Wesley Morris: How Critics at Large See the Stories We Miss

Trevor sits down with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Wesley Morris for a wide-ranging conversation that uncovers the hidden stories in everyday culture. From Carlos Alcaraz’s accidental buzz cut becoming the real drama of the US Open (and why men rarely have to explain their appearance), to the deeper meaning behind dead baby names, looted ancient artifacts, and Trump’s complicated relationship with museums. They dive into why blockbuster movies have abandoned regular human stories, how Superman reboots reflect America’s shifting self-image, and why horror films and death-obsessed songs are dominating right now. Wesley breaks down the superpower of a “critic at large”: spotting trends everyone else misses and connecting them to what they really say about us. Thought-provoking, funny, and full of unexpected insights—this one will make you see the world a little differently.

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

• 0:04Trevor Noah?

  It's fascinating to look at when Superman movies come back and when they don't. Oh, yes. And when they do well and when they don't. This is a great point. It's like, there's a moment when America is telling a story about itself being exceptional and fighting the Russians and fighting communism, Superman's the thing. And then that story like fades away, Superman fades away. And then the Superman that becomes popular and comes out is like a gritty, non-Superman-y Superman. That's the Trump, that's the first Trump Superman, yeah. That's like the, and then now the, now the, the American Superman sort of thing is like back and the parents are even more folksy and the, you know what I mean? It's like, it's, it's interesting to think about like what we're experiencing in our world.

• 0:43Trevor Noah?

  And then the question, then the question becomes, is the art imitating life or is life imitating art?

• 0:56Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

• 1:01Trevor Noah?

  This episode is presented by Whole Foods Market. Eat well for less. Earth can be a lot sometimes. Heat waves, gas prices, bad hair days. Why not go where life is good? Escape to Pluto TV. Turn off your problems and turn on your favorite movies and shows. You know, the ones you already love. From Anchorman, the Legend of Ron Burgundy, to Dirty Dancing, to Top Gun Maverick. From Alias to The X-Files. It's all here and all free. Go where the TV is always good. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 1:41Trevor 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 on 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.

• 2:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, booked forever, forever.

• 2:29Trevor Noah?

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• 2:33Trevor Noah?

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• 3:18Trevor Noah?

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• 3:47Trevor Noah?

  You guys both have, like, old men names.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Um, you know?

• 3:52Trevor Noah?

  No, but it's true, though.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:54Trevor Noah?

  Wesley, Wesley's a very, like, not-now name.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Wes is a young person.

• 3:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, Wes, Wes, but Wesley. I would like to see the birth certificates, because I'm sure they're not even bothering with the name. No, but think about it, Wesley is a, is like an older name in that way. And then Eugene is also a name.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  I prefer mature, not older.

• 4:13Trevor Noah?

  I mean, you can take it the way you want. I meant it not as a slur or a slight, because I don't see age.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  I appreciate that.

• 4:21Trevor Noah?

  What do you see?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I I was just talking about women's names that you're just never gonna get again.

• 4:33Trevor Noah?

  Like Ethel?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Ruth, Ethel.

• 4:36Trevor Noah?

  Margaret.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  My grandmother's name was Martha.

• 4:39Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like Martha.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  That's kinda not dead yet.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  There's an, it was a Hazel.

• 4:48Trevor Noah?

  But Martha always felt incomplete.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Why? My mother, Martha Anne.

• 4:52Trevor Noah?

  You see?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Martha Anne.

• 4:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  That was her, yeah, Martha Anne. Everybody called, people called her Martha, but only if they didn't know there was an Anne. If you knew, it was Martha Anne.

• 5:01Trevor Noah?

  Then it was Martha Anne.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  It was Martha Anne, yeah.

• 5:02Trevor Noah?

  Where's your mom from?

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Uh, Philadelphia.

• 5:04Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Judith, there's another one. My mother's name is Judith. My father's name is Arnold.

• 5:10Trevor Noah?

  Arnold can come back.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Really?

• 5:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 5:13Trevor Noah?

  No. What do you mean, no? I, I know.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  When's the last time you met an Arnold?

• 5:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but guys, guys, all these names, and I'm actually, you're the perfect person to talk to about this stuff.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Why?

• 5:21Trevor Noah?

  It's perfect to have these conversations with you. And I wanna say thank you and apologize to you for not giving you like a full idea of why we're here. Right?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I, I had been asking, and then I was like, you know what? I trust these guys.

• 5:36Trevor Noah?

  Thank you.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  So, I, I'm here. Not ordinary, I'd walk into a blind environment and not know what I have been, but for Negroes, I will do it.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  For two Negroes, I will definitely, I will do it.

• 5:51Trevor Noah?

  So, so let me explain, right? The reason I say you're the perfect person is because of what I would like this episode to be. I was trying to explain to a friend the other day what a critic at large is basically doing.

• 6:05Trevor Noah?

  See? I, I am that friend. Go ahead. No, no, no, no, no, no, but I was, oh yeah, it was you. So. For a second, I was like, are you taking the other, then I was like, oh yeah. Negroes look alike to him. It was, it was you. We're all one. Must have been another Negro.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  We, we are all.

• 6:20Trevor Noah?

  It was, we are all one. So.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  What office are you running?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Trevor Buddhist.

• 6:27Trevor Noah?

  So.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Not even Pete wouldn't even try that.

• 6:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, Pete wouldn't do that. Don't slander Pete like that.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 6:32Trevor Noah?

  You were right here with him. Don't slander Pete. So, um, what I was trying to explain was like your superpower, and I genuinely think it's a superpower.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:40Trevor Noah?

  It is the ability to look at culture, notice trends that other people may not necessarily be necessarily be noticing.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:48Trevor Noah?

  But then go beyond that and understand what the trend actually tells us when you correlate it with something else. Its origins, its its moment, its significance. And I know someone listening or watching this might be like, wait, what did you just say? You'll see it unfold and names is like a perfect place.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 7:05Trevor Noah?

  Right? You just said, which name is never Judith is never coming back.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, Margaret.

• 7:10Trevor Noah?

  Arnold is never coming back.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Those are my my parents' names. Methos and aunt.

• 7:15Trevor Noah?

  Uh, yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  So good.

• 7:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but I'm saying.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  I think we're holding a seance here. Did she, did she also? She like wearing purple.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Ethel?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. Ethel was basically purple.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  I see her now.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  But that's, that's alcohol.

• 7:35Trevor Noah?

  So this is what I mean. Names are like a perfect place to start this conversation in. Because there's a generation that'll have a name, right?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:45Trevor Noah?

  So now we go, oh, there's no more Judas, there's no more Ediths, there's no more this, there's no more that, there's no. Then I go, yes, but all it takes is one moment, one elected official, one famous athlete, one.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Bring it back.

• 7:57Trevor Noah?

  Movie star, like a name, a character, something, and all of a sudden, it comes back.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 8:03Trevor Noah?

  Right?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I like this. This is, I, this is definitely persuasive. There's one problem.

• 8:10Trevor Noah?

  Let's go.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Well, I think that the cycle has basically begun to eat itself, right?

• 8:17Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  So like it's a, it used to just be maybe a line, but now it's a circle. So, you know. Explain the line. The line used to be, people would get born. Yeah. They would die. The names wouldn't get too crazy because everybody was essentially, well, there were circles and then the browner, the gayer, the more, the less from England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Less Eurocentric. Yeah. The more, the more interesting the names got in terms of spellings,

• 9:01Speaker 02

  in terms of just the variety of options. But I think culturally, I don't know, I don't know when to say this started, but it definitely feels like in the last

• 9:12Speaker 02

  20 years, I think that, like, when you're talking about like what you need as a very famous person to then change the name conversation. Yes. But, I mean, think about it. It's all Taylors and Jacobs and Travis's and Jason's. Trevors. And, well, not as many Trevors, right? Trevor still would be like, what a gift. Thank you. Thank you, Wes. Sorry, Wes. Thank you. Sorry. What a what? A gift. Of what? Of just, of a kind of variety. Eugene, dead. Wesley, dead. I didn't know what was coming. Wait, sorry.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, you're, you're out. You're the last Eugene. Um, I just, I don't know. Like, we're gonna get a lot, a lot less interesting names. And I think in this country, in terms of, you know, I, the, the place, a place to look is like, what are, like, people from other countries, like, especially Asian countries? Yeah. What are they choosing as their, like, American name? Right? Like, what are, what are those names? Because I just want to live in a world where like, Yun is just, that's the new James in the US. That is the name. Right? They're like, white kids walking around being called Yun.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  But I don't know if we really want that, but like the odds, the odds are low because of the way assimilationism works here.

• 10:40Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Like, the assumption is Yun won't get into college if he's Yun. Yun won't get a job with some white people if he's Yun.

• 10:47Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  So he's, he's James, period. And I think for his, for his, I don't know what lots of other cultures are doing, but predominantly if you come here and you wanna make it, you can't be Sandeep. You gotta be Sandy. You gotta be Sam.

• 11:04Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Um, I think that still feels true. Like, I've met a lot of South Asians, for instance, who have not changed their names. Or changed them, but like ascribed some, given themselves some new name.

• 11:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Um, but in the meantime, in order for the name thing to change, like, here's a, here's a test. How many Baracks do you know?

• 11:26Trevor Noah?

  Only one?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. I think there's something about, I also was like naming your kid Jesus in a way.

• 11:35Trevor Noah?

  Jesus.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Right?

• 11:35Trevor Noah?

  It is a bit like, it's very unique.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had the same thought. Yes. Yeah. You did? Yeah, you just, you said Jesus. What else do you have? I have, um, five thousand dollars. What do you?

• 11:46Trevor Noah?

  We don't have five thousand dollars. We don't have the same thoughts anymore, David.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Definitely. Do you, was that a thought to get five thousand dollars or to like have in your possession five thousand dollars? Um, I don't know. I, they, they're, they're interesting, like, things, okay, I mean, Donald, that's a dead name. I don't care how powerful, how cataclysmic. Not coming back? Nobody, Donald's not, I don't care how much they love this man.

• 12:13Trevor Noah?

  Donald has become too ubiquitous, or it's become like too like singular.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  It's old fashioned. It's just not a cool name. Then why didn't Barack catch on? I don't know either. He was loved. I think that's too ethnic. It's considered too ethnic. Just think about the US, right? Just think about the way that Americans brainwash themselves into believing that things have to seem, sound, feel American. Yes, he ran the country for eight years. Yes, many, many people profess to love him, but the real test is would you name a baby after this person? And I don't think, even Donald, I, have you, have you heard about Donald? No. I don't know what the, we should look up the top 10 names in the last like 10 years, but. I don't believe Donald is on.

• 13:00Trevor Noah?

  So you see, what you've just done now is why I wanted to have a conversation with you, why I wanted to have you on. My dream and my goal is that by the end of this episode, you help us.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  This episode?

• 13:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, this episode.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:13Trevor Noah?

  You help us to understand or help us learn how to process the world through the lens of a critic at large. Because I'll try, I'll try and break down what you do and you'll, you'll correct me on the other side of it, wherever I go like astray. When I think of what a critic at large does, the first thing I do is I have to separate it from a critic generally.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 13:35Trevor Noah?

  So a critic is somebody who is criticizing or commenting on the elements of any particular thing, food, movie, etcetera, but that's it. A critic at large is somebody who is looking at society, all of the elements that are within that society, and then tries to notice how the shifts in that society are telling us a story that the society itself doesn't notice. You know what I mean? And, and, and so like when I was, when I was thinking of examples, actually, I'll, I'll play this out with you and I'll see if I'm, if I, if I have it right here.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:11Trevor Noah?

  Would you write about

• 14:15Trevor Noah?

  the US Open, just coming back to New York for another year?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:20Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:21Trevor Noah?

  Would you write about, um, uh, Sinner, Yannick Sinner beating, um, just like a random person in one of like the early rounds?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Okay, uh, perhaps?

• 14:36Trevor Noah?

  Okay, but it's not, that's not a yes.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  I mean, depends on who, who won, he played Denis Shapovalov in like the fourth round or maybe the fourth round, I want to say. Uh, that was a good match. He took a set off him. Maybe the third round? Um, but no, that, I mean, I, I would, that would be a data point. I would make a mental note to remember that Denis Shapovalov got a set off Yannick Sinner.

• 15:01Trevor Noah?

  Okay. Would you write about people's reaction to Carlos Alcaraz cutting his hair off?

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yes. A hundred percent. That's the Ed Lajpot no brainer.

• 15:13Trevor Noah?

  Do you see what, you remember what I told you? So now, I would love for you to explain why. Cause you love tennis.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:20Trevor Noah?

  You are absor-, you are observing a US Open as it's playing out.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:24Trevor Noah?

  Why is it that Carlos Alcaraz, cutting all of his hair off? And the reactions to it is what you would write about at the tennis and not the tennis itself?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's connected to the tennis.

• 15:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, of course it is.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Um, it's that the US Open is the place where people do the weirdest stuff to themselves.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  I mean, just like a recent-ish history of weird clothes and hair at the US Open. There's a player named Dominic Rabaty, H R A B T Y. Who showed up at the Open, I'm pretty sure it was the Open. And he had, his shirt had two vents in the back. They were like, cut out of the shirt, like two holes. Like where wings might maybe have once been.

• 16:18Trevor Noah?

  Like angel wings?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he played, I mean, I don't know, he maybe lasted to the third round. He was one of those, Rabaty was one of those players, like he could give you trouble every once in a while and he would, he would make it to the third round of just about every tournament.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  But he wore that outfit and it's like, wha- what's the story here? And you know, he, it just got him a lot of attention. It was a weird thing to wear and it made no aerodynamic sense. He claimed, I think the claim was that it did, it helped his tennis.

• 16:49Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  It helped something about the airflow on his back and it just felt really good to hit a backhand. Serena, every great terrible thing she ever wore, pretty much happened at the US Open.

• 17:01Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  So into this history of like, things people wear at the US Open comes Carlos Alcaraz. Who was wearing in his sort of purple getup, you know, purple, magenta, whatever, getup. You know, standard, pretty good thing to wear at the Open. But he shows up with a haircut, it looks like he got.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Thirty seconds before he got on court?

• 17:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  You could still see Nick's.

• 17:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it was a fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh buzz, fresh.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  So what I thought the final was not.

• 17:31Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Was actually the final result.

• 17:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  No. Well, the final, it's like, funny story about the final is, we learned how fast hair can grow. Because by the end of the tournament, he looked like himself again.

• 17:44Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  So when was the haircut in relation to the?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  The claim was that he wanted his brother to touch up.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  His haircut, maybe that day. And, you know, made a mistake. This is why you don't, I mean, there, this is.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  You don't buy it.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Oh, I believe it. A hundred percent, I believe it. Well, wait, oh my God, do I not believe it? I didn't even give it a second thought.

• 18:10Trevor Noah?

  I believed it. Eugene doesn't believe it at all.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  I, I, I don't buy it. There's something also I don't buy at the US Open that I'll talk to you about.

• 18:16Trevor Noah?

  Wait, wait, so you don't buy it at all?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I don't buy it at all.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  What do you think happened?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  He has a critic at large.

• 18:21Trevor Noah?

  No, no, but tell me why you don't buy it.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  He has a critic at large.

• 18:23Trevor Noah?

  Tell me why you don't buy it.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Having a conversation about it, about it.

• 18:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Because I feel like there's certain sports or certain arts where you need to do something crazy to stand out. And I think cutting your hair.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Is one of those.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  But not that haircut.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Breakdown and a meltdown and still winning.

• 18:39Trevor Noah?

  But don't go, but wait, don't go far.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Oh, that's Djokovic. We can come back to that guy.

• 18:43Trevor Noah?

  But my question here is.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  So.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Yes?

• 18:47Trevor Noah?

  I want to know why you think the person wouldn't just cut their hair and then, because I mean, the days are gone of athletes like being afraid. Why do you think he wouldn't just say, yeah, it's my new look?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Because I think he knows what the impact would be of him appearing different.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Here's my rebuttal to this, because I've thought about it. With this, I have, I didn't think that, I, I didn't think the way you were thinking, so hats off to you.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Because that's, that is interesting, but what I thought was, this is clearly a mistake because, first of all, it looks terrible.

• 19:21Trevor Noah?

  It did.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  It looks like a mistake got made and they just decided, you know what, shake the Etch A Sketch. Just, it never happened.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  You know, I'm gonna say that to people who make mistakes now.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Shake the Etch A Sketch!

• 19:38Trevor Noah?

  It is a great line. Shake the Etch A Sketch.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  I mean, it's just like, we don't want to shake the Etch A Sketch anymore. We're over. We need to re- keep drawing. Just keep turning them. Make something new. Don't shake it. And then put it in the Smithsonian and lock that shit up.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  No, I thought it's gotta be a mistake. You're in New York City. I don't know what the per capita barber situation is here versus the rest of the US anyway. But there are more people who could give you a great haircut.

• 20:13Trevor Noah?

  Easily.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  And he's in Queens.

• 20:15Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  He could go, I mean, I'm sorry. It's gotta be a mistake, but also the idea that nobody said, like, like, Francis Tiafoe wasn't like, listen, when I'm in New York, here's where I go. Cause you gotta get a line up or just, you need to shape it up. Get a line, get something. Cause this is, this is not working. This is a mistake. You can't go out there like that. Went anyway. Looked like he just fell out of a calf's butt. Is how, is how fresh that haircut was. He looked like he just got born. It just, I don't know.

• 20:51Trevor Noah?

  But what was interesting to me was that he addressed it and pseudo apologized. And that's, that's what made me think of you. I went.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  We don't expect this of you, Carlos.

• 21:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  You've got the best hair in men's tennis. Why would you do this to us?

• 21:08Speaker 02

  That's the apology.

• 21:08Trevor Noah?

  For exactly that reason. For exactly. This, now you see, this is what I mean. This is what your, no, but this is what your brain does though.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  But what were you thinking when you saw it?

• 21:20Trevor Noah?

  I won't lie, I wasn't thinking too deeply about it.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:22Trevor Noah?

  Because I, uh, a few months ago, David Beckham was cutting his own hair. He cuts his own hair. And then he was cutting his own hair and then he messed up.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Gets fall for these scams all the time.

• 21:30Trevor Noah?

  You calm down. You just calm down.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Wait, what would this scare me?

• 21:35Trevor Noah?

  And David Beckham, just like, he was like, and he like, just messed it up a little bit. And then he made a video, he's like, I messed up my hair.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Oh, very cool.

• 21:40Trevor Noah?

  Right?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:41Trevor Noah?

  But, like, hmm? And then he just shaved it, I don't know what he did, but he like, fixed it, but he, he also did that. So I go, there's a good chance that you can mess up your hair. Carlos Alcaraz's story made like, boring sense to me. You're traveling, your barber couldn't get to you in the way you planned.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:55Trevor Noah?

  So your brother's like, let me handle this. I've been in that situation where someone close to you is like, I got you. How hard can it be?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:02Trevor Noah?

  And then, they know firsthand how hard it can be, using your head, right?

• 22:08Speaker 02

  They find out, they find out.

• 22:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but, but that wasn't the thing that got me. The thing that, that made me think of you, because I knew you were coming on the podcast, obviously, was, I went, why is this such a thing? They spoke about it the entire tournament. They, he kept on like, acknowledging it, he had to keep on saying like, oh, what do you think now? And, and, and I, I found myself wondering, I was like, huh? What is this saying about the US Open and the people who watched the US Open and the community of the US Open? That, that we don't know that it's actually saying or not saying? Or, like, is there a sport where the person wouldn't have had to address it? Would they ignore it? Would the commentator say anything about it? Like, what is it about that echelon? You know what I mean?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  I think it has a lot to do with who the person is and what the environment is, right? Like, think about, where my brain goes when you put it that way.

• 22:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Is like, NFL training camp, 2012, I think? 2011, 2011, probably? And Tom Brady shows up for camp. And he's got hair that comes down to here. This is a thing, nobody had seen this before. Why is Tom Brady's hair down to it? What's he trying to tell us? What's Gisele making him do? Because they were still together at the time. Like, it was a real story for like, the first four games of the season.

• 23:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  What is going on? And if he cuts the hair now, is it a Samson and Delilah thing? Where the season's over if he cuts it? There's a whole thing. Like, there are these occasions where a person's, where our idea of a person...

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Is challenged in some way because the person is like, you know what? Fuck it. I'm, I'm getting out of this prison. I wanna, the thing that you think you love about me, I'm removing it.

• 24:01Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm challenging it in some way. It's not always hair or like clothes. It's like, how I, how I, what roles I take. Um, in Carlos's case, it was truly an accident. But he felt compelled to respond to it because he couldn't even win a match. And go to a press conference without like the second question being, so what happened? Even though he had already addressed it. Like this is a thing he's already talking about. But then you start thinking about, well, who else got bald? And had to like account for the baldness. It's usually women. It's usually women who get a haircut and then have to apologize for having gotten the haircut. Right?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Or what is a woman telling us when she does, I mean, Britney Spears? Famous example of a woman who, you know, not, I mean, I guess, you didn't appreciate how important the hair was to the getup until there was no hair.

• 24:57Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Didn't Halle Berry go through such as though? Was there a point where Halle Berry cut her hair off, right?

• 25:02Trevor Noah?

  When she cut it short.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Right. She, it was short and people were like, eh, right, but she's still Halle Berry. Like, it doesn't matter what Halle Berry does to her hair. Like, this just doesn't matter. Um, Sigourney Weaver in that fourth Aliens movie, right? Like what is Ripley? What is, what is going, or the third Aliens movie, I want to say. Is it the third one or the fourth one? I think the Winona Ryder one.

• 25:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Um, when women go short that way, it's just a scandalous thing. And it's usually received as some attempt to like get closer to masculinity.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  But with Carlos Alcaraz, because he's already so boyish, it just, it did, it neither toughened him up, it made him seem even younger somehow.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Like truly, like he had just like, like climbed out of the call of, of, you know, that, that, that protective coating that, that animals and people are born, yeah. Like an alien movie, actually. And I think that like, there was, it just was too much for people to accept that this had happened. And you could hear the buzzing when he took the first, when he took the court, that first match. Like you could just hear people being like, oh my God, what happened there? What was he trying to say? But the truth is, like, he had to then say, I'm not trying to say anything. This was an accident. Hopefully by the end of the tournament,

• 26:40Speaker 02

  we won't be having this conversation anymore because I will have won it. And I was nervous that, what I was really, the thing I would have tried to write about if I had jumped on it the night it had happened, because it was a night match. Um, because I sat on my sofa for about 20 minutes being like, should I do it? Should I do it? Should I do it? And then like, what should I do? And the story would have been seeing what night, what, like if he makes it to round three.

• 27:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Like what round three is like? Like, are we still talking about the hair? Is the hair still a story?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  So I sat there and I really thought about it, but it was so clear. I was like, is it going to affect his play? Is it gonna, like, is he gonna be in his head about this?

• 27:27Speaker 02

  And it's just like a weird, it's a burden that men never have to deal with, right? Like, is my appearance gonna cost me something?

• 27:36Trevor Noah?

  Oh damn.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  And

• 27:38Trevor Noah?

  Now this is critic at large now.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  This is like a thing women always, I mean, in addition to all the other shit that women have to take on a tennis court with them, right? Like, You know, I hope my body cooperates.

• 27:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  I hope I don't hear somebody say some stupid sexist shit in the third row, which happens not, I mean, I don't want to say not infrequently, but I've heard it. Like, somebody saying something to Sabalenka about something.

• 28:05Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Amelie Maresmo, they called her a man. Would go to these tennis tournaments and they would just call her a man. That's the thing she had to hear. I mean, maybe her whole career. Serena Williams, Venus Williams. The things that they, I mean, Sloane Stephens. Uh, just like the things you have to put up with just because they're in earshot. Um, now here's a man having to like, explain his physical appearance in a way that I don't recall a male tennis player, male athlete really having to do. Unless you're Jokic, unless you're, unless you're Jokic and, or, or Luka, Luka Doncic.

• 28:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Who, it's the opposite problem. It's like, he was being dogged for years for being overweight.

• 28:51Trevor Noah?

  And then he lost a ton of it.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Lost the weight. And now everybody's like, well, I mean, I don't know how this is gonna go. He lost the weight. This guy can't win. Like, got traded, got into the best shape of his life because he needed to. I mean, I don't, I don't know what Luka needed, but like, it can't hurt that he's in.

• 29:11Trevor Noah?

  Oh, no, no, I mean, that's what LeBron said, right? He said he improved his longevity by years by dropping, I don't know the exact number, but it was, it was a pretty substantial amount. I think, I stand to be corrected, maybe 20 pounds?

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean.

• 29:24Trevor Noah?

  He was just like, it just, it just helped him last longer in the game.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I liked that body. Cause you know, as a tennis player, that is Stan Wawrinka's body.

• 29:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Right? Like Stan Wawrinka was built just like that. Won three majors against, you know, you know, during the big three era. Beat all those guys. Um, did he beat Federer really in a meaningful way ever? No, but he beat Rafa and he beat Djokovic, um, to win majors. And I don't know, I like that body, but the idea that he now has to talk about it, he's gonna spend however many months of the NBA season when it starts.

• 30:00Trevor Noah?

  Just talking about that.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Just talking about like, you know, whether or not, depending on how the Lakers do. Is it, is it the new body? Does he need to get used to it? Is it, is it just the wrong body for this guy playing this? And you know, the dumb shit that people have to talk about. But men don't have to deal with it. This is a woman problem and.

• 30:21Trevor Noah?

  So wait, so what does it say that men are starting to have to deal with then?

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know.

• 30:25Trevor Noah?

  If they are.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  I don't think they are. I think in this case, Carlos Alcaraz did.

• 30:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, okay. But and so.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  He could have gone away with not doing it.

• 30:33Trevor Noah?

  Oh, you're saying he could have, he could have just carried on playing?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, no one would have said anything.

• 30:37Trevor Noah?

  But now when you, okay, so now.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  I do think he was being asked about it. That was the news, right? Like this is now a thing that he has to. It's the same, this was happening simultaneous. How about this? The same tournament, Coco Goff. She was the other story of the tournament and that was the story of the tournament until she lost, right? They stopped talking about Alcaraz maybe by the third round.

• 31:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  She loses in the fourth round. And the story of the tournament is. She's getting her serve fixed in real time. She's getting her forehand fixed in real time. Let us count the double faults. Let us, let us like keep track of every time Coco Goff double falls if she fixes her serve. She needed to fix it because she's, she's got the most double faults on the tour.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  But she knows that and she's working on it. Maybe because should she have stayed home and just worked on her serve until January? I, I don't know. That's not, that's not my business. But this woman had the, had the.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Bravery, courage, determination to enter the tournament. And see how this, you know, technique surgery was going in real time. And the tennis commentators, that's all they would talk about during her matches. That's all the press conferences were about when she won the matches. And when she lost, she had to explain that too. It's just like, it's such a burden. It's such a burden having to, and this is not necessarily because she's a woman. But I don't recall any man.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Changing how they play the sport that they play in real time. And having to like constantly talk about it. Um, and that, that gets in here. And I was worried with Alcaraz that, that all of that talk and self-explanation would get in his, get in his head.

• 32:32Trevor Noah?

  Didn't seem to.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  He played, that was the best tennis I have ever, it was not the most exciting tennis. But he wasn't gonna keep winning like this with exciting tennis.

• 32:42Trevor Noah?

  He just went in, he became a bull. He, he reminded me of Nadal in some ways, just like the Spanish bull.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  That's a great, that's a great.

• 32:47Trevor Noah?

  Pushing through similar outfit. But I wanna go back to what you were saying about, I sat on the couch and I thought, should I write this? Should I write this?

• 32:55Speaker 02

  For thirty minutes.

• 32:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and then you went, no, I'm not gonna. I, I wanna get into that, like. How do you decide what you should write and what you shouldn't write? Like, what was, what was the last piece that you put out?

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 33:07Trevor Noah?

  Let's talk about that.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I'm, well, it's funny, cuz I'm making this podcast.

• 33:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  It's called Cannonball. And a lot of my time is being spent like figuring out, you know, how much time to spend making our show.

• 33:22Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  And how much time to spend writing these pieces. Um, and it's, I'm now at a place where like, I'm like, oh, I think I've, I've struck a balance. Where writing, I can write pretty much as often as I used to and still make this show. Um, so the, the answer to your question, the last thing I think was published that it was a, that was a piece that had nothing to do with the show, was about how to look at art in museums, like, like not.

• 33:49Trevor Noah?

  How to look at art in museums?

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Let's be, I'm gonna be extra clear. How one should position oneself to not be cut off by some other art looker. Right? Like, how does one stand? How should one stand? How far away from a painting do I need to stand to keep your ass from cutting in front of me while I'm looking at it?

• 34:10Trevor Noah?

  And to make sure I still enjoy the full.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:12Trevor Noah?

  Experience of, of looking at the art.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  I'm having a moment with this piece of art. What?

• 34:17Trevor Noah?

  When?

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Is it two feet? Is it?

• 34:19Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Six inches? You know, I mean.

• 34:22Trevor Noah?

  What now, you see? That's such a left field term for me.

• 34:27Trevor Noah?

  Why did you think that was significant? Art seems like such a like, it's such a niche world. It's such a, you know, highfalutin world. Why did that? What were you, what did you get to in that piece?

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 34:39Trevor Noah?

  That wouldn't be obvious when I read the headline.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  I think it's not the deepest thing I've ever written.

• 34:43Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, but still, what, what, what did you?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's just that everybody makes this mistake and nobody really thinks that it's a problem. It's the, it's the, it's the kind of etiquette. You know, I am probably fifteen percent Larry David. You know?

• 34:59Trevor Noah?

  Only?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Like, well, no, no, really, because the eighty-five percent is why I'm, I'm in this job and not, you know.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Doing Curb Your Enthusiasm. But I think the degree to which, you know, there's a Larry David in a lot of us.

• 35:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Um, it meets up in these areas in which decisions are made on our behalf, allegedly to make them easier, but make them worse. I would identify packaging as this. You know, like, I mean, famously, there's a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.

• 35:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, the episode where he buys the scissors that open the package. But then he gets them in the package and he can't open the package without the scissors because the scissors to open the package are in the package to open packages.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  It's, it is the deepest, realist, but obvious, most obvious, one of the most obvious problems we humans face, is like how to get something out of something, how to like remove something from something else. Um, but another one is, is each other. Like, how do we deal with each other? Like strangers.

• 36:02Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  How do we, how do we comport ourselves in public space? That's a huge Larry David question. And for me, I hate it when I am looking at a painting, a sculpture.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Whatever, whatever, whatever the museum is like asking me to stand here and look at. And somebody's just like boop, boop, boop, breaking this connection that I'm having with the, with the work. I'm not trying to take a picture with my phone. I'm looking with my eyes.

• 36:34Trevor Noah?

  You're standing there.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  But maybe you're standing for too long, Wes. I've got places to go to. You've been here for five minutes. I've been behind you.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Eugene, Eugene, have you ever seen a queue? For, Mona Lisa does not count. Where's the queue? Oh, Guernica at, at the Prado. There's another, I've seen a line to look at Guernica.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  How did you know that's my one thing that I want to see here?

• 36:57Trevor Noah?

  Is what?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Guernica.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Oh, it's in Spain though.

• 37:00Trevor Noah?

  Are you being serious?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  It's, you gotta go to Madrid.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  But what is that painting that Picasso has at the United Nations Building?

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Oh, what is that? You should go.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  You should go right now though, because they're coming next week. UN Week is next week, so get over there now.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  I wanna see that.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  What's, oh, there is a Picasso there.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  That is Guernica.

• 37:20Trevor Noah?

  When you go, when you go.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  It might be a replica of Guernica.

• 37:23Trevor Noah?

  When you go there, you should stand there.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Yes, that makes sense.

• 37:26Trevor Noah?

  And then I hope Wes cuts in front of you.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  I would never.

• 37:29Trevor Noah?

  While you're staring at. So what was your, what was your conclusion? What did you come to? What's the rule? How far should you stand? How long should you stand for?

• 37:36Speaker 02

  I just don't.

• 37:37Trevor Noah?

  Were you wrong? Who was wrong?

• 37:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm sure there's a world in which like I need to get over myself.

• 37:42Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I, I'm open. See, the thing about me is I am open to the possibility that there's another way.

• 37:50Trevor Noah?

  Okay, cool.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Um, which is why I'm not a world leader. Um, and I'm just a critic because I know that there's, there's another opinion or another way of doing things that might be better than the one I've got. But I think that, I mean, conclusion, I think you should just.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  It was ceremoniously so.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  Oh, sent back to the Prado. The Prado took it back?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, in 2022, it was ceremoniously removed.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  The Prado, it comes home to the Prado. I mean, it really should be in northern Spain with the Basque people, honestly. That's where it belongs. It should not even be in Madrid, but we'll take it because the Prado is one of the great museums. More people will probably go to Madrid than go to wherever they would put it. I mean, maybe at the Bil, at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

• 38:37Trevor Noah?

  Do you think all art should be back where it's from?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  That's a great question. That's deep. Trevor, what do you think?

• 38:47Trevor Noah?

  You can't throw it back to me.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  All right, I'll think I'm.

• 38:49Trevor Noah?

  You said no.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  I feel like it's not art if it's with its people. I feel like it's art when it's not home. When people get to view something that doesn't belong there and they get to stare at it longer. It happens when people are people watching.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Someone looks unfamiliar, they stare longer. So it becomes, it has significance when it's not at home. That's why I think it was more at home here because I've been doing my research about it. And the one part that I missed was the fact that I'm three years late.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I didn't even.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Because when? In a think piece, did not think to inform me that it's gone.

• 39:20Trevor Noah?

  Wait, okay, so I like this for you. So you're saying you, you don't necessarily think that art should go back to where it's from?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Think of anything exotic.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  I really like this. I like this.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Women, home design, athletes. The way you guys speak about Alcaraz now is reminiscent of the Spanish bull. Like you guys were saying with, um.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Nadal.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Nadal, yes, he's foreign. There's no way anyone local would have captured you like this because anything exotic and foreign is always going to be attractive. It's gonna be look at, I look at the Pagani Zonda, for example, and I'm like, what a horrible car. The teardrop mirrors, those gear knobs, the metal, the clank, clank. I mean, we buy cars now because they are quiet and you buy that thing because it's loud and there's metal clanking on metal inside with a gear lever. So I'm like, we love it because it's exotic, it's one of a kind, and it's foreign. Anything foreign will do. Ice cream is the same. Hmm, ooh, it's in, uh, lies. It's just not from here.

• 40:14Trevor Noah?

  Okay, okay, wait, so let me think then.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Anything foreign.

• 40:18Trevor Noah?

  So you want every art to go where it's not from?

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Well, wait, there is, there are some complications here.

• 40:25Trevor Noah?

  Tell me.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, looted art, for instance.

• 40:29Trevor Noah?

  What is looted art?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  The Jews in Austria, Germany, Holland, who had the Nazis came in.

• 40:36Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Took all the art.

• 40:38Trevor Noah?

  Got it.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  That got, take, that wound up in museums. The museums claim, well, we didn't know. We didn't know the providence of these, these great artworks, these climps and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

• 40:49Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  These modiglianis, we didn't know how they, how they got here.

• 40:53Trevor Noah?

  But that's personally owned. That's theft to me.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Of a hundred percent.

• 40:57Trevor Noah?

  Yes. To me, looting is more like.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  But, I mean, just like, think about, let's just, but I'm thinking about this as like, absolutely philosophically.

• 41:04Trevor Noah?

  Okay, go, go, go. Yeah, yeah, go.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  I want to present the, maybe the worst case scenario.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Carol wants to go, what's the difference between looting and booty?

• 41:14Trevor Noah?

  That is a very valid question. You're not wrong. You're not wrong, actually. Yes.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Just don't loot the booty. Just, just don't do that. That's no good.

• 41:23Trevor Noah?

  So.

• 41:26Trevor Noah?

  I like to, let's, let's go into the philosophical idea here. So.

• 41:31Trevor Noah?

  Art exists somewhere.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:33Trevor Noah?

  It is held by someone or something. There's a moment in time, it shifts, it moves, it whatever. I think we can break it down into, wait, let's start by breaking it down into like a few categories, right? There are things that have been owned by people directly.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:47Trevor Noah?

  That was stolen from you during a war, during a raid, during a theft. That's just theft. I think we can all agree on that. It's like theft, theft.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 41:54Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Looted.

• 41:55Trevor Noah?

  Right. No, that's theft.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Theft, okay.

• 41:57Trevor Noah?

  Theft, theft. Yes, stolen.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Is a, is a, is a, is a class of theft.

• 42:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but no, but, but what I mean is like by looted is. Let's say somebody goes to, um, like Egypt is a great example of this.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, let's go to, let's go to ancient civilizations.

• 42:12Trevor Noah?

  Yes, right, right. One of the big conversations people are having now is, should all the Egyptian art that is everywhere in the world be given back to Egypt?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:21Trevor Noah?

  Now, you're saying no, again, okay?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  I don't, well, okay, no. But there's an asterisk next there, next to the, next to my no, because.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  I think who's, who says, right? Does the Egyptian government say?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  Do the Egyptian people say, right? Does the Egyptian exhibitor class have a say? Like, who makes the decision about where the art that's already like, for instance, at the beautifully redesigned ancient civilization sections of the Museum of Modern, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Wait, what? Oh, well, how long are you guys here? Till Sunday. Okay, Eugene. Yeah. Go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And like, in the wake of this conversation, and keep it in mind, as you walk through this, you know, very pristinely renovated portion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

• 43:24Speaker 02

  where all of this great craft work, you know, civilizational craft work, they call them antiques, antiques, no, we're not doing that. Okay. This is, this is art that's just old. No one at their house looked at this and goes, "It was old, 300 years ago." No, it's just, it's just in the possession of a major art collection and therefore blah, blah, blah. But antique implies for sale to me. There's a, there's a, there's a... Okay, there's a negative connotation. There's a, there's a monetary value associated with antique to me. All right. These are, these are great craft pieces that both tell a story of a people, of a time, of a place.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  They've done a really good job of positioning where in the world and in time, these, these pots and tiles and little, little tiny statues are from. You know, shields. Pyramids. Everything, everything, everything. But the question is, like, like, the way we've been talking is, does, where should Sumerian art go back to, right? Where, where should Babylonian art be returned to?

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Um, you know, these great Western African pieces, like what nation, what nation?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  They claim to them, yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Right. So in that sense, it's funky to say, well, let, let the American institution have them. Cause I don't know, they've taken really good care of them at this point.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Um, the providence of a lot of these things is really still in question, right? Like, we don't know, we don't, we neither, we need, we know neither the makers' names.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Or in some cases, how they got in these collections.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, mm hmm.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Well, we, sorry, how do I put this? We know by and large, it's a white person, who the white person was, who what? You know, the stories that these places tell are like, you know, this very rich person liked to go off and load up his Jeep with

• 45:32Speaker 02

  spears and shields and skulls and stuff. And in a moment of absolute generosity, he dumped some of it at the, at the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exactly, the Smithsonian. Um, so like, like the thing that I love about no matter where the art winds up is responsible institutions will tell a story of where it was and how it got to be where it is.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Right. And the, the sort of the, the mythos, the mythos of the pieces becomes important to the way the, the art is framed and positioned. To want it back for the sake of, of having it.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  It kind of only gets you so far with art.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Exactly, but I think.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Especially with older art, because there's a story that you're then, I think, responsible for telling.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  I think art is sometimes meaningless without it being attached to some suffering of some sort. Pieces being stolen and artists that cut off his ear because he was frustrated.

• 46:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I mean, you're not wrong. The Mona Lisa is the perfect example.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Ever, ever going.

• 46:34Trevor Noah?

  It was, it was nothing, really, not nothing. Let's, you know, let's calm down, Trevor.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  This is like me, I went to a party once, it was like, the Constitution's a stupid document.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  I had like 17 gay men looking at me like.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, I think that like

• 46:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, no, that's

• 46:57Speaker 02

  The following and meant, anyway.

• 46:58Trevor Noah?

  I'm not saying it, I'm not saying it's, but I do find it interesting to, exactly what you just said. That the Mona Lisa owes a lot of its fame to the fact that it was stolen. And that begins its journey of, before that, there was no lion. There was no famous anything, it was just one of the paintings. But when the painting got stolen, the law of the painting

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:23Trevor Noah?

  made it what it is today.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:25Trevor Noah?

  And so many, many art scholars will sort of argue, you know, obviously there's the mainstream, they'll go like, no, no, this is the Mona Lisa and it means this and it means that, it means that. And then others will go like, actually, this thing wasn't anything special in that way.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:38Trevor Noah?

  Until it got stolen, and when it got stolen, it became this story of like, the greatest art heist and where's this painting and what is the, and why was it stolen? So it's interesting that you say that because sometimes that is, you know, like to come back to like a critic at large, it's like, it's funny how these things are shaped in ways that we often don't look at.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:57Trevor Noah?

  But even art and value and not, like when you said, you, you said, these people are generous, driving a Jeep, going and picking up spears and shields and dropping them off at a museum.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Anonymously.

• 48:07Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no. The first thing I think of beyond anonymously is I think to myself, what a brilliant way to create value for your collection.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:15Trevor Noah?

  So if I went somewhere in the world and I found six pieces of ceramic art,

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:20Trevor Noah?

  wherever I am, from five hundred years, a thousand, three thousand years ago. What better way to make that, that ceramic collection more valuable than by giving some of it to a museum? Because if I give them three pieces and I keep the remainder, those three pieces can become prominent because they're on display and they get a story told. And then someone will be like, we still wonder where the other pieces are. And then you're like, ah, look who has. The other piece.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Surprise, surprise.

• 48:46Trevor Noah?

  And you create, you can create, you can create value that, and I'm not even saying it in like a conspiracy way, I just, you can create. It's the same way artists, big, great artists will have some of the biggest jumps in their prices and their prestige. When their art is on display in these museums and in these, in these galleries.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:05Trevor Noah?

  The art was already there.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:07Trevor Noah?

  But because it is now in the space, it's hallowed in a different way.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  But this is now raising these other concerns to me, like, we have not quite settled the question of like, does Egypt get its shit back?

• 49:19Trevor Noah?

  No, but here's, here's the question, actually, you know what, you know what I wonder, this is, I, I like that you both asked the question through the lens of people. But I didn't hear either of you ask the question through the lens of time, and I think that's actually the more complicated one to answer.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:31Trevor Noah?

  Is like, what I mean by this is, if your people, your family, your city, your country, your, whatever you want to use. Have agreed or done something in a different time to you, whose time gets to supersede the other person's time? So this is what I mean, there was a time when the Egyptian government welcomed archaeologists from England. Who were funded by some rich person who just wanted to have like stuff nobody else had.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:00Trevor Noah?

  They paid for all of these expeditions, they paid for the like, they were the ones who were like, yeah, go and do this. Because we get to benefit from what you're doing in some way, but that's a time. And then you find like today's government, not just of Egypt, of any country might go, no, we want our, we want our stuff. But you were given it by another time, and that's where I think it actually becomes more complicated.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Yes, a hundred percent, because again, like who, who adjudicates, who votes?

• 50:28Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Like what, you know, I think with respect to time, I think you learn from it, right?

• 50:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  You just.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Give the looted stuff back to the people, the descendants of the people from whom it was stolen. But I think maybe we're talking about a statute of limitations. Like, there's a statute of limitations and anything.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Let's just, let's just, I don't, there could actually be one and I don't know. But I've never heard of, of, of these collections spoken of in this way. But like, let's just say that the statute of limitations is like a century. Right?

• 51:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  There's like, beyond a certain point in nineteen hundred, with exceptions for, for looting.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  And, or theft, right, like outright theft. But that's sort of more of a, that is a sort of interpersonal, um, legal question, whereas we're talking about kind of international law.

• 51:31Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I'm talking more like a thing that didn't even happen between people per se.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Right. I think that a statute of limitations really does kind of make the, make the questions of claim and, and reappropriation a little easier, easier to adjudicate. And so I would say that anything that is in these great museums or even like these small museums, but they're, but they're, it's a work that, that has no known owner. You know, no known maker. Just leave it.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  And when I was, sorry to disturb you here.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  We were talking about houses. Someone was renovating a, a former school building to become their own personal house. They went antique shopping. They found pieces, decorated house, very beautiful. And myself and Ryan said, if someone buys this house two years from now, they'll look at all of this as trash. They'll be like, what? No. But that person was like, I love these things. These things are so beautiful to me. And here's the thing for me with African art, West African art and all those places, and also Egyptian art, and like, there's two distinct differences that I draw here. West African art and that kind of art, East African art as well. How sure are we that when it was acquired, it was art? It could have been an arts and crafts market and a European was walking around going, I like this, I like that, I like this. There was no museums, these were things that were used by people.

• 52:54Trevor Noah?

  They bought a plate from a flea market.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Yes, if you bought, if you got yourself as a sailor all those centuries ago. A Ming Dynasty vase, you probably bought it. You didn't have to steal it.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Where are you gonna run to clanking, clanking, clanking with a gigantic ceramic vase?

• 53:09Speaker 02

  I don't think they were running anywhere.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  They just, they just put it in a bag and walked off.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  And, and Trevor said it quite well with the Egyptian art, and I think the Egyptian art, even, even the battle of getting the art back does a lot for Egypt and its popularity than getting the art, I mean, than getting the, because that is not art that was stolen there. It was stuff from the valley.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  It was craft.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  And, it was, yes, and burial rituals and the mask of Tutankhamun, which I'm a big fan of. I've seen it in a couple of exhibitions, the copy of it, is what made me interested in the story of Egypt. I think Tutankhamun as a king, he didn't do much to be lured as a great leader of Egypt. In fact, he wasn't a leader long enough for Egypt.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  It was just the process by which.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  The mystery of the chariot and the mask and his, and, and, and, and, and the, and the burial chamber is what attracts me to Egypt. So if anything, it made me realize that there's a great king Khufu, who's done far more, who built the Pyramid of Giza.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  The stories, it's truly the story of the lore of the pieces themselves that, that sort of create an interest, not only in the pieces, because you know, it's crazy that like, I, I don't know how I became the person who's now talking about artifacts in museums, because that's the part of the museum I always skipped, right? I'm just in love with somebody right now who, where that's one of his favorite parts to go in a museum. No, no, we just met, but give me a second. Um, just give me a second. I can see it.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  I can see it, but just hold on. Um, I feel like

• 54:44Speaker 02

  now I go and I'm really paying attention to all the stuff that, I'm asking these questions. Um, I'm much more aware of, or I'm much more.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Unsure of and questioning what the difference is between craft and art. Right? There's no doubt, there's no doubt, there's no doubt that these people are artisans. Yes. I mean, because it's the question around, you know, the way that they, the way that all diasporic black people are sort of talked about what inherits in us and what we had the skill, education, knowledge, prolonged experience to do. Right? It wasn't that, you know, for instance, you know, enslaved Africans just were born knowing what to do with soil. Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  They had to, this was a cultivated knowledge that took, you know, centuries of studying, learning by trial to figure out. And so I think that the point at which artisanship yields, can yield the craftsmanship. Right? Or the, or the places in which craft and art meet, sort of where they meet. Those are the places in these, in these artifact collections that I'm fascinated by because the parts stand in for a whole and you kind of need one, you need these big institutions

• 56:21Speaker 02

  in some way to have the capacity to have enough pieces to tell a story. Yeah. So I, the reason I love these places now is like, oh, plates, forks, bowls. Yes.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  But, but I'm like, wait a minute, they had Tuesdays, they had Thursdays, like they, they ate with utensils, with vessels. And I would love to know what they looked like. They took time to paint these, these ceramic bowls. Yeah. You know, like just, there will be times when I'm sitting there looking at a comb and I'm just like, wow, they took the bone. And just, I don't know how you turn a bone into a comb, but like. But they did it. Somebody did it!

• 57:18Trevor Noah?

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• 58:03Trevor Noah?

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• 58:48Trevor Noah?

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• 59:32Trevor Noah?

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• 1:00:12Trevor Noah?

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• 1:00:36Trevor Noah?

  It makes me think of the idea that maybe the mistake we make sometimes in society is we search for a concrete answer that'll that'll exist for all time. But maybe the answers are always shifting. And if we can, if we can get comfortable with that, if we can get comfortable with that, maybe then we'll be better at answering the questions because we understand that the question is not permanent.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Trevor, you should, you should just run. Just run.

• 1:01:02Trevor Noah?

  Run away.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  From here.

• 1:01:05Trevor Noah?

  No, because here's, here's, here's why I say this.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  That's a good one, yeah.

• 1:01:08Trevor Noah?

  I love what you just said about stories and arts and the people because let's start with, you know, a simplistic idea of where this, this, this journey begins. There's a tribe somewhere in Africa. They're making their craft.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Pottery.

• 1:01:25Trevor Noah?

  Pottery, plates, whatever. They're making jewelry. You know, the Zulu were smelting gold long before Europeans were, et cetera, et cetera. So they're just doing their thing.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  In Mapungu where they were making rhino statues.

• 1:01:36Trevor Noah?

  Exactly, exactly. So they're just doing their thing.

• 1:01:40Trevor Noah?

  At that point, I would argue, a lot of the stuff that they have is not art. I would argue, right? You find some of it is, but I think for the most part, it's just like, it's just a thing that they're making its crafts and they're enjoying it. Then you, you, you, you develop a world where there's now global trade and then obviously pillaging as well, right? The two coexist at the same time. So some stuff is traded. So the Europeans bring hair dye and they bring different spices and they dingbo. And then they get traded mirrors and, but whatever, people are trading, people are trading. So some things go legitimately. Some things go illegitimately as in they're taken, okay? They go to museums, they exist in different places, then people's houses, they, you know what I mean? I would argue, at the time when Africans are making this stuff originally,

• 1:02:25Trevor Noah?

  it doesn't hold that much value even to African people because they're just making it and they make it at the time.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 1:02:31Trevor Noah?

  No, but now, but now, it then leaves after a combined period of both trade and pillaging. Other people presented in their museums telling a story, whatever. But I think when Africa is now in a place where the narrative about it is that it can get nothing done. It has come from nowhere, it means nothing, it has no intelligence, it has no advancement, it has no... Now, all of a sudden, that plate, that comb, that statue is no longer just a plate, a comb or a statue. It's now proof that these people whose stories was, whose stories were stolen actually happened.

• 1:03:15Trevor Noah?

  It's now, it's now like, you get what I'm saying? So now it becomes, even beyond art, I can see it now being, you know, like in a.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  Symbol of civilization.

• 1:03:23Trevor Noah?

  Exactly. And in a perfect world, I would almost argue that a New York museum should go, hey, we have a bunch of your stuff, but right now, the stories that are being told about you are that you've never had stuff.

• 1:03:37Trevor Noah?

  So we're actually gonna give you this stuff so that you have an opportunity to showcase to your people and to other people who come to you.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Trevor Noah?

  The fact that you had stuff.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  See, I actually think it's the converse of what Eugene said.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  Because I think, I mean, I think both things can be true. I think that a people needs to know its story and it's in the value of the story.

• 1:04:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. That the artifacts represent a whole that kind of dignify or redignify a people.

• 1:04:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, or like redignify, yeah.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  And I also think it is important to advertise the dignity to the world.

• 1:04:19Trevor Noah?

  Ah, damn, that's true.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Of these, of these other civilizations, right? Because, you know, I just will say as a, as a black American, the, the, the points of pride, just to stay in the museum space, right? The idea that some curator thought to put a Horace Pippin painting, well, no, in the Prado, in the Prado, in Madrid. There are no, there's very little African American art. There's lots of American art, very little art by African Americans. There's a Horace Pippin that is just in the, the, the American 20th century art section.

• 1:05:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  It's just sitting there next to Ad Reinhardt and, you know, I don't know, Mel Gussau. Um, and wait, Mel Gussau is a critic at the New York Times. Forget that.

• 1:05:18Trevor Noah?

  He should be there.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Like, he should not be there. Uh, like, right next to Joseph Stella, right? And this, like, Horace Pippin is just, like, a little tiny or not insignificantly sized Horace Pippin. It's just among these great white artists. Um, and it just fills you with pride. Like, I came all the way over here, didn't need to see any black shit.

• 1:05:41Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  But here we are. Just like a great, and it's like, it is a story, you know, I don't remember which one, which, which Pippin is at the Prado. But it's a, or is it a Bearden? Now I'm just all over.

• 1:05:54Trevor Noah?

  You can just say names and I'm gonna stay here because I don't know, I don't know the names of any artists.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  I believe it's actually not Horse Pippin, it's Romer Bearden.

• 1:06:01Trevor Noah?

  You can call it, you can say Judith, you can say Arnold, you could, I'm just gonna be like, mm-hmm.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  There's a great Romer Bearden that lives at the Prado. And it's just there among all these great artists. And these great white American artists, but he's just, to the Prado, an American artist.

• 1:06:18Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Right? They're not like the great black artist, uh, you know, Romer Bearden. He's just like, this guy's the same as everybody else in this room. They, we probably don't, we might know he's, well, I mean, at the museum they know, but like, they're not, that's not the story they're telling. The painting tells the story.

• 1:06:37Trevor Noah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  Um, but I think there's a real power in letting these, like, I guess the sort of literary poetic term is like, um, like it's a metonym, it's like a piece that can stand in for the whole. And that piece signifies something to everybody who bothers to go look in the, in the vitrines and, you know, like me who skipped it for years and years and now like, you know, I wanna talk about Indonesian art. Let's just talk about it because I didn't have any feelings 10 minutes ago, but I got a lot of feelings now because I spent two hours just walking around looking in these cases. I have a lot of questions.

• 1:07:21Trevor Noah?

  Is that, is that why, is that why Trump and his people are so adamant about?

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Trevor, you know the answer.

• 1:07:30Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no. I don't necessarily know the answer. I never assumed that I know the answer.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  You, you have a sense.

• 1:07:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but that doesn't mean I know it.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  But complete your thoughts. Sorry, I interrupted.

• 1:07:38Trevor Noah?

  We might get, we might get further together. Is...

• 1:07:43Trevor Noah?

  We we talk about the world of art and you know these museums, they're very hoity-toity.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:48Trevor Noah?

  You know, very like, most people would go like, ah, who cares and who doesn't?

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  I like where you're going.

• 1:07:54Trevor Noah?

  I found it particularly interesting that like Trump and his close cohorts took a special interest in museums.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  On day one, basically.

• 1:08:05Trevor Noah?

  I was like, this is such a who cares world is is what people often say.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:11Trevor Noah?

  I was like, why does he care about this so much? Why does he care so much about what the exhibits are? And more importantly, what the exhibits say?

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  I think you have the answer.

• 1:08:22Trevor Noah?

  Do you do you get what I'm saying? No, but but what it made me realize is

• 1:08:28Trevor Noah?

  as much as people, you know, will roast Trump and maybe his people for being uncultured and uncouth and I was like, what do they realize about art and its power? That a large swath of the population doesn't. You you you get what I'm saying?

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 1:08:44Trevor Noah?

  Like, most of the time, when people have conversations about museums and galleries and what, people are like, nah, who? Art is such a niche, da, da, da. But for Trump on day one to go, yo, museums, we need to.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  He's not saying my kid could do that. He's saying this shit is powerful.

• 1:09:02Trevor Noah?

  That's what I mean.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  And it needs to be stopped. Right. And you know what's crazy? I don't know if you remember this. He went to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

• 1:09:15Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  Like, the month after the inauguration.

• 1:09:19Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Got a tour from Lonnie Bunch. Like, who's now the who now is the director of the entire Smithsonian system.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  And he left the tour and like gave remarks and was like, you know,

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  this is some powerful shit. I don't think I saw everything, but I'm gonna come back. And everybody needs to see this because this is a very important American story. This is very important. And, you know, there's a lot to be proud of here, but you know, there's still, I mean, I'm now paraphrasing, but like, there's a lot of work to do. And this museum is, is an important part of, of that work. Lonnie, I salute you. This museum's a real success.

• 1:10:06Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Can't wait to get back. To your point, the question isn't why is he doing this now? The, the, I mean, you kinda, you were right, Trevor, like, he's doing it because he already knows the power. Now, the question, the real question-

• 1:10:25Trevor Noah?

  I love the fact that, because I didn't know that part of the story.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Trevor Noah?

  I, I only knew, no, I only knew the part where like Trump very recently said, hey, National Museum of African American History and Culture, you guys get a, you guys better get your shit together and stop being so anti-whites, right? That's like basically the-

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:10:44Trevor Noah?

  The mandates, he was like, you are very, very anti-whites. And the way you make it seem like slavery was just white people, it's not cool, man.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Who else?

• 1:10:54Trevor Noah?

  It's not cool. But now, the way you tell the story,

• 1:11:00Trevor Noah?

  but the way you tell the story now almost feels more like, it's weird that like, what? He was like walking through this museum.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  I have been thinking about this.

• 1:11:07Trevor Noah?

  Like, what was, like, what was, like, what was he doing when he was, do you get what I'm saying?

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  I really have been thinking about this.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  And I don't know, I don't know what, you know, there's a, there's a kind of person who just doesn't have the patience to try to sit in his brain to figure it out, but I want to. Like, I'm not scared to be in there. Right? Like, I have a shower, I know how it works.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  I, but I think that, because I do think that to the extent that he is like no other American,

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  he also is quintessentially deeply,

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  like inexorably,

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  like, the apotheosis of America.

• 1:11:52Trevor Noah?

  The, the what?

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  The apotheo, like, the, the sort of ultimate example of-

• 1:11:56Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Apotheosis. Well, quintessential, no, in some ways, because quintessential implies-

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  That there's something.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  To measure you against?

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Well, preservable. Like worth, worth, like this is the quint, this is like the absolute essential. Now, I could be displacing my own feelings about my own word choices. I would not use quintessence, quintessence or quintessential to, to describe Donald Trump. Unless we're like talking about the, like the quintessential cheeseburger eater. Right?

• 1:12:36Trevor Noah?

  Wow, wow, wow.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  You went from the burger to a cheeseburger eater.

• 1:12:42Trevor Noah?

  This guy just said the quintessential cheeseburger eater.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:12:46Trevor Noah?

  I'm gonna use that for somebody. You've just gotta walk past somebody, we're having him here and be like, well, well, well. If it isn't the quintessential cheeseburger eater. Oh, my goodness.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Who isn't the Hamburglar, by the way? It can't be the Hamburglar.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  But I think that, like, he is, like, he is the apotheosis of this country in many ways, right? Like, he is, he is the, he is a very good example. There are lots of, like, great Americans. Trump is, Trump at the end of the day, no matter what you say, is, is one of the great Americans in, in like, the purest sense of the word, great. Like, it is, it is enormous. It is vast. It has great capacity to contain lots of aspects, things, ideas, moments.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  Um, and I think, oh, God, like, in his mind, to just be in there for a second.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  You know, to listen to him talk about the things he thinks he deserves, the Nobel Peace Prize.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Mount Rushmore.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Mount Rushmore, the Kennedy Center Honor. There's a world in which I think.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Depending on like how, depending on what the Smithsonian body chooses to do in response to the threat.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  I think there's a world in which, you know, forget the Presidential Library. Like, one of those museums becomes his.

• 1:14:17Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:17Speaker 02

  Right? And it is filled with, with, with not just his version of American history, but the history of him.

• 1:14:27Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Right? He thinks, I mean, it's, I don't, I can't recall a person who simultaneously, you know, I'm not a historian. Like, I'll let, like, the Smithsonian staff, like, come at me when I say this.

• 1:14:46Speaker 02

  Because they would know better than I would, but I can't think of a living person of that level of prominence with that degree of power, who also simultaneously knows nothing about

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  history, but also has a deep understanding that he is making it as he goes.

• 1:15:07Trevor Noah?

  That's fascinating. What a conundrum.

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:15:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  And so, he, I'm gonna say he doesn't like that history, not only because it

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  defaces white people, like, like blames white people. It's that he honestly can't imagine himself in that story. He can literally say he never owned slaves, right? He can say he never enslaved anybody. He can't say he never rented to a black person. He can't say, he can't say, I, I, I never, he can't say, I never didn't.

• 1:15:47Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  He can't say, I never denied a ho, you know, there are lots of things he can't say he didn't do. He can't imagine himself, he cannot, he can't, he doesn't have the empathy to understand the degree to which, or he's denied himself access

• 1:16:04Trevor Noah?

  To that.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  to an empathy, because he, he performed it once. He went on that tour and came back and was like, works for me.

• 1:16:12Trevor Noah?

  So I think you might be a little more generous in your reading of him than I would be.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Probably, probably. I am, I

• 1:16:20Trevor Noah?

  No, no, I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. I, the thing that's

• 1:16:25Trevor Noah?

  In many ways scares me more with Donald Trump is. I feel like he is completely shaped. By the people he is with at any given time. That's true. That is true. That is true. That is true. And so I think. It feels true. His worldview in any given moment can change depending on who is next to him telling him the story. Now someone will go, no, but he's been pretty consistent. He he hasn't really been. He's in fact, he's he's shown these blips of inconsistency. That that like one of them was um. Do you remember when there was that bombing in Syria? I've got to get more specific, but it was the image of a kid. Who his face was covered in white ash.

• 1:17:07Trevor Noah?

  And dust and it was this image of this young boy in an ambulance. And this picture went around the world and that's when Trump was like he he launched a strike against Syria. Do you remember? And people. I didn't remember the causality. This was his first term and. He was very proudly even then saying we're never we're not going to get involved like we're not fighting. No fights for us. Nothing for us. Not getting involved. And then he launched a strike, right? And then they said to him, what changed? And he said. Ivanka showed me a picture of the little boy. So sad. Little boy. No, but that little boy. And I remember at the time, a lot of people were like, oh, he doesn't care. And I was like, no, no, no. He did in that. It's a weird thing, but he did because Ivanka showed him the picture.

• 1:17:49Trevor Noah?

  Right? It's the same way. He didn't toe the line. Do you remember when? The the the images were coming out from Palestine of the of the children starving. And then Netanyahu was like, no, no, no, these images are fake. This is not a thing. There's not. Someone showed it to Trump and then he they asked him and he's like, he's like, those are real. I know start. That's that's real. You can't lie about that. It's terrible. It's terrible. And it it completely went against. His position, quote unquote. And you see it with all of these things like I've seen Trump. I'm sorry, you you've seen these moments. When Trump gets surrounded by like, let's say. The heads of HBCUs or something. Oh, well, the famous, yes. Yeah, Trump is in a room with black people and they're telling him something. Trump will walk out of that room and he'll be like.

• 1:18:33Trevor Noah?

  What has happened to African and terrible, terrible times and we got to fix it. We got to change it. We got to fix it. And people go, oh, but then he doesn't do it. And I'm like, yeah, but I know this sounds crazy.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  If you took his administration and just replaced it with like,

• 1:18:50Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  The Obama, the Obama people.

• 1:18:54Trevor Noah?

  Hmm, yes.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  We would be, we would be in a different situation.

• 1:18:57Trevor Noah?

  But that's what I mean, because I found every time, because remember, the HBCU presidents visit him, but they don't stay with him.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  What is the HBCU?

• 1:19:05Trevor Noah?

  Um, historically, black colleges and universities.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Stallman, Howard, you know, Fisk, I mean, many, many others.

• 1:19:12Trevor Noah?

  Historically, black.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  They, there was a famous moment in, I believe, 2017.

• 1:19:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Where all of these, was it 2017? Where all of, you know, the presidents and chancellors of all these historically black colleges and universities are going to the White House for what they think is just like a, like a, like a visit. And at some point, they, I don't know how this happens to people, but it hap, it apparently happens a lot. They're going for a visit and then all of a sudden, they're walking down a hall and a door opens and they're in the Oval Office.

• 1:19:49Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  And these 20-something, like, very senior, very executive-oriented negro people find themselves in a, in the Oval Office with Donald Trump. It's, who is, you know, ready to take a picture. I don't, the meeting did not occur in the Oval Office. This is a photo opportunity and there's a very famous photo. Um, of these people standing around, some of them looking really like.

• 1:20:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, what just happened?

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  Are you fu, what? And Donald Trump, it's an amazing photo because Donald Trump is standing at the desk. And just looking so pleased with himself, like, I got him. I got him. Look at this photo. It's amazing. I can dine out on this photo for for four years. And the composition of it is great. Like, his tie clears the debt. It's just an amazing image. But to your point, like, if those people were also suddenly, if they also found out that day, by the way, guys, guess what? You've got new jobs. You're no longer going to be heads of these elite universities, these great black American institutions.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  You're working in Trump administration. Good luck! I actually think if those, if the people who found themselves, I mean, I guess that's slavery, actually. That actually is.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  A surprise.

• 1:21:23Trevor Noah?

  One minute, people were walking, the dogs were there, the next thing.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  They're important, powerful people. The next minute, they're working for some white man forever.

• 1:21:32Trevor Noah?

  But let's say in this instance.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  But let's just say in this instance, like, they signed a document and there was a paycheck involved and they have options. They know, but they sweeten the deal, whatever. Just let's play Twilight Zone for one second.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Like, how different would things have been according to your theory of his impressionability? Would it have been if you had had, you know, a room full of black men and women helping him advise the country instead of Stephen Miller?

• 1:22:00Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  I'm down, I'm down to find out. I'm not that down, because his tie has been cast, but.

• 1:22:06Trevor Noah?

  No, but this is, but this is what I'm trying to say is like strange about him in that way is that I don't think that Donald Trump holds any values beyond Donald Trump. Okay? So, he said many times, if you like me, I like you. He says it very simply. Doesn't matter what you say about him in the past. If you're just cool with him now, he's cool with you. He like, he brushes it away like quite quickly, actually, because it's almost like wrestling to him. He's like, no, no, let's keep it moving. Let's keep. I understand that plot's done, and now we can move on, right? But, but I, I love that you, you said he is the, say that word again?

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  The apotheosis.

• 1:22:45Trevor Noah?

  Apotheosis.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Of America?

• 1:22:48Trevor Noah?

  Because in many ways, I would argue.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Or an apotheosis.

• 1:22:51Trevor Noah?

  I would argue that like, he's an apotheosis of, of most people in that. He holds the ideas of the people who are closest to him. And he feels that those are the most important ideas. And so I argue if Mar-a-Lago was predominantly black. If the golf clubs that he was in and around were predominantly Hispanic. If the places where he was, think, think of the small things that Trump has revealed, right? He said, immigration, I don't want it. But then he went, well, except for, of course, like. All my, all the people in my life who I know, right? Yeah, no, no, no, but then he said, he said, but I'm not, not, I'm not talking about sommeliers. No, no, he said, he didn't say sommeliers, I'm saying sommeliers. He said, he called them wine choosers or something like that.

• 1:23:37Trevor Noah?

  I don't know if you remember that actually. Wait, what was this? No, no, he said, that was like second term right now, now, likely. He said it, oh man, he didn't say sommeliers, because I remember correcting it in my head. But he said. Wine choosers. Yeah, he said some wine waiters, wine choosers. What did he say, Ryan? It was wine. He's not talking about the, the people who work on the, he's not talking about the actual grape. He's talking about the person who comes to you and helps you select your wine. I know that for a fact. The wine picker. But you could see, it was so interesting that in his head. The good type of immigrant is the one that he encounters all the time, who brings him his food and his wine. And he's like, that immigrant should stay, of course.

• 1:24:19Trevor Noah?

  But the one that he sees on Fox News and on his social media, crossing a border and then killing a family. He's like, that one mustn't come in. You, you, you hear what I'm saying? Yeah, of course. And so like I, I, the reason I say that he is, he's a great apotheosis in, in that way is.

• 1:24:39Trevor Noah?

  It's very seldom that a country is run by somebody. Who is swayed as much as the average citizen of that country is swayed. The only difference is they have so much power. Exactly. Like that, like that, that thing always gets me with Trump is where I go like, man. Just, you just get him in the right room, in the right, you know, who knows this? Almost all the leaders in the Middle East. Well, this, well. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. Too, right? They know, you get him in the room. The man will come out and all of a sudden he'll say something slightly different to what he said coming in, because he's had time with you.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  But the problem is, like, talk about shaking an Etch A Sketch. It's so easy to shake his Etch A Sketch. Yes. Right? His Etch A Sketch gets shaken every day. Yes. And somebody, somebody's always gotten the knob. So to speak.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  I just, but see, the problem with that, I mean, what you're saying is, I believe that. That is a very cogent way of thinking about Trump.

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  But then there is, I mean, the part that does feel like he is like a metaphor in, in action. Is that it never amounts to anything because he's also so aware of his own. If he understands the value of anything, it's him. Yes, definitely. And so it's never like, you know, I'm for immigration because my homie from Wharton, you know, came up from Chile. No. To get an education, just like me. It's never, no one is ever equal to him. He's never, he's, he's rarely has an equal.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  His equals are, you know, Putin. Kim. Kim Jong Un. Yeah, I mean, but even, or, or conversely, you know, in the business world, right? Like, who are the people? He's never really aspiring to be Steve Jobs. No. His, I mean, he's never said this, but I mean, he's much closer to like the obvious people, like a, like a, like a Gotti or something like that. I mean, those are the, and those would be, that's a, that's an applicable model to, to an aspect of his governance, which is, you know, using a kind of threat tactic, bullying tactic to get people to just yield.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Strong arm.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  Or give him what he wants. But you know, and then, but these never sort of make their way into policy, right? It's not like the whispering in the ear for good things ever results in, you know, more housing for.

• 1:27:25Trevor Noah?

  But I'm saying it's because they're not around enough.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:27Trevor Noah?

  And I, and I mean that honestly.

• 1:27:28Speaker 02

  I believe that.

• 1:27:28Trevor Noah?

  I genuinely think they're just not like, you, you can't do it in one meeting. And you're not going to be around him for more than one. Yeah, long enough, but the people who were around him long enough. And I think that's why there's so much infighting around him. Amongst his own people to get other people away from him. So Steve Bannon fights with Stephen Miller and then that person fights with that person. Because they know.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  Once you've got his ear.

• 1:27:49Trevor Noah?

  If you can.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  I want his ear.

• 1:27:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you keep his ear.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:53Trevor Noah?

  You've got his power. But if you, if, if it's like, that's why the Elon Musk thing threw everyone off. Cause it's like Elon's whispering this, the other people are whispering that Elon. And then he's like, I like Elon, but I hear this about him. But at the same time, I also think Elon's annoying.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  Elon wasn't there 24 hours a day.

• 1:28:07Trevor Noah?

  And he wasn't. He was when he had the most power.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 1:28:10Trevor Noah?

  There was a point where, there was a point where he was at Mar-a-Lago 24/7. He was basically living there. He was around Trump all the time.

• 1:28:17Speaker 02

  But he had to Doge.

• 1:28:18Trevor Noah?

  You see?

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  And Doge was work and it meant he had to actually go to these agencies.

• 1:28:22Trevor Noah?

  There you go.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  And when he was out Doge-ing.

• 1:28:24Trevor Noah?

  Then now someone's whispering in Trump's ear, yo, man, what's up with this Elon guy?

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  He was out Doge-ing.

• 1:28:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, when he's out Doge-ing. But listen, I don't, I don't want to spend all the time talking about Trump because everyone does.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  He, but he is like a fascinating cultural.

• 1:28:37Trevor Noah?

  Oh yeah, he is the.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Figure, right? Because.

• 1:28:40Trevor Noah?

  He's the defining cultural figure for now.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  No, I mean, and, and so it, it is, he is fascinating to talk about, even though there is a kind of danger in.

• 1:28:53Speaker 02

  You can't forget the other things that, that that.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  Figureheadness is, is, is also doing, right? Um, and that's always the, the sort of moral tension among discussants when it comes to Trump. Like, like also, yes, keep in mind though, that like there are people being disappeared. Keep in mind though, that, you know, he's about to take over another, you know, American city with a, predominantly with a, with a significant black population.

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  So I don't know, it's tough. Like, you know, I'm a person who loves to try to figure out and unpack.

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  Cultural figures, including presidents, but you know, it kind of runs aground. I mean, for instance, you know, I wouldn't have spent, I didn't spend very much time talking about George W. Bush during his presidency, although there was, because there was so, because also there was so much culture around that presidency, like responding to it in real time. There's no culture, he is the culture, right?

• 1:30:02Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that is true.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  There's no, there's no filmmaking that, that is like responding to this presidency first or second.

• 1:30:11Trevor Noah?

  But how could you? People are terrified.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  I think though.

• 1:30:14Trevor Noah?

  And what I mean people, I mean like the money is terrified. I don't mean like the people.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. But what's interesting is these things have a way of happening anyway.

• 1:30:21Trevor Noah?

  Anyway, yes.

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  Right? So I think that's really fascinating that like the horror movie is like the most interesting things happening at the movies in, at least in this country involve horror, right? Involve, you know, the un, like the darkest, grimmest.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  And not just like, you know, there's a, there's a crazy person at the door, but like there are mysterious things happening that don't seem to make a lot of sense.

• 1:30:49Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  And it's interesting to me that like our death drive is on the charts, right? Like I am obsessed with the fact that Die With A Smile. This Lady Gaga Bruno Mars song that, that Won't Die is called like, is still in the top 10. Is as of this, as of our conversation right now, it is number 10. It has been in the top 10 for a year. Like when we were kids, songs didn't last, you'd like, if you got a song to last in the top 10 for a week.

• 1:31:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:31:23Trevor Noah?

  Like a, yeah.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  So the idea that you've had a song that's been in the top 10 for a year, like it probably more than a year at this point, is just mind blowing to me. And maybe it's not more than a year, but it's definitely almost a year. And it's about like, you know.

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  I'd rather like, you know, it's coming back to me. The melody just hit me, just like washed over me. Um, you're, you don't have to deal with this. I don't know if you're doing the Grammys this year, but you don't have to deal with this song. I really thought that was the lyrics of the song. I thought that was the lyrics of the song. I was like, no. They knew. No, I, I think it's just fascinating to me that that song is about, not about like spending the rest of my life with you, not about like, but you know, I'm, if I get like, you know, another, another bit of time with you, I will die with a smile. Like it's just a, it's a beautiful sentiment, but it's just telling the song is called Die With A Smile. I'm kind of a literal minded person. You put it, you put it on a plate like that.

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm going to put my fork in it.

• 1:32:33Trevor Noah?

  Don't press anything. We've got more. What now after this?

• 1:32:39Trevor Noah?

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• 1:33:24Trevor 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 are 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.

• 1:34:09Trevor Noah?

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• 1:34:12Trevor Noah?

  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 Lux 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. When they're done really well, they become the foundation of an entire outfit.

• 1:34:57Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

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• 1:36:15Trevor Noah?

  I wonder then, so when you, you see that, that's what I mean about like how you see these things and how you think about them. Going back to what you said about horror movies.

• 1:36:25Trevor Noah?

  I don't think I would think about that just off the bat.

• 1:36:31Trevor Noah?

  But we do have to ask ourselves why certain things are more popular when they are and what they're tapping into when they're tapping into it. Like, you know, there's more obvious ones that you can see in hindsight, like movies like Rambo and all of those things. America was telling itself a story and it needed to tell itself the story and it did it successfully, you know, and even in like the cartoons and stuff like that. Like when I think of like Popeye, Popeye was telling me a story, you know, and, and. Of domestic violence? Who was? Oh, Bluto. Bluto and olive oil. Oh, no, no, I thought you were saying Popeye. I was like Popeye hit Olive. I was like, damn, bro, which ones did you watch? No, no, no, no, no. But I mean, but I'm saying the stories. And human trafficking. No, but if you look at the stories. There's a lot going on in Popeye.

• 1:37:15Trevor Noah?

  Superman, the stories that Superman was telling, you know, and it is interesting to now when I'm, when I'm thinking through your brain, I go, huh. It's fascinating to look at when Superman movies come back and when they don't and when they do well and when they don't and what. It's like, there's a moment when America's telling a story about itself being exceptional and fighting the Russians and fighting communism. Superman's the thing. And then that story like fades away. Superman fades away. And then the Superman that becomes popular and comes out is like a gritty, non Superman-y Superman. That's the Trump, that's the first Trump Superman, yeah. That's like the, and then now the, now the, the American Superman sort of thing is like back and the parents are even more folksy and the, you know what I mean? It's

• 1:37:57Trevor Noah?

  like, it's, it's interesting to think about like what we're experiencing in our world. And then the question, then the question becomes.

• 1:38:07Trevor Noah?

  Is the art imitating life or is life imitating art like you know?

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  I think that that art has a weird way of corresponding to moods. Cause the people that make this stuff are basically us, right? Like they have the same neuroses or like not dissimilar neuroses. Part of the problem truly with movies right now is that I think there aren't enough geniuses who don't who aren't like us to show us like how we how we could be.

• 1:38:39Trevor Noah?

  Oh damn.

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  Or to like to like elevate. Well, I think that talk about like we're talking about we never really quite got to the bottom of the name thing. But the there is a way in which because Hollywood is no longer making as many movies as it used to. Just to stick with the movies because the movies are an important. Talk about a thing that you put in a museum to tell a story of a people and its priorities and who it was. Like like the movies are the museum in action, right?

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  Like a like a video store when we had them, those were museums.

• 1:39:19Trevor Noah?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  Of of world civilization.

• 1:39:23Trevor Noah?

  Was time traveling.

• 1:39:24Speaker 02

  Right, but it was both it was both that and artifacts of of peoples.

• 1:39:29Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  And without them, it's really hard to know.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  It well, not really hard because we've got this whole.

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  I would say quarry of social media, right? Where like you could you could dig through there to find that one chunk of marble that like is worth keeping. But there's just a lot of rocks in there.

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  But the movies are this kind of like determined, like cultivated art form. Where even when they suck or like don't have aspirations to greatness, still wind up telling you a story.

• 1:40:08Trevor Noah?

  They do.

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  It's it's it and it's it feels true. And I think that we are no longer we are so addicted now to. Whatever it is the superhero gives us in terms of a feeling of of.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  I'm giving these movies more credit than they probably even need. But like, there might be something here about the way these movies make us feel as a people.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:33Speaker 02

  Right? Like, it's great to watch these people stop the world from ending over and over and over and over. And what no longer happens is, regular people no longer exist in this world, right?

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  There's a world in which I, for as strange as I found Clark Kent's parents in this new Superman movie, I was kind of fascinated by how these two people raised that.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  Are they black?

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:41:03Speaker 02

  You'd have heard about that.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Spoiler alert.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  You'd have heard about that. You know you would have heard about it.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Thought we got Ariel.

• 1:41:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got stuck with Ariel. That's as good as it's gonna get.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  But I think that, you know, I grew up in a time, and this is not a nostalgia, this is not nostalgia that I'm talking about. It's the value of storytelling, which is not a nostalgic observation. But you got a really robust menu of stories. Even when they didn't explicitly feature people who were black, were Asian, were gay, you got stories that were human enough

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  Amen, yes.

• 1:41:48Speaker 02

  to trick you into thinking that you were Molly Ringwald. Right? Could trick you into thinking you were Clint Eastwood. For as problematic as that even is, right? You would be seduced into identifying with lots and lots of different people who did not wear a cape.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  You're right. It's almost like there's certain parts of making a movie that have been removed. The kitchen.

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  Oh!

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  The dining table.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  Speak!

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  The couch and the TV, the remote, holding the remote. The driveway, the garage, the car, have all been removed and those were the things.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  This is...

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  The bicycle lying in the driveway, you know, and the lawn, and the sidewalk. Those things have been removed to make movies more efficient. And if you look at old movies, those things were always there.

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  Always there.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  Even when they looked fake, right? They were still present.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  I always say the first time I experienced a beer...

• 1:42:43Trevor Noah?

  In in in cinema, was was was through was through cinema, I mean.

• 1:42:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:47Trevor Noah?

  When someone just opens a can of beer after coming back from work and holding a six pack.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  He told a story.

• 1:42:51Trevor Noah?

  For the longest time, I never thought you drank beer cold.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:42:55Trevor Noah?

  So when you see commercials.

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  Oh, my god, wow.

• 1:42:58Trevor Noah?

  You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. After a long, hot day's work, you take a six pack. And then then I experienced a hangover and I'm like, how do you go to work tomorrow after? After drinking six warm beers?

• 1:43:12Trevor Noah?

  So all all of that has been removed. You're right. A real human being and the aspirations that a a normal human being would want to have of having somewhere to go to and somewhere to depart from have been removed.

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  They don't exist anymore.

• 1:43:24Trevor Noah?

  Look looking through a window has been removed.

• 1:43:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, because you now have these giant like hangars where all the action takes place, right? Like, they call them headquarters. You know, I mean, they could, they're just giant sound stages that seem like sound stages in the movies themselves. And so I don't know, I just, I'm not saying I want more farm movies. But there was a value to watching Sally Field try to keep her farm from going under.

• 1:43:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:53Speaker 02

  Which is the kind of movie that happened every week. Like Jessica Lange, Sally Field, there was a there was a farm movie a week with some some great white woman trying to keep the farm going. And Danny Glover was on every single one of them being like, I got you.

• 1:44:08Trevor Noah?

  But you know.

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  I'm gonna help.

• 1:44:09Trevor Noah?

  You know, it's funny, you just say that you said that now. I do think there's something powerful in that imagery and what story it tells us, because let's think of like, you know, like Danny Glover and that type of story. Lethal Weapon.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  Oh, here's a great example.

• 1:44:26Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean? Lethal Weapon or Die Hard or any of those types of movies. As much as these people are quote unquote professionals, there was also like a very everyman-ness to the story.

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  You spend so much time in Danny Glover's house over, once they realize that that was a real relationship between Mel Gibson and Danny Glover.

• 1:44:43Trevor Noah?

  Exactly.

• 1:44:44Speaker 02

  You got to know his family.

• 1:44:45Trevor Noah?

  That's exactly what I mean. That's exactly, but what to what you just said now, which I've never considered is you don't have that with the Avengers.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:44:53Trevor Noah?

  You really don't. Do you know what I mean? Their family only exists as a device to give them an origin story. But beyond that. We we don't see like why this is their family or who these people are, who they mean to them, or how they shape them, or how they but what it does more importantly is I I think of the effect that it has on us in in questioning or even imagining where safety comes from. Wow. You get what I'm saying? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Think think of how if you if you just grew up now watching. That was a good one. That was good. No, but think about it. If you grew up if you grew up watching like Rambo, or if you grew up watching like like that that era

• 1:45:33Trevor Noah?

  of movies, Die Hard, you believed that you as an individual could make an outsized influence in the world. I don't care if a band of terrorists has taken over a building, you can do something about it. In your tank top and bare feet. You can indeed, but you can do something about it. And then Avengers comes along and it's like, listen, listen, all you are gonna do is be in your office screaming. That's your only role. And then Superman or Hulk or whoever, DC or. Gonna destroy your office. Yeah, but all you your only role is to scream and run and then pray Superman swoops you off the ground before the thing falls on you and pray that, you know, storm creates

• 1:46:17Trevor Noah?

  a little tornado to protect but that's your only role. They don't even like help the superheroes. There's not even like a thing where it's like, if it wasn't for you, people of Earth, this wouldn't know. It's like y'all wouldn't be anything without us. Your job is to have your hot dog cart that gets blown up and all you do is run away. Your job is to have your car fall off a bridge and then that superhero comes and lifts it and holds the bridge and then you get out with your family. That's your only purpose. But that's us turning everything over to these powers. But that's what I mean. But I'm saying like you don't you don't think of the power of that because and I'm sure some people watching this be like, ah, come on, man, movies. But one of the best analyses that was like like of sociology was the the Eddie Murphy

• 1:47:01Trevor Noah?

  special when he talked about Rocky. Do you remember that bit? Oh, yeah. And he talked about like what it did for like white working class men was yo, Rocco, hey, Rocco. And I think it was very astute. It made a lot of people who were like, oh, that's me. I'm a quote unquote nobody, but you know what? I'm a somebody. I could come to a draw in a ring with Leon Spinks. Just let me, just let me. All I gotta do is run up a art museum steps.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  And beat up a cup of like a hanging, hanging cut of beef?

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  Side of beef?

• 1:47:34Speaker 02

  Let me, let me at Leon Spinks. I will fucking fuck him up.

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's powerful. We take for granted how powerful that is.

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  I mean, just think about what it takes for people of at least my parents' generation. But I mean, really, anybody who grew up as a non-white person in a society of oppression, right? You grew up in the Jim Crow South, you grew up in apartheid South Africa, and you get these stories that are asking you to, to spend some time with white people who don't ostensibly have anything to do with your situation. But it's a story about somebody trying to overcome something. Somebody trying to, somebody caught in a plot that they need to like get solved by the end of the, you know, hour and 40 minutes. You are suddenly forgotten about your situation.

• 1:48:25Speaker 02

  And you have completely invested your hour and 40 minutes into this other person's situation. And there's a world in which some of the images from this experience, whether it's like terrible, like the movie itself is not very good. It doesn't matter.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter, yeah.

• 1:48:42Speaker 02

  Because you're, you're wrapped up in a story. And maybe by the end you're like, this doesn't really work. But what you did was you watched an avatar for your own self in some way, go through something that you couldn't imagine going through until you... Do you think I ever thought for one second that Bruce Willis, like I never thought once about trying to save people from a, from a hijacked skyscraper? Never once!

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  You've tried to help them from someone blocking them from viewing art. And that's about it.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  That is a superheroic act that a regular person can do every day. But the power of the movies...

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  Big and small is like when they're focused on what regular people are dealing with and going through. You just, you learn something about how to be in the world, just period.

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  There were no CEOs in movies.

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  Well, there were.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  They were just regular working guys.

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  There was a really, but here's another aspect of this. To your point about Die Hard, there was a whole moment in the eighties. That you probably remember because I know you saw these movies where like every week you'd get some young person. Who thought they could do a better job making money than the people who went to Princeton to do it. Like Working Girl, Secret of My Success.

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  These movies came out all the time or they were like the descendant, they were the children of these people like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The story of a yuppie's kid who just decides. I'm gonna just act like my dad all day and not even realize I'm acting like my dad.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  That day was.

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. You hated it.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  I loved it.

• 1:50:20Speaker 02

  Oh, you loved it. Okay, good.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  We should try to recreate it.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  You and me?

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you can bring a friend or two and then. Could have the longest day ever. Exactly.

• 1:50:30Speaker 02

  What would it look like for a bunch of like old men to do Ferris Bueller? I think, I don't know, but I feel like.

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  Matthew Broderick, right?

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, just like you, he would take, I mean, he's actually, didn't he do a Ferris Bueller commercial or something? He did, yeah.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  As his old self, as his regular current self.

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  No way.

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, he did it. But that's the other thing, right? Like we have given the keys to our, to our, to our, to our civilization over to. I'm gonna say the algorithm to decide, right? Like these executives who make our movies don't care about telling stories that reflect the lives that we are living currently. They care about mergers. They care about like making sure that, I don't actually know what they care about, but I can tell you what they don't care about because we don't get it.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  I'm not saying I want places in the heart every week. But I wouldn't mind it now.

• 1:51:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I was I was thinking the other day, I don't know how long it'll be before we see another movie like Forrest Gump in the cinema.

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, that's a great for example.

• 1:51:35Trevor Noah?

  That's like, that's a, that's an example of a film where I go, I don't know a single person who could watch Forrest Gump and not find themselves somewhere in the story.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:51:43Trevor Noah?

  I don't care who you are. That story touches everyone. It touches everything. It touches race, class, disability. It touches war. It touches capitalism. It touches. It doesn't matter what it is.

• 1:51:54Speaker 02

  Everywhere.

• 1:51:54Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but.

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  It's about going everywhere.

• 1:51:56Trevor Noah?

  Exactly. And and can that story exist today? And someone might go, oh, but who cares? And I'm like, yeah, but. If you look at it on the on the on the smallest level, do you remember what you would do as a kid when you were done watching a movie?

• 1:52:11Speaker 02

  You'd watch it again.

• 1:52:12Speaker 01

  You'd enact everything you.

• 1:52:13Trevor Noah?

  You would enact everything. You would go, I'm going outside.

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  Would watch it.

• 1:52:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, Wes was a critic. He was like a five year old critic.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  What was that? Wes is like a. I want to know how that works.

• 1:52:23Trevor Noah?

  Wes is like a, Wes is like a five, a five year old critic at large. Right, all right.

• 1:52:26Speaker 02

  Well, this time, this time I'm making notes. That you probably shouldn't be reenacting.

• 1:52:31Trevor Noah?

  Oh, damn.

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  When I was eleven, I saw Fatal Attraction Lake three times in the movie theater. So guess what I'm not doing?

• 1:52:41Trevor Noah?

  So.

• 1:52:42Speaker 01

  You don't want to know how much, how many times you watch Sharon Stone doing the leg cross.

• 1:52:45Trevor Noah?

  So now, yeah, but what I'm saying is like, what you would do is you would go out and want to be. You would, you would try the kick.

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  Goonies is a great example of that, for instance.

• 1:52:57Trevor Noah?

  You would go on the adventure. You would, you would imagine yourself, to your point, in that world, or you would imagine that that world could happen to you, right? And so as as we look at the shift of storytelling, you know, when you tie all of these threads together, the museum, the story that is telling you of you and the possibilities that you and your people may contain, uh, movies, it's it's exactly the same thing. It's like, yeah, names. It's telling you the story of you, the possibilities that you contain.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:53:29Trevor Noah?

  And then within that framework, you you now act, you now. It it, I just remembered something I I wanted to ask you, and I wondered how this fits into everything. Why do you think it is that so many critics at large, you know, whether they focused on fashion or art or whatever, why do you think so many of them were black men? What do you, what do you think it is? No, genuine question.

• 1:53:53Speaker 02

  No, I'm thinking about this because there's also Margo Jefferson, who is a, you know, great American critic and memoirist and a black woman.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  I think it really, I mean, I'm like, we should name who were, some of the people we might be talking about, like Hilton Als, Vincent Cunningham, Margo, of course.

• 1:54:21Speaker 02

  Some other great person that I'm not remembering at the moment. But basically, I think, well, I mean,

• 1:54:29Speaker 02

  I think there's like an innate curiosity about, like you get trained to be curious, right? Like, I mean, if you have the luxury of being able to think broadly about things, or like making these connections, because so much of, I mean, a lot of my life was really about, like my childhood anyway, was my mother sort of encouraging me to, to just

• 1:54:53Speaker 02

  think for myself, right? Like, if you've got a question, you go find the answer, because I actually don't know it.

• 1:55:02Speaker 02

  So you'll have to look it up, and there was no internet. So I would, you know, I, I became very good at encyclopedias, for instance, which is where you got the answers to these questions if you, if you, if you had them.

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  I think a lot of the people that we're talking about are basically the same age.

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  I also think, I mean, I'm younger than those guys, but I also, well, and Vincent is, is younger than I am. But I think that you, there is something about

• 1:55:31Speaker 02

  Seeing things and wanting to be free enough to not just ask a question, but like to connect them to something else.

• 1:55:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  And also, it's like, it's a little dissatisfying because you learn this. I was a movie critic for a long time.

• 1:55:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  And you realize, at least in the, in my practice, that I was spending a lot of time doing critic-at-large work anyway. Right?

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Because movies are, are a fascinating art form because they already incorporate so many other art forms to exist.

• 1:56:04Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:56:05Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, there is, you know, the visual, the audio, the compositional, right? They have to be written. Hopefully, I mean, more than typed. You hope you got a screenplay that was written and not just typed.

• 1:56:20Trevor Noah?

  Does the fashion?

• 1:56:21Speaker 02

  There's the costumes. There are the, there's the soundtrack or the score. There's so many, I mean, if we're, I mean, architecture. There's, there's just an opportunity, if your eye is open, to making these connections among all these different disciplines and art forms that are being assembled and harnessed to tell, you know, any kind of story.

• 1:56:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  And these are things that you frequently, as a moviegoer, you just take for granted.

• 1:56:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48Speaker 02

  But I learned at some point, for instance, I usually stay for all the, I worked at a movie theater for a number of years and I would have to stand at the back of the theater while people left and watch the credits.

• 1:57:00Trevor Noah?

  Well, what were you doing at the movie theater?

• 1:57:02Speaker 02

  I was an usher.

• 1:57:02Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was an usher from like 16 to 19.

• 1:57:08Trevor Noah?

  Wait, so what did you do back then as an usher? Because I feel like ushers have changed over the years in movie theaters. Like, what was your job? Breaking the ticket and showing them?

• 1:57:17Speaker 02

  Rip a ticket.

• 1:57:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:18Speaker 02

  Like, if it was an older person or a disabled person, I would take them to their seat.

• 1:57:22Trevor Noah?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

  You'd wait at the back of the theater for the first 15 minutes of every show to make sure the picture was right? Doesn't happen anymore.

• 1:57:29Trevor Noah?

  Oh, no, I'm like, I'm like, where were you? You know how many movies are, you know how many movies are blurry these days? And I'm like, oh, where is, I didn't even know there was someone who's supposed to do something about that.

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  Trevor, I go and report. And now, I didn't like doing it in the old days because when something was wrong, there was one projectionist, at least in Boston, where I lived for a while. Who, and you know, that person might get in trouble if something was wrong. But then, and I, you know, there are a lot of things to be happy for James Cameron for. One of them that's not so great is that, like that momentary advent of 3D.

• 1:58:01Trevor Noah?

  That was terrible.

• 1:58:02Speaker 02

  Which changed projection, right? It helped change projection. I'm gonna blame James Cameron in Avatar, but it could have been some, some other thing.

• 1:58:10Trevor Noah?

  I don't, I don't blame him. I blame the people chasing the money behind him. Cause Avatar did it for real, for real.

• 1:58:16Speaker 02

  Oh, it did do it for real.

• 1:58:17Trevor Noah?

  And then everyone else was just like, it's 3D. And it's like, no, it's not. But it's just two pictures, man.

• 1:58:22Speaker 02

  But Trevor, they would leave the lenses on. They would leave the 3D.

• 1:58:25Trevor Noah?

  Is that what it was?

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  They would leave the, some theaters would leave the 3D projector on for 2D movies. Or, or the lens that you needed to flip off or whatever for a 2D movie. So, I mean, there's a lot of things about the movie going experience that suck. But like my job back in the day with a film print was just to make sure the picture was straight. The sound was good. There were no issues with the print. Um, and then I cleaned the bathroom. Lot of bathroom cleaning. Spent a lot of time cleaning the bathroom.

• 1:58:53Trevor Noah?

  What's the worst bathroom to clean, men or women?

• 1:58:56Speaker 02

  Great question. Women, easily.

• 1:58:59Trevor Noah?

  That's the worst?

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  Oh my God. Ellen DeGeneres, one of Ellen DeGeneres' greatest bits.

• 1:59:06Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I thought, you know, I didn't know where this story was going.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  I thought you were gonna say Ellen DeGeneres uses female bathrooms. I was like, how dare you?

• 1:59:12Trevor Noah?

  I thought he was gonna say Ellen DeGeneres took a dump so, like, I didn't know where that was going. I didn't know where that joke was, where that story was going. Yeah, or, or, he went, he went like, he went like, women bathrooms are the worst. Ellen DeGeneres.

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  No, Ellen DeGeneres never came to the rits of the bors where I worked for a bunch of years. But Ellen DeGeneres informed, I was doing this bathroom work.

• 1:59:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

  Before I saw Ellen DeGeneres' great bit about her own questions about what is going on in the ladies room. And she at some point is like, I went into the ladies room and I just thought that a bomb had gone off in here, except the dirtiest bomb of all time. This is like from like the late eighties.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  I thought it was cleaner.

• 2:00:03Speaker 02

  Oh, no. And she's like, I, when I go in there and I see what's on the walls and on the floor, I'm like, what are these ladies doing? Like, and then she, she's like, they go, do they go into the, were they using the, the, the disabled bars in the, in the, in the handy, in the disabled stall to like, to not sit on the toilet? Because that's what I did. And I'm swinging around doing a, doing a, doing a, a high bar routine in the ladies room. And then she, I think the punchline is like, so I got down and I looked around what I did and I was like, oh, this explains it.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  Oh, damn.

• 2:00:37Speaker 02

  This is why they're in such bad shape. All the women going in there are doing gymnastics.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  Yo, any place with a queue and high foot traffic can never be clean. Also.

• 2:00:45Trevor Noah?

  I just, I don't, I don't know why, okay, cause I assumed, you know why? Because whenever I'm in a men's bathroom, it's always, there's always pee on the floor. It's always sticky for some random reason.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, no random reason. That, that reason is not random. Don't go spreading lies on this podcast. There's no random reason why their floors are sticky.

• 2:01:07Trevor Noah?

  So, so I would always go like, this is disgusting. Surely the other side can't be worse because I went, the, people aren't just like peeing on the floor the way the men are. Now you've just blown my mind because I've never, I've never wo, I've never worked in cleaning men's and women's toilets, so.

• 2:01:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, the women didn't even want to clean the women's room.

• 2:01:27Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 2:01:27Speaker 02

  Like, I mean, that's how, I mean, it was, you know, I worked with, with, I won't, I mean, uh, I'm, Loden, Loden was one of the women who worked, she just, Loden would never clean.

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  She would refuse.

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  She wouldn't do it. She's also was too cool. That was one of the coolest people I've ever worked with. Joe Novak, Fritz, uh, we wound up cleaning the, the, and, and Greg. Oh, man, I loved Greg. Anyway. Yeah, it's like, why do you even ask a question like that?

• 2:01:59Trevor Noah?

  Because I've always wanted to know.

• 2:02:01Speaker 02

  Because whenever I talk about it, I really, that's how I remember it. Was, I can't believe the women's room.

• 2:02:08Trevor Noah?

  No, that's what I wanted to know.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, but my question is, where does this model high horse come from when you live with a woman and should always criticize our bathroom etiquette when their public stalls look like that?

• 2:02:19Trevor Noah?

  That's what I, maybe that's also another thing. Because like, that would be like a thing that maybe even my mom would say, just, yeah, would be like, oh, it's like a men's toilet in here. At school, they used to say something similar as well. I don't know. I mean, now I'm hearing it, Derek. This was like a big conspiracy theory. This is wild.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 2:02:37Trevor Noah?

  But I interrupted you, sorry. Let's go back. So we're in the movies, you're in this world. You are, your job is to make sure that everything works.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:02:45Trevor Noah?

  Rewinding to that. Sorry, I took us off, everybody.

• 2:02:48Speaker 02

  No, that's fine. I mean, I now I'm curious about the mail that you guys are gonna get about about pristine, about pristine women's rooms. But I will tell you firsthand, I spent three years cleaning, but cleaning two sets of bathrooms and one, one I did not dread cleaning.

• 2:03:07Trevor Noah?

  Damn. Well, this is good to know. So, going back to what you're saying.

• 2:03:14Trevor Noah?

  I, I wonder if the gist of it is, is it, is it that it's easier to look in when you are not in? Is that what it is? Is, is there, is there a correlation between being able to critique a society and look at it through an objective lens? When you are not like, held within the, the, the deepest ven of that, of that society? Is that what it is? Or, or is it just how your mind works? Like, what do you, what do you think informs how you're able to be a great critic at large?

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  It's probably both. I mean, you know, I'm gonna answer this, but I'm also like, in sitting here talking to you and being familiar with the work that, that, that goes on.

• 2:03:54Trevor Noah?

  Work?

• 2:03:55Speaker 02

  Like, especially with Trevor. I mean, it is.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Wes, have you seen us though? Where have you been for the last hour and a half? Work!

• 2:04:05Speaker 02

  You've been working. Like, this, this is a, this is a mind. This is an act of mind. Um, but I mean, I think, I, I mean, one of the things that, you know, one of the great thrills of, of, of my cultural diet in my lifetime.

• 2:04:22Speaker 02

  Was was like spending time with you during the pandemic.

• 2:04:26Trevor Noah?

  Oh damn, thank you.

• 2:04:27Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, you were doing the work that I do just in this highly concentrated, I would say almost like vertiginously difficult form, right?

• 2:04:40Trevor Noah?

  Vertiginously?

• 2:04:41Speaker 02

  Just, you know, like, oh.

• 2:04:42Trevor Noah?

  Man, we need to like, yo.

• 2:04:43Speaker 02

  Doesn't matter, you can cut it.

• 2:04:44Trevor Noah?

  Yo, no, I'm not cutting anything. We just need a, whew.

• 2:04:49Speaker 02

  But anyway, the point is like.

• 2:04:50Trevor Noah?

  This man's vocabulary.

• 2:04:51Speaker 02

  I think there's a world in which some of my interests, yes, vertiginous, vertiginous, like vertigo, you know, like.

• 2:05:01Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, I'm with you. I'm like, yeah, I'll, I'll catch up.

• 2:05:04Speaker 02

  All right.

• 2:05:04Trevor Noah?

  I learn words, me.

• 2:05:07Speaker 02

  It's gonna be a long night for me. Oh no, look out, passenger seat, bro. He's, he's already there.

• 2:05:16Speaker 02

  Wow, it usually takes me a drink to start working for massa.

• 2:05:24Speaker 02

  I mean, just saying, I, I did, we did just, we, well, whatever.

• 2:05:33Speaker 02

  My point is that I think I'm hearing what you say, and I think that there is,

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  there's something about wanting to understand how the world works.

• 2:05:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:45Speaker 02

  And there's an understanding, you develop an understanding, especially as a young person, that like art, art is a version of how the world works.

• 2:05:53Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:05:55Speaker 02

  It is a world unto itself that is also in, in one way or another, reflecting the world you live in, even if like the properties within that world aren't one to one,

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  yours. I mean, I think that one of the most amazing things about the way that I grew up, and Nicole Hannah-Jones and I talk about this a lot, just in terms of, with a sense of wonder, which is, you know, we grew up, like millions of people grew up at a time, black people, grew up at a time where, you know, if you go back and watch the, the movies of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, like there were very few flattering depictions of black people from Hollywood at least.

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  And it never mattered, right? It never mattered because A, I mean, I knew what my family was like. I knew I was, I was a part of a family that had no bearing, like, you know, there would be these ways in which like people would seem to overlap with members of my family, like this actress Anna Maria Horford. When she would show up like as Harrison Ford's secretary and presumed innocent, I knew that movie wasn't about her and I wasn't silly enough to think it should have been. But there was also a part of me that was like, why shouldn't it be? What's she doing while this woman's getting murdered over here in the office? Like, I, I just wondered about things like that.

• 2:07:24Speaker 02

  But I also was just fascinated by how these made things like had meaning. They meant something, like the stories amounted to something. The, the prolonged exposure to individual stars or individual story tropes. They wound up meaning something. Like, what, what is a Glenn Close performance when you've watched 10 Glenn Close movies in, you know, seven years? You know, who is Spike Lee, who is this guy Spike Lee? Once you've seen, you know, four or five Spike Lee movies?

• 2:08:07Speaker 02

  What are soundtracks doing? Like, so you're telling me there's a world in which there's music playing in this movie? And the people in the movie can't hear it? Whoa, but I can hear it? And this music has nothing to do with the, with anything happening in the world of the movie? But, well, in the world of the characters, but in the world of the movie, this soundtrack is like, like a conveyor belt of action? And of emotion. Right, and of feeling? Like, that is, I just, I became obsessed with how soundtracks worked in, in, in movies. Now there are no soundtracks. Yeah. Right? There's a music supervisor who makes sure like there's vintage music in a lot of these movies. Or cool, cool songs. But at one point in time,

• 2:08:53Speaker 02

  you were getting original music, some of the greatest pop songs ever written were written for movies. My heart will go on. I mean, yeah. That is like, that is an elite example. Highway to the fucking danger zone, right? Like, like a movie, like a song that.

• 2:09:10Speaker 02

  It's so written and could only exist for Top Gun.

• 2:09:16Speaker 02

  Like, you couldn't put that, you just, you couldn't put that out as a song without knowing there was a, there was a fighter jet attached to it. What, what is Kenny talking about? What's he talking, highway to the danger zone, but you know, because you would have known.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:09:31Speaker 02

  That Tom, well, you would have known that Top Gun was attached to it. Tom Cruise was not quite yet.

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  Not the big star that he is.

• 2:09:38Speaker 02

  The Tom Cruise. He became a star in part because of that movie. But I don't know, I just really wanted to figure out what, what the meaning of things were. Like, I can tell you, like, reading all of those people as younger versions of themselves.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:53Speaker 02

  That they also had these questions. And frequently, the thing that made someone like Margot Jefferson great was that she

• 2:10:04Speaker 02

  really wanted to understand, for instance, because she wrote about music for a long time, why all these white artists sounded black. Right? Like, she just was hearing black music in these white artists' sounds and wanted to try to taxonomize and kind of theorize a little bit about what she was hearing. And, you know, she wrote one of the greatest pieces of criticism I've ever read about, like, mostly built around Elvis, but also just around, like, 1970s rock and roll and its, its relationship to 1950s rock and roll in the US.

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  Do you guys, like, are there, like, South African critics that you, that you like a lot?

• 2:10:57Speaker 01

  Well, there was one that Trevor brought up the other day.

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  Who?

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  Which we grew up watching on television every Sunday.

• 2:11:02Trevor Noah?

  Oh, Barry Rungar?

• 2:11:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, he was legendary.

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm into that.

• 2:11:05Trevor Noah?

  But he was, yeah, he was a film critic, but he was.

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  Every Sunday. Barry Rungar?

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:11:10Trevor Noah?

  Passed away many, many years ago, but like, he was the first person, I think, most of us encountered where he would, he wouldn't tell you, like, the movie was cool or fun or, he didn't, he didn't use any of those words or ideas. He... He critiqued what it was trying to do and what it meant and how it would. But in a way, we're like, I remember sitting in front of the TV as a ten year old. And I felt like I needed like a monocle and a glass of tea. No, because of how sophisticated he made me feel.

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:11:40Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, I would, I would, and then when I would go to the cinema, I would stand there with my friends and I'd be like, ah, yes, I've heard that it relies too heavily on tropes of, I was like, I don't know what any of this means. But you know what it made me do is like, at least around that time, it, it gave me the first invitation. To think beyond what was presented.

• 2:12:03Trevor Noah?

  And also include how it was presented and what that meant.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:12:06Trevor Noah?

  And he like, I think he did that in a big way where it was like, oh, he made you realize when things were derivative. He made you consider why it wasn't, you know, because you'd be like, it's a dope action movie. And then by the end of his review and his critique, you'd go, huh, this is not, it's not really a great story. Or it's not a, you know, and I, I, that's, I would say that's like one of those where we, he had an outsized influence, I think, in, in a lot of South Africans' lives.

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 2:12:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd never heard of him. I'm, I'm definitely, I will spend some time watching some YouTube.

• 2:12:38Trevor Noah?

  Some YouTube. I wonder if they'll be on, you never know.

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  Bejazzled waistcoat.

• 2:12:43Trevor Noah?

  He used to have an.

• 2:12:44Speaker 02

  Oh, not one of those critics. There's always, you know.

• 2:12:48Trevor Noah?

  How he dressed.

• 2:12:49Speaker 01

  He used to have a waistcoat and like a white long shirt.

• 2:12:52Trevor Noah?

  I actually forgot how he dressed.

• 2:12:53Speaker 02

  It was, it was sequined?

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, some, yeah, he was flamboyant.

• 2:12:57Speaker 02

  Huh, huh, fascinating. You don't remember that part?

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 2:13:00Speaker 02

  So the important part got through, though.

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:13:04Trevor Noah?

  I mean, I guess, yeah, but I'm like.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Whenever I got information about a movie, I was like, I'm never wearing a waistcoat in my life, ever.

• 2:13:11Trevor Noah?

  But a jacket with sequins.

• 2:13:13Speaker 02

  Count me in.

• 2:13:15Trevor Noah?

  Oh, man. Yo, Wes, this has been great, man.

• 2:13:17Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:13:18Trevor Noah?

  No, man, like, because genuinely, I hope, I hope people get what I get from you. And it's like, I don't know, here's what it is. I think as we've come to live in a world that gives us more faster, it means we have less time to digest, right? So just like food, you're just getting it shoveled at you, shoveled at you, shoveled. But now it's in like tiny little bites and it's like it just moves on and it's gone.

• 2:13:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:13:43Trevor Noah?

  And when you're in that world, you don't necessarily notice the story of the meal that you're getting. You don't see the trend. You don't really understand what just happened or what you might be part of or what story you're hearing. And what I really love about your work is it just reminds us and invites us to do that in like a really cool way. Like, I think a lot of people love movies, but not many people think about what a movie does to them and how it makes them feel, how it can make a country see itself or not, how it can make a people see itself. So like, thank you, man. I appreciate your work, your vibe, coming and hanging with us.

• 2:14:18Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:14:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, man.

• 2:14:19Speaker 02

  I mean, it was an honor. I appreciate you guys a lot.

• 2:14:23Trevor Noah?

  You got to come back again.

• 2:14:24Speaker 02

  Truly, I appreciate you.

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  I will come back.

• 2:14:25Trevor Noah?

  You got to come. What's the best movie you've seen this year?

• 2:14:29Speaker 02

  This year?

• 2:14:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I know a lot of them were terrible. What's the best one you saw this year?

• 2:14:33Speaker 01

  From this year?

• 2:14:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:34Speaker 02

  Okay. I mean, it's tricky. You know, I saw this, there's a few, there's a few movies I've seen that I liked.

• 2:14:44Speaker 02

  I just, well, I liked Warriors a lot. Warriors, sorry, Weapons.

• 2:14:48Trevor Noah?

  Weapons, Weapons.

• 2:14:49Speaker 02

  I liked Weapons a lot. I don't know why I keep calling it Warriors. Uh, Weapons, you know, has all the, when you were talking about the, the granularity, the sort of like, like native granularity that is going out of the movies.

• 2:15:03Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 2:15:03Speaker 02

  Just like, you know, the things that give a movie or any work of art, be it a novel or a painting, a sense of place.

• 2:15:11Trevor Noah?

  Texture as well.

• 2:15:12Speaker 02

  There's a, have you seen this movie?

• 2:15:14Trevor Noah?

  No, don't spoil anything.

• 2:15:14Speaker 02

  I won't spoil anything.

• 2:15:15Trevor Noah?

  But I know it's from the same director and I think writer of Barbarian.

• 2:15:19Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 2:15:20Trevor Noah?

  And, and some of the imagery that you sort of even alluding to is similar. Like you felt like you were somewhere with people who live a certain life and it felt very.

• 2:15:30Speaker 02

  Like us. This movie has a sense of place. Even though it doesn't tell you exactly where it is, I see some Pennsylvania license plates. Um, and in the distance, you can see a city that is not Philadelphia, but you, you know, you're somewhere. Like small towny, but you also, there's a, there's a really important shot in the movie. It doesn't spoil anything, but I think about it a lot in terms of the way. Some production person and perhaps even the screenplay itself. Wanted us to notice something without drawing our attention to it explicitly. There might be a close up of what I'm about to tell you, but I noticed it before the camera told me to.

• 2:16:15Speaker 02

  Which is a bunch of newspapers piled up in a driveway. Like newspaper delivery and they just, these plastic bags of newspaper just littering a driveway. In a, in the background of, of a different shot, of a, of a shot that had. You're not necessar- you're free to notice whatever you want because it's a painterly image, right? The, the image is a long shot. It's framed in such a way that your, your eye is free to go wherever it wants. It's a very democratic piece of filmmaking, this movie in a lot of ways. In terms of what it's allowing you to keep your eye on. Um, but I noticed that and I was like. I don't really care what else happens in this movie because this, the person who made it.

• 2:17:00Speaker 02

  Cares about the things I care about. Thought about us. Right. He thought about like what a, what a regular human might. Be like living day to day. So I don't know. I mean, that's a great, but also, sorry, I got, I tried to connect that to what we were talking about earlier. The movie's just suspenseful. It's just a very great work of suspense. Okay. I had, it hit my dread, my dread area. I rarely experienced dread the way. Oh, wow. Um, I did in this movie. Um, you might hate the ending. Um, I, it, the ending changed nothing for me. I like the ending just as much as I liked everything else.

• 2:17:42Speaker 02

  Um, sinners, you know, sinners is not, sinners, it's funny. I, I was watching.

• 2:17:49Speaker 02

  Weapons and was like, I think this is a better made movie than Sinners. Cause it almost really is, but Weapons doesn't have what Sinners has, which is like an active mind that is really determined to make you wonder. Hmm. What is really going on here? Yeah. Right? Like your imag- your imagination as a moviegoer is free to, I mean, I'm, I'm still not sure about Sinners. In terms of like what is going on. A hundred percent. Um, whereas Weapons, it's, it's pretty, there's some ambiguities, but. It ties it up.

• 2:18:28Speaker 02

  Its ambiguities aren't really at selling point. It's the crispness of its filmmaking and it's, it's real attention to how to build and generate and exploit suspense. Um, but Sinners is just like, god damn it. It's a great film. Like this, the first hour of that movie alone, I could have watched two of that. Yeah, that's just like a film film. Yeah. And this is like, and it's just a very satisfying I, work of ideas. Um, and sometimes a work of ideas is almost better than a perfectly made movie. Mm hmm. Um, so I mean, those are the two, and then there's this movie that's going to come out in the fall, um, by Kelly Reichart. Called Mastermind. That's about, um, that's got, um,

• 2:19:13Speaker 02

  oh my God, what's that guy's name? I'm not used to saying, uh, he's the Irish guy who is in Challengers, who is not Mike Feist. Um. Irish guy in Challengers. Yeah, anyway, that guy, whose name will occur to me while I'm saying this to you, um, he tries to commit, you're not going to believe this, an art heist. Full circle moment. And the question is, um, is he going to pull it off? Um, and I won't ruin it for you, but this movie has, it's just you, it's thrilling because you're watching a director whose movies you've been, I've been watching for. Yeah. Years. Been yearning for. And she,

• 2:19:59Speaker 02

  she's just really, she's an art house, she's an art director. She doesn't care, I don't, I don't know if she cares where her movies get played, but like, she just.

• 2:20:10Speaker 02

  All she's into texture, she's into like atmosphere. Plot is not really her thing.

• 2:20:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:17Speaker 02

  This woman was like, you know what? I wanna, I wanna tell a story. Beginning, middle, end, suspense, surprise. This movie is the, the ending of the year.

• 2:20:29Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:20:30Speaker 02

  It's got.

• 2:20:30Trevor Noah?

  Big words.

• 2:20:31Speaker 02

  Um, it's called Mastermind. It is, it is very, very good with that Irish actor that you're gonna see all over. What is it? Josh O'Connor? Is that it? Josh O'Connor.

• 2:20:41Trevor Noah?

  We, we, we believe in no Googling in our friendship. Eugene, Eugene and I have a pact. Whoever can say the answer, the most convincing.

• 2:20:49Speaker 02

  We go with it.

• 2:20:50Trevor Noah?

  We go with that.

• 2:20:51Speaker 02

  I've been convinced many times this afternoon.

• 2:20:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, we're just, we're anti-Google, so. Yeah, Wesley, this was great, man. Thank you for joining us.

• 2:20:57Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.

• 2:20:59Trevor Noah?

  And good luck in the, in the, you have the podcast?

• 2:21:02Speaker 02

  Yes, Cannonball is happening every week for the foreseeable future. Forever, forever and ever and ever.

• 2:21:08Trevor Noah?

  Forever and ever.

• 2:21:08Speaker 02

  Um, and you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go write tomorrow. Thanks for having me.

• 2:21:17Trevor Noah?

  This is dope. Thank you.

• 2:21:18Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:21:22Trevor Noah?

  This episode is presented by Whole Foods Market. Whole Foods Markets has everything you need for the holidays. Whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner. Whole Foods Markets has convenience and cost friendly finds that'll delight everyone at your table. Plus great gift ideas, all of which follow the Whole Foods Markets strict ingredient standards. Shop for everything you need at Whole Foods Markets, your holiday headquarters.

• 2:21:51Trevor 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 Parduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now?

• 2:22:22Speaker 04

  Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. Some say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk, scaling with you while being magically affordable. And some say Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more are like building blocks for creating a custom software suite. But I say Odoo is all of it. Fertilizer, magic beanstalk, building blocks. For business. Yeah. Odoo. Exactly what every business needs. Sign up at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.