Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Finding Your Roots, Gospel, Stony the Road) is a filmmaker, professor, and cultural critic. Henry joins the Armchair Expert to discuss what techniques he uses when interviewing people, how far back he can trace his family heritage, and the sugar plantation slave trade. Henry and Dax talk about what the Salt Thesis is, what their observations were visiting Africa, and how culture mostly drives a person’s development. Henry explains why class is just as important as race, how America is a nation of exiles, and how groups of people are often manipulated to hate each other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by the Minister of Duluth, the Duchess of Duluth. Did you see any mice on your trip? 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. So whenever they were removed for Aaron to pull up the hide-a-bed, they would be up on the counter and I would see where those little mice

had been gnawing away at it. You don't think there was a new mouse? There's definitely not new mice, no. Because there's foods around and we would have heard them. I told you I would have a talk with them and I did. I appreciate it so much because they were not in the dunes with us at all.

Okay, good. Today we have Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. He's an award-winning filmmaker, a literary scholar, a journalist, and a cultural critic. He's been teaching at Harvard. This is a ballpark. I probably said it in the interview, but I think he's 30 years into teaching at Harvard. Yeah. His books include Stony the Road, Colored People, a Memoir, and The Signifying Monkey.

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. Both sensational. He is so good at both of those things. This was such a fun interview. It was. It was like having a history lesson. Yeah, I loved it. But like so dynamic. And he such a fun interview. It was. It was like having a history lesson. Yeah, I loved it.

But like so dynamic. And he's a very special person. Yes. And he was sitting in a position we've never experienced. He was much closer to us because he was in a chair for his back or something. Yeah. Yeah. And he was quite close to us, which I enjoyed.

It was more like having a meal with him. It was. And also, it's funny because he comes up on this show a fair amount. Yes, so many of our guests have been and done his show. Yeah. Kerry Washington, that was a huge part of her interview. Ends up becoming a book. Yeah. Yeah. So it's fun. So it's about time he was here. Please enjoy Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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Man, you have a nice house. Oh, thank you so much. I got a proper hillbilly compound here in the middle of Los Angeles. See, I'm from West Virginia, so I understand. My whole family's from rural Kentucky. 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. But you need a washing machine. I do need a washing machine. With a ringer. Big time. On the porch. And a refrigerator. Yes, yes. And then comedically, an enormous satellite dish, which is also present. You know, I'd like to, I have a stenosis, so I

would prefer to sit on a hard chair. Is that possible? Oh, so this. Like a straight up chair. More like a desk chair. A desk chair. You know, at a right angle. Totally got it. If that can make it work. Is this to your liking?

That's great. We had a screening last night, excuse me, of LeVar Burton. You know LeVar Burton? Yes, yes, for Reading Rainbow. Yeah, are you in the Reading Rainbow generation? I am, yeah. He has three generations of fans. Roots, that's me. Yeah. Reading Rainbow generation? I am, yeah. He has three generations of fans. Roots, that's me.

Yeah. Reading Rainbow, that's you. Yeah. And then Star Trek, of course. Yeah, that's true. He's sort of run the gambit. I think Kristen is friends with him, too. Oh, really?

Mm-hmm. Let's see if he can get my girls. Oh, great. Another challenge to get the last generation. Exactly. That's right. So we started doing screening episodes of Finding Your Roots at Loyola Marymount. Oh, nice.

On a big screen with a guest. Oh, okay. And 500 people. And is it the first time they're seeing it? Yeah. Well, Angela Davis, the revolutionary, she wanted to see hers in advance. And I didn't want her to go off and go black on me in the middle of fucking 500 people. Sure, sure, sure.

But LeVar didn't want to see his. He wept like a baby. Oh. Yeah. And then he sat next to me while we watched. Then we did a one-on-one, and he cried all over again. Oh, my gosh. No, it was fat.

It wasn't the great experiences of my life. Oh. How wonderful. And that was at Loyola? Yeah. Okay, so we're on in theory. Crying's got to be a good signal when you do your job right. The money shot.

Yes, we must. For us too, by the way. Yes, I think we might share that in common. That's why I brought that up. I'm not after it, but obviously when it happens, I go like, oh, that's really special. It's a real moment. Connection. Yeah, something occurred that's real.

I had to learn pacing, timing with a guest. You know, when we sit down, our reveals last four hours or five hours. Right. We're seeing an edited 48-minute version. Okay, yeah, 30 minutes. Because we always do two guests per episode. When I started, it was called African American Lives. I only did black guests.

My whole intent was to replicate what Alex Haley purported to have done. Forgive me, I don't know who Alex Haley is. Alex Haley wrote Roots. And then LeVar was Kunta Kinte in Roots in 1977. So Alex Haley is coterminous with African-American genealogy, with black people finding their roots in Africa. Right. Are you old enough to know about the Go-Back Machine?

No. Oh my God. Tell me about the Go-Back Machine. Oh, I think it was called the Go-Back Machine. You could go back in time. Okay. And it was a show. Yeah, it was a show. It was a cartoon show. Okay. Okay. Maybe somebody can Google. We do a fact check after this. It'll be a part of the fact check for sure. 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. This was every African-American's dream. So I conceived a documentary series for PBS

that did what he purported to do scientifically in a laboratory, in a test tube. That was the whole conceit. And it aired in 2006. And Oprah, Quincy, Chris Tucker, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut, because I didn't want to just show business people. And a different range of phenotypes. Black people come in a thousand

shades of brown. We're a real rainbow coalition of sepias. So I wanted to stress that as well. And we were revealing something to one of the guests, I can't remember which one, and they didn't cry. And my producer, Isako Glacio, at the time, when we were doing an analysis, I said, why didn't they cry? I mean, it was such a moving revelation. And she said, because you stepped on their line. You didn't give them enough space. And I was mortified. And I had to learn to count. I had another producer who said, put your head down, shut your eyes, and count to five, because they are getting so much information, and the information is so emotional that you have to let them process it.

And that's what I've learned to do. And last night, a rabbi, after the screening of LeVar Burton and Wes Studi's episode, he congratulated me on giving people their space to respond. And I said, I owe it to two producers who said, just take a breath. Just let them process. And it seemed like an interminable amount of time to me. Yeah. But for them, it was just seconds. Oh, yeah. I had to learn this same exact lesson.

It's hard. But what helped us was we have an audio format. So whereas you can give space and there's a million things being said by the close-up of the guest on their face, in this format, it's dead. There's nothing there. So before we edited, this show started out and it was just live. And I had that kind of neurotic sense of filling all the gaps. And then once we started editing, I think we both got, well, me, I was the main offender, got more comfortable in just letting things live. But it's still hard.

There's this codependent urge to comfort, fill the space, prevent awkwardness. You know, there's a lot of human stuff that's going on while you're still trying to conduct this other thing. 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. These are all cues that you're trying to draw them out, right? You're trying to keep them going. You're trying to let people know that you're listening and you don't know what the hell

is going on in their head. 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. You've inherited DNA from them. You are a walking family tree. Yes. Back 500 years.

That's amazing. It's crazy. Or mitochondrial Eve all the way back to Africa. I mean, literally, it's all there. It's history before history. It's a form of immortality. Yeah. For ancestors living in the last six generations, if we take 30 years as a generation, you actually

inherit DNA from each of those. And that's a lot of ancestors. The first time I did my family tree, I was nine years old. For me, a family tree was my father's line and my mother's line. That's right. It never occurred to me that the leaves and branches in the tree are relevant to my, they're my roots. The branches of the tree, pick a better metaphor. We go top down. Yeah, right. So you have your father's mother's father's

mother's line and your number of ancestors doubles each generation. So you actually have 64 fourth grade grandparents. You have two parents, you have four grandparents, you have 64 fourth-grade grandparents. You have two parents. You have four grandparents. You have eight great-grandparents. You have 16 great-grandparents. You have 32 third-grade grandparents and 64 fourth-grade grandparents. Now, for me, as an African-American, I'm extraordinarily lucky in two ways. I know the identities of six of my fourth-grade grandparents.

Wow. Two sets were freed by the American Revolution. And the third set was freed in the will of a man named Abraham Van Meter in 1823. And the punchline is, now I grew up in the hills of eastern West Virginia, in the Allegheny Mountains on the Potomac River. Not exactly a hotbed of African-American culture. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, right.

The only thing we could get on the radio a.m. in the daytime was WWVA, country music. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. 50,000 watts. And then the black music would sneak in. After the sun went down, the black states from the south, we'd be able to pick them up through a.m.

The sun went down. The black states from the south, we'd be able to pick them up through AM. But when I started the series, I'm looking east toward Africa. I want to replicate Alex Haley. I want my Kunta Kente moment. 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. No.

No kidding. My family never moved from the hollows of the hills of eastern West Virginia. And you're a country boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, deep, deep roots. I didn't have to look to Senegal or Angola or Nigeria. I had to look at Moorfield. Different counties.

Yeah. Moorfield and Hardy County. And I grew up right on the Maryland-West Virginia border, the Potomac River. The first day of deer season, school holiday. Yeah, exactly. Same in my town, yeah. When you were 12, you get a 410. Uh-huh.

You know? Yeah. The people there wrapped themselves up in the Second Amendment, and they have no idea why anybody would want to ban guns. But you know what? I'm 73 years old, and I lived there 24-7 until I was 18. I went off to college, went off to Yale. Up to that time, I never heard of one person shooting another person. And everybody had guns. Now, I don't want to come off like I'm defending. I believe in gun control. I think we're out of control. But nobody had an AK-47 to shoot a deer. Exactly. No one's wearing Kevlar out there. They were wearing an orange vest. Yeah. And doing their best not to shoot a cow, which was mistaken for a

deer. That happened more often. Right. So I grew up in this counterintuitive but deeply rooted African-American rural culture, which doesn't fit in the textbooks. The history books don't generally write about the kind of black experience that I experienced. And so I have very deep roots, which were right under my feet. Right. 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 of the 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were under your nose, as we would say.

They were a snake. They would have bit you. You got it. Isn't that amazing? Yes. It's so incredible. Let's go back to there, though. So there were a snake, they would have bit you. You got it. Isn't that amazing? Yes. It's so incredible. Let's go back to there, though. So nine years old, you do the first family tree.

Was that like a school exercise? On July 2, 1960, Edward St. Lawrence Gates died. He was my father's father. He looked like a white man. He was so white, we called him Casper behind his back. Oh, my gosh. Grandpa Casper. You guys too young to know about Casper.

Oh, I know Casper, the friendly ghost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. I mean, his skin was translucent. There were only two of us, my brother Paul, who's an oral surgeon, retired now, and me, the baby. And Daddy, who also looked like a white man. He was often mistaken for Jewish. He even went to a Jewish school for a while in Newark, New Jersey.

He worked in a paper mill. He worked in the paper mill in the daytime and was a janitor at the telephone company in the evening. But his aunt married a dentist. She went to Howard University and became a nurse at the beginning of the 20th century. Wow. My father was the seventh son and was really brilliant. So they brought him up there to live

and he went to a public school in Newark and most of the kids were Jewish. So he goes to school on Yom Kippur. And the teacher says, what are you doing here? It's Yom Kippur. And my daddy said, what? Yom Kippur? What is that?

He realized they thought he was Jewish. He was like, wasn't anyone here? Is it deer season up here? You got it. So daddy took my brother and me up to the open casket at his father's funeral. It's July 2, 1960 1960 in Cumberland, Maryland, which is 25 miles from the little town in West Virginia in which I grew up. All the Gateses are from Cumberland, also in the Potomac River. All the Coleman's, my mother's family,

are from Piedmont, which is across the river from the paper mill. And all the Gateses are still in Cumberland, Maryland, going back to the oldest Gates, which is what the story's about. So I had never been that close to a corpse before. And my grandfather looked ridiculously white. I mean, if he looked like Casper with blood coursing through his veins, you can imagine how white he looked dead. He looked like he had been coated with alabaster and sprinkled with baby powder. He identified, though, as African-American. He was a race man, yeah. And he didn't try to pass. But we've had people in the Gates family who did pass. Well, just I think it's relevant for backstory. You did ultimately figure out that you have 50% European ancestry.

That's right. With some Irish folks in there. 50% European and 50% sub-Saharan African. 50, wow. And so I was just freaked out being that close to a corpse. And also looking at this alabaster-coated man who was my grandfather. So that was very traumatic. So then we went to the Rose Hill Episcopal Cemetery, the gates were Episcopal, and buried

my grandfather. And all the gates are buried there. And we came back to my grandparents' house. And Daddy took Rocky, my brother, and me upstairs to his parents' bedroom. And we'd never even been upstairs in this house because you couldn't do that. You know, things are very formal then. Couldn't go upstairs in your grandparents' house. Couldn't sit on a bed. You couldn't step on a grave. And you definitely could not call an adult by their first name. My parents are gone. Their parents are gone. And if I'm telling a story about Mr. Ozzie, I'm still calling him Mr. Ozzie because I'm traumatized.

So anyway, it was like going to the moon for us. Rocky and me were looking at all this furniture and all this stuff. My grandfather, his hobby was to grow tulips. And he had all these framed blue and red and yellow, I think was the third color, ribbons for competitions. We had no idea. So anyway, there was a sun porch off their bedroom. Daddy takes us out on the sun porch.

And there was a big armoire. And Daddy opened it, and it was full of bank ledgers. And my grandfather was a janitor at the First National Bank in Cumberland, Maryland. And he was stealing these bank ledgers. So Rocky and I compared notes later. We thought this meant we were rich. Sure, sure. He had squirreled away some fortune.

Unfortunately, my grandfather was stealing these bank ledgers and using them as scrapbooks. He was clipping newspapers, and he glued the clippings in. Just using his paper. Yeah. There were dozens. So daddy starts taking these big bank ledgers, putting them on the ground where he was crouched, tearing the pages for his seat. Finally, after six or seven of these explorations, he found what he was looking for.

And he said, you boys, look here. He lived to be 97 and a half until his dying day. He called me boy. That was his term of affection for me. So we looked and it was an obituary. And the obituary was dated January 6th, 1888. And it said, died this day in Cumberland, Maryland, Jane Gates, an estimable colored woman. Like estimating cheese. No, estimable. Oh, estimable. Yeah, that's right. That's right. A person who commands your esteem.

Yes, yes. That's right. Then he pulled a sepia colored photograph out between the pages of the scrapbook. And he said, that's Jane Gates. That's the oldest ancestor we've ever been able to trace. I never want you to forget her name. And I never want you to forget her name, and I never want you to forget her face. And she was a midwife. And in the obituary, I think they used a euphemism that

suggested she did nursing. And my brother and I stared at this obituary, said this funny-looking lady who had her midwifery outfit on. It was just head and shoulders, but she had this cap on and this white thing. And then Daddy put the photograph back in the scrapbook, closed it, gathered all the rest of them, put in the armoire. We went downstairs, had the repast, the meal following the burial, and then we drove home to Piedmont.

Now, because my father worked two jobs at the paper mill as 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. this little town of 2,500 people, an Irish-Italian paper mill town with a handful of black people. So what that meant, because he had this second job and extra income. And mom worked. No, mom had never worked. Oh, that's- No, because that was the thing. He worked two jobs, so my mother could be a lady. You should sue Wikipedia. It said she cleaned

houses. When she was a little girl, she did. And she was one of 12. She cleaned houses. She cleaned one house, and the people were so horrible to her, but it was a very nice house. And she was one of 12. She cleaned houses. She cleaned one house and the people were so horrible to her, but it was a very nice house. And it turned out years later, it was owned by my father's best friend who was this white man. And when I was 25, I came back from England and I talked to my brother and we bought that house for my mom. Oh, wow. That feels good. And the first night we were at dinner and we were all so happy And my brother's married, I was married, and we had really nice wine. And right in the middle of dinner, my mother burst into tears. And she said, these people treated me so horribly.

And one time they planted $5 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 is Pauline Gates' house. This is your house. Everything was fine. Sorry, you were at the downstairs gathering.

Because we had a very nice house, I always had my own bedroom, and I had my own bookcase and my own desk. Beautiful mahogany antique set. And on my desk, next to my 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. And the last thing I did was look up the word estimable. Here we go. Ding, ding, ding. Because I didn't know what it was. And I thought, wow, that funny looking old lady who has my

surname is estimable. Maybe I'm estimable too. So the next day was July 3rd, 1960. I'm still nine years old. I would be 10 in September of that year. And we went to the colored Fourth of July picnic. Those schools integrated in my county incredibly in 1955. Remember, Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court decision is 54.

So you would have been four years old at that time when they integrated? They integrated in 55. Oh, okay. Right now it's born in 1955. So you entered, it was already integrated. In first grade, I went to the white school. So I went to 12 years of integrated school. 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. That was not happening. And on the way back, I asked Daddy to stop at Red Bull's newsstand, which is like a convenience store today.

He was of Irish descent. I remember I'm from an Irish-Italian paper mill town. So everybody, they were either Irish-Italian or some mixture or some variety of that. They were all Catholic. They were a lot of Catholic. Yep. I asked Daddy to buy me a composition book. 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. I wanted to know two things.

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 with translucent skin. 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. Wow.

They never met him. They didn't know his name. Did you uncover this? You must have at this point. To this day, there's only one Gates who knows the identity of this man. Is his name Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.? Oh, my God. We are having a Gates family reunion.

And you're going to unveil it? In May, in Cumberland, Jane Gates' house, which she bought in 1870, cash. Wow. Where did a person who was enslaved to 1864 get enough money to plunk down $1,200 in a white neighborhood for a house? That house, because of my cousin Johnny Gates, is on the National Historic Register. We are having a family reunion, and C.C. Moore, the most brilliant genetic genealogist in the history of science, will reveal the identity of Jane Gates' paramour. Oh, my gosh.

Okay, wow. And obviously, it's assumed that that mysterious man is the one who bought that house for her. Or gave her the cash. Gave her the cash to buy the house. That's what we presume, but we don't know. $1,200 is significant. But you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess it. Right.

But who knows? All of my cousins have taken DNA tests. Let me tell you something interesting about that family. There was Jane. Her eldest son was my great-grandfather. He married a woman also very like-complected. They had two boys and three girls. At the beginning of the 20th century, they sent those three girls to Howard University.

Really? 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 Cumberland, Maryland. It's hard for people to understand, but the paper mill town I grew up in is halfway between Pittsburgh and Washington. It's a funny tri-state area, and it's on the Maryland-West Virginia border, and Pennsylvania is only a few miles away. Right, so that's a scene of a million Civil War...

Harper's Ferry, where John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal took place in 1859, is now a superhighway. It's about an hour and 15 minutes away. Gettysburg is fairly nearby. 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. One had slavery, one did not at some period, right? Well, West Virginia was Virginia until June 20th, 1863. But the reason that I descend from so many free people of color is that there was no need in those mountains for slavery. 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. 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 the30, the president of the United States signed the Indian Removal Act, Andrew Jackson, to get that soil from the Creek, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, and the Seminole. So where I grew up, my ancestors, there were house servants, maybe, but no estates. So we were lucky in that way.

And that led to people being freed early on. 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. And we have his will. 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. And we have his will. So he probably freed them. One, he liked them. He said that in his will.

Also because he didn't want to burn in hell. Right, right, right. The will says, on the death of my wife, Elizabeth Van Meter, they will be free. And he gave them 1,000 acres of land. And some of that land is still in our family, the Bruce branch. Wow. You know, it's horrible, though. My instinct is to say, that's nice. Well, there's a lot of like, contradictory emotions you have. 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. So you couldn't have

done it if it wasn't yielding. And I'm like, well, that's kind of a dicey thing to bring into this. Well, it's all horrible. Because apologists for slavery, I know this is going to sound outrageous, 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. Yeah, I don't buy that for a second, 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, 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. 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. Right. You studied anthropology. Yeah, at UCLA. You guys were both summa. I'm just a measly magna. I'm glad you brought that up.

Yeah, yeah. It's two days in a row. I know. You know, I was class of 73. And when I hit Yale in 69, anthropology was one of the sexiest of the majors. Sidney Mintz, who wrote a brilliant book on the role of sugar. You know, in America, you think about cotton and slavery, but the real demonic commodity was sugar. That's everything that's happening in the Caribbean.

The Caribbean and Brazil. Yes. Okay, here's a quiz. Parley game for you. Oh, great. We now know. I got to remind you, I'm only magna. And he's dyslexic.

This might be a summa question. And he's dyslexic. Yeah, yeah. The confusion. And I's dyslexic. Yeah, yeah. Hence the confusion. And I walk with a cane. So, you know, I see you. I died last night, so. Three spades.

By the way, do you play spades? Everybody plays spades. We are obsessed with it. It's our religion. We probably play nine hours a week. Really? Oh, my gosh. I haven't played in a long time.

So when you just said that, I got a burst of excitement. Okay, so we know because of a huge database 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. It turns out there were little pockets of historians trying to count the number of Africans who were enslaved shipped across the Atlantic. These guys figured out they could bring everybody together and collate all the data. And this is what they found.

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. 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. 15% die in the Middle Passage. That means about 10.7 million

get off the boats. How many of those 10.7 million came to what is now the United States? Just guess. Mine's 4 million. 4 million? That's a good guess. Mine's 9. 9 million.

Yeah. Okay, final guess? I'm sticking. I'm going to have to stick because it's so arbitrary. That's 4 million. 4 million? That's a good guess. Mine's 9. 9 million. Yeah. Okay. Final guess? I'm sticking. Yeah, I'm going to have to stick because it's so arbitrary. That's my hunch. 388,000. What?

Of the 12.5 million? Of the 12.7 million, only 388,000 were shipped directly from Africa to what is now the United States. And another 70,000 were shipped to the West Indies and then came. 450,000. That's it. So it was entirely a sugar workforce.

Five million went to Brazil. Oh my God. Brazil today is the second largest black nation in the world after Nigeria. Approximately 950,000 went to Cuba. 772,000 went to San Domingo, which is now Haiti, because of the Haitian Revolution. Almost 2X got to Haiti.

A million went to Jamaica. So 5 million went to Brazil. A million went to Jamaica. Almost a million went to Cuba. 772,000 went to Haiti. And all because of a five-letter word called sugar. And the average lifespan of an enslaved man on a sugar plantation was seven years. Fuck. Oh, Lord. And they just replaced them like we used to replace spark plug. Can I now add

an anthropological part of that whole story? Yeah, sure. 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 Africans were captured in East Africa. Shaking your head, no. No. 99% came from West. Okay. So many were marched across Africa to sail out of West Africa, where they were shipped from. And many, many died on that walk from dehydration. So the people that made it to West Africa to get on a boat had already had an inordinately high salinity count naturally in their body. Then they get on a ship where this whole other wave dies of, again, dehydration.

dives of, again, dehydration. And the only ones that actually made it alive to get to these islands or to here are people that had such an inordinately high salinity count genetically. And that's the group we start with here. It's called the salt thesis. Essentially, you're right. Africa is too big to have walked anybody from the east to the west. Right. Okay.

But they were from the interior. That's better. 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 very well. Sounds derogatory in this group. That you had a better chance to survive. That's the good news. The bad news is if you retain fluid, you have high blood pressure. So that's what's called the salt thesis. Yes. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Sasha hated sand, the way it stuck to things for weeks.

So when Maddie shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated. Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan. And they both spent the week in the water. You were made to follow your whims. We were made to help find a place on the beach with a pool and a waterfall and a soaking tub and of course a great shower.

Expedia. Made to travel. Expedia. Made to travel. Can I get into one other dicey observation I made? I'm reluctant to say it out loud, but it definitely struck me, which is I grew up in Detroit. Detroit. Yeah, I mean, let's be real. I grew up 20 miles outside of Detroit, but I also did live in downtown Detroit before I ended up moving here. 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. I mean, significantly. Like if I'm walking around Detroit, I'm maybe in the 65th percentile in height and muscularity and everything else. And I go to Africa and nearly everyone I meet, I'm bigger than. And for me, I was like, oh my God, this is so interesting. But there's a great variety. You know, the Tutsis. Yes. They're very famous for being tall. Yes.

And the Hutu or Grasseal, which is why the white people said that they should run things. But your point is that nutrition, the amount of milk determines your stature. But also genetics as well. Vile about it. Who survived? Who was robust enough to get here? Who was bred to be a laborer? There's just so many factors that lead to how this is been-

Once they were here. Yes, once they were here. I couldn't not notice it. There's just so many factors that lead to how this has been... Once they were here. Yes, once they were here. I couldn't not notice it. You've been several times, and you did that great show. When I was an undergraduate, Yale had a program called Five-Year BA. Twelve people were chosen. It was very competitive.

And you went to what we used to call the third world, the developing world. And you had to work, hence Five-Year BA. And I really wanted to go to Africa. 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 he ended up in Washington State. And the idea of crossing the equator became an obsession with me. Yeah. And I was pre-med.

I was raised to be a doctor. My brother's an oral surgeon. For my mother, God bless her soul, you know, in heaven, there's a father, son, the Holy Ghost, and a medical doctor. Birthday stethoscope, you know, Christmas dissecting kit. All smart little colored boys and colored girls are going to be doctors. Doctor was the top of the heap. Then lawyers. Same with Indian family. Any immigrant family also has that exact same. Hierarchy. You'd go to someone's house and they'd say,

Skippy and Rocky, I understand you're doing well in school. What are you going to be? And my mother would say, they are going to be doctors. Yes. The Gateses are Episcopalians. And the Anglican communion is divided up between what we might call first world and third world dioceses. And the diocese of West Virginia's sister dioces was the Diocese of Central Tanganyika, now Central Tanzania. So I was able to get a job at a mission hospital in the middle of Tanzania with the go-go people. In those days, they didn't have frequent flyer miles.

They had air miles. So if you're JFK and I'm Dar es Salaam Airport, there were exactly 11,000 air miles between the two. air miles between the two. So I got on a plane with a backpack, pair of sandals, jeans, three books, plus Arthur Frommer's Europe on $5 a day. Oh, lovely. You had a Frommer's guide. And I flew

from New York to London to Paris to Amsterdam to Rome to Athens to Tel Aviv to Addis Ababa to Nairobi and to Dar es Salaam over, I don't know, a six-week period. And then slept from Dar es Salaam into the interior. The worst trip of my life was on a bus.

It took 18 hours to go from Dar to Dodoma, the official capital. On the nicest roads imaginable. Oh, my God. I bounced off the ceiling. I mean, literally. And people got on with goats and chickens and stuff. And I did my best not to burst into tears and think, this is the biggest mistake I ever made in my whole life. Exploring my roots. I didn't think this was what my roots were going to look

like. And I worked in that mission hospital. I learned a lot about myself. I was living with European missionaries. There were maybe half a dozen. They were mostly Australian nurses and an Australian doctor and an Irish female doctor for a while. And she eventually left. We had a 120 bed hospital for 50,000 people in that district. I worked in the theater, as we say in England. I worked in the operating room holding a mask for people under anesthesia. That's what I did every day. And I saw things that I never would ever see in medical school in the United States. A woman came in, said she'd been pregnant for two years. The doctor was the jack of all trades. He did everything. He removed a basketball tumor out of this lady's stomach.

I learned a lot about human beings. I learned a lot about myself. I learned how African I was and wasn't and how American I was and wasn't. Yeah. Can I ask what your fantasy was before arriving and what was the dissonance and what did you conclude? Oh, that's a great question. I don't think anybody's ever asked me that. First of all, there were so many myths about what our people in Africa were like. I'm using scare quotes. We got quotes going, yeah. What our people were composed of, what different African civilizations consisted of. And I wanted to see for myself. I wanted to get to know one specific African culture, the Gogo people. The language is marvelous. A singular one was an

Ngogo, plural is wagogo. They lived in ugogo, and they spoke kigogo. And I learned a little Swahili. I was tutored by a fellow student from Tanzania who was at Yale. But my vocabulary was inordinately populated by two kinds of words. A word like wehele, which means breathe deeply. Right, right. And because I was living with missionaries, I had to go to chapel every morning. So let's see. You have a couple trucks out there, right? So you can pick the kind of truck that's your fantasy truck, and it will be my gift if you answer the following question.

Okay, wow. What does wehele mean? No, wehele means breathing. Okay, I was going to say, is this a trick? No, what does umtakatifu mean? It's a religious term. I was just going to say you're in chapel, so No. What does Umtukatifu mean? It's a religious term. I was just going to say you're in chapel, so that's a good context. Oh, God, Dax.

A lot's riding on this. I don't want any chaps. That's your fantasy truck. Okay, Umtukatifu. I'm going to say in his name. That's close. Oh! But not close enough for a truck.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. It means holy. Holy. So I have all kinds of words in my vocabulary related to the hospital and to church. Right. Breathe deeply and holy. But I guess my question is, you're a young man. We're all searching for our identity at that point.

The boat ride on the Queen Elizabeth II to go to England. I know that moment. I can only imagine what the narrative self was saying. I'm going to England. I'm going to study. Oh, my God. I'll be so happy. I can only imagine.

So this is another one of those moments. Like, I'm going to go to Africa. I'm from there. I'm going to feel when I get there. Did you have expectations that you would have some kind of sense of connection, a connection and a clarification and the whole, we all carry being filled. Those were the questions on the table. Would I feel connection? I was completely open. How African is an African-American, a 19-year-old. I turned 20 in the village. I was never into romanticizing Africa.

I didn't throw away all my Western clothes and have a closet full of dashiki. I had one dashiki, which was cool. They weren't the holders of magic they were going to hand you. No, I had an afro. I'm very proud of that afro. You could Google Skip Gates and afro

and you could see it online. Oh, I shall. After I watch the Time Machine cartoon, straight over to the afro. The Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine. Wayback Machine. I'm getting closer to remembering.

I realized that Africa was a long time ago in the history of our people, that we were an African people who lived in the New World. And even the Africans called me and any other African American an Mzungu, which basically means white man. Right, right, right. You are ours, you are our brother, but you are Western. The most important thing I realized is how American we are. To me, culture defines everything.

I've always been kind of hesitant at a notion that our identity or the spirit or anything would be just a genetic thing. Yeah, that it would be biological. It's ridiculous. It's kind of crazy. Or essentialized. Culture is the operating software. I have two children.

If at birth they had been spirited away to, say, China and raised in China, and if the Chinese, this is crucial to what I'm about to say, if the Chinese people treated them like they were Chinese, they'd be Chinese. Right, 100%. What are they going to do? You know, like. And fried chicken?

Right. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Those things are not biological. That's a crazy, ridiculous thing. So I loved it. I loved the people. They loved me.

I loved being there. I went from pre-med. It took me a few years. Cambridge was the crucial arena. When I abandoned that fantasy of being a doctor and discovered, thanks to two Africans, Wolee Shoyinka, who got the Nobel Prize 13 years later after we met, the first African to get the Nobel Prize in literature, and my best friend Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes the Ethicist column in the Sunday Times Magazine. Oh, cool. The great philosopher. Both the godfathers of my two girls.

And you met them both. I met them at Cambridge. You were fucking bouncing around. There's a lot in the stew. And you cool. The great philosopher. Both the godfathers of my two girls. And you met them both. I met them at Cambridge. You were fucking bouncing around. There's a lot in the stew, and you've already been to Africa. Now you're in England. There's one more element. Remember the fantasy of hitchhiking across the equator? Yes, yes, yes, yes.

So after I lived in the village, the people didn't have running water and didn't have electricity. We had a generator because I was living with the missionaries. Many of the most important battles in World War I were fought in Africa. There was a German outpost, this village. Oh, really? And I lived in the German jail. And it was like a German fort.

And there was a cemetery of German soldiers who had died. The village is called Kilimatindi. And you could see it in the very first documentary that I made. It was for the BBC series called The Great Rail Journey. You went with your wife, your then wife and your two daughters. Yeah. And it ends with me going back to the village 25 years later. Between August and December, I lived in that village and it was tough. I was seeing things. I didn't like the politics of the missionaries vis-a-vis the Africans. And I got in arguments with them. Let me put it kindly.

I mean, these people were sacrificing so much to help the African people. But they also had condescending attitudes about it. They came with a price. Yeah. We got in big fights about that. And finally, I left. And I went to Dar es Salaam. 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. I was there about a month and I wanted to go to Zanzibar. So I'd 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. And you'd give them a dollar. And there was this white guy there named Lawrence Biddle Weeks. Well, hold on a second. Yeah, your name recalls incredible. it's kind of unparalleled yeah we always we've noticed that older people do this

my mother does this she remembers all of her school teachers names we're working on the theory on why this is maybe too much stimuli and tv and something else we don't have it i feel like it's unique to your generation well but it's genetic in my family. My father and brother could tell you the hand you played in bid whiz 20 years ago. Okay. I mean, they had this photographic memory. I have a good memory. They had a perfect memory. My brother could tell you all the bones in the body, all the nerves, that kind of stuff.

A sign of genius. Yeah. But anyway. Yeah, you got a white cat on a boat. Larry Weeks. Larry. And halfway over to Zanzibar. And you have to imagine what the stars look like with no pollution.

You could see the Southern Cross, you know, a different set of constellations. Because you're south of the equator. It moves you to tears. He told me that his fantasy had been like Cecil Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes wanted to build railroads from Cape to Cairo. So Larry's was to hitchhike from South Africa all the way to Egypt. I told him mine, because that Reader's Digest article was a hitchhike across the equator.

We flipped a coin. I won. And about two weeks later, we went from Dar es Salaam to Mombasa, Kenya, Mombasa to Nairobi. Nairobi to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, right after Idi Amin's coup. From Kampala 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 Kisangani. And we got on the big riverboat and took six days and sailed down the Kinshasa, which is about 200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. So you won the coin toss. Yeah. And I got my fantasy. You did.

We did. And that matched your fantasy. That was. You should have abandoned medicine to be a novelist at this point. This is like your Hemingway out there. 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. Wow. Yeah. And when I came back to Yale, nobodyum, I'd been to the Holy Land, and I'd seen six African countries. Wow. Yeah. And when I came back to Yale, nobody could tell me shit about it. Anything. No, sitting around in bull sessions, people in dashikis and afros smoking a joint telling me, are people in Africa? And I go, you don't know what you're talking about.

And that freed me. I was proud of my African heritage. And I became a of my African heritage. And I became a professor of African and African-American studies because of the intervention in Cambridge of Shoenick and Anthony Appiah. But I knew where my Africanity, as it were, started and stopped. I knew the culture was not biological. I knew that it was not essentialized. I knew that our people had left Africa a long time ago and there were big differences. And when I sailed back to the United States from England and saw the Statue of Liberty,

I burst into tears. I was glad to be home and I knew that I was American and I was proud of it. But I was an African American. I wasn't an American like you're an American. And I wasn't an American like you of an immigrant family. My people had been here forever. Is it fair to say you're walking with a limp because you're an African American? 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. Oh, my God. Yeah, because black folks lie about their pain level. Oh, yeah.

If you break your hip, you have what's called referred pain. So I had this enormous pain in my knee. But my leg was rotated out 180 degrees. So any elementary medical school student would have known that my hip was broken. Right. Except this idiot. And so he wrapped my leg with a walking cast. And while he was doing it, he said, well, I understand you're a good student.

Everybody knew everybody in this county. And I said, yes, sir. I want to be a doctor. And he said, well, who was the first scientist to process oxygen? And I said, I think it was Joseph Priestley. Somebody can fact correct me on that. He asked me three or four questions and I answered them. The cast dried a few hours later and they stood me up to have me walk with my hip, the bones completely separated. Oh, my God. And I fell. And my mother was there. And my mother said, that's it.

We're taking him out of this hospital. Yeah. But that was the guy. 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. No. I swear to God. And I don't even like to talk about it because it's so. That's so.

And so, yes, you're returning to America. There is the Statue of Liberty. You are right to cry. And also, there's a reality that you're also entering this country with a limp because of the reality of being black in America. Yeah. But the differential between the lengths of my leg got worse over time. So I didn't walk with a cane then, but I walk with a cane now

and there's about an inch and a half difference. How old were you when that happened? I was 14 years old. Playing touch football. No! Yeah, I was on a warpath about football, so I just want to fuel it a little bit.

Three operations, and then they finally put in a cup arthroplasty, and now I've had two hip replacements. And I have my shoes made by a great orthopedic shoemaker, if anybody wants to know. The T.O. Day Company, D-E-Y. Shout out. Make the best orthopedic shoes in the whole world.

Okay, we've got to get into the shows. This is so fun, though. It is so fun, and you're such an incredible storyteller. But the boat ride. I'm a romantic. The boat ride at that age to England. I had just graduated from Yale the day before. You're from a rural area of West Virginia.

Yeah. The narrative itself has got to be high-fiving itself. Well, the Gateses have a long history of college education. So I mentioned my three great-aunts were educated at Howard. My father's first cousin, the son of one of those three, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1949. Wow. George Lee. The Ivy League was always his presence.

Yeah. And he married a black woman. His wife got a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard in 1955. Oh my gosh. As a black woman? Yeah. Wow. Her name was Dorothy Hicks Lee. And we created a prize in her honor that's given at Harvard every year.

Oh, amazing. Hicks Lee. And we created a prize in her honor that's given at Harvard every year. Oh, amazing. She's the first black person to get a PhD in comparative literature and the second woman. So anyway, the Gateses valued education. So one of us had gone to Harvard, so I applied to Yale, and I got in. And I loved it from the second I got there. I was so glad. The last thing I told my father and my mother was, I said, look, all these kids up there are geniuses. I thought it was like Albert and Alberta Einstein. 1969, when I was going up, I was transferring. I did my first year at a community college five

miles away, and then I transferred. And when I wrote to Yale, I said, I'd be happy to repeat my freshman year. My brother and I never got the memo that black people didn't test well on a standardized exam. We were too far away from the city. So we always tested well. So I tested well. I'd gotten straight A's at Telling State College. And they let me in the sophomore year. When I got there, I looked at this building,

neo-Gothic building that was a cathedral. I walked in. It was the library. And I stood there. And there's this great stained glass window where you used to go to check out books. And I thought, this is Never Never Land, man. I have been transported into Hogwarts. Yeah.

And that was the year they let in women for the first time. Well, good for you. Class of 73. Yeah. Yeah, thank God. You've time shipped pretty perfectly. Schools were integrated. No, they allowed women in Yale.

And it was the largest class of black kids. We were the first affirmative action generation. When the Ivy League schools lifted their strict racist quote on the number of black kids who could matriculate, and I was one of 96, either in the freshman class or who transferred. Because some of the women were transferring from the Seventh Sisters or Hunter. Sheila Jackson Lee, very good friend, congresswoman from Houston. She transferred from Hunter.

If I get a C, average, I'd said to my dad, that's like getting an A from West Virginia University. And he looked at me and he said, boy, you think I'm stupid. I'm trying to set my expectations low. He said, just go up there, do as well as you can do, and if they don't treat you right, just remember you can always come on home. And when he told me that, I cried. And that did more to give me self-confidence.

The message was, my love for you is unconditional. You can come back with your tail between your legs. You're my son. But then he added, but I know if you do the best you can do, you're going to get straight A's. Exactly. We didn't have A's and B's. We had honors, high pass, you're my son. But then he added, but I know if you do the best you can do, you're going to get straight A's. Exactly. We didn't have A's and B's. We had honors, high pass, pass, and fail.

The first semester, if I'm recalling correctly, I got one honors and three high passes, and I was ecstatic. But the second semester, baby, I got four honors and one high pass. And the rest of my time, I got straight A's. And you went in Andrew Mellon? Paul Mellon. Paul Mellon. I was junior year of Phi Beta Kappa, and I graduated straight A's. And you went in Andrew Mellon? Paul Mellon. Paul Mellon. I was junior year of Phi Beta Kappa, and I graduated just like you.

Summa. Summa. Wow. Summa wouldn't want to be you. That's why you're magna. We had more fun, that's why. In that bag of fantasies that I was carrying around invisibly, one was to be a Rhodes Scholar. I wanted to go to Harvard, Yale, and I wanted to go to Oxford, Cambridge.

And I applied for all these fellowships. Look, I was a junior, 5'8". I was black. I was from West Virginia. I was going to get one of these things, right? But I was a finalist, and I didn't get any. I was a finalist for Rhodes. I was a finalist for Marshall.

And I was blowing the interview somehow. And my girlfriend at the time said, you're probably just being an asshole, trying to pretend to be somebody you're not. Why don't you just go in and be yourself? I was down to the seventh possibility to fulfill this fantasy that I'd had since the eighth grade. And it was the Mellon Fellowship. Before I walked in, I was sitting in the ante room and this kid came out and his face was radiant. And he knew that he had been selected. He said, oh, that was the best interview I ever did. And this kid came out and his face was radiant. And he knew that he had been selected. He said, oh, that was the best interview I ever did. And I'm going to go to Cambridge and I'm going to, we say, read. We don't study or major. He said, I told him I was going to read English

with Professor so-and-so. And I thought, man, I'm dead because I don't even know who he's talking about. So door opened, they said, Mr. Gates. And they said, why would you like to go to Cambridge? The Melons, they're two from Yale to Clare College, Cambridge, and two from Clare who come to Yale. There were 12 colleges at Yale, which at Yale's are named for dorms. And the head of the college until recent was called the master. And one of the masters was a woman, to make it even more ironic, Kitty Lustman. I'll never forget her. A brilliant child psychologist.

Yeah, you won't forget it because you haven't forgotten a single name you've heard over the last 73 years. And I said, I have no idea with whom I want to study or even what. And they looked at me like I was dead. And they said, well, why do you want to go? Why do you want this fellowship? I said, at the end of my sophomore year, I was lucky enough to be chosen for the five-year BA program 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 and London 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 majority majority black. 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 and African culture. 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. Oh, Cass, that great book. Isabel's book. And I said, I would like to have the same opportunity in reverse.

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. How is race socially constructed in England? What does it look like over there? That's right. What is transcendent about blackness and what is local about blackness? What is the black experience in England and how does the black experience in England compare to the black experience in America? That was it, baby. Yeah. I just got chills, so that didn't work. That killed it. Because I was telling the truth.

That was why I wanted to live there. I didn't know that my fate was sitting over there at the University of Cambridge. 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, Wole Soyinka. When he got out, he published his prison memoirs, and the Nigerian government wanted to kill him all over again. He took political exile, got a fellowship to teach at Cambridge. The English department was so backwards that they wouldn't give him an appointment

because they said African literature wasn't really literature. So he was in the social anthropology department. Oh, sure. Well, we'll take anyone. Come on in. Amazing. And he only had one social anthropology department. Oh, sure. Well, we'll take anyone. And he only had one student, and that was me. And he gave a series of lectures, which were collected under the title, Myth Literature in the African Worldview. 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 a teaching appointment in social anthropology. And then Anthony Appia was a second year student,

a genius like Shoinka. And he had moved from wanting to be a doctor, he was pre-med first year and switched to philosophy. And the two of them, after we had met for a month, Anthony's father's a prominent Ghanaian politician. It was best friends with Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah turned against him, put him in jail because he accused Nkrumah of corruption. But he's like the John Adams of Ghana. And the two of them took me out to an Indian meal. And my mouth was on fire because these Africans like this hot food. Shoyinka is an oenophile, connoisseur of wine.

And my generation, Yale, didn't drink wine. We used cheap wine like Boone's Farm Apple Wine and Mad Dog 2020 in hookahs for the consumption of more vaporous kinds of pleasure. So my mouth is on fire. I'm getting drunk from drinking all this wine. They look at me and they said, we have brought you here for a reason. We are from your future. And you are not going to be a medical doctor. You are going to be a professor of African and African-American studies.

I was thunderstruck, and I burst into tears because I realized that it's what I really wanted to do. Yeah. And you got permission to. I got permission to. I was black, but not a socially constructed blackness in America. I was like an anthropologist. I could be completely removed from the experience of West Indians who had come primarily on the wind rush in 1948 and their descendants living in England. 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, how much was really constructed by class. What social problems were common to Tanzania, England, and the United States? Well, they can't all be about the experience of slavery and its aftermath in the world. Yeah, and that's what Isabel did. She did the Dalit in India, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the African Americans here. Absolutely. They don't share race in common. No.

So what else do they share in common? Right. So you control the variables so I can experiment. 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. I thought before I went to Africa that race was everything, which is a famous saying from a racist scientist in the 19th century. But it's not. Class is just as important.

Well, you look at the similarities. I, as a white trash kid from my area, why do I like rap? Why do I like country? This is disenfranchised stories. Yes, that's right. It's the same shit. I graduated Piedmont High School with 36 kids, and most of them were white. I know that, as it were, the cultures of poverty are colorblind.

Right. That obesity, out-of-wedlock pregnancy Educational attainment, health attainment, every metric we would use to evaluate, you could graph them, we wouldn't know who was who. You got it. Which is not to say there's not another layer, which is more dangerous, I acknowledge, but you could make a graph where no one could tell.

The bottom line is economics. You know, as the brothers say, it's all about the Benjamins. Everything else is part of the superstructure. I definitely believe that. 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? The two races have been. That's what I'm saying.

It's been intentional to make these poor white folks in the black folks. 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. And he published an essay called The Wages of Whiteness, and I'll be teaching it. 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 to their class counterparts. Their brothers. Their brothers and sisters

that we should be fighting together to address problems that are fundamentally economic. 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,

the sanctity of whiteness. Why they suffer. All these people of color coming in. But it's not. They're being exploited by the system economically. And used to pacify. Well, at least you're not those people. So if those people are really below you, even though they're not,

that is something we can give you to prevent you from poking holes in the system you should be so delighted you're a part of. And so that most attempts historically to organize workers economically fell apart as soon as they played the race card. Exactly. They go, at least you're not an n-word. Yeah, yeah. No matter how poor you are, you are a white man.

It's the great Chris Rock joke. There's a white janitor in here that's watching me and saying, I don't think I'd trade places with him. I'll just stick with this white thing. more humane. And I've been very blessed in my career. My wife is a Cuban citizen and my stepchildren are now Americans. I met her in 2009 when I was filming one of my favorite Black History series for PBS called Black and Latin America. And she was a prominent historian. And I met her at 10 o'clock in the morning, interviewed, took her to lunch, took her to dinner. I've been in love ever since. But for her, raised in a communist country, class was everything. And what was suppressed was race.

That's so interesting. And for us, what was suppressed was class. America, what are you talking about? We don't have classes. Right. We're a meritocracy. Yeah. And it's not true.

A meritocracy trap. 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. I'm generalizing, not everybody. But when they're family gatherings and people talk about the promise of America, you realize that that is what made our country great. Martin Luther King gave a commencement address at Stanford that I like to quote, and he said, it's commonly said that we're a nation of immigrants of America, but we're also a nation of exiles. And that's beautiful. We are a nation of immigrants of America, but we're also a nation of exiles.

And that's beautiful. We are a nation of political exiles, religious exiles, and economic exiles. And people came here and they go, this is wide open. 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? No way. Everything became possible once they came here. And we have to remember that. I think the popularity of Finding Your Roots has to do with two things. One, reminding people that we are a nation of immigrant slash exiles.

And two, biologically, that at the level of the genome, we're 99.99% the same. And three, note there is no such thing as racial purity. Yes. That we're all mixed up. And 50,000, there is no such thing as racial purity. Yes. That we're all mixed up. Yes. And 50,000 years ago, we were all Africans. Yeah. Yeah.

In anthro, we reject race as a concept. 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. Right. Demagogues, evil people, have used the tiny little phenotypical differences. The least significant, least complex gene order. To reify them, to say that those signify fundamental differences of essence. Characteristics meaning something different than we mean.

Your level of intelligence. Yes. Ultimately, your value. Yes. So then on all of those diagrams of the great chain of being, there's God at the top looking like Carlton Heston. There are the angels right under God. And then there are the four or five quote unquote races of man.

And at the bottom of the races of man was an African with a Simeon look just under the African. The next rung of the great chain of being was an ape. Last stop. Isn't that cold? Oh, fuck. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Okay, we must, because you've come here, obviously, to promote something.

This is great. It is so awesome. I didn't have to do shit. I'm going to Jacques-Marie-Mage to buy a new pair of glasses. Oh, my gosh. I just learned about that brand. They are amazing. My next-door neighbor, my friend Larry Bobo, has about 10 pairs of these.

I've just heard about it, that they're amazing sunglasses. And I went. When we landed, I dropped Marielle off at Malibu, and Eli took me to the shop in Venice. And the director, he's Norwegian. It's a Netflix show. What's it called? Brother-Son?

That's so hot. I haven't seen that. Mikkel, somebody. This tall Norwegian guy. Anyway, he was there celebrating the success, buying two or three pairs of these Jacques Marie Maj glasses. OK, so we're almost done, right? Yeah, we're totally almost done.

I mean, I'm enjoying it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm about to hit the wall because I've only had a banana. Totally. Of course, of course. But I really have had a good time. Me too. 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. That's right. Recorded here in LA at a famous church. With John Legend. That's right, with John Legend. And he was one of the people that we had on.

I just wanted to ask you two questions about this. And then we're done. Oh, sure. We have had Alicia Keys. We have had him. We've had 10 singers on who all got their start in the church singing. Without exception, everyone we interviewed has a much different relationship with religion now than they grew up with, right? And I do think

we would agree that the country gets more secular. I have this deep fear of what replaces that. When you look at Aretha Franklin, you look at Whitney Houston, it all came out of church. It all came out of gospel. And as that dissipates, what happens? That's a great question. First of all, you're absolutely correct that R&B, soul, the foundation is gospel music. All of Motown came out of the church. Yeah. There's even the Sam Cooke record.

And he's part of the people transitioning from gospel to R&B. On side A, it's gospel. And side B, it was R&B. There it is, epitomized in an actual record. 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. W.E.B. Du Bois famously said that the black church is composed of three elements, the preacher, the music, and the frenzy. I did a documentary on the history of the black church called The Black Church. This is our story.

This is our song. And you couldn't do everything, not even in four hours. So I wanted to do the sequel on the glue that held it together. And the glue that held it together was the music. The music and the rhetorical styles of great preachers, which are very musical. And that's what our series is about. There's a great line from one of the female guests in the doc who says, the sermon becomes the song, the song becomes the sermon.

That's right. Inextricably intertwined. Yeah, it's just one big circle informing one another. Gospel existed in the 19th century. It was a white form. Blessed Assurance was written by a blind white woman, which is, this is our story, this is our song. 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 1919. 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. And this becomes this cauldron of culture. And all this stuff is boiling and bubbling. And the secular version goes into jazz, out of blues and ragtime. And the sacred version, jazz and blues, meld with the spirituals, the music created by the slaves, to form gospel. And that becomes this powerful new musical form, which still exists and is still morphing.

To answer your question, Kirk Franklin records Stomp in 1997, which flips out all the preachers because it's hip-hop. Yeah. Right. So here we can see that musical forms are still growing out of the church, the golden age of hip-hop. So the church is still important, but it's not as important as it was before, which brings us to a fundamental formal or structural aspect of hip-hop, which is sampling.

Yes. And the thing about sampling is that's like going to music school. Yeah. Because you're borrowing forms that your father or even at at this point, your grandfather, or grandmother, or your mother listened to. It's also the greatest democratizing tool to ever hit music. Yeah, which is one reason it survived for 50 years. Yeah, it's incredible. And it's everywhere.

Okay, on your next trip, I'm going to make you tie together the signifying money. Monkey. Monkey. Dyslexia, I typed it up wrong. Yeah, the signifying monkey. Money signifies too. Monkey. Monkey. Dyslexia. I typed it up wrong. Yeah, the signifying monkey. Money signifies too. And rap. On your next visit, we're going to explore that.

Yeah, you have to come back another time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think there's some crazy huge parallel between those two things. Oh, but I really had a good time. Me too. My PR people said, you know, we want you to do this song. I go, who the fuck is this guy? Yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah. And they said, you know, you're doing his wife's family tree. And I go, who the fuck is this guy? Yeah, of course. And they said, you know, you're doing his wife's family tree. And I go, oh, okay. Well, I'm glad

I got the nice side of you because of that. Not the first time I've benefited from her. So look, you're going to let me do your family tree? You got to let me do it now.

I don't want to go down and sit with you to find out my family owns slaves. But you know what? Well, I'm going to tell you, your family owns slaves. Yeah, exactly.

Now that I've told you, we have lanced that royal. I do want to do it because I have the honchos from Hazard, Kentucky, who are all murderers, and it's a very wild ride. But you never know where it's going to go. And besides, who cares what your ancestors did? No, I agree. My producers, when I was coming over, they go, nail this motherfucker down. I said, we have a big.

You do it? Yes. Yay, handshake. Look at that, tit for tat. And wherever we go, I'll walk you through it. Okay. I'll hold your hand. Okay, I'm in.

Because I like you. I have rapport with both of you. We have a nice little thing here. It's great. This was wonderful. It's good. Chemistry, we call it. You have it or you don't?

No, it's nice. When I got here and realized I was in a time warp and I was back in Appalachia. Yes, exactly. High-end Appalachia. Yes, exactly. High end Appalachia. All right. Great having you and good luck with everything. Thank you.

Stay tuned for the fact check so you can hear all the facts that were wrong. You got to wear your orange boots. I can because it's a rainy day. It's a rainy day. It was a rainy day yesterday and a rainy day today. And how's your sad? My sad is confused. I've had some exchanges with you and you sounded pretty chipper. Yeah. My sad is a little confused because I'm coming out of my funk. Okay. But then it rained. So my funk funk was like we're supposed to be funky again right and now we have an excuse yeah so it doesn't really know how to feel

what day did the funk lift it had to do with astrology oh tell me tell me you're getting deeper and deeper and i love it i know because my it. I know, because of my natal chart. Right. Because of my natal chart, Clarice, the woman I saw, the astrologer I saw. Your advisor. Well, I haven't brought her onto the team yet. Okay, full time. But I get her emails now. Oh, okay.

You're on her mailer list now. Actually, let me read it. Okay. Okay. Oh, my God. It's my dad's birthday. Holy smokes. Good thing we looked at your astrological chart. It's Calvin's, too. Is it their share. Okay. Oh my God, it's my dad's birthday. Holy smokes. Good thing we looked at your astrological chart. It's Calvin's too.

Their share birthday. Oh my God. That's good luck for Calvin. Calvin reminds me of a show. I can see that. Similar coloring. Yeah, okay. They seem like-

Twin Flames. Quietly wise. Twin Flames. Subtle wiseness. Yeah, I can see that. Wow. Twin Flames. Maybe Yeah, I can see that. Wow. Maybe Calvin is going to inherit the Sim. When my dad is going to retire.

Well, your dad might be enjoying the Sim so much that he had himself now born to go through on another ride, another cycle. They do kind of look alike now that we're talking about it. They do. And they have a very similar disposition. Twin flames. Twin flames. That was a good one, Rob very similar disposition. Twin flames. Twin flames. That was a good one, Rob. That was good.

Okay, Clarice. She said. Oh my God, for half a second when you said Clarice. You thought it was. No, you go, okay, Clarice. Which is the exact delivery of our guests. Like whatever the fact check's about. And I was like, oh, Clarice.

I don't remember. I was really scrambling. Oh, I see. I don't remember talking to a Clarice. Yeah, oh, Clarice. I don't remember. I was really scrambling. Oh, I see. I don't remember talking to a Clarice. Yeah. No. Clarice. Isn't that the name of?

Yeah. What's that movie? Silence of the Lambs. A Chianti. Oh, we have something fun coming up. What? We have a fun themed week ahead. Unthemed week ahead.

And in having to do with that, just reminded me, there's a scene in the show of the theme we're doing. Oh, boy. Where parts of a body is eaten. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And blood drank. Uh-huh. Yep.

Pivot, Clarice. Yes. This is her email. Hi, all. A significant event is set to unfold this Saturday. Pivot, Clarice. Yes. This is her email. Hi, all. A significant event is set to unfold this Saturday. This was this past Saturday. Oh, my goodness. Making a transition as Pluto moves from Capricorn to Aquarius.

This shift occurring as Pluto changes signs includes a final conjunction with the sun at the very end of Capricorn, 29 degrees. A degree in astrology known for its connection to Mars, the planet associated with aggression and tension. Ooh. As an Aquarian, oh, I won't talk about our personal stuff. It's important to note that January 20th could potentially be an intense and dynamic day. If you're interested, okay, that was all. Okay.

But that really kind of was the day. But it's interesting, because it sounds a little foreboding, that was all. Okay. But that really kind of was the day. But it's interesting because it sounds a little foreboding, that email. It sounds a little intense. And what were the adjectives used? Yeah, aggression and tension. Yes, that's not. No, but it's coming out of. Oh, okay.

Okay. That does make sense. Right. There has been tension and aggression, actually. Oh, yes. I thought it was was me i was like cracking my brain i'm like i don't think i've been aggressive but i have quit dip so maybe i've lost perspective no no no but yeah so so i do think i felt the the pluto shift turn the plutonian shift the plutonian shift it moved moved out of Capricorn into Aquarius. The age of Aquarius.

Then I read something else that was like a longer, more intricate thing on it. Do you, could we, let's do a percentage out of a hundred. A hundred is you believe in astrology in a way that you would make decisions in your life around it. Okay. That's a hundred. Okay. I don't know why I'm using a hundred scale let's use 10 okay that's easier because i had a weird hunch it was going to be down into like a you know like 33 i had a hunch we're going to need the extra digits so let's stick with a hundred

decimals like 9.4 oh okay let's do a centa based okay so i don't think that's a word so that's a hundred is you're designing your entire life around it. Zero is it's hogwash. It'd be a waste of time. It's not even entertaining because it's such a waste of time. I see. Yes. I've said enough about the product. Where do you think you're at and where do you think you're headed? I am at, I'm at. at i'm at be honest i am you're a little probably embarrassed to go no don't don't do that don't lead the witness don't point paint me into a corner capricorn i didn't get the memo that pluto has left capricorn okay i think i'm at 46.7 kidding. But I'm heading to 68. Okay. And where were you when you first started sending Kristen and I those?

10. Wow. So it's really building. 10 for fun. 10 for fun and entertainment. And then up until 22, it was entertainment. Okay. Then from 22 to 37, it was, man, these signs, like your astrological sign is seeming pretty dead on.

Right. Okay. So more convincing. Yeah. Then from 37 to what I say, 46.7, where I'm at. We need a chart in here, by the way. I'm already worried that we're going to lose these numbers. Yeah. Well, I'll write it down when I listen to the fact check. Okay. Yeah. For the future, you mean? Well, I'd like to have a chart in here. So we know.

That's a good idea. Yeah, as the years unravel, yeah. Well, okay, so that little area is expanding to like the sky and this stuff. More predictions. But not predictions. First it was just like, wow, these are pretty accurate descriptions, but now the predictions are. I'm not there yet though. Okay. That will start at 52. Okay, okay.

But I'm getting there because I didn't want to tell you this. During the natal chart reading, she did. So I am very against predictions of any kind. Right. The only thing that scares me about your new interest in this and growing belief is self-fulfilling. Self-fulfilling prophecies. Yeah, but 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 for it and you sort of make

it happen. You make it happen. You manifest it. Yeah. No, I'm hyper aware of self-fulfilling prophecies. Okay. And it's why I don't ever, like I'm so against psychics or tarot card readings or anything like that. So far, astrology isn't that.

It's this was your chart when you were born. And these are like attributes. Right. But when I had my reading, she asked me, is there anything I've been like worried about or want to know? You knew immediately what you would want an answer to. Yeah. Yeah.

And I asked. You did. It was about, it was about career, I imagine. It was about work. It was about work. Yeah, yeah. And well, okay. And then she didn't, she did a good job.

She wasn't like, yes, this is going to happen or this isn't going to happen or anything. She kind of said like, uh-oh. Oh, geez. I know. I know. I know. She didn't, but the way she was answering it did make me feel scared.

Yes. Yes. And then I was so mad that I had asked that I had done this. You even cracked the door to it. Yeah. Yes. This is exactly why I don't do this. Yeah.

But then she found out another piece of information and that changed everything. So anyways, it was good. Okay, good, good. But of course, for me, I'm hearing this, what I was scared was bad news. And I immediately, I was like, I have to unhear this. I hate that. That's not true. And then immediately I went into how do I reframe this in my head to make it?

Like I was already going to make it good. Right. But it was going to take a lot of work and a lot of zigzagging. Yeah. Yeah. But it didn't matter because it was fine. Oh, okay, great.

So I guess I did kind of, oh, she did, then she gave- You broke your own rule a little bit. She was like, these dates are good. Oh, what were the dates? I didn't write them down.

But it was like- And Rob wasn't there. It it was like now ish you guys are bringing rob to these but no it's like now ish and so okay i think this has to get rolling which just seems like it is anyway so i i have used it guess, slightly more than I would have thought. Also, I'm reading this book. I don't love it. First of all, congratulations. You're reading. Thank you. You're doing your resolution. I'm trying. I don't love the book, so it's hard. Why don't you switch books? I don't want to. I want to finish it. Okay. See it through. Finish what you start. It's a good book, but it doesn't have its hooks in me. It doesn't have a hook, yeah.

But there's a bunch of astrology stuff in it. The protagonist is obsessed with astrology. How fun for you. And so it's all coming together. Yeah. Yeah. What's your percentage? Be honest.

Four. No, you like it more than four. Well, I enjoy when you send those things and that does sound like us yeah you get a little bit like wow but i don't i've heard you say wow well for sure i mean i think one of them said i wear noise canceling headphones but at the same time you know why that's tricky this is what keeps me at a four. Everybody wears noise-canceling headphones. Rob wears noise-canceling headphones. Yes, America wears noise-canceling headphones. Even the earbuds are noise-canceling.

It was not about that. It was- But hold, just one second. So they're saying things that really apply to everybody. But in this case, yeah, they really apply to me because I'm using them to prevent myself from going mad. Right? So I agree. in this case yeah they really apply to me because i'm using them to prevent myself from going mad right so i 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 you know everyone's doing that's not fair or right you're right because for one the noise canceling headphones happened

while i was after the next day after you had noise-canceling headphones on all day to regulate your emotions. Yeah. And none of us did. It wasn't like we were all walking around with them. You were very specific in that. Yes. That one was crazy. And that was really fun.

And that's what kept me willing to read them. Like, when you send them, I don't ignore them. Let me read one. Well, hold on. What's the actual science behind it? Like, what is it? stars and planets and when you're born and the way it maps i don't i there's a lot i don't know the one i've heard people say that i can see where they think it's compelling is that your body is majority water i've heard this one like the moon and the moon is pulling the tides in and out so it it has an enormous impact, obviously, on water.

And you're made of water. Now, for me, there's a big gap between water in your body and serotonin and neuroepidephrine and every chemical that's actually controlling your mood. I mean, I guess you could argue there's a lot of water in those chemicals. I don't know. You could. But I don't even know if that in those. I don't know. You could. But I don't even know if that's true. I don't know if synapses and neurotransmitters are full of water or electricity. I'm not even sure.

It's more traits than mood. I mean, some of it's mood. And like when Mercury is in retrograde, that has a big effect. Yeah, buckle up. Especially for me, because Mercury is my ruling planet. You're a slave to Mercury. Which she said is a good thing. Okay. That is a good one? I guess. Oh, the other thing. So my other issue. So one is that I think they say things that everyone has. Yeah. And you have it in varying

degrees. And then on a month where it's like, wow, I was peak that trait. I mean, we all have the same stuff. We're all agitated at times. We're all excited. We're all horny. We're all sad. We all wear noise canceling headphones. I have not worn them yet. I know. And that's my present to you. I'm going to, I just haven't, I just put, I just. Do you need me to connect it? Is that what's going on? Is that what you're a little nervous about? I'm a little like, I probably have to do some stuff. Right. So why don't you just bring them back to the attic? Just pretend you're returning them. And then when you're here, I will connect your phone and your computer to them. So then all you

gotta do is pick them up, put them on, and it'll go beep beep. And then it's connected. Yeah. That might help. They've made it way easier connecting now. Isn't it just you press a button? Yeah. And then you're turning your Bluetooth on your device. I'm gonna. My other issue is like because my mother would go to, she would get a reading once in a while.

Uh-huh. It's something she liked to do. For entertainment purposes. Yeah. One or two things would materialize, and she would be blown away by that. Yeah. But the problem is they spoke for an hour, sometimes two hours. So several hundred things had been said that didn't come true.

Sure. So the percentage is so low if i take 25 guesses right now about you and one of them's right but 24 are wrong i don't think you'd ever go like dax is clairvoyant no you're not right because i've even seen people do these mind games with people and they get three wrong in 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 and they'll go wrong in 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. And they'll go like, oh, I don't have a sister.

But maybe it's a friend you're so close to you think of it as a sister. Yes, Becky and I always say we're – I know. They don't care that it was wrong because we got that she has a friend. I agree. Everyone agrees. Okay, so that's why I'm at four. But I just think that's not – I don't think that's an I'm at four but I just think

that's not I'm just I don't think that's an accurate number what do you think my number is I think you're a 14

okay I'll do that I'm 14 okay if anyone asks me later today I'm gonna say I'm a 14

and we have to write it on the chart okay tell me about your weekend because I was out of town so I don't know anything that happened to you this weekend

we were out of town what did you do oh I had a valley day. Okay. Sportsman's lodge. Um, no, it wasn't a tried and true Valley day. 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 Cucco's and have burritos. Oh, fun. God, you're young. So young. I'm really not. Yeah. Did you do any of that stuff? Well, yeah, we went to Don Cuco's. We went to Houston's. Oh, fun. For lunch. Friday night. Oh, for lunch. Which was delicious. And then I went to the

bookstore. Okay. And then we went to Foreman's. Okay. And played, we ended up playing spades, not poker. Okay. And then we went to Don cuco's and then we got a milkshake fun yeah it was really fun i love that man bob's has just the best milkshakes but you went to bob's big boy yeah that's where i go for milkshakes this is a ding ding because this weekend i cooked a steak for my friend rich uh-huh and he said i it fucking blasted. Like leave it on so long. Well, 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. So I've been friendly with them and I camp with them sometimes. I really, really like them.

They're both retired now. Yeah. And then they were with friends who I'd never met, Mike and Amber, and they were awesome. So like the four of them, I just was having so much fun with. And so Mike and Amber have been out to a restaurant with Rich a bunch of times watching him try to order a steak and he can't get them to ruin it enough. So I said, you might want to try this technique. I love the malts at Bob's Big Boys. And I always want them to put more malt in. And the strategy I finally figured out that works every time is you tell the server, okay, I want you to put so much malt in that you will have a moment where you think, fuck, I put too much malt in it and I've ruined it. Double that.

Yeah. And that works. Yeah. So I said, start telling them, like, I want you to cook this so well burnt. The moment you think I've ruined this steak, you're halfway there. Wow. So they're going to try the TBD. We'll see if that strategy works.

Wow. But what a ding, ding, ding. Because then I ended up telling that story probably three times this weekend about the malt. Oh, you did? Well, because then I cooked them a hamburger and I also had to blast the hamburger. And then some other people were talking about how Rich loves his hamburgers blasted. Oh, wow. Okay. And then I, you know.

Wow. Yeah. Well. It doesn't take a lot of provocation for me to tell that malt story as you would have guessed. Yeah. Cause. I knew you were thinking that.

And so I'll be cut to the chase. Only because we have heard it on here once before too. Yeah, but you know- But it's great. The thing is we've been on for six years. So sometimes I'm gonna, I gotta, we have new listeners in India that don't know and they might go to Bob's on vacation.

The Indian listeners have been here since day one. I don't know. It's as fast as growing. Yeah, no, it's true. A lot of people don't know about Peababy. That's a sad truth. I know, Peababy. But Peababy was a long time ago.

Right. And I might have told that malt story around that time. It was. And it was pretty, because it was a few months ago, because- You have an exact memory of when you told it? I do know why. I know that the reason we talked about it is because I was talking about Valley Days.

It's because Jess and I get malts. But you just like a milkshake, not a malt. Yeah, but he loves malts. And it was probably around the time I was telling the story of my trigger shot because that had to do with that day. This all makes sense. That was October.

And then we were talking about Bob's and then you told your malt story. Oh, okay. And here I am again. And I told it all weekend. And you. Is there any prediction of when I'll stop telling that story? Because clearly something's in my moon cycle. Okay.

Other highlights? Oh, yeah. Oh, no, no. That was Friday night. I want to hear about your Saturday night. Yeah. I had a brunch with Liz. Fun.

There's a pin in that for synced for two weeks from now. And then yesterday I did nothing. Well, I cooked. I made a banana bread and then I made a soup. But based on something that happened in the brunch with Liz that we're going to talk about two weeks from now on synced, we talked about boredom and how we can't really get bored anymore. Our society doesn't understand boredom anymore. No appetite for boredom. No tolerance for boredom. You always have a distraction. You always have your phone. There's always a million

things you could be looking at. And then I got a little bored yesterday. It was like sort of the goal. I'm not going to go do anything. I'm going to try not to just like keep refreshing the phone. What was the longest you had put your phone down? I was down a while because I, well, I made the banana bread, although that's like not boring. But yeah, like when I would grab it out of instinct, I would put it down. I mean, a few times I looked at it. I'm not saying I didn't look at it, but it was an intention to just don't always go here. You can just like lay here. Yeah, yeah. I read some of my book, but I got a little bored, which was nice. And I think maybe as adults, we might get three of those days a year.

There's so few and far between. They're probably restful in a weird way. Very. Yeah, restorative. So it was nice. Oh, good. Okay. So I went with Aaron Winkley, best friend Aaron Winkley.

Yes, to the sand dunes. To the sand dunes. And we had a spectacular time. Great. And we brought four vehicles to off-roading because they break it's part of the biz yeah it's to be expected yeah 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 it's so fun i was having so much fun then we went out

in the raptor at night to try out all the crazy new lighting I have for it. And that was awesome. Loved it. And then Thursday, Rich and Patty were there. I got the sand car out. And then I'm following Rich in his sand truck. So much fun. And then the girls showed up on Friday.

But Erin and I, first night we watched most of Napoleon. Okay. We like to do movie nights when we're out there. Great. Napoleon Dynamite? Nope. The movie Napoleon with- Joaquin Phoenix.

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 of the way through, so I shut it down. What's that mean?

Pooping? No, snoring. Oh. Yeah, he was snoring. Oh. Yeah, he was out cold. We put the pullout bed out. He sleeps on the pullout bed, which is an air mattress. And the big TV's up front. And then we lay in the pullout bed and watch.

That's sweet. And then all of a sudden he was snoring. So then Friday, the girls arrived, Lincoln, Delta, Kristen. I took the girls out in the Raptor at night, which was really fun. Lincoln, of course, wanted more, more, more. Then at night, Lincoln really wanted to put some Ted Seeger stickers on the swing set because everyone put stickers on it. So we had to go get to the swing set.

There's also a volleyball court. Oh, sand volleyball. Played sand volleyball. Monica's favorite the shepherds plus aaron versus patty rich amber and mike fun and um reactivated everything that had hurt from the week before rotator cuff right arm fucked knee left knee doesn't matter diving it's a blast it was a nail biter 13 to 15 we. But we had two kids. Okay.

But also. And we're in the middle of the dunes playing volleyball. It was like a weird synchronized. I know. But you've been saying for weeks now, sand volleyball, bad. Hate it. Would way rather play grass. But then you loved it?

Well, I'll play volleyball on any surface. I love volleyball. Okay. Is what we're finding out. I'd play on hot lava if there was a matter. I love volleyball. Okay. It's what we're finding out. I'd play on hot lava if there was a matter. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

So that's fun. It was really, really fun. Then that night, second viewing of Barbie. All right. Yes. Great movie. What a great movie. Really held up.

It's a masterpiece. It's really- I love that you love it so much. It's so well-made. It's so creative. Yeah. Also, I was thinking for those actors, there's those scenes where they're on that stupid beach set with a plastic wave behind them and plastic everything. And I was thinking, on set,

these people, thank God, had a lot of faith in her. And it was warranted. But when you're standing on this crazy, plasticky set doing a big song and dance routine without the music. There's no real music in those scenes. Yep. Ryan Gosling. This one in particular is him singing his big song. Yeah. And it's at the beach. And I'm like, this is full commitment and probably felt a little scary. He's pulling his shirt open and he's being douchey intentionally. Totally. And it's on this plastic toy set. I know. And I'm impressed. Yeah.

And to Greta, holy smokes. I know. It's just such a masterpiece. Side note, Aaron and I, this entire trip, have had a new thing. 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. This all started because I was peeing driving the bus following a police escort of an oversized trailer on the drive out. So we're going 35.

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. So then I was using the paper towel to wrap around my penis when I put it back in my pants. Okay. 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.

You don't see their penises. You just see pee. Bob's paper towel can absorb a whole lot. I see. Okay. And it's all about a workman and your tools. And the urine doesn't look healthy. It's very dark.

Ew. So we're going on and on about Bob's paper towel and it's exactly what greta does the fact that he's obsessed with horses is so funny that's the exact kind of thing that aaron and i would be obsessed with that a man likes a horse right and i forgot how much ken thought that the patriarchy had to do with horses. Yes, yes, yes. And when he makes it Ken land, Mount Rushmore now has four horses' faces. Oh, my God. And he admits that he was confused that he thought it was mostly about horses. Yes. It's so our kind of joke, Erin and I, is where we just keep going further and further.

Like, what's more manly? What's more manly? Right. All while making fun of us. Exactly. It's so funny. So it was a great weekend. Yeah.

And the ride home was incredible because the lions were playing oh and i had that going over the stereo they won they're going to what's it called rob afc championship they have not been to even where they're at since 1957 or i think they were at the super bowl 1957 1957. So they're fucking going. And the game was awesome. And I was cheering. I was inside the bus cheering. Wow. And then I started really believing, wow, Michigan's on fire.

Because U of M won the whole shebang. Yep. And now the Lions are on their way to the AFC Championship. NFC title game. The NFC title game. So exciting. So then what? If they win that?

They go to the Super Bowl. It's fun to care about a team. It is. I really like it. It changes the game. Something that also happened, I guess, Friday, probably before Pluto moved into Aquarius. Okay. 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. Oh, the door that brings you into the entryway. Yeah, exactly. I heard that door open and then my door. Someone twisted the knob. Twisted the knob. The knob was twisted. And I was standing there.

So I like saw and heard it. And immediately my thought was, oh, like a friend is over. Right, yeah. Or like someone's coming over. But I was getting ready to leave, and anyone who would drop by, it didn't make sense. And then I was like, lady, no, it's not her. And then I got freaked out, and I started making some noise. You didn't want to go to your peekaboo?

No, because I was afraid. So I just started making noise to let whoever was there know that somebody was in there. And then they went upstairs and then they came back down and then there was like a major pause before they left. And I looked. Okay, now you look you look yes and this is where things get tricky so it was a guy who cleans the windows okay and my apartment has multiple little small buildings within it so i went to the next one and then was in there and he was cleaning the window there. So why would he have, did you report this to him? 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 handle. 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 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 so he probably washed the outside or whatever you gotta say something and then i think he went upstairs i believe to there's an upstairs window. Okay.

Yeah. So he did that. And then when he came down, my guess is the reason there was a pause is he was probably doing the inside of the bottom. There's a window there? Like the door. Oh, it has a window.

I left and I saw him in the other building and I just made eye contact and then I kept walking. Is there a door to get to the stairs? She couldn't have heard another door handle. Yeah, exactly. Well, I meant if he got confused at which door he was trying to open. He was like trying to get to the door upstairs. I was the only one.

Isn't that weird? That's got to be reported. You think so? Yeah, I do for sure. Fuck. Yeah. I don't want to get him fired though. What if he's just like had a bad.

What could be the explanation of spinning someone's doorknob instead of knocking? Also, why would he even knock? Exactly. He had no business. Yeah, I know. But then I thought maybe instead I should just maybe get a camera. Sure. Yeah.

Get a camera. That's fine. But. But also. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Also, what's her name?'s fine. But. But also. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Also, what's her name?

Got murdered by the dude working in the building. I know the waitress lady. I know exactly. Of course. Of course. That's exactly what I thought. This is a role reversal right now, but I have to say, I think that's very fucking weird that he tried to open the door to your apartment. In fact, it's insanely weird and you need to report it.

Okay. Yeah. I don't think he'll come back because he knows I saw it. No, you got to. What, so he can do it to someone else? No. Maybe he had taught him a lesson that he could get caught at any time. No. Okay. Yeah. But also if he gets fired, he might come hurt me because I got him fired. Like there's a lot to think about. Well, I think what'll happen is they'll say hey someone heard your thing he'll say no i didn't yeah and then he'll go oh fuck i can't do that people have reported me already like i'm on high alert there but then don't you think that eye contact would have done that it

needs to be a record of this so that when someone comes into your apartment and your shit's missing there's at least one person there just needs to be a record of this okay but now i'm what if i made it up well i don't know how to answer for that i don't either that's the part that i'm scared i mean how is there a window but still is there a window upstairs that he could have been cleaning upstairs why do you go upstairs yeah there is a window yeah he went up there to clean the window was my assumption. Okay. I don't think he went up there to like check the doors there. Okay.

I don't think. I don't know. It just feels complex. Why don't you say, I think I heard him. Okay. Yeah. I guess I have to. It feels weird.

Because what if someone else has already reported it and it already went that way and he already denied it and now there's a second one yeah it's hard yeah it's hard to know what to do how it's hard to know when to trust your instincts yeah but i in 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. And so I'm going to. Yeah. 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. Like that's part of the guilt I have.

I understand that. And I think a lot of people proceed through life that way. 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. No, it's not very gray, though. You would never twist someone's door handle.

You would not. If he needed to talk to you. Do you think 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 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. Yeah, just do it in a very, I'm not asking the person to be fired. I think I heard this. I want you to know that I did in case it happened to someone else then. Anyway, so I think I am going to get a camera also. Great. Okay.

Anyway. All right. So this is for Henry Louis Gates. What a delight. Henry Louis Gates. So fun. His life story. Is Louis Gates. So fun. His life story. Is bonkers, yeah.

It was really fun getting to talk to him and hear his whole thing. Yeah. Okay, a couple facts. Is it the go-back machine, the cartoon? He sent me an email. Yeah. Oh, that's funny. Yeah.

It's the way-back machine, but it's spelled W-A-B-A-C, all caps. W-A-B-A-C. Mm-hmm. Oh, that's confusing. Yes. Not helpful. The Wayback Machine was from the Peabody's Improbable History segment of the early 1960s cartoon series, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Ah.

The machine was constructed by Mr. Peabody, a professional bowtie-wearing dog, to be able to visit historical events. Oh, a dog created it. Yeah. Wow, that was unexpected. That's probably why it was misspelled, because the dog spelled it. Yeah, dogs aren't good at spelling. No. He said we could look up a picture of him with his afro.

Here it is. Oh, damn. Yeah, that's a healthy, healthy afro. Yeah, it's really nice. If you guys want to Google image search. He almost looks like a Black Panther in that photo. Yeah, he does. With the shades on. Well, yeah, it says a younger me during the Black Power era as a student at Yale. That was from his Twitter. So check that out. The first scientist to process oxygen was Joseph Priestley. He was right when he was in

the hospital with his hip thing. Oh, uh-huh. The doctor was grilling him. Yeah. Okay, I pulled up the Chris Rock joke about the janitor. The janitor. Oh, good, good, good, good. Now, you watch the TV. You watch like 60 Minutes of City. You see white people pissed off, man. Mad. The white man thinks he's losing the country.

You watch the news like, we're losing everything. We're fucking losing affirmative action and illegal aliens and we're fucking losing the country. Losing, shut the fuck up. White people ain't losing shit. If y'all losing, who's winning? It ain't us. It ain't us. Have you driven around this motherfucker?

It ain't us. Shit. Shit. There ain't a white man in this room that would change places with me. Here we go. None of you. None of you would change places with me. And I'm rich. That's how good it is to be white.

There's a white one-legged busboy in here right now that won't change places with my black ass. He's going, nah, man, I don't want to switch. I want to ride this white thing out. See where it takes me. That's right. So when you white, the sky's the limit. When you black, the limit's the sky.

Hold on, I think there's a janitor. That's right, man. Now, when it comes to racism, you know who the most racist people are for real? The real most racist people? Oh, maybe not. Maybe the busboy was the... Yeah, maybe it was the busboy. Yeah.

That's good. Okay, he was at Jacques-Marie-Mage, the glasses place. He wanted to leave to go to Jacques-Marie-Mage and get some new glasses. He was at Jacques-Marie Mage, the glasses place. He wanted to leave to go to Jacques-Marie Mage and get some new glasses. He was at Jacques-Marie Mage and he said, there was an actor there from The Brother's Son and The Brother's Son's doing so well. And so they were celebrating getting these glasses and we didn't know Brother's Son. We didn't know who he was talking about,

but The Brother's Son is a very popular show on Netflix. It's a comedy action drama that Brad Falchuk created with Byron Wu for Netflix. And it has Michelle Yao from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It is a very popular show. The guy in it is Mikkel Bondeson. Oh, great. And he was the one presumably shopping for new shades? He was the one shopping for the shades.

And Henry said- My brother's son? Is that what you're saying? The brother's son. The brother's son. Yes. S-U-N. S-U-N, yes.

You could say nephew. The original title was nephew. But S-U-N. Oh. The brother's son. Okay, good. I'm glad you pointed that out. S-U-N. Oh. The brother's son. Okay, good. I'm glad you pointed that out. S-U-N.

I would have typed in something different. You would have typed in nephew and hoped you could find the brother's son. That's right. Yeah. And he said Mikkel, and he's right. Mikkel Bondeson. But he's an executive producer. He's not.

He's not an actor on it. No, I don't. He doesn't have any actor credits. No, he's a producer or executive. Okay. So. But good for him. But no, I don't. He doesn't have any actor credits. No, he's a pretty serious executive. Okay. So. But good for him.

And Jacques Brimage is not cheap. Not cheap. No. But not Gucci. At all. More. I mean, they're like $1,000 sunglasses. Oh, wow. You know, I really want some.

I have an outrageous pair of sunglasses. But I will say, I don't have a bunch. I have one style that I've been wearing for 15 years, and I'll wear it for the rest of my life. So back to your sweater that you're amortizing the cost of. Yeah, cost per wear. Leisure Society. That's my brand. And they're obnoxiously expensive, but they're made in Japan.

So are these. The Japanese have really figured out the sunglasses, I guess. Yeah. Leisure Society, the optical collection? Because you also have glasses, right? Yes, I've gotten the same frames that my sunglasses are, but they're my transition readers. Ooh, these are pricey. What's a pair?

I want to say mine are like- Some are $1,300. Yes, nice. But if you look at the detail and all the stuff that's happening. They're outrageous. Absolutely gorgeous. Very durable too. All right.

Well, so you get it. I get it. But what I don't get is like. Maybe we should get you a pair of Jacques Marie Mods. One time I went into Puffy, Puff Daddy's bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Like during an MTV movie where somehow I ended up in there. Yeah. And there were like conservatively 30 pairs of sunglasses laid out on a table.

So like, I can't relate to that. I have a lot of sunglasses. You do. You can, you're more in the puffy camp. Because they're parts of outfits for me. It's not, it's more than just, this is my sunglass. And so I want it to be nice. It's like, this goes with this outfit. This goes with

the style. 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. I can't wear plastic frame sunglasses. I see them all the time. They look, Aaron was wearing a really cool pair of sunglasses in the dunes. I would love them, but i have to have the little doodads that are adjustable the metal doodads yeah um that i can make one side really high up and the other one low to deal with this interesting yeah because if i put on normal plastic sunglasses they're they're diagonal on my face can i try those on surely early wow jacques marie ma oh these are leisure society it's very blue yeah those are i have two different readers yeah and those are the ones that those are self-tinting okay because it hurt yeah i give you but i like that how'd How'd they look? They're not for you.

Oh, no. Really? No. Well, but I would hope, if anything, you go like, oh, so he is telling me the truth when he likes my sweater. Why? What happened? They're just not for you.

That's not the- In what way? I need more detail. They didn't look good on you. I'm asking 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 in those and I was like, I wouldn't recommend those for you. OK, wow. All right. How about like what? Give me an example of let's say that I put these on and I go, how do they look on me? I would if i didn't yeah you gotta assume that yeah then i would say uh i think they're a little wide for your face okay or they were definitely too wide for your face okay yeah i was like why is she got such

big glasses on oh although sometimes you wear really big glasses and they work 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. Or just like the blue is a little off for some reason. You could say that. Although that's a little confusing because you wear it with the blue. Although these are my least favorite. I like the ones I keep in the house much better than these that are just clear. Wow.

Well, Leisure Society and Jacques Marimage. Although don't buy, I guess don't buy them off the internet because if I had bought that. I don't think you would have bought that style. That's not your style of sunglasses. Well, I like the way it looks on its own. I might have if I saw it online. There's nothing about it that i would be like oh that's not for me right so yeah which is why i wanted to get down to why so that i can know

for future i wish i were better at um explaining why it wasn't working now if your car was experiencing fuel starvation under heavy load, which is what was happening to my sand rail, I would know how to help. Well, we can't be good at everything. If you're jeeing out too easy, I would know what's going on with the shocks. Okay. Well, I'll keep that in mind. Please do.

All right. That's it. I love you. Love you.