No Jumper - The Van Lathan Interview

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

Van Lathan is a senior producer and journalist at TMZ. He is also the host of his own podcast Van Lathan's The Red Pill where he interviews guests ranging from Teanna Trump to Jermaine Dupri and much more. We got him in the studio to talk working at TMZ, confronting Kanye West live on air, and more. Enjoy! --- FOLLOW OUR NEW SPOTIFY PLAYLIST! https://spoti.fi/2vi9lsD CHECK OUT OUR ONLINE STORE!!! http://www.nojumper.com/ SUBSCRIBE for new interviews (and more) weekly: http://bit.ly/nastymondayz Follow us on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/nojumper and iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/no-jumper/id1001659715?mt=2 and follow us on Social Media: http://www.twitter.com/nojumper http://www.instagram.com/nojumper http://www.reddit.com/r/nojumper JOIN THE DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Q3XPfBm follow Adam22 as well: http://www.twitter.com/adam22 http://www.instagram.com/adam22 and follow adam22hoe on Snapchat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No Jumper. Coolest podcast in the world. I'm in here today with Van Lathen. What, what up? How you doing, man? I'm great, my brother. You feeling good? Always, man.

The veganism thing ain't wearing you down? Nah, dog. You know what? That was one of the stupidest fucking things I've done in a while. Oh, okay. So you have a negative opinion of it. For me, yeah. I mean, I think it's a different thing with everybody.

I'm saying? So, like, I try to do it. I try to go completely vegan for three days. Right. And just had these weird, fucked up headaches. I felt terrible. Right. But now.

I'm pescatarian. So I'm not eating any meat just like fish. Right. And I feel better. I haven't lost no weight or nothing like that, but I feel better. For me, I don't even understand how to think about veganism anymore. I was when I was in high school. I did a couple years as a vegan.

High school, huh? Yeah. I was just like this misguided little punk rock kid who I thought that this was a good idea. And then over the years, like as I've got more into having to learn how to eat right and lose weight, when I think about the healthy things to eat, I think about protein and vegetables. And so, you know, I look at a big steak. salad, chicken salad, whatever. I mean, that's where you want to gravitate to as soon as you're vegetarian. It's like, how the hell am I going to get full off of just straight vegetables?

That, that to me is really challenging. That's the thing. I don't know what to eat. Like, it was, when I was doing the vegan thing, like, I didn't know, I mean, apparently if you stay by, if you stick to it long enough, like you'll figure that out. But I had no clue what to eat to feel satiated, to feel cool to be able to still go out and hoop and do all of this stuff. So I'm just like, whatever, man, I need some sort of dense protein. And I guess the seafood's So many people I know who go vegan, they just end up on like tortilla chips, a lot of French fries. The exact things, if I were to tell somebody how to lose weight, those are like the main things you need to get out. Yeah, because you see, it's not like if we keep in it a buck, it's not like you see a bunch of hard body vegans.

You know what I mean? You need the protein for something, but it's definitely a healthier lifestyle. So you see people that their overall health has improved. But if you're talking about like physically, aesthetically looking the way, it's not like the vegans look that particularly great. Right. But so you went from, by the way, you should check out vegan bodybuilding competitions versus non- like... Do they look better? They, I mean, they look okay, but then if you look at the dudes who are not on steroids but are eating meat and the bodybuilders, they're way bigger, and then you look at the dudes around steroids and they look like freaks. Right, of course.

Okay, but so is the weight loss thing still a constant struggle in your mind? Do you still not feel happy with the way you're at? Because for those out there who don't know, you used to be much heavier. 375. And you're right now what? Oh, right now about two. 240. But normally, like, it, I'm a little even like thinner than this. Normally I'm around 225, 2.30, but you know. Right. Sometimes and they can be eating. But veganism.

Right. Exactly. All right. But, um, now, for me, there's like a, anything that you want in life, once you get there, once you kind of deciphered in your mind, it is a constant math problem that you got to do to stay where you're at, right? If you, if you're a writer, how you get your writing time in, if you're a basketball player, how you get your hoop time in, whatever. So for me, knowing how my body is and knowing how, you know, when I'm predisposed to, it's just something I got to live with. So it's not like before I just didn't give a fuck. I would eat whatever I wanted to eat.

I wouldn't work out at all. Now I know when things are getting a little out of hand, you've got to kind of move it back. So I just watch it. It's more of a lifestyle thing now that actual diet. Yeah, like, and it's weird the more you know about exactly what's going on your mind. Like I can imagine there's a lot of people who live sort of like an unquestioning life in terms of their own relationship with food. Like I can identify exactly what's going on now when I do feel the need.

Like, hey, four fucking candy bars like a week ago. You know? You know? And it's just like, I know exactly what was going on because I had had a really like long, hard day at work. And I just knew that I wasn't going to feel satisfied by going home on the, sitting on the couch and smoking a blunt, watch a TV that I just needed to like somehow indulge myself and make myself feel good in a way that I had control over and that I didn't

feel like I get in that moment. Yeah. You know, it's crazy? For me, if I don't get enough sleep, I eat bad. Really? So if, like, let's say it's a, because we wake up mad early to go to TMZ. Like, I'm in the office by 6 a.m. Okay.

Like, every morning. So if I want to go out and do something, if my homies come in town or something like that, we're going to be out, whatever we're going to do. I might get back at the crib, 2, 3 o'clock. That's only like an hour and a half, two hours before I got to wake up and get moving to the office. That's brutal. That day, I'm going to eat like shit the whole day. I just can't, like, like, I don't know if I'm not, if I'm too tired to have discipline

or if I just need it to stay going. but days like that are the days. But if the rest of my life is on track, you know what I'm saying? If I'm sleeping right, if I'm working out right, the eating part is actually kind of easy to me. Right.

Yeah. And it's like, for me, a weird part about it too is how I can be so committed and so disciplined about certain things. Like I would never not show up ready

for an interview. I would never, you know, there's just a lot of things I wouldn't fuck up on, but somehow it's just torturous to force myself to do cardio or to avoid like eating something

delicious at the end of the night or whatever. It's like, but then there's, other people that you'll talk to who that's just built into them. Like, I'm sure there's plenty of ballplayers that you've read about or that you know who that it's just built into them that they train however many hours a day. I listen to Joe Rogan talk about him waking up at four in the morning to train and shit.

And it just doesn't resonate with me. Like, there's just a warrior gene that some people have that just seems like it's lacking in certain people. Do you have any cardio activities that you like? Yeah. Like, so if you like for me, the way I really lost the weight was on a basketball court. So that's something I had given up when I had kind of adopted a sedentary lifestyle But when I got back on that

With the diet, it melted off And then after that, you kind of, listen, if you can push through that early part of it Like when I started boxing, like really heavy, I started running because if you're in a boxing ring And you run out of wind, you get your ass kicked. So when you hear about Joe, Joe Rogan even, that's like a combat fighter, right?

That's a guy who does many disciplines of combat fight. He's got a reason to be in shape. So if you sponsor, you sponsor. and you're in there and you get tired, you automatically pay a price. If you're on the basketball court and, like, I'm competitive, right? So if you can't keep up, if your cardio's not there, you pay a price for it. So that made me start running.

And after I started running for a little while, like, you feel really good after a long run. Like, if I go out, run five miles right after that, the endorphins kick in, and it's a little high, and you'll get addicted to that. Like, you'll fuck your knees up chasing a runner's high. So sometimes just initially you got to push through it, but then once you push through it, you get used to it. you straight. Definitely. Did the TMZ lifestyle sort of like make you make you get more out of shape? Is there a lifestyle associated with being a part of that organization where you just have to

constantly be kind of moving around? So when I first got to TMZ I had a different job, right? So I had lost the way in 2007 before I even got to TMS. Oh, okay. Right. But when I first got to TMS, I had a different job. And that job was like being a camera guy and doing actually the TMZ tour that you see. Oh, right, right, right. So I did that for a while. So for that, it was like you were going and you would do a show and then you might not have to work your shift to like six or whatever like that so you can go hoop to whatever now though I'm on three shows I'm doing the whole nine I'm doing live hits all day so working out now is actually harder because you just you just basically have to you know some people say yo we work six to four 30 I work six to really six 30 because I just I put in the workout as part of

my day right because if I go home and get into Netflix or whatever the fuck I'm not doing it so I just do it right there at the office yeah so what is the average day now tell me Take me through what you're actually doing when you're in there. Okay, so I get to work. For the first couple hours before we shoot the first show, I normally do live hits. So, you know, you see somebody come on TV, like, oh, we're going to throw TMZ

and he's going to talk about celebrity news, blah, blah, blah. I do a bunch of those, and then I do the first TMZ show, which is the one that comes on at night, like with Harvey's holding in the cup and all of that. So I do that joint, and then after that, I got maybe like a couple of hours where I'll do more live hits. write some stories that go up on TNZ sports.

And then after that, do TMSY Live, which is the one where it's Harvey and Charles. Right. Boom. So I do that for about an hour, an hour and a half, and then I go on a walk. I take three walks a day, and by the time I go on this 45-minute walk,

I come back, and it's time to do TMSY sports. That's the sports show. That's from like 1.30 to like 2.15 or whatever. 45-minute walks, so those are your breaks? Well, I mean, I don't know what everybody else does, but I got to get out the office. So I take one walk at lunch and then I take two of the other parts of the day. Are you working on your phone or anything during this?

Sometimes talking to my manager, talking to whoever, like catching up on shit, talking people and stuff like that sometimes. And then after that, write stories for the next day, go home. Right. So that takes you throughout the whole day. Do you feel very like, do you feel satisfied in like your urge to grow as a, you know, in your career, as a creator, etc.? And have you just worked your way up to this point where you have so many responsibilities? And could you have easily just sort of kept coasting and been like sort of a real mid-tier employee there? Probably not.

As my profile there grew, they kept wanting me to do more. So they kept wanting me to speak in more places and be more visible and stuff like that. So it would have been impossible for me if I wanted to make more money or if I wanted to continue to have any sort of, I guess, rank or tenure in the office. had to keep. They kept asking me to do more. Like I was doing the tours and playing basketball and doing camera or whatever and they wanted me in the office that we were starting TNZ sports and we were all real proud of TNZ sports and it was something that they knew I had knowledge about and that it was a startup for him. So for me it would have been impossible. As far as the things that creatively you want to do, you know, I think that anybody in the world will tell you that

having a day job is not the way to maximize your creative output. Right. Things that. that you want to do for yourself, things that you want to get done for yourself, any mark you want to leave on this world, any change you want to make in your community and society, is going to be severely hampered by having a day job. Now, a lot of people have to have them. You are one of the lucky people. It does not have to have one. But a day job is just going to detract or subtract from all of that, no matter what that day job is.

That day job could be the fucking NBA. But as long as you a basketball player, you're not going to be the rapper you think you should be. See, that's what's interesting me about you is that you should. seem to have been able to sort of leverage this day job into getting yourself into a position that you probably couldn't have gotten into as easily in another way, which I think is really interesting because that's kind of the best thing you'd think that you'd be able to get out of any corporate job is to be able to sort of use it to up your profile enough that you don't even necessarily need it anymore. Yeah, I mean for that, in terms of that, I mean, that was both

them and me to be real with you. They kept wanting more from me. I want more for myself, so it was easy to kind of make that happen. But eventually, I just think that if you have your own ideas and your own thoughts and your own goals, then you want to be able to attack those things individually and being tethered to any company, especially a company that has such a reputation and is so well branded, which TMZ is incredibly well branded. You'd be unambitious if you didn't look around and think, okay, what could I do if I wasn't with them? You know what I'm saying? But of course, being on TV three times a day every day for eight years

is the minding that you had to do to get to the point to even have those conversations with yourself. Right. But honestly, from my perspective, as someone who's kind of always just made their own content, done their own thing, and it's like that, I find that very impressive that you've been able to sort of exist in that system for eight years without at some point doing something that

kind of fucked it all up. What you mean? I don't know. I just feel like being in that corporate environment for that long, that at some point, like something would go wrong. But that's like impressive to me that you've been able to sort of like function in that system. Well, I mean, really, to be real with you, I thought that the yay shit had gone wrong.

Like for me, when I, when, when I, you could ask, you know, I'm sure you didn't have Charlemann up here, but you could ask him. Like when I got, when I got off the phone, I called him. I was like, yo, I fucked up. Really? I was like, yeah. I was like, like, yay popped up at the office. And I haven't feeling a certain way about that for a while.

And, and, yo, me and him had a shout match. And I'm on the phone And I'm talking to people I'm like yo man This really went left Like we were going back and forth I was yelling to the top of my lungs Like because

Going back and look on Looking at it I was like yo I was pretty respectful In that moment But in the moment All I knew is that I was raising my voice Right And so

And I always try to maintain cool Even when I'm mad pissed off Just because how things I see things go in Baton Rouge Like Baton Rouge Two niggas start yelling Then you know Whatever has to happen happens

But so that was It was one of the times I thought I had really messed up, but it ended up being one of the best things that ever happened. It worked. That was crazy. Yeah. I can't, because at the same time though, I mean, from your perspective, it's like this is TMZ. They love good content, good video content is gold, good video content involving Kanye West.

That's like the number one thing they're looking for. But was your perspective like, are they going to think that I made it too much about myself or that I just like butted in when I shouldn't have? You should have just kept them ranting because he probably would have ranted longer if you had gone on. He just disrupted the whole show. Right. And it was even hard to get the show back on track after that.

It just disrupted the whole show. So I didn't know. I mean, looking back on it, it was probably stupid to think that that was anything other than what they exactly wanted to happen, a big huge moment with a big, huge star coming into the office. But it just kind of, it took the show off the rails. Like, you know, then Kanye was where he was. And then Candace came up and they were doing their whole thing.

But it wasn't the same, like, after that was over. What's your opinion of Candace? What's my opinion in Candace? This is what I think. I think that for someone, I don't agree with not Candace's positions. I mean, I don't agree with her positions, but we have to have a diversity of thought in society, right? Right. You have to have people that are on all sides of this thing.

You have to have a diversity of thought. That's fine. I think what I most vehemently disagree with Candace Owens about is the method by which she's getting her thing out. So what I'm saying is that if Candace Owens thinks sincerely that black people have spent too much time being on the Democratic plantation, as she likes to call it, and she thinks that the left hasn't given black people anything for the allegiance that we've had to them for a couple of generations. Maybe she has a point there. Maybe that's a conversation that needs to happen culturally, not just with black people, but with any people who support any political movement, right? Right. But I think that to attack so many different people in the way that they attack, right,

if you get in the conversation with like Candace or Tommy Lairn, I'm sure it's a lot different talking than them human to human. But to spend all day firing bullets at people and calling names and doing all of that stuff, it kind of builds a wall between you and a lot of the people that you might be attacking. Like if you attack Angela Rye or if you attack people like that, it's not constructive because now a lot of people that you actually need to reach out to, if your point of view has merit, they're not going to fuck with you

because you're putting them in an enemy position. Like, if you're calling people that look at the history of black Americans in a specific way, if you say that they're worshipping victimhood, or that they have a victim mentality, or you're lobbying pejoratives at them the entire time, well, how can you expect those people to want a coalition bill with you?

When you're putting them... in a position where they feel inferior to what it is that you're saying. So it is not that I don't have a problem with black people being conservative or black people being on the right. I don't agree with those viewpoints. But I think especially culturally within one another, there's a way that we should talk to one another and a way that we should relate to one another. And I think that that should be done with a little bit more caring and a little bit more

respect. And that goes on both sides. But Candace has such a following. That's the only thing I would say to her. No problem with. anybody that's on the left or anybody that's, or excuse me, on the right or anybody that's doing that. But when black people talk to each other in public, we should show respect to one another. If you look at, I think that she's such like, she's the Trojan horse of that

whole TMZ situation, because if you pay attention to what Kanye was saying at that time on social media and stuff, it was so obvious that he was just starting to sort of parrot her talking points, which if you've paid much attention to the conservative media are just sort of like the basic boilerplate conservative talking points. And then all of a sudden you have a Kanye communicating them, also shouting her out on Twitter. And then there was this sort of like abrupt breakup, like a couple weeks later, where it almost seemed like his team might have like intervened and really sort of said, like you can't keep so closely associating yourself with her.

Like you've got to assume that there's some attempts being made by his team to sort of put out these fires that he's starting. And that that seemed like to me like it might have been one of them. Well, as far as that situation with her directly, I can't speak to it. But I do know that there were people in Yey's life that, um, that sort of circled the wagons at some point to make sure that Kanye had the information that they felt like he needed

and would be closest to his heart. I can't say anything about the relationship between Kanye and Candace because, you know, with creators of that level, you know, you fuck with people on that level. They very rarely build long-lasting new relationships. Think about the songwriters and the rappers

that have come in and out of Kanye West's life, not just political people, but all kinds of people, right? Right. So it might be a number. number of reasons there, but I think that one thing that he learned from that whole situation is just how big his voice was. I think that he always

felt it, but actually me and him have had some corresponders where he says, like, you know, he realized how much what he says affects people. And for him specifically, if he's going to say something to be serious about it and want it to affect people and change people, he's got to do it

in a certain way. And maybe her way might not be the best way, but who knows? I mean, like, it seems right now that you have more sort of new ideas popping up in a black community than ever, like not just politically, but religiously, all different types of ways. So we're almost figuring out on the fly what it is that we really believe after a couple of generations. Right.

Like you've seen this complete and total sort of like free-for-all in terms of progressive ideas being put into the mainstream over the past year or so. When you look at all these Democratic candidates, there's so much further left. Actually, that's an interesting question to ask you. Do you feel like all this democratic infighting? You see the right make so much out of it, like as if, you know, Trump is definitely going to win because you've got like the Nancy Pelosi's beefing with the squad, etc. Do you buy into that idea and how do you think that Democrats or people who want purely to get Trump out of office

should, do you think that they should moderate their beliefs to make the Democratic vote seem a little bit more appealing to people? Do you think there's any validity to that line of thought? Well, I don't believe in moderating your beliefs at any time, any place ever. I believe if you believe something and you have to say it, then you've got to do it, right? Because I think in the end, if you want nothing more to win in your truth, whatever that truth is, I don't give a fuck what it is. So I don't believe in moderating anything ever. What I do think, though, is that Democrats don't have an identity. They don't know who they are, right?

You got a bunch of old white dudes that are telling you, yo, we got to go win voters here and here and here. So this is the way we got to do it. You have a bunch of other people who see a lot of problems in society that might be seen as being more progressive or further left that are trying to advance their positions. And those people are being met with that can't win. Really, the Democrats don't know what will win. They don't know how they need to win. Trump fundamentally changed the rhythm of politics in America. And I don't know if they'll ever go back to the way it was before, right?

He completely threw it off rhythm. America right now is in the arrhythmia because of Donald Trump. You don't know if you're supposed to go out there and be insulting. You don't know if you're supposed to just serve your base. You don't know if you're supposed to go out there and be incredibly aggressive and be combative. You don't know what it is that you're supposed to do. So what you see is different candidates on the left doing a little bit of all of it. You see some people throwing like Trump came with like wild ideas that really got his base.

You know, like I'm going to build a wall. Like I'm going to have a Muslim band even though that wasn't such a wild idea. Other presidents had done versions of that. And he said all of these things and he got people really. fired up about them, and that's how you get 20 or 30,000 people or whatever it is to a rally. So the Democrats feel like that they have to do, you know, little parts of all of that. I'm going to throw out some ideas that I know are just going to pander directly to people. And then I'm going to do some things that I know are going to be seen as strong, and I'm going to

make sound by it. So I'm going to do all of this when really what they should do is as a left, as a coalition, as a group of people who have a certain political ideology, is decide. like what their party is, like what their identity is. And there's a couple of different things that they would need to do that, but the one thing that they would need to do more than, one thing they need to have more than anything is authenticity. I don't know how authentic the field is right now.

I like some of them. I like some of them a little bit more than others, but I just don't know if we're getting the real versions of any of these people right now. But it's about what you emphasize, because, you know, you can imagine that to some significant segment of the Democratic vote, the issue of like trans bathrooms or whatever is really important. But then you have a whole another section of people who probably look at that is this completely frivolous concern and any time spent talking about things like that are almost an affront

and an assault on the likelihood of Trump getting elected. It's like and it's what the problem is too is that the right is so good at weaponizing the farthest left traits or the conversations that they're having and then taking those and presenting it as if this is like mainstream left concerns. And they virtue signal less. I mean, I think, you know, some of the opinions on the right I think are wrong. Some are dangerous and some are vile. But that's really what they think.

You know what I mean? Like that's really how they feel. So at the end of the day, you have to give them that. I think sometimes liberals and I am a bleeding heart, big time liberal. So I have to watch myself for doing this as well. we want everybody to feel so empowered so much to where we pretend to understand things that we really don't we pretend to be allies to cause it says sometimes and that's how you get in trouble that's how you get guys um you know not to diss him like alec ballin who is a huge huge supporter of glad but gets cost saying

the effort every time he gets mad at somebody you start to wonder well what it is that this guy really believes and the right will poke holes in that hypocrisy they'll poke holes in the hypocrisy of, you know, if you're taking money from certain people, if the Democrats claim to be about getting the money out of politics, they take as much corporate money as anyone. You know what I mean? So it's like it depends. The guy who I get a lot of my political philosophy from is Chomsky,

Noam Chomsky, and if you read Chomsky, it's a very binary way of looking at the world. It has to do with solidarity, morality, the common good of a society, and whether or not what it is that you believe is trying to get to that. Like what's good for everyone. And what's good for everyone is probably

decentralizing power, to be honest with you. It's probably a system that doesn't lend itself to this incredible income inequality that we have right now. But I can guarantee you one thing. Neither side wants to hear that. Neither side wants to see true power back in the hands of the people

that have their lives affected every day by these decisions. Neither side wants that. The left doesn't want that. the right doesn't want that the country has never been about that you read guys read madison or jefferson or any of these guys early on they warn against sort of pure democracy and putting that in people's hands you know what i mean um if you read the wealth of nations past the first paragraph which people don't really read past the first paragraph but if you read past it uh adam adam smith will talk about he'll talk about the vile maxim which is the masters of mankind saying

that the way they should run society is all for us us and nothing for anyone else. So he's warning about that even back then. So the fact that we have a society like we have right now doesn't have to do with any one political ideology. It has to do with corporate wealth being centralized in America to a point to where it's very difficult for you or me or any group of people to make a difference and really puncture through that to get power back into their own hands. And that has to have very much to do with politics. It has to do with economics. But do you think that we have any chance of like flattening of income inequality? Not really. Is there any logical path that's going to get us there? Not really.

Because it's a bunch of common folks against a bunch of geniuses with millions or billions of dollars at their hands. You're too far behind the A ball. Like you're like the best thing that you can do, I mean, really, to be honest with you, the best thing that you can do is to make small decisions in your community, right? So if you're in a black community, if you're somewhere and you know that the government isn't going to make decisions that are going to impact where you live in any positive way, not directly. You have to make those decisions. You have to decide to support one another, right? You have to decide to invest into each other's business. You have to take, you have to have like little fiefdoms where you are in control of it. Because if you wait for any

type of legislation that's going to put a factory back in your community or any type of legislation that's going to make it easier for, for, is that going to donate money to public education or anything like that, that's not going to happen. But it's kind of like you're asking people to sort of outthink the billions of dollars that are spent on advertising that hit their eyes and their ears every year. Well, you're asking people essentially to unlearn, right? You're born into this, like, there's specific advertising for kids. Which seems particularly sinister, right? Yeah, there's, like, there's something in, there's something in advertising called a nag factor. Like, it was, it was, it was realized some time ago that, you know, kids, although they don't have any money, right?

They used to, like, not marketing anything to kids. They don't have any money, but they do have influence, meaning the kid can nag their parents about something for X amount of time, and the parents to get over it will buy the kid what they want. So after a while, advertising agencies started honing in on them to get kids to nag their parents. Right. So you're building a consumer relationship. You're turning a human being into a consumer from a very, very early age.

Like you don't know anything better than you know about how to buy something and have something that you don't really need. And not only that, but that having something and somebody next to you not having it makes you better than them. So that's something that's so ingrained into you to unlearn it and want you and the person that lives across the street from you to have something like equality. seems like an alien thing almost un-American. I mean, to care about splitting the pie equally so everybody can eat, does it seem like what America is about? It seems like America's about,

I'm going to tell, I'm going to do all this, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what you don't know is, like, you're playing a game that's really, really pretty rigged from the beginning. Like, the corporations and the banks and things that are kind of moving and shaking, I don't want to sound like conspiracy theories, but they've been doing this for a long time

and they're really, really good at it. Right. So what do you do? How do you live your life differently to sort of undo these things in small ways? Or do you think is it worth it to try to unlearn that type of behavior? Grassroots organizations are the best way. Right. Like reaching out, like holding hands with people who have a different view, sort of a different code, a different expectation of society and trying to get things done are the best way. People working with people.

Did you have a more idealistic time period in terms of the power of the Internet? It was supposed to sort of erase hate and help us arrive at healthier ideas. And it seems like it's pretty much inevitable at this point that it's having a far worse impact on our society that we ever could have imagined. You know, it's crazy. So the first dude I ever knew that had internet was my homie Charles. He had prodigy internet. I remember walking into his crib because they is kind of rich and seeing prodigy internet, right? and going, damn, like, you can do all of this stuff with this.

And when I would visit at his crib and use the internet, at first, it was all looking shit up, doing all kinds and stuff like that, whatever you could do on prodigy, right? Then I didn't fuck with the internet for about two more years, about 96. And my man, a homeboy named, Jabrell, he had it at his crib, but it was like the dial of internet shit. And I realized early that the internet. was going to descend into something that it wasn't useful at all because all we did on the internet

and all I've done since was download porn. No. So, like, we used to sit there and wait because I'm 39. So we used to sit there and wait for one page, one picture to print out. And once that happened, the internet was a fucking rap. Right. That was it. Yeah. All I

used the internet for was he, For years. It was for years. Like all like all I used the internet for was to was for dumb shit. Make yourself feel better. I used to download music on it back when they had Napster and I mesh and the real player. Like using the internet as a resource to where I will go on internet sites and get smarter with it, literally a new thing for me. Yeah. When you started to really like I remember when I just realized like oh I can Google things now and that was just sort of like a big moment. And then I remember like you know I had a girl I was hanging. out with and I sort of realized like, holy shit, this girl's Googling way more than me. Right. She's, she's Googling all kinds of shit. She just Googling how to fix her microwave. That never used to occur to me. Also, I just want to say the first day I ever was on the internet, I saw a girl eat a

turd. Right. Exactly, right? And so for me, it's like, you're seeing all of these, like, these memes. I remember it was the fucking dude who was singing about the mini mall and all of that shit back in the day. Oh, the mini mall, dude. All of that stuff.

And then I started to read and I started to realize it's declassified documents on the internet. It's like really almost anything you want to learn in life you can learn on there. So at this point, how smart you want to be is completely up to you. It's completely up to you. There's not one piece of knowledge besides, you know, I guess tinfoil hat theory, knowledge, whatever people that. But there's not one piece of knowledge that you can't access on the internet. So now that I'm older and I realize that my brain and my worldview matter, not just to me, but to other people, I spend more time looking for other shit. So you and your own ways use it in a very positive way, which yeah, totally like actually that's totally what made me start doing a podcast in the first place was just sort of getting deeper and deeper into other people's podcasts, reading blogs, just getting deeper into the internet and just sort of finding myself in these wormholes and just learning about stuff and wanting to like express it.

in some way. But when I'm saying the power of the internet for evil means, I mean, I'm more referring to the Russian disinformation that it seems like we have like almost no chance of beating and like just knowing that the idea of either side

getting along in a way that is healthier or better than even what we have now seems fairly naive because it's hard to imagine the various agents that are sort of coaxing along on whatever narratives we end up sort of settling on in a green

or what our culture is going through, it's almost impossible to imagine that letting up. And even the legitimate media organizations are almost complicit with it as well because they're sort of propping up the most extreme conversations that are taking place on social media and everything like that.

Well, now, I mean, the media organizations are in a kind of a no-win situation. And the reason why I look at it like that is because they have, have to cover things that are going to make people watch. Like, it's like it's, so the Washington Post is owned by Amazon, right? So that's a corporation that owns the information that you're getting. So the information that you're getting is owned by someone.

So every piece of information that you get, no matter where, someone's paying someone to do it. So the hope of getting unbiased media coverage in anything, and media coverage is not specifically trying to trigger you or make you want to come back. or make you want to watch, it's just not a very realistic thing. What I do think in terms of what you're saying is that there are so many ways for people to fuck with you now and manipulate you now that unless there is a concerted effort to have genuine information come to people by somebody that's trustworthy and that's in it for the right reasons, you're going to see more of what you see, right?

So perhaps if we didn't have a president who I believe doesn't really have any problem with Russian meddling, perhaps if it was more vilified because you have one side because it's in their political interest saying, yo, this guy is a Russian agent and all of that, which I believe to be true to some degree, right? You have this guy as all it is, but you have one complete, the people that are wearing shirts that say, I'd rather be a Russian than a Democrat, right? And so, like, when you look at that, if we're told for 200 and some odd years that the thing that makes us different is the fact that we have free and fair elections where the will of the people is reflected in the leaders that we choose. And then all of a sudden, one day the rules change and we don't give a fuck who is fucking with our elections, then part of the soul of the country has eroded. Right. And so what despite everyone who's maybe a deep state agent, maybe a misinformation agent, fake news or whatever, those people are going to have a field day with that

because there's no even opposition to them. We're not even, we don't even have the unity of opposition. We can't even oppose them because we don't know, once again, who we are. I think that the election of Barack Obama was a litmus test for America. I think that people like me, made mistakes when Obama was elected president because I thought that that was the end of a certain segment, excuse me, of a certain era in America. I really did believe that there had been a sea change and that things were never going to be the same again. I think that what started to happen is

elites on the left didn't pay attention to some of the angst that people were going through. And that left those people victims really to demigog. And if you look at it now, there's almost anything he can sell them. So if he sells them that's really not so bad what the Russians are doing, you hear people, you say stuff like that to people and they go, well, we met all in elections before. I'm like, okay, yeah, we do a lot of shit. We sponsor client terrorism all over the world. Like, we do a lot of stuff.

You still don't like it when it's done to you. We're talking about America here. And if people are willing to kind of shrug these things off, and if there's no groundswell of public opposition to them, then of course they're not going to get done. I mean, Trump has a mandate from his base that I've never seen politically before. They really don't give a fuck what he does, right? Right.

And so because of that, the political economic and social capital that he can will is almost unprecedented. I don't know how you beat it, to be honest with you. Like, the Russians aren't, oh, I'm cool with Putin. Not that bad. Like, nobody cares. You know what's really scary is the idea of who the Republican candidate could be after Trump.

Because say they managed to get somebody who's, you know, say they managed to get a Candace Owens, which I don't know. she would necessarily be likable enough or serious enough for anybody to take her that serious. But if someone who could sort of slide into that position and be a bit less reprehensible, it seems that that might be the move that they would make going forward,

don't you think? Yeah, it depends. I used to be able to kind of look at those things. Like, I don't know how it'll go. There's a chance that things self-correct and they realize things can't go this way for a long time. And there's been a lot of people who feel, I know a lot of people on the right who feel

they didn't get some of the things that they thought they would get from from from president Trump's administration. So they might almost come back to what we know as traditional Republicans or a traditional GOP. But to your point, it might be over forever. And if it is over forever, you have to wonder if in some time in the near or not so distant future, there's going to be some kind of mass bloody conflict in America. Could you see it? I could. It feels like the preparation that they have or their ability to control the people revolting is so strong that it's kind of hard to imagine.

It's it's imaginable to me that there would be mass widespread violent if Trump were to lose an election. Because if he loses an election and he then one or two things happen, right? If he loses an election, he says that election wasn't fair. and that there's been, you know, they've conspired to get them out, they hate Trump, you know, there'll be people who are going to want to go to the mattresses for that. Also, there could be a chance that Trump won't leave office. I think that everyone's read that. So if Trump alleges some kind of voter tampering or voter fraud or whatever,

sues, gets it through the U.S. attorneys, the U.S. circuit courts, and gets it into the Supreme Court where he has kind of his guys up there and he wins that and gets four extra years or whatever would happen, there's a chance that people on the left. Might think that that's the breaking point and you might see widespread violence. But literally, I think that we have between 16 and 20 months

to really figure out the future of America. Right. And that goes from a climate change perspective, really that's the world, and from a political and social perspective. I think that we are, on the precipice of serious, serious danger. Right.

So fast forward, say Trump wins. How are you feeling after that? Like, how do you continue to go from there and what is the next four years going to be like? I think if Trump wins, like, for me personally, you just got to keep doing what it is that you're doing. And you have to really start to look at things in a micro level.

You have to really control and affect who you can affect and control. I think that the first Trump administration was bad. The next one would undoubtedly be worse. But what you definitely can't do is do what people do whenever they're pulled by a bully, which is fucking panic. You definitely can't panic. You just got to get your knuckles dirty and fight a little bit.

And I think if there's one criticism that I have of the left is they sometimes act like on their pussy shit. Like they're scared of a good fight. They're scared to get in the mud. They're scared to get down in the dirt. They're scared to really go in for what they believe in. They want to be a little too conciliatory. They want to be a little bit too light. They want to be a little bit too this.

It's kind of some soft bullshit sometimes. Sometimes you just got to roll your sleeves up and get to fucking work. And if I was talking to any of the candidates on the left, I would tell them, man, it's time to grab your lunch pail and get to work. It's crunch time. So some of the shit, and it's, you know, I don't know if they have the right personalities over there. I don't know what it is, but with me, no matter who's in the White House, that's what I'm going to do. When you look at a lot of the conversations that are taking place about fake news and the responsibility of the media and everything,

the majority of the stuff that TMZ covers is a lot less serious than stuff that's directly political. But is that kind of an internal monologue or is that a conversation that's kind of constantly going on within the office about how to report on things responsibly? I think that I mean listen the three guys who do what they do at teams the Harvey Evan and Charles they are real newsmen they care about being accurate

they care about the news representing what really is happening you know what I mean they care about having solid sources they care about that every news organization gets things wrong even on just a personal level or even just caring about their own well-being they don't have to give a fuck because they're getting sued and all this right? No I mean they they I mean

they just, you know, Harvey King comes from a journalism background. They care about that type of stuff. I mean, obviously nobody wants to get sued, you know what I mean? But they need it to be real. Like, the way that you really, really because even,

Adam, from a branding standpoint, if too much of your shit is bullshit, you can't build a type of audience that you need to have people coming back to your site. So they really care about that. I would say that in any place that's controlled by, any people, you have a chance of people's inherent biases bleeding through the product that

they have. And that has certainly been the case, in my opinion, at TMZ from time to time. And I think, for me, the only thing that I can do is to make sure that if there's something culturally that I understand that they don't, then I'm able to voice my opinion about it, maybe sit down and participate in the writing of a story or whatever. and make sure that it comes out in a way that I think is reflective of sometimes a cultural truth because there's absolute truth and then there's cultural truth. An absolute truth is, did this happen yes or no?

A cultural truth is how and why it happened. Right. So you could paint somebody a bad person for doing something that reflects the fact that they adhere to a completely different set of rules than you do. And it would take somebody to explain that to you in order for you to. get it. Have you ran into a situation where there's rappers, for instance, just sort of having their actions presented in ways that you didn't feel were accurate and you have to sort of leap in and give like a black perspective that might have been lacking? Well, not necessarily that weren't accurate, but I knew what they meant. Because there's a lot of rap talk, but if you read it

literally, it sounds insane. Yeah. It's like, it's not necessarily that it wasn't accurate. Like, he didn't do this or that didn't happen is that I knew how it was meant. And maybe before you come down on somebody or you get all up in arms about. it, if you kind of understand what the deal about it is, then, like, you would kind of, you would understand it, right? You'd get it. And it's like that with almost any culture. Like, if you, if I told you one day that I belong to a group of people that on Sunday, on Saturday,

we don't drive cars, we walk everywhere we got to go. We don't use any electricity. Or if I told you I belong to a group of people that we never use electricity, or we're able to have five or six wives, whatever to, at the beginning, you're going to make a cultural judgment of that. But when someone kind of connects the dots for you and translates the culture for you, hopefully you can humanize it a little bit. And the only thing that you want in a situation where you're dealing with people's actions in their lives

and not on television or anything else is you want it to come from a human perspective. You want people to know that any story that you put out is going to actually affect someone in their family. It's going to affect someone in their business. It's going to affect someone in their relationships with a girl or whatever they might have coming up. in their past or whatever, it's going to actually have an effect on somebody. And as long as you feel like you can make that case of somebody and they're listening to you,

I feel like I'm doing my job at TMZ. That's what I feel like I have to do for rappers and ballplayers and people like that, you know, reported accurately, just make sure we reflect where they come from and how they look at it and all of that stuff and work with those people so that they have their side of it, which is something that TMZ does. It's kind of weird when a rapper breaks through

and all of a sudden becomes TMZ worthy, right? It's a thing. Like with 6-9, I remember, like, all of a sudden he was on TMZ, and that was sort of like, oh, he's that big now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are questions. The question is, Van, is this a person that somebody?

Right. Like, Van, is this, like, Van, have you heard of rich homie Kwan? Do you, are you familiar with, you? Okay, Van, we got a guy and this is a young thug. Do you know who is young thug a thing? And it's about if the verb is dope enough, because if it's rich, homie Kwan, uh, threatened to burn down a building, then, okay, boom, it's good. But Rich Homi Kwan, you know, like Young Thug doesn't really have to do that much to be newsworthy.

Right. That's the way it is. Either big story or big celebrity. Yeah. You know what I mean? But also for me, one thing that I love about TMZ, and my job there is I'm able to put artists on that I like. So I'm able to like, Benny the Butcher, shout out to Grisel, that they were on TMZ last week.

Oh, really? And that's because, you know, me and Benny were able to hook it up to where they're guys that like, now they would have never called me and asked to be on TMZ. Ever. They would have never called me and asked to be on TV. Wouldn't even thought of it. But for them, if it's just on some cool promotional type cool shit and they out here, yeah, I'm like, I know what those guys are going to be. Send a camera out there. Let them do that thing on TV.

How did you contextualize it so it made sense for the TMZ audience when you're dealing with dudes like that that aren't as high profile? It's about how you frame the story, how you pitch the story. So I'm in the office. I'm pitching the story. You know, I know that people might not know exactly who Benny and Conway and West Side are quite yet. They're gone, though. But I know people might not know quite yet. But I know that they know if Jay-Z says he's fucking with them.

I know that they know if there's a list put out. I know they know the double Excel cover, right? So like Hove had told Benny not to do the double Excel cover. I know the double X-Zell cover. just, it's all about linking them to fame so people who know who they are. You know, for a long time, to be real with you, I was trying to get them to put Cardi B on TMZ. And her pitches would never make the show. Wow.

And then one day, boom, you know what, what happened was love and hip hop happened. And that's a show that's already so famous. If you're from in love and hip hop, you're automatically worthy to be on, kind of on TMZ. But it's all, it's nothing, it's never anything personal. Yeah. It's all about sort of being able to report on people and cover people that people are going to care about. And that's always a tricky thing because you have some people that have, like, bro, like four million subscribers on YouTube, but they don't get recognized when they walk through LAX. Right.

So it's always like who, especially now, it's harder to tell than it's ever been through. Yeah. And you deal with that a lot where it's like celebrities or the ideas are being thrown out there and that is how famous they are. They're YouTubers. But I mean, I know a lot of YouTubers that. I know a gang of them. That are huge on YouTube. But then in reality, they don't have any.

trouble walk around in public. Nah, they can't, like, the people don't know who they are. You know what I'm saying? But, but that community is, that community even looks at celebrity in a different way. Right. When those community, when those people want to see those, those celebrities, they can see them any time that they want. They can see them on YouTube.

And then these people have things and different things where you can go have, have fun with them. You can go like to different functions that they're having and stuff like that. They consume celebrity in a different way. And those, the YouTubers, they spend so much time making content that you're less likely to run into them. Now, there are some people, the Paul brothers and other people like that. What's the little girl?

Little Tana? No, the other little girl. Little Tay? The one, not her. Bad baby? No. Great, that's it. Whoa Vicky.

Not Wo Vicky. The other little girl, the little girl, she's like 16. She got like pigtails in her hair. She like, she does like all she got sparkles everywhere. It was Jojo. Jojo Siwa. Joe Sewa. Yes.

She's fabulous. She gets mobbed. Yeah, I believe it. She gets mob. But she's also got her stuff on some on Target. Right. Yeah, so she gets mob. So I'm not saying that they're not big celebrities.

It's just sometimes you wonder how the TMZ audience is going to, you know, look at them. Jojo, see why it's so big that I will see, like, like, families will come in here. And inevitably, if the daughter is, like, you know, like six to ten years old, she's got a big old bow in her hair, just like her. It's so weird. I had rappers hit me up saying, like, yo, my daughter wants to meet Jojo. Can you make it happen? It's a big fucking thing. I don't think so.

And it's one of those things that, like, you don't know how big it is until. really dawns on you how big it is. She's huge. But I mean, yo, you've been on TMZ? Yeah, but I had to be talking about both X and Tupac in the same headline. Oh, is that real? Or I had to have a gun in my face. But you know what though?

Here's the thing, though. If you were walking through LAX, they would shoot you. Yeah, that's true. Like they would shoot you. Because he would think of something on the spot that asked me that was big enough. They would shoot you, boom, and it's all of that. So, you know, that's kind of a thing now. Right.

But how do you feel about it? about people knowing how to and being able to game that system that TMZ and so many other institutions are in. Because like for me, if I was walking through the airport and the TMZ camera rolled up on me and started talking to me, the first thing that my brain goes to is what some fuck shit that I can say right now that won't irreputably damage my personal brand, but will get me on TMZ tomorrow.

Well see, that's what- And everyone thinks that now. I know, that's what the responsibility comes in, right? So the responsibility comes in, journalistically to where if you say something that, I mean, if you just say some wild shit, whatever but if you say something that we can't verify or we think is irresponsible or we think that will hurt people you're actually lessening your chances that you make it on now if you say something

that's really really controversial but within the realm of thought that a discussion can be had about then yeah but then you got to own that right so um that's got to be an opinion for the most part it's got to be like this is what i think about this because it can't be factually inaccurate right like this i feel like this like i feel like that if you go on TMZ and you alleged that someone did something to you and so and you can't prove that, that's not going to get up there. But if you go in there and you think, yo, I really don't, I'm really against women having jobs.

I think women should go back to, you know what I'm saying? If you say that, you don't get a headline. You know what if you see that coming in and you're like, man, I know Adam? He doesn't really think that. He's just saying that to try to get on TV. Now, now here's the deal. I mean, if I knew you, if I knew you, I would say that. I'd be like, yo, just let you know this guy's, but here's a deal, though.

If you're saying something spicy like that, like, and you have enough celebrity cachet, it doesn't matter, yeah. Don't matter, you know what I mean? I'm not, I'm not saying that we don't care whether or not you mean it. I'm saying that if you said it, then you got to own it. You said it on video. And I've told, I've told people that before. You said it on camera.

You said that on video. The best it can be done in the situation like that is for me to be like, in the room or somebody like, yo man, this dude is a troll. He just be saying stuff. Now, if you do it too many times, they'll stop covering you. Right.

If that's your wave every single time, then they're not stupid. I feel like that's kind of what happened with Lil Zand. He got covered so much about everything he fucking did for a while to the point where they just all of a sudden they were like,

yeah, we're not even writing about the same way. Yeah, it was. That's kind of crazy with him. Wait a minute. I don't know if I know who that is. Is Lil Zan, the Tupac dude? Yes. The dude that said that like,

Tupac can rap or some shit like that. Yeah. I mean, look, you know what I'm saying? That went up, but he had to do that to... Yeah, he pulled a gun. Like, that's when you really... When you pulling out the hammer on somebody

at the... The parking garage or whatever, you desperately want to make TMZ at that point. I don't know them. You know, I wish all people... You know, little dudes like that well, whatever they got to do, but if you diss Tupac

or pull a hammer on somebody, you will probably make TMSI. Right. Facts. Yeah. That's easy. people will always like the most sort of mediocre criticism of TMZ will always be why don't you ever cover when someone does something positive?

We do. But how would you sort of coach them from like your sort of PR standpoint? Like if you want to do something positive and get on TMZ, this is what you got to do. So this is what I would say. First of all, if you want to do something positive, you want to get on teams, send it to me, we'll cover it. We do cover positive stuff. You know what the real problem is?

Nobody remembers the positive stuff. the real problem is like we cover we cover positive stuff all the time all the time i can think off the top of the head all kinds of positive things i've covered because i go i don't really do negative stories there right i do cool stories stories that you know like if you go into a club and you drop 150 000 people love that type of shit right i cover i do stuff like that and then i do other positive stuff we cover stories like that all the time the problem is that what the people remember and what the people gravitate towards

are the things that are negative. And so that does two things. Number one, it puts less currency on positive stories. And number two, it makes the positive stories resonate a little bit less. Now, I will say this, that's not to alleviate any news organization's responsibility to cover the totality of an individual.

cover someone every time they fuck up you should try to cover someone when they're trying to do something good I completely agree with that but what I would say is people lean a little bit more into good news we all need to do that though that's just kind of how we wired though Max Kellerman has a great great quote right

are you in sports? No not really Max Kellerman has a great quote and he says everybody in the world's favorite sport is boxing everyone's favorite sports boxing it's like why he goes okay so if you go to if you're on a street corner, right, and it's three different things

happening on the street corner. One is two guys playing one-on-one. Another one is some kids in the street playing stickball. Another one is a pickup football game. And on the fourth side of the street is two guys fighting. Which one you're going to watch? Everybody's watching the two guys fighting.

And he goes, that's why your favorite sport is boxing. There's something that's hardwired into us as human beings that draws us to conflict. I don't know why that is. And that makes it kind of sad that boxing is not nearly as popular as all the other sports. Because, like, it was explained to me one time that people will always be able to, like, will always gravitate towards, like, nationalism and pride in their region more so than they will focus in on individuals.

So when you go and you watch, you know, like, Boston versus New York is, like, a great rivalry in all sports. But then, like, you know, it's harder to create an identity but decides an individual. jewel. Also, boxing is coming back now, but boxing fucked itself for a long time by being not about competition. Like, boxing became sort of an exhibition show where guys were to fight each other. And, like, you can only gain people

for so long until they realize y'all not serious about what y'all doing. And you could be a Yankees fan for your entire life. But, like, when I started watching UFC, I was a Brock Lesnar fan and the fool was out of there in, like, four fights. Right. You know what I'm saying? And so, and so there's a lot of brand building and shit like that that goes into it. But I say all that to say that, like, you know,

conflict and all of that stuff like that, you want to grab people. But I do think, honestly and sincerely, that of the organizations that I know and of the people that I know, TMZ, does its best to accurately report and portray things. That does not mean that mistakes don't get made. It does not mean that sometimes I don't believe that we've been unfair. I think that you have human beings running things and human beings do what they do. they do the best they can do and sometimes they're wrong-headed about things. But whereas

I'm not like a company man where I will spend a lot of time defending the company and all of that stuff like that. It's not, you know, I'm not all of that. I'm saying that I will say that like they try at least. I think I heard you say something on another podcast where you were saying that you feel like

TMZ is overall kind of dangerous or negative for your personal brand. You feel that way? No. Well, I mean for me personally I just think that there is a um it's not so much that it's it is it's it yeah I mean to a degree yeah like for me I think that being um that culturally there's a certain perception of it and so because there's a certain perception of it what happens is I get connected to TMZ stories that people might not like so if the if the if the uh if the if the if the

website does something and it's covering an important black artist of black figure in a bad way, they say, Van, how did you let that happen? And the reality is that I'm not an editorial voice at TMZ. Like, I have input. I can talk to people and be influential. But at the end of the day, there are only a couple of editorial voices at TMZ. And those people make the decisions of what goes up. And it's not like a willy-nilly thing. It's a whole office of people that make those decisions. So I think sometimes it's always interesting when you have a personal brand or when you have people that look at you or look to you for a certain way and you are in part represented by something that you really can't control. I mean, you can't control it. That's when you kind of

have to find ways to make sure that people know what it is that you really think, what it is that you really believe. And one thing I will say is even when all the Trump stuff was going on, and TMZ was, in my opinion, supportive of Donald Trump. All of those arguments and fights I was allowed to have on television. So it wasn't like I was behind the scene saying, yo, we're all fucked up and we're not covering this fairly. We're all fucked up and we're like with this guy. I was able to have those fights on TV where everyone could see them so everyone knew where I stood.

It's interesting because TMZ, like I understand that they did. do important work and that there's an extent to which, you know, clearly it's not a gossip rag and they're reporting on all kinds of stuff that other companies just straight up don't go out of their way. I've like read all about the crazy research stuff that they have and everything. But it seems like it's almost impossible to get the average person to understand that. And TMZ has sort of just become the sort of catch-all term for anything that's like paparazzi gossipy type content.

And it's weird because that in and of itself is why TMZ is such a dominant brand. It's like it almost has to have that sort of... You have to serve your base. Yeah. You can't turn into Al Jazeera, Z Magazine, CNN overnight. That's not what people come to you for. People come to you for to learn about things that are funny. And people come to you to look at celebrity in a certain way.

People come to you. A lot of people come to sites like TMZ to see celebrities to have to see them getting taken down a peg. I don't know why people are into that, but sometimes they like that. So you got to stay true to who you are, but I think that it doesn't matter what you're doing. You can sell crack with integrity. Right. It doesn't matter what you're doing.

Just do it with integrity. You know, selling crack is definitely something that's negative, right? Right. But you don't have to sell it to pregnant women. You don't have to sell it to kids. You know what I mean? That's a conversation I'm always interested in having with, like, when I'm talking to Benny the Butcher,

it's like, you know, at a certain point, do you have to deal with the feeling of like, look what I've done to my community? I mean, I think that everybody should deal with that. But I think that the way that you deal with it is people have made all kinds of mistakes for all kinds of reasons. All kinds of mistakes for all kinds of reasons. The way that you deal with your mistakes is to, one, acknowledge them. And then two, to try to undo them.

So, you're selling crack. You're doing whatever it is that's wrong, whatever it was that you were doing. how about try to create a system somewhere where someone doesn't have to fall into the same mistakes that you did now hove rapped for years for years about dealing drugs if he puts out an album today it's going to have a whole bunch more about dealing drugs too is he? I mean it might be a little bit more

looking back on it but well he put out 444 that wasn't really about dealing drugs at all he didn't really yeah not not really so what I'm saying I'm just so used to jZ just pretty much always rapping about some drugs that if he didn't I didn't notice right so he put out 444 4 4 4 4 4 before. It really was about his family. It was about ownership. It was about the world as he sees it. But here's the thing about that, though. It was about a whole bunch of different things. The reason why it wasn't lip service is because we've watched him actually change. He's not wearing the same shit that he was wearing in 2001, 2002. He's not eating the same shit. He's not

around the same. He's got a wife. He's got a family. We've watched actual change. So personal evolution is what leads to community evolution and message evolution. He's actually different than he used to be. FWM, Adam. Sorry. Oh. Donation came and I forgot to turn off the notifications. So, like, he's actually different than he used to be.

So because he's actually different, his message can come through authentically and it can be sort of digested authentically. Right. So what I would, you know, to anybody that wants to undo things that they might have done in the past man change yourself first you know what I'm saying change yourself first like really do the work on yourself first and then all of that'll happen organically

you'll think about different things did you have a nihilistic wild young stage before you became sort of the mature gentleman that we know you as now yeah but it was like how did it manifest your anti-social behavior every guy's got to have some at some point on the way up right

what you mean like my anti-social behavior what you mean yeah I mean for some people it's selling drugs for some people it might be smash a mailboxes or I don't know it's like everybody's got to have something like some sort of journey on their way to adulthood right yeah I think um I think for me it was uh it was manipulating people like I don't think that um like I never I was always too afraid to do like illegal shit I've never been involved in anything like that well that's not true I've I've I've never been involved in anything to where it was for me I've done things for friends and I've

I've helped friends out with things like that and stuff like that. But I've really never really gotten involved with that. I think for me, the really, the most destructive stage that I had was getting other people to do my shit for me. Really? Like what? Like if I wanted.

I wish I was that smart. I wish I was a kid. Well, I mean, we're talking, I mean, we're also talking about someone that spent a lot of time by himself. Like me.

Really? Tons of time by myself. Why was that? Well, because when I was bigger, I wasn't confident enough to leave the house. I used to take showers with the lights off. Wow. You know what I'm saying? So I would be in there just kind of figuring out how to like, like, there were so many people that saw so much potential in me.

And they were so, they safeguarded me so much and they loved me so much. They did so many things for me. And there was a point in my life where I didn't have a lot of ambition. I was just kind of hanging around, afraid of the world. And I would use those people's love and affection to get them to do things for me that I didn't want to do for myself to make them feel bad about enjoying themselves

and just kind of making other people feel shitty so that I felt a little bit better about everybody else not having such a great time. I did that for years. How did you identify that in yourself? Or how did you start to change it? I had to move away. Really?

So when I moved away and there's a difference, between being by yourself when you can make a call and see your mama and your brothers and all of those people like that. But there's a difference than being out here by myself. So I hear about, I'll hear in LA, you're alone, you're not tethered to anyone. You've got to really walk around and figure out how you're going to make this place work for you. So many people that I know that came out here at the same time of me, they've already gone

back to where they're from. So what I realized was that that was weird. weakening me. I wasn't strengthening my own brain. I wasn't strengthening my own mind. I wasn't strengthening my skill set. Everything about me that people thought was special was eroding because I was leaching off people. I was a grown man using my mom and my dad for bread. You know what I'm saying. And people forget about how scary that feeling is of going to a city for the first time moving somewhere and just having to completely figure everything out. Totally. It's just a fucking scary-ass thing. I forgot about it.

Totally scary. Before I moved here. I moved to New York. when I was 20, and then I moved to LA when I was 29 or 28. And both times, I had forgotten how fucking weird that feeling is of just not having anything that's familiar to you. That's really what, like, when I first, when I got here, I was like, you know what, man, I got to lose weight. It's going to take the best version of me that I can be, to be successful in this place. There's nobody here that I can make, come do something for me.

I can't. There's no one here. that remembers times that I did shit for them. There's no one here that gives a fuck about anything. If I'm going to be here in this city, I got to be useful. I got to be ready, and I got to be able to make an impact and a mark based upon my skill and my talent. And if I'm going to do that, I got to be the best version of me I can be. Or not even the best, a better version.

So I think there was a point to where I stopped being complacent, or I stopped being okay with mediocrity. And since then, things have actually changed and life has been better. Yeah, it's interesting because when you were in that point where you really felt you had to lose weight, that was probably when you found it easiest to do so. Do you find it hard to get focused on your diet and everything now because of the fact that you are pretty happy with yourself? Your life is going in a good direction.

You feel a lot more comfort and safety. Yeah. Then it felt like, okay, we got to do this now. we got to be on top of this now, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now it's like, yo, man, you know, the scale is kind of low this week. I can go ahead and peel off these apple fritters. I love them fucking apple fritters, dog. Apple fritters are fucking crazy.

Just that word just triggered me. Bro, I'm saying, you know what I'm saying? Like, I love them apple fritters. So I'm like, no, now, but the consistency over weeks and weeks out of time to always do it, especially when you on the road, like, you know, I just left a Nike thing. I drive across here, come do this, desperately. wanted to come sit down with you, been listening to the podcast for a long time. So it's like, it's so many different things that you have to do.

The busyness, I'm writing a book about my weight loss, right? So the, the number one thing that stops people is a four-letter word, and that four-letter word is life. Life gets in a way, the type of body and the type of health that you want. Right. Right? Because sometimes your schedule is not everybody else's scheduled. Like, if, like, I know, I know ladies, my manager, my manager will be very open about the fact that

she wants to have a certain fitness goal and she's doing her best, but she got to take care of like two or three kids. And when she's taking care of them, how are you not going to have a Capri Sun? You know what I'm saying? Like how are you not going to have some of the little luncheables or whatever like that?

It's hard, like things get in the way. Now, when you have to do it, you'll, whatever. But sometimes now taking on so much and looking at your mirror, looking at the mirror and going, man, I don't look that bad. Right. You know what I'm saying?

I can't see my titties. You know, like, you know what I'm saying? Looking in the mirror now, you might slack a little bit, but that's when you, you know, you just got to kind of pick up and be even more on your ground. Like my personal trainer is, picture me plus 30 pounds of muscle minus 40 pounds of fat. Like, he is fucking big, the exact same height as me, but he's like chiseled, fucking six-pack all year round. And I see him every day, and he's eating like a fucking Spartan. And he's so religiously consistent with it.

And, you know, every once in a while I have like a. burger and fries or whatever. But it's just, it's almost depressing to realize that he's like 40 and he's been doing this for so long and he still is like in that zone. But that's what makes him a guy who just consistently is in perfect shape is the fact that he has that mind state to just fucking consistently eat like a protein bar and like a hard-boiled egg for lunch. Also, something else that's very important is I made a mistake earlier when I said the best

version of me. The goal is better. That's the goal. I'm still at a point. People talk about, oh, man, you've had some success or whatever like that. I'm still at the point to where most rooms I'm in, I'm the broke as nigga in the room. Really? Yeah.

Like, I make great money from here and from other stuff, like from my job and from other stuff. But the guys that I'm around, especially now, like. You know what you could be comparing yourself to. But if I spend time thinking about what it is that they have, if I spend time, thinking about and sometimes there's even opportunities that people are getting other things that people are doing if I spend time thinking about that it's going to derail me from the from the vision of me that I need to have to get to where they are so I got to concentrate on better like I lost a lot of weight I'm never going to be beach ready I can be in the best shape there are parts of my body

that have forever been changed by a mile weight that I lost right that's the way it is so So even when I'm in great shape, super lean, and I got pictures super lean, there are areas of my body that reflect the amount of weight that I lost. I'll never get surgery on them, ever. You won't? No. Don't ever get surgery on them. Really? That's the real me.

Okay. Like those scars matter. When you see Gucci come out and he's got like the fucking chiseled six pack and he used to have like a fucking lean gut out to here, I'm like, damn, he got that shit's sewn up real nice. Whatever. Some people do, you know what I'm saying? But you couldn't bring yourself to do it? No, it's not for me. I thought about it.

You know what I'm saying? I thought about, you know, with the amount of time I spent in the weight room, if I spent two months and lean out and then whatever I go. I mean, I don't look bad, but you can see it. Like, I remember I was, at one point, I was a couple years ago when I was really on it for real. I was about 224. Like, my body fat was down to about 12%. Like I was really on it doing my thing all the time.

I go through phases like that. Phases where I get a little up, whatever. And I went for a physical. And they were putting the EKG on me, right? So they put the EKG on you and all of that stuff like that. You got to take your shirt off. And I remember I take the shirt off. And my first thing that the nurse says to me was,

oh, you lost a lot of weight, didn't you? And I'm like, damn, I thought I looked great. He's like, you lost a lot? I was like, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, she noticed it. I'm like, yeah, that was years ago. She's all I can tell by like around this area, I'm thinking to myself,

you could have just not said that. Motherfucker, like, why are you bringing old shit up? Like, what are you doing? Right. Like, but, but, and at that point, I remember thinking, damn, you know, and so I went and looked at like, I'm, and you, you never feel more wanted than you do in a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon's office. They want you to be there.

Right. They are nice to you. like you like you you go in there oh come here listen you're gonna look like fucking what's the guy from the um the guy richie movie oh that's edris elba you're gonna look like edris elba like we're gonna get you so oh my god look look at him tammy come here that's so good that they just pick like a hot celebrity version of yourself and that's what they do that's what they do like come here come here look at this guy you have great shoulders listen this is what we're gonna do we're gonna lift the muscle here we're gonna snip you're gonna take this little skin out there's gonna be very very

small little cuts, your complexion's great, you're not even going to be able to see them, but after that you're going to have, you know that little sexy V that guys have? We're going to make sure you have that. And they, and when you go there for the consultation, after you go there, if you don't come back and tell them, they email you. Then the price starts going down. Then they start doing all of that. They stay on you.

So I remember I had a lot of time to think about that. And then I was like, nah, man, this is me. This is part of my story. You know what I'm saying? Like this is like, like, I was heavy. You're going to see it. Like, it's never going to be perfection. It's just better than what I was before.

Yeah. Do you feel like your, like the quality of your mental health is directly related to where you're at in terms of how you're treating yourself with your exercise and diet? Sometimes I feel like the version of me that is eating like shit and treat my body terribly is the version of myself that's depressed. And when I'm in a great state of mind, I eat healthy. I treat myself like I care about my. myself. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, with me and some of the stuff I've been

through with my mental health and all of that stuff, it was worse when I wasn't doing anything. And the more you learn about your body and the physiology of your body, you learn why. You learn why you need the sun. You learn why you need those endorphins that you get from working out. You learn why you need your heart to like pump blood and stuff like that. But I remember there's, you know what Beniggins is? No, what's that it's a restaurant that they got in the South. Oh, yeah. Okay. And I remember I used to leave working Best Buy.

I don't go to Benicans. And, like, be at work at Best Buy, just not feeling great about myself. You know, I used to crawl up the stairs because I didn't want my heart rate to jack. I heard you talking about that. That must have been dark. It was terrible. Some people would laugh. My boys thought that was the funny shit in the world.

But so I would go. I remember I left. and I used to go to Benegans and I would get these big ass chicken tenders and they were good as fuck and the first time I went there

I'd go to get the big chicken tenders a big huge chicken tenders that they had and then to be like you get two sides and I'll be like okay I'll have a loaded mashed potato and fries

and the lady goes you're gonna get a loaded mashed potato and fries she goes baby like a loaded mashed potato and fries and I'm like yeah so I will go there

and I will get that and I would on the way home I would have a shake and then I would sit at the house and I would eat and one time I went to the Benegans and they weren't open and I cried. It hurt. Like I was 24 years old. Wow.

I cried. I go to the Benegans is not open. I remember I drive up and bro the Benegans was literally right around according to the Mall of Louisiana. People that are listening to this from Baton Rouge, they know that this is true. There was a Mall of Louisiana

right over there, the best buy was right near the mall. And the Benegans, you could have probably walked there, but it was just on my way home and you would pull up and you would do the curbside thing, right? And I remember when I left work and I looked across the parking lot at the Benegans, I was like, yo, man, yo, man, why the lights off? And I was like, nah, man, it's probably just like people have it.

I don't know, I'm going to drive up. And I was, as I was driving up, the feeling of dread that the Beniggins might fucking be closed. was creeping up in my fucking body. And I remember I got there and I actually got, this is pathetic. I got out and walked to the front and pulled on the door to make sure that they were closed. You know what I'm saying? And they were closed.

I remember I got back in the car and I cried. You were just that committed to that ritual? No, I needed the food to feel good. Like I needed the food to feel good. Like I'll have my heart set on it the whole day. Right. Like my whole day I had my heart set on it. And I was like, shit.

I got home and I remember I went to McDonald's and I ate the, it just wasn't the same. It just wasn't the same. You know what I'm saying? So like I was, and then, but I didn't even think about that until years and years later. Because when, like, when you're trying to build your discipline, when you're building discipline, every single act of discipline that you successfully achieve. Begets the next one. Begets the next one. people are having cake you go now

that feels good feels good I don't know if it feels good as eating the cake not quite as good as like getting the workout in but if you really realize in your mind that it's just as important that really you saying no to that cake is far more important than any workout

you could possibly do today last night I come home and I have been tired because of something I had to do the day before and I'm like you know what I'm not going to work out I'm not going to work out man I'm fine things are cool it's great I think I saw your tweet about how you actually did it.

And then I just went, I just like, I was like, fuck it. I put my shit on and I went out and I ran four miles. And the last couple steps getting back to my place, I felt like I had fucking knocked out Deonté Wilder. I felt so fucking good. And at the end of it, you think, you know, man, how was I about to pass up on this? Like, a lot of times it's like that was that, you know,

I ran four miles. That was 40 minutes. It's like, put yourself through something for 40 minutes to kind of get to where you want. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't take any time at all, but it's hard to do. The picture you painted there about the sides when you're picking out the sides. That's always a really crucial moment in any fat dude's life because realistically, the protein is not going to be that bad. Even if you get, you know, it's like the chicken is breaded, the cutlet is breaded, whatever.

Like even if the steak is soaked in fucking oil, whatever, it's not that bad. But then when you choose your side, it's like you have like right there. Like you could get the green beans. You could get the broccoli. You could. It's so easy to make choices that are like 100% healthy. And it's really very telling about where you're at in your mind state when you're at Arawan and you could decide a mac of cheese and fries or you could decide on broccoli and green beans. I had games, bro.

I had games. I used to play with the people. I would go there and I would be about to finish my order and then I would get a call. I would get a call from somebody who wanted something. There was nobody. Just because you were embarrassed to order too male? I was embarrassed to order too much stuff. There was nobody.

It was like, oh shit, what you want? You want a piece of chocolate cake? Damn, it's late for that. You sure you want that? What kind of chocolate cake y'all got? Oh, they got the, what you say, the ooey, gooey, extra chocolatey shit? You want the Ui-Gui?

That's a lot. You sure? I hope you eat it, baby. I love you. Bye. And you know what I'm saying? And then like, but you would have to do stuff like that because there's a lot of shame in that.

So I had all. kinds of shit, man. But, you know, that was a habit and then healthiness can become a habit. Like, I don't think people think that, you know, positive living, positive thinking, looking at health a certain way, like looking at the gym a certain way, looking at all, I don't think that people allow those things to become habits because they don't feel as good to start. But when they become happens, they become habits. And it's hard to, you know, occasionally I'll realize that me telling somebody a little bit about working out will actually have a big

impact on them, which is easy for me to forget because I always just think it's so easy to figure out how to lose weight or whatever that nobody needs any kind of encouragement in that regard. And once in a while, I forget who it was recently, but I had a conversation with them where I basically was just hitting them with the basic facts of like if you want to lose weight. I'm like, the beer

is not going to work in the fucking sandwiches and the potatoes and all this shit. It's like, this is your main enemy. Because a lot of times people are like, well, I'm eating whole wheat bread and I'm not losing any way. It's like, okay, the bread is the issue. The whole wheat factor doesn't really change much. And it's easy to forget that you can actually have an impact on it.

When I was like 21 and I knew I needed to lose weight, I had broken my leg and all this stuff where I couldn't exercise for a year and a half. And I needed to learn how to work out so bad. I had nowhere to go. I picked out bodybuilding magazines. It's a weird way to get into it because they're telling you a lot of stuff that's kind of counterintuitive. Like they're telling you why you should eat 12 eggs for breakfast. Right.

And if you want to lose weight, it's not really the best thing you could do. I mean, the one thing I will get as much. much opinion as you can. One of the funniest things that ever happened at Best Buy was there were two jacked guys that worked there in the warehouse because they put all the jacked guys in the warehouse. And so I was like, yo,

I'm really about to do it. I'm about to lose some weight. Like, what should I do? And they gave me two diametrically opposed things to do. Like, one dude was like, you should wake up in the morning and you should probably eat some chicken breast in the morning and blah, blah, blah. And I said, don't do that. Wake up in the morning and get a

complex carb in the morning. Get energy for the rest of the day so you'll feel satiated. You'll eat a smaller lunch. He's like, no, don't eat carbs. No carbs ever. You don't want any carbs. It's crazy. It's so hard to figure out what the real info is for sure.

This guy doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Both of those sound pretty logical in the moment. Right. And then... In their own way, both of them do make sense. Both of them do make sense. And my mother said, son, what you should... And you always go to your mama.

And my mother said, some, what you should do is probably eat a small portion of of oatmeal and then eat some egg whites. There you go. You have your complex carb and you have your protein. Your mom hit it on the head. Hit it on the head? Pretty good. I don't even eat carbs on the morning.

I drink coffee and eat eggs and bacon sometimes. That's dope. I mean, to be honest with you. I mean, you get your jolt of energy and you got your protein. You straight. There you go. At what point did you realize that you wanted to go off and do your own podcast? I found that kind of interesting because for me, it's like me and a lot of other people I know,

we like start our own platform and then people start looking at you like well yeah but can you go do a show like that that would be your way of like proving that you're for real for you i'm imagining that that was kind of the conversation you're having in your head you're like well i'm doing really good in this environment i feel like i'm a smart dude but i want to go out there and create my own platform because otherwise i feel like i haven't really established myself is that is that accurate yeah i would say the the second part is definitely accurate but someone actually brought it up to me shout out to chris morrow oh shout to chris morrow yeah shout to chris morrow so i did the brilliant Idiots.

And when I was on The Brilliant Idiots, Chris Moro is always trying to get somebody to start a podcast. That's his whole deal. Very true. That's his whole deal. He's an evangelist. Yes, his whole thing. So Chris, I'm on The Brilliant Idiots and, you know, it's me and my man, Andrews sparring, as we always do, loving to death. That's my guy.

And so we're on there and he goes, yo, have you ever thought about that? And then I'm not going to lie, there was a part of me that I thought, yo, could I do that, though? Because it's just you. you know what I'm saying? It's just you talking to somebody. Now you can't pivot. You know, when I'm on TV, it's five second burst and I can be funny or compelling in those things,

but can I do that for like a whole, a whole time? And then we ended up kind of making it work and coming to a deal. And I felt like there was a lot that I had to say and a lot of things that I had to say I need to unpack them. And more than that, I like the challenge because there's so many people that have come on a podcast, right?

and the guests have been so diverse but everybody has something in common is that they bring a lot of shit with them right but they bring it in different ways they bring shit with them like I had Torrey Lanes on the podcast right Tori Lanes comes in nice guy great dude but when he comes in he's got his jewelry he's got his entourage

he's a big rat star right so he's brought a lot of shit with him so my what I like about by the interview is getting through all of that stuff to just the guy to where now me and him just talking. We just vibing. We just like connecting. That's a good feeling. Yeah, it's great man.

If it's him, if it's money bag, if it's James Prince, who's a little harder to do with Mr. Prince, but if it's, Mr. Prince been, you know. This is a tough exterior. Yeah, he's been doing this thing for a long time. But whoever it is, if it's a great, intelligent, a immensely fierce woman Amanda Seals or if it's Jamila Lemuel or if it's Ava Duvonne, whoever it is, getting through to the core where you can just talk to somebody and maybe

somebody learns something. That's something that I really enjoyed and you just can't do that in every form. You've got to have time. Sometimes you got to have time. You build a little trust and then you know you build a little bit of equity. You start having a real combo. So I like that. And I didn't know if I was going to be good at it first, but it's been good so far. What do you think is your, well, I guess you just described your style. But when, say it comes time for you to interview somebody like Jermaine Dupree, do you feel like your TMZ experience has prepared you to be, like, properly antagonistic to him?

And do you feel like you were really kind of like, you were pushing him to, like, elaborate on views that he was sort of claiming weren't his own views? Like he was really trying to make the point that he didn't think the thing that the sound bites had basically said that he said. So, yeah, with something like that, I think with something like that, when somebody's coming on in the wake of something, you want to make sure you get it addressed. Because either they're coming to bring clarity to what it is that they said

or they're coming to clean it up. Okay. In the case of Jermaine, he had said something, and everybody was like, this is going to be an interview. He was going to come down, he's going to sit down, he's going to talk. I think that the only thing with him is, that he said things in the interview to me that were kind of contradictory

in a very small space. I think that Jermaine knows what he thinks and what he feels. I think he was slightly taken out of context and he was slightly misunderstood with what he said. But at the same time, I do think he has some feelings about what he thinks the state of the female rap game is.

And I think that those feelings aren't really in line with the overall health of music, if I'm making sense. What I mean is he said in the interview that like, you know, there are certain things that female rappers rap about

that when he's in a car with his daughter, he got to turn them off. Cool, that's fine. Your parent, you got kids, turn it off. And my question was, do you turn it off when they're talking that trap shit? I mean, Atlanta,

I love all of those guys. GZ, chains, whoever from there, all of that shit. Love all of it, right? But if we're talking about messages and music, we can't be selective about it, right? We can't say that talking about busting your pussy wide open is any different than talking about busing somebody's fucking hair wide open. It's the same thing.

Actually, I would say, but you can bust your pussy open as much as you want. Don't hurt nobody. Right. You bust somebody hair open. You took somebody from their family, don't matter how bad they were. And most people wouldn't even think about, think about the violent content, but somehow like the profanity and the sexual content is judging. It's just in a completely different way.

And really, to be honest with you, it's judged unfairly if you ask me. You know what I'm saying? So, um, like I've had porn stars on my, um, on my podcast and people go,

oh man, why are you interviewing this person? They never asked that question about any criminals or any, whatever that I've had on my pocket. They never asked the question. So I think if you're going to be approved, be a consistent prude. And I don't,

I think in that moment, Jermaine DePree is a good man and he's really doing his best to try to show people that he cares about enhancing the culture which he's always done but I think in that moment sometimes you get to a point of interview where someone hasn't even considered something and I

like that too. I like being an interview where I haven't considered something you know what I'm saying? I did an interview with Glass-Malone yesterday and I'm asking Glass-Malone about you know gang-banging and whether or not gang-banging is still unnecessary and stuff like that. And I'm all ready to win that argument. I'm ready to win that

exchange. I'm talking to somebody who's been banging since he was 15 and he has a very clear worldview on it. And after a while, you leave thinking, I see why he feels the way he feels. Right. Like I do I agree? Nah, but I get it. He made sense. He made sense why it's not such a bad thing to him. He made sense why it made sense. Don't agree. But before, I thought, yo, this was going to be something that was going to be easy work. Of course gang violence is bad. Of course gang banging is bad. But listen to somebody that has been in it for a long time, talk to you about it. And if you're not, if you're being authentic and you're not trying to come off holier than now, you just might have somebody

that makes you understand their experience. And those conversations are valuable. Do you think that it's sort of a weird world we live in, where in the wake of the Me Too era and everything, that a lot of men might have a version of themselves that they put on on camera and then a version of themselves that they have off cameras in terms of their opinions about women. Do you encounter that a lot? Do you feel like that is a lot of times, like the kind of the nexus of these conversations is that a guy will basically be caught on camera saying something that they were just feeling a little too casual with, and then they go on this sort of apology tour where they're correcting themselves to this fake. opinion that they didn't really have in the first place? Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I think it's true for a couple of reasons. Number one, I think that men are very uncomfortable talking about their actual feelings about

women, no matter what they are. I think men that like to be around, women that are more sexually, how do I put it, women that, men that like to be around women that are more sexually adventurous, they're afraid to talk about that. They're afraid to, like, be around their boys and be like, yo, this girl's been with this many guys. They're afraid to go, yeah, but I love her, and I love being around her, and she's smart, and she's funny, she's all of that. They're afraid to say that. And at the other time, there are men who are legitimately afraid of the sexual liberation of a woman and the sexual authority that a woman can have.

And then the rules are very complicated now. So you can, like, everybody is lying because they don't really know what they're supposed to say. they don't know if they're supposed to say okay what you want from women is sexual responsibility and for them to care about their bodies enough not to go around sleeping with everybody else or they don't know if there's because you say that

and then somebody comes at you and they go oh my God how could you possibly say that women should be able to do whatever she wants okay and then you go out and you say a woman should be able to do whatever she wants and then somebody comes at you and you go what you just want everybody to be out here fucking everybody the reality is that Number one, a woman can do whatever she wants,

should be able to do whatever she wants with her body. And it's a laughable situation that we even have conversations about what somebody can do with their own private parts. That's dumb, whatever. But a lot of that has to do with the fact that men's views about women oftentimes are formed without women being a part of those conversations. Very true. Like you don't get a chance to talk to women about how they,

feel and what they're going through and what their experience has been. The one thing that the Me Too movement did for me is I didn't realize, I'm going to be real with you, I didn't realize all this assault was going on. Not like this. I remember being in the office and talking to people and stuff like that. Fuck that. I remember talking to my homeboys and then being

like, yo, you never just, you know, see a girl in the club and you just grab her ass or whatever. I'd be like, no, not really. Like, for real, you like, you never did that. Like, you never just, you know, like you had body classes. You knew what niggas used to grab asses and stuff like that. And I never knew that. those guys don't think that they're terrible people. Right. They think that that was a part of like having a little fun.

We all been to spring break and shit. Like, so they, they don't think that they're bad people. It cracks open like a weird conversation right there because, okay, growing up on BMX all these years is that there's, you know, a sliding scale of to what extent dudes are willing to just start a conversation with a girl on the street and how direct it might be. And I've seen everything from dudes who are the most foul, fucking disgusting pig. on earth who would say the worst shit on earth to a girl on the street all the way to you know dudes who you know maybe would say something or like try to say they're more of a polite way and

I've always just observed that dynamic and always been like pretty uncomfortable I remember moving to New York in like 2004 and just being kind of horrified by like what was average for a dudes to say a girl on the street there which actually a ton of girls who I know who moved to New York at some point in their life have told me that it's like the worst street harassment they ever dealt with and that's oh I feel like that conversation did get cracked up that where there's like a lot of guys who probably considered that they never had thought about it previously. Yeah, I mean, listen, the way to do this is to do something that men seem to be incapable of doing when it comes to women. And it's the easiest thing in the world. Let them set

their rules. It's their bodies. It's their minds. It's their lives. Let them set their rules. Stop thinking about what makes sense to you. That's hard to do. I'm saying? When you have that much privilege. Anyone with privilege is hard to let somebody else set their rules and define who they are. She says she don't want to be talked to her like that. Don't talk to her like that. She says she doesn't like this energy. Don't give her that energy.

You thought it was cool. You were wrong. It's our good. Move on. It's like, I mean, I really don't understand. Like, relax. Like, I posted the video on Instagram, right? And that video I thought was funny. This girl, I guess they were at a Trinidad Inn party or something like that. Oh, yeah. And she was whining her shit up

real nice. And some dude tried to come behind her and she turned around and she was like, she didn't curse him out or smack his face or do anything. She turned around and smiled at him and was like, no, it's okay. I don't want anybody grinding on my ass today. So it's like so many times that's like cultural thing, right? It happens all the time, right? People, that's how people dance, not only in that part of the world, but where I'm from or whatever. But this particular time, this lady went, I don't want somebody grounded on my ass. None for you. I thought that was funny because that's a great curve. Everybody needs a great curve in that. life. You're not a, you're not doing your thing out here with ladies if you haven't been curved

viciously a couple times. You figure out the limits, right? I was surprised at how many guys in the comments were like, yo, well, if she didn't want a nigga grind on her ass, why she's shaking her ass? It's her ass. It's like, that's elementary thinking. Right. It's her ass. I'm in awe of guys like that because I was always a dude who was too insecure to go dance on a girl's eye dancing. I, bro, I would like, I'd have. I, I'd have, you. I'm in awe of guys like, I'd have have to write you that little, you know, can I dance on you? Please check this box. Yes or no. Like, I had no nuts when they can. I'm not even going to lie. Like, people from Baton Rouge are going to be like, oh, Van I up here trying to act like he was not. I wasn't the one. Right. So,

but, but what I'm saying is, it's like, it's just wild, man. I'm not about to go off on a soap box and make it seem like I don't understand how sexual dynamics can get confused and whatever. But I'm just saying it always surprises me like how stuff like that goes. You know, is her ass, is her body, is her mind. You don't have no rights to any of it. If she decides that she wants to let you share in it for however long it is, and that's you.

My dad had a saying, and this is going to sound a little crass, but this might have shaped my world. I'm sure people in the side of her that's around, he would be like, yo, you guys around here trying to claim these little girls and stuff like that, you'd be like, remember, it's not your pussy. It's your turn.

And your turn will last as long as she deems it fit that you are putting in the record was an amount of work and that you're doing something. He's like, I've been with your mama X amount of years. If I ever get complacent, it's going to be somebody else's turn. So earn your turn. It's not you. Nobody belongs to you. You know what I'm saying?

Like people stay with you as long as you're making them happy and fulfilling them. I just think that man feel, I mean, obviously we do. I mean, this is all stuff that none of this is groundbreaking, but just feel a little too entitled. Just it's not even about, don't feel bad about yourself. It's nothing. It's not a big deal. Just relax. You don't have to go and cry and, you know, like get all upset about it and hate women.

Just relax. It's like, I think one of the most important skills for a guy to learn throughout his life is how to gauge how a woman feels about him without having to make any, like, sort of overt gesture. be able to sort of spot whether she's feeling you in any way and then to be able to operate on that without having necessarily like when you hear about a lot of stories of dudes and like just like office culture like bosses and making crazy passes of women and stuff that make them feel super uncomfortable it's like to me and it's it's unfortunate because it's the kind thing you can't teach at all but through a lot of life experience you slowly start to be able

to develop this really good gauge of who's interested in you and who isn't and it's very very valuable it's like really hard to sort of implement that into a young man also some of that has to do what you take in stock of yourself. I mean? Knowing what's realistic. Yeah. Sometimes you take stocking yourself like it's like you know, a lot of these guys

like really like Harvey Weinstein you know what I mean? Like you knew all these beautiful actresses. Yeah bro come on dog. Like he knew exactly yeah and even some of these other guys these guys know these guys know that they're powerful

and they have this influence if fucking Brad Pitt was running a joint or somebody even swagged out, somebody even swaggerer was running a joint, it might be a little bit different. But you have to take stocking yourself and know this woman probably doesn't want you. And if you want to try to make an impression, then there are ways to do that that are appropriate and there are ways to do that that are inappropriate. Sometimes you shouldn't do it. But I think that there's a conversation to be had and it's a conversation to be had with women about, how they want to be approached. What is appropriate.

What is appropriate? What's not appropriate? You know, why I'm from, yo, hey, Redbone, come here. That was appropriate for a long time. You know what I'm saying? Yo, yo, yo, yo, backpack, backpack, red shorts, red shorts, come in. Like, you know what I'm saying? That, like, that was appropriate.

Yeah. I am learning now saying, hey, Redbone, backpack, red shorts, red shorts, is actually not appropriate. But they got to set those rules and we got to follow them. Yeah. It's crazy. What role does hip hop play in your life at this point?

Has it always been like that? You've always been like a rabid rap fan? Has it kind of gone in and out? Sometimes I feel like dudes have a hard time aging well in their rap fandom, that they either sort of lose the interest in it because it is such a young man's game or that they just sort of slowly get out of it or start listening to Aretha Franklin? Nah, man, hip hop means a lot to me. I think that hip hop was like one of the first things that was mine.

that I felt like it was mine, right? So like all the music that I was on growing up, I loved it, but it was really my parents' music. It was what they were connected to. So, you know, I love Stevie. I love Marvin. I love Aretha. I love the arrhythmics.

My mom had me listen to all that shit, too. But then, yeah, like, there was absolutely no chance of my mom being into Snoop Dog. It felt very different. Right, right. You know, Prince and all of that. And then when hip hop came along, This was for me.

I remember I was like five or six, and like kids on the bus were talking about LL. And like I was literally in elementary school, and then I started listening to it. And so I grew with hip hop. I was born in 1980, so I grew with hip hop. I grew up with it. And everything they did through at me, I tried it. I've been through every phase of hip-hop. Every phase I've tried it all.

I've listened to it all, right? Listen to the native tongues when they were popping. I was on my ex-clan shit I was on my my Raq Kim shit I was on my just all of it my KERS 1 my big daddy

cane and then when it turned a little bit when Pock started jumping when NWA started coming I would lie and tell people I had heard NWA even though I hadn't heard it because I couldn't get the music right

then my brother came home and I was able to get it and I was able to listen to that and so I think that the the the chore of hip-hop right now is to really listen to good music

that you don't relate to it all. That's the chore. That's why I like, I don't get paid from them, but that's why I like title because title just curates the playlist and you listen to it. And all of a sudden, you listen in the little no eyes

and you're like, yo, this is dope. Have you heard that little? And you listen to it and it's good. But when you say it doesn't speak to you, you mean because it's of a completely different generation or it's coming from somebody who doesn't have anything close to you in the name of life?

experience. Sometimes you actually can't understand it. I mean, when I say I can't understand it, sometimes I can't understand what they. It's one of the young thug types out there. You don't even have to understand thug. His voice is kind of like an instrument. But like, let me see. I'm trying to think, like, I love Gunna. My favorite Gunna song is Speed It Up. I don't know if Gunna is saying anything that speeded up. You know what I'm saying?

Like, I don't know if Speed It Up has lyrics. Right. Like, I know, speed it up, did it. But I've listened to that song all the time. Right. And the only way that I kind of get to these artists is about knowing that there's good music out there that's resonating with people for some reason

and I've got to check it out. Other than that, like, music that still twist my soul up is that hip-hop shit that I'd be like, when I listen to Griselda, when I listen to Benny and them, when I listen to those guys, when I listen to the Dreamville Cats, when I listen to IDK, when I listen to Adam Dallas, when I listen to all of those guys,

like those are the guys to me that I really get deep into Freddie Gibbs. Like, I'm like, I'm straight up, like, this is the shit, these are people that's like really talking to me. But there's so much great music. These kids are so creative, bro. They're so creative. But it's, it's, you guys,

it's almost like doing work sometimes now. To kind of you sit down and you, you, you, you, You take a Friday and Saturday, you try to keep it like the shit that y'all was on when I came in here. I don't know what the fuck that shit is. TGAX6, scammer music. Okay. What's scammer music? He's just, like, rapping, like, ridiculously in-depth tutorials about, like, credit card fraud.

It's, like, some of the weirdest shit I ever heard. Like, Guap be talking about scamming. Is Guap scam music? Shout out to Guap. Guap has claims to have done quite a bit of scamming. I feel like the difference with the TGX6 kid is that he's just straight up. It's, like, it's the whole character as well. Because if you look at his Instagram, he seems like he's still committing credit card fraud.

I told him, I'm like, I don't want to do an interview with you because I feel like you're going to get caught up because of the interview. And he's like, no, don't worry about it. He's like, I'm good. I don't know what the fucking scam is that apparently he can't get caught. And it's something about him rapping so offbeat, too, that somehow like just seems like it aligns well with all this ridiculously technical credit card shit. But like, you know, a lot of these guys, man, you just people just keep talking about them. Act put me on a lot of these guys Like

If you go on act shit Like act as all of these guys are on act Like I didn't know For a long time I would not listen to anything that 6-9 put out Just because it looks so weird Like you know I mean It looks so weird

Even God rest of death Even with um With ex It just it looks so Like I couldn't understand Then you know He was really really gifted You know so so

So um But like when you listen to some of these guys It's good music Yeah definitely So but you find you find yourself gravitating towards more traditional type stuff. Is there anything from your youth that you still find yourself going back to? I feel like a lot of people have sort of just their core couple of albums that they just return to.

Three albums, my core albums. Hot boys, get how you live. Underrated. That's a good idea. We got to put that on. Like, nobody talks about it. Ridiculous. Right.

Like, y'all think Wayne is a God. Y'all think y'all have heard Pete Wayne. y'all have heard the most famous wayne right peak wane when wayne was a little murderer a little killer on this you know wayne can rap way can always rap people gonna people gonna freak out when that when i say this gonna be like yo man wayne no ceilings and all of this stuff like this wayne with those guys rapping like a kid rapping amongst a bunch of grown men you can hit a talent spilling through your speakers it's ridiculous when you ask people their favorite wayne album and they say like dedication three or just kind of like oh all right like you caught him on a completely different

wavelength than the one that i was initially experiencing in like 98 yeah i'd never heard anybody's voice sound anything like that he was doing the like wayne Wayne was doing the little uh the little the little sound effects and shit like that i got that i was on my neck bing he was just doing the whole he was just creative he was created you know what i'm saying so uh that one uh rock him the 18th letter and i know that's later rock him a lot of people not going to fuck with that but That's like for some reason just where I was that really grabbed me. And P. Ghetto D.

Really? Yeah. Like when I put on honorable mention to 400 degrees, honorable mission to honorable mission to Rich season event, honorable mention to so many of those different things. And those are honorable mission that everything Pock did, all of that. but get OD to me when I listen to to Massape, get OD it just takes me right back bro.

I'm thinking about a time of my life where I thought everything was possible why I didn't know if I was going to be one day I was going to be the president of the United States and next day I was going to be off guard at NBA. It was just like it was in the melodies and the music and the beats

the authenticity is just there. I listen to that oh shit all the time. It's hard to find it sometimes but I listen to it. That's crazy because I feel like that stuff didn't age as well. wealth for me as I got older. Like I was listening A lot of No Limit Cash Money at the time

But then over the years No Limit of Sort of There was such an abundance Of product at that time too There was so much That I felt like a lot of it sort of got lost for me But remember that's my That's around the corner for me

That's like Yeah Those are real rhythms Of Bat Rouge and New Orleans And you know That's real shit Like that's where I'm from So

You're a Boosie fan? Hell yeah I went to high school with Busy Really? Yeah Holy shit Is it a man then too? Huh?

Was he the man then? Boosy has never not been famous. Really? Never. Wow. Went to high school with Boosy. Shout out McKinley High at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Not only Boosie went there, but Kevin Gaines went there too.

I'm just having a hard time even imagining a Boosie that wasn't like the dude, like a lame-ass Boosie. He came on campus. Me and his brother had gone to school with. Like, he came on campus as this little dude that everybody already loved. By the way, I'll tell you something that y'all might not know about Boosie. Boosie could really hoop. Really? Like, Boosie could really play ball.

He is the smallest dude I've ever seen be effective on a basketball court. Like, not, like, varsity. Wow. Like, Boosey could play. Boosey would get in there, do his thing, like a little small dude, like, looked like he was heaving the ball at the basket. Right. But, yeah, and then I remember I left and went away to college. And because I don't think, I think something happened at McKinley.

I don't think Boosie was around that much. But, like, I think something happened either his 10th or 11th grade year. He could probably tell a story. I'm not going to speak for him. But then I came back and they were like, yo, Boosie rapping. And he was with Seelow in the concentration camp at that time. Then after he was with Seelow, he got with Turk and Mel and then boom, he was out of here. But he always had that.

He's a star. Yeah. Definitely. You fuck with his music? Yeah, I love. Yeah, he's dope. Like, he's a star. And wild, like, dudes from back home.

That's, you see, you listen to Busy and Webby and, you know, other dudes from Baton Rouge, Box and all of those guys like that. Like, you listen to those guys, that's Bat Rouge. That's real Bat Rouge. Young boy in them, I love, I'm not, like, they're way younger than me. Right. So, you know, I don't know how the city has changed. You want to hear my one Boosie story is that while I was interviewing him and little blurry, his 12-year-old white kid that he signed.

And it's unfortunate because he had gone and done, like, like, Bozzi had done, like, a three-hour Vlad interview that would presumably be chopped up into, like, 18 different pieces. And then he just got high as hell. Like, because when I watch the Vlad interview later, which I mean, you know that that's just what it's going to always. Is there, is there an issue? No, no, no. Okay.

Yeah, Vlad. It's just like he interviews Boussey like every four months and it just gets like 18 pieces out of it. And it just keeps working. It's just a factory. But so we got a different version of Bucci because Bucci just like gets in the van and just smokes a shitload of blunts before he does the interview. He's high as hell. And like at one point during the interview, he starts talking about getting a girl. out pregnant from pre-com and then he just looks over at little blurry and he's like,

oh man, he's like, I can't be talking about this. You know, I just like realizing that it's like a different responsibility or something that his parents were probably going to be watching that and feeling some type of way. But then, okay, Bousie's car, his rental car gets stolen in the middle of the interview. Wait, what? Yeah. Somebody must have been following him from the video shoot that they did after the Vlad interview or some shit like that.

And basically their rental car gets stolen. And he happened to have his bag with him That had all his jewelry and his money with it But it seemed as if they Like were gunning for that Right But so then me and my guys We get to be the dudes that Boussey just met

That are like the only Like to him Maybe we set him up I don't think he actually thought that we did But he at least wanted to you know Sort of feel us out And he was like hanging out here For like another two hours

I had to do another interview afterwards And it's just sort of awkward Because Bousy's kind of like Just looking around Just trying to figure out If we fucking jibed them or something Yeah I mean the reality he talked to her in that interview he talked about

feeling like he had targeted in Baton Rouge. He got to feel like he had a target in LA and they come out here. Definitely. It was a little awkward. But didn't hurt my fandom at all. Yeah, I mean, look, like a real dude, man. Like, real, real dude.

They tried to job him down there in Baton Rouge. But, like, he is the guy that kind of, that really put... We had guys before. I don't want to be disrespectful. Obviously, Boosie's the guy that put Baton Rouge. on the map map as far as rap is concerned. Then Waby was right there with him the whole trail.

Boose is the one that kind of profoundly broke through and gave us a super, superstar. Definitely. What actually has you motivated these days in terms of what you want to accomplish, what you're trying to do with your life at this point? That's a great question, man. I think what has me motivated is just the uncertainty of it all.

It's been a long time since I didn't know what I was capable of. You get into a situation where you work in a day job and you go in there every day and you know what's expected And then all of a sudden something happens for you and people start listening and then you start thinking you know what do I really have to say Your podcast is growing quickly so all of a sudden you're like holy shit like anything could happen with this right so you're thinking about that you think and then you're thinking about seriously The reality of of of maybe having a life that really Changes something And not in a When I say change or something

I don't mean in a Say to Wales you know Like type of corny way I mean like You know What really means something to you

Like who are you Like what are you What do you really give a fuck about Like you've been a wind up toy For so long right And you've been talking about Different things Now that people are listening

What do you give a fuck about How do you want to Not just inform people but entertain them How do you want people to feel How do you want people around you to feel like what is it that you want to do i just think figuring that out and knowing that there's some power behind that it's a dope-ass time i'm saying i got to go uh up um to a Nike event and talk to 30 of the best players these guys are going to the NBA 30 of the best players in

the country earlier today and while everybody else is talking to these kids about basketball I just wanted to make sure that they were investing into their own humanity. They were becoming something different, that they were reading, that they were learning, that they were learning how to love, that they were learning how to be present, that they were learning how to do this. And to be able to actually tell those kids that, you know, there's people out here that care about you or that need you and they need you to be happy people. Well, commodifying yourself and your brand and all of that shit like that, we want y'all to be happy people.

We want y'all to be well-involved people. It just makes you feel like you out here doing something. Yeah, definitely. And reality is that in a weird way, I got to thank Kanye for that opportunity. Right. You know, I really do because, first of all, there's no animus between me and him at all.

What I will say is that was the first time that I realized that. The reason why I realized that is everybody that watches that clip. Pay attention to something at that clip. He says what he says. He turns around, he asks that question. When I start talking to him, he's listening. So I'm talking to, to be honest with you, my musical idol, the one artist I would say his music has meant the most to me. You know what I'm saying?

He's listening. He's listening to me. So my voice matters. Even though I've been on TV all of these years, my voice matters. He's listening to me. Me and him are the same. He's no different. Flesh, bone, blood.

I'm talking to him. He's listening. it's it to me that's a mandate not because Kanye West is so important but it's it's it's a mandate because there are things that I say that people no matter what want to hear and some things that they need to hear I just got to make sure that I keep pushing myself in the right direction to give them the right information yeah wow that's kind of like a mandate you know it's a great word for it like there's just certain experiences that you go for go through like you know I just randomly got a young thug interview backstage at wireless festival and

London. Appreciate that. And I got it just by asking him on the spot, like slightly by utilizing my Juice World friendship to just like even get around him, but then I just asked him for it and just went for it. And that was just like a huge moment for me of being like okay, like don't

ever forget the value of just asking for something. I'm just trying, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I'm just people that do that all the time with me. It's like, yo, man, will you will you put my resume through the TMZ? Well, yeah, since you asked. You know what I'm saying?

Like, Van, will you do this? Yeah, since you asked. I mean, now my deal's going to go crazy. But, but, um, but, but, but yeah, not, you know, a guy like that. Plus, thug know who you are. I'm saying? Sometimes you got, sometimes, that's one thing I would say to everybody. Know who the fuck you are.

I'm saying? People are important and they have reverence for different reasons. But they hear for their reasons and you hear for yours. But that kind of clip, that in that moment, it was like, oh shit, this dude carries himself like he can just have a fucking conversation with Kanye West and not just a conversation

but calls his ass out. That was like, in that moment, you just like explained your whole personal brand like whatever it seems like you're going for is like just putting yourself in the arena being like, look, I can do this. And it's crazy how you just sort of solidified it right there. I mean, yeah, I mean the real

with that is that, you know, that is a part of who I am. It's like it, like the only thing that I wasn't that was surprised at was that he was so he was taking the time to let it digest because in the newsroom, in that newsroom, Harvey

runs TMZ, me and Harvey go back and forth all the time. It's his shot and me and him go back. So like in that place that's a away game for everybody else. I'm at work. I come here every day. So like I felt completely comfortable and really to be honest with you, I'm going to be real with you. While I'm from Baton Rouge, like the guys

that y'all see from Baton Rouge, we are like that for a certain reason. They don't really grow like timid men. You're boring conversation. That's how we do it. Like, that's a Baton Rouge thing. The art of conversation is a real thing. We're Southern, we're aggressive, we believe in ourselves.

Any guy that you meet from my city that's really doing something, that's how they're going come off. And it's good nature too, which is kind of the main thing. Right. You're not expecting Kanye to hate you for hitting him with your opinion because the guys that you grew up with did not. Right. And the reality is that even if you disagree, I'm going to pay you the proper respect.

Always. Always going to pay you the proper respect. I'm going to say, listen. everything that you've got and you deserve you're a genius you deserve all of this this is what we're going through it up yeah like I believe that if the proper respect I just don't know how people be so wild disrespectful nowadays that's the one thing that I don't

get how you see the baby shopping and I don't get like I don't get how people are so wild disrespectful and I don't expect things bad things to happen to them like nobody's going to tap your jaw like you're not going to get that karma to come back to you just for all of this stuff that's that's really weird to me because whatever I do whatever disagreement I have with you, whatever sort of issue I have with you,

it's going to be done respectfully until we can no longer respect each other. And it's going to take me a while to get to that point because all I really want to do is sincerely get my point across you. I'm not trying to sun you. I'm not trying to dominate you. I just want to make you understand where I'm coming from. Definitely. There it is.

Hey, we did our two hours. That's pretty good. That's dope. Two hours. I ain't done two hours on a while. Two hours is like a long one? Definitely. Yeah.

We usually gravitate towards like an hour. Okay. Word. Here you go. We just had wheels. Man, listen, bro, I've been watching this shit for a long time.

I appreciate you having me up here, right? I appreciate it. I can't believe I did it all in a foos gone wild shirt, too. Too. Some kind of way about this. I'm just going to call it out. All right, Van Lathan.

Also, I just want to say your name is not very agreeable with autocorrect. Do you ever notice that? No, what does it say? I was getting a lot of can larynx instead of Van Lerens. Yeah, just it refused to believe that I actually wanted to...

Well, I'm just like typing the notes. So I write Van Lathan and then I start writing some stuff down below, which I actually didn't even look at. But I'm trying to write van as a first name. And then as soon as I start to write the L, it just becomes convinced that I wanted to write Cannes for the first word. I swear to God, I did it three times in a row. And I was just like, I wonder if he deals with this. So the can thing I do. The larynx thing, no.

The larynx thing tells me more about what you type in than anything else. I don't know if I ever said larynx. Right, larynx. Like the Dr. Seuss book or like the part of your body. Larynx is like right here. What's the Dr. Seuss book? That's pharynx or something.

Didn't he have a book called The Larynx? Is it? I don't know. I don't know. If he does, I probably ever read it since I was elementary school, but for some reason it's lodged to my brain. Oh, shit. Well, hey, I appreciate you, man.

Thank you for coming on. No problem, man. Then Lathen, no job, our coolest podcast in the world. Check us on YouTube, SoundCloud, iTunes, like, comment, and subscribe. Thank you to Laura for lining us up. Yeah, Lord. Thank you, Laura. Thank you, Laura.

Appreciate you, man.