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

Roy Wood Jr., Trevor, and Eugene delve into Roy’s journey from growing up with an absentee father to becoming a father himself, and how writing his memoir helped him understand what fatherhood really means. The three also discuss how life’s circumstances have shaped their world view and comedy.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Now, 25 years into his career, Wood is in his prime. He's a father to six-year-old Henry.

• 0:19Trevor Noah?

  My next guest is a comedian, an actor, a Daily Show correspondent. Senior campaign correspondent, Roy Wood Jr., everybody. Roy Wood Jr.

• 0:28Speaker 03

  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 gonna be hosted by Emmy Award nominee Roy Wood Jr.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  This is What Now? with Trevor Noah.

• 1:07Trevor Noah?

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• 1:42Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info and travel days, or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 2:27Trevor Noah?

  You're booked forever, forever.

• 2:30Trevor Noah?

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• 2:34Trevor Noah?

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• 3:19Trevor Noah?

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• 3:48Trevor Noah?

  All right, well, let's do this, Roy. You ready to start your grind?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Stop, see?

• 3:54Trevor Noah?

  I heard you.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  You're like the women in my life. Even after I tell you what the truth is, you're just gonna stay on the fucking truth that you've conjured.

• 4:02Trevor Noah?

  Wow, we jumped straight into it. Welcome to the podcast.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, we're rolling?

• 4:09Speaker 01

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

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Is that what you think?

• 4:15Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:17Trevor Noah?

  What up, Roy? How you been?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  I'm good, man. It's been a minute, man.

• 4:20Trevor Noah?

  It's been too long.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  We text, but we don't get to this.

• 4:24Trevor Noah?

  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 gonna be your village. Yes. And then you leave the village of work, and then the people are just gone.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Now, you know what's funny? I still see David Kabuka in my neighborhood.

• 5:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but David's that guy. David is the most, he's the most employed homeless person I know.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  I'll see like Daily Show employees just out and about now. And in a weird way, it's, oh, should I speak? That's my friend.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should speak. Yeah, we have a friendship that's deeper than the building where we work.

• 5:29Trevor Noah?

  But it's weird though, right?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:30Trevor Noah?

  It is weird. It's like meeting your school friends on a weekend. And a mom. No, no. And your mom. No, but it's even weirder than that. It's you were, you out of the school. You finished school. Yeah, I mean, finished is one way to think of it. You're just, you're just out.

• 5:45Trevor Noah?

  You're just out of school.

• 5:47Trevor Noah?

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

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 5:57Trevor Noah?

  I was in, uh, I was in the park in Brooklyn and.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  That's cross, that's cross territory.

• 6:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and I was, I was walking around. And he saw me, I didn't see him. Hmm. Hey, boss. No, and he went like, he's like, hey, Trevor, as he walked by, you know, 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's just carried on walking. And then I was like, yo, Matt. And he was like, hey. I said, why, why did you keep walking? He's like, oh, I don't know, I figured maybe you're done with us.

• 6:38Speaker 01

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

• 6:41Trevor Noah?

  After the job is done?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:42Trevor Noah?

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

• 6:46Speaker 01

  It's transactional because work, this is the job. And then at some point in your twenties, 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, like, you know who, um, who oddly are probably the, who I see the most, I won't say the closest, but who I see the most is Desi's husband.

• 7:13Trevor Noah?

  Desi's husband.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Desi's husband, Gannon. Me and him, we in a group chat with two other dudes from the show. When I tell you that's my dog.

• 7:20Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm. How?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I, I don't know. But I know part of it is also our boys are the same age. So, we, we swap birthday party invites every year.

• 7:31Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And then me and Gannon became kinda like the, at the adult ga- at the kid gathering. We in the cut, sipping something and just talking shit.

• 7:39Trevor Noah?

  Looking kidnapped.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And call hang all the time. I say Hassan a close second. I, I see, I've seen Hassan a lot.

• 7:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Since I left the show. But, you know, I don't, 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 gonna like, show up to any.

• 8:06Trevor Noah?

  You know the way, 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 vibe. No, your tone and your vibe made it feel like, when we're in prisons, like, I mean, we all, I mean, you know me, I'm around and I'm.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  It's the military. It's, it's the same. We served. I served, you served.

• 8:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  And then you, you, you're, you're retired. Your daily show retired. And the people who are still enlisted, hey, Isaac, 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- 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?

• 8:54Trevor Noah?

  No, I, I don't think that's what it is.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  A lot of it is circumstantial. Like, a lot of sincere moments happened because we were working together.

• 9:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, okay, here's what I think it is. I think. Because Americans have to be so nice at work.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Have to be.

• 9:08Trevor Noah?

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

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get an H R complaint. Also, I need something from you sooner or later.

• 9:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. Whereas I find in South Africa and the little work I've done in like the U K. 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.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 9:28Trevor Noah?

  You can just work together.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:30Trevor Noah?

  You know what I mean?

• 9:30Speaker 04

  You don't have to be friends.

• 9:31Trevor Noah?

  I need those reports. Thank you. It's just keep it moving. Do you know what I mean? You 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.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:39Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 9:50Trevor Noah?

  And then when you're out, the people are like, oh, okay, I mean, that's that's done. Whereas in whereas in South Africa, I find people aren't nice to everyone they work with. I'm not saying disrespectful or anything.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Do y'all have like cultural rules and faux pas at company parties, like in 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.

• 10:11Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  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 feely. You're still at work, even though it's a party.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  Even if it's a company, oh, yeah.

• 10:24Trevor Noah?

  No, with us, when there's alcohol, there's alcohol.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  So you don't wait to see if the boss is gonna have a sip.

• 10:30Trevor Noah?

  I've never seen that. No.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Crazy talk. Crazy talk.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Want to move?

• 10:36Speaker 01

  No, because you're gonna, you're gonna use that against me when we get back to work.

• 10:40Trevor Noah?

  No, you see, no, that's another thing. No, it happened at the party.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:43Trevor Noah?

  No, Roy, what happens at the party stays at the party.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 10:47Trevor Noah?

  Why are you gonna bring those things up?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Talk to that one person.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Especially if it's a single woman.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  Especially.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Oh, we're talking five minutes. All right, give him a. If it's just. If it's one on one.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  You have to leave and come back.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  You don't have any internal. You don't have that countdown clock in your head?

• 11:22Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  When you're talking to another single person at a company event? A coworker?

• 11:26Trevor Noah?

  No, no. But again, we didn't-

• 11:27Speaker 01

  You're not gonna make me feel crazy.

• 11:29Trevor Noah?

  No, you're not, I'm not saying-

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I kept good jobs for a very long time.

• 11:32Trevor Noah?

  You've had many jobs. That should have been the book you wrote, The Man of Many Jobs.

• 11:37Trevor Noah?

  You write about many fathers. I was like, this man has had every... See, but you know what's funny? Just listening to you say this now makes me realize, like, you, 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.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:57Trevor Noah?

  You, 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-

• 12:04Speaker 01

  A single woman.

• 12:05Trevor Noah?

  A single woman at a, at a company function.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Where somebody else could get two best friends.

• 12:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. Every day at The Daily Show, when I'd walk in, in the mornings, we'd do our, we'd do our morning meeting. Everyone would hang out, and then, um, Roy would go to his office. And I remember I'd go in, I'd walk past Roy's office, and I'd sometimes just like walk in and see what he was doing.

• 12:26Trevor Noah?

  I've never felt like somebody is hiding another life more than Roy. You know when you look at a person's computer screen?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  It's work.

• 12:36Trevor Noah?

  No, one, one day it was coding.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:39Trevor Noah?

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

• 12:45Trevor Noah?

  I was like, this man's coding. Then a few weeks later, I'd come back, he's doing deep research on like K-pop and-

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:51Trevor Noah?

  Like, Korean music in general and K-dramas and all. I come back a few weeks later, Roy's like, do it. I'll be like, who is this man?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Video editing.

• 12:59Trevor Noah?

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

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Graphics. Oh, you're talking about the day when I was doing the graphics. I was trying to build a graphics package. I was learning, um, Adobe-

• 13:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Um, After Effects. And just watching videos and just, how do, I wanna know how to do this stuff, cuz I also wanna know when I'm getting screwed. And that's also part of paranoia.

• 13:20Trevor Noah?

  See, that's the paranoia.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  But-

• 13:22Trevor Noah?

  This is the paranoia.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Paranoia drives you to work even harder.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Before I pay you, I must know exactly what I'm paying you for. Yes. Coding! I need to learn it. I need to learn some degree of it, because then, when you tell me that it's gonna 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.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  Because you've done it.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I've done it. I know enough about. 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 gonna fuck me. I'm not gonna 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 it was also the desk where some of the interns would be set or whatever. Well, come in, talk, whatever. But you're standing in that goddamn doorway. If you come in this office, stay at all the advice in the world you want. Anything you want to chat about, but you stand up. You stand in that goddamn door. You're not coming in this office. And it needs to be two of you.

• 14:31Speaker 04

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

• 14:33Trevor Noah?

  This guy was born a dad.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Way before you had kids. You fix your pants, comb your hair.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  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, 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 P A 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.

• 15:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely, we'll get you an Uber. But we're not riding.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  Wait, so before the Daily Show, had you ever been in a corporate environment as a, as an employee of someone?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:46Speaker 04

  It was harassment training.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And it's America.

• 15:48Trevor Noah?

  That's how Roy knows how to harass. Have you seen him harass? He's one of the best harassers you've ever come across. This man will harass you, Roy.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  I know the loopholes, baby.

• 15:56Trevor Noah?

  Roy harassment, man, this boy's a. Roy Wood.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:06Trevor Noah?

  It would be so funny. Cause we always just assume these things. Have you been for your harassment training? He was like, I sure have. Smack, smack my ass. Let me see how you do it. Ah, yeah, you got your training. Yeah, you do it real good, boy.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, wait. Wait. How, how long? Cause a certain friend of mine who I won't mention was telling me that they wanna attend the course to learn how to fall. Prenders, people who teach people how to fall.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Okay, clown school and all that.

• 16:33Trevor Noah?

  I don't appreciate. You know what, Roy? You've, you've been roped into roasting me without realizing it.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I'm not.

• 16:38Trevor Noah?

  So don't respond to anything this man says. Clown school is important. No, stop calling it clown school. But it is. There's a school that teaches you pratfalls. Don't let, this man has roped you in? Steve O built a career. He went to clown school. I'm not saying any, you're harassing me right now without knowing it. I'm not saying, anything you're saying is wrong.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Okay, stunt school. He's a stunt person.

• 16:56Trevor Noah?

  Fine.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we, that's how we start. We said, 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, sort of jiu-jitsu, taekwondo, but they can teach you how. But actually, there's people who teach you how to fall.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  The Brazilian grapple?

• 17:13Trevor Noah?

  I just wanna learn how to, look, it's, you need to know how to fall.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  You know this guy too?

• 17:17Trevor Noah?

  You just need to know how.

• 17:18Speaker 04

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

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Well, I guess with the wrist brace, you do need to learn how to fall. Your shit's fucked up, man.

• 17:27Trevor Noah?

  How long was your harassment training?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  I see, right there, I'd get a report. A month from now, you made someone feel uncomfortable. When you single them out.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  That was a classic case of.

• 17:41Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  When I did radio, we had harassment training. You gotta remember, I did radio, I came in 2001. Two years later was the Janet Jackson Super Bowl press. So decent.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  See how he said press?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  I said boob out.

• 17:56Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you said boobs out.

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Cause I didn't do the course.

• 17:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you didn't do, you didn't take class.

• 17:59Trevor Noah?

  You've never had a job. He, he's been in training.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  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. 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, there's drugs, like it's chaos. But also it happened outside the building.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  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. And then we would just walk over to the control rooms all automatic. We were just going there.

• 19:11Trevor Noah?

  No, Roy.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Do live radio at three in the morning. Fuck it. My boss sleep. And if he up, it's because he cheating.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Because he's fucking listeners. So I know you're not gonna call.

• 19:26Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  I know you're not gonna check me right now, not when you're supposed to be in bed, married, person.

• 19:32Trevor Noah?

  So what would the 3 a.m. radio show be about?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Oh, we would just take calls. We stopped playing music and we would, we would have people, I gotta give a shout out to my man Young Dill. Because Young Dill was the one that was, he was supposed to work till midnight. 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.

• 19:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's that 3 a.m. I did, I did three to six.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:56Trevor Noah?

  And it was the same thing.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  How was the club? Well, you know, how was it? Whatever. Just what happened in the club tonight? Or tell me about the person you about to go fuck. And that was it, or you'd be coming back from a booty call. How was the booty call?

• 20:08Trevor Noah?

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

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's always some

• 20:12Trevor Noah?

  Going.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Truck.

• 20:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, there's always

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Some beverage, delivery, food, person.

• 20:17Trevor Noah?

  Seafood. Yeah, one serious person, five drunk.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:21Trevor Noah?

  That was like the ratio. One serious, five drunk. No way. Yeah, that's what it is on radio. At that time of the morning.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's 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 nine AM, 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. Cause they out in the street, they selling, they selling 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 of extra ad buys from people and stuff like that. So

• 21:11Speaker 01

  that side of the building was the sexy side. So they needed a video to watch, to go, hey.

• 21:18Trevor Noah?

  When you're out there?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Don't say nice titties.

• 21:23Trevor Noah?

  You say appropriate breasts. These are appropriate breasts.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  For having your breast out today.

• 21:29Trevor Noah?

  You know, when I, when I, when I was thinking about you coming in today, I was going, I was going through your life and I was like, man, this guy, there's few people I, I've, I've met who I feel like have lived a life that is more parallel than yours and mine. Like every, everything about you, you know, 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, it's only when you sit down and you look through someone's life, do you go,

• 22:10Trevor Noah?

  I was like, damn, I worked with you at The Daily Show for seven years. I, 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?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Just freedom.

• 22:27Trevor Noah?

  Just, I didn't know that you and I, like it was, 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, both South, South, South, you know? Yeah, South Africa, South of the United States, you know what I mean?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  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 gonna get along.

• 22:52Trevor Noah?

  Let me teach him about K-pop and programming.

• 22:56Trevor Noah?

  You know what's funny about dads though is like, and I mean, we'll talk a little bit about about your book, because man, I love what you wrote.

• 23:05Trevor Noah?

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

• 23:14Trevor Noah?

  on how to become a father, become a person, and even how to be a child. I don't, I don't, 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, 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 can't, they can't bullshit me. I'm gonna learn how to do this so that they can't scam 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.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Before he left the house?

• 23:50Trevor Noah?

  Before he left the house.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  And he would only buy the item from the cheapest, whichever store offered that item the cheapest.

• 23:58Trevor Noah?

  No matter how far they were?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  So if I could bring the coupon in and prove to you that they across town got it for cheap.

• 24:25Trevor Noah?

  They'll give it to you.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  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, because like.

• 24:44Trevor Noah?

  And he beat the system?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  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, like.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  But if an apple costs a dollar on our side of town and that same apple costs eighty-five cent on the white side of town, my pops is gonna go buy the eighty-five cent apple from the white side of town and then bring coupons that are for the, for this other store and make the white

• 25:21Trevor Noah?

  To the black store.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  To the white store.

• 25:22Trevor Noah?

  No, to the white store.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  To the white store.

• 25:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  To basically go, ha, ha, ha, now you gotta give me all this shit for cheap, cuz y'all charging, cuz 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?

• 25:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  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 a gallon of milk versus half a gallon versus a quart. And we would stand there and I would have to add, 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, 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

• 26:24Speaker 01

  two half gallons. And so this week, we're gonna get our dairy from over here, but we're gonna get too much milk.

• 26:29Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  More milk than you could ever fucking drink.

• 26:31Trevor Noah?

  (laughing).

• 26:33Speaker 01

  But we saved money. But did you, though? If you got more milk than you can consume before it expires, have you saved money?

• 26:41Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  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 Warner hats every Saturday and Sunday for like, used camera, my, my dad collected cameras.

• 26:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So...

• 27:00Trevor Noah?

  Like vintage cameras, yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Vintage, old-school cameras and Lincoln, any, any Lincoln you could name. My pops owned it. He bought, 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.

• 27:17Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:28Trevor Noah?

  Because they wanted to trade in their car. They were thinking of trading in the car.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:32Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  It hadn't been inspected yet. My, but, somebody is coming in to trade in, like, let's say you got a Lincoln Continental, like a eighty-nine Continental, that was his favorite one.

• 27:48Trevor Noah?

  Suicide doors.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  No, no, he, he, he would keep it factory. He would just add leather seats or whatever. He would like trick out the inside. So, my pops, it'd be, it was Midfield Dodge was one of the places. And Midfield Dodge would call my dad. Hey, Mr. Will, we got a, we got somebody down here bringing in an eighty-nine Continental, uh. You 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.

• 28:17Trevor Noah?

  And he put down four quarts of milk.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  And when I was old enough to start driving, my pops everywhere when I had like a, um, learner's permit when I was fifteen. 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 per- this shit is still in the car. My kids are babysitting. Belongings.

• 28:49Trevor Noah?

  Excuse me?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  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. Cause he was for sure, somebody was getting over on him somehow.

• 29:06Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  So he used to be in a lot of distrust.

• 29:17Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  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 and I know the track record. My pops would go over people's houses, you know, a lot of, the newspaper was a wild time, cause you would just pull it, it was like Craigslist.

• 29:43Trevor Noah?

  Classified?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. You just, it's just a stranger, 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.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  No way.

• 30:00Speaker 01

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

• 30:04Speaker 04

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

• 30:07Speaker 01

  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, now, you know, in those days, the TV would get all the dust on it, the, you know, the box TVs. So if your electronics were dusted and your liquor was in a nice place in the house.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  We're making a deal.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  He, we, we gonna 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.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Do you remember the conversations, sorry, the conversations in the car going to make deals? And the conversations coming back from making a deal?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  I think that he and I talked about everything but me in my life, like, I don't know, I just had one of my pops, he's just like, I felt like I just merged into 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.

• 31:17Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Come with me doing the thing. We grocery shopping. And it was like, 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 showed 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.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  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 gotta be careful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 on the freeway to Montgomery and I'm driving him down to Alabama State. So he can do a radio show that morning. So he was always talking about the news, the world, society.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  He was quick to talk about politicians, local politicians, state reps. He didn't like most of them. He didn't care for most of local politicians.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  So there was a, there was a guy. So there's a barber shop 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, it's war. Yeah. And you both made it back. Mm-hmm. You got a bond. Yeah. So Pete's, 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 like epicenter. So there would be on any random day on a Saturday in the style shop, my pops, the radio news DJ,

• 33:15Speaker 01

  the mayor would be there, there would be a black state rep, any black mayors from 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that's where the meetings happened. That was the room. Was Pete Stone Style Shop. So there was a, um. There was a, there was a mayor, um, at the time of a suburb of Birmingham named Larry Langford. And so Larry Langford was the mayor of Fairfield, predominantly black suburb. It's not, it wasn't, he had gotten it, they were doing decent enough as a suburb.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  And Langford was getting ready to run for city council and all this other stuff. And my pops and them are basically telling him 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's, Fairfield is between Birmingham and Mississippi.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Langford had done, 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 Langford'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 and 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, you're not gonna build anything that can compete.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  It's Atlanta.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  It's just not gonna happen. And every Saturday for the next year and a half, Larry Langford came in that barber shop 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, it's 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 in 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 gonna be in your neighborhood,

• 35:42Speaker 01

  well, if it's so good, why's it gotta 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.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  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 music park, and it's Vision Land. That was the name of it.

• 36:10Trevor Noah?

  That was the name of the music park?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yes, Vision Land, because I had a vision. He was, listen, this is black men in the 90s.

• 36:16Trevor Noah?

  I mean, still, Vision Land.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:18Trevor Noah?

  Hey, kids, you wanna go to Vision Land?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a vision.

• 36:23Trevor Noah?

  What are we doing at Vision Land?

• 36:25Speaker 01

  I had a vision for a land. I called it Vision Land. But you gotta 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.

• 36:39Trevor Noah?

  Oh, so this was impossible?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  It's impossible.

• 36:41Trevor Noah?

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

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we riding in the 89 Continental, and we passed by the Vision Land sign, and my dad is driving, and he just looks, and he looks up at, "Motherfucker did it."

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Which then starts a conversation about your dreams and your goals and what you're gonna 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. It's never how was your day. My dad could name them favorite foods, but you knew, like, hey, Jesse Jackson's coming to town, we're gonna go backstage.

• 37:23Trevor Noah?

  Right, right, right.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Democratic, I think 88, he came to town, backstage. My pops back there doing interviews, and it's Al Sharpton, everybody back there. We're 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, talked to me like a regular ass partner. Also, for context, my pops was old. My dad was 63 when I was born.

• 37:47Trevor Noah?

  63 when you were born?

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I was, when I was born. He was wearing suave, I looked 45, I lotioned myself every day.

• 37:55Trevor Noah?

  No, but still, 63?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  63, yeah. I think my mom's was like...

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Thirty, thirty-one?

• 38:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but still, I mean, that's a.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  So, his ideall- I don't even, knowing what I know now as a man, you at sixty-three, and at that point, you over seventy.

• 38:12Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  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 struggle and saving money on milk, and that's the values I'm gonna give you.

• 38:24Trevor Noah?

  You know, it's funny you say that because

• 38:27Trevor Noah?

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

• 38:36Trevor Noah?

  in, in a more methodical way than Roy Wood Jr.

• 38:40Trevor Noah?

  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 I mean?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  I'm working a case, Trevor.

• 38:51Trevor Noah?

  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 bad way to write a joke, but I've, 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 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.

• 39:27Trevor Noah?

  And so, uh, 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 a hundred and seventy-five percent. 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, this, is this a joke? This is a joke that you're talking about? This is where he's like, yeah, I'm gonna find the funny.

• 39:52Trevor Noah?

  I'm gonna find the parts of it that make it fun. Yo, but I remember, cuz you remember, I just, remember, I just met you as a human being. Like, you, you just popped into my life out of nowhere, you know what I mean?

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:02Trevor Noah?

  Think this, to set the stage for you properly, you gotta understand how Roy Wood Jr. comes into my life as a person.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Tell me.

• 40:08Trevor Noah?

  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, cuz the South doesn't really help anyone, doesn't, doesn't matter. We're getting an African to replace Jon Stewart. The Jon Stewart. 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, like, the legacy, everyone was like, oh yeah, we're gone. It's, 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 who compliment you? So I'm getting tapes, I'm getting, I'm getting everything. People are like, try this person, look at this person, try this person. And then it was Neil Brennan,

• 40:52Trevor Noah?

  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 Wood Jr.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 40:59Trevor Noah?

  I was like, I don't know who Roy Wood Jr. is.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 41:02Trevor Noah?

  And then somebody told me Roy was performing at the Comedy Cellar. So I go down to the Comedy Cellar. I watch 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? Cuz a gang is an establishment, and he had this bit about like, if you have an establishment, you gotta have middle management, you gotta have a supervisor. So is there someone who goes to each of the gang members and critiques their sway? But it's, it's an amazing, but it's phenomenal, phenomenal joke, right? Like a performance review in a gang. Yeah. And 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.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  I saw him.

• 41:43Trevor Noah?

  Forget the audition, he's the guy. They're like, well, that's not how this works, cuz you, you African, I'm like, whatever, we just do the thing. They're like, no, we have procedures here.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Has he done sexual harassment?

• 41:55Trevor Noah?

  Yes, I have. So they bring, so they bring Roy in, Roy does the audition. I mean, he's Roy. It's one of the funniest people. Immediately, everyone's on board. But now we are jumping into a show that's starting in how, 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, there's no long getting to know you process. It's merging 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

• 42:35Trevor Noah?

  and then turns into the funniest human being you've ever come across in your life, but every day, every day. Consistently. Okay, 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. In the first six weeks? But that's because I didn't, I didn't. There's a reason for my intensity though, but keep going. Okay, I'm glad you acknowledged it. Did you have a gun? No, no, no, but I, I, 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, this is before I like. Maybe a son of a Vietnam vet? 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 find.

• 43:20Trevor Noah?

  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. 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.

• 43:45Trevor Noah?

  That's what Roy seemed like.

• 43:48Trevor Noah?

  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. This, 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.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  I'll be damned.

• 44:19Trevor Noah?

  They were like, man, this, this guy is, and I remember telling this to her, I was like, that was so funny. I was laughing. I was like, that was amazing. That was funny. And Roy was like, we gotta do it again tomorrow. Before.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Let me explain the intensity.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  So for context,

• 44:39Speaker 01

  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 Vaughn, we would sit with Steve Coonan, who at the time was the head of TBS.

• 44:53Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  And we'd have a little celebratory dinner.

• 44:56Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  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 Coonan 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 is happening.

• 45:16Trevor Noah?

  You planned your life around it.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  And then it 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 two o'clock with Michael Smith, which you want to. So I'm doing all of these free spots on ESPN. For about a year. I booked a pilot with Jermaine Fowler for ABC. It's Jermaine Fowler and Whoopi Goldberg. Network loves it. It's looking like we're gonna go to series. But it fall, and this story is as it was told to me, I'm don't go back to Whoopi Goldberg and say I said, this is as it was told to me.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  At the time, The View was going through a co-host change. And Whoopi was going through contract negotiations. The contract for our sitcom was also with ABC.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  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-host? Cause the sitcom is the thing to do in addition to The View. The View is the main thing, so we gotta get that straight. And ABC was like, well, that's gonna take a little longer. All right, well, I guess we ain't doing the sitcom.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Take it away.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Two weeks later, Neil Brennan calls me. And says that you wanna see me.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  No way.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Meanwhile.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  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 have been, I'd been in LA seven years. I hadn't done shit, bro. Couldn't book nothing, I just couldn't, just 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 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 fifteen years, so, but you don't wanna keep doing that. I don't wanna do forty-five weekends.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  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 Newsom climbed the pole, snatched it down. There was a kid, there was a black kid in West Virginia who had a Confederate flag tattoo.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  And it was basically, oh, I'm black and I ain't driven no Confederate flag. And I pitched 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 gonna 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 seven o'clock in the morning, the morning of my Daily Show audition. Printing Confederate flags

• 48:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Exactly. How long it takes?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  And I made a Confederate flag and I stuck that shit on my arm and I brought the cuff of 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 gotta feed this boy when he show 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?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  It was police reform?

• 49:55Speaker 01

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

• 50:02Speaker 01

  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 Chang was the one that gave me the courage to pitch it. I go into the pitch meeting and the field meeting, I go, yeah. Uh, it's the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March. I think there's some comedy there. Um, 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.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  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 gotta 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 DC. And I just want to go talk to the white people and see why they scared. If you're not racist, why are you bothered with black people just fellowshipping? And Trevor's like.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  I like fellowshipping.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  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 Klepper on that ride along to start the season. And then when that, when the Million Man March piece got approved, that's my second piece out the door. I was like, okay. This is a good, I've.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  I call my girl, all right, you can move here now.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  We're good.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I think it's gonna be all right.

• 51:48Trevor Noah?

  It's so funny how we, we don't, we don't necessarily know other people's intentions, perspectives and experiences while we, we're in the same spaces them. You know, there's, there's always that, I don't, 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.

• 52:30Trevor Noah?

  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, I was going, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I don't know if this is gonna 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, alright, let's see, graphic design. Just by the way, you know what I always wonder about, like, the butterfly effect in life?

• 53:03Trevor Noah?

  Do you ever think to yourself that there's somebody out there who worked in that, wherever you were, whatever copy 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?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  The FedEx where he was printing.

• 53:21Trevor Noah?

  If you saw, if you saw Roy Wood Jr. Printing out tattoos and putting them on himself, then pulling it in his sleeve. And then you saw him on The Daily Show.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  This one is good.

• 53:30Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Bro, that shit was a struggle. And, I mean, shit, even just getting to New York, once I got the job. 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, 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 an opener. 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? Would you not?

• 54:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you're not gonna.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:16Trevor Noah?

  You get all the days off.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  But Wendy goes. Tell Trevor I said hello and I'll see you tomorrow. No way. So the next ten 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. 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.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  I'm staying till nine thirty every night and I'mma watch, I'mma watch. And this I learned from you was, one day a week, have, try to have lunch with a different

• 55:17Speaker 01

  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 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. can be flipped. Because then I'm, now I know I'm not pitching something that graphics can, you're pitching a joke at two thirty in the afternoon, it's too late. Yeah. 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 seven thirty 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.

• 55:58Trevor Noah?

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

• 56:05Trevor Noah?

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Did you know that Apple Card is designed to help you pay off your balance faster with smart payment suggestions? And because fees don't help you, Apple Card doesn't have any. That's right, no fees. So if your credit card isn't Apple Card, maybe it should be. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from seventeen point nine nine percent to twenty eight point two four percent based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October one, twenty twenty five. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 56:49Trevor Noah?

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• 57:34Trevor Noah?

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• 57:54Trevor Noah?

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• 58:34Trevor Noah?

  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. Right? 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. That's I, and I mean, I even noticed this when I was with you at the Daily Show.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:17Trevor Noah?

  Is like there, there's, there's a thing in you that

• 59:21Trevor Noah?

  that has become focused. You know, there's, there's, 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?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Cause I didn't know my dad.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:04Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Like, I had an inkling about like, all right, am I gonna 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 my momentum.

• 1:00:36Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  You lose half the tuck ins, you lose half the chit chats and you know, fuck, he's gonna not know something about it. He's missing time to observe me. All right, fuck, he's gotta, I mean, he needs to know me. What if I die before he's 16? He's not gonna know me. And then you realize how compartmentalized your friendships are.

• 1:01:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:25Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  And I didn't want that for him. So I'm like, well, what if I just put something together?

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, what do you know about your dad?

• 1:01:46Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  Shit, I don't know a lot. Okay, well then where did I learn all that stuff? And then you start realizing that there's all these beautiful people that you got put in your life, either for one day or for, you know, flash in the pan or for a lifetime that influenced you. And so then I do finding your roots around the same time.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Finding your roots, I find out that my dad lost his father when he was four. 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 I had taken around my dad's side of the family twice before he died. I don't know. I ain't never seen you. Don't know. 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.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  He had a um, he had a hip implant. He had a hip, he had a prosthetic hip from when he was a teenager. Because he was trying to.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  A woman, he was, he was in high school and a woman had just broken up with him. And so he was trying to like, he's trying to get her back. You're trying to get back, you're trying to get your girl back. You know, somebody pulled your girl. Now you're trying to get her back. And and running behind her, like literally running behind her, got hit by a car. And so what would a limp the rest of his life? What would a prosthetic that had to be extended for the rest of his life? You're 13 and that happens?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  What does that do to your psyche? What does that do to you as?

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  As a, as a human and how does it change your relationship with women?

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  For the rest of your life, how does it change how you see women? How does it change how you see love?

• 1:03:48Trevor Noah?

  With a daily reminder.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:04:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, rejection's rejection.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  That's the most scarring, 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 twenty-four hour status with him, there became this heightened sense of no.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  No, because I don't know what's gonna happen. He knows his mom's side, he knows all of them, he sees those relatives on a regular basis.

• 1:04:45Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  I'm closer with my two younger half siblings than I am my elders. I keep in touch with the elders, 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, my mom,

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:19Trevor Noah?

  Hmm, huh.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  So I write a book.

• 1:05:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but you didn't, you didn't, you didn't just write a book, though, you.

• 1:05:30Trevor Noah?

  You revealed yourself. Because I, I, I think we have two options when we write a book, maybe, maybe even three. You know, like, 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, what I found like 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, I don't read this and it's neatly tied up in a bow.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  A happy ending.

• 1:06:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I don't, 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, there's none of that. Like I, I, it, it feels like this, this gradual unraveling and this stripping. I don't think you can separate it from where the book starts. Like you, you've got this, this great story where you talk about being in the airport. And you, you bump into a fellow comedian. He's buying a Father's Day card.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Never.

• 1:06:49Trevor Noah?

  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 if I did, I guess it might've been great.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Trevor Noah?

  Like where's.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  We're the genuine ones.

• 1:07:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, like. You know what I mean? Like from that moment, I was just like, man, we're, we're in for a journey on this.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  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 even with Mother's Day, there's always, we had our ups and downs.

• 1:07:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's way more. It's sentimental. 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 be 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 buy your dad a Father's Day card, you're buying him a Father's Day card because they told you it's Father's Day for the most part, right? And you're 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.

• 1:08:19Trevor Noah?

  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, 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, land at Newark, drive in, drive, you know, like, man, there's no flowers. But besides the point, it was such a sentimental, soft, you know, it wasn't like, all right,

• 1:09:02Trevor Noah?

  kid, you go out there and you work hard, you, uh, you do your best, you're here.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Trevor Noah?

  You know?

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  I, I, I, 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.

• 1:09:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  And then I, I had to.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:09:45Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  He's nine. But, you know, hey, man. How you doing? Not good. I had to.

• 1:09:52Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  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 tried 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.

• 1:10:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Just some of the values that I learned from certain folks. And, you know, it, it, but it's not like. That's why I struggle with calling it like a memoir. And like, it's just 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, but.

• 1:10:51Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  His absence?

• 1:11:31Trevor Noah?

  That gaping hole.

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. Taught you this.

• 1:11:34Trevor Noah?

  Taught you this.

• 1:11:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, you grew a limb because of that.

• 1:11:36Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Trevor Noah?

  You, this missing.

• 1:11:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Trevor Noah?

  Made you compensate in this way. This not being there made you feel this way that you, do you know what I mean? And it's, it's interesting because.

• 1:11:45Speaker 04

  That's actually good, yeah.

• 1:11:46Trevor Noah?

  Because you, 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, you know, the women in my life. And you're like, that's a story 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

• 1:12:11Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:24Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:12:24Speaker 04

  Of being one role.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  They get robbed.

• 1:12:26Trevor Noah?

  And also just being one person.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  You're robbed. Like, 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, and like, the idea of doing, like, Trevor is saying to me sometimes, like, Trevor would just see me, like, post some random event that I'm 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.

• 1:13:11Speaker 04

  Hustle.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  TBS, Whoopi Goldberg, like, there's a trauma with that, right? But even predating that, when I look at, there were times where my parents,

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  they didn't necessarily argue about money, but my pops could use money to manipulate the house, right? So if there was a week's stretch or a two-week stretch, well, 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 gonna freeze, or you gonna 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.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Okay, well, money is always a burden in this house. And once we moved to Birmingham, I kind of talk a little bit in the book. You become more sentient of your parents' stresses.

• 1:14:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Trevor Noah?

  Hmm, definitely.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Somewhere in middle school, late elementary or middle school, you can look at him and go, oh, I'm having a bad day today. You're less selfishly involved in your own wants. So this idea of, damn, I know, I know she be stressing about money because I see her body language when I ask for ten dollars for the field trip.

• 1:14:56Trevor Noah?

  Yep.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  I bet. I'm gonna put my Nintendo tapes in the paper. I've been watching my pops long enough. I know how to secondhand some shit. I'm gonna put a garage sale in the paper. It costs ten dollars. Birmingham News should have something called Bargain Bananas. Anything under a hundred dollars, they will put in the paper for free. So I will put my entire bedroom in the paper for free. Saturday pickup only, nine 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.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  You know, they don't care about, they don't enforce child labor laws like that. And what I peep is that if I had a job that would only give me twenty hours, I could just go work temp service. Soon as I leave this job, I'm gonna go down to Labor Ready and Labor Finders. They gonna get me outside in the construction for seventy-five. At the time, my minimum wage was four and a quarter. So that's good money.

• 1:16:01Trevor Noah?

  You had a crazy list of jobs. I mean, this, this man worked. You, you were sweeping the parking lot outside.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  Church's Chicken.

• 1:16:09Trevor Noah?

  Church's Chicken.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  In West End at the time.

• 1:16:11Trevor Noah?

  Right. One day, you went and worked at a, what was it, like a concrete factory?

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Quick Crete. Quick Crete in Columbia, South Carolina.

• 1:16:20Trevor Noah?

  I will say, that story's 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.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  The hardest I've ever worked is the Quick Crete Factory in Columbia, South Carolina, bro. I've never understood heat.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  And so you know what Quick Crete is? It's the fake, it's the concrete, the wet, you add water.

• 1:16:48Trevor Noah?

  Dries up quick.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Yes. There's a machine that's got all the Quick Crete powder, and it comes down into a funnel, into a bag.

• 1:16:56Trevor Noah?

  No, but wait, wait, you gotta, you gotta 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 Crete to get a job, I'll go like, oh, well, this is par for the course. No. The day, the day starts with Roy and a, a room of grown men.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Five AM.

• 1:17:12Trevor Noah?

  Five AM.

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  How old are you at this time, bro?

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Uh, early twenties, twenty-one, twenty-two.

• 1:17:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  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, Comedy House Theater. They would book the MC for a two-week run. So you're in town for fourteen days.

• 1:17:35Trevor Noah?

  They're there. May as well get a part-time job.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  You're going to do comedy?

• 1:17:42Trevor Noah?

  All right.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:17:43Trevor Noah?

  Roy, you're special.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  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 stabbed faster if you got.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  Work boots?

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you got work boots. And a dude would just go, all right, wood, Jenkin Turner, y'all work in the Quick Crete? 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 ninety degrees. And it's a big aluminum shed that's baking.

• 1:18:16Trevor Noah?

  Hot.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  And, and inside, just, and mind you, all I work is food service, I work air-condition. Like, but to work, to make quick money, the money's outside. You gotta sweep leaves, you gotta do that. 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 ten-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 new pallet, wash, rinse, repeat for eight hours.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  And I'm the bag man and I'm just loading a pallet. And you think that this isn't a lot, but this.

• 1:19:08Trevor Noah?

  For eight hours.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  From shoulder height, ten pounds from up high to down low.

• 1:19:13Trevor Noah?

  One direction.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  One direction.

• 1:19:16Trevor Noah?

  This is called eccentric loading. That's what that is.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  And you're twenty 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.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  And you got a show tonight.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  You still have a show to do. So you get back to the room at five thirty and you're just like washing concrete out of your hair.

• 1:19:46Trevor Noah?

  Lugging the drains.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then at seven o'clock tonight, you gotta be on stage. Man, the Confederate flag, crazy.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  Fourteen, 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,

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  either food service or work outdoors for one year.

• 1:20:32Trevor Noah?

  They should have.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Every, everybody, every single person in this country, just on some mandatory. You ain't gonna get them to go to the military, but I think everybody should do food service or work outside.

• 1:20:44Trevor Noah?

  So funny you say that. We had an episode with Tracy McMillan-Cottam.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Trevor Noah?

  And she heard, she was saying like if she ruled the world, she would make it that everyone had to work in the service industry or everyone. It's, it's almost exactly what you're saying.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:21:15Trevor Noah?

  I mean, what would the right word be? A disturbingly intimate relationship with fast food.

• 1:21:24Trevor Noah?

  Let me, let me tell you something, Roy Wood Jr.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  I would pitch food segments.

• 1:21:29Trevor Noah?

  Every single week. And he's off show then. Every single week.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  They would go viral.

• 1:21:34Trevor Noah?

  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. Then I'm like, oh, is it everything? Then Roy, 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, 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, you got Popeyes and Popeyes is pretty big. And Popeyes is normally known for their, for their pieces. They're not really known. They're not like KFC and chick. And then, then, and he'd take me down this deep rabbit hole.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  Chick fillets for sandwiches. Popeyes is for the loose chicken.

• 1:22:15Trevor Noah?

  This guy, yo.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  KFC is for a full meal.

• 1:22:17Trevor Noah?

  Yo. With a mash. This man knows life through the lens of fast food. I don't, I don't know how, I don't, you have the most intimate relationship with fast food.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:22:42Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  Tabasco sauce, hot sauce? Yeah, we were talking about Baja Blast.

• 1:22:46Trevor Noah?

  Do you remember when you made the, um, you had like a, it was like a mafia style thing on your, on your social media?

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Oh, the coalition.

• 1:22:53Trevor Noah?

  The co, it was the chicken wars or some, because, I think it was because Popeye made the burgers, right? Because Popeyes made the burger. Roy did this whole thing.

• 1:23:02Trevor Noah?

  Let me tell you something. If someone should win a Pulitzer Prize. For that? For fast food analysis and like their writings and their thinking. I, I've always wondered like what, not what is it about fast food, but you have this.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  Food connects us.

• 1:23:17Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:23:22Trevor Noah?

  I don't know, man.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  It's 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 still?

• 1:23:42Trevor Noah?

  With their clientele.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  And this guy's getting all the clout.

• 1:23:45Trevor Noah?

  Moving into the new turf.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  We got to kill them. We got to kill them. 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,

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  there's, they have a personality.

• 1:24:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  There's a relatability. This, 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.

• 1:24:28Trevor Noah?

  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, they'll give you an answer.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  They, they change suppliers and then that affects the recipe. Like even down to the water that they use to make biscuits, it can change how biscuits taste for different reasons. 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.

• 1:25:20Trevor Noah?

  I wonder when, when you think like this, right? And then I, 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.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Well, because I'm him.

• 1:25:40Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  And that's also a mind, a mind fuck.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Is looking at yourself and going, oh.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Let's see, I care about people. Check. Okay. I figured out a way to use my gift to enrich and educate people. Okay. Check.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  Healthy distrust of close relationships. Check.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Damn, I'm just doing what he do. I'm just a little funnier than him. You know, I still have, I was, 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.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  There was a movie called The, The Assignment with Michelle Rodriguez. Where. A male hitman is turned into, to get revenge on a hitman. A male hitman is turned into a woman.

• 1:26:56Trevor Noah?

  Sounds familiar.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  And so now the woman hitman is looking for the surgeon that turned her into a woman.

• 1:27:02Trevor Noah?

  To reverse the surgery.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Or get revenge. Correct.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  And so. How, this was 2018, 2019.

• 1:27:12Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:27:31Trevor Noah?

  But that's what I'm, but that's what I mean. But this, this is, this is what I mean about. Being your father's son, right? And, and, and, and what your book goes through in so many ways is. Your dad was living this life. Like I, 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.

• 1:28:17Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  What are the worst parts of you?

• 1:28:23Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  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'd 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 even gave you a whooping or some shit. Like, that's, that's what my dad was. My dad was.

• 1:28:54Trevor Noah?

  Educator and provider.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, 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 the fir- until the, till third grade.

• 1:29:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:29:28Trevor Noah?

  You wasn't sleeping.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  You're older, you're an older dude, you want a nap. I'm 46, I want a nap. This mother was knocking 70. So yeah, you want a nap and you drove three and a half hours and you worked mornings. And he did morning radio for five hours and then he did an evening jazz. And he'd do a talk show in the afternoon and that would roll into a jazz show.

• 1:29:50Trevor Noah?

  You was tired.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  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 I'd play with the truck, but they were all forgettable toys, nothing that stood out. And then fast forward,

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  I'd say maybe two years ago.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Let's just say second grade, when my son was in second grade, he's in fourth grade now. Let's just say second grade. First grade, he became sentient about me being gone.

• 1:30:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  You know, cuz I, cuz I, cuz 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-parenting 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.

• 1:30:50Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:31:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  But that shit hurt. Woo.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  They never been missed by nobody.

• 1:31:09Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:31:11Trevor Noah?

  Or no one's told you they've missed you.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  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, when I'm gone.

• 1:31:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  Here's a video or the thing, I'll send that to his tablet. We will FaceTime here and there, but I more so enjoy sending him the, 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 it can send quicker. And then I'll get on the train that, that morning. I, 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.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Here's the train, here's it. So I look like a tourist, which really used to scare me because now I look robable. You know what I'm saying, like my, you know, my spidey senses is just.

• 1:32:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, your paranoia is off the charts right now.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  I'm from the, at the time, the most murderous zip code in Birmingham.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Like fax. 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.

• 1:33:01Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  But you don't, you don't know for another thirty years. You ain't gonna know till he has his kid, probably.

• 1:33:08Speaker 04

  You know, the, the thing yesterday was when we're discussing this episode, if you'd allow me, was. I knew I was not gonna 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.

• 1:33:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you did say that.

• 1:33:30Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:33:44Speaker 04

  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 twenty-five-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.

• 1:34:27Speaker 04

  Because you are out here now, you are playing, you are taking videos, you're 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, those are your gifts. Those are the things that he left you with, he made you a father, your son made you a, a, 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 a time where you equalize. Now you understand why your dad had to take that nap.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58Speaker 04

  At first you might have thought, yeah, he's avoiding me, doesn't wanna be. Now, you, you understand exactly.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  I've been wanting to nap so bad.

• 1:35:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  That's beautiful, thank you for that.

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I try now with him. To just be very verbal about.

• 1:35:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  Feelings, sharing feelings. To me, to me, the main thing is love and how does that manifest? How do you receive it?

• 1:36:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Teach him how to receive it, teach him how to show it. If I can do that. I'm good.

• 1:36:09Speaker 04

  Does he know how funny you are?

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:18Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no, does he know how funny you are?

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  I make him laugh.

• 1:36:22Speaker 04

  Oh, that's what I mean.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:25Speaker 04

  No, no, forget that. I'm saying, does he know how funny you are?

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  How funny, no, but I can make him laugh from time to time.

• 1:36:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Speaker 04

  That, no.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  And he's got a sense of humor too.

• 1:36:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that's what I mean, that's, that's one of the things that I think we take for granted is. This 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, you've committed in this book is.

• 1:36:52Trevor Noah?

  You've processed your father through the most generous lens possible, which is love.

• 1:36:59Trevor Noah?

  You've got a man who had a 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 and have the things that you 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 gonna make you both pay and not pay the gas bill or not pay the electric bill. He's gonna 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.

• 1:37:44Trevor Noah?

  I didn't see him as a as a as a villain. I didn't see him as. You spend so much time trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, in a beautiful way, by the way. And I was like, damn, what a like, 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. Fiction. 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

• 1:38:27Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  And watch out for these white people.

• 1:38:37Trevor Noah?

  Exactly. But I I can't teach you joy.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:38:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  But what are we talking about in the car?

• 1:38:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Ten years old, don't pay them taxes.

• 1:38:56Trevor Noah?

  But if you think about it though, if you, if you think about it though, he has to tell you that because he can't, he can't tell you how to have fun because he didn't come from fun. He didn't have fun. He didn't, you, 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, we lose out on. This, 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, if you have the luxury of being the next generation that can move forward. Yeah. 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

• 1:39:40Trevor Noah?

  because those are the things that make surviving worthwhile.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:44Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Trevor Noah?

  You wanna win the war, but you wanna win it so that you come back to your friends and family and laugh. If you can't come back and laugh and enjoy. That's exactly it. Because otherwise, what was it for? Like, what were you actually fighting for as, as an idea or as a, did, did you get what I'm saying?

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:40:08Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  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, that there's a balance in that, which is why I try to let him laugh with me. Crack a joke. You have the, the one thing, and this is more from my mom. He, he, he always has freedom of opinion. You can share it respectfully, but like all of that be quiet and stand in the shop. You think this up? Tell me why. Break it down. Get like.

• 1:40:38Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Give me the logic of it. I still might not agree with you, but we, 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.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  We are either the parent we wish we had, or we're a carbon copy.

• 1:41:01Speaker 04

  Of the parent we have.

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  Of the parent we wish we didn't have. Yeah. And this, the right balance is somewhere in the middle. But I mean, man, we laugh like, but you know, me and my son laugh at it. It's, 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 of times and Matthew McConaughey's character's got that robot, Tars, 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.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Tars, 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 gives me something as silly as that. I talk to you as if you're an AI robot. Yeah, but that's what I mean. So funny, yeah, I, I, I think that the only, 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 ever again. So as far as I know, it was just him and his mom. Wow.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  And if there was a man, they weren'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 head of household.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  No quality time.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  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 growing up, you know, you growing up in Chicago during the boom and then then civil rights and, 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.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  My daddy was mean and. Yeah, I know. It's like, ah, you did the thing and here's how that day on that choice affected me. Hmm. You didn't pay the bill, you didn't pay the power bill. So I chose to work thirty hours a week in high school so that there would always be money in our back pocket. Because I'm never gonna 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.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  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'mma let, I'mma 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. Damn. But I gotta survive the night and it's two degrees.

• 1:44:37Speaker 01

  And so you just gotta sleep in a cold car. But there's a weird, oh, I've been here before. Hmm. That kinda 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'm, that know that story, or 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 come to you dealing with something similar, you don't even know how to help him unpack it. Hmm.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Cause you ain't, you ain't looked at it yet. You hadn't looked at that idea of how to move.

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  When there isn't, when you aren't confident. Or what to do. Hey, I had to, I had to quit working with him. 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. Hmm. That's what you hope the long run is from a conversation like that. So, you know, you, you just, you don't know it, how it's gonna all connect in the long run, but. You know, I just, I just share everything. I, 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.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  Having this story of. You know, I, 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, uh, clean out my office. Yeah, yeah, you wrote about that. Cause he needs to understand and none of these jobs are forever. None of this stuff is forever. Do you think he understood that? Not yet. Yeah. But I've taken him by CNN and he's come there and understood that and he's, he's old enough now to understand. The idea of this show and this show.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Connects. He's Googled me once.

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  So, so, you know, like this, 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 Kassanat is. He'll be like, Daddy, you ain't famous for shit.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  KSI or somebody like 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 thankful that my pops used to take me to the barber shop and he's boring ass speaking engagements and I would sit on the floor with him in a radio station while he did call in shows and 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 would, this wouldn't need to happen with the referendum and you need a new city tax and at that I pay for the educate.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:48:31Trevor Noah?

  Don't go anywhere because we got more what now after this.

• 1:48:36Trevor Noah?

  Everybody has that oddly specific thing that they're curious about. Maybe it's restoring old watches. Maybe it's Japanese ceramic making. Maybe it's watching someone explain why one bridge in a remote area of Norway is secretly better than all the other bridges in the world. YouTube always has exactly what you're looking for, even when you didn't know you were looking for it. With YouTube premium, those deep dives feel even smoother. You get ad free viewing, but you also get background play when you need your hands free and you get offline downloads so you can keep watching wherever you happen to be, even if you happen to be off the grid. It's everything you already love about YouTube, just somehow even better.

• 1:49:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, one of my favorite YouTube premium features is smart downloads because how many times have you gone somewhere and realized, ah, I forgot to download anything and now you're on the way to the airport and you're like, download, download, download, download. You're on the plane, download, download, download, download. There's no wifi. I wish I downloaded. Now all of those things that you were gonna watch. Or just on the internet. Smart downloads basically thinks ahead for you. It automatically downloads recommended videos based on what you like to watch. So even when you forget to prepare, YouTube Premium didn't. I love it. It's like packing for a trip and discovering somebody already remembered the thing you always leave at home. It's always the underwear. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium.

• 1:50:06Trevor Noah?

  Terms apply. Cancel anytime. I think one of the things you realize when you start caring about clothes is that simple doesn't have to mean basic. Because a T-shirt is a T-shirt until you find the right T-shirt. Ooh, then suddenly you're talking about the cut, the fit, the weight, the way it falls on your body. Then you're like, no, no, no, you don't understand. Look at the sleeve. And that's what I've really enjoyed about Quince. One of my favorite things is their Pima Cotton Luxe Touch T-shirts. And it's become one of those pieces I keep reaching for. The cotton has this really smooth, premium feel to it. The fit is great and it just lays really nicely. And I think that's what you sometimes take for granted with simple clothes.

• 1:50:51Trevor Noah?

  When they're done really well, they become the foundation of an entire outfit. You can throw on a jacket, a sweater, whatever you want, but everything works because you started with the right thing. That's what I like about Quince. It feels premium without feeling like you're trying too hard. It's effortless. So find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. Hello over there. Oh, and if Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was What Now with Trevor Noah. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:51:42Trevor Noah?

  It's funny, you know, when you talk about um 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, especially in the age that we're in now. Everyone will go, you know, my family did this, and I'm gonna be the one who doesn't do it. And my dad was like this, and I'm not gonna be that. And my mom was like this, and I'm not gonna be that. And I will be the one, and I will be the one. And the great irony of it is you'll end up being the one, just from a different place.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:13Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  This is what it is.

• 1:52:36Trevor Noah?

  Like, 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, change it. 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?

• 1:53:20Trevor Noah?

  And that's what I, that's what I mean, is like, I feel like that's where you're doing the work, and that's, that's where you and your son will benefit, because you're naming the cage.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think it all, I think it all helps. I, I, I don't, I don't think it's a book he'll read or appreciate for another fifteen years.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  I think he's gotta be twenty, somewhere in there.

• 1:53:42Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:54Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:54:04Trevor Noah?

  Like, I, I tell everyone all the time, I go, write a book about your life. And they're like, who's gonna 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 don't, you realize you don't even know your parents.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  At all.

• 1:54:21Trevor Noah?

  At all.

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  At all.

• 1:54:23Trevor Noah?

  We know what our parents did.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

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

• 1:54:27Trevor Noah?

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

• 1:54:33Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  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. Cause this is a 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 sharecropper and also I'm pregnant.

• 1:55:14Trevor Noah?

  Psych!

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  And it was the seventies, you could really scare a dude back then.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  The technology wasn't what it was now to prove you're a liar.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  And I'm like, Mama, why you did that? Pissed me off.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  Laughing at that. So you start, you forget that your parents are just humans.

• 1:55:38Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:56:05Trevor Noah?

  But I think that's, that's, that's the beauty of different art forms, right? I I never used to understand why musicians would paint sometimes. You know, you'd read these random stories that go, they go like, Da da da has a painting. They paint. I'm like, why? What are you doing? Just, you 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. You, you, everyone has something creative in them that they, 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.

• 1:56:47Trevor Noah?

  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,

• 1:57:03Trevor Noah?

  because of the book, the book is a different stage.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:06Trevor Noah?

  I was laughing. I was laughing about you working at Quick Crete with the concrete in your hair. I I was laughing at you with the credit, like Roy's credit card fraud. Man, let me tell you something.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  Woo, those were some good times. We ate good for two years.

• 1:57:22Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  It was just to get food. Like, that's how it started.

• 1:57:26Trevor Noah?

  There's the relationship. No, but it's true. That's true.

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  I'm saying with food.

• 1:57:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  You know what it was? We just wanted Pizza Hut, bro.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  We won at Pizza Hut. It was ninety six and it was the beginning of Pay at the Pump. And in those days in the States,

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  your gas station receipt had your full name, full credit card number and expiration date.

• 1:57:58Trevor Noah?

  Ah, what a, what a wonderful time.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  Insane. Insane.

• 1:58:02Trevor Noah?

  What a dream.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  And I go to a gas station and I get Pay at the Pump and whoever was there before me hadn't, hadn't pulled their, 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.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  And I went back to the dorm. I told my boys, I said, boys, whatever you want, meat lovers, we getting breadsticks, all that. And we ordered like forty dollars 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.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  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 get robbed. So the pizza man's already paranoid because he's already on ten about being robbed. But we would walk up to pick up fifty, sixty dollars in pizzas.

• 1:59:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  With a ten dollar 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're trying to psych you out.

• 1:59:26Trevor Noah?

  You're trying to invoke racism.

• 1:59:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  Yes, because I need you to not ask me for this card because you think we gonna stomp you out. Oh, would you think I ain't got the card? Oh, you re- I didn't have the card. All I had was the receipt.

• 1:59:37Trevor Noah?

  The receipt from the pump. Yeah, but I like the ten dollar tip though. That's psychological, that's brilliant.

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  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 would walk off and he'd never ask for the card. So you come back to the dorm, celebrating and you're eating like-

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  We've ordered eighty dollars worth of pizza. We can't eat all this pizza. Oh, the dorm is just, them motherfuckers is floating.

• 2:00:14Trevor Noah?

  You guys are the ninja turtles.

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  You know how they smell them pies and them cartoons?

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  So, we're in the dorm during Monday Night Football, which is like premier packed TV room. And we in the back like some fucking bosses and motherfuckers will come up and.

• 2:00:34Trevor Noah?

  Pay their respects.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  No, and they come up and one dude from the football team, he come up and go, "Hey,

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  I give you ten dollars for that pizza right now, fathead ass nigga."

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  And this is like a fifteen dollar meat lover, he's offering me ten.

• 2:00:53Trevor Noah?

  That you haven't paid for.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  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 in my head. And so, I just started selling food. Like, 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 a RA for two years. Just forgot. And they were like, "Well, you can go work in the post office." Cool. Mail sorter.

• 2:01:39Speaker 01

  Now you have access to the actual tangible cards. At a college campus where everybody is applying for credit cards.

• 2:01:48Trevor Noah?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  And in those days.

• 2:01:50Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  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 zip code.

• 2:02:00Trevor Noah?

  We could argue that they basically made you a fraudster, if we're honest. I mean, let's be honest, Roy. You had no other choice.

• 2:02:07Speaker 01

  I mean, really. This seems logical at this point. I'm like, this is God. God wants me. So, now.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  Now, when we order the pizza, I can show the card.

• 2:02:17Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man.

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll write in, you're still gonna get tipped, but, so.

• 2:02:23Trevor Noah?

  The confidence has gone up.

• 2:02:25Speaker 01

  And that's where you get sloppy. Cause you get, you get too arrogant. And so now with these tangible cards, you can sell clothing.

• 2:02:33Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  Cause you can just go buy clothes.

• 2:02:35Trevor Noah?

  Oof. And wholesale.

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  Tell me what you need, get it half price.

• 2:02:39Trevor Noah?

  It goes deeper, man.

• 2:02:40Speaker 01

  So you become, you become the dude, like pizza's one thing, but now PlayStation, whatever you need, just half price. Just come tell me what you need. I'm just, I'm, I'm Amazon.

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  For, for that part of the campus.

• 2:02:56Trevor Noah?

  Look at me, look at me, I am Jeff Bezos.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  And so we take a card in the dillards and we knew one of the girls that worked the cash register. And she was doing us a favor.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:22Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  Which I didn't need you to do.

• 2:03:25Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:03:25Speaker 01

  Cause 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.

• 2:03:39Trevor Noah?

  One of those mall stores.

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  Correct, one of the designer departments where there are no seven dollar sweaters.

• 2:03:44Trevor Noah?

  Yep.

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  She's ringing up shit for like six dollars, bro. Like, this is too low.

• 2:03:50Trevor Noah?

  Uh.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  And so she got caught and then the dominoes fell. And we're at the house waiting on a pizza.

• 2:03:59Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  And, 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.

• 2:04:10Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  Whole task force come in the house and take us down. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, seven, eight cops, like, we got them, we got them.

• 2:04:24Trevor Noah?

  He blew the whistle on you, looking like a.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  Here's the, here's the fucked up part though. We got arrested, they started searching the house.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  And then fucking Pizza Hut showed up with that goddamn pizza.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  And couldn't eat it.

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  Couldn't eat it.

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  And the cop ain't have enough sense to ask the pizza man if that was like stolen.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  And so got suspended from school and then during the suspensions when I started doing stand up.

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  Cause I was like, oh, I'm probably gonna go to prison. Well, that makes me sad. Well, let me just try stand up. Cause now.

• 2:05:27Speaker 01

  You realize your common, the common bond you share with people is your ability to give them things. And the moment I lost that superpower.

• 2:05:41Speaker 01

  Nobody want 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.

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  The first place I ever experienced true forgiveness and benevolence from strangers, coworkers. You don't know me and then you find out after a month or two, you find out I get probation.

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  Don't know how. I get probation. I don't go to, 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.

• 2:06:38Speaker 01

  Half the store is on probation.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  Because we had an owner who hired, who hired convicted felon to return a citizen. The 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, the legal system is set up to make you feel like you're gonna fuck up again. And they psychologically tell you, like.

• 2:07:09Trevor Noah?

  You're coming back.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  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. Cause there was like an eighteen month stretch in my life where I could have been discarded. Florida A and M 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 on probation when I started ninety five seven.

• 2:07:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:08:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  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, cause I know over here. Must be something. I, I know how to, and I know how to get there, cause I've been, I've been at rock bottom before. So this, this, this is easy. I can get from here. All right, career's still going. Like, that's how all of that thought process started was during, was during that first year of probation. Just in terms of like figuring out.

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  The self reliance. And that's where everything from my pops and my moms 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.

• 2:09:02Speaker 01

  Ain't nobody trying to help you make the dream happen. And you in school. You back in college talking about you gonna be a comedian. Nobody buying that. Not in a building full of scholars and not fam use journalism. But 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm in Jacksonville doing an open mic or some shit and we backstage, they got the TV on. And I see one of my classmates anchoring the weekend news.

• 2:09:41Speaker 01

  We're the same age and he's the weekend anchor. And I'm sitting here. On TV. Like he's on his way and I'm like, in that moment, I saw him outside. Fuck. This gotta work.

• 2:09:59Speaker 01

  This is gotta work because I don't. I'm never gonna. I'm never gonna get to that. I'm, 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 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.

• 2:10:37Speaker 01

  So we were the local show.

• 2:10:39Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:10:39Speaker 01

  But then you would have Tom Joyner syndicated in. I think Steve Harvey was just starting. 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.

• 2:10:55Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:10:56Speaker 01

  And so when you're the local black show, you have to creatively be way out in left field.

• 2:11:02Trevor Noah?

  To even be considered.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right. To compete.

• 2:11:04Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  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. I, the Leo Dublin character.

• 2:11:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:18Speaker 01

  On Daily Show. That was an old radio character. I wouldn't even have 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 gonna remember because tomorrow's a new day on radio. If they don't like it, it's Birmingham. They gonna call and tell you, you trash, but they're gonna 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.

• 2:11:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't, it doesn't count towards the next thing.

• 2:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:02Trevor Noah?

  It's not a cumulative. No, it's not a cumulative thing.

• 2:12:04Speaker 00

  An individual correction.

• 2:12:05Trevor Noah?

  You don't take it, don't take it personally.

• 2:12:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:12:07Trevor Noah?

  We just told you you suck. Keep moving.

• 2:12:09Speaker 00

  He's still mad. Come on, man. The boo. Come on, man.

• 2:12:11Speaker 01

  Why are you tripping?

• 2:12:11Trevor Noah?

  You gonna act like you didn't suck. You know you suck.

• 2:12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:15Trevor Noah?

  You know what?

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  It was a different time though, man. I'm, I'm very grateful

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  for that time because I needed forgiveness at a time where I did not deserve it.

• 2:12:26Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 2:12:28Speaker 01

  And I got an abundance of it. And so that's part of what keeps me gracious.

• 2:12:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  And trying to give, you know, chances to people. I just, I haven't been able to get anything greenlit in a place where I can do effectively for other people. What was done for me, especially,

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  you know, people coming off probation, coming out of prison, stuff like that, doing some staffing shit with that, like that's gonna be, that's the Birmingham plan, you know?

• 2:13:01Trevor Noah?

  You say that, but I, 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.

• 2:13:42Trevor Noah?

  Think about it. In the thick of COVID. Think about it. 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, you brought, like you name it.

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  Cause people were kind to me, bro.

• 2:14:00Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, you, you say that, but like, I, I think you, you see in, 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 literally a mountain that you've built.

• 2:14:29Speaker 01

  There's more.

• 2:14:30Trevor Noah?

  Do you, 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 is I always go like, oh man, just look back at some of those.

• 2:14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've always wanted me to stop and just like.

• 2:14:38Trevor Noah?

  Always. You did alright. Not even stop, pause.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:14:50Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  So I just had to keep moving.

• 2:14:54Trevor Noah?

  Imagine playing with trains as his kid. What a, what a crazy journey that must be. Play trains daddy choo choo. And that's the end of my line.

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  Oh, kids used to die in Birmingham back in the eighties. They used to try and hop freight trains to class.

• 2:15:08Trevor Noah?

  Oh yeah, that's like us when we were, yeah, that's, that's, yeah, same thing as South Africa. That's why I say it's like we lived, we lived a parallel life.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16Trevor Noah?

  You know, can I tell you one of the biggest things your book did for me? That, that I appreciate is it brought something top of mind that I think is, is really important to think about now. And it's, you 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 sixteen years of your life, him dying. And then you talking about the many fathers and the, 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, uh, give, you know, act of kindness. But what I, what I found myself thinking of when I closed the last page of the book is I went, damn.

• 2:15:59Trevor Noah?

  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, do you get what I'm saying?

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:15Trevor Noah?

  Like the way we used to live. Yeah, the way we used to live, like even having, even having a father was like, um, it's like they were all fathers. And I mean, you like, this is like, this, this is where the language of, you know, African languages, especially South African languages tie you to that concept. Everyone was bub. You know what I mean? So if I was talking to Eugene's dad, I'd say bub kozza. You know, father kozza, but it's like father and, and you know what I mean? Mom kozza, like, you know what I mean? Mama guy Eugene, mama guy, like, it's like mom, so there's all the moms and there's all the dads. So all 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 this, and yours might not be there. But there are many of them around.

• 2:16:58Trevor Noah?

  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 like, imagine growing up now as a young man, whose father isn't present. Physically or emotionally. And then like, where, where are your fathers?

• 2:17:15Speaker 01

  Isolated.

• 2:17:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, where are your fathers? It's like just what, the internet? Do you know what I mean?

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  In a lot of cases, yeah.

• 2:17:21Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 2:17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:31Trevor Noah?

  Do you get what I'm saying?

• 2:17:32Speaker 01

  You get to, you get to.

• 2:17:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they get to tell you all these things. Let me tell you what a real man does. Let me tell you a relationship. Let me tell you what a real man. Let me tell you what a real man. Click thing goes off. And then it's like, well, who's that person? Cause kids see through the, like you, you wrote a whole book where you're seeing through the facade of your father. You know what I mean?

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:49Trevor Noah?

  Your father's telling you who he is, but then you're seeing who he really is.

• 2:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, 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, um, like I'm, I'm the, 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, fourteen year olds in front of me in line. And then I'll say, I'll stay out of trouble, you know?

• 2:18:26Trevor Noah?

  And you're out.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, cause these kids don't want that advice.

• 2:18:30Trevor Noah?

  Oh man, Roy, that's somebody. I'll stay out of trouble now.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, or I'll ask him an easy thing, an easy thing with adolescents and like which teacher you hate.

• 2:18:43Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's, that's a nice one. Okay.

• 2:18:45Speaker 01

  And they'll start going off about the teacher. I'm like, yeah, but you still gotta learn something from them. Like just stay in it.

• 2:18:54Trevor Noah?

  Man, Roy, you're not wrong. Roy has been an old man his whole life. You know what we need to do? After this podcast, we need a book. We're gonna go trampolining. We're gonna go like, we're gonna go throw slime at each other. We gotta. Bullcut. Just, I wanna do like the dumbest, silliest things with you. Disneyland? Yo, whatever it is. Or Vision Land. Vision Land?

• 2:19:16Speaker 01

  It's Alabama Adventure now at foreclosed.

• 2:19:18Trevor Noah?

  Oh, okay, okay, okay. I thought we were gonna go around, I thought we were gonna go around wearing little, I have a dream hats. It's Vision Land. Vision Land. Have you been, have you been on the million man march ride? Oh, it's so long. Yes, a million more steps. Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand more steps.

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  Ownership a number of times, but it's still standing. One of the largest wooden roller coasters in the world.

• 2:19:44Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it's called the civil rights movement.

• 2:19:48Speaker 01

  Fuck you. Stop roasting my city.

• 2:19:52Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man. Roy, man. Thanks for coming through.

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  Man, I appreciate you, man. This was good.

• 2:19:57Trevor Noah?

  And can I tell you, man, thanks for sharing you in like, I appreciated it selfishly, just 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 you are a mom who is a single mom, if you are a dad who's not in touch with your kids, if you are an 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, yeah, man. It's phenomenal.

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  I appreciate it, man.

• 2:20:42Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, man. Thank you.

• 2:20:44Speaker 01

  Well, until I have another child and then write another book, that'd be good.

• 2:20:52Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man.

• 2:20:56Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackel. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Paud. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.

• 2:21:31Speaker 06

  What's up, sports fans? I'm Rachel Damita, here to tell you about my show Courtside Club. If you love hoops and hot takes, then you're in the right place. Want to hear about Katelyn Clark's unstoppable rise in the WNBA? How stars like Wemby and Luka Doncic are dominating the NBA? Or maybe you just want the tea on this week's most viral sports moments. Don't worry, we'll keep you updated on all of it. So grab your popcorn and come hang with us. Courtside. You can listen to Courtside Club wherever you get your podcasts. Oui et ah.

• 2:22:02Speaker 05

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. It's the tangiest time of the year. For a limited time, head to McDonald's and get a McRib sandwich. Make it a meal by adding a medium fries and a soft drink like an ice cold Diet Dr. Pepper. So grab a McRib sandwich and embrace the tang. Save time by ordering ahead on the app. At participating McDonald's for a limited time. Dr. Pepper is a registered trademark of Dr. Pepper 7-Up Inc.