Henry Louis Gates Jr.

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert experts on expert.

[1] I'm Dan Rather, and I'm joined by the Minister of Duluth, the Duchess of Duluth.

[2] Did you see any mice on your trip?

[3] No mice, but I did see the evidence of when said mice were at play while the cat was away because they did eat back of one of the couch cushions.

[4] So whenever they were removed for Aaron to pull up the hide of bed, they would be up on the counter and I would see where those little mice had been gnawn away at it.

[5] You don't think there was a new mice.

[6] There's definitely not new mice, no, because there's foods around, and we would have heard them.

[7] I told you I would have a talk with them, and I did.

[8] I appreciate it so much because they were not in the dunes with us at all.

[9] Okay, good.

[10] Today we have Dr. Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. He's an award -winning filmmaker, a literary scholar, a journalist, and a cultural critic.

[11] He's been teaching at Harvard.

[12] This is a ballpark.

[13] I probably said it in the interview, but I think he's 30 years into teaching at Harvard.

[14] Yeah.

[15] Now, his books include Stony the Road, Colored People, A Memoir, and The Signifying Monkey.

[16] He has two new docs that are dropping right now, season 10 of Finding Your Roots on PBS, and he also has gospel, which is also coming out on PBS right quick.

[17] Both sensational.

[18] He is so good at both of those things.

[19] This was such a fun interview.

[20] It was.

[21] It was like having a history lesson.

[22] Yeah, I loved it, but like so dynamic and he's a very special person.

[23] Yes.

[24] And he was sitting in a position we've never experienced.

[25] He was much closer to us because he was in a chair for his back or something.

[26] Yeah.

[27] Yeah.

[28] And he was quite close to us, which I enjoyed.

[29] It was more like having a meal with him then.

[30] It was.

[31] And also it's funny because he comes up on this show a fair amount.

[32] Yes, so many of our guests have been and done his show.

[33] Yeah.

[34] Carrie Washington, that was a huge part of her interview.

[35] Ends up becoming a book.

[36] Yeah.

[37] Yeah.

[38] So it's fun.

[39] So it's about time he was here.

[40] Please enjoy Dr. Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.

[41] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[42] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[43] He's an armchair expert.

[44] It's so great to have you.

[45] It's great to meet you.

[46] Man, you had a nice house.

[47] Oh, thank you so much.

[48] I got a proper hillbilly compound here in the middle of Los Angeles.

[49] See, I'm from West Virginia, so I understand.

[50] My whole family's from rural Kentucky.

[51] I grew up in Detroit, so we're the only family in this neighborhood that has 20 cars in the yard and a motorhome and dirt bikes.

[52] But you need a washing machine.

[53] I do need a washer.

[54] Big time, on the porch.

[55] And a refrigerator.

[56] Yes, yes.

[57] And then communically, an enormous satellite dish, which is also present.

[58] You know, I'd like to, I have stinosis, so I would prefer to sit on a hard chair.

[59] Is that possible?

[60] Oh, so this, probably.

[61] Like a straight -up chair.

[62] More like a desk chair.

[63] A desk chair.

[64] You know, at a right angle, if that could make it work.

[65] Is this to your liking?

[66] That's great.

[67] We had a screen last night, excuse me, of Lovar Burton.

[68] You know Lovar Burton?

[69] Yes, yes, for Reading Rainbow.

[70] Yeah, are you in the Reading Rainbow Generation?

[71] I am, yeah.

[72] He has three generations of fans.

[73] Roots, that's me. Reading Rainbow, that's you.

[74] Yeah.

[75] track, of course.

[76] Yeah, that's true.

[77] He's sort of run the Gambit.

[78] I think Kristen has friends with him, too.

[79] Oh, really?

[80] Mm -hmm.

[81] Let's see if he can get my girls.

[82] Oh, great.

[83] Another challenge.

[84] You get the last generation.

[85] Exactly.

[86] Yeah.

[87] So we started doing screening episodes of Finding Roots at Loyola Marymount.

[88] Oh, nice.

[89] On a big screen with a guest.

[90] Oh, okay.

[91] And 500 people.

[92] And is it the first time they're seeing it?

[93] Yeah.

[94] Well, Angela Davis, the revolutionary, she wanted to see her as in advance.

[95] And I don't want her to go off a Go black on me in the middle of fucking 500 people.

[96] But LeVar didn't want to see his.

[97] He wept like a baby.

[98] And then he sat next to me while we watched.

[99] Then we did a one -on -one, and he cried all over again.

[100] Oh, my gosh.

[101] No, it was fat.

[102] It wasn't the great experiences in my life.

[103] Oh, wonderful.

[104] And that was at Loyola?

[105] Yeah.

[106] Okay, so we're on in theory.

[107] Crying's got to be a good signal when you do your job right.

[108] The money shot.

[109] We might, yes, we must.

[110] For us, too, by the way.

[111] Yes, I think we might share that in kind of.

[112] And that's why I brought that up.

[113] I'm not after it, but obviously when it happens, I go like, oh, that's really special.

[114] It's a real moment.

[115] Connection.

[116] Yeah, something occurred that's real.

[117] I had to learn pacing, timing with a guest.

[118] You know, when we sit down, our reveals last four hours or five hours.

[119] Right.

[120] We're seeing an edited 48 -minute version.

[121] Okay, yeah, 30 minutes.

[122] Because we always do two guests per episode.

[123] When I started, it was called African -American Lives.

[124] I only did black guests.

[125] My whole intent was to replicate what Alex Haley purported to have done.

[126] Forgive me. I don't know who Alex Haley is.

[127] Alex Haley was Kuntikinti in Roots in 1977.

[128] So Alex Haley is co -terminous with African -American genealogy, with black people find their roots in Africa.

[129] Right.

[130] Are you old enough to know about the go -back machine?

[131] No. Oh, my God.

[132] Tell me about the go -back machine.

[133] Oh, I think it was called the go -back machine.

[134] You could go back in time.

[135] Okay.

[136] And it was a show.

[137] Yeah, it was a show.

[138] It was a cartoon show.

[139] Okay, okay.

[140] Maybe somebody can Google.

[141] We do a fact check after this.

[142] It'll be a part of the fact check for sure.

[143] Alex was able to reverse the middle passage, go back to Africa, and find the village where he came from on his mother's line.

[144] This was every African -American's dream.

[145] So I conceived a documentary series from PBS that did what he purported to do scientifically in a laboratory, in a test tube.

[146] That was the whole conceit.

[147] And it aired in 2006.

[148] and Oprah, Quincy, Chris Tucker, Bishop T .D. Jake's, May Jemison, the first black female astronaut because I didn't want, just show business people.

[149] In a different range of phenotypes.

[150] Black people come in a thousand shades of brown.

[151] We're a real rainbow coalition of sepias.

[152] So I wanted to stress that as well.

[153] And we were revealing something to one of the guests.

[154] I can't remember which one.

[155] And they didn't cry.

[156] And my producer, Asaco Glancho at the time when we were doing an analysis.

[157] I said, why didn't they cry?

[158] I mean, it was such a moving revelation.

[159] And she said, because you stepped on their line.

[160] You didn't give them enough space.

[161] And I was mortified.

[162] And I had to learn to count.

[163] I had another producer who said, put your head down, shut your eyes, and count to five.

[164] Because they are getting so much information.

[165] And the information is so emotional that you have to let them process it.

[166] And that's what I've learned to do.

[167] And last night, a rabbi, after the screening of Lovar Burton and West Studi's episode, he congratulated me on giving people their space to respond.

[168] And I said, I owe it to two producers who said, just take a breath.

[169] Just let them process.

[170] And it seemed like an interminable amount of time to me. Yeah.

[171] But for them, it was just seconds.

[172] Oh, yeah.

[173] I had to learn this same exact lesson.

[174] But what helped us was we have an audio format.

[175] So whereas you can give space and there's a million things being said by the close -up the guest on their face.

[176] In this format, it's dead.

[177] There's nothing there.

[178] So before we edited, this show started out and it was just live.

[179] And I had that kind of neurotic sense of filling all the gaps.

[180] And then once we started editing, I think we both got, well, me, I was the main offender, got more comfortable and just letting things live.

[181] But it's still hard.

[182] There's this codependent urge to comfort, fill the space, prevent awkwardness.

[183] You know, there's all the human stuff that's going on.

[184] while you're still trying to conduct this other thing.

[185] A lot of bad habits for me. Well, an example is the fact that while you were just speaking, I nodded my head at least three different segments.

[186] These are all cues that you're trying to draw them out, right?

[187] You're trying to keep them going.

[188] You're trying to let people know that you're listening, and you don't know what the hell's going on in their head.

[189] I have the pleasure of introducing you to stories you never dreamed of, but which are not only relevant to the person that you've become, But genetically, the stories about these people are embedded in your genome.

[190] You've inherited DNA from them.

[191] You are a walking family tree.

[192] Yes.

[193] Back 500 years.

[194] That's amazing.

[195] It's crazy.

[196] Or mitochondrial Eve all the way back to Africa.

[197] I mean, literally, it's all there.

[198] It's history before history.

[199] It's a form of immortality.

[200] Yeah.

[201] For your ancestors living in the last six generations, if we take 30 years as a generation, you actually inherit DNA from each of those.

[202] And that's a lot of ancestors.

[203] The first time I did my family tree, I was nine years old.

[204] For me, a family tree was my father's line and my mother's line.

[205] That's right.

[206] It never occurred to me that the leaves and branches in the tree are relevant to my, they're my roots.

[207] The branches of the tree, pick a better metaphor.

[208] We go top down.

[209] Yeah, right.

[210] So you have your father's mother's, father's mother's line.

[211] And your number of ancestors doubles each generation.

[212] So you actually have 64 fourth -grade grandparents.

[213] You have two parents, you have four grandparents, you have eight great -grandparents, you have 16 great -grandparents, you have 32, third -great -grandparents, and 64 fourth -grade grandparents.

[214] Now, for me, as an African -American, I'm extraordinarily likely in two ways.

[215] I know the identities of six of my fourth -grade grandparents.

[216] Wow.

[217] Two sets were freed by the American Revolution.

[218] And the third set was freed in the will of a man. Abraham Van Meter in 1823.

[219] And the punchline is, now I grew up in the hills of eastern West Virginia in the Allegheny Mountains on the Petalamic River.

[220] Not exactly a hotbed of African -American culture.

[221] You know what I'm talking about?

[222] Yeah, right.

[223] The only thing we could get on the radio a .m. in the daytime was WWVA.

[224] Country music.

[225] Yeah.

[226] Right, right.

[227] And then the black music would sneak it.

[228] After the sun went down, the black states from the south, we'd be able to pick them up through AM.

[229] But when I started the series, I'm looking east toward Africa.

[230] I want to replicate Alex Haley.

[231] I want my Kunta -Kente moment.

[232] And when they did my family tree, it turned out that the most interesting thing and the most deeply moving thing that they found was all these generations of African -Americans who were free since the American Revolution, or shortly after, and who lived 30, miles from where I was born.

[233] No. No kidding.

[234] My family never moved from the hollows of the hills of eastern West Virginia.

[235] And you're a country boy.

[236] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[237] You know, deep, deep roots.

[238] I didn't have to look to Senegal or Nigeria, had to look at Moorfield.

[239] Different counties.

[240] Yeah.

[241] Morefield in Hardy County.

[242] And I grew up right on the Maryland -West Virginia border, the Potomac River.

[243] The first day of deer season, school hollows.

[244] Yeah, exactly.

[245] Same in my town, yeah.

[246] You get a 4 -10.

[247] The people there wrapped themselves up in the Second Amendment, and they have no idea why anybody would want to ban guns.

[248] But you know what?

[249] I'm 73 years old, and I lived there 24 -7 until I was 18.

[250] I went off to college, went off to Yale.

[251] Up to that time, I never heard of one person shooting another person, and everybody had guns.

[252] Now, I don't want to come off like I'm defending.

[253] I believe in gun control.

[254] I think we're out of control.

[255] But nobody had an AK -47 to shoot a deer.

[256] Exactly.

[257] You know.

[258] No one's wearing Kevlar out there.

[259] They were wearing an orange vest.

[260] And doing their best not to shoot a cow.

[261] Right.

[262] Which was mistaken for a deer.

[263] That happened more often.

[264] Right.

[265] So I grew up in this counterintuitive, but deeply rooted African -American rural culture, which doesn't fit in the textbooks.

[266] The history books don't generally write about the kind of black experience that I experienced.

[267] And so I have very deep roots, which were right under my feet.

[268] Right.

[269] And I had to go to Yale, go to Cambridge, England, get a PhD, come back, get a job at Harvard as a professor, wake up in the middle night, basically through a dream, get the idea for finding your roots, then become the most DNA -tested black man in the history of the world, only to find that my roots are right under my feet.

[270] Yeah, yeah, yeah, they were under your nose, as we would say.

[271] I know my nose.

[272] They were a snake, they would have bit you.

[273] You got it.

[274] Isn't that amazing?

[275] That's so incredible.

[276] Let's go back to there, though.

[277] So nine years old, you do the first family tree.

[278] Was that like a school exercise?

[279] On July 2nd, 1960, Edward St. Lawrence Gatstein.

[280] He was my father's father.

[281] He looked like a white man. He was so white.

[282] We called him Casper behind his back.

[283] Oh, my gosh.

[284] Remember Casper?

[285] You guys too young to know by Casper.

[286] Oh, I know Casper.

[287] I mean, his skin was translucent.

[288] There are only two of us, my brother Paul, who's an oral surgeon, retired now.

[289] And me, the baby.

[290] And Daddy, who also looked like a white man. He was often mistaken for Jewish.

[291] He even went to a Jewish school for a while in Newark, New Jersey.

[292] He worked in a paper mill.

[293] He worked in the paper mill in the daytime and was a janitor at the telephone company in the evening.

[294] But his aunt married a dentist.

[295] She went to Howard University and became a nurse at the beginning of the 20th century.

[296] Wow.

[297] My father was the seventh son and was really brilliant.

[298] So they brought him up there to live and he went to a public school in Newark and most of the kids were Jewish.

[299] So he goes to school on Yom Kippur.

[300] And the teacher said, what are you doing here?

[301] It's Yom Kippur.

[302] And my daddy said, what?

[303] Yom Kippur, what is that?

[304] He realized they thought he was doing it.

[305] He was like, wasn't anyone here?

[306] Is it a deer season up there?

[307] You got it.

[308] So, Daddy took my brother and me up to the open casket at his father's funeral.

[309] It's July 2nd, 1960 in Cumberland, which is 25 miles from the little town in West Virginia, in which I grew up.

[310] All the gaites are from Cumberland, also in the Potomac River.

[311] All the Coleman's, my mother's family were from Piedmont, which crossed the river from the paper mill, and all the gates are still in Cumberland Mill, going back to the oldest gates, which is what the story's about.

[312] So I had never been that close to a corpse before.

[313] And my grandfather looked ridiculously white.

[314] I mean, if he looked like Casper with blood coursing through his veins, you can imagine how white he looked dead.

[315] He looked like he had been coated with alabaster and sprinkled with baby powder.

[316] He identified, though, as African America.

[317] He was a race man, yeah.

[318] And he didn't try to pass.

[319] But we've had people in the Gates family who did pass.

[320] Well, just, I think it's relevant for backstory.

[321] You did ultimately figure out that you have 50 % European ancestry.

[322] Yes, right.

[323] With some Irish folks in there.

[324] 50 % European and 50 % substand here in Africa.

[325] 50, wow.

[326] And so I was just freaked out being that close to a corpse.

[327] And also looking at this alabaster -coded man who was my grandfather.

[328] So that was very traumatic.

[329] So then we went to the Rose Hill Episcopal Cemetery, the gates are Episcop in, and buried my grandfather.

[330] And all the gates are buried there.

[331] And we came back to my grandparents' house.

[332] And Daddy took Rocky, my brother, and me upstairs, to his parents' bedroom.

[333] And we'd never even been upstairs in this house because you couldn't do that.

[334] You know, things were very formal then.

[335] Couldn't go upstairs and your grandparents' house.

[336] Couldn't sit on a bed.

[337] You couldn't step on a grave.

[338] And you definitely could not call an adult by their first name.

[339] My parents are gone.

[340] Their parents are gone.

[341] And if I'm telling a story about Mr. Ozzy, I'm still calling a Mr. Ozzy.

[342] I'm so I'm traumatized.

[343] So anyway, it was like going to the movie.

[344] for us, Rocky and me were looking at all this furniture and all this stuff.

[345] My grandfather, his hobby was to grow tulips.

[346] And he had all these framed blue and red and yellow, I think, was the third -color ribbons for competitions.

[347] We had no idea.

[348] So anyway, there was a sun porch off their bedroom.

[349] Daddy takes us out on the sun porch, and there was a big armoire.

[350] And Daddy opened it, and it was full of bank ledgers.

[351] And my grandfather was a janitor at the First National Bank in Carmel and Maryland.

[352] And he was stealing these bank ledgers.

[353] So Rocky and I compare and notes later.

[354] We thought this meant we were rich.

[355] Sure, sure.

[356] He had squirled away some fortune.

[357] Unfortunately, my grandfather was stealing these bank ledgers and using them as scrapbooks.

[358] He was clipping newspapers and they glued the clippings.

[359] Just using it as paper.

[360] Yeah, there were dozens.

[361] So Daddy starts taking these big bank ledgers, putting him on the ground where he was crouched, turning the pages for his free seat.

[362] Finally, after six or seven of these explorations, he found what he was looking for.

[363] and he said, you boys, look here.

[364] He lived to be 97 .5 and a Tuesday's dying day.

[365] He called me, boy, that was his term of affection for me. So we looked, and it was an obituary.

[366] And the obituary was dated January 6, 1888.

[367] And it said, died this day in Cumberland, Maryland.

[368] Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman.

[369] Like estimating cheese.

[370] No, esteemable.

[371] Yeah, that's right.

[372] That's right.

[373] A person who commands your esteem.

[374] Yes, yes.

[375] That's right.

[376] Then he pulled a sepia -colored photograph out between the pages of the scrapbook.

[377] And he said, that's Jane Gates.

[378] That's the oldest ancestor we've ever been able to trace.

[379] I never want you to forget her name and I never want you to forget her face.

[380] And she was a midwife.

[381] And in the obituary, I think, they used a euphemism that suggests that she did nursing.

[382] And my brother and I stared this obituary.

[383] She said this funny looking lady who had her midwifery outfit on.

[384] It was just head and shoulders, but she had this cap on and this white thing.

[385] And then daddy put the photograph back in the scrapbook.

[386] closed it, gathered all the rest of them put in the arma.

[387] We went downstairs, had the repast, the meal following the burial, and then we drove home to Piedmont.

[388] Now, because my father worked two jobs at the paper mill and the janitor, we were the quote -unquote richest black people in this little town of 2 ,500 people, an Irish -Italian paper mill town with a handful of black people.

[389] So what that meant, because he had this second job, extra income.

[390] And mom worked.

[391] No, mom would never work.

[392] Oh, that's, no, because that was the thing.

[393] He worked two jobs.

[394] So my mother could be a lady.

[395] You should sue Wikipedia, it said she cleaned houses.

[396] When she was a little girl, she did.

[397] And she was one of 12.

[398] She cleaned houses.

[399] She cleaned one house.

[400] And the people were so horrible to her, but it was very nice house.

[401] And it turned out years later, it was owned by my father's best friend.

[402] It was this white man. And when I was 25, I came back from England.

[403] I talked to my brother.

[404] And we bought that house for my mother.

[405] Oh, wow.

[406] That feels good.

[407] And the first night, we were at dinner, and we were all so happy.

[408] and my brother's married and I was marrying and we had really nice wine and right in the middle then my mother burst into tears and she said these people treated me so horribly and one time they planted five dollars in a sofa to see if she would steal it and she was 12 years old Skippy she said I don't know if I can live in this house and we said mama it's not Thompson's house anymore this Pauline Gates's house this is your house everything was fine so sorry you were at the downstairs because because we had a very nice house.

[409] I always had my own bedroom and I had my own bookcase and my own desk, beautiful mahogany antique set.

[410] And on my desk next to my bed sat a Red Webster's dictionary because in the eighth grade I fell in love with etymology and I loved just reading a dictionary.

[411] And the last thing I did was look up the word estimable.

[412] Okay, here we go.

[413] Ding ding, ding.

[414] Because I didn't know what it was.

[415] And I thought, wow, that funny -looking old lady who has my surname is estimable.

[416] Maybe I'm estimable, too.

[417] So the next day was July 3rd, 1960.

[418] I'm still 9 years old.

[419] I would be 10 in September that year.

[420] And we went to the colored 4th of July picnic.

[421] Those schools integrated in my county incredibly in 1955 in 95.

[422] Remember, Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court decision is 54.

[423] So you would have been 4 years old at that time when they integrated?

[424] They integrated in 55.

[425] Oh, okay.

[426] So 4.

[427] Right now I was born in 1950.

[428] So you entered, it was already integrated.

[429] first grade, I went to the white school.

[430] So I went to 12 years of integrated school.

[431] In spite of the fact that the schools integrated, the social events were segregated because people still weren't crazy about miscegenation, interracial dating or sex.

[432] That was not happening.

[433] And on the way back, I asked Daddy to stop at Red Bulls newsstand, which is like a convenience store today.

[434] He was of Irish descent.

[435] I remember I'm from an Irish Italian paper mill tell.

[436] So everybody, they were either Irish Italian or some mixture or some variety of that.

[437] They were all Catholic.

[438] Maybe a lot of cats.

[439] Yep.

[440] I asked Daddy buy me a composition book.

[441] And that night in front of our 12 -inch RCA Victor Television, I interviewed my mother and father about what only years later I would learn is called your family tree or your genealogy.

[442] I wanted to know two things.

[443] I wanted to know how someone with my physical feature, my phenotype, could be descended from a grandfather who was so white, he looked like a ghost.

[444] Yeah.

[445] With translucent skin.

[446] And I wanted to know what in the world was my connection to this woman who had been a slave until slavery was abolished in Maryland in 1864, but who had my name and who had five children, all fathered by the same man and whose identity she took to the grave, a white man. The only thing she told those five children, including my great -grandfather, also Edward Gates, was that they had the same father and that he was white.

[447] Wow.

[448] They never met him.

[449] They didn't know his name.

[450] Did you uncover this?

[451] You must have at this point.

[452] To this day, there's only one Gates who knows the identity of this man. Is his name, Dr. Henry Lewis Gates Jr.?

[453] We are having a Gates family reunion.

[454] And you're going to unveil me. In Cumberland, Jane Gates' house, which she bought in 1870, cash.

[455] Wow.

[456] Where did a person who was enslaved to 1864 get enough money to plung down $1 ,200 in a white neighborhood for a house?

[457] That house, because of my cousin, Johnny Gates, is on the National Historic Register.

[458] We are having a family reunion, and C .C. Moore, the most brilliant genetic genealogists in the history of science will reveal the identity of Jane Gates's paramour.

[459] Oh, my gosh.

[460] Wow.

[461] And obviously, it's assumed that that mysterious man is the one who bought that house for her.

[462] Or gave her the cash.

[463] You gave her the cash.

[464] That's what we presume.

[465] Yeah, because $1 ,200 is significant.

[466] But you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes.

[467] I guess that.

[468] But who knows?

[469] All of my cousins have taken DNA to, let me tell you something interesting about that family.

[470] There was Jane.

[471] Her eldest son was my great -grandfather.

[472] He married a woman also very like -complected.

[473] They had two boys and three girls.

[474] At the beginning of the 20th century, they sent those three girls to Howard University.

[475] Really?

[476] And they kept my grandfather to run our 200 -acre farm in Patterson's Creek, West Virginia, which is very near Piedmont and very near Cumber, in Maryland.

[477] It's hard for people to understand, but the paper mill town I grew up in halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington.

[478] It's a funny tri -state area, and it's on the Maryland -West Virginia border, and Pennsylvania is only a few miles away.

[479] Right.

[480] So that's a scene of a million Civil War.

[481] Harper's Ferry, where John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal took place in 1859, is now a superhighway.

[482] It's about an hour and 15 minutes away.

[483] Gettysburg is fairly nearby.

[484] So clearly there were family members, well, maybe not because they've been merged by your current family, but certainly family members, some were living in Maryland, some were living in West Virginia.

[485] One had slavery.

[486] One did not at some period, right?

[487] Well, West Virginia was Virginia until June 20th, 1863.

[488] But the reason that I descend from so many free people of color is that there was no need in those mountains for slavery.

[489] You know, you're not having tobacco plantations like we had in Virginia or cotton plantations like you had in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, which is what led to the trail of tears.

[490] The richest cotton -growing soil in the United States, and perhaps one of the richest cotton -growing soils in the world, happened to be occupied by five Native American nations, the so -called five civilized tribes, which is why, in 1830, the president of the United States, signed the Indian Removal Act, Andrew Jackson to get that soil from the creek, the chocktail, the Chickasol, the Cherokee, and the Seminole.

[491] So where I grew up, my ancestors, there were house servants, maybe, but no estates.

[492] So we were lucky in that way.

[493] Yeah.

[494] And that led to people being freed early on.

[495] And Joe and Sarah Bruce, my fourth great grandparents of my father's mother's line, were freed, as I mentioned in 1823 by a man named Abraham Van Meter.

[496] And we have his will.

[497] So he probably freed them.

[498] One, he liked them.

[499] He said that in his will, also because he didn't want a burning hell.

[500] Right, right, right.

[501] The will says, on the death of my wife, Elizabeth Van Meter, they will be free.

[502] And he gave them 1 ,000 acres of land.

[503] And some of that land is still in our family, the Bruce Branch.

[504] Wow.

[505] You know what's horrible, though?

[506] My instinct is to say, that's nice.

[507] Well, there's a lot of like contradictory emotions you have.

[508] Like, I was even inclined to say, like, yes, if there's not an enormous economic benefit to the practice, it was also expensive to keep people in that time.

[509] So you couldn't have done it if it wasn't yielding.

[510] And I'm like, well, that's kind of a dicey thing to bring into this.

[511] But it's also because apologies for slavery.

[512] I know this.

[513] going to sound outrageous.

[514] But some people, historians made the argument that slave owners were being benevolent because they were losing money and they were doing this to help these poor benighted Africans graduate from the University of slavery.

[515] Yeah, yeah.

[516] Yeah, I don't buy that for a second.

[517] But I read a great paper when I was an anthropology major about someone breaking down in modern day economic times, the cost of each of the things they were supplying, whether it was boots and it was food and this and that.

[518] And then making an analysis of minimum wage and confronting the fact that a lot of the modern systems are nearly, obviously, you have freedom.

[519] They're not comparable in that way, but just the actual cost in many instances is cheaper to just pay this minimum wage, which is completely insignificant and you can't sustain your, you know, that was the angle of the paper.

[520] Right.

[521] You studied anthropology.

[522] Yeah, at UCLA.

[523] You guys were both Summa.

[524] I'm just a measly magna.

[525] I'm glad you brought that out.

[526] Yeah, yeah.

[527] Two days in a rough.

[528] I know, I was class of 173, and when I hit Yale in 69, anthropology was one of the sexiest of the majors.

[529] Sidney Mintz, who wrote a brilliant book on the role of sugar.

[530] You know, in America, you think about cotton and slavery, but the real demonic commodity was sugar.

[531] That's everything that's happening in the Caribbean.

[532] The Caribbean and Brazil.

[533] Okay, here's a quiz.

[534] Parley game for you.

[535] Oh, great.

[536] We now know.

[537] I got to remind you, I'm only Magna.

[538] And this might be a suma question.

[539] And he's just like, yeah, hence the confusion on the house.

[540] And I walk with a cane.

[541] So, you know, I see you.

[542] I died last night, so.

[543] Three spades.

[544] By the way, do you play spades?

[545] Everybody play space.

[546] We are.

[547] It's our religion.

[548] We probably played nine hours a week.

[549] Really?

[550] Oh, my God.

[551] So when you just said that, I would love to.

[552] I got a burst of excitement.

[553] Okay, so we know because of huge database.

[554] called the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, put together by a man I admire so much David Eltis and David Richardson who recently passed, and a lot of other historians.

[555] It turns out there were little pockets of historians trying to count the number of Africans who were enslaved shipped across the Atlantic.

[556] These guys figured out they could bring everybody together and collate all the data, and this is what they found.

[557] Any of your listeners can look up voyages .org or just type in the transatlantic slave trade database and you can get to the website that has the data that I'm about to share with you.

[558] So we now know that there were 12 .5 million Africans shipped across the Atlantic between the early 16th century and 1866, more or less.

[559] 15 % die in the Middle Passage.

[560] That means about 10 .7 million, get off the boats.

[561] How many of those 10 .7 million came to what is now the United States?

[562] Just guess.

[563] Mine's four million.

[564] Four million?

[565] That's good, guess.

[566] Mine's nine.

[567] Nine million.

[568] Yeah.

[569] Okay, final guess?

[570] Yeah, I'm going to have to stick because it's so arbitrary.

[571] That's my hunch.

[572] 388 ,000.

[573] What?

[574] Of the 12 .5 million?

[575] Of the 12 .7 million, only 388 ,000 were shipped directly from Africa to what is now the United States.

[576] And another 70 ,000 were shipped to the West Indies and then came.

[577] 450 ,000.

[578] That's it.

[579] So it was entirely a sugar.

[580] Wow.

[581] course.

[582] Five million went to Brazil.

[583] Oh my God.

[584] Brazil today is the second largest black nation in the world after Nigeria.

[585] Approximately, 950 ,000 went to Cuba.

[586] 772 ,000 went to San Damang, which is now Haiti, because of the Haitian revolution.

[587] Almost 2x.

[588] Got to Haiti.

[589] A million went to Jamaica.

[590] So five million went to Brazil.

[591] A million went to Jamaica.

[592] Almost a million went to Cuba.

[593] 772 ,000 went to Haiti.

[594] And all because of a five -letter word called sugar.

[595] And the average lifespan of an enslaved man on a sugar plantation was seven years.

[596] Fuck.

[597] Oh, my God.

[598] And they just replaced them like, we used to replace spark plug.

[599] Can I now add an anthropological part of that whole story?

[600] That always fascinates me. When you look at the incredibly high rate of hypertension and related health issues among African Americans, in exploring why that is, it was pointed out that most of the the Africans were captured in East Africa.

[601] Shaking your head now.

[602] No. 99 % came from West.

[603] Okay.

[604] So many were marched across Africa to sail out of West Africa where they were shipped from.

[605] And many, many died on that walk from dehydration.

[606] So the people that made it to West African to get on a boat had already had an inordinately high salinity count naturally in their body.

[607] Then they get on a ship where this whole other wave dies of, again, dehydration.

[608] And the only ones that actually made it alive to get to these islands or to hear are people that had such an enormously high salinity count genetically.

[609] And that's the group we start with here.

[610] It's called the salt thesis.

[611] Essentially, you're right.

[612] Africa's too big to have walked anybody from the east to the west.

[613] Right.

[614] Okay.

[615] But they were from the interior.

[616] That's better.

[617] And so it is a thesis, which is a salient thesis, that if you could retain fluid under those circumstances, as you put it, Mr. Anthropologist, Mr. Magnus, so we're very well.

[618] Sounds derogatory in this group.

[619] That you had a better chance to survive.

[620] That's the good news.

[621] The bad news is, if you retain fluid, you have high blood pressure.

[622] So that's what's called the salt thesis.

[623] Yes.

[624] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[625] We've all been there.

[626] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange ral.

[627] Ashes.

[628] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[629] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[630] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[631] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[632] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[633] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[634] Prime members can listen early and ad -free on Amazon Music.

[635] What's up, guys?

[636] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's too good.

[637] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[638] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[639] And I don't mean just friends.

[640] I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox.

[641] The list goes on.

[642] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[643] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[644] Can I get into one other dicey observation I made?

[645] I'm reluctant to say it out loud, but it definitely struck me, which is I grew up in Detroit, Detroit.

[646] Yeah, I mean, let's be real.

[647] I grew up 20 miles outside Detroit, but I also did live in downtown Detroit before I ended up moving here.

[648] And when I went to Africa in 2012, and I was in Tanzania and I was in Kenya and I was in a few different places, my initial shock was, oh, my God, these black folks are so much smaller than the black folks in Detroit.

[649] I mean, significantly.

[650] Like, if I'm walking around Detroit, I'm maybe in the 65th percentile in height and muscularity and everything else.

[651] and I go to Africa, and nearly everyone I meet, I'm bigger then.

[652] And for me, I was like, oh, my God, this is so interesting.

[653] But there's a great variety.

[654] You know, the Tutsis, they're very famous for being tall.

[655] Yes.

[656] And the Hutu or Grasil, which is why the white people said that they should run things.

[657] But your point is that nutrition, the amount of milk determines your stature.

[658] But also, genetics, is wild about it.

[659] Who survived?

[660] Who was robust enough to get here?

[661] Who was bred to be?

[662] a laborer.

[663] There's just so many factors that lead to how this they were here.

[664] Yes, once they were here.

[665] I couldn't not notice it.

[666] You've been several times and you did that great show.

[667] When I was an undergraduate, Yale had a program called five -year BA.

[668] 12 people were chosen.

[669] It was very competitive.

[670] And you went to what we used to call the third world, the developing world.

[671] And you had to work, hence five -year BA.

[672] And I really wanted to go to Africa.

[673] When I was a kid, I read an article in the Reader's Digest about an African kid who essentially walked across the equator and was saved by these missionaries, and I think it ended up in Washington State.

[674] And the idea across the equator became an obsession with me. And I was pre -med.

[675] I was raised to be a doctor, my brothers and a world surgeon.

[676] For my mother, God bless her soul.

[677] You know, in heaven, there's a father and son, the holy ghost, and a medical doctor.

[678] Birthday stethoscope.

[679] You know, Christmas, dissecting kid.

[680] All smart little color boys and color girls are going to be doctors.

[681] Doctor was at top of the heat.

[682] Then lawyers.

[683] Same with Indian family.

[684] Any immigrant family also has that exact same.

[685] Hierarchy.

[686] You'd go to someone's house and they'd say, Skippy and Rocky, I understand you're doing well in school.

[687] What are you going to be?

[688] My mother's saying, they are going to be doctors.

[689] The gayses are Episcopalians, and the Anglican communion is divided up between what we might call first world and third world diocese.

[690] And the diocese of West Virginia's sister diocese was the diocese of Central Tanganyika, now Central Tanzania.

[691] So I was able to get a job at a mission hospital in the middle.

[692] of Tonsania with the go -go people.

[693] In those days, they didn't have frequent flyer miles.

[694] They had air miles.

[695] So if you're JFK and I'm Dar es Salaam Airport, there were exactly 11 ,000 air miles between the two.

[696] So I got on a plane with a backpack, a pair of sandals, jeans, three books, plus Arthur Frommers Europe on $5 a day.

[697] Oh, lovely.

[698] You're out of Frommers' Guide.

[699] And I flew from New York to London to Paris to Amsterdam to Rome, to Athens, to Tel Aviv.

[700] to Addis Ababa, to Nairobi, and to Dar Salaam over, I don't know, six -week period.

[701] And then slept from Dar -Salaam into the interior.

[702] The worst trip of my life was on a bus.

[703] It took 18 hours ago from Dar to Dodoma, the official capital.

[704] On the nicest roads imaginable.

[705] Oh, my God, I bounced off the ceiling.

[706] I mean, literally.

[707] And people got on with goats and chickens and stuff.

[708] And I did my best not to burst in the tears and think, this is the biggest mistake I ever made in my home.

[709] You know, I'm exploring my roots.

[710] I didn't think this was what my roots are going to look like.

[711] And I worked in that mission hospital.

[712] I learned a lot about myself.

[713] I was living with European missionaries.

[714] There were maybe half a dozen.

[715] They were mostly Australian nurses and an Australian doctor.

[716] And I was a female doctor for a while.

[717] She eventually left.

[718] We had a 120 -bed hospital for 50 ,000 people.

[719] Almost.

[720] in that district.

[721] I worked in the theater, as we say in England.

[722] I worked in the operating room, holding a mask for people under anesthesia.

[723] That's what I did every day.

[724] And I saw things that I never would ever see in medical school in the United States.

[725] A woman came in, said she'd been pregnant for two years.

[726] Okay.

[727] The doctor was the jack of all trades.

[728] He did everything.

[729] He removed a basketball tumor out of this lady's stomach.

[730] I learned a lot about human beings.

[731] I learned a lot about myself.

[732] I learned how African I was and wasn't and how American I was and wasn't.

[733] Yeah, can I ask what your fantasy was before arriving and what was the dissonance and what did you conclude?

[734] Oh, that's a great question.

[735] I don't think anybody's ever asked me that.

[736] First of all, there were so many myths about what our people in Africa were like.

[737] I'm using scare quotes.

[738] We got quotes going, yeah.

[739] What our people were composed of, what different African civilizations consisted of.

[740] And I wanted to see for myself.

[741] I wanted to get to know one specific African culture, the go -go people.

[742] The language is marvelous.

[743] A singer one was an m -gogo, plural's wago.

[744] They lived in U -gogo, and they spoke Kigogo.

[745] That's wonderful.

[746] And I learned a little Swahili.

[747] I was tutored by a fellow student from Tanzania, who was at Yale.

[748] But my vocabulary was inordinately populated by two kinds of words.

[749] A word like Weheli, which means breathe deeply.

[750] Right, right.

[751] And because I was living in me. missionaries.

[752] I had to go to chapel every morning.

[753] So let's see.

[754] You have a couple trucks out there, right?

[755] So you can pick the kind of truck that's your fantasy truck, and it would be my gift if you answer the following question.

[756] Okay.

[757] What does Wehaley mean?

[758] No, Wehaley means breathing.

[759] Okay, I was going to say, is it a trick because...

[760] No. What does Umtuketifu mean?

[761] It's a religious term.

[762] I was just going to say you're in chapels, so that's a good context.

[763] Right.

[764] Oh, God, Dax.

[765] A lot's writing on this.

[766] You go...

[767] I don't want any trust.

[768] That's your fantasy truck.

[769] Okay.

[770] Umtucket I'm going to say, in his name.

[771] That's close.

[772] Oh.

[773] But not close enough.

[774] Not close enough for a truck.

[775] Holy, holy, holy.

[776] Oh.

[777] Lord God Almighty.

[778] It means holy.

[779] Holy.

[780] So I had all kind of words of my vocabulary related to the hospital and to church.

[781] Right.

[782] Breathe deeply and holy.

[783] But I guess my question is, you're a young man. We're all searching for our identity at that point.

[784] the boat ride on the Queen Elizabeth, too, to go to England.

[785] I know that moment.

[786] I can only imagine what the narrative self was saying.

[787] I'm going to England.

[788] I'm going to study.

[789] Oh, my God.

[790] That would be so happy.

[791] I can only imagine.

[792] So this is another one of those moments.

[793] Like, I'm going to go to Africa.

[794] I'm from there.

[795] I'm going to feel, when I get there, did you have expectations that you would have some kind of sense of connection?

[796] A connection and a clarification and the whole we all carry being filled?

[797] Those were the questions on the table.

[798] Would I feel connection?

[799] I was completely open.

[800] How African is an African -American?

[801] A 19 -year -old.

[802] I turned 20 in the village.

[803] I was never into romanticizing Africa.

[804] I didn't throw away on my Western clothes and have a closet full of dashique.

[805] I had one dashiki, which was cool.

[806] They weren't the holders of magic they were going to hand you.

[807] I had an Afro.

[808] I'm very proud of that Afro.

[809] You could Google Skip Gates of an Afro and you can see it online.

[810] Oh, I shall.

[811] After I watch the Time Machine cartoon, straight over to the Afro.

[812] The way back machine.

[813] The way back machine.

[814] I'm getting closer to remember.

[815] I realized that Africa was a long time ago in the history of our people.

[816] That we were an African people who lived in the new world.

[817] And even the Africans called me and any other African American in Mzungu, which basically means white man. Oh, wow.

[818] You are ours, you are our brother, but you are Western.

[819] The most important thing I realize is how American we are.

[820] To me, culture defines everything.

[821] I've always been kind of hesitant at a notion that our identity or the spirit or anything would be just a genetic thing.

[822] Yeah, that it would be biological.

[823] It's ridiculous.

[824] It's kind of crazy.

[825] Culture's the operating software.

[826] I have two children.

[827] If at birth, they had been spirited away to, say, China and raised in China.

[828] And if the Chinese, this is crucial to what I'm about to say.

[829] If the Chinese people treated them like they were Chinese, they'd be Chinese.

[830] Right, 100%.

[831] What are they going to do?

[832] You know, like basketball and fried chicken.

[833] You know what I'm talking about?

[834] Those things are not biological.

[835] That's a crazy, ridiculous thing.

[836] So I loved it.

[837] I loved the people.

[838] They loved me. I loved being there.

[839] I went from pre -med.

[840] It took me a few years.

[841] Cambridge was the crucial arena when I abandoned that fantasy being a doctor and discovered thanks to two Africans, Wally Shoyenka, who got the Nobel Prize 13 years later after we met, the first African to get the Nobel Prize in literature.

[842] And my best friend, Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the ethicist column in the Sunday Times magazine.

[843] Oh, cool.

[844] The great philosopher, both the godfathers and you met them both.

[845] I met them in Cambridge.

[846] You were fucking bouncing around.

[847] There's a lot in the stew, and you've already been to Africa.

[848] Now you're in England.

[849] There's one more element.

[850] Remember the fantasy of hitchhiking across the equator?

[851] Oh, yes, yes, yes.

[852] So after I lived in the village, the people didn't have running water and didn't have electricity.

[853] We had a generator because I was living with the missionaries.

[854] Many of the most important battles in World War I were fought in Africa.

[855] There was a German outposts that's a village.

[856] Oh, really?

[857] And I lived in the German jail.

[858] And it was like a German fort.

[859] And there was a cemetery of German soldiers who had died.

[860] The village is called Kilimatindi.

[861] And you could see it in the very first documentary that I made.

[862] It was for the BBC series called The Great Rail Journey.

[863] You went with your wife, your then wife and your two daughters.

[864] Yeah.

[865] And it ends with me going.

[866] going back to the village 25 years later.

[867] Between August and December, I lived in that village, and it was tough.

[868] I was seeing things.

[869] I didn't like the politics of the missionaries vis -a -vis the Africans, and I got in arguments with them.

[870] Let me put it kindly.

[871] I mean, these people were sacrificing so much to help the African people.

[872] But they also had condescending attitudes about it.

[873] It came with a prize.

[874] Yeah.

[875] We got in big fights about that.

[876] And finally, I left, and I went to Dar Salon.

[877] There was a great university, and I heard the great historian Walter Rodney lecture about the history of slavery and relationship to economics and all kinds of interesting things.

[878] I was there about a month, and I wanted to go to Zanzibar.

[879] So to go to Zanzibar, you would go down to the dock at night, and there were fishing boats that would sail overnight to Zanzibar from Dar.

[880] And you'd give them, you know, a dollar.

[881] And there was this white guy there named Lawrence Biddle Weeks.

[882] Well, hold on a second.

[883] Yeah, your name recalls incredible.

[884] It's kind of unparalleled.

[885] Yeah.

[886] We've noticed that older people do this.

[887] My mother does this.

[888] She remembers all of her school teacher's names.

[889] We're working on the theory on why this is.

[890] I have too much stimuli and TV and something else.

[891] We don't have it.

[892] I feel like it's unique to your generation.

[893] Well, but it's genetic in my family.

[894] My father and brother could tell you the hand you played in Bidwis 20 years ago.

[895] Okay.

[896] I mean, they had this photographic memory.

[897] I have a good memory.

[898] They had a perfect memory.

[899] My brother could tell you all the bones in the body, all the nerves, that kind of stuff.

[900] A sign of genius.

[901] But anyway, you got a white cat on a boat.

[902] Larry Weeks, Larry.

[903] And halfway over to Zanzibar, and you have to imagine what the stars look like with no pollution.

[904] You could see the Southern Cross, you know, different set of constellations because your south of the equator moves you to tears.

[905] He told me that his fantasy had been like Cecil Rhodes.

[906] Cecil Rhodes wanted to build railroad from Cape to Cairo.

[907] So Larry's was a hitchhike from South Africa all the way to Egypt.

[908] I told him mine, because that Reader's Digest article was the H .I. Cross the equator.

[909] We flipped a coin.

[910] I won.

[911] And about two weeks later, we went from Darsalam to Mambasa, Kenya, Mambasa to Nairobi, to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, right after Idi Amiens Kew, from Kuala down to Kuala, down to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, from Kigali to Koma on Lake Kivu in the Congo, and then six days through Bush in eastern Congo to Kis.

[912] Sangani, and we got on the big river boat and took six days and sailed down the Kinshasa, which is about 200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean.

[913] So you won the coin toss.

[914] Yeah.

[915] And I got my fantasy.

[916] You did.

[917] We did.

[918] And that matched your fantasy.

[919] That was.

[920] You should have abandoned medicine to be a novelist at this point.

[921] This is like your Hemingway out there.

[922] But in my 20th year, I had climbed the Parthenon, I'd been to the Coliseum, I'd been to the Holy Land, and I had seen six African countries.

[923] Wow.

[924] Yeah.

[925] And when I came back to Yale, nobody could tell me shit about it.

[926] Anything.

[927] No, sitting around in bull sessions, people in Daeshikis and Afro, smoking and joint telling me, are people in Africa?

[928] And I go, you don't know what you're talking about.

[929] And that freed me. I was proud of my African heritage, and I became a professor of African and African -American studies because of the intervention in Cambridge of Schoenikin and Anthony Apia.

[930] But I knew where my africanity, as it were, started and stopped.

[931] I knew the culture was not biological.

[932] I knew that it was not essentialized.

[933] I knew that our people had left Africa a long time ago, and there were big differences.

[934] And when I sailed back to the United States from England and saw the Statue of Liberty, I burst in tears.

[935] I was glad to be home, and I knew that I was American, and I was proud of it.

[936] But I was an African American.

[937] I wasn't an American like you're an American.

[938] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[939] And I wasn't an American like you of an immigrant family.

[940] My people had been here forever.

[941] Is it fair to say you're walking with a limp because you're an African -American?

[942] Yeah, I had a normal hip condition, a slipped epithesis that was misdiagnosed by a racist white doctor who said that it was entirely psychosomatic.

[943] Oh, my God.

[944] Yeah, because black folks lie about their pain level.

[945] Oh, yeah.

[946] If you break your hip, you have what's called referred pain.

[947] So I had this enormous pain in my knee.

[948] But my leg was rotated out 180 degrees.

[949] So any elementary medical school student would have known that my hip was broken.

[950] Right.

[951] Except this idiot.

[952] And so he wrapped my leg with a walking cast.

[953] And while he was doing it, he said, well, I understand you're a good student.

[954] Everybody knew everybody in this county.

[955] And I said, yes, sir, I want to be a doctor.

[956] And he said, well, who was the first scientist to process oxygen?

[957] And I said, I think it was Joseph Priestley.

[958] Somebody can fact correct me on them.

[959] Yeah.

[960] He asked me three or four questions.

[961] And I answered them.

[962] The cast tried a few hours later.

[963] they stood me up to have me walk with my hip, the ball inside, completely separate.

[964] Oh my God.

[965] And I felt.

[966] And my mother was there.

[967] And my mother said, that's it, we're taking him out of this hospital.

[968] Yeah.

[969] But that was the guy.

[970] And he told my parents that it was psychosomatic, that I had studied too hard that all those answers I gave were a sign that basically the Negro mind had cracked under the pressure.

[971] No. I swear to God.

[972] And I don't even like to talk about because it's so, yes.

[973] And so, yes, you're returning to America.

[974] There is the Statue of Liberty.

[975] You are right to cry.

[976] And also there's a reality that you're also entering this country with a limb because of the reality of being black in America.

[977] Yeah.

[978] But the differential between the lengths of my leg got worse over time.

[979] So I didn't walk with a cane then, but I walked with a cane now.

[980] And there's about an inch and a half difference.

[981] How old were you when that happened?

[982] I was 14 years old.

[983] Playing touch football.

[984] No. Yeah.

[985] I was on a war path.

[986] about football, so I just want to fuel it a little bit.

[987] Three operations, and then they finally put in a cup arthroplasty, and now I've had two hip replacements.

[988] And I have my shoes made by a great orthopedic shoemaker, if anybody wants to know, the T -O -Day Company, D -E -Y.

[989] Shout -out.

[990] The best orthopedic shoes in the whole world.

[991] Okay, we've got to get into the shows.

[992] This is so fun, though.

[993] It is so fun, and you're such an incredible storyteller.

[994] But the boat ride, I'm a romantic.

[995] The boat ride at that age to England.

[996] I had just graduated from Yale, Day before.

[997] They're from a rural area of West Virginia.

[998] Yeah.

[999] The narrative self has got to be high five in itself.

[1000] Well, the Gateses have a long history of college education.

[1001] So I mentioned my three great aunts were educated at Howard.

[1002] My father's first cousin, the son of one of those three, graduating Harvard Law School in 1949, George Lee.

[1003] The Ivy League was always this presence.

[1004] Yeah.

[1005] And he married a black woman.

[1006] His wife got a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard in 1955.

[1007] Oh, my gosh.

[1008] It's a black woman.

[1009] Her name was Dorothy Hicks Lee.

[1010] And we created a prize in her honor that's given at Harvard every year.

[1011] Oh, amazing.

[1012] She's the first black person to get a PhD in comparative literature and the second woman.

[1013] So anyway, the Gates is valued education.

[1014] So one of us had gone to Harvard.

[1015] So I applied to Yale.

[1016] And I got in.

[1017] And I loved it from the second I got there.

[1018] I was so glad.

[1019] The last thing I told my father and my mother was, I said, look, All these kids up there are geniuses.

[1020] I thought it was like Albert and Alberta Einstein.

[1021] Ninety -69 when I was going up, I was transferring.

[1022] I did my first year at a community college five miles away, and then I transferred.

[1023] And when I wrote to Yale, I said, I'd be happy to repeat my freshman year.

[1024] My brother and I never got the memo, the black people didn't test well on standardized exam.

[1025] We were too far away from the city.

[1026] So we always tested well.

[1027] So I tested well.

[1028] I'd gotten straight A's at the Tomew State College.

[1029] And they let me in the sophomore year.

[1030] When I got there, I looked at this building, Neo -Gothic building that was a cathedral.

[1031] I walked in.

[1032] It was the library.

[1033] And I stood there, and there's this great stained glass window where you used to go to checkout books.

[1034] And I thought, this is Never, Neverland, man. I have been transported into Hogwarts.

[1035] Yeah.

[1036] And that was a year they led in women for the first time.

[1037] Well, good for you.

[1038] The class of 73, yeah.

[1039] Yeah, thank God.

[1040] You've timed shit pretty perfectly, but schools were in.

[1041] immigrated and they loved women and yell.

[1042] And it was the largest class of black kids.

[1043] We were the first affirmative action generation.

[1044] When the Ivy League schools lifted their strict racist quote on the number of black kids who could matriculate.

[1045] And I was one of them 96, either in the freshman class or who transferred.

[1046] Because some of the women were transferring from the Seven Sisters or Hunter.

[1047] Sheila Jackson Lee, very good friend, congresswoman from Houston.

[1048] She transferred from Hunter.

[1049] If I get a C average, I'd said to my dad, that's like getting an A from West Virginia University.

[1050] Right.

[1051] And he looked at me and he said, boy, you think I'm stupid.

[1052] He said, he said, just go up there, do as well as you can do.

[1053] And if they don't treat you right, just remember you can always come on home.

[1054] And he told me that, I cried.

[1055] Yeah.

[1056] And that did more to give me self -confidence.

[1057] The message was, my love for you is unconditional.

[1058] Yeah.

[1059] You can come back with your tail between your legs.

[1060] You're my son.

[1061] But then he added, but I know if you do the best you can do, you're going to get straight -hairs.

[1062] Exactly.

[1063] We didn't have A's and Bs.

[1064] We had honors, high pass, pass, and fail.

[1065] The first semester, if I'm recalling correctly, I got one honors and three high passes.

[1066] And I was ecstatic.

[1067] But the second semester, baby, I got four honors and one high pass.

[1068] And the rest of my time, I got straight A's.

[1069] And you went in Andrew Mellon?

[1070] Paul Mellon.

[1071] Paul Mellon.

[1072] I was junior year 5 Beta Kappa, and I graduated just like you.

[1073] Summa.

[1074] Wow.

[1075] Summa wouldn't want to be you.

[1076] That's why you're Magna.

[1077] We had more fun, that's why.

[1078] In that bag of fantasies that I was carrying around invisibly, one was to be a Rhodes Scholar.

[1079] I wanted to go to Harvard, Yale, and I wanted to go to Oxford, Cambridge.

[1080] And I applied for all these fellowships.

[1081] Look, I was junior five -bait.

[1082] I was black.

[1083] I was from West Virginia.

[1084] I was going to get one of these things, right?

[1085] But I was a finalist, and I didn't get any.

[1086] I was a finalist for Rhodes.

[1087] I was finding some remarshall.

[1088] And I was blowing the interview somehow.

[1089] And my girlfriend at the time said, you're probably just being an asshole, trying to pretend to be somebody you're not.

[1090] Why are you just going to be yourself?

[1091] I was down to the seventh possibility to fulfill this fantasy that I'd had since the eighth grade.

[1092] And it was the Mellon Fellowship.

[1093] Before I walked in, I was sitting in the ante room.

[1094] And this kid came out, and his face was radiant.

[1095] And he knew that he had been selected.

[1096] He said, oh, that was the best interview I ever did.

[1097] and I'm going to go to Cambridge and I'm going to, we say read.

[1098] We don't study your major.

[1099] He said, I told him I was going to read English with professor so -and -so.

[1100] And I thought, man, I'm dead because I don't even know who he's talking about me. Yeah.

[1101] So door open, they said, Mr. Gates, and they said, why would you like to go to Cambridge?

[1102] The melons, there are two from Yale to Clare College, Cambridge, and two from Claire who come to Yale.

[1103] There were 12 colleges at Yale, which Yale's a name for dorms.

[1104] and the head of the college until recent was called the master.

[1105] And one of the masters was a woman to make it even more ironic.

[1106] Kitty Lustman.

[1107] I'll never forget her.

[1108] A brilliant childhood college.

[1109] Yeah, you won't forget it because you haven't forgotten a single name you've heard over the last 73 years.

[1110] And I said, I have no idea with whom I want to study or even what.

[1111] And they looked at me like I was dead.

[1112] And they said, well, why do you want to go?

[1113] Why do you want this fellowship?

[1114] I said, at the end of my sophomore year, I was lucky enough to be chosen for the five -year BA program.

[1115] And I lived in Africa, and on the way to Africa, I traveled over the European continent and went to the Middle East, and then on the way back, I went to Paris in London.

[1116] And so I had a year when I had a chance to look at myself as a black person living in a continent, the people of which were a majority black.

[1117] And I was able to begin to understand how much of social dilemmas that I faced, how much of my personality and my characteristics were related to African people.

[1118] African culture.

[1119] And I said, in other words, I had a chance to think about how much is racial in terms of social dilemmas and how much is related to other factors like class, like economics.

[1120] Or Cass, that great book.

[1121] Isabel's book.

[1122] And I said, I would like to have the same opportunity in reverse.

[1123] Yeah.

[1124] Yeah.

[1125] I would like to be able to be a black American, studying race, living in Europe to see how much of my personality is American.

[1126] How is race socially constructed?

[1127] in England?

[1128] Was it look like over there?

[1129] That's right.

[1130] Yeah, yeah.

[1131] What is transcendent about blackness and what is local about blackness?

[1132] Yeah.

[1133] What is the black experience in England and how does the black experience in England compared to the black experience in America?

[1134] That was it, baby.

[1135] Slam down.

[1136] Yeah, I just got chills, so if that didn't work.

[1137] That killed it.

[1138] Because I was telling the truth, that was why I wanted to live there.

[1139] I didn't know that my fate was sitting over there at the University of Cambridge.

[1140] That my whole career was waiting for me through the intervention of two African geniuses, one who had spent 27 months in prison during the Nigerian Civil War, Wolli Shoyinka.

[1141] When he got out, he published his prison memoirs and the Nigerian government wanted to kill him all over again.

[1142] He took political exile, got a fellowship to teach at Cambridge.

[1143] The English department was so backwards that they wouldn't give him an appointment because they said African literature wasn't really literature.

[1144] So he was in the social anthropology department.

[1145] Oh, sure.

[1146] Well, we'll take anyone.

[1147] Come on him.

[1148] And he only had one student.

[1149] And that was me. No. And he gave a series of lectures which were collected under the title Myth Literature in the African World View.

[1150] And in the preface, he talks about the experience of his one student in the English Department not giving him a teaching appointment and getting the teaching appointment in social anthropology.

[1151] And then Anthony Apea was a second year student, a genius like Shiainka.

[1152] And he had moved from wanting to be a doctor.

[1153] He was pre -med first year and switched to philosophy.

[1154] And the two of them, after we had met for a month, Anthony's father's a prominent Ghanaian politician.

[1155] It was best friends with Kwame and Krumah.

[1156] And Krumah turned against and put him in jail because he accused Enkrumah of corruption.

[1157] But he's like the John Adams of Ghana.

[1158] And the two of them took me out to an Indian meal and my mouth was on fire because these Africans liked this hot food.

[1159] Shoyinka is an enophile, connoisseur of wine.

[1160] And my generation, Yale, didn't drink wine.

[1161] We used cheap wine like...

[1162] Boone's Farm, Apple Wine, and Mad Dog 2020, in hookas for the consumption of more vaporous kinds of pleasure.

[1163] So my mouth is on fire.

[1164] I'm getting drunk from drinking all this wine.

[1165] They look at me and they said, we have brought you here for a reason.

[1166] We are from your future.

[1167] And you are not going to be a medical doctor.

[1168] You are going to be a professor of African and African American studies.

[1169] I was thunderstruck.

[1170] And I burst into tears.

[1171] Because I realized that it's what I really wanted to do.

[1172] Yeah.

[1173] And you get permission to.

[1174] I got permission to.

[1175] I was black, but not a socially constructed blackness in America.

[1176] I was like an anthropologist.

[1177] I could be completely removed from the experience of West Indians who had come up primarily on the wind rush in 1948 and their descendants living in England.

[1178] And I was able to begin to understand, like I did in Africa, how much of what, I thought was social situations entirely constructed by racism.

[1179] How much was really constructed by class?

[1180] Yeah.

[1181] What social problem were common to Tanzania, England, and the United States?

[1182] Well, they can't all be about the experience of slavery in its aftermath.

[1183] Yeah.

[1184] And that's what Isabel did.

[1185] She did the Dalit in India, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the African Americans here.

[1186] Absolutely.

[1187] They don't share race in common.

[1188] So what else do they share in common?

[1189] Right.

[1190] So you control the variables.

[1191] So I can experiment.

[1192] I was blessed because of that experience that year away between my sophomore and junior year and the fellowship to go to Cambridge to study the curious interaction between race and class upfront and personal in my own life every day.

[1193] I thought before I went to Africa, that race was everything, which is a famous thing from a racist scientist in the 19th century.

[1194] But it's not.

[1195] Class is just as important.

[1196] Well, you look at the similarities.

[1197] I, as a white trash kid from my area, why do I like rap?

[1198] Why do I like country?

[1199] This is disenfranchised stories.

[1200] Yeah, so it's right.

[1201] It's the same shit.

[1202] I graduated at Piedmont High School with 36 kids, and most of them were white.

[1203] I know that, as it were, the cultures of poverty are colorblind, right?

[1204] That obesity, out of wedlocked pregnancy, educational attainment, health attainment, every metric we would use to evaluate, you could graph them, we wouldn't know who was who.

[1205] You got it.

[1206] Which is not to say there's not another layer, which is more dangerous, I acknowledge.

[1207] But you could make a graph where no one could tell.

[1208] The bottom line is economics.

[1209] You know, as the brothers say, it's all about the Benjamins.

[1210] Everything else is part of the SuperShuff.

[1211] I definitely believe that.

[1212] And it's infuriating to watch how the two classes have been pitted against each other to prevent us from getting together to go, wait, who's the real enemy here?

[1213] That's what I'm saying.

[1214] It's been intentional to make these poor white folks in the black.

[1215] folks.

[1216] In two weeks, I'll start second semester at Harvard, and I'm teaching a brand new seminar on W .E .B. Du Bois, the greatest black intellectual of all time.

[1217] And he published an essay called The Wages of Whiteness, and I'll be teaching it.

[1218] And it's about how people with identical class interests, because of the structures of racism in America, would rather identify vertically in the silo than laterally.

[1219] Latterly to their class counterparts.

[1220] The brothers, the brothers and sisters that we should be fighting together to address problems that are fundamentally economic.

[1221] And then you have demagogues who then manipulate these received structures of racism to convince poor white people that their interests are based on the purity of whiteness, a sanctity of whiteness.

[1222] And it's all these people color coming in.

[1223] But it's not.

[1224] They're being exploited by the system economically.

[1225] And used to pacify.

[1226] Well, at least you're not.

[1227] not those people.

[1228] So if those people are really below you, even though they're not.

[1229] That is something we can give you to prevent you from poking holes in the system.

[1230] You should be so delighted you're a part of.

[1231] And so that most attempts historically to organize workers economically fell apart as soon as they played the race cards.

[1232] They go, at least you're not in Antwerp.

[1233] No matter how poor you are, you are white man. That's the great Chris Rock joke.

[1234] There's a white janitor in here that's watching me and say, I don't think I'd trade places with him.

[1235] I'll just stick with this white.

[1236] And I learned that implicitly every day in the year in Tanzania in Europe, a year off, and then in England.

[1237] And that was a great thing.

[1238] Didn't make me a Marxist.

[1239] Right, right.

[1240] You know, I'm very much involved in figuring out how to make capitalism more humane.

[1241] Yeah.

[1242] And I've been very blessed in my career.

[1243] My wife is a Cuban citizen.

[1244] And my stepchildren are now Americans.

[1245] I met her in 2009 when I was filming one of my favorite black history series for PBS called Black and Latin America.

[1246] And she was a prominent historian.

[1247] and I met her at 10 o 'clock in the morning, interviewed, took her to lunch, like a dinner, I've been in love ever since.

[1248] But for her, raised in a communist country, class was everything.

[1249] Yes.

[1250] And what was suppressed was race.

[1251] That's so interesting.

[1252] And for us, what was suppressed was class.

[1253] You know, America, what are you talking about?

[1254] We don't have classes.

[1255] Right.

[1256] We're a meritocracy.

[1257] Yeah.

[1258] And it's not true.

[1259] But you can also see, we happen to own a condo in Miami, and you can see the fervor of Cuban immigrants and how well they do.

[1260] generalizing, not everybody.

[1261] But when they're family gatherings and people talk about the promise of America, you realize that that is what made our country great.

[1262] Martin Luther King gave a commencement address at Stanford that I like to quote.

[1263] And he said, it's commonly said that we're a nation of immigrants America, but we're also a nation of exiles.

[1264] And that's beautiful.

[1265] We are a nation of political exiles, religious exiles, and economic exiles.

[1266] And people came here and they go, this is wide open.

[1267] I often ask people that I'm interviewing for finding your roots, Do you think that you could have had this career if your ancestors had stayed in Ukraine or in England?

[1268] No way.

[1269] Everything became possible once they came here.

[1270] And we have to remember that.

[1271] I think the popularity of finding your roots has to do with two things.

[1272] One, reminding people that we're a nation of immigrant slash exiles.

[1273] And two, biologically, that at the level of the genome were 99 .99 % the same.

[1274] And three, no, there is no such thing as racial purity.

[1275] That were all mixed up.

[1276] And 50 ,000 years ago, we were all Africans.

[1277] Yeah, yeah.

[1278] In Anthro, we reject race as a concept.

[1279] You could genetically have more in common if you're Irish with somebody in Central Africa than someone in Southern Africa would have, you know.

[1280] Right.

[1281] Demagogues, evil people have used the tiny little phenotypical differences.

[1282] The least significant, least complex gene order.

[1283] To reify them to say that those signify fundamental differences of essence, characteristics meaning something different than we mean, your level of intelligence.

[1284] Yes.

[1285] Ultimately, your value.

[1286] Yes.

[1287] So then on all of those diagrams of the great chain of being, there's God at the top looking like Carlton Heston.

[1288] They're the angels right under God.

[1289] And then there are the four or five, quote unquote, racism, man. And at the bottom of the races of man was an African with a simian look just under the African.

[1290] The next rung of the great chain of being was an ape.

[1291] Uh -huh.

[1292] Last stop.

[1293] Isn't that cold?

[1294] Oh, fuck.

[1295] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[1296] Okay, we must, because you've come here, obviously, to promote something.

[1297] It's so awesome.

[1298] I didn't have to do shit.

[1299] I'm going to Jacques -Marie Maja by a new pair of glasses.

[1300] Oh, my gosh.

[1301] I just learned about that brand.

[1302] They are amazing.

[1303] My next -door neighbor, my friend Larry Bobo, has about 10 pairs of these.

[1304] I've just heard about it, that they're amazing.

[1305] Amazing sunglasses.

[1306] And I went.

[1307] When we landed, I dropped Mariel off at Malibu, and Eli took me to the shop in Venice.

[1308] And the director, he's Norwegian.

[1309] It's a Netflix show.

[1310] What's called Brother's Son?

[1311] That's so hot.

[1312] I haven't seen that.

[1313] This is a tall Norwegian guy.

[1314] Anyway, he was there celebrating the success buying two or three pairs of these Jacques Marie Maj glasses.

[1315] Okay.

[1316] So we're almost done, right?

[1317] Yeah, yeah.

[1318] I mean, I'm enjoying it.

[1319] Yeah, yeah.

[1320] But I'm about to hit the wall because I only have.

[1321] had a banana.

[1322] Of course, of course.

[1323] But I really have had a good time.

[1324] Me too.

[1325] I just want to tell people, though, Finding Your Roots Season 10 is currently airing, and you have a new four -part documentary called Gospel and a gospel live concert accompanying that.

[1326] That's right.

[1327] It was recorded here in L .A. at a famous church.

[1328] With John Legend.

[1329] That's right, with John Legend.

[1330] And he was one of the people that we had on.

[1331] I just wanted to ask you two questions about this.

[1332] Oh, sure.

[1333] We have had Alicia Keys.

[1334] We have had him.

[1335] We've had 10 singers.

[1336] on who all got their start in the church singing.

[1337] Without exception, everyone we interviewed has a much different relationship with religion now than they grew up with, right?

[1338] And I do think we would agree that the country gets more secular.

[1339] I have this deep fear of what replaces that.

[1340] When you look at our Aretha Franklin, you look at Whitney Houston, it all came out of church.

[1341] It all came out of gospel.

[1342] And as that dissipates, what happens?

[1343] That's a great question.

[1344] First of all, you're absolutely correct, that R &B, soul, the foundation is gospel music.

[1345] All of Motown came out of the church.

[1346] There's even the Sam Cook record.

[1347] He's part of the people transitioning from gospel to R &B.

[1348] On side A, it's gospel, and side B, it was R &B.

[1349] There it is epitomized in an actual record.

[1350] By the way, the largest collection of gospel music is at Baylor University because of a scholar named Robert Darden, whom we interview and who's in the series.

[1351] E .B. Du Bois famously said that the black church is composed of three elements, the preacher, the music, and the frenzy.

[1352] I did a documentary on the history of the black church called the Black Church.

[1353] This is our story.

[1354] This is our song.

[1355] And you couldn't do everything, not even in four hours.

[1356] So I wanted to do the sequel on the glue that held it together.

[1357] And the glue that held it together was the music.

[1358] The music and the rhetorical styles of great preachers, which are very musical.

[1359] And that's what our series is.

[1360] There's a great line from one of the female guest in the dock who says the sermon becomes the song, the song becomes the sermon.

[1361] That's right, inextricably intertwined.

[1362] Yeah, it's just one big circle informing one another.

[1363] Gospel existed in the 19th century, it was a white form.

[1364] Blessed Assurance was written by a blind white woman, which is, this is our story, this is our song.

[1365] But black gospel was invented about in the 1920s, in different places, but Chicago takes pride of place because Thomas A. Dorsey, Georgia Tom, the blues player, migrated there, first in 1916, then settling in 1990.

[1366] Mahalia Jackson comes up from New Orleans in 1927, and this is part of the Great Migration, which Isabel Wilkinson's also written about, and the series that I'm making now is on the Great Migration.

[1367] And this becomes this cauldron of culture, and all this stuff is boiling and bubbling.

[1368] And the secular version goes into jazz out of blues and ragtime.

[1369] And the sacred version, jazz and blues, meld with the spirituals, the media, music created by the slaves to form gospel.

[1370] And that becomes this powerful new musical form, which still exists and is still morphing.

[1371] To answer your question, Kirk Franklin records Stomp in 1997, which flips out all the preachers because it's hip -hop.

[1372] Right.

[1373] So here we can see that musical forms are still growing out of the church, the golden age of hip -hop.

[1374] So the church is still important.

[1375] But it's not as important as it was before, which brings us to a fundamental, formal, or structural aspects.

[1376] of hip -hop, which is sampling.

[1377] Yes.

[1378] And the thing about sampling is that's like going to music school.

[1379] Yeah.

[1380] Because you're borrowing forms at your father or even at this point, your grandfather or grandmother or your mother listened to.

[1381] It's also the greatest democratizing tool to ever hit music.

[1382] Yeah, which is one reason that survive for 50 years.

[1383] And it's everywhere.

[1384] Okay.

[1385] On your next trip, I'm going to make you tie together the signifying money.

[1386] Monkey.

[1387] Monkey.

[1388] Dyslexia.

[1389] I typed it up wrong.

[1390] Yeah, the signifying monkey.

[1391] Money signifies too.

[1392] On your next visit, we're going to explore that.

[1393] Yeah, you have to come back another time.

[1394] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1395] Because I think there's some crazy, huge parallel between those two things.

[1396] Oh, but I really had a good time.

[1397] Me too.

[1398] My people said, you know, we want you to do this.

[1399] I go, who fuck is this guy?

[1400] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1401] And they said, you know, you're doing his wife's family tree.

[1402] And I go, oh.

[1403] Okay.

[1404] Well, I'm glad I got the nice side of you because of that.

[1405] Not the first time I've benefited from her.

[1406] So look, you've got to let me do your family tree.

[1407] You got to let me do it.

[1408] I don't want to go down and sit with you to find out my family owned slaves.

[1409] But you know what?

[1410] Well, I'm going to tell you your family owned slaves.

[1411] Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[1412] Now that I've told you, we have Lance that loyal.

[1413] Well, I do want to do because I have the honchels from Hazard, Kentucky, who are all murderers, and it's a very wild ride.

[1414] But you never know where it's going to go.

[1415] And besides, who cares what your ancestors?

[1416] No, I agree.

[1417] My producers, when I was coming over, they go, nail this motherfucker down.

[1418] Okay, I'll do it.

[1419] I'll do it.

[1420] You do it?

[1421] Yes.

[1422] Hey, handshake.

[1423] Look at that, tip for tap.

[1424] And wherever we go, I'll walk you through it.

[1425] Okay.

[1426] I'll hold your hand.

[1427] Okay, I'm in.

[1428] Because I like you.

[1429] I have a rapport with both of you.

[1430] We have a nice little thing here.

[1431] It's great.

[1432] It's good.

[1433] Chemistry, we call it.

[1434] Do you have it or you know?

[1435] No, it's nice.

[1436] When I got here, realized I was in a time warping, I was back in Appalachia.

[1437] Yes, exactly.

[1438] High -end Appalachia.

[1439] All right.

[1440] Great having you, and good luck with everything.

[1441] Thank you.

[1442] Stay tuned for the fast check so you can hear all the facts.

[1443] We're wrong.

[1444] You got to wear your orange boots.

[1445] I can because it's a rainy day.

[1446] It's a rainy day.

[1447] It was a rainy day yesterday and a rainy day today.

[1448] And how's your sad?

[1449] My sad is confused.

[1450] I've had some exchanges with you and you sounded pretty chipper.

[1451] Yeah.

[1452] My sad is a little confused because I'm coming out of my funk.

[1453] Okay.

[1454] But then it rained.

[1455] So my funk was like, we're supposed to be funky again.

[1456] Right.

[1457] And now we have an excuse.

[1458] Yeah, so it doesn't really know how to feel.

[1459] What day did the funk lift?

[1460] It had to do with astrology.

[1461] Oh, tell me. Tell me. You're getting deeper and deeper and I love it.

[1462] I know because my natal chart.

[1463] Right.

[1464] Because of my natal chart, Clarice, the woman I saw the astrologer I saw.

[1465] Your advisor.

[1466] Well, I haven't brought her on to the team yet.

[1467] But I get her emails now.

[1468] Oh, okay.

[1469] You're on her mailer list now.

[1470] Actually, let me read it.

[1471] Okay.

[1472] Okay.

[1473] Oh my God, it's my dad's birthday.

[1474] Holy smokes.

[1475] Good thing we looked at your astrological.

[1476] It's Calvin's too.

[1477] They'll share birthday?

[1478] Oh, my God.

[1479] That's good luck for Calvin.

[1480] Calvin reminds me of a show.

[1481] I can see that.

[1482] Similar coloring.

[1483] Okay.

[1484] They seem like.

[1485] Twin flames.

[1486] Quietly wide.

[1487] Twin flames.

[1488] Subtle wiseness.

[1489] Like, yeah, I could see that.

[1490] Wow.

[1491] Twin Flines.

[1492] Maybe Calvin is going to inherit the Sim.

[1493] Well, my dad is going to retire.

[1494] Well, your dad might be enjoying the Sim so much that he had himself now born to go through on another ride, another cycle.

[1495] We do kind of look alike now that we're talking about it.

[1496] They do.

[1497] And they have a very similar disposition.

[1498] Twin Flames.

[1499] Twin Flames.

[1500] That was a good one, Rob.

[1501] That was good.

[1502] Okay.

[1503] Clarice.

[1504] She said.

[1505] Oh, my God.

[1506] For half a second when you said Clarice.

[1507] You go, no, you go, okay, Clarice, which is the exact delivery of our guests, like, whatever the fact check's about.

[1508] And I was like, oh, Clarice, I don't remember.

[1509] I was really scrambling.

[1510] Oh, I see.

[1511] I don't remember talking to a Clarice.

[1512] Yeah, no. Clarice.

[1513] Isn't that the name of?

[1514] Yeah.

[1515] What's that movie?

[1516] Sounds like the lambs.

[1517] A kianti.

[1518] Oh, we have something fun coming up.

[1519] We have a fun themed week ahead.

[1520] And in having to do with that, just reminded me, there's a scene in the show of the theme we're doing where parts of a body is eaten.

[1521] Oh, yeah.

[1522] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1523] And blood drank.

[1524] Uh -huh, yep.

[1525] Pivot, Clarice.

[1526] Yes.

[1527] This is her email.

[1528] Hi, all, a significant event is set to unfold this Saturday.

[1529] This was this past Saturday.

[1530] Oh, my goodness.

[1531] Making a transition as Pluto moves from Capricorn to Aquarius.

[1532] This shift occurring as Pluto changes signs includes a final conjunction with the sun at the very end of Capricorn, 29 degrees.

[1533] A degree in astrology known for its connection to Mars, the planet associated with aggression and tension.

[1534] Oh.

[1535] As an Aquarian, oh, I won't talk about our personal stuff.

[1536] It's important to note that January 20th could potentially be an intense and dynamic day.

[1537] If you're interested, okay, that was all.

[1538] Okay.

[1539] But that really kind of was the day.

[1540] But it's interesting because it sounds a little foreboding that email.

[1541] It sounds a little intense and what were the adjectives used?

[1542] Yeah, aggression and tension.

[1543] Yes, that's not.

[1544] No, but it's coming out of.

[1545] Oh, okay.

[1546] Which that does make sense.

[1547] Right.

[1548] There has been tension and aggression, actually.

[1549] Oh, yes.

[1550] I thought it was me. I was like cracking my brain.

[1551] of like, I haven't think I've been aggressive, but I have quit dip, so maybe I've lost perspective.

[1552] No, no, no. But yeah, so, so I do think I felt the tides turn, the plutonian shift.

[1553] The plutonian shift, it moved out of Capricorn into Aquarius, the age of Aquarius.

[1554] Then I read something else that was like a longer, more intricate thing on it.

[1555] Do you, could we do, let's do a percentage out of a hundred.

[1556] 100 is you believe in astrology in a way that you would make decisions in your life around it.

[1557] Okay.

[1558] That's 100.

[1559] Okay.

[1560] I don't know why I'm using a hundred scale.

[1561] Let's use 10.

[1562] Okay.

[1563] That's easier.

[1564] Because I had a weird hunch it was going to be down into like a, you know, like 33.

[1565] I had a hunch we're going to need the extra digits.

[1566] So let's stick with 100.

[1567] Let's two decimals, like 9 .4.

[1568] Oh, okay.

[1569] Let's do a centa based.

[1570] Okay, so I don't think that's a word.

[1571] So that's 100 is you're designing your entire life around.

[1572] it.

[1573] Zero is it's hogwash.

[1574] It would be a waste of time.

[1575] It's not even entertaining because it's such a waste of time.

[1576] I see.

[1577] Yes.

[1578] I've said enough about the product.

[1579] Where do you think you're at and where do you think you're headed?

[1580] I am at.

[1581] I'm at Be honest.

[1582] I am.

[1583] You're a little, probably embarrassed to go high.

[1584] No. Don't do that.

[1585] Don't lead the witness.

[1586] Don't point me into a corner.

[1587] So Capricorn.

[1588] I didn't get the memo that pluto.

[1589] has left Capricorn.

[1590] Okay, I think I'm at 46 .7.

[1591] No kidding.

[1592] But I'm heading to 68.

[1593] Okay.

[1594] And where were you when you first started sending Kristen and I those?

[1595] 10.

[1596] Wow, so it's really building.

[1597] 10 for fun.

[1598] Entertainment value.

[1599] And then up until 22, it was entertainment.

[1600] Okay.

[1601] Then from 22 to 37, it was, man, these signs, like your astrological sign is seeming pretty dead on.

[1602] Right.

[1603] Okay.

[1604] So more convincing.

[1605] Yeah.

[1606] Then from 37 to what I say, 46 .7 where I'm at.

[1607] Uh -huh.

[1608] We need to put, we need a chart in here, by the way.

[1609] I'm already worried that we're going to lose these numbers.

[1610] Yeah, well.

[1611] I'll write it down around when I listen to the fact chat.

[1612] Okay.

[1613] For the future, you mean?

[1614] Well, I'd like to have a chart in here so we know.

[1615] That's a good idea.

[1616] How it's progressing.

[1617] How it's progressing.

[1618] Yeah.

[1619] Well, okay.

[1620] So that little area is expanding to like the sky and this stuff.

[1621] More predictions.

[1622] But not a prediction.

[1623] First was just like, wow, these are pretty accurate descriptions.

[1624] But now the predictions are.

[1625] I'm not there yet, though.

[1626] Okay.

[1627] That will start at 52.

[1628] Okay.

[1629] Okay.

[1630] But I'm getting there because I didn't want to tell you this.

[1631] During the natal chart reading, she did.

[1632] So I am very against predictions of any kind.

[1633] Right.

[1634] The only thing that scares me about your new interest in this and growing belief is self -fulfilling prophecies.

[1635] Exactly.

[1636] It's not a waste of time to detail what we mean by that, which is like a lot of times when you hear something's going to happen, you look forward and you sort of make it.

[1637] You make it happen.

[1638] You manifest.

[1639] Yeah.

[1640] No, I'm hyper aware of self -filling prophecies.

[1641] Okay.

[1642] And it's why I don't ever, like, I'm so against psychics or tarot card readings or anything like that.

[1643] So far, astrology isn't that.

[1644] This was your chart when you were born, and these are, like, attributes.

[1645] Right.

[1646] But when I had my reading, she asked me, is there anything I've been, like, worried about or want to know?

[1647] You knew immediately what you would want an answer to.

[1648] Yeah.

[1649] And I asked.

[1650] You did.

[1651] It was about career, I imagine.

[1652] It was our work.

[1653] And, well, okay.

[1654] And then she didn't, she did a good job.

[1655] She wasn't like, yes, this is going to happen or this isn't going to happen or anything.

[1656] She kind of said like, uh -oh.

[1657] Oh, geez.

[1658] I know.

[1659] I know.

[1660] I know.

[1661] She didn't.

[1662] But the way she was answering it did make me feel scared.

[1663] Yes, yes.

[1664] And then I was so mad that I had asked and I have done this.

[1665] Yes, this is exactly why I don't do this.

[1666] But then she found out another piece of information.

[1667] And that changed everything.

[1668] Okay.

[1669] So anyways, it was good.

[1670] Okay, good, good.

[1671] But of course, for me, I'm hearing this.

[1672] What I was scared was bad news.

[1673] And I immediately, I was like, I have to unhear this.

[1674] I hate that.

[1675] Yeah.

[1676] That's not true.

[1677] Mm -hmm.

[1678] And then immediately I went into how do I reframe this in my head to make it?

[1679] Like, I was already going to make it good.

[1680] Right.

[1681] But it was going to take a lot of work and a lot of zigzaggy.

[1682] Yeah.

[1683] But it didn't matter because it was fine.

[1684] Oh, okay, great.

[1685] So I guess I did kind of, oh, she did, then she gave your own rule a little bit.

[1686] She was like, these dates are good.

[1687] Oh, what were the dates?

[1688] I didn't write them down.

[1689] But it was like, it was like, nowish.

[1690] You guys aren't bringing Rob to these.

[1691] Yes.

[1692] They had to take that.

[1693] Dates.

[1694] But no, it's like now -ish.

[1695] And so I think this has to get rolling, but it just seems like it is.

[1696] Anyway, so I have used it, I guess, slightly more than I would have thought.

[1697] Also, I'm reading this book.

[1698] I don't love it.

[1699] First of all, congratulations.

[1700] You're reading.

[1701] Thank you.

[1702] You're doing your resolution.

[1703] I'm trying.

[1704] I don't love the book, so it's hard.

[1705] Why don't you switch books?

[1706] I don't want to finish it.

[1707] Okay.

[1708] Finish what you start.

[1709] It's a good book.

[1710] but it doesn't have its hooks in me. It hasn't ever hooked, yeah.

[1711] But there's a bunch of astrology stuff in it.

[1712] The protagonist is obsessed with astrology.

[1713] How fun for you.

[1714] And so it's all coming together.

[1715] Yeah.

[1716] Yeah.

[1717] What's your percentage?

[1718] Be honest.

[1719] Four.

[1720] No, you like it more than four.

[1721] Well, I enjoy when you send those things and that does sound like us.

[1722] Yeah, and you get a little bit like, wow.

[1723] But I don't.

[1724] I've heard you say, wow.

[1725] Well, for sure.

[1726] I mean, I think one of them said I wear noise canceling headphones.

[1727] But at the same time, you know why that's tricky?

[1728] This is what keeps me at a four.

[1729] Everybody wears noise canceling headphones.

[1730] Every scene.

[1731] Rob wears noise canceling headphones.

[1732] Yes, America wears noise canceling headphones.

[1733] Even the earbuds are noise cancelling.

[1734] It was not about that.

[1735] It was, just one second.

[1736] So there's same things that really apply to everybody.

[1737] But in this case, they really apply to me because I'm using them to prevent myself from going mad, right?

[1738] So I agree, but I'm just saying it's, it's hard to believe in anything because you just say like, these folks brush their teeth and I'm like, oh my God, I do.

[1739] You know, everyone's doing it.

[1740] That's not fair or right.

[1741] You're right.

[1742] Because for one, the noise canceling headphones happened right after the next day after you had noise canceling headphones on all day to regulate your emotions.

[1743] Yeah.

[1744] And none of us did.

[1745] It wasn't like we were all walking around with them.

[1746] You were very specific in that.

[1747] Yes.

[1748] That one was crazy.

[1749] And that was really fun.

[1750] And that's what kept me willing to read them.

[1751] Like when you send them, I don't ignore them.

[1752] Let me read one.

[1753] Well, hold on.

[1754] What's the actual science behind it?

[1755] Like, what is it?

[1756] Stars and planets.

[1757] And when you're born and the way it maps.

[1758] I don't, I don't.

[1759] There's a lot I don't know.

[1760] The one I've heard people say that I can see where they think it's compelling is that your body is majority water.

[1761] I've heard this.

[1762] one.

[1763] And the moon is pulling the tides in and out.

[1764] So it has an enormous impact, obviously, on water.

[1765] And you're made of water.

[1766] Now, for me, there's a big gap between water in your body and serotonin and neuroepidepidifrin and every chemical that's actually controlling your mood.

[1767] I mean, I guess you could argue there's a lot of water in those.

[1768] I don't know.

[1769] Yep, you could.

[1770] But I don't even know if that's true.

[1771] I don't know if synapses and neurotransmitters are full of water or electricity.

[1772] I'm not even sure.

[1773] It's more traits than mood.

[1774] I mean, some of it's mood.

[1775] And like when Mercury is in retrograde, that has a big effect.

[1776] Yeah, buckle up.

[1777] Especially for me because Mercury is my ruling planet.

[1778] You're a slave to Mercury.

[1779] Which she said is a good thing.

[1780] Okay.

[1781] That is a good one?

[1782] I guess.

[1783] Oh, the other thing.

[1784] So my other issue, so one is that I think they say things that everyone has.

[1785] Yeah.

[1786] And you have it in varying degrees.

[1787] And then on a month where it's like, wow, I was peak that trait.

[1788] I mean, we all have the same stuff.

[1789] We're all agitated at times.

[1790] We're all excited.

[1791] We're all horny.

[1792] We're all sad.

[1793] We all wear noise cancelling headphones.

[1794] I have not worn them yet.

[1795] I know.

[1796] And that's my present to you.

[1797] I'm going to.

[1798] I just haven't.

[1799] I just put.

[1800] Do you need me to connect it?

[1801] Is that what's going on?

[1802] Is that what you're nervous about?

[1803] I'm a little like I probably have to do some stuff.

[1804] Right.

[1805] So why don't you just bring them back to the attic?

[1806] Just pretend you're returning them.

[1807] And then when you're here, I will connect your phone and your computer to them.

[1808] So all you got to do is pick them up, put them on, and it'll go, beep, beep, and then it's connected.

[1809] Yeah.

[1810] That might help.

[1811] They made a way easier connecting now.

[1812] Isn't it just you press a button?

[1813] Yeah.

[1814] And then you're turning your Bluetooth on your device.

[1815] I'm, I'm gonna.

[1816] My other issue is, like, because my mother would go to, she would get a reading once in a while.

[1817] Uh -huh.

[1818] It was something she liked to do.

[1819] Uh -oh.

[1820] For entertainment purposes.

[1821] Yeah.

[1822] One or two things would materialize, and she would be blown away by that.

[1823] Yeah.

[1824] But the problem is they spoke for an hour.

[1825] sometimes two hours.

[1826] So several hundred things had been said that didn't come true.

[1827] Sure.

[1828] So the percentage is so low.

[1829] If I take 25 guesses right now about you, and one of them's right, but 24 are wrong.

[1830] I don't think you'd ever go like, Dax is clairvoyant.

[1831] No, you're not.

[1832] Right.

[1833] Because I've even seen people do these mind games with people, and they get three wrong en route to the fourth, and then when they get to the fourth, it's like, whoa, it'd be like, I see that you have a sister.

[1834] and they'll go like, oh, I don't have a sister.

[1835] But maybe it's a friend you're so close to you, think of it as sister.

[1836] Yes, Becky and I always say we're saying.

[1837] You know, like, they don't care that it was wrong because we got to that she has a friend.

[1838] I agree.

[1839] Everyone agrees.

[1840] Okay, so that's why I'm at four.

[1841] But I just think that's not, I'm just, I don't think that's an accurate number.

[1842] I think you're a 14.

[1843] Okay.

[1844] I'll do that.

[1845] I'm 14.

[1846] Okay.

[1847] If anyone asks me later today, I'm going to say I'm a 14.

[1848] And we have to write it on.

[1849] the chart.

[1850] Okay, tell me about your weekend, because I was out of town, so I don't know anything that happened to you this weekend.

[1851] What did you do?

[1852] Oh, I had a Valley Day.

[1853] Okay.

[1854] Sportsman's Lodge?

[1855] No, it wasn't a tried and true Valley Day.

[1856] Normally, I get a bagel, then I go to the coffee shop, and I work all day at the coffee shop, then we go to Foreman's and play poker, and then we go to Don Cuckos and have burritos.

[1857] Oh, fun.

[1858] God, you're young.

[1859] So young.

[1860] I'm really not.

[1861] Yeah.

[1862] Did you any of that stuff?

[1863] Well, yeah, we went to Don Cout.

[1864] We went to Houston's.

[1865] Oh, fun.

[1866] Friday night?

[1867] Oh, for lunch.

[1868] Which was delicious.

[1869] And then I went to the bookstore.

[1870] Okay.

[1871] And then we went to Foreman's.

[1872] Okay.

[1873] And we ended up playing spades, not poker.

[1874] Okay.

[1875] And then we went to Don Cucco's.

[1876] And then we got a milkshake.

[1877] Fun.

[1878] Yeah, it was really fun.

[1879] I love that.

[1880] Man, Bob's has just the best milkshakes.

[1881] But you went to Bob's Big Boys.

[1882] Yeah, that's where I go from milkshakes.

[1883] This is a ding, ding, ding.

[1884] Because this weekend, I cooked a steak for my friend Rich.

[1885] Uh -huh.

[1886] And he said, I want it fucking blasted.

[1887] Like, leave it on so long.

[1888] It wants well.

[1889] So let me just say, Rich and Patty, who I've known now for 14 years, Rich and Patty owned the company, Tatum, that built my sand car, the best one in the world, named after their daughter, Tatum.

[1890] So I've been friendly with them and I camp with them sometimes.

[1891] I really, really like them.

[1892] They're both retired now.

[1893] Yeah.

[1894] And then they were with friends who I'd never.

[1895] met Mike and Amber, and they were awesome.

[1896] So like the four of them I just was having so much fun with.

[1897] And so Mike and Amber have been out to a restaurant with Rich a bunch of times watching him try to order a steak.

[1898] And he can't get them to ruin it enough.

[1899] So I said, you might want to try this technique.

[1900] I love the malts at Bob's Big Boys.

[1901] And I always want them to put more malt in.

[1902] In the strategy, I finally figured out that works every time is you tell the server, okay, I want you to put so much molten that you will have a moment where you think, fuck, I put too much molten and I've ruined it.

[1903] Double that.

[1904] And that works.

[1905] So I said, start telling them like, I want you to cook this so well burnt.

[1906] The moment you think I've ruined this steak, you're halfway there.

[1907] Wow.

[1908] So they're going to try that TBD.

[1909] We'll see if that strategy works.

[1910] Wow.

[1911] But what a ding, ding -ding, because then I ended up telling that story probably three times this weekend about the malt.

[1912] Oh, you did?

[1913] Well, because then I cooked a hamburger, and I also had to blast the hamburger, and then some other people were talking about how Rich loves his hamburgers blasted.

[1914] And then I, you know.

[1915] Wow.

[1916] Yeah.

[1917] Well.

[1918] It doesn't take a lot of provocation for me to tell that malt story, as you would have guessed.

[1919] Yeah.

[1920] I knew you were thinking that.

[1921] And so I'll be cut to the chase.

[1922] Only because we have heard it on here once before, too.

[1923] Yeah, but you know.

[1924] But it's great.

[1925] The thing is we've been on for six years.

[1926] So sometimes I'm going to, I got to, there's, we have new listeners in India that don't know.

[1927] And they might go to Bob's on vacation.

[1928] The Indian listeners have been here since day one.

[1929] I don't know.

[1930] It's as fast as growing.

[1931] Yeah, no, it's true.

[1932] A lot of people don't know about Peabody.

[1933] You know, that's a sad truth.

[1934] No, Peabody, but Peababy was a long time ago.

[1935] Right.

[1936] And I'm going to told that malt story around that time.

[1937] It was pretty because, because it was a few months ago because.

[1938] When did it, you, you have an exact memory?

[1939] I do know why.

[1940] I know that the reason we talked about it is because I was talking about Valley Days.

[1941] It's because Jess and I get malt.

[1942] But you're just like a milkshake, not a malt.

[1943] Yeah, but he loves malts.

[1944] And it was probably around the time I was telling the story of my trigger shot because that had to do with that day.

[1945] That was October.

[1946] And then we were talking about Bob's and then you told your malt story.

[1947] Oh, okay.

[1948] And here I am again.

[1949] And I told it all weekend.

[1950] And you, is there any prediction of when I'll stop telling that story?

[1951] I'll ask for it.

[1952] Clearly something's in my, my moon cycle.

[1953] Okay, other highlights.

[1954] Oh, yeah.

[1955] Oh, no, no, that was Friday night.

[1956] I want to hear about your Saturday night.

[1957] Yeah, I had a brunch with Liz.

[1958] Fun.

[1959] There's a pin in that for synced for two weeks from now.

[1960] And then yesterday, I did nothing.

[1961] Well, I cooked.

[1962] I made a banana bread and then I made a soup.

[1963] But based on something that happened in the brunch with Liz that we're going to talk about two weeks from now and synched, we talked about boredom and how we can't really get bored anymore.

[1964] Our society doesn't understand boredom anymore.

[1965] No appetite for boredom.

[1966] Well, doesn't exist.

[1967] You will all, you always have a distraction.

[1968] You always have your phone.

[1969] There's always a million things you could be looking at.

[1970] And then I got a little bored yesterday.

[1971] It was like sort of the goal.

[1972] Oh, okay.

[1973] I'm not going to go do anything.

[1974] I'm going to try not to just like keep refreshing the phone.

[1975] Did you?

[1976] What was the longest you had put your phone down?

[1977] I was down a while because I, well, I made the banana bread, although that's like not boring.

[1978] But yeah, like when I would grab it out of instinct, I would put it down.

[1979] I mean, a few times I looked at it.

[1980] I'm not saying I didn't look at it.

[1981] But it was an intention to just don't always go here.

[1982] You can just, like, slay here.

[1983] Yeah, yeah.

[1984] I read some of my book, but I got a little bored, which was nice.

[1985] And I think maybe as adults, we might get three of those days a year.

[1986] Uh -huh.

[1987] There's so few and far between.

[1988] They're probably restful in a weird way.

[1989] Very.

[1990] Yeah, restorative.

[1991] Mm -hmm.

[1992] So it was nice.

[1993] Oh, good.

[1994] Okay.

[1995] So I went with Aaron Weekly, best friend Aaron Weekly.

[1996] Yes.

[1997] To the Sand Dunes.

[1998] To the Sand Dunes.

[1999] And we had a spectacular time.

[2000] Great.

[2001] And we brought four vehicles to off -road in because they break.

[2002] It's part of the biz.

[2003] Yeah.

[2004] It's to be expected.

[2005] Yeah.

[2006] So first day, we went on a rip in the four -seater and the one -seater, and I haven't driven my one -seater since it's been turbo and the engine's done.

[2007] It's so fun.

[2008] I was having so much fun.

[2009] Then we went out in the Raptor at night to try all the crazy new lighting I have for it.

[2010] And that was awesome.

[2011] Loved it.

[2012] And then Thursday, Rich and Patty were there.

[2013] I got the sand car out.

[2014] And then I'm following Rich.

[2015] in his sand truck so much fun and then the girls showed up on Friday but um Aaron and I first night we watched most of Napoleon.

[2016] Okay.

[2017] We like to do movie nights when we're out there great Napoleon Dynamite no the movie Napoleon with uh Joaquin Phoenix oh the new movie the new movie yes okay how was it we were loving it but then Aaron started sawing logs about two thirds away through so I shut it down what's that mean pooping no snoring Yeah, he was out cold.

[2018] We put the pull -out bed out of...

[2019] He sleeps on the pull -out bed, which is an air mattress, and the big TV's up front, and then we lay in the pull -out bed and watch.

[2020] That's sweet.

[2021] And then all of a sudden, he was snoring.

[2022] So then Friday, the girls arrived, Lincoln Delta Kristen.

[2023] I took the girls out in the Raptor at night, which was really fun.

[2024] Lincoln, of course, wanted more and more.

[2025] Then at night, Lincoln really wanted to put some Ted Seeger's stickers on the swing set, because everyone put stickers on it.

[2026] So we had to go get to the swing set.

[2027] There's also a volleyball court.

[2028] Oh, sand volleyball.

[2029] Played sand volleyball.

[2030] Monica's favorite.

[2031] The Shepherds plus Aaron versus Patty Rich.

[2032] Amber and Mike.

[2033] Fun.

[2034] And reactivated everything that had hurt from the week before.

[2035] Rotator cuff, right arm.

[2036] Ficked.

[2037] Left knee.

[2038] Doesn't matter.

[2039] Diving.

[2040] It's a blast.

[2041] It was a nail biter.

[2042] 13 to 15.

[2043] We lost.

[2044] But we had two kids.

[2045] Okay, but also.

[2046] And we're in the middle of the dunes playing ball.

[2047] It was like a weird, synchronized.

[2048] I know, but you've been saying for weeks now, Sam volleyball, bad.

[2049] Hate it.

[2050] Would way rather play grass.

[2051] But then you loved it?

[2052] Well, I'll play volleyball on any surface.

[2053] I love volleyball.

[2054] Okay.

[2055] This is what we're finding out.

[2056] I'd play on hot lava if there was an adult.

[2057] Wow.

[2058] Okay.

[2059] So that's fun.

[2060] It was really, really fun.

[2061] Then that night, second viewing of Barb.

[2062] All right.

[2063] Yes.

[2064] Great movie.

[2065] What a great movie.

[2066] Really held up.

[2067] It's a masterpiece.

[2068] It's really...

[2069] I love that you love it so much.

[2070] It's so well made.

[2071] It's so creative.

[2072] Yeah.

[2073] Also, I was thinking for those actors, like, there's those scenes where they're on that stupid beach set with a plastic wave behind them and plastic everything.

[2074] And I was thinking, on set, these people, thank God, had a lot of faith in her.

[2075] Yeah.

[2076] And it was warranted.

[2077] But when you're standing on this crazy, plastic -y set doing a big song, and dance routine.

[2078] Without the music, there's no real music in those scenes.

[2079] Yep.

[2080] Ryan Gosling.

[2081] This one in particular is him singing his big song.

[2082] Yeah.

[2083] And it's at the beach.

[2084] And I'm like, this, this is full commitment and probably felt a little scary.

[2085] He's pulling his shirt open and he's being dushy intentionally.

[2086] Totally.

[2087] And it's on this plastic toy set.

[2088] I know.

[2089] And I'm impressed.

[2090] Into Greta.

[2091] Holy smokes.

[2092] It's just such a masterpiece.

[2093] Side note.

[2094] Aaron and I, this entire trip, have had a new thing.

[2095] We want to have a brand of paper towels, and it's for men who work hard and sometimes have to pee just on a roll of paper towel.

[2096] This all started because I was peeing, driving the bus, following a police escort of an oversized trailer on the drive -out.

[2097] So we're going 35.

[2098] I've got the cruise on, and I'm standing next to the wheel peeing in a very small jug, and I had to cut it off halfway through, and then I was afraid of a bunch of drippage.

[2099] So then I was using the paper towel to wrap around my penis when I put it back in my pants.

[2100] Okay.

[2101] And then that led to us thinking of just a commercial where there's two rolls of paper towel on a counter and then two men in work outfits come.

[2102] You don't see their penises.

[2103] You just see P. Bob's paper towel can absorb a whole.

[2104] I see.

[2105] Okay.

[2106] And it's all about a work man and your tools.

[2107] And the urine doesn't look healthy.

[2108] It's very dark.

[2109] Ew.

[2110] So we're going on and on about Bob's paper towel.

[2111] And it's exactly what Greta does.

[2112] The fact that he's obsessed with horses is so funny.

[2113] That's the exact kind of thing that Aaron and I would be obsessed with, that a man likes a horse.

[2114] Right.

[2115] And I forgot how much Ken thought that the patriarchy had to do with horses.

[2116] Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[2117] And when he makes it Ken land, Mount Rushmore now is four horses faces.

[2118] Yeah.

[2119] Oh, my God.

[2120] And he admits that he was confused that he thought it was mostly about horses.

[2121] Yes.

[2122] It's so our kind of joke, Aaron and I is where we just keep going further and further away.

[2123] What's more manly?

[2124] What's more manly?

[2125] Right.

[2126] All while making fun of us.

[2127] Exactly.

[2128] It's so funny.

[2129] So it was a great weekend.

[2130] Yeah.

[2131] And the ride home was incredible because the lions were playing.

[2132] Oh.

[2133] And I had that going over the stereo.

[2134] They won.

[2135] They're going to, what's it called, Rob?

[2136] AFC championship.

[2137] They have not been to even where they're at since 1957.

[2138] Oh, my God.

[2139] Or I think they were at the Super Bowl in 1957.

[2140] So they're fucking going.

[2141] And the game was awesome.

[2142] And I was cheering.

[2143] I was inside the bus cheering.

[2144] Wow.

[2145] And then I started really believing, wow, Michigan's on fire because U of M won, the whole shebang.

[2146] Yep.

[2147] And now the lions are on their way to the AFC championship.

[2148] NFC title game.

[2149] The NFC title game.

[2150] So exciting.

[2151] So then what?

[2152] If they win that.

[2153] They go to the Super Bowl.

[2154] It's fun to care about a team.

[2155] It is.

[2156] I really like it.

[2157] Changes the game.

[2158] Something that also happened, I guess, Friday, probably before Pluto moved into Aquarius.

[2159] Okay.

[2160] I was in the living room and I was brushing my hair, very rare, and I heard the door open from the, like, vestibule door.

[2161] Oh, the door that brings you into the entryway.

[2162] Yeah, exactly.

[2163] I heard that door open, and then my door.

[2164] Someone twisted the knob.

[2165] Twisted the knob.

[2166] The knob was twisted.

[2167] And I was standing there, so I, like, saw and heard it.

[2168] And immediately my thought was.

[2169] Oh, like a friend is over, or like someone's coming over.

[2170] But I was getting ready to leave and anyone who would drop by, it didn't make sense.

[2171] And then I was like, lady, no, it's not heard.

[2172] And then I got freaked out.

[2173] And I started making some noise.

[2174] You didn't want to go to your peekaboo?

[2175] No, because I was afraid.

[2176] So I just started making noise to let whoever was there know that somebody was in there.

[2177] Right.

[2178] And then they went upstairs, and then they came back down, and then there was like a major pause before they left.

[2179] And I looked.

[2180] Okay, now you look.

[2181] Yes.

[2182] And this is where things get tricky.

[2183] So it was a guy who cleans the windows.

[2184] Okay.

[2185] And my apartment has multiple little small buildings within it.

[2186] So I went to the next one and then he was in there and he was cleaning the window.

[2187] there so why would he have did you report this to no i didn't you need to for sure that's really weird i know but it's one of those weird like you're not sure if he really rotated the door hand what if i like what if that didn't happen and what if he gets fired it's like too scary about him don't you know for sure whether he twisted the door window i mean i feel like i know for sure but how like without going back in time and then he went up he washes the exterior windows he must Wash both sides, would be my guess.

[2188] So he probably washed the outside or whatever.

[2189] You got to say something.

[2190] And then I think he went upstairs, I believe, to do there's an upstairs window.

[2191] Okay.

[2192] Yeah.

[2193] So he did that.

[2194] And then when he came down, my guess is the reason there was a pause.

[2195] He was probably doing the inside of the bottom.

[2196] There's a window there?

[2197] Like the door.

[2198] Oh, it has a window.

[2199] I left and I saw him in the other building.

[2200] And I just made eye contact.

[2201] and then I kept walking.

[2202] Is there a door to get to the stairs?

[2203] She couldn't have heard another door handle.

[2204] I meant if he got confused at which door he was trying to open.

[2205] He was like trying to get door upstairs.

[2206] That's the only one.

[2207] Isn't that weird?

[2208] That's got to be reported.

[2209] You think so?

[2210] Yeah, I do for sure.

[2211] Fuck.

[2212] Yeah.

[2213] I don't want to get him fired, though.

[2214] What if he's just like had a bad?

[2215] What could be the explanation of spinning someone's doorknob instead of knocking?

[2216] Also, why would he even not?

[2217] Exactly.

[2218] He had no business.

[2219] Yeah, I know.

[2220] But then I thought maybe instead, I should just maybe get a camera.

[2221] Sure.

[2222] Yeah, get a camera.

[2223] That's fine.

[2224] But also?

[2225] Yeah.

[2226] Yeah.

[2227] Also, what's her name got murdered by the dude working in the building?

[2228] I know the waitress lady.

[2229] I know exactly.

[2230] Of course, that's exactly what I thought of.

[2231] But I have to say, I think that's very fucking weird that he tried to open the door to your apartment.

[2232] In fact, it's insanely weird and you need to report it.

[2233] Okay.

[2234] I don't think he'll come back because he knows I saw it.

[2235] No, you got to.

[2236] What, so he can do it to someone else?

[2237] No. Maybe he had taught him a lesson that he could get caught at any time.

[2238] No. Okay.

[2239] Yeah.

[2240] But also, if he gets fired, he might come hurt me because I got him fired.

[2241] Like, there's a lot to think about.

[2242] Well, I think what'll happen is they'll say, hey, someone heard your thing.

[2243] He'll say, no, I didn't.

[2244] Yeah.

[2245] And then he'll go, oh, fuck.

[2246] I can't do that.

[2247] People have reported me already.

[2248] Like, I'm on high alert there.

[2249] But then don't you think that eye contact would have done that?

[2250] It needs to be a record of this.

[2251] So that when someone comes into your apartment and your shit's missing, there's at least one person.

[2252] There just needs to be a record of this.

[2253] Okay.

[2254] But now I'm, what if I made it up?

[2255] Well, I don't know how to answer for that.

[2256] I don't either.

[2257] That's the part that I'm scared.

[2258] I mean, how could I make it up, but still.

[2259] Is there a window upstairs that he could have been cleaning?

[2260] upstairs?

[2261] Why do you go upstairs?

[2262] Yeah.

[2263] There is a window.

[2264] Yeah.

[2265] He went up there to clean the window, is my assumption.

[2266] Okay.

[2267] I don't think you went up there to like check the doors there.

[2268] Okay.

[2269] I don't think.

[2270] I don't know.

[2271] It just feels complex.

[2272] Why don't you say I think I heard him?

[2273] Okay.

[2274] Yeah.

[2275] I guess I have to.

[2276] It feels weird.

[2277] Because what if someone else has already reported it and it already went that way and he already denied it?

[2278] And now there's a second one.

[2279] Yeah.

[2280] It's hard.

[2281] Yeah.

[2282] It's hard to know what to It's hard to know when to trust your instincts.

[2283] Yeah, but I, and this, I don't want to be dramatic, but it is the exact same thing as why pedophiles go unchecked, is someone's like, well, I rescued my kid from this, or I narrowly avoided this.

[2284] And so I'm going to, that's what I feel guilty about is like, oh, had I reported the person who molested me, perhaps I would have prevented other kids from getting molested.

[2285] Like, that's part of the guilt I have.

[2286] I understand that.

[2287] And I think a lot of people proceed through life that way.

[2288] they do and it's why people get away with stuff for very much longer i will say that's different though because there's no questioning whether that person hurt you this is a little more gray it's not very gray though you would never twist someone's door handle you would knock if the person if he needed to talk to you or get he just cleaned it could that have been well when you tell the manager you go I don't know if he cleans door handles if he does then I'm wrong but I what I heard is my door handle be twisted yeah so I just wanted to say that in case anything else is happening yeah I guess I'll say it and find out you just doing a very I'm not asking the person to be fired I just I think I heard this I want you to know that I did in case it's it happened to someone else then anyway so I think I am going to get a camera also great okay anyway all right all right So this is for Henry Lewis Gates.

[2289] What a delight.

[2290] So fun.

[2291] His life story is bonkers, yeah.

[2292] It was really fun getting to talk to him and hear his whole thing.

[2293] Yeah.

[2294] Okay, a couple facts.

[2295] Is it the go -back machine, the cartoon?

[2296] He sent me in an email, yeah.

[2297] Oh, that's funny.

[2298] It's the way back machine, but it's spelled W -A -B -A -C, all caps.

[2299] W -A -B -A -C.

[2300] Oh, that's confusing.

[2301] Yes.

[2302] Not helpful.

[2303] The Wayback Machine was from the Peabody's Improbable History segment of the early 1960s cartoon series, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

[2304] Ah.

[2305] The machine was constructed by Mr. Peabody, a professional bow -tie wearing dog to be able to visit his overall events.

[2306] Oh, a dog created it.

[2307] Wow, that was unexpected.

[2308] That's probably why it was misspelled because the dog spelled it.

[2309] Yeah, dogs aren't good at smelling.

[2310] No. He said we could look up a picture of him with his asses.

[2311] Afro, here it is.

[2312] Oh, damn.

[2313] Yeah, that's a healthy, healthy afro.

[2314] Yeah, it's really nice if you guys want to Google image search.

[2315] He almost looks like a Black Panther in that photo.

[2316] Yeah, it does.

[2317] Shades on.

[2318] Well, yeah, it says a younger me during the Black Power era as a student at you.

[2319] That was from his Twitter.

[2320] So check that out.

[2321] The first scientist to process oxygen was Joseph Priestley.

[2322] He was right when he was in the hospital with his hip thing.

[2323] Oh, uh -huh.

[2324] The doctor was Grillium.

[2325] Yeah.

[2326] Okay, I pulled up the Chris Rock joke about the janitor.

[2327] The janitor.

[2328] Oh, good, good, good, good.

[2329] Now, you watched the TV.

[2330] You watched like 60 minutes and you see white people pissed off, man. Mad, the white man thinks he's losing the country.

[2331] You watch the news like, we're losing everything.

[2332] We're fucking losing affirmative action and illegal aliens and we're fucking losing the country.

[2333] Losing shut the fuck up.

[2334] White people ain't losing shit.

[2335] If y 'all losing, who's winning?

[2336] It ain't us.

[2337] It ain't us.

[2338] Have you drinking around this motherfucker?

[2339] It ain't us.

[2340] There ain't a white man in this room that would change places with me. Here we go.

[2341] None of you would change places with me and I'm rich.

[2342] There's to be white.

[2343] There's a white, one -leg bus boy in here right now that won't change places.

[2344] with my black ass He's going No man I don't want to switch I want to ride this white thing out See where it takes me It's right Because when you white The sky is the limit When you black The limits the sky Hold on I think there's a janitor Now when it come to racism You know who the most racist people are For real The real most racist people Oh maybe not Maybe the bus boy Yeah maybe it was the bus boy Yeah Oh, that's good.

[2345] Okay, he was at Jacques -Marie Maj, the glasses place.

[2346] He wanted to leave to go to Jacques -Marie Maj and get some new glasses.

[2347] He was at Jacques -Marie Maj and he said, there was an actor there from the brother's son.

[2348] And the brother -son's doing so well.

[2349] And so they were celebrating and getting these classes.

[2350] And we didn't know brother's son.

[2351] We didn't know who he was talking about.

[2352] But the brother's son is a very popular show on Netflix.

[2353] It's a comedy action drama that Brad Falchuk created with Byron Wu for Netflix.

[2354] And it has Michelle Yao from Everything Everywhere All at Once.

[2355] It is a very popular show.

[2356] The guy in it is McKell Bondison.

[2357] Oh, great.

[2358] And he was the one presumably shopping for new shades.

[2359] He was the one shopping for the shades.

[2360] And Henry said, we would call him Henry.

[2361] that what you're saying?

[2362] The brother's son.

[2363] The brother's son.

[2364] Yes.

[2365] S -U -N.

[2366] Yes.

[2367] You could say nephew.

[2368] The original title was nephew.

[2369] But S -U -N.

[2370] The brother's son.

[2371] Okay, good.

[2372] I'm glad you pointed that out.

[2373] S -U -N.

[2374] I would have typed into something different.

[2375] You would type in nephew and hoped you could find the brother's son.

[2376] That's right.

[2377] Yeah.

[2378] And he said McKell, and he's right, Michael Bondeson, but he's an executive producer.

[2379] He's not.

[2380] He's not an actor on it.

[2381] But no, I don't, he doesn't have any actor credits.

[2382] But good for him.

[2383] And Jacques Brimaj is not cheap.

[2384] Not cheap.

[2385] No. But not Gucci.

[2386] Kind of.

[2387] I mean, they're like $1 ,000 sunglasses.

[2388] Oh, wow.

[2389] You know, I really want some.

[2390] I have an outrageous pair of sunglasses, but I will say I don't have a bunch.

[2391] I have one style that I've been wearing for 15 years and I'll wear it for the of my life.

[2392] So back to your sweater that you're amortizing the cost of.

[2393] Yeah, cost per wear.

[2394] Leisure Society.

[2395] That's my brand.

[2396] And they're, they're obnoxiously expensive.

[2397] But they're made in Japan.

[2398] So are these.

[2399] Oh, Japanese have really figured out the sunglasses, I guess.

[2400] Yeah.

[2401] Leisure Society, the optical collection?

[2402] Because you also have glasses, right?

[2403] Readers, yes.

[2404] I've gotten the same frames that my sunglasses are, but they're my transition readers.

[2405] These are them.

[2406] These are pricey.

[2407] What's a pair?

[2408] I want to say mine are like...

[2409] Some are 1 ,300.

[2410] Yeah, that's nice.

[2411] But if you look at the detail and all the stuff that's happening, they're outrageous.

[2412] Absolutely gorgeous.

[2413] Very durable, too.

[2414] All right.

[2415] Well, so you get it.

[2416] I get it.

[2417] But what I don't get is like...

[2418] One time I went into Puffie, Puff Daddy's bungalow at the Beverly's Hotel, like during an MTV movie where it somehow I ended up in there.

[2419] Yeah.

[2420] And there were like conservatively 30 pairs of sunglasses laid out on a table.

[2421] So, like, I can't relate to that.

[2422] I have a lot of sunglasses.

[2423] You do.

[2424] You can, you're more in the puffy camp.

[2425] Because there are parts of outfits for me. It's not, it's more than just, this is my sunglasses.

[2426] And so I want it to be nice.

[2427] It's like, this goes with this outfit.

[2428] This goes with this style.

[2429] And also, let me, let me be forthcoming with the fact that because of my fighting history, my nose has been broken in a manner that I can't wear most sunglasses anyways.

[2430] I can't wear plastic frame sunglasses.

[2431] I see them all the time.

[2432] They look on.

[2433] Aaron was wearing a really cool pair of sunglasses in the dunes.

[2434] I would love them.

[2435] But I have to have the little doodads that are adjustable, the metal doodads.

[2436] Oh, yeah.

[2437] That I can make one side really high up and the other one low to deal with this.

[2438] Interesting.

[2439] Because if I put on normal plastic sunglasses, they're diagonal on my face.

[2440] Can I try those on?

[2441] Shirley.

[2442] Shock Marie Maude.

[2443] Oh, these are leisure society.

[2444] It's very blue.

[2445] Yeah.

[2446] Yeah, those are, I have two different readers.

[2447] Yeah.

[2448] And those are, these the ones that, those are self -tinting.

[2449] Okay.

[2450] Because it hurt.

[2451] Yeah, I give you.

[2452] But I like them.

[2453] How'd they look?

[2454] What's that?

[2455] They're not for you.

[2456] Oh, no. Really?

[2457] No, well, but I would hope, if anything, you go like, oh, so he is telling me the truth when he likes my sweater.

[2458] Why?

[2459] What happens?

[2460] They're just not for you.

[2461] That's not the.

[2462] In what way?

[2463] I need more detail.

[2464] They didn't look good on you.

[2465] I'm asking.

[2466] because of the shape because of it's so square or what why you just you don't know why i just like i've seen you in sunglasses and you often look great in sunglasses and i looked at you and those and i was like i wouldn't recommend those for you okay wow all right how about like what give me an example of let's say i put these on and i go how do they look on me i would if i didn't yeah you'd assume yeah then i would say, uh, I think they're a little wide for your face.

[2467] Okay.

[2468] Or, yeah, they were definitely too wide for your face.

[2469] Okay.

[2470] Yeah.

[2471] I was like, well, why she got such big glasses on?

[2472] Oh.

[2473] Although sometimes you wear really big glasses and they work.

[2474] So I, that's why I was inclined to not say that because that's implying that you don't look good in really big glasses, which often you do.

[2475] Or just like, the blue is a little off for some reason.

[2476] You could say that.

[2477] Although that's a little confusing because you wear it with the blue.

[2478] Although these are my least favorite.

[2479] I like the ones I keep in the house much better than these that are just clear.

[2480] Wow.

[2481] Well, Leisure Society and Jacques Marie Maj. Although don't buy, I guess don't buy them off the internet because if I had bought that.

[2482] I don't think you would have bought that style.

[2483] That's not your style of sunglasses.

[2484] Well, I like the way it looks on its own.

[2485] I might have if I saw it online.

[2486] There's nothing about it that I would be like, oh, that's not for me. Right.

[2487] So, yeah, maybe go try my mind.

[2488] Just why I wanted to get down to why so that I can know for future.

[2489] I wish I were better at explaining why it wasn't working.

[2490] Now, if your car was experiencing fuel starvation under heavy load, which is what was happening to my sandrail, I would know how to help.

[2491] Well, we can't be good at everything.

[2492] If you're jean out too easy, I would know what's going out with the shocks.

[2493] Okay.

[2494] Well, I'll keep that in mind.

[2495] Please do.

[2496] All right.

[2497] That's it.

[2498] I love you.

[2499] Love you.

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