and I mean, like, know your parents.

Ask them, like, a real deep question that isn't, isn't,

and what I mean about a real deep one is they're actually the ones that seem like they're on the surface.

Yeah.

My mama told me a story one time

about in college how she faked being pregnant on a dude.

And we laughed for a fucking hour.

Because this is an esteemed black college educator, three degrees, and i work in administration and i make sure these kids get their degrees i was the first nine black people at delta state we protested at the president's office and we fought and i'm the child of a sharecrop and also i'm pregnant

psych

and it was the 70s you could really scare a dude back then

The technology wasn't what it was now to prove you're a liar.

And I'm like, Mama, why you did that?

Pissed me off.

Just

left it at that.

So you start, you forget that your parents are just humans.

Exactly.

So yeah, put that in the book.

Yes, son.

Yes.

I stole a credit card and tried to buy some shit and got caught.

Let me tell you about

that world.

Let me tell you about like all of these weird times.

And so that,

I don't know, man.

I just, I just don't know if I would ever talk about any of this on stage.

So I don't know when else I would ever have had a platform for it.

But I think

that's the beauty of different art forms, right?

I never used to understand why musicians would paint sometimes.

You know, you'd read these random stories.

They go like, Da-da-da-da has a painting.

They paint.

And I'm like, why?

What are you doing?

Just you make music already.

And then over time, you start realizing, and I think this applies to everybody, whether you're an artist or not, because I think everyone is an artist genuinely.

Not like in like, oh, everyone's an artist.

I mean it.

Everyone has something creative in them that they'll benefit from getting out.

And I think we take for granted that sometimes we think all of our stories will be told in the places that we think they can be told, but they won't be.

Some of your stories will only come out because of your friends.

Some of your stories will only come out because you go to church.

Some of your stories will only come out because of therapy.

Some of your stories will only come out because you're in a relationship.

Some of your stories will only come out if they are given the right avenue and stage to come out in.

And so, in a way, I go like

because of the book, the book is a different stage.

I was laughing.

I was laughing about you working at quick crete with the concrete in your hair.

I was laughing at you with the credit, like Roy's credit card fraud.

Man, let me tell you something.

Good times.

Food on some good times.

We ate good for two years.

Do you know what I mean?

It was just to get food.

Like, that's how it started.

There's the relationship.

No, but it's true.

That's true.

With food.

Yeah.

You know what it was?

We just wanted Pizza Hut, bro.

That's all.

We wanted Pizza Hut.

It was 96, and it was the beginning of Pay at the Pump.

And in those days, in the States,

your gas station receipt had your full name, full credit card number, and expiration date.

Ah, what a wonderful time.

Insane.

Insane.

What a dream.

And I go to a gas station and I get paid at the pump, and whoever was there before me

hadn't pulled their receipt.

So my receipt was attached to theirs.

And I saw that full credit card number.

And I was like,

we having Pizza Hut tonight.

And I went back to the dorm.

I told my boys, I said, boys, boys, whatever you want.

Meat lovers, we getting breadsticks, all that.

And we ordered like $40 worth of pizza on somebody else's credit card.

And in those days, when they would deliver the pizzas, right?

This is where racism can help you.

In those days, when they delivered pizzas to black colleges,

it was most black colleges are on a or adjacent to a bad side of town in a lot of instances.

So

sometimes the pizza man gets robbed.

So the pizza man is already paranoid because he's already on 10 about being robbed.

But we will walk up to pick up $50, $60 in pizzas with a $10 cash tip in hand.

White driver literally trembling as we're walking up.

And we're dressed as

hood as we like in black hoodie.

Black Nike.

Like we want psychologically, we are trying to psych you out.

You are trying to invoke racism.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes, because I need you to not ask me for this card because you think we're going to stomp you out.

Oh, would you think I ain't got the card?

Oh, you.

I didn't have the card.

All I had was the receipt.

Yeah, but I like the $10 tip, though.

That's psychological.

That's pretty cool.

Because no one's tipping.

And so we would walk up and we would go, hey, man, can I write the tip in?

Do y'all take cash?

Hmm?

Me?

Yeah, you, man.

There you go.

Oh, here you go.

And there's Parmesan and there's some red flakes for you.

And we'd walk off and he'd never ask for the card.

So you come back to the dorm,

celebrating, and you're eating like

we've ordered $80 worth of pizza.

We can't eat all this pizza.

Oh, the dorm is just them motherfuckers is floating.

You guys are the ninja turtles

out there, Natello, coming out the food with you now.

They smell them pies and them cartoons.

So we're in the dorm during Monday Night Football, which is like premier-packed TV room.

And we're in the back like some fucking bosses.

And motherfuckers will come up and

pay their respects.

And they come up, and one dude from the football team, he come up and go, hey,

I give you $10 for that pizza right now, fathead ass nigga.

And it's like a $15 meat lover.

He's offering me $10.

That you haven't paid for.

Bet.

Nice doing business with you.

That's how I started.

We just wanted to eat pizza.

One night, somebody bought one of the pizzas wholesale, and then a flashlight went off of my head.

And so I just started selling food.

I was the food dude.

And then

about a year or two later, I got a work study at the post office on campus.

And mind you, the only reason I got the work study at the post office was because I was late signing up to be an RA in the dorm.

I just forgot to sign up.

I've been an RA for two years.

Just forgot.

And they were like, well, you can go work in the post office.

Cool.

Mail sorter.

Now you have access to the actual tangible cards

at a college campus where

everybody is applying for credit cards.

Goodness.

And in those days,

credit cards came already activated in the envelope.

There was no sticker.

There was no call this number and put in your pin and your matching stick.

I mean, we could argue that they basically made you a fraudster, if we're honest.

Yeah.

I mean, let's be honest.

You had no other choice.

I mean, really.

This seems logical at this point.

I'm like, this is God.

God wants me.

So now

when we order the pizza, I can show the card.

Hey, there's no more tip.

Oh, man.

Yeah, I'll write in.

You still don't get tipped.

The confidence has gone up.

And that's where you get sloppy

because you get too arrogant.

And so now with these tangible cards, you can sell clothing because you can just go buy clothes.

Oof.

And whole thing.

Tell me what you need.

You get half price.

It goes deeper, man.

So

you become the dude.

Like, pizza is one thing, but now PlayStation, whatever you need, just have price.

Just come tell me what you need.

I'm just, I'm, I'm Amazon

for that part of the campus.

Look at me.

Look at me.

I am Jeff Bezos.

And so

we take a card in the Dillard's, and

we knew one of the girls that worked the cash register, and she was doing us a favor.

And this is where, so to do us a favor, to leave more credit space on the card, she undercharged us for the merch so that the card would have more space,

which I didn't need you to do because I'll just go steal another card when it's time to do this again.

And

she undercharges us for everything.

And this is, she's working in like, I don't know, Polo or Tommy, whatever.

One of those mall stores.

Correct.

One of the designer departments where there are no $7 sweaters.

Yep.

She's ringing up shit for like $6, bro.

This is too low.

And so she got caught and then the dominoes fell.

And

we're at the house waiting on a pizza.

And the police, Tallahassee police came in.

They kicked that door.

And this is at a time where Tallahassee only had like four or five murders a year.

So this was some good action.

Whole task force come in the house to take us down.

Yeah, it's like, I don't know, seven, eight cops.

We got him.

We got him.

He blew that whistle on.

You look at it.

Here's the fucked up part, though.

We got arrested.

They started searching the house.

And then fucking Pizza Hut showed up with that goddamn pizza.

And couldn't eat it.

Couldn't eat it.

And the cop didn't have enough sense to ask the pizza man if that was like stolen gas.

And that's all I remember about the night I got arrested was that fucking pizza hut smelled so good and I couldn't fucking touch it.

It was sitting right there in the living room, bro.

Couldn't fucking touch it.

So got suspended from school.

And then during the suspensions, when I started doing stand-up,

because I was like, oh,

I'm probably going to go to prison.

Well, that makes me sad.

Well, let me just try stand-up.

Because now

you realize your common

bond you share with people is your ability to give them things.

And the moment I lost that superpower,

nobody wanted to talk to me.

I had like one or two friends.

And around the same time, I started working at Golden Corral.

And

Golden Corral was like the first place I ever worked.

The first place I ever experienced true true forgiveness and benevolence from strangers, coworkers who you don't know me?

And then you find out after a month or two, you find out I get probation.

Yeah.

Don't know how.

I get probation.

I don't go to jail.

And I'm doing stand-up.

I'm working at Golden Corral.

I'm riding out my suspension from school.

And then my coworkers at Golden Corral found out

that I was on probation.

And I just remember just expecting to be fired, like, oh, I, okay.

And then, and then you, you discover that

half the store is on probation

because we had an owner who hired

who hired convicted felons and returning citizens to

tax breaks, but also he legitimately believed in second chances.

And so

that place at that time in my life was exactly where I needed to be because

the legal system is set up to make you feel like you're going to fuck up again.

And they psychologically tell you.

Like, you're coming to that.

It's only a matter of time.

I'll see you soon, sir.

And so,

yeah, like that's the type of stuff where I feel like my son, my son should know that.

And then it's also interesting in how that helped shape

why I try to be as kind as I can to people and try to give chances to people.

Yeah.

Because there was like an 18-month stretch in my life where I could have been discarded.

Florida AM could have thrown me out.

Golden Corral could have thrown me out.

The school let me back in so I could graduate.

Then I go get a job in Birmingham, you know, working at the radio station after I graduate.

I was still in probation when I started in 95-7.

So

that only happens because there were so many people that saw me for what I could become.

so it changed how I saw myself so I didn't feel like who I was I could only see what I was destined to be and like that's all I still to this day that's still how I carry myself yeah oh well yeah I'm doing this now but I know what's gonna happen over there are you scared did you no no let's leave daily show because I know over here must be something I know how to and I know how to get there because I've been I've been at rock bottom before so this this this is easy I can get from here

all right career still going.

Like, that's how

all of that thought process started was

during that first year of probation, just in terms of like figuring out

the self-reliance.

And that's where everything from my pops and my mom's and being a latchkey kid and then selling my own stuff and hustling and not asking my mama for no help.

I needed that shit when I was on probation because I didn't have nobody.

Ain't nobody trying to help you make the dream happen.

And you in school,

you back in college talking about you going to be a comedian.

Nobody buying that.

Not in a building full of scholars and not fam news journalism.

Man, I had a classmate, man.

I ain't never felt more nothing in my life.

And I'm still enrolled.

And I'm back in college.

I'm in Jacksonville doing an open mic or some shit, and we're backstage.

I got the TV on, and I see one of my classmates anchoring the weekend news

with the same age, and he's the weekend anchor.

And I'm

on TV, like he's on his way, and I'm like, in that moment, I saw him, I was like, fuck,

this gotta work.

This has gotta work.

So I don't, I'm never gonna,

I'm never gonna get to that.

I'm not doing journalism properly.

You know, and I ended up doing my own version of it.

And, you know,

I got lucky as well

because

I worked in morning radio at a time where black radio

Morning terrestrial radio was disgustingly competitive in certain certain markets.

And we were one of the few markets, I think it was about 10 cities at the time, that had four

different black morning shows.

So we were the local show, but then you would have Tom Joyner syndicated in.

I think Steve Harvey was just starting, but there was also Doug Banks.

There was also Tony Scott.

There was also Russ Parr.

So any of those five or six entities, four

could be in any market.

And so when you're the local black show, you have to creatively be way out in left field

to compete.

So,

yeah, I can do a lot of crazy, weird ideas.

I don't have to just do prank phone calls.

I can come up with weird call-in characters.

I can come up with parody songs.

The Leo Debling character that we did on Daily Show, that was an old radio.

character.

I wouldn't have even had the gumption to pitch it at Daily Show had I not been given that creative freedom to just play in the sandbox and figure it out.

And if it sucks, who cares?

Nobody's going to remember because tomorrow's a new day on radio.

If they don't like it, it's Birmingham.

They're going to call and tell you you're trash, but they're going to give you another chance.

Like, that's the one thing about black audiences is that you can get booed,

but you can always come again.

You can always come back again.

Try again.

If it's good this time, we'll cheer.

And if it's bad again, we'll boo.

And each boo is its own individual, yeah.

It doesn't count towards the next thing, yeah.

No, it's not a cumulative thing, an individual commitment.

You don't take it, don't take it personally.

Yeah, we just know you suck.

Keep moving, you're still mad.

Come on, madaboo.

Come on,

they don't act like you didn't suck.

You know, you suck.

Yeah,

you know what?

It was a different time, though, man.

I'm very grateful

for that time because I needed forgiveness at a time where I did not deserve it.

And I got an abundance of it.

And so that's part of what keeps me gracious

in trying to give, you know, chances to people.

I just, I haven't been able to get anything green lit in a place where I can do effectively for other people what was done for me, especially,

you know, people coming off probation, coming out of prison, stuff like that, doing some staff and shit with that.

Like that's going to be, that's the Birmingham plan, you know.

You say that, but I feel like in the same way you sometimes put an outsized amount of pressure on yourself to be the perfect father that you never had.

If there's one thing everyone in this industry, and I mean everyone,

will agree on, and people don't agree on anything in life.

is Roy Wood Jr.

has helped them in some way, shape, or form.

I'll tell you now, you will be hard-pressed to find a comedian or anyone who's like tangentially related to comedy who doesn't have a story about how you've helped them in some way, shape.

And I mean everyone.

Here's Eugene.

This is a random African.

Think about it.

In the thick of COVID.

Think about it, though.

When you didn't have to.

Yeah.

Like me,

you name it.

The Neil Brennans of the world, the, I mean, every random comedians nobody knows.

Comedians, everybody does know.

Big comedians, small comedians, bro.

Like, you name it because people were kind to me bro no no no you you say that but like i i think you you see in you saying like i've never had the chance i go man you take for granted how and this is something that i i've always loved about you as a friend but i've always like wanted to strangle you on is i go

you'll focus on the mountains but you'll take for granted how many pebbles you've piled up

yeah do you know what i'm saying You'll always be like, man, when I get that mountain going.

And I'm like, Roy, look how many pebbles you've put here, man.

That is a, that's that's literally a mountain that you've built.

There's more.

Do you get what I'm saying?

Yeah, there is more, but I'm saying that that's like my wish for you as a friend and as a person.

I always go, Oh man, just look back at some of those.

Yeah, you've always wanted me to stop and just like always pause, not even stop, pause.

Yeah, it's hard.

It's hard because I always feel like that light in the tunnel.

It's not the end of the journey, it's the train trying to run me over.

Damn, and so I just had to keep moving.

Imagine playing with trains as his kid.

What a crazy journey that must be.

Okay, trains, daddy, choo-choo.

And that's the end of my line.

Oh, kids used to die at Birmingham back in the 80s.

They used to try and hop freight trains to class.

Oh, yeah, that's like us when we were.

Yeah, that's

the same thing as South Africa.

That's what I say.

It's like the corner of the train.

We lived a parallel life.

You know, can I tell you one of the biggest things your book did for me?

that I appreciate is it brought something top of mind that I think is

really important to think about now.

And it's,

you talk talk about your journey with your father, partially knowing a man, and I argue we only partially know everyone in our lives, you know, but partially knowing this man for 16 years of your life, him dying, and then you

talking about the many fathers and the men in your life that raised you in some way, shape, or form, even in the smallest conversation, even in the smallest instruction, the smallest,

you know, act of kindness.

But what I found myself thinking of when I closed the last page of the book is I went, damn,

that's probably the biggest blow that masculinity has taken in society today is that

we have fewer and fewer fathers because we have a smaller and smaller village.

Do you get what I'm saying?

Like the way we used to live.

Yeah, the way we used to live, like even having

even having a father was like a, it's like they were all fathers.

And I mean, like, this is like, this is where the language of, you know, African languages, especially South African languages, tie you to that concept.

Everyone was Bab.

You know what I mean?

So if I was talking to Eugene's dad, I'd say Bab Kausa,

you know, father Kausa, but it's like father and, and, you know what I mean?

Mom Kausa, like, you know what I mean?

Mamaga, Eugene, Mamaga, like, it's like mom.

So there's all the moms and there's all the dads.

So you're the brothers.

And all the brothers and all the sisters.

So you, yours directly might not be there.

But we always grew up being like, man, there's fathers everywhere and there's moms everywhere.

And yours might not be there.

But there are many of them around to give instruction, to give a beating, to give correction, to give guidance, to give whatever it might be.

And all I thought to myself was, I was like, imagine growing up now as a young man whose father isn't present physically or emotionally.

And then like, where are your fathers?

Isolated.

Yeah, where are your fathers?

It's like just what, the internet?

Do you know what I mean?

In a lot of cases, yeah.

Yeah, but the problem with the internet that I have is it's a bunch of men telling you how to act.

But unlike a real father, you don't get to see how they really act.

Yeah.

Do you get what I'm saying?

You get the, you get the

things.

Let me tell you what a real man does.

Let me tell you a relationship.

Let me tell you what a real man does.

Let me tell you what a real man.

Click thing goes off.

And then it's like, well, who's that person?

Because kids see through the, like, you wrote a whole book where you're seeing through the facade of your father.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Your father's telling you who he is, but then you're seeing who he really is.

Yeah, I think that men are a lot less,

I don't know, inclined to help too.

I don't think everybody wants the help.

I remember,

like,

I'm the guy now.

The best I do with young people is stick and move.

Like, if we're in line, like bodegas and stuff, and it's like three, four, 14-year-olds in front of me in line.

And then I'll tell you, all right, y'all stay out of trouble.

You know?

And you're out.

Yeah, because

these kids don't want the advice.

Man, Roy, that's somebody.

Y'all stay out of trouble now.

Yeah, or I'll ask him an easy thing, an easy thing with adolescents.

I'm like, which teacher you hate?

Oh, that's a nice one.

Okay.

And they'll start going off about the teacher.

Yeah, but you still got to learn something from him.

Like, just

stay in it.

Man, Roy, you know what?

Roy's been an old man his whole life.

You know what we need to do?

After this podcast, we need a book.

We're going to go trampolining.

We're going to go like, we're going to go throw slime at each other.

We got to.

I want to do like the dumbest, silliest things with you.

Disneyland?

Yo, whatever it is.

Or Vision Land.

Visionland.

It's Alabama Adventure now at foreclosed and it was bankrupt.

Okay, okay, okay.

I thought we're going to go around.

We're going to go around wearing little, I have a dream hat.

It's vision land.

vision land have you complementary have you been on the million man march ride oh it's so long yes a million more steps 999 000 more steps

ownership a number of times but it's still standing one of the largest wooden roller coasters in the world

yeah it's called the civil rights movement

oh man roy man thanks for coming through man i appreciate you man like and and can i tell you man thanks thanks for sharing you and like i i appreciated it selfishly just as as a human being who knows you man your book was

because like i got to have conversations with you that we've never got to have and i think anyone who reads it if if you are a a mom

who is a single mom, if you are a dad who's not in touch with your kids, if you are a expecting dad, if you are a son who doesn't know their dad,

if you are a human being, fundamentally,

I feel like

you've written the book for them, man.

It's beautiful, it's forgiving, it's insightful, it's light, it's funny, it's it's yeah, man, it's um, it's phenomenal, but I appreciate it, man.

Yeah, man, thank you.

Well, until I have another child and then write another book.

I bet you

oh man,

what now with Trevor Noah is is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM.

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