Dr. Maya Shankar
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science…
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Lately, comedian Hasan Minhaj is taking a second look at his motives for performing. Hasan was initially drawn to comedy because it allowed him to hold people in power accountable. In shows like “Patriot Act” and “The Daily Show,” he often took on controversial topics and challenged world leaders. But after some of his provocative commentary went viral, he realized his motives were less pure than he thought. In this conversation, Hasan reveals how that realization is making him reconsider his career altogether.
Hasan Minhaj
It is intoxicating. You open up your phone and it's like quote tweet, "This guy's awesome," quote tweet, "This is awesome," quote tweet, "This is awesome." Everybody that you respect, admire can participate in lifting you up and saying you're awesome.
Maya Shankar
Hasan Minhaj was hearing a lot of positive feedback after one of his comedy routines went viral a few years back. You may know Hasan from the Daily Show or his Netflix series Patriot Act. At the time, Hasan relished his increasing popularity. But in our conversation he revealed a desire to move beyond a career that's so dependent on whether or not people like him.
Hasan Minhaj
Do you like me? How many millions of people like me so I can hopefully continue doing this? Man, I don't want to participate.
Maya Shankar
On today's episode, what happens when our self-worth and livelihood rely on how much people like us. I'm Maya Shankar, and this is A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Hasan's brand of comedy is overtly political and often provocative. In his Netflix show, Patriot Act, he took on powerful world leaders like the Saudi Crown Prince and the president of China. You might also remember his speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner back in 2017 when Trump was president.
Hasan Minhaj
The leader of our country is not here, and that's because he lives in Moscow. It is a very long flight. It'd be hard for Vlad to make it. Vlad can't just make it on a Saturday. It's a Saturday. As for the other guy, I think he is in Pennsylvania because he can't take a joke.
Maya Shankar
Hasan was initially drawn to comedy because it allowed him to hold people in power accountable. He's always liked playing the role of jester, an identity he talks about in his Netflix special, The King's Jester. It's a role Hasan began playing back when he was in elementary school.
Hasan Minhaj
Comedians sometimes identify and they see the world as this thing where there's people in the front of the class and then there's people in the back of the class. There is a divide between those people so there is the people in the front of the class that uphold the status quo, that are goody-goody students, type A, high achieving, whatever the teacher tells me to do. That's like the Old Testament, and I take it as this is the Holy Scripture.
Maya Shankar
Stop describing my life as a seven year old.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
Jesus, Hasan.
Hasan Minhaj
I know, I'm so sorry. As I'm looking you directly in the eye, I'm like, "There's a particular type of person that's like this."
Maya Shankar
Yeah. A person who, I don't know, makes up extra credit projects when they don't even exist.
Hasan Minhaj
Uh-huh.
Maya Shankar
Yeah.
Hasan Minhaj
Then there's people in the back of the room that's like, "This is insane." They understand the cosmic joke, so to speak. Mrs. Luddington does not have all the answers. Mr. DeMarco, the gym teacher, does not have all the answers.
Maya Shankar
Totally.
Hasan Minhaj
For him or her to be decreeing this to us is absolutely ridiculous, so they're shooting spit balls from the back of the class. I definitely felt growing up that I was outside of the core group of 30 kids and I'm observing this thing. There was this feeling where I always felt like I was the DVD commentary to the story that was happening in real time, where I'm like, "Whoa, that's weird that Andrew does this and Brittany does this." I was able to piece those things together. In those moments where I would sometimes be a smart aleck in class or growing up, it felt like all the code lined up in that moment. The Tetris of my comedy logic lined up perfectly, and just for a moment, I felt a sense of agency.
Maya Shankar
Is there a memory you have of a time when you felt like, "Oh, I got a knack for this. I'm pretty talented at it."
Hasan Minhaj
I was in the third grade in 1993. I'll never forget this. Ms. Anderson was my teacher of the third/fourth grade combo. She loved Diet Pepsi. This was during an era in the '90s where a lot of adults would just not drink water, but they would pound 80 plus ounces of these Big Gulp Diet Pepsis and being like-
Maya Shankar
Yeah. Because they were told there's no consequences. Right?
Hasan Minhaj
There's no consequences.
Maya Shankar
It's just like water.
Hasan Minhaj
It's just like water. Who needs water?
Maya Shankar
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hasan Minhaj
But kids couldn't drink it. This was also during an era where kids could not have soda pop. Right?
Maya Shankar
Yeah.
Hasan Minhaj
It was a bad thing. I remember she would sometimes have a case, a 12 pack case, on her desk and I would just observe her being like, "Yo, she is shotgunning diet Pepsi throughout the day, and nobody seems to think this is weird." I remember one day I go, "Ms. Anderson, can I get a Diet Pepsi?" She's like, "Kids can't drink soda pop." I go, "Okay, Ms. Anderson." Then my dad loved watching 60 Minutes. I remember there was this big investigative report on 60 Minutes about how diet soda causes cancer. I go, "Oh, my God. She's shotgunning cancer juice." I remember the next day I went in to class and I go, "Hey, Ms. Anderson, can I get a Diet Pepsi?" She goes, "Hasan, children cannot drink soda." I go, "You're right, Ms. Anderson. Only adults should get cancer." I got in such big trouble. She wrote it down and I got a pink slip and it was a whole thing.
Maya Shankar
Did the other kids in class laugh when you said that?
Hasan Minhaj
No, they didn't laugh because they didn't-
Maya Shankar
Know.
Hasan Minhaj
... understand-
Maya Shankar
Yeah, that's right.
Hasan Minhaj
... that I had seen the report.
Maya Shankar
But you felt ... This is interesting because you did not get any social validation in that moment-
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
... that you were funny. But I had asked you tell me about a time you realized that you were funny.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
You're naming this moment, which means there was some confidence there that you knew you had landed this joke, that it was objectively funny.
Hasan Minhaj
It was very funny. I was thinking about this, too, where there's this duality that I think comedians inhabit where, on one hand, you're like, "I'm the shit. I deserve to be on stage and people should listen to what I have to say. My opinions are probably the most important in this entire room." But there's also this extreme lack of self-confidence of, "I'm pretty worthless. I'm not shit." It's that duality, it's the arrogance and this complete lack of any self-esteem that you vacillate between that allows you to be a comedian because I think our hippocratic oath for comics is, "I ain't shit and neither are you." You have to start by interrogating yourself. Then that gives you license to be able to be like, "And you ain't shit, either."
Maya Shankar
Let's fast forward a bit. After many years of hustling, your big dreams start coming true. You get a job as a correspondent on The Daily Show with on Stewart, which I imagine is just one of those mind blowing moments of, "Holy crap, I cannot believe this is coming to fruition."
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. It was the first time in my life I felt like I was chosen. It really meant a lot to me. It felt like making it in entertainment, it's very competitive and it's not guaranteed and there's so many people that I know that are super funny that just never make it, and they never just get "chosen." It was one of those things where it felt very validating that, "Man, this thing I devoted my life to," at that point, it was 10 years, one month and nine days, that, "it was for something."
Maya Shankar
The show's known for blending comedy and political activism. Right?
Hasan Minhaj
Mm-hmm.
Maya Shankar
I'm wondering if there's a memorable segment that you worked on in which you felt, maybe for the first time, the power of marrying comedy and political activism.
Hasan Minhaj
Oh, yeah. I think it's that perfect combination of silly and sincere. That's the perfect combo for me. I remember I was at the Daily Show, and it was during the 2016 election. This was one of my favorite pieces. What's great about the Daily Show is you get to do it live from the conventions. At that time, this was peak Donald Trump, "Mexicans are rapists," Muslim ban moment. Right? One of the things that you get to do at the convention is you get to meet delegates from every state. They're walking around.
The segment I pitched was called Hasan's Farewell Tour, where I get to go up to people and I go, "Hey, I'm Hasan Minhaj. Where are you from?" They go, "Ah, hi. I'm a delegate from Montana." I go, "Oh, my God. I've always wanted to go to Montana. What's Montana like?" "Well, it's big sky country. We can't wait for you to check it out." I go, "I can't." They go, "Why?" I go, "Because the person you're voting for wants to ban me from the country." Then it's like [inaudible 00:09:03] Hasan's Farewell Tour. It's a montage like that. What's the best thing about Wisconsin?
Speaker 3
The Green Bay Packers.
Speaker 4
In Georgia, we have great whitewater rafting.
Hasan Minhaj
I would love to go whitewater rafting. What's the best thing about Oklahoma?
Speaker 5
The Oklahoma Center.
Hasan Minhaj
Wow. I would love to go there sometime.
Speaker 6
You're always welcome to come.
Hasan Minhaj
I would love to come down and see a game.
Speaker 5
Yes, come.
Hasan Minhaj
I can't.
Speaker 5
Why?
Hasan Minhaj
I'm a Muslim, and if Donald Trump is elected, he's probably going to throw me out. As we cut together the package, it just got more and more ridiculous and funny. Then at the end, there was this really nice moment where someone was like, "He's not going to do that. He doesn't mean that." I go, "Really?" There'd sometimes be these older delegates and then be like, "I would never let that happen." I go, "Why not?" They go, "Because you're one of the good ones."
Maya Shankar
Oh, God.
Hasan Minhaj
I go, "You know what? I feel the same way about you." We'd hug and embrace. That, to me, is the perfect cocktail. It's just the perfect cocktail of comedy and I love it. Some people get mad, some people feel righteous indignation. "How could you say this?" I don't care about any of that. The incongruity of all of this is fucking hilarious. That's what I find so funny.
Maya Shankar
After your time at the Daily Show, Netflix green lights have showed that you've created.
Hasan Minhaj
Mm-hmm.
Maya Shankar
It's called Patriot Act.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
This is the first time in your career where you were at the helm of a TV series. For your first episode, you end up taking on a particularly risky topic.
Hasan Minhaj
Right.
Maya Shankar
Which is the Saudi Crown Prince.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
This is following the murder of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who is murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The story really blows up online.
Hasan Minhaj
Right.
Maya Shankar
I'm curious if you can walk me through the decision making calculus behind all this, and then we can talk about what happened after.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. At that point in my life, the decision making calculus always is chase the truth. In Hindi, there's this word called [foreign language 00:11:00], which means a tickle in your tummy. There's always, whenever I'm writing a joke or I'm working on something, there's always this little tickle in my tummy of, "What if I said this," like that Ms. Anderson moment. "What if I said this in this moment?" Chasing that, because that's a little bit out of your comfort zone. You're breaking what the status quo is. The calculus that I had was I know that every other show in late night right now does not know how to position themselves in relation to this subject. Stephen Colbert won't have the same angle I will be able to have here, and he won't be able to talk about being Muslim and having that relationship to Saudi Arabia as an Indian, as an American, as a Muslim. He won't be able to triangulate that, so that's part of the math for me.
Just a few months ago, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka MBS, was hailed as the reformer the Arab world needed. But the revelations about Khashoggi's killing have shattered that image. It blows my mind that it took the killing of a Washington Post journalist for everyone to go, "Oh, I guess he's really not a reformer." Meanwhile, every Muslim person you know was like, "Yeah, no shit. He's the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia."
Speaker 7
Well, Netflix under fire today after its decision to pull an episode of a comedy show that was critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his alleged role in the killing of Journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Hasan Minhaj
The episode gets banned in Saudi Arabia. It becomes a big international news story about tech platform censorship and what you can and can't say. I didn't know I'd be at the center of that.
Maya Shankar
You talk in the special about how intoxicating it was-
Hasan Minhaj
Oh, it feels great. Yeah.
Maya Shankar
... to get all of this attention. Right?
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
To be trending on Twitter and all the likes, all the comments.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
All the retweets.
Hasan Minhaj
Likes, comments, retweets, give them to me. Everyone in the world cared about me for no particular reason.
Maya Shankar
Tell me more about what that experience was like on a psychological level, being almost confronted with a new tier of attention.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah, it is intoxicating. You feel like you're pretty drunk on it. You feel like you're the coolest kid in high school.
Maya Shankar
Yeah.
Hasan Minhaj
Everybody's inviting you over to the blue benches and they're like, "You're fucking awesome." It feels like you're at a slot machine. You open up your phone and you just hit refresh, and it's like quote tweet, "This guy's awesome," quote tweet, "This is awesome," quote tweet, "This is awesome." It's this crazy feeling where, pre-social media, you had to do a lot to curry favor and validation from people. But this puts that on steroids because everyone around the world can participate in lifting you up and saying you're awesome. The sick part of it is, if you start to understand the rhythm of the algorithm, you can break down how it works. You say something divisive, irreverent, bold, and you find someone, a point of your ire, and you go, "Okay, I'm going to target in on this person and I'm going to upload the video at 9:00 AM EST. That way everybody gets it first thing in the fucking morning." They pull out their phone and, ooh, you let it rip all day long.
Maya Shankar
You've talked about the fact that, at some point after working on these Patriot Act episodes, after getting recognized as one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the world, your wife Beena observes that you seem to only care about certain topics when, "the cameras are on."
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
Right?
Hasan Minhaj
Uh-huh.
Maya Shankar
Was that the first time that you began noticing just how much you were being driven by the attention and recognition? Was it in that moment with your wife?
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. Beena has always been this Jimminy Cricket to me because she is one of the best people I've ever met in my life. There's a reason why. The moment I met her, I just remember being like, "She's one of those people that is a good person whether or not there's social clout or validation from it. She will do the right things privately. When she checks me on stuff. I really have to reckon with it."
Maya Shankar
You've said that you don't want to be doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Hasan Minhaj
Right.
Maya Shankar
What are the wrong reasons to do something?
Hasan Minhaj
Social signaling. You stand with Ukraine, you put up the black box, or you do the hashtag because everybody that morning is doing it and you want to be part of the in group. The right reason to do it is, this is in every ancient tradition or faith, you give with one hand without the other hand knowing. You donate anonymously on GoFundMe.
Maya Shankar
This is so interesting, Hasan, because I think there are other comedians that would just hold themselves to a different standard. They would think, "Look, the right reason is just being desirous of making people laugh and engaging them." The fact that you're even asking yourself these types of questions shows me that you do identify as more than just a comedian.
Hasan Minhaj
I want to be the best artist I can be, which requires honesty, and I just want to be a good person. By good, I mean the people that know me the most can testify and be like, "He's a good dude. He is ethical. He is sincere. He is a person of his word." All of those things. The people that can validate that are my wife, my two kids, the crew that I grew up with, my sister, my parents. All those people can really vouch for that. The thing that I'm noticing is that there are "good guys and good gals" vis-a-vis what they say on Twitter, but they ain't shit outside of that. I think that's the social grift we're all observing.
Maya Shankar
We'll be back in a moment with A Slight Change of Plans. We're back with comedian Hasan Minhaj. Hasan says he's eager to do things for the right reasons rather than for social clout or validation. But I wanted to push him a bit on this desire for pure intentions. It seemed like he was holding himself to a pretty high standard. I wondered whether the focus on purity might actually prevent him from doing social good. I think one challenge I have around assigning so much importance to the purity of our motives is that I want to make sure that we're being reasonable with ourselves about what's possible to accomplish. I say this only because, okay, here's a hypothetical. Let's say that you, Hasan, have brought light to the fact that there is an innocent person sitting in a jail somewhere in the world. As a result of your advocacy, a result of the fact that you shed light on this, that person is free.
Hasan Minhaj
Yes.
Maya Shankar
But then I, Maya, the mad cognitive scientist, have created this machine, let's called it a hypothetical how pure is this dude really MRI machine.
Hasan Minhaj
Sure. Yeah.
Maya Shankar
Okay. I put you in the scanner and we get some pretty troubling news. We find out, "Hey, actually 70% of Hasan's brain shined a light on this piece of information because he wanted a popular story on Instagram, but 30% of him cared about the person."
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
Okay. I might think that's not great. I would prefer if Hasan got to 100% in terms of his motives, but I would never have wanted that "impurity" to curb your behaviors because the behavior is net positive.
Hasan Minhaj
But this is just a personal journey for me, Maya. For me, especially because the internet has now made the world the quad at Davis High. Everybody is now in the quad and it's lunchtime and the popular kids and the jock, everybody's there. Now it's 8 billion people that are in this quad at lunch. The reason why I have to check my motives is because it's becoming harder than ever to find out why you're doing something. The thing for me is, if I can lock in on what the truth is in my heart, selfishly it'll make me a better artist. I don't want to disappoint myself. If I can hold myself to that standard, at least that I'm trying, then I can also be braver and more vigilant in my art because, as an individual, I am seeking capital T truth, not consensus.
Maya Shankar
I wonder whether your aspiration to try your hardest to do the right thing for the right reasons is in some way a stabilization exercise. It's grounding you in a sturdier place where, because you feel so firmly in your own convictions and you have that inner belief, in some sense, it insulates you from that noise that's happening on the outside.
Hasan Minhaj
Totally.
Maya Shankar
Because you're like, "You know what? I'm not as vulnerable as you think anymore because I know I put up this episode for the right reason. I know I made this joke because I actually wanted to help this person. If you think it's lame or you think it's stupid, or you think that I'm blah or this or that, I'm a little bit more impenetrable than I was before."
Hasan Minhaj
Correct. Yes.
Maya Shankar
Okay.
Hasan Minhaj
100%. This is why I have to use this mental exercise to be like, "I got to know who I am, because-"
Maya Shankar
Because otherwise, I'm now relying on everyone else to tell me who I am all the time, and that's just too disorienting.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. I can't live that way. Yeah.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. It's too fragile.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
It's too fragile a position to be in.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
I completely understand that.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. Yep.
Maya Shankar
What you're saying is, for you to have a sustainable career, for you to feel like you can actually create the best art and create armor around yourself.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
Because it's only going to get ... Sorry, I just feel cynical about the future. But it's only going to get worse. It's only going to get nastier.
Hasan Minhaj
Yep.
Maya Shankar
There's going to be more vehicles by which people are going to be able to troll you and take you down and shake your self-confidence. It feels very wise to me that you're trying to put in that work now to create the only version of armor really that exists today, which is a sense of who you are and the reasons why you're doing the things you're doing.
Hasan Minhaj
When the special premiered, I did this event for Netflix employees. They screened it at the Netflix offices, The King's Jester. Then afterwards we did a Q&A with the staff. One of the employees at Netflix goes, "Hey, Hasan, we all know that you did comedy much to the chagrin of your parents. If your daughter wants to do comedy, will you let her?" I go, "No." Here's why I'm genuinely afraid and I don't want my daughter to do comedy. I don't want my daughter to participate in an art form that is reliant on whether or not people like her.
From the moment she gets on stage at that first open mic in front of 10 people at the Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco, the whole subtext of that interaction will be, "Do you guys like me?" To the moment she auditions for her first improv team, "Do you like me?" QHopefully she advances and she auditions for SNL. "Loren, SNL, do you like me?" Now she has a career. Now she's doing that at scale. "Do you guys like me?" Oh, she has a pilot and it goes to air. "Do you like me? How many millions of people like me so I can hopefully continue doing this?" Man, I don't want to participate in this business that's entirely dependent on whether or not people like me. This episode comes out, people are going to tweet, "I didn't like him. I didn't like that episode." I don't know if you had this in your community growing up. There was always that one kid that got into Stanford.
Maya Shankar
Yeah.
Hasan Minhaj
Or that one kid that got into MIT. In our community, it was Nikhil Sachdev, and I still believe this. People are like, "Are you happy with your life?" I go, "If I could go back in time, I would cut my own finger off to be Nikhil Sachdev." I'm not lying.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. No, I understand that.
Hasan Minhaj
Maya, I've hosted the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Maya Shankar
Yeah.
Hasan Minhaj
I'm doing pretty well. I would do anything to trade places with Nikhil Sachdev.
Maya Shankar
Why is that? Why do you value that more?
Hasan Minhaj
Well, because what's beautiful about Nikhil, and it's funny, I'm still very good friends with Nikhil, is he has created a line of work where his self-worth is not linked to whether or not people like him. He works in investment banking. You can't go after him on Twitter. You can't say he fell off. He can walk through the grocery store with his partner, his lover, and no one's going to take a photo of him and be like, "Whoa, Nik's getting old." There is no thing like that. He is truly free.
Maya Shankar
Yeah.
Hasan Minhaj
He's free from all this, Maya.
Maya Shankar
It's interesting because, like you said, he's not really beholden to anyone. Right? His worth doesn't come from other people's approval or whether they find him funny or charming or whatnot.
Hasan Minhaj
This is why Nikhil Sachdev won. He's not playing a game that's predicated on whether or not people like him.
Maya Shankar
How do you work with that? Because it's one thing to make a resolution to yourself to say, "Look, I want to not care what other people think. I want to be proud of the stuff that I do. I want to bring the purest motives and intentions." But it's not like overnight you're like, "Okay, made that resolution. Brain transplant accomplished. Now I'm a new person and I've rid myself of all personal ambition and the desire to be loved and the desire to be liked and whatnot." Are there strategies that you're using to actively try and cultivate a more resilient mindset or a more pure approach to the work that you do?
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. I think the ultimate way to defeat this thing, and it is the cosmic joke, I have to leave the game. I got to graduate from the game and move on to something else. I think this industry will drive you crazy. For me, I think there's a world where I eventually move on from it and I transition to something else.
Maya Shankar
Yeah. The thing you would transition to, it would have to meet the criteria where, "Whatever the next thing I do is, I'm going to be able to establish my self-worth independently of other people's subjective assessment of me."
Hasan Minhaj
Totally. Being an artist is who I am.
Maya Shankar
Yes.
Hasan Minhaj
I do have this need to express myself, but I have to find new mediums as my life continues that are less and less and less attached to whether people like me or not. Maybe it's writing, maybe it's producing, maybe it's directing.
Maya Shankar
Behind the camera.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. But if you are to really go full kamikaze mission on this, then you actually have to leave the game and never come back.
Maya Shankar
No, it's such an honest take because I think a lot of people, they ... Look, maybe the Buddhist monks are capable of this.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
They're like, "I will transcend this shit. I will reach a state of enlightenment in which I do my best work. I'm an artist. I go up on stage. I do my standup routine. I just don't care what the response is anymore."
Hasan Minhaj
You're not. You're lying. You're lying. You're lying.
Maya Shankar
To me, that feels like an impossible task because, look, part of the-
Hasan Minhaj
It's baked into the game.
Maya Shankar
It's baked into the calculus of being a good comedian to constantly be narrating in your own head and having this voice, "Are people going to find this funny? Are they going to find this bit funnier than this bit? Are they going to think I'm a little bit too smarmy if I were to say this thing? Or they think I'm a little bit too humble braggy if I do that?" Right?
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
That's such a hard tension to navigate.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
Was there a moment of reckoning in even just the last year where you found yourself unhappy, you found yourself, despite having all the dreams that little Hasan had for himself, you're sitting there and you're thinking, "Oh, gosh. This is not ... I'm not having the experience I should be having given that I'm in this position."
Hasan Minhaj
I think there was a morning, I was getting some bad news. Something was happening. My son is really cute. He's two. He's in peak cute.
Maya Shankar
Cuteness?
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
Oh.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. Yeah. He still smells really good, and he just wants to nuzzle and cuddle and all that stuff. I'm holding him, and then I got my phone in one hand, and I'm dealing with just some bullshit that's attached to just this stupid Hollywood stuff. I'm like, "This is idiotic. This game I'm playing is so stupid," because also the thing that I was dealing with was some press perception BS thing. It'd be one thing if I was cuddling my son and I'm dealing with notes about the set, or there's something productive that's about, again, like what I'm talking about, seeking truth. It was this just ego, clout, PR, some email thing. "Someone said this about the special. Do you have a comment?" Some idiotic thing.
Maya Shankar
What's your response to the critic?
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. Yeah. "You spent two years of your life writing, performing, crafting this thing. This person has a response to your thing. Do you have a response to their response?" I'm like, "What are we doing? What on earth am I doing? I'm going to miss these amazing moments with him for this. I can't continue to be a part of this."
Maya Shankar
The reason I love that you're saying this right now is that these are the kind of reflections people have when they're at the lowest part of their careers. It's how they find ways to rationalize the lack of success or the great fall from a top. They say, "None of this stuff mattered anyway. What is fame? It's a flimsy thing. It's a transient thing. It was just based on whether other people like you." I feel like I see it more as a retroactive rationalization of no longer being at the summit. What means a lot to me right now is that you are at the proverbial summit. Maybe you'll go higher Hasan, but you're at the highest point you've been at, relative to the rest of your career.
Hasan Minhaj
Sure. Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah.
Maya Shankar
You're standing there and you're still able to see the cosmic joke and all.
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah.
Maya Shankar
You're still able to see with some perspective how harmful, how pernicious, how destabilizing. We're all so vulnerable to the perils of this game. You know?
Hasan Minhaj
Yeah. Yeah. I could feel like, "Yeah, this can't sustain itself. I'm getting older. I'm getting grays in the beard." It's fine. It's okay. Just keep it moving and continue to find ways to express yourself and be honest in your art. But you only win by leaving the game. Again, I think that is actually the true comic understands the joke of it all. That would be the most comedian thing to do.
Maya Shankar
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Join me next week when I talk to Vanessa Bohns, a social psychologist and author of the book You Have More Influence Than You Think. Vanessa's on a mission to make us more mindful of all the ways we already exert influence, often without realizing it.
Vanessa Bohns
It's not just the times that we're up in the front of the room. It's not just the times we're actively trying to persuade someone. It's also the times we just make a throwaway comment and suddenly that changes the way someone feels about something. It's just our mere presence in a room that changes how people talk about a particular topic.
Maya Shankar
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me, Maya Shankar. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Greene, our senior editor Kate Parkinson-Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our associate producer Sara McCrea. Luis Guerra wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there. Of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Li. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram @drmayashankar.
The Host
