W. Kamau Bell
W. Kamau Bell is a Peabody Award winner, 4X Emmy Award winner, documentary filmmaker, stand-up comedian, Celebrity Jeopardy! champion, Official Ambassador of the band Fishbone, self-proclaimed #1 Bruce Lee Expert…
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The podcast opens with Kamau giving Rafael his flowers. Rafael, who has lived in LA for seven years, insists he still identifies Berkeley and Oakland as home, describing his time in LA as an extended work trip.
The conversation moves into Rafael’s background in the Bay Area youth poetry scene, where he competed in the National Poetry Slam and earned a reputation. Around season three of Def Poetry Jam, producers sought out younger voices and brought Rafael on at age 18. He describes being a nervous, skinny kid staring at the ground on stage, having never memorized a poem before. He was one of the first people to convert his clip from VHS and upload it to YouTube, where it reached a million views, a rare feat at the time. He then toured colleges for a decade off that single clip.
During this period, Rafael and his childhood friends opened a recording studio in a North Oakland warehouse, where he first began collaborating with Daveed Diggs. He later took a role as creative director of a poetry scholarship program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also worked toward a degree, finishing four credits shy of completion.
The interview touches on Rafael’s identity as a white Latino, the complexity of Hispanic racial identity, and the importance of honest self-placement within conversations about race and representation in Hollywood.
The conversation closes with Rafael discussing his commitment to the Bay Area community, including efforts around the Oakland film incentive, the Baylist initiative connecting Bay Area media makers, and a call for investment in local film infrastructure. He reflects on the importance of mentorship and passing permission to younger artists, citing an encounter with Jim Carrey as a defining moment of validation.
Donate to #Makeitbay at https://makeitbay.org and to Youth Speaks at https://youthspeaks.org
Who’s With Me is produced by Rabbit Grin Productions. Music by Chris Dowd. Distributed by Pushkin Industries.
Hey, everybody. It's me, W. Kamau Bell.
00:17
Speaker 2
Welcome to episode 21 of Who's With Me, my podcast that is based on my substack of the very same name. As always, if you want to keep up with me, the best way is to subscribe to my substack.
00:27
Speaker 1
Just go to substack. You can download the app.
00:30
Speaker 2
Follow me. Subscribe to Who's With Me. You can subscribe for free, or you can throw me a few dollars because I got a lot of children. How are you going to do it? Anyway, this is episode 21 of my podcast.
00:39
Speaker 1
Who's With Me?
00:39
Speaker 2
My guest today is my friend, Rafael Casal. Rafael is a director. a writer, a rapper, a musician, did I say actor, a showrunner, an activist, an advocate for the East Bay of California, the whole Bay Area, but specifically the East Bay Area of California. He's one of those people who has a lot of slashes in his name, but is working the hell out of all those slashes.
01:05
Speaker 1
You may have seen him in the TV show Loki.
01:08
Speaker 2
He's most famous for his film and series Blindspotting, which he did with his best friend, David Diggs, who was in episode five of Who's With Me.
01:15
Speaker 1
You know, he's just a good dude.
01:17
Speaker 2
I met him and David when they were first promoting the film Blindspotting. They reached out to me and called me and said, hey, do you want to help us promote this film? I did a moderated conversation with them. That was the first time I met them in real life, and I've been in touch with them ever since. These are just two great dudes. We already talked to the first great dude, David Diggs, and today we're talking to the second great dude, Rafael Casal, Berkeley's own. We'll get more into that later. Oh, also... So I'm done with promoting stand-up dates for a while.
01:46
Speaker 3
Yay!
01:47
Speaker 2
I did the Stanford Comedy Club. That was fun. I did Stanford University. Our national nightmare is behind us of Stamford versus Stanford.
01:57
Speaker 1
I did Stanford.
01:58
Speaker 2
Brought my mom. Called Stanford out for its use of AI. So that was sort of a little bit of a news story. So I called Stanford out for that. We also talked about consent on college campuses. Felt like a good place to do it. And, you know, I did the things I do. And my friend Nato Green was there.
02:16
Speaker 1
Dr.
02:16
Speaker 2
Seema Yasmin was there. And it wasn't that far from home, so it was nice. Right now, the number one thing you can do to say, come out, how do I support you? Pre-order Rock, Paper, Scissors, Cheese. We're supposed to get actual copies of it tomorrow afternoon as I tape this. So hopefully next week I will have physical copies of the actual book. I'll be making videos, me and Adam Mansback will be making videos with it. We'll be doing a lot of things, got a lot of ideas, ways to not just promote the book. but just promote bookstores, independent bookstores. You know I love independent bookstores. I actually just wrote a Substack recently about independent bookstores, the bookstore Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis. I was there when I did my series on Substack. I spent three days in Minneapolis. So yeah, we're going to do some things. So real quick before I get into the meat of what I want to talk about today, I don't know if you know this, but a lot of comedians, we make a little bit of extra money. By royalties, we get paid for our comedy shows. running on Sirius XM satellite radio. So Sirius XM takes our albums, and then they have a channel that they've had called Raw Dog Comedy for years now, and they would play comedians, famous comedians, up-and-coming comedians, comedians you've never heard of, because if you have an album or a special, they would take that, and they would play the tracks on their Raw Dog Comedy channel. Well, recently, and you got paid royalties for it. That's the important part. And you would sometimes get checks like, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. And as a working comedian who's not super famous... it can make a big difference. You can be like, now I can have like, I can go.
03:43
Speaker 1
To the doctor.
03:44
Speaker 2
So recently that channel has transformed into a Sebastian Maniscalco comedy channel. Sebastian Maniscalco, one of the biggest comics in the country. If you don't know, sells out arenas. He makes movies with Robert De Niro. He's a huge, huge touring comedian. He's always on Forbes top list of money entering comedians for the last five, six, seven, eight years ago, maybe 10 years, who knows?
04:04
Speaker 3
Huge media.
04:05
Speaker 1
So now the channel is in his name.
04:07
Speaker 2
But they've cut back from the 800 comics they used to run on the channel to 300 comics. And apparently, from what I'm understanding, my friend Mike Kaplan, who's a great comedian, said that those 300 comedians are overwhelmingly just household names and legacy acts. So it's going to be super famous comedians, and then apparently Bob Hope is one of the comics on the channel, so you can find out what Bob Hope thinks about stuff. What that means is that that channel, which was a source of income for many comedians who could use the money, is now just going to be a place for... Rich and successful comedians. And so the comedy community is coming together to say, hey, Sebastian, we don't know if you know about this. You're so rich and so famous. It may be below your pay grade. But we're just coming together to say, hey, Sebastian, we know you're a fan of comedy. We know that you were a working comedian before you broke.
04:52
Speaker 1
He didn't break early.
04:53
Speaker 2
By the time he broke, he already had gray hair, kind of like this guy here and me. So think of the working comedian. Bring back the 800 different comedians that we used to play and more. Don't restrict it to only famous names. So comedians are coming together to say that. It happened on Monday this week. It was a big call to action for comedians. So lots of comedians do it. Patton Oswalt did it. And my friend Kevin Avery did it, who will be on an upcoming episode eventually. And lots of comedians in between, from Patton Oswalt to Kevin Avery. So anyway, just want to get that out there. You don't have to do anything other than just know. And if you see those videos on the internet, spread the word. All you got to do is put them in your stories. Um, but yeah, we just want to get the word out and hopefully Sebastian will just say, oops, but you know, wouldn't that be nice if people just said oops sometimes and fixed the thing. Speaking of situations where oops won't work. So, uh, as I said at Stanford, I talked a lot about, or did a good bit about, uh, consent on college campuses. I actually made a video last week on my, uh, Instagram. I posted on Instagram. This video is for heterosexual men. Maybe this information is good for people who are not heterosexual men, but as a heterosexual man, I know it's good for us. If you're not a heterosexual man, keep watching if you want to.
06:05
Speaker 1
I'm not going to tell you to keep scrolling.
06:07
Speaker 2
So men, let's talk about consent. Let's be clear about something. Consent you get at 10 p.m.
06:12
Speaker 1
It's not a.
06:13
Speaker 2
Blanket consent for the rest of the time you're with that woman. That is just 10 p.m.
06:17
Speaker 3
Consent.
06:18
Speaker 1
Consent can change at 10.01, 10.02, 10.03, 10.04. Second thing, we need to take the responsibility to make sure we still have consent.
06:27
Speaker 2
I directed specifically at heterosexual men, not that the information I was putting in there couldn't be for other people, but I just think as a heterosexual man, I kind of, that's the lane I know what heterosexual men need to hear. And it's just simply the idea that like consent is an ongoing conversation. And if you're in the middle of intimacy, sexual intimacy, and it feels weird, that's probably a sign to stop. If it feels awkward, that's probably a sign to stop. if you're not sure about what's being said, that's a sign to stop. And I say probably, but I'm being a little bit rhetorical. If things are weird, stop. And a lot of people appreciate what I said. Other people were putting out videos like this too, men and women, but especially men were putting them out. And I saw some people in the comments saying, especially women saying, men already know the rules of consent. They're just not abiding by them. So it's almost like this advice isn't helpful because men who are violating consent know they're doing it. And I would say 100%, That is true that some men are fucking demons. I'm not in any way saying that there aren't men who are saying, I know what the rules of consent are.
07:31
Speaker 1
I don't give a shit. For sure. For sure.
07:34
Speaker 2
The other thing I know to be true because I was once a young man is that the men, the demons are often louder than the good guys. The demons are the one who will go, hey, who will sort of give advice on how to be around women. I am old enough to be a member of that generation where we started to say no means no. And I can't tell you how quickly after that there would be dudes saying, well, it doesn't always mean no. So the PSA around the country was no means no. And date rape came into the lexicon when I was a teenager, when I was a young man. So the idea that before that, the idea that rape only happened, it was like a stranger chasing down a woman in a dark alley, which happens, but all the information tells us that rape and sexual assault happens more often to a person from someone they know to, it happens to a woman from someone they know, a man they know is who does it. So, and you know, I did a, I bring it up on the podcast all the time and I hope you're not tired of it. I did do a four hour documentary about Bill Cosby. So I had, I learned a lot in that thing about rape and one of the things and sexual assault and a couple of things we learned is the idea of rape culture. There's just a culture in which rape exists in because there's not a lot of talk against it. And I think the talk does need to come from dudes like me who are like, no, no, no, no, no. We need to be louder about saying this is consent, this is not consent, stop it.
08:53
Speaker 1
We need to be louder.
08:53
Speaker 2
And so what I'm trying to do is add my voice and be louder because I think I didn't grow up with dudes who were preaching about consent. It just wasn't a thing. I mean, either you'd see a PSA or every now and again a movie of the week about it or there might be some sort of seminar, but it wasn't a thing that dudes talked about a lot. And so what I'm trying to do is try to be a part of the culture of heterosexual dudes being like, hey, consent, as some people said, consent is sexy. It's great when the person you're with is into it. Let's do that. There should be no convincing. And if there is, if you feel like you have to start convincing, stop, stop. So on Substack, I'm gonna have a conversation with Christopher Pepper, who's the co-author of the book, Talk to Your Boys, him and Joanna Schroeder, 16 conversations to help tweens and teens grow into confident, caring young men. So we're gonna talk about that because he has written a book again. I think those of us who want to be on the correct side of, this discussion have to be louder. And I think it certainly understand women who are like, this is like one-on-one information. Everybody knows this. They're just being demons. I want you to understand. Yes, there are some demon men. And then there's also a bunch of young boys who are just only getting information from the demons. We talked about a little bit of this earlier in the podcast, in the episode with Mike Eagle, Open Mike Eagle. He talked about his son and how he feels like he has to help his son navigate, especially because the internet is also a big part of it, the Manosphere, the Rogansphere, the Andrew Tate of it all.
10:18
Speaker 4
With the way... social media is, of course. They don't have to be asking. They're just getting better.
10:24
Speaker 3
Andrew Tate's just showing up.
10:26
Speaker 1
All the time.
10:26
Speaker 3
Yeah, just with some unsolicited advice.
10:28
Speaker 4
My son has been exposed to Andrew Tate for like seven years.
10:33
Speaker 3
You know?
10:34
Speaker 4
He's not even the one I'm really worried about.
10:36
Speaker 3
I'm more worried about the ones where.
10:37
Speaker 4
It's like I can tell that it's like that, but it's not as immediately apparent.
10:41
Speaker 1
It's not as obvious. Yes, it's not as obvious.
10:44
Speaker 2
So yeah, I think we have to understand that young men who might just be on the internet just because this guy is a funny comedian in the Rogan sphere, or this guy's got hot takes about sports and they don't understand that they're also being flooded with misogynistic, sexist and rape culture content that then if they don't hear anybody else, shout that down. Not everybody has lucky enough to have a dad like open my Eagle. You, it's not that you're a demon, but you're demon adjacent and you don't know how to interact when you're in the room with demons. Like think about this group chat with the Cornell seven. Apparently the, these two young men gave this woman ketamine. This is all allegedly, I'll say allegedly. And then they went to a group chat and told a whole bunch of dudes that they could come over and sexually assault this woman. And it ended up being seven dudes from what I understand, the Cornell seven. And there were more than seven dudes on that group chat. Some of them didn't go and maybe some of them didn't go because then it was wrong, but they didn't take the next step of like, I need to tell somebody, I need to tell somebody this is happening. I need to let people know this is happening because this is wrong. That's what we got to get to. They're like, oh my God, my quote unquote friends are the guys I'm on this group chat with. And we're all in some group chats we don't really want to be in because you don't want to opt out. I need to then alert the authorities that something's happening or alert somebody I trust. The problem is also, and this is too long a conversation to get to, and this is what I learned from my documentary about Bill Cosby.
12:05
Speaker 1
We need to talk about Cosby.
12:07
Speaker 2
Sometimes calling the cops doesn't help because the cops often are part of rape culture too.
12:13
Speaker 1
And they're part of like, well, what were you wearing?
12:15
Speaker 2
And also, if you call the cops and say, my friends are about to go sexually assault a woman, they're probably going to be like.
12:19
Speaker 1
What do you mean about to? They're not.
12:21
Speaker 2
As my friend Kat Brooks says, cops don't prevent crime. But obviously, we need more resources. We need more loud voices out there. College campus need the idea of like my friend, my pastor, Pastor Michael McBride, works with violence interrupters, people who go to interrupt violence before it happens, which are not law enforcement. We also need sexual assault interrupters, somebody you can call to be like, hey, I think this is about to go down. Help me stop this from happening. So I know it's, I certainly understand women who are online right now who are like, I can't believe we're having to talk about this one-on-one conversation about consent. I'm right there with you. I mean, I'm not right there with you, but I understand. But I also think that like part of it is to build a new normal for men talking about consent as being a good thing, about it being sexy, about it being fun, about it being necessary so that we can actually dismantle The Rape Industrial Complex. A man who I also know is interested in dismantling oppression is Rafael Casal. Rafael Casal, as I said, writer, director, rapper, musician, activist, East Bay native, came from Berkeley, but is also down with Oakland. We talk about a lot of things in this episode. We talk about the differences between Berkeley and Oakland. We talk about his early days as a spoken word poet. He came up through the Youth Speaks scene here in the Bay Area, which is a Bay Area spoken word scene for young folks that still exist.
13:45
Speaker 1
You can check it out.
13:47
Speaker 2
And then he ended up on Deaf Poets at like 19. It's crazy with this giant UC Berkeley sweatshirt on. And he's been a musician, which is how he met Daveed Diggs. And they worked together and they wrote Blindspotting, both the film and the series. And Ruff is also acting. He's been in the film Bad Education. He's been in the Marvel series Loki. I see him directing something right now on Instagram that Ethan Hawke is in.
14:10
Speaker 1
So that dude is up there. He's good at a lot of things.
14:13
Speaker 2
We started off the conversation talking about how he's good at a lot of things. And we also talked about what it is to be a white passing Latino. Or he calls himself white.
14:22
Speaker 3
And he is white.
14:23
Speaker 1
So he's white.
14:23
Speaker 2
But we talk about his racial identity and Latinos who– white passing Latinos or white Latinos who vote for Trump.
14:31
Speaker 1
So anyway, it was a great conversation.
14:32
Speaker 3
Check it out.
14:33
Speaker 1
Hey, thanks for watching an episode of Who's With Me. If you're on YouTube, please like and subscribe, share, hit that hype button. I hear it makes all the difference. Please like, subscribe, share, hit the hype button. Thank you.
14:56
Speaker 3
Here we go. Oh, it's so suddenly so quiet in here. It happens. It happens. Welcome.
15:01
Speaker 1
Welcome. What's up, man? We've been talking for like a half hour.
15:05
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:05
Speaker 1
Now welcome.
15:06
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This continues.
15:08
Speaker 1
This continues.
15:08
Speaker 3
Welcome back.
15:09
Speaker 2
Well, first of all, thank you for being a guest on the podcast.
15:12
Speaker 1
How are you, man?
15:13
Speaker 2
You know, the whole point of this podcast is for me to have conversations with people that... I am in community with, but don't talk to often enough, but because I'm a middle-aged man, I have to schedule them as work.
15:22
Speaker 3
Same.
15:24
Speaker 1
I can't just assume we're ever gonna have an hour-long conversation.
15:26
Speaker 3
It's just a friendship.
15:27
Speaker 1
It's a friendship.
15:28
Speaker 2
That's how I build friendships, is through monetizable content.
15:31
Speaker 3
Fair enough.
15:32
Speaker 1
But with people I want to talk to.
15:33
Speaker 3
What an interesting time. Yeah, what an interesting time. Otherwise, my male friendships die, so... That's the next podcast. Keeping male friendships alive.
15:42
Speaker 1
Exactly.
15:43
Speaker 2
Well, and first of all, I always start by giving people their flowers because I feel like in this era of America and the world, it's hard to find good news. So I obviously want to start with the fact how much respect I have for you as a member of the community who prioritizes being a member of the community.
16:00
Speaker 3
Thanks, man.
16:01
Speaker 1
Even though you've been in L.A. for a while now, right?
16:03
Speaker 3
I've been in L.A. for... Seven years?
16:06
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. You didn't move down there and just become an Angeleno. Nah, dawg.
16:12
Speaker 3
It's a work trip. This is an extended work trip.
16:17
Speaker 1
So when people ask you where you.
16:19
Speaker 3
I'm doing a tour. This is like a tour of duty. Yeah, it's a tour of duty.
16:23
Speaker 1
When people ask you where you're from, what do you say?
16:24
Speaker 3
The Bay Area.
16:26
Speaker 1
Okay, okay.
16:26
Speaker 3
The Bay all day. I say Berkeley and Oakland, specifically. Yeah.
16:31
Speaker 2
That's what I was, because I do wonder about that aspect of it. Because you are a person who reps the bay.
16:37
Speaker 3
Yeah.
16:37
Speaker 1
But from Berkeley. From Berkeley. But then Oakland is such a big influence.
16:42
Speaker 3
O-Town all day.
16:43
Speaker 1
Yeah.
16:43
Speaker 3
They're five minutes from each other. This is a thing that we deeply prioritize here and nobody cares about. No. I'll pull up a map and be like, so I'm from here. And then I lived here and here and here and here. But this line and this line are death. Yes.
17:01
Speaker 2
I remember when I first moved out here, I was living on MLK near the border.
17:05
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:06
Speaker 2
And I remember hearing a group of people yelling at each other. And it was like South Berkeley, you North Oakland motherfuckers. You South Berkeley. And then there are these internal rivalries.
17:17
Speaker 3
Like for years, South Berkeley and North Oakland, it was like people were dying over that. That's the impression I got. So like to misstep that line was crazy. And what people were really asking is like, what do you bang or like what is your area? And so you had to be really, really hyper specific. So in the bubble, deeply important, when you're in another state, they have no association or very few associations with any of these places. And so then you start going, well, what am I really trying to say? I'm trying to tell you what I'm like. And so I go, do you know the Bay Area? And they go, I know San Francisco. I go, okay, sorry. Love San Francisco, but also says something different about you. And people's association with San Francisco right now is like, tech and money and it's not the san francisco i grew up with which was like the mission district and the tenderloin the old tenderloin you know these are it's also when you grew up in the bay this other thing right.
18:18
Speaker 2
Yeah so yeah so i think that when i want to get into that because i have a lot of i i feel like you have expertise in that area that i don't have as a as it's no even though i've been here basically since 97 i will always be a transplant and i'm aware that even though my kids are now from here.
18:32
Speaker 3
But I know, because now you have family who are like, I'm so bae with it. Exactly.
18:39
Speaker 2
My kids don't like Sacramento for no reason other than they're from here, so they're not supposed to like Sacramento.
18:44
Speaker 3
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what the year minimum requirement is.
18:51
Speaker 1
I haven't hit it.
18:52
Speaker 2
Believe me, people on the internet, people from here on the internet regularly let me know that I'm not from here.
18:56
Speaker 3
The internet's not a great barometer.
18:57
Speaker 1
No, it's not.
18:58
Speaker 3
For membership. For finding out. No one's a member of anything. I was like, oh, my kids, they were all born here.
19:04
Speaker 1
Okay, anyway. But also, I have so much admiration for you.
19:09
Speaker 2
Because you are, as a person of meager talents who feels like I work them, the meager talents, I'm about to do it. No, no, no, but I just, I know what I'm good at, and I'm proud of what I'm good at, but I would never call myself, and I put myself in a lot of areas, but I would never call myself, like, you know, now the new, I'm multi-hyphenate, but I'm not a polymath. Like, I have a lot of hyphens, but I'm not good at a lot of things.
19:33
Speaker 1
And you, my friend, and this is the point where I give you flowers, are good at.
19:36
Speaker 2
A lot of things.
19:37
Speaker 3
I'm derailed by the negative self-talking. It's not negative. I'm a good writer.
19:43
Speaker 2
I'm proud of my stand-up comedy skills.
19:48
Speaker 1
But I also know that like.
19:50
Speaker 3
I think because you exist in the craft, you are humble about it. But you have done successful comedy specials that have been filmed.
19:59
Speaker 2
Yes.
20:00
Speaker 3
To a new comic or a non-comic, you are a great comic.
20:03
Speaker 1
Well, and let me be clear about this. Like this, this last year, this happened.
20:07
Speaker 2
I saw a lot of comics getting like young comics getting sort of anxiety online about the Montreal comedy festival about like, I didn't get in or I got in and I shouldn't have got it. And I put up this thing about like, look, I went to the Montreal comedy festival, uh, as an older, I was like 30 at the time, which was a little bit older than like new faces, but I still new face. I went there with no manager and an agent. I came back with no manager and an agent. Uh, I've never been top 10 to watch, young comic on the rise, 30 under 30, and yet, and I listed all my accomplishments. It'd be like, I understand that for me, there's lots of different paths to success. And I just did not take the traditional one. But I wanted to say that it's like, don't think because you didn't make that thing happen that everybody else is getting, that you're not making it. So I understand that. And now back to you. You were 18 on HBO doing deaf poetry.
20:55
Speaker 3
That sounds cool now.
20:56
Speaker 1
No, no, I get it.
20:58
Speaker 2
But I'm saying when I look at you, I'm like, this dude could be a tenured professor at a liberal arts college teaching creative writing and poetry.
21:05
Speaker 3
God, that'd be fun.
21:06
Speaker 1
Yeah.
21:08
Speaker 2
You clearly have made a career as a working actor in Hollywood, which is one of the hardest things to do as someone who is regularly working in the industry. And also, has the debut hip-hop album ever dropped?
21:18
Speaker 3
Am I wrong?
21:19
Speaker 2
Like the actual, or I don't even know if you'd be doing hip hop, because sometimes you sing. That could be a career that you could just be doing that.
21:27
Speaker 3
We did a bunch of albums. I mean, we did them in this building, which I'm sure you'll cut to. But no, there was this whole other life as a musician in the Bay before any of this sort of stuff that I'm known for now. And that was then the greatest thing I'd ever done in my career. We were on the radio, we could tour, we could sell out venues in the Bay. Yeah, like in my mind, I was like, wow, I'm like a successful Bay Area musician. But this thing happens when you join sort of the Hollywood machine is like the minute you get your first credit, everything you did before that goes away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you're reborn. You're reborn in the, I guess what would be considered like the mainstream. And everything you did in the independent world kind of becomes this like secondary career. It was kind of like the other thing you did that doesn't compare to what you're doing now. I find that so bizarre because at the time I was like, if this is my career, I'm so proud of it. So proud of it.
22:28
Speaker 1
When did you know that these other things, these lanes were open to you?
22:31
Speaker 2
Because I had a great time doing a deep dive on your deaf poetry career. And I really enjoyed it because I know I must have seen you. but the time didn't know you. Because I watched, when Deaf Poetry hit, I had a moment of like, is that what I'm supposed to be doing? Because this stand-up comedy thing isn't working. And that was like- Maybe if I didn't try to be funny.
22:50
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
22:50
Speaker 1
Or if I tried to be funny and then serious and then funny.
22:53
Speaker 3
Serious. Yeah, because that was the- Make the turn, yeah. It was for a lot of stand-up comics who couldn't stick the landing. There was a lot of that going on. I'm a poet. great opening joke and they'd be like but seriously guys yeah so trauma and so to see you on that especially you were super you know you were young on that I was young as hell can you talk about Deaf Poets how did that come about yeah I mean Deaf Poets so the youth poetry scene was big yeah and that's what I was doing and I was doing really well at that and we were doing the National Poetry Slam and um you know, was really making my name for myself in this competition that was its own reward. Like that was the top of the scene.
23:31
Speaker 1
That was the gold medal.
23:32
Speaker 3
That was the gold medal. Brave New Voice is still going on. It just happened. Simultaneously, there's an adult poetry scene that Russell Simmons and Camila Forbes and all these sort of producers had discovered in LA with Dante Bosco and Sheehan and Poetry and these guys at the Poetry Lounge. And they decided to make the show. Stan Latham produced it. And they did. And Stan Latham, for you to.
23:56
Speaker 2
Know, basically directs all of Chappelle's comedy specials.
23:58
Speaker 3
Stan Latham is like this legendary director.
24:01
Speaker 1
Producer director.
24:01
Speaker 3
Yeah, producer director who did so many of these 90s sitcoms and all of Chappelle's stuff and a bunch of other specials. He's a legend. And he takes this on with Russell Simmons. The show comes out. It's a big niche hit, I would say. But it was unusually successful for how niche of a poetry. It ran for six seasons on HBO.
24:21
Speaker 1
Yeah.
24:22
Speaker 3
And at around season three, they became really privy to the youth scene. And we're like, we need to get some of these kids on the show to infuse some new blood. And so suddenly there was like, I think there was maybe three of us that season. Maybe it was me and two other people who were 17, 18 years old that they brought on. And then the next season, it was like 20. They were like, this is it, guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. what was amazing is that, you know, Stan Latham and Camila Forbes, who was running the hip hop, Camila was running the hip hop theater festival at the time, put me on and suddenly I'm in the room with, you know, early Kanye, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Common, like, you know, everybody, Dave Chappelle, they're all back there.
25:09
Speaker 1
It became a thing.
25:10
Speaker 2
This is why I think as comics started thinking about it because it was like, it became a thing where They had poets, like dyed-in-the-wool poets, but they had people who were sort of poetry adjacent.
25:20
Speaker 3
Yeah, but they were in your court. They were in the thing that you do. And so there was this weird for like a week. We shot it all in a week in a hotel in New York. So everybody was in the hotel or they were New Yorkers and they were popping in. But I just remember being like, oh, it broke the wall of celebrity and put us all in this artist space in a thing that I was like, you know, I considered myself to be good at at the time.
25:44
Speaker 2
You weren't being a celebrity space, they were in your space.
25:46
Speaker 3
Yeah, and so you're backstage and you're like, you're in the wing with Mos and Kanye. You're just like, this is so, I can't remember, no one's gonna remember this, but Kanye like put a bunch of like, Louis bags or something on stage when he, I can't remember what, it was some designer bags. And I remember him backstage being like, how should I do it? Is it like, should I do a stack? It's like, well, you roll them out, all right?
26:14
Speaker 1
And then I'm going to do a stack and a stack.
26:16
Speaker 3
You know, you see it now, you're like.
26:17
Speaker 1
And this is pre-Kanye.
26:18
Speaker 3
I think Through the Wire had happened.
26:20
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:21
Speaker 3
And that was, and maybe he produced some stuff on the Black Album for Jay.
26:24
Speaker 1
Yeah.
26:24
Speaker 3
But this was, you know.
26:26
Speaker 2
When he walks out on stage, people are just sort of like, oh, Kanye West. Like there's not like.
26:30
Speaker 3
No, this isn't pandemonium Nazi Kanye West. It's backpack Kanye West. It's early, you know, deep, you know, the endearing, beloved.
26:44
Speaker 1
Still just a guy from Chicago.
26:45
Speaker 3
Still just a guy from Chicago. Yeah, yeah.
26:47
Speaker 2
Well, I mean, I remember seeing that show back in the day. And it had basically the energy and vibe of Def Comedy Jam. but because it sort of was set up the same way, and it was definitely black. I mean, I'm sure it was multiracial, but it felt black with the same way the Def Comedy Jam felt black. But because it was poetry, there was a more artistic vibe in the air.
27:09
Speaker 3
Yeah, it did feel like, you know, when you went to like a Youth Speaks event in the Bay, it felt very multicultural. And then there were also open mics in Oakland and Berkeley and in San Francisco. Like San Francisco, there were ones that felt like very Hispanic. You're like, you're at the Latino open mic in the Mission. Then there were ones in Oakland that were like, you're at the black open mic. Yeah, that poetry was like, you're at the black open mic.
27:32
Speaker 2
Yeah, and you sort of had that like, you know, I feel like you see it in Def Jam or black comedy all the time when the white boy goes up. When the room has a little bit of like, here comes the white boy. Here comes the white boy and see what he's about.
27:46
Speaker 3
You got about.
27:46
Speaker 2
0 seconds to figure out, to let us know how we should feel about this.
27:50
Speaker 3
Yeah.
27:51
Speaker 1
I mean, you're from here, so.
27:52
Speaker 2
You're not probably feeling that the same way.
27:54
Speaker 3
You're probably not worried about it. We're not worried about New York like that. We're just like, yeah, it's a poetry event. We know what to do. And I don't think they'd never seen me before. I think they immediately knew how to categorize me. Lemon Anderson was also on the show, and I think Lemon and I had a little Venn diagram overlap, and he's from New York. And so I remember him coming up to me backstage and being like, Uh-huh. Stay with me, kid. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see it. Be over here.
28:27
Speaker 1
Were you on three times? It seemed like from the internet.
28:29
Speaker 3
Three times, yeah.
28:29
Speaker 1
Three times, yeah. So all three of them exist out there. Two of them are on YouTube. And two of them, it seems like you say you wrote like days before.
28:39
Speaker 3
Yeah, you know, I had no concept of like the immortal nature of television, really. So I was very like, I came from the poetry scene that was like, you don't do old shit. Mm-hmm. You know, you write something that you feel and you get up on stage and you do it. This wasn't that now everybody like memorizes their poems and it's this whole theatrical monologue. But at the time we were sort of, deaf poetry was the first place that I'd really ever seen that. The youth scene was like, I wrote this right now. This is on my heart. I'm going to spit this thing. And that was what you got socially rewarded for. And so. The struggle, really, I mean, if you watch, I'm a kid. I'm staring at the ground. I've never had to memorize anything before.
29:16
Speaker 2
It was so, because you're wearing, and the one, I saw it through, but the one I saw, you're wearing this giant Berkeley hoodie.
29:24
Speaker 3
I'm wearing a giant, ginormous Berkeley hoodie and a backwards hat, which I'm sure is a New York hat.
29:31
Speaker 2
And you look like you weigh 89 pounds.
29:36
Speaker 3
I weigh 89. I'm a string bean.
29:37
Speaker 1
Yeah, you're a string bean. And you're staring down the whole time.
29:39
Speaker 3
I hate how many people are going to look this up now. Oh, yeah, yeah. For sure, for sure. Yeah, I'm nervous, and I haven't really stepped outside of my... I hadn't toured yet, so I hadn't been... I hadn't really been outside of the Bay yet on my own. And so I'm also, like, very in, like, my Bay street kid bubble.
29:59
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah.
29:59
Speaker 3
And I'm in New York and I'm having culture shock. And I can't look at people in the eye because I've never had to do a monologue before, which is essentially what they're asking you to do. They're like, all right, cameras here, cameras here, cameras here. Oh, God. No, thank you. I don't need to do, no.
30:16
Speaker 1
When's the last time you saw that?
30:17
Speaker 3
Sometimes I feel like. Jesus. No, thank you. We can stop. We can stop that. I love him.
30:22
Speaker 1
All right.
30:26
Speaker 3
I love that young man.
30:27
Speaker 1
Treat him the way you wanted me to treat myself.
30:28
Speaker 3
I want to hug that young man.
30:29
Speaker 1
Treat me the way.
30:30
Speaker 3
So bad.
30:31
Speaker 1
How old were you?
30:32
Speaker 3
I'm 18 right there.
30:33
Speaker 2
I mean, that's the part about it that for me as a guy, what year was that? So if you're 18, what was it?
30:39
Speaker 3
2004.
30:40
Speaker 1
Yeah. So 2004.
30:42
Speaker 2
I'm 31 at that point. Comedy is not going the way I want it to go. And I'm seeing this and I'm like, oh, maybe I'm supposed to be over there because comedy is not doing the thing I'm supposed to do.
30:50
Speaker 3
Oh, we're all doing the other thing though. We're all going like. pretty heavy wish i could just tell some jokes i know the amazing thing about that show that never got aired is in between every poet because there's a reset yeah most would go up there and basically just do stand-up and he's so fucking funny yeah yeah he's hilarious and you're like oh there is actually an overlap between for sure all these mediums for the folks who are true multi-hyphenates you're like there is a funny bone now it's not enough to maybe do an hour set off top mm-hmm But you see why getting up on stage just turns you... And I would say at that point, I was like... Now I look back and I go, oh, it was a very pure moment in my art because I actually had no interest in the audience. It was entirely just like, I have something I want to say. I want to say it to people that mean something to me. I hadn't really experienced... We played like Herb's Theater and stuff in San Francisco for the Poetry Slam, but like it's a thousand people in the audience of local people. So you really are performing for like your community. And you know that it's not getting any bigger than this. This was the first time I was like, it aired, you know, six months later. And this is in the beginning of YouTube. And I was one of the first people on that show to like get my clip off VHS and Take it to the computer lab at Berkeley City College, which was called Vista City. No, I think I did it at Laney, actually. Convert it to digital and upload it to YouTube, and it got a million views.
32:20
Speaker 1
Wow.
32:20
Speaker 3
And that didn't happen back then.
32:22
Speaker 1
No, it's rare you see a YouTube clip that was uploaded 20 years ago.
32:25
Speaker 3
20 years ago. That's what it is.
32:27
Speaker 1
I was like, 20 years ago.
32:27
Speaker 3
And I toured for 10 years off of that clip.
32:30
Speaker 2
How is that guy not still doing that?
32:32
Speaker 1
Like, how do you branch out from that?
32:34
Speaker 2
Because there's a lot of the poets of that era, if you look them up, they're still out there doing poetry.
32:38
Speaker 3
Yeah, well, I think they also came about it later in their lives and it became a different sort of beacon of their identity than it did for me. I started doing poetry when I was 14, and so it wasn't like me deciding what I wanted to do. It was just something that gave me an identity. I think poetry was... a gateway art form for me. It just allowed me to do a little bit of everything. I got to write. I got to perform. I got to tell a story. I got to get some attention. I got to do all the things that the arts afford you. I was under the mentorship of this cat, Mark Mamouti Joseph, who I'm sure you know. Bamu was starting to do theater. And so I wanted to be over there with the Living Word Project. And music was really important to me. And I was like, that's my, I want to start recording this stuff and putting out albums and doing music shows. That's where the social rewards were more for me. And so I was doing poetry to get gigs because I just knew I could get paid doing it. But honestly, by the time that clip came out, I was kind of done. I was like, I was into poetry, but I was like done doing that. I'd won so many poetry sessions. That day, that same day that I filmed that clip, I went to the Nuyorican Cafe and I won that shit. And that was my goal. I went on a Wednesday night. It was like a qualifier for their, like to make their team. I walked up and I was like, I'm doing deaf poetry. You guys got to let me do the thing. And they're like, all right, kid. And I swept the floor with everybody in there. And I remember just going like, I'm done. And for me, it was competitive. I really enjoyed the competitive element of it. But if I didn't have something to say that was meaningful, like I wasn't just writing just to like have another thing to drop. And so then those questions start around 18, 19 years old. And you go, why do I do, why do I love art so much? What is it that's going to be fulfilling for me? And I realized quickly like, oh, I think, Going to a poetry slam and waiting my turn and going up there and doing the thing is not actually where my heart is, but it hooked something in me and now I need to explore that hook. And now I'm over here doing theater development and I'm doing music and that initial hook is growing and I'm going, oh yeah, now I'm chasing the thing.
35:12
Speaker 1
And I saw you also were part of a program at University of Wisconsin.
35:16
Speaker 3
When was that? Oh, man. Yes. So this is a... I'll try to keep this short. Okay. I ended up... I'd been on tour for... four years, then I started doing the NACA conferences where you get booked. I'm sure you've done those. Poetry, you could do them as well. There was a guy who was recruiting out of deaf poetry because he knew he could get a commission off of booking people for colleges.
35:38
Speaker 2
Yeah, for people who know the NACA conference, the big one is like a national conference where All sorts of acts go, poets, comedians, magicians, musicians.
35:46
Speaker 3
You do five minutes.
35:48
Speaker 1
And you do it in front of the bookers of the colleges.
35:50
Speaker 3
Which are kids. Which are kids, yeah.
35:51
Speaker 2
You're doing it for freshmen and juniors and whatever. The kids who decide who they want to come to their college. And you get five minutes, and you have to impress these co-eds.
36:02
Speaker 3
And then if you do well, your whole year gets booked out. Your whole year gets booked out. You know how much money you're about to make.
36:08
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those college geeks pay more. Because they have budgets that they have to spend.
36:11
Speaker 3
They have to spend. Yeah. So you're getting a G or two for a show. Yeah. And so I would go to the NACA conferences, all that like Poetry Slam experience of doing like three minutes really paid off in a five minute slot. Yeah. So I would go. Most of the poets are in their 30s and 40s.
36:29
Speaker 1
Yeah.
36:29
Speaker 3
The kids don't relate to them. They're talking about mortgages. I'm 19.
36:33
Speaker 2
Yeah.
36:34
Speaker 3
You know, and I'm on YouTube, this thing that all college kids are looking at. Yeah. And so I booked like, Yeah. And so I was going to every college I couldn't get into. Every university I'd ever been like, wow. I always wanted to see Harvard. Yeah, I always wanted to see Harvard. And I'm going to these colleges that would never have let me on their campuses. And I'm playing shows like 500 college kids. And then the professors are hearing about it. And they're booking me to come to their English classes. And they're booking me to come to, because they're looking for a contemporary tetherer. for the material. Suddenly the university's going, when you come, let's keep you here for a week and you'll do a week residency. And I did, whatever university you're thinking of, whatever liberal arts university you're thinking of, I played that shit. I did them all. I went to Alaska. I went wherever there was a gig. I got a gig and I kept going back. How do I get these kids interested in Shakespeare? Raphael Casale. Raphael Casale. No. But I, you know, I went to UW Madison a few times. Mark Bambuti Joseph ended up doing a residency there. He brought me out a bunch. Met a girl. So I was coming out there a lot to hang out. And they were starting a program there, like an undergraduate program for, the bridge was to get poetry kids on scholarship at the university. And really what they were trying to do was like create a diversity initiative program, but to make the qualifier. poetry as a gateway art form into the theater department, into whatever. So the, their plan was, we're going to give out 15 scholarships a year. We're going to build a program that is separate from the regular curriculum. We're going to hire some staff to run that program that helps them like remain artistically active while they pursue their degrees. I know I got a lot of press for it and they're gonna put all these kids in the brochure and all that shit, all that shit that run them like the athletes. Yes. But they needed someone to be the creative director. that was younger, that knew the poetry that these kids were coming from. And so they offered me a job. And I said, no, I'm not moving to Wisconsin. But of course, like, I'm dating this woman that I'm in love with at the time. And I do love the city. And I was like, I have no reason to be here, guys. I don't even have an undergraduate degree. And what they said is they're like, look, we'll pay you. And you can take classes for free. And you can get your degree while you're here. And so I was with a bunch of my boys in the Bay and they were like, I mean, you got to take that. Nice.
38:59
Speaker 1
I love the boys with the good advice.
39:00
Speaker 3
The boys with the good advice, man, were just like, I mean, that's a free degree. And so I moved out there for two and a half years, finished my degree. I'd taken some community college at Laney in Berkeley City that was enough to transfer in as a second year. And I taught, I became the creative director of this program. I gave out 15 scholarships a year with a small staff. And then I did, I taught two or three classes a week and then I took 21 units a semester, 18 units a semester. and um yeah and you got your degree i'm four credits shy i was like come on the alumni association doesn't know this so tell.
39:41
Speaker 2
Me where we are right now and why this why is more oh yeah so.
39:45
Speaker 3
We're in this building um 21 22 years ago My first recording studio I ever opened when I was 18 was in this building. It was right across the hall. I haven't been here since then. And I opened it up with a buddy of mine, Hiroshi Murio, who was one of my high school best friends, and one of my childhood friends I went to preschool with, Hawk Galvan, who's since passed away, rest in peace. And the three of us opened up that studio. It was a shack of a room. It was the only thing we could afford. I'm sure we were all pooling our collective drug money and rented that place. And it was where I first started working with my now longtime collaborator, Davide Diggs, who was brought through on a late night recording session. We were in here working and a mutual friend of ours was like, hey, do you remember that theater kid from high school, Davide? I was like, the guy who wore the pajama pants every day?
40:43
Speaker 1
Yeah.
40:43
Speaker 3
Yeah, that guy. I was like, oh, well, yeah, what about him? They're like, well, he raps. You should work with him. And they played me some of his stuff. And I was like, yeah, have him pull up.
40:53
Speaker 1
Have him pull up.
40:55
Speaker 3
And he came through. And we started working on music. And I think everybody else left by like 3 AM. They got tired. And he and I kept going until 6 in the morning, 7 in the morning. And then for the next year, we would do that every night. We'd burn things to CD and go to the parking lot and put it in the car and listen to it. I have so many memories just like in this parking lot with the sun coming up, listening to some song that never came out. We were like, this is the greatest thing.
41:22
Speaker 1
That's ever been made.
41:23
Speaker 3
This is going to change the world. This is going to change the world.
41:25
Speaker 1
We're just not going to release it.
41:25
Speaker 3
We're just not going to release it. But we did. We released, he released an album out of there. I released two albums out of there.
41:31
Speaker 1
Yeah.
41:31
Speaker 3
We created a whole sort of mixtape sets that we would do, that we would perform all throughout the Bay. We started our band in that room. Yeah, it's a trip. Walking in here, I was like, oh man, this is really bizarre.
41:44
Speaker 2
Yeah.
41:45
Speaker 1
And that the same person. You had a very visceral, like, you were having a sense memory when you walked.
41:49
Speaker 3
I was having a sense memory, especially because it's the same owner. So, like, that's who rented it to us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, like, we were children. Can you imagine, like, three 18-year-olds walking in here right now who, like, don't look trustworthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And are just like, we want to rent that room for music.
42:06
Speaker 2
And at the time, you all were so before who you are now that Brian, the owner, was like, Wait, Daveed was here?
42:12
Speaker 1
Like Daveed Diggs was here? Yeah.
42:14
Speaker 3
Oh yeah. No, but yeah, there would be no semblance of, you know, any, any notoriety whatsoever. I mean, I probably was spending tour money, you know, it was probably, it was probably not a conference. Some university gave me a thousand bucks and.
42:30
Speaker 1
And you turned it into recording studio.
42:32
Speaker 3
And I bought, yeah, I bought Pro Tools and a computer and we, you know, whatever, whatever. And, um, and we started recording. making art for ourselves, which we still do that. And yeah, this is like our clubhouse. We're here like all day and all night. We live in this place. There's no AC. We're sweating with the doors open. And we're trying to figure out what does it mean to make something professional that people might want to buy and become fans of, which was a novel thing at the time.
43:03
Speaker 1
So then how does that guy end up being a guy who's like, in Loki.
43:08
Speaker 3
You know what I mean?
43:08
Speaker 2
Like, I just, you're on this very sort of like, I get the poetry to hip hop track, but then now you're just like a guy who like, I just regularly see in the trades, like, like movie announcements and things where it's like, and also Raphael Casal.
43:22
Speaker 1
Like, you know what I mean? Like you are, you know?
43:24
Speaker 3
Yeah. I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't see them all as because of that poetry background, like getting up on stage and performing words, which I became on tour, got really comfortable with. Because now I'm not doing it in some competition. I have to do a set. And I'm on tour with comedians, right? So I learned a lot from comedians where I got to go do 45 minutes to an hour. And I remember most doing is in-betweens and I would go and see comedians go up and musicians go up and the banter was big. What's your through line? How do you hold people's attention? Because nobody wants to hear 10 poems in a row. That's crazy. But if you can do five... six good ones. And the in-between are stories that give it context and that are funny. And what's amazing about being a poet is they don't expect you to be funny. So you get easy laughs. It's like somebody making a joke at a funeral. You know, like everybody's like, oh God, thank God. Thank God this isn't going to be all crying. And that helps a lot. And so there was like the building of the set, which I think turned me into a performer. There was working with Mark Mamouti Joseph was like all about being in your body. Um, me and David and Ben Turner, who ended up being on, it was like a kid. It was like, you know, we met him when he was 14. He ended up being on Blindspotting as Earl, but he was much younger than us. We all did a play together that, that we wrote with Bamu directing in New Orleans right around that time. And like that changed my life and turned me into a performer. But to me, I was always like, I was performing out of necessity. I just wanted to perform my own work. And so those, those plays became places for me to perform and I got to do the muscle. but the job of an actor, the thing that I saw David doing, which is like going up and doing a play as a playhouse or, or at the Berkeley rep or something. I was like, I don't have the desire to go and audition for the things that you're doing. I saw him do Jesus off the A train and it was like, this is amazing.
45:20
Speaker 2
Yeah.
45:20
Speaker 3
If I wrote this, I would want to be in it. Yeah. But I don't, the amount of work you're doing to get into it, to do this, you're not showing up at a million auditions.
45:28
Speaker 1
Hi, my name.
45:29
Speaker 3
I had no desire.
45:30
Speaker 2
Yeah.
45:31
Speaker 3
Um, but you know, then 10, 12 years later we do blind spotting the movie, which we had started writing then. We started writing when I was 20, 19, 20, because my producing partners now saw me on YouTube do that, do that video. Wow. And they came up to the band. We're like, Hey, have you ever thought about writing movies? And I was like, get the fuck out of here. Um, and they were kids now that I think back on it, they were like 23 and 25. Um, but when we did that movie, I remember, uh, the first day of shooting, I had like a crisis of confidence. And David, of course, was coming off of Hamilton. And I was like, I suddenly feel really inadequate. I was like, I don't, what if my take on Miles is wrong? And I remember David pulled me aside and he goes, nobody knows this guy better than you do.
46:24
Speaker 1
Nobody.
46:25
Speaker 3
You've done the work, you wrote him and you know him. And that's all it really is, is if you've done the work to know this person. And just as he said that, we were at the corner store, was the first thing we shot. This dude comes out of the, tries to come up to the corner store and we're like, someone was like, it's closed, it's closed, we're filming. And he just goes, it's closed, man. Fuck y'all. Gentrification on a whole other level. And he walks off and he looks just like me. He's like this tall white dude, hoop shorts, big, you know?
47:00
Speaker 2
Yeah.
47:00
Speaker 3
And I looked at him and I looked at Davi and just went, no, I got him. I got him. I got him.
47:07
Speaker 1
The universe said, let me send you an avatar.
47:09
Speaker 3
There's Miles. So I was like, there he is. No, I got him. You don't know him? Here he is. Yeah. And that was really me accepting that acting was a thing that I could say I do.
47:18
Speaker 2
Yeah.
47:18
Speaker 3
And then this movie comes out and of course everyone starts going like, oh, you're an actor who writes. And I was like, whoa.
47:24
Speaker 1
How dare you?
47:25
Speaker 3
And I still get it all the time because the most prominent thing, people who don't know that, career before the career, that weird transition, the first time they see you do a thing, they go, oh, you guys are like the Good Will Hunting guys. You're like our actors who wrote a movie for you to star in.
47:39
Speaker 1
You're actors who couldn't find a movie, so you just.
47:41
Speaker 3
Oh, no, no, no. We're writers and musicians who just think movies are interesting.
47:45
Speaker 1
Yeah. Oh, wow.
47:47
Speaker 3
And so for us, we come about it in such a different way. And David is an amazing actor. And it is very much in many ways like his foundation. Certainly more so than it is for me. I think his entry point to art is as a performer. But He's become so much more of a writer. And I think in the same way, my identity has shifted so much more to like, I am a writer first, I am a musician first, but acting has become a thing that I'm like, I feel comfortable doing and practicing and being in the trajectory of without feeling like quite the imposter. Now, you're always an imposter, but I'm like in the circle of being an imposter. Yeah, with the other imposters. And with the other imposters who are professionals.
48:37
Speaker 2
It's funny, it never occurred to me, because I know you two, to think of you, but of course, as the, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck of the Bay Area.
48:46
Speaker 1
Like it never occurred to me. But of course other people do.
48:48
Speaker 3
I wouldn't say that.
48:49
Speaker 2
But I mean as far as like the friends who, like I didn't think of you as that in that same way, but of course other people might think of you that way.
48:55
Speaker 3
I think we just got that a lot because we were friends who made a thing, you know, for us to be in that we wrote together. And, you know, I think that was in some ways the packaging, the marketing of the movie. It's an easy way to talk about it. Easy way to talk about it. But yeah, the idea that like, Now what I get a lot is like, oh, you're an actor and then you started writing material for yourself. And so actors come up and be like, how did you start writing material for yourself? And I go, oh, shit. I was 14. Yeah, no, that's not, I wasn't, I'm not an actor who suddenly, because that's the advice actors are getting now is you got to write your own shit. It's like, you can and you should do that. But like anything, same way that I was with acting or that I was with anything else, like every medium is its own discipline. Yes. And it can't be like a, like a, a, a, something you just sort of tack on to another part of your career for opportunity. It's a, like anything, it's a deep craft, especially screenwriting, which is so different from poetry, which is so different from music.
49:49
Speaker 1
Yeah.
49:49
Speaker 3
Yeah. Screenwriting is a beast.
49:51
Speaker 2
So, I mean, we'll talk about that too, because, you know, every now and again, I, you know, I've bought the final draft software four or five times in my life. Like, so, you know, here, I think I bought it about a year ago.
50:00
Speaker 3
I was like, here we go. Finally.
50:02
Speaker 2
And so much of that type of writing, you know, please, please correct me if I'm wrong. there's a part of it that's also like math, screenwriting. Like you need to, if you don't have an act one, act two, act three, it's, you know, and you want it to be a mainstream thing that the audience recognizes.
50:20
Speaker 1
Yeah. You're sort of stuck. You're not making it, you know, like you're.
50:22
Speaker 3
Yeah. You got to break the rules strategically.
50:25
Speaker 1
Yeah.
50:25
Speaker 2
Right.
50:25
Speaker 3
You got to know. You got to know them.
50:27
Speaker 1
It's the Coltrane thing. Know the rules, break the rules. Yeah.
50:29
Speaker 3
Know the rules, break the rules.
50:30
Speaker 1
Right.
50:30
Speaker 3
But I think it's no different than poetry or music or comedy.
50:32
Speaker 1
Yeah.
50:32
Speaker 3
Like you learn the rules of a joke. You learn the rules of a poem. You learn the rules of a song. And then suddenly you don't need the bridge. And suddenly you don't need the good intro that has the riff that everyone's going to remember.
50:42
Speaker 1
Suddenly you can hide the exposition.
50:44
Speaker 3
But you know that the first hook you're going to go into is so good. You can just drop it on the one and people are like, damn, this is so confident. But I think screenwriting is the same way. And I'm just now starting to feel like I can say that I feel like I'm getting good at it. And the rest was like a lot of help, a lot of mistakes, a million and one drafts. Now I'm starting to see the matrix when I have an idea. I go, okay, before we even start writing, we need to understand the in, the out. When people say, what is the hero's journey? Truly, what does that mean?
51:16
Speaker 1
Yes.
51:17
Speaker 3
When do you know you have the conflict of a character figured out and the conflict of a story figured out? And that screenwriting is 90% you walking around thinking about it. Yeah. Because it should just be a good myth you can tell another person over a drink. And if you can't do that, if you can't walk me through the story over a meal or a drink or something, it's not good enough.
51:42
Speaker 1
That's a great way to put it. That's a real great way to put it.
51:46
Speaker 3
Think about all your favorite movies. I could tell Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as like a Bible story. It is so perfectly designed. And that's that great thing of great writers is like, Yeah, it can be super contemporary. It can be, like, you know, very.
52:05
Speaker 1
Push the envelope.
52:06
Speaker 3
It can push the envelope. It can be very street. It can be very, quote, unquote, high art. It can be whatever. But the bones of it are always going to be that classic human experience of how we like to hear a good hero or villain story. It's the same every time. And the truth is, like, that should be comforting. You don't have to reinvent that. You don't have to reinvent that.
52:25
Speaker 1
It's right there.
52:26
Speaker 2
I remember years ago, a friend of mine, Clark Taylor, who was a comedian who also wrote screenplays, said that, like, if you hand an executive a screenplay, the first thing he has to do is feels like, especially a physical, this is back in the days of when they were more, like this feels about the right length.
52:40
Speaker 1
If it's too thin, I'm like, you didn't.
52:41
Speaker 3
Write a screenplay.
52:42
Speaker 1
If it's this, you didn't write a screenplay, but it's about the right thickness.
52:46
Speaker 2
And they're going to look at the first page and see the names of the characters and then flip to the last page and see if those, some of those characters are still there.
52:52
Speaker 3
Okay.
52:52
Speaker 2
Now I might read it, but like, there's just sort of the basics of like, Does it feel like, does it have the girth of a screenplay? And also, did you carry these characters through to the end? Because if you didn't, I'm not, you know.
53:03
Speaker 3
You know, in the last three pages, is it all completely different people?
53:06
Speaker 1
Exactly, yeah.
53:07
Speaker 2
With a completely different set of events that were established in the first place.
53:11
Speaker 3
95 pages versus 140 pages, big difference. What's the genre? Is it 140 pages and it's a comedy? Yeah. It's too long, dawg. too long that's wrong that's not funny you know is it a horror and it's two and a half hours like too long dog horrors are shot out of a cannon yeah you know so.
53:30
Speaker 2
Just is it the odyssey and okay it's three hours long because the odyssey.
53:33
Speaker 3
The odyssey's fine because even doing it in three hours is a feat yeah yeah wow good for you you edited a lot down you really whittled it down you got a lot out a lot of voiceover yeah yeah yeah.
54:02
Speaker 2
You just said something about yourself that i wanted that wanted to bring this up and this is the best way to bring it up you just referred yourself as a white guy did i yeah well you said that you said the guy outside of the bodega was a white guy oh yeah yeah the corner store was a white guy and that was your character in the And I guess, was Miles a white guy in?
54:21
Speaker 3
I mean, if I am, he is. Okay, but so that's my question.
54:24
Speaker 2
So, you know, it's funny, I don't think of you as a white guy, but I also understand, I have mixed race kids, so I understand this.
54:30
Speaker 3
Is all very complicated. It's a construct, my G.
54:32
Speaker 1
I understand. Did a whole film about it.
54:36
Speaker 3
And documentaries.
54:37
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
54:39
Speaker 2
And yet, like, my middle kid, who's my, the kid who's gonna pass, and we've talked about that a lot, she knows we talk about it, I love when she says, white people in that way that sounds like a black person.
54:49
Speaker 3
I'm like, ah, okay, I'm doing the right, I'm teaching her the right way. Even though she.
54:53
Speaker 1
Knows some people will see her as white people.
54:55
Speaker 2
So talk about your identity and how you, cause I, you know, I think he was a, as a Latino dude, light skin, white presenting, you know? Yeah.
55:05
Speaker 3
No, I'm white, bro.
55:06
Speaker 1
And also I know that like, but also that doesn't disqualify. Latinos can be white.
55:11
Speaker 2
Yeah.
55:11
Speaker 3
Yeah. They are not, uh, they're not mutually exclusive.
55:15
Speaker 1
Yeah. Um, I.
55:19
Speaker 3
Also be saying white people's shit.
55:21
Speaker 1
I've heard you say that.
55:21
Speaker 3
In a discouraging way towards a group of people I don't feel akin to.
55:25
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. Your hat's black, not red.
55:28
Speaker 3
There are sects of the whites. You've also heard the expression, I'm white, but not that kind of white. Yeah, yeah. That one's good too. That's really like, you know what I'm talking about. Them over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, and really the question that you're asking is like, what is Hispanic? latino identity which like we don't have time to get into.
55:48
Speaker 2
No but especially right now it's you know why it's.
55:52
Speaker 3
Wildly interesting and what it means in this country but i think what we talk about when i hear like a purely racialized conversation i hear about like phenotypically how do you how do you function in society right so we're talking about your daughter who's passing it's like it doesn't really there's like there's also this different thing with specifically black people where like the way that we've talked about color in race and the way that we've talked about cultural identity are mixed in one, in one title of a people. And so it's particular, it doesn't transfer in the same way. And so I can like racialize like Latino people so much more easily because I go, yeah, like you can be black and Latino or Hispanic. You can be brown or indigenous looking and you can be Chinese. You literally can be. It's literally anyone. And it's this weird intersection of like, race and nationality and ethnicity. And that is so bizarre. And it's super flawed. I have so many problems with it that we don't have the theme of this podcast to get into. But I think the responsibility of Hispanic people who are white is to own that reality and not pretend as though you are just like really, really, really light. Because there isn't this like weird line that you trip over. It's all made up. And so how you look is kind of mostly all that matters. And then there's how you are culturally raised and how you identify and what your history is. And that's what you carry with you. Your daughter carries with you, you as her father and her mother and the history of that. And she's responsible for all that in a way that some other white kid who maybe looks exactly like her doesn't have to deal with at all and never has to. And so I think what's interesting for me, and I think it's also important, like we're Spanish Hispanic. We're like through, by way of Cuba and Spain, we are Spain Spanish. And so there is no indigeneity myth. And that simplifies it for me in a lot of ways. Whereas I have a lot of friends who are, we could be absolute siblings. In many ways, they are like more that kind of white feeling than I can be sometimes. But some people will hide behind a 23andMe and play the person of color card and try to like unenroll themselves in the responsibility of being a white person in society, white presenting or white, however you want it. And what it means for you to participate in society. And that's where we get like, Why are all them Cubans voting for Trump? It's like, they're white.
58:37
Speaker 1
That's an easy answer.
58:38
Speaker 3
Guys, they're Spanish speaking whites. They're all over Latin America.
58:42
Speaker 1
Yes, yes, yes. They're everywhere.
58:44
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah. Just my favorite game to play. I shouldn't say this. I'm going to say it anyway. My favorite game to play is to just pull up a picture of like a president of a Latin American country and go, is this a president of a Latin American country or a lawyer from San Francisco? And just take the name off. And you start to realize that your perception of people's, ethnicity or race is so colored by where they're from. And if you remove that for a moment and you go, before you hear them, speak before you hear anything about them look at this person yeah you know and there are things that that person can immediately escape and things that they cannot and that what when we have these especially because this comes up in hollywood all the time with these like these very specific representation conversations And I'm always like, what are you actually trying to do? Because this is a visual medium. And you like pumping this full of the widest Latino people you can find isn't doing what you think it's doing. You know, like it's still... Just because their last names end in some Zs or some... It does something.
59:45
Speaker 1
Yeah.
59:46
Speaker 3
You know, like I think my name is Rafael Santiago Casal. It's like, it's a thing. That's a thing.
59:51
Speaker 1
Yeah.
59:51
Speaker 3
I like... Making people read it. And you didn't change the name to, you didn't go, why go by Randy? No, I like seeing it on a screen. I like people having to say it. I like people having to contend with what it might mean. That's important to me. You ever seen the movie Roma? No. It's this amazing movie that shows the dichotomy of like racial disparity in Mexico. And it really like crystallizes the different populations within Latin American countries. I think it was very eyeopening for a lot of people. And for me, when we're having these conversations, specifically because I work in film and television about representation, I care about how it looks. I think how it looks matters a ton, especially when we're talking about reflecting back how a society is supposed to be. And so you can be responsible culturally for what you're standing up for, but not everyone's going to watch.
1:00:43
Speaker 1
The press tour.
1:00:46
Speaker 3
But when I'm watching a movie and I see somebody who I know maybe has only really been in American cinema, which is like globally the most popular, you know, or feels like Hollywood is the thing. When I see that in a meaningful role, it means something. That's why it's important for me. That's when they bring me into a thing and they go, and Raphael's a person of color. And I go, boo, you need to shut the fuck up. funny luckily we've done it we've checked that box yeah it's it's it's person of culture person like outside of like am i culturally mixed absolutely am i outside of sort of like the american like white anglo-saxon probably whatever the book is you know the thing is yeah when i when i watch like trump's trump's cabinet talk about a particular kind of like american christianity do i feel absolutely outside of it in every conceivable way yeah yeah And so there's the otherness of that, but it's important not to conflate otherness or a cultural difference with like a racialized America and pretending to be on the side of a line that I'm not on.
1:02:01
Speaker 2
Which is why I think when I watch, I'm speaking about Blindspotting, the show and the movie, both of them, that it's very clear that you two, and you were the showrunner for the show, right?
1:02:11
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah.
1:02:12
Speaker 2
Which is, I think it's important to say, that's the title that you are making the lion's share of the decisions or deciding who makes decisions when you're the showrunner. So you're not just writing on the show, you're not producing, you're not acting, you're also, like, deciding, like, you're trying to figure out, you're trying to make sure the catering is right. And also, and maybe you don't make the decision, but you try to make sure the person who makes the decision knows what they're doing. And you're also casting, that the way that those both are cast, that you and David are really trying to make sure that it's clear that, like, we're talking about a community that has lots of different people in it and lots of different types of people in it and not.
1:02:46
Speaker 3
Making sure that we have, Oh, we got one Latino person. Okay.
1:02:49
Speaker 1
That's, we got that wrapped up.
1:02:51
Speaker 3
Yeah.
1:02:52
Speaker 1
It's definitely not trying to do one black, one type of black person, you know? Yeah.
1:02:56
Speaker 3
It wasn't trying to, to be this, it was really just trying to be like, this is kind of what, um, a lot of friend groups and family groups in the Bay look like. Um, and trying to, trying to pull as many different, folks from those communities in as possible. A lot of that was also done in the day players and the storylines and all that. But also even that nuanced of a conversation about race and ethnicity and nationality is all like a product of being raised here, right? Like I recognize also that even going just as far south as LA and the industry, which is mostly populated by people not from California, it's just behind, you know? So like I was being told about the nuances of my identity by older people when I was younger. You know, I got to get comfortable with that early. There's still people, and I don't fault anyone for sort of navigating it, but I've watched like actor friends of mine over the course of five years go from I'm a person of color to I'm white, and I'd like to acknowledge that, back to I'm a person of color. Back to I'm white, you know? And really wrestling with it, and I think that it's important to just like not talk shit And go, you're working it out. This is who you are. That's tough. And you are out of your context. And you're trying to figure out what it means. Because also, like, I'm received so differently up here than I am out there. I have my context here. People know my friends and how I was raised up here and where I'm from and what neighborhoods I'm from. I don't have that there. And you know, like, Hollywood's got its little, like, There's like gangs.
1:04:34
Speaker 1
Yeah, yep, yep, yep.
1:04:37
Speaker 3
It's a trip.
1:04:38
Speaker 2
Which is why I still live up here. I haven't got clearance down there.
1:04:41
Speaker 3
I'm trying. Trying to get back. Come home, come home. I'm trying, bro. Yeah, yeah.
1:04:46
Speaker 2
I'm sure you are. So let's wrap up on this. You know, you are also very clear, and I started talking about community. like when people up here need help or you feel like you're a bright light of celebrity and it can help that you will lend your voice and your resources to causes up here. I was a part of the one where you and David were working to save Fairyland during the pandemic, which Fairyland is great. For people who don't know, Fairyland is apparently where Walt Disney went to and was like, oh, I.
1:05:16
Speaker 1
Should do this, but bigger.
1:05:17
Speaker 3
I should do Disneyland like this.
1:05:18
Speaker 1
Yeah, I should do this, but like, but more capitalistically focused.
1:05:21
Speaker 3
Not $ 5 Wednesdays with children. No, no, no, no, no, no.
1:05:25
Speaker 1
Not like that.
1:05:26
Speaker 3
He went to Fairland and was like, y'all ain't charging enough.
1:05:28
Speaker 1
Yeah, y'all ain't charging enough. You can do it.
1:05:30
Speaker 2
So during the pandemic, there was an effort to save Fairland, which was obviously not able to operate during the pandemic. And then you've done things for teachers up here. I mean, there's not too much time that goes by before your IG goes, hey, everybody, I need you.
1:05:43
Speaker 3
I need help.
1:05:44
Speaker 1
I need help.
1:05:44
Speaker 3
And often.
1:05:46
Speaker 2
In the world, but also in the Bay Area. So talk about why that's the case.
1:05:51
Speaker 3
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, like, we're so raised here to feel personally responsible for certainly the cultural institutions of this place and to not just come in and go, gimme, gimme, gimme, and run. But it's also part of my way of staying connected to the Bay on the ground is to stay really invested in the places that make it what it is, and the places where people are going to continue that legacy of really beautiful cross-cultural connection and music and art. And so I think one of the things that's happened a lot lately is because we're working more in film and television, I'm working more in film and television, I'm more connected now than ever to other people in the Bay who want to be doing that. who don't know how. And the truth is it's, it's, it feels so impossible here. There's no, you know, there's no ladder really. And so the Bay list, for example, is the last thing we did, which is a collaboration with the blacklist, which is you've been a part of, and we tried to reach out to every, all, all the superheroes we could find, all the media makers in the Bay we could find.
1:07:07
Speaker 1
The Avengers of media.
1:07:08
Speaker 3
The Avengers of media. We went to Lucasfilm and Steph Curry's company and boots and, Francis Ford Coppola's company and everyone we could. Cheryl Dunye. Cheryl Dunye, who I think we're seeing later today or tomorrow. Yeah, today. And you know the schedule better than I do at this point. I'm trying to wrap it up.
1:07:25
Speaker 1
We're late.
1:07:26
Speaker 3
That project, the Bayless project, is really about trying to create some kind of pipeline for people. I think efforts like that, which I'm always trying to encourage anyone who has any clout to do, I think when you're 16, 17, 18, which I remember still very vividly, clearly, as you can tell from being here as an artist, when somebody who's a little further along comes around and says, um, you can totally do this. All right, I'll give an, I'll do a name droppy story. Um, right after we did blind spotting, I was trying to figure out what to do with my career. Um, I, I, I'll, I'll tell the longer version of this some other time, but I ended up at a dinner with, um, with Jim Carrey. And, uh, Jim had just watched Blindspotting and he was wonderful.
1:08:15
Speaker 1
Yeah.
1:08:17
Speaker 3
Brilliant, beautiful, amazing man. And somewhere in that dinner, he just went, you know, I'm sure I was telling him how much I deeply admired him or whatever I was babbling on. He just goes, but you're doing it. Same as me. You're being who you are. You're making your art. You're getting after it. You're telling your truth. And it's fantastic. And I was just like, oh. You know, and it's just a permission passing. Somebody that you know that is doing a thing that you love. And that you've seen is somebody who's like on the mountaintop. And that's a name droppy extreme case.
1:08:58
Speaker 1
Yeah, but it's also happened. It happened.
1:09:00
Speaker 3
You know, and even if somebody's just like, ah, Blast Body was all right, you know, but me and David roll up and suddenly we're not like these fictional things on a screen, but we're standing there. Mm-hmm. I know that like some of that hater shit immediately goes away and people go, Oh shit. Now it's, now you're standing here. And now I do wish that I had some sense of, um, approval, you know, or a sense of, uh, of relationship and to be able to go in and go, Hey, like I know right now you just think you're like the bummy kid in a recording studio in a warehouse or, or you just have your little DSLR camera and you're shooting shit with your friends. But like, That's the same thing as what we did. And I just think debunking this myth of this gap and making people feel that it's very doable with the very minimal resources and just the dream of it and the ambition of it is so fucking important for artists. And so I just love doing it because I've had it happen a few, it happened with my students at UW-Madison. some of those students have gone on and used poetry to become teachers and principals and lawyers and all kinds of stuff. And some of them are like world renowned artists. And it's crazy that you, you watch them and you're just like, you're doing what? And they're like, man, our time doing that program. Thanks for helping me. You're like, you know, one of them, one of them recently was just like, I was like, oh, for some crazy award and was asked like, name five people who like, you know, really did. And they tagged me and I was just like, oh.
1:10:47
Speaker 1
Oh.
1:10:47
Speaker 3
Yep, yep. You know, and it was, look, the shout, I love a shout out on Vane, but also it was just like, wow, that was an important time to you. And that work matters. And I think about all the teachers.
1:11:00
Speaker 1
And the work sustains.
1:11:01
Speaker 3
It sustains. And I think about how much like Mark Monty Joseph and Chris Walker and all these mentors like, There are mannerisms during this podcast that I stole from Bamu. It stays with you forever. And I just love that work.
1:11:15
Speaker 1
That's so cool.
1:11:16
Speaker 2
It's so funny to think that you just basically described the journey from across the hall where we.
1:11:20
Speaker 3
Were to right here.
1:11:23
Speaker 1
But you had to go down Jim Carrey way to get here.
1:11:26
Speaker 3
I still managed to get that story out.
1:11:28
Speaker 2
And also it happened and it's a real thing. And I think I've actually had a similar experience. Story I'll drop with Jim Carrey where he saw me somewhere and was like, oh I know who you are and I'm like and it's weird cuz again It's easy to go Jim Carrey Hollywood a-list that uh, and yet, you're you know, the TV can look back at me Really good at what he does. Yeah and has clearly fought for artistic integrity When he sewed up we didn't go that guy has artistic integrity his ace Ventura, but he did and Yeah, but he's fascinating.
1:12:00
Speaker 3
We don't even have time to get into that guy.
1:12:02
Speaker 2
That's a whole separate, I think, it's funny, I really appreciate how he has evolved into one of the, like sort of Hollywood Santa Claus, like he's this guy who's still working and clearly made some, anyway, we can.
1:12:11
Speaker 1
Talk about that another time.
1:12:13
Speaker 3
Yeah, he's an amazing dude. There's a thing about, yeah.
1:12:16
Speaker 2
So the last thing I ask, and you sort of mentioned some organizations, and we've also worked together on Make It Bay, which is about trying to make filmmaking in Oakland specifically, but the Bay as a whole more accessible. Shout out, Any organization you want to? There's so many you work with and have started up and created. I mean, honestly, I'm shouting out Make It Bay right now. I'm shouting out Make It Bay. I know it's like, it would be self-promotion if any of us got paid. But actually what's happening is we have an Oakland film incentive. Again, really for the first time, we almost got it a few years ago. And then it crashed and burned. And now we have it again. Barbaralee has approved it.
1:12:51
Speaker 3
It's not a ton of money, but we need to get infrastructure immediately to be able to get films coming here to use that incentive.
1:13:00
Speaker 1
We need a real Oakland film office.
1:13:01
Speaker 3
We need a real Oakland film office, which does not exist. There's some money to start building it in, but really what's going to do that is getting private companies who are invested in building film infrastructure here long-term to start matching some of that money that the city's giving in so that when a big film from LA or New York or wherever is like, this really should be shot in Oakland, or between Oakland and San Francisco, that that's feasible, that there's enough money in that fund to make it worth their time. And so I know there's always people who want to give $ 10, $ 20.
1:13:32
Speaker 2
$ 30.
1:13:32
Speaker 3
If you want to do that, give it to YouSpeaks. They gave me my start. Please, by all means, it's an amazing organization. If you have more than that. If you have more than that. If you've got a lot of zeros in your donation and you're trying to figure out how to build up the art scene in the Bay Area in a way that can create mass jobs everywhere, Job creation, which we talk about all the time. Union jobs that will last and last and last and pay for people to buy houses and create families here.
1:14:02
Speaker 2
As we say, that will make entertainment just another industry, a boring industry.
1:14:07
Speaker 3
And a local industry, an industry that's not bringing in all this talent from outside, but that actually will reward hiring because the incentive is bigger if you hire local. It will reward local hiring and local training. Get in touch with Make It Bay. get in touch with Sam Benpong who knows all the inner workings of how the city funding is working and make a contribution because people should be shooting here. It's just stop going to Albuquerque.
1:14:30
Speaker 2
And we have some pretty big local filmmakers who would probably rather shoot here.
1:14:33
Speaker 3
And we have amazing, the local film, the people that are part of the Baylist sort of like leadership board and co-founders, it's a crazy list of people. There's a reason that Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas brought their institutions here. Yeah. That we want more of that. We want more of that kind of business coming here.
1:14:54
Speaker 1
Yeah.
1:14:54
Speaker 3
All right. My last question is, the podcast is called Who's With Me.
1:14:58
Speaker 1
Are you with me?
1:15:00
Speaker 3
I'm always with you, Doc.
1:15:01
Speaker 1
I appreciate that.
1:15:02
Speaker 3
Thanks, man. My man. Thanks, man. I knew it. I knew it.
1:15:05
Speaker 2
But it's in the contract, I have to ask. And literally, we are leaving here to go be at this event, The Baylist.
1:15:13
Speaker 3
Yes, we need to get over there.
1:15:14
Speaker 2
Yeah, so yeah, we need to get over there. I need to get a beard trim. Next time you see me, it's going to be all cleaned up. But thank you, brother.
1:15:19
Speaker 3
Thanks for having me, man. This was awesome. Thank you.
1:15:23
Speaker 2
Thank you for listening to Who's With Me. Thanks to Rafael Casal for stopping by. I love talking to that dude. I feel cool when I talk to that dude. I must be a pretty cool person to talk to Raf. And as I found out, Blindspotting the series is going to start streaming on Netflix.
1:15:35
Speaker 1
The two seasons, they're great.
1:15:37
Speaker 2
Check them out. You can binge them. October 20th, they'll start streaming on Netflix. Again, like I said, he's working all the time. He's following him on Instagram. He's always putting up songs and ideas and advocacy. And also you can see he's always working. Like I said, he just directed something with Ethan Hawking, that dude is constantly working. So yeah, he mentioned two different nonprofits. He mentioned Youth Speaks, which is the nonprofit that teaches kids how to do spoken word. And they have camps and afterschool programs and they have brave new voices and they have competitions. And that's what launched Roth into the world. And they're still out here doing good work. So check out Youth Speaks. And then he also talked about an organization that me and him are both a part of called Make It Bay, which advocates for the Bay Area, especially the East Bay. San Francisco is doing its own thing, but especially the East Bay. To be a more accessible place for filmmakers so that more people can make film and media here. And that it's not an idea that it's just, you have to go to LA to do that. It's a thing that can happen here. So making it easier to get permits and to get funding and to have, uh, like, like support from the city of Oakland.
1:16:40
Speaker 1
So yeah, make it Bay.
1:16:41
Speaker 2
Uh, it also wants to attract filming to the Bay area the same way that has.
1:16:45
Speaker 1
Happened in Atlanta.
1:16:46
Speaker 2
In other cities, we want the Bay Area to be a place where big Hollywood productions can come here and hire locally with those boring-ass union jobs that pay good money and give you benefits. Anyway, thank you for listening and watching. Who's with me this week? Thanks to Ravagrin Productions, Pushkin Industries, and who knows Best Productions. Thanks to Skyline Studios where we take this episode here in beautiful Oakland. As always, special thanks to Fishbone!
1:17:14
Speaker 1
And again.
1:17:14
Speaker 2
As always, do something good for yourself. Do something good for your community. Do something good for the world. See you next week.
The Host
