Charlamagne tha God Opens Up About His Depression & Childhood Trauma!
Guests: Charlamagne
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
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I didn't realize until I got older. I was just a young kid and I was molested. Whoa.
Please welcome Charlamagne Tha God, co-host of The Breakfast Club and America’s most influential radio host.
Growing up, my father was telling me, "If you don't change your lifestyle, you're going to end up in jail, dead, or broke." The problem was he wasn't practicing what he was preaching. When I started selling drugs, I found out he was selling drugs. Then he had an affair on my mom, so I became a player because I felt I had to be like my pops. But then I ended up getting in a situation where a shooting happened and going to jail.
But I was able to finally wake up. And I was smart enough to realize whatever I want to be doing five years from now, I got to start doing now.
And the microphone ultimately changed your life. But I didn't know that you had 12 years of rejection.
I got fired four times. I had just collected my last unemployment check. I was scared to death. But you can't live life with fear; you got to live life with faith. Next gig I got was The Breakfast Club. Fast forward three, four years, I'm having more success than I've ever had in my life, but I just was not happy. I was losing myself. And those suicidal thoughts just crossed my mind for no reason. And even now, what am I still doing here? Man.
"Get Honest or Die Lying." Why did you choose those words? Why did you choose that title?
It's a play on 50 Cent’s "Get Rich or Die Tryin'." I'm always going to have some old hip-hop somewhere. Like my last book was "Shook One," which was paying homage to Mobb Deep. But also, just talking about how I felt my whole life when I would get panic attacks, get anxiety attacks. And "Get Honest or Die Lying"—that's not just a play on 50 Cent’s title, that's how I truly feel.
It’s like, yo, if you don't get honest with yourself, you're going to die lying. I went to a spiritual retreat back in February with my wife, and that's one of the things that came up for me that weekend. One of the things that came up for me was: stop lying to yourself and stop volunteering those lies to others.
I think a lot of us do that a lot. Like we lie to ourselves and then we just volunteer those lies to other people. Nobody even asked us. And I think social media contributes to a lot of that because every day you feel like you have to feed this beast.
You might go look at your feed and at some point you got to ask yourself, "Who is this person?" Or just the things that you say to people in your life as you're just growing and evolving. Just as a human, you might just volunteer lies for security purposes, or to mask insecurities, or to mask fears. And so it's just like, yo, if you don't start getting honest with yourself, you're going to die a liar.
The truth and the lies start young for all of us. Especially if you look at the stats for Black men, because they are much less likely to get to the point where they can get honest with themselves in their whole selves—their mental health, everything. When I read through your story, I met an individual that I never knew before.
I've watched The Breakfast Club for years and years—probably for a decade. It's always been my connection with US culture, watching that show. And I watched the guy that was a bit of an antagonist to the guests coming on, but I never knew all of the other stuff. And you're one of the only Black men that I encountered, especially in the United States who has a big public figure, who has been so unbelievably honest about what it is to be a complete man and the complete human experience.
And your complete experience starts very young. If I am trying to understand the man that sits before me right now, where do I have to start to truly understand?
Oh, you definitely got to start from the beginning. You got to start from that single-wide trailer in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. Growing up as a young man to a great father and a great mother. I say "great" now in regards to my father because I understand him as a man.
There was a period of my life, especially when I first started going to therapy, where I didn't know if I even liked him as a person. Because you know you got to question yourself—you question things that he did to you growing up. I always said my dad raised me out of fear and not love.
But the fear was just from the standpoint of he didn't want me to make the same mistakes that he did. And he didn't want to see me make the same mistakes that he saw a lot of people in our town making. The one thing that he used to always instill in me was like, "If you don't change your lifestyle, you're going to end up in jail, dead, or broke sitting under the tree."
And I think that's what happens with kids a lot, right? Kids end up mirroring the parent. And I think sometimes when you see yourself in your child, if you made a lot of mistakes and you bumped your head a lot of times, man, that'll probably terrify you to see your child going down that same path. So for me, my journey would definitely have to start in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, in that single-wide trailer on that dirt road.
You grew up in a single trailer in a dirt road with a father that seemed to be pretty absent from what it says in your book. You talked about him raising you there, but it sounded like he very much also didn't raise you.
No, he was absent in the sense of he had his own issues that he was dealing with. And I didn't find that out until 2018 when I put out my second book, "Shook One: Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me," where I really opened up about a lot of my anxiety and a lot of my depression and going to therapy.
I'll never forget it; it was the week of Thanksgiving 2018. And I had a younger cousin, he was like 24 or 25 years old, and he tried to complete suicide four different times. And on the fourth time, he completed it. It was the week that he completed it, and then on top of the fact my father had just read my second book, he called me.
He talked about my cousin and he talked about my book, and he said, "Man, I was going to therapy two and three times a week. And I tried to kill myself 30-plus years ago. And I was on 10 to 12 different medications for my mental health." So when he said that to me, I already knew that he had the substance abuse issues. I knew he dealt with the substance abuse issues, right? But I knew that, but I didn't know the other aspect of it.
So when I realized that, I'm like, "Oh, I get it." Because my dad was absolutely there when he was sober for the most part, or when he wasn't dealing with his own issues. But like I said, the way he raised me was out of fear more than love. But he definitely had his foot up my ass in a real way just because he didn't want me to make those same mistakes.
But I always felt like growing up, we didn't have the kind of relationship I wanted to have, that I would think a father and son would have. But that's only because he was dealing with his own issues. And then he started having an affair on my mom, so he really wasn't in the house then. He was off with his new family.
How old were you?
It had to be like '98, so maybe I was 19, 20 when he left the house.
I think we model our relationships—we model our idea of relationships based on the relationship we first see with our parents. I think about my own—my mom's Nigerian, my dad's English. A household that was very loud, to say the least. And I always thought my dad was in prison. So growing up, I never had a relationship because I thought women were like prison.
And it was only until I got to about 30 years old that I had a real relationship. But even now, I've had to go to therapy with my partner over and over again to get out of being triggered by this idea. Whenever we have conflict, I'm like "Run," because I always wanted my father to run from my mom. So I had that deep in me that relationships were prison. And when I read through your story and looked at your father and his infidelity with your mother, I was wondering how that impacted your future perspective of what a relationship is.
Oh, it had me bad for a while. Because I've always been the type of person—I like being with one partner. I like being with one woman. Like that's something that I always thought was really cool growing up, probably because a lot of the images that we saw especially on TV back then, it was always the nuclear household.
It was always like the mother and the father, whether it was The Cosby Show, or whether it was Martin and Gina, whether it was the Winslows on Family Matters, whether it was the Evans on Good Times before James died, whether it was the Jeffersons. You always saw a Black man with a Black woman and they had a family. That was what I thought the American Dream consisted of. So that was always something in my mind that I wanted.
And then I remember when I found out my pops was cheating on my mom, and I remember just confronting him about it and just asking him. I'll never forget it: he was in my room in my mom's house. I used to have one of those exercise bikes in the room, and he came in to get on the exercise bike because I needed to talk to him.
And I brought it up to him, and I remember him just saying to me like, "Yo, so you only got one woman, huh?" He looked me right in the eyes and that's what he said. He was like, "You only got one woman, huh?" And I was like, "What do you mean I only got one woman?" He was like, "You know, when you get older, you'll understand."
Like literally. So planting that in my head just made me feel like, "Am I doing something wrong? Am I supposed to have more than one woman?" So I spent a large majority of my life trying to show him that I was like a player. I was like my pops. I had a roster too.
Only for him to come all the way back around to tell me I always had it right. Literally. To only come back and tell me one of the worst mistakes he ever made was leaving my mom, or causing my mom to leave him, however which way it went. And I remember him saying that to me and he just was like, "Man, you've always had it right."
But that just shows you, right? Just because somebody is older than you doesn't mean that they're right. It doesn't mean that they're always correct. Like we're always growing, we're always evolving if we allow ourselves to. And we're going to figure out later on in life that yeah, we did make a mistake doing whatever it was that we were doing. And we should be able to admit that no matter the age, and correct it no matter the age.
Eight years old, your cousin's ex-wife had a sexual encounter with you. And you talk about these sexual encounters changing your personality thereafter. When did you decide to speak about this, and when did you begin to learn the implications that that one incident when you were that age had had on you throughout your life?
Well, I used to always make jokes about it. Because I used to always say—I used to buy these little firecrackers that were like these little poppers, and you could throw them on the ground and they would pop. And so it's like, one day I just started throwing them at her because I didn't want her to touch me.
And when I did that, she started calling me ugly, like literally from that moment. "Yo, you ugly, you got a big nose." She'd be telling everybody, "Look at this nose, I think his nose is swollen." To the point where my grandma, God bless the dead, would take cream and put it on my nose to try to reduce the swelling. But it wasn't swollen, she was just messing with me. So in my mind, it was like a psychological thing—like she was messing with me mentally.
And how old was she?
I don't know. She was 30, 40, 50—she was definitely older. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was eight. Yeah. And I remember me telling people the reason I made her stop is because I didn't like the smell of her Jheri curl. So that was always the joke.
And I remember watching Tyler Perry on Oprah Winfrey’s show. And I remember watching him cry over an older woman who molested him. And I remember thinking to myself, "What's wrong with him?" Because the way we rationalized it in our mind is like, when you're young, you just used to talk about it like it was a sexual encounter.
And when I think about it now, like I had me and three of my other younger friends, and all of us were talking about these sexual encounters we were having with older women. So now that I think back on it, I'm like, "Damn, we all was getting molested." You just don't look at it like that when you're a young man. When you look at it when you're a young man, you look at it like, "I'm just getting action early."
So when I saw Tyler on Oprah, that's when I first started like thinking about it. And I remember—I forgot what year this was, but this was way, way back in the day—but I remember there was Twitter, and I remember tweeting about it. But I was tweeting about it in jest, like wondering like "What the hell is wrong with Tyler Perry?"
But then I had to start asking, "Well, what's wrong with me?" That I'm not reacting to being molested the way that he is. But then you don't even realize that it's molestation until you get older. At least I didn't realize it until I got older. And I was like, "Oh, I was getting molested."
And then when you start going to therapy and you start peeling back the layers of that trauma, you start realizing, "Oh, this is why I am the way I am in regards to pleasing people." Because I felt like even though what she was doing to me was wrong, and it made me uncomfortable and I didn't like it, I had to keep doing it so she'd stop calling me ugly.
Because her calling me ugly was really, really, really hurting my feelings as a young eight-year-old kid. So that leads to you being an older adult who's a constant people pleaser because you don't want to let nobody down. Because you know if you let them down, then they'll talk bad about you.
But then you realize you got to set those boundaries. Because if making yourself uncomfortable is the only way to please said individual, that individual don't need to be in your life. That's not somebody that you need to have in your circle at all.
You've never gone back and found out who that person was and done anything about it?
No, I see her.
You still see her?
Yeah, I've seen her. I've seen her around in my hometown. Absolutely.
You're not interested in—?
No, last time I saw her actually, she came up to me—this was about—let me see, it's 2024—this probably had to be before COVID. She came up to me at a house party and she was like, "Oh, you're so handsome!" And I was like, "You've been thought I was handsome. Beat it!" Like you've been thought I was handsome. Knock it off.
Your behavior becomes problematic. 15 years old, 1993. I read through from when you were 15 up into your early 20s, up to about 23 years old, and there was quite a shocking pattern of behavior involving drugs and other things.
Not that early. 15, I was still in high school. The disciplinary problems started in middle school. It started when I was in like seventh grade. And the disciplinary problems started just because my older cousins were like, what you would call I guess, bullying me.
I was wearing glasses and I had the fanny pack, and I was in what they used to call it—the classes were broken down in letters. So it was like A and C were for like the smart students. So I was in the A class. And there was only like two or three Black people in the class. Rest is all white.
And so like I would be with a lot of white people for the most part. And my cousins, who were all from my daddy's side of town, they would bully me. Like literally, like they would just beat up on me because I was being with all the white kids. Because my dad is like a—was a really cool dude.
Like he was like the guy who always had like the small little sugar shack where you could come over there and get your alcohol and stuff like that. And he used to hustle his drugs and stuff like that. People knew my pops; my pops was a cool dude. So they thought I was supposed to be like that.
So being that I wasn't like that, they was like—they would bully me. And it just became one of those things where it was like, yo, "If you can't beat them, join them." So it's like, my glasses fell off my face one too many times, and like that one time where they fell and they just broke for good, that's when I broke for good.
And I was just like, "You know what? If I can't beat them, join them." So I just started hanging with them. And in order to hang with them, I had to be I guess like worse than them to prove myself in a lot of ways. So that's when like the disruption really started in class. That's when the class clown really started to happen.
And that just evolved into me getting left back a couple of times. I went to summer school twice in seventh and eighth grade, then I got left back in ninth grade. And that's when I actually had to stay back. And then by the time I got to 10th grade, I was getting kicked out of the school I was in, Berkeley High School.
And they transferred me to Stratford High School where my mom taught, because they thought if I was at my mom's school, then I would act better. But most of my problems from that point on started to be in the street more so than in school. And so I ended up in a situation where I was with some of my homeboys and a shooting happened, and we all ended up going to jail. And they actually came and arrested me from Stratford High School. And that's the last time I was in a high school.
And you sat in jail for three months?
No, it was like 45 days, something like that.
Your dad could have bailed you out.
My dad could have bailed me out, but he wanted to teach me a lesson. Like he wanted me to learn from my mistakes. So he let me sit in there for 45 days. And sadly, that wasn't a wake-up call, but it wasn't the "wake-up wake-up" call. It was more like I woke up but then I hit the snooze button. Slept for a little while longer before I finally got up.
As a grown man, you can look back now and think that 15, 16-year-old kid—he needed something that he wasn't getting. He needed a bunch of things he just wasn't getting. Because you got kids now yourself, so if you saw that behavior in your kid, you probably wouldn't think, "Okay, they need to go to jail and sit in jail for a while." You'd probably look at it and go, "There's something unmet there."
Man, that's such an interesting question because when I do think back on it, I say to myself, "I didn't have to do none of that." That's my mindset now. Like I didn't have to do any of that. My mother was an English teacher, she was a Jehovah's Witness, my grandmother was a Baptist. They absolutely taught me better. I absolutely, positively knew better.
I had the example of my father. If my father had been probably more honest with me about his life and the things he had gone through and who he was, then I probably would have seen a lot of those obstacles coming. Because I got to the point even when I started selling drugs—when I found out he was also selling drugs, you can't tell me not to do it.
You can't be on some "Don't do as I do, do as I say" type stuff. I remember us having that conversation, and he was like, "Well, it's my house, so you're not going to be doing that in my house because you're making me hot." Like literally. And so I feel for me, I was just a young, impressionable kid who wanted what every single human being wants, and that's just simply security.
And if you don't get security from people, you will find a way to get it. So me becoming that version of myself I was then—that was literally for security. That was for survival. Like I was just literally a kid that was tired of getting bullied. But once you get down that path, if nobody stops you, there will be things that stop you. Like jail. Or sadly, in some cases, death. But then it's too late. So I just always thank God that even though I got caught up and I made those mistakes, I was able to finally wake up.
I've sat with Busta Rhymes and Ashley Walters and they talk a lot about their fathers, and they also talk about the absence of male role models often for young Black men and the impact of that. I've actually come to learn the impact of that by having these conversations over and over with Black men that didn't have a male role model in their life that could stop them from going down that path.
And I don't think it's talked about enough. Because I've learned about it from Busta Rhymes and from Ashley Walters from Top Boy, and it's really made me think that there's something we need to think more of in society. For people that have single parents or have an absent father or an emotionally absent father, I think we could save a lot of downstream consequences with mental health, crime, and all of those things if we thought more about the importance of male role models.
Oh yeah, I mean listen, I had a male role model in my father, but the problem with my father was he wasn't practicing what he was preaching. So you have to be about actions; you can't just be about words and lip service. People have to see you and see that you're a living, walking example of what it is that you're telling others.
Like I didn't even believe that men could be faithful to their women until I started seeing it from people that I actually knew. It's one thing for somebody to tell you they are, but like let's just say you're out and about at a television shoot and you're out of town, right? And you and this person or these people are hanging around after the shoot, and their wife is nowhere in sight and they got every opportunity to do the wrong thing.
But they're like, "Nah, I'm going back to my room. I love my—I gotta get home to my wife." Then you strike up conversations like "Really?" and they're like, "Nah, I'm faithful. I don't get down like that." You're like, "Oh, alright, that's respectful." So it's just like, action speaks way louder than words, man.
And the thing I love about the era that we're in now—this is the first generation of people that I feel like we have the luxury of healing. The people before us, our parents—I'm 45—my parents, they were just scratching and surviving. They were just trying to figure it out, just trying to make it, trying to keep some food on the table and a roof over their head. We are the first generation that has the luxury of actually healing. And I think that's a beautiful thing.
There's a lot of role models emerging now on the internet. You think about the Andrew Tates of the world and all of those conversations, and at the same time, what it is to be a man has become quite unclear in many respects. Like gender roles, and there's a lot of—because we're in the post-#MeToo movement where a lot of inappropriate behavior was called out.
And it's funny, a guy came up to me in the gym, Lifetime Gym just down the road from here in Brooklyn yesterday. Came up to me, 25-year-old kid wearing a Barcelona shirt, tapped me on the shoulder, said, "I love your podcast, listen to it a lot." One question. He goes, "I'm 25 years old. Where do I find male role models?"
And I remember I was with Will in the gym and I just remember thinking, "That's so interesting," because I'm getting that conversation over and over and over again. I think what he's actually saying is like, "What is a man in 2024, and who do I model myself on?"
Because there is a lot of—if you go on like Twitter, there's a crowd of people that are saying "Lamborghini, 17 women, Rolex, loads of money." And I'm not necessarily sure that's a great example either. And then you look at the stats around suicidality amongst men. In the UK, where I'm from, the single biggest thing that has the chance of killing you is suicide if you're over the age of 18 and under the age of 45 as a man—it's yourself.
And I just think if we put all this in context—this looking for role models, masculinity is really unclear, we've called out men, do we need to call them back in? What matters? You got a young son?
No, I got all girls. I got four daughters. Me and my wife got four daughters. I mean, I guess it just depends what you're trying to model. Like we use that term "role model," but what does the term "role model" mean? Because you can only model yourself after what somebody shows you.
You can only model yourself off what somebody presents. So if you like that person's Lamborghini, if you like that Rolex, if you like the clothes that they got on, if you like their jewelry, then you're going to say to yourself, "Okay, that's what I want." So that's what you're modeling. You're not necessarily modeling the man, you're modeling the man's things.
You might as well be looking up the mannequins. It's hard to really model yourself after somebody's personality, after somebody's morals, after somebody's values, after somebody's beliefs, because you don't necessarily know exactly what they are. And especially on social media, you just know what people present.
So you got to be very careful of that. I would tell people, "Man, yeah, if you admire something about a person, cool. Let that be like a guide for you so to speak. It's like a flare going up in the air so you kind of know which direction you may want to go." But you don't know that individual. The only individual that you will ever truly know is you.
What kind of man do you want to be? Are you trying to be with the therapy, with the work you've done with your books, etc.? What kind of man are you trying to be?
A good man.
And what does that mean?
Just somebody who is who they say they are. Like that's what I always tell people, and that's what I constantly tell myself: I want to be who I say I am. I want to be who—if you see me saying something, if you see that I'm telling you that this is what I believe in, if I'm telling you this is my truth, I want you to know that that is exactly who I am.
Like you're not going to hear something in the future and be like, "Oh my God, this dude had a whole other life going on and he had this going on over here and that going on over here and nobody ever knew about it." No, I'm a faithful husband. I am a learning father.
And the reason I say "learning" is because there's no class on being a parent. None whatsoever. Anybody tells you that they got that figured out, they are lying. I got a 15-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a 2-year-old. And every single one of them challenge me and my wife in completely different ways.
And there's been plenty of times where me and my wife sit around late at night or at dinner somewhere or just sitting around talking in the bed asking ourselves if we getting it right. So there's no blueprint or no manual on how to be that. But I just want to be the adult that I feel like I needed when I was a child. I want to be present. I want to raise them out of love, which is very hard, especially being that I deal with really bad anxiety in a lot of ways.
And I talk about parental paranoia a lot. And you just have to let go and let God. I'm a faithful person because I have no choice but to be. I'm an optimistic person because I have no choice but to be. The opposite of faithful is worried; the opposite of faithful is doubt. And like you can't raise kids in that way because they got to live their own life.
My 15-year-old, she wants to go hang out. I can't worry about what may happen at the mall. You open up a newspaper and you see all types of crazy stuff happening in the world and you see crazy things happening to other people's kids and you just like, "Yo, I don't want my child to ever get caught up in anything like that." But man, sadly that's just not your call. And you just can't live life like that.
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With all this work you've done on your mental health to understand the anxiety and the bouts of depression and so on, have you been able to pinpoint the causal factors of it in your early years?
Oh yeah, I mean my being molested at eight was definitely part of it. Definitely the bullying early on. Definitely wanting my father to raise me out of love and not fear. One of the main things that I realized when I had like one of my first breakthroughs in therapy was when I realized my dad used to discipline me for things he never taught me.
So I remember one example I always tell is like I had just got my driver's license. And so he told me to follow him somewhere. And he was like, "Follow me, do what I do." "Alright." Driving, he's driving, and we're coming off Gilyard Road in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, about to get on the highway—highway's Highway 52.
So we're driving and we get to the stop sign, but he doesn't stop. He just drives onto the highway. So I drove onto the highway. You know, and he pulls over to the side of the road. I pull over to the side of the road. What I didn't notice was he drove like maybe several seconds before a car was coming.
And so I came right behind him, so the car had to swerve out of the way. I didn't even notice that. So he tells me to pull over. He pulls over, so I pull over. He gets out the car, he comes to the window, slaps the shit out of me. I'm like "What?!" He's like, "Wake up!" That's all he said.
And I'm just sitting there like—I mean I think about that now, but there's no teaching in that. Where was the teaching in that? I didn't even realize what I did wrong. You told me to do everything that you did. You literally said, "Do what I do." You ran the stop sign, so I ran the stop sign.
And then once you slapped the shit out of me, you don't even tell me what I did wrong. So that's why I said my father used to discipline me for things that he never even taught me. So I think that's where a lot of the insecurity and anxiety and imposter syndrome—that's where a lot of that comes from. And the bouts of depression—I don't know, that's probably just some chemical imbalance or something.
Because like that's just—I constantly have to pump myself up. And I do that through prayer, I do that through daily affirmations, I do that through just constantly telling myself I belong. And that's something—I remember being young, my affirmation used to be: "I love Jehovah God and His Son Jesus Christ," and I would say that three times. And then I would say, "Fuck Satan," and I would say that three times. And that is what used to get me like, "Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready for the day, I'm ready for whatever the day is going to deliver me." So yeah, it's all of those things from my childhood contributed to those issues.
At some point it appears that you reached a sort of personal rock bottom in those early 20s. And you made a decision that enough was enough. I find that so interesting because I sit here with so many people who reach that moment where they look at their lives and they go, "Listen, look at what I'm doing with myself."
And some of them carry on going and they're probably not around to sit in the chair. And then some hit that rock bottom moment and they go, "I can't carry on doing this with my life," and they make a decision to take at least one footstep in some positive direction and that starts to compound for them. Is that accurate? Is that an accurate description of what happened in your life?
Yeah, because I learned early that everything my father was saying was true. So when my father was telling me, "If you don't change your lifestyle, you're going to end up in jail, dead, or broke under the tree," I actually saw that starting to happen to not just myself, but people around me.
So you know, I had my stint in jail, but then I had people around me that was going to jail for like five years, like they was going to jail for actual prison sentences. And I had people around me that were dying, that were actually getting killed. And I saw like people that I used to once look up to who were older than me sitting under the tree literally doing nothing with their lives.
Just becoming that next generation of people who just sit under the tree all day and drink or do drugs or whatever it is. So I saw that happening, and I was just one of those kids that was smart enough to realize, "Man, whatever I'm doing today will directly impact what happens in my life tomorrow."
And that's always—that's been my mindset since I was early 20 years old. Like whatever I want to be doing five years from now, I got to start doing now. Literally. That's always been my mindset. And so when I finally got that break to find an internship in radio, just being in that environment, being around that in 1998 as an intern literally made me say, "Okay, this is what I want to do with my future."
Before that, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was going—speaking of male role models, like I had an uncle, Uncle Henry, he worked at UPS. I'm like, "Alright, maybe UPS is the move." I had a cousin—one of my mother's cousins named Bruce, he was in the military. "Okay, maybe being in the military is the move for me."
I was just trying to figure out what I was going to do with my adult life. And I started working a bunch of odd jobs. I did telemarketing, I worked at a clothing store called Demo in the mall, I worked at a warehouse called Industrial Acoustics, I worked at a flower garden, I worked at Taco Bell for a couple of weeks because my sister was the manager there. I was just trying to figure things out.
And at one point in my life, I worked at Demo in the mall with my now wife, I worked at the telemarketing place, and I had stumbled upon an internship probably like a year prior, which was at the radio station in 1998. And then around 1999, I actually started being on the air. And once I started being on the air, it just started to let me see what the future could potentially look like.
Up until that point, did you have high hopes for yourself and your future? Were you ambitious?
Yeah, because I thought I was going to be a rapper. Because most young Black men from the hood in the late 90s, or from the rural area that I was from in Moncks Corner, South Carolina—when you look on television or you open up these magazines, the people that you see that are successful are usually in rap, hip-hop in some way, shape, or form, or athletics.
And so I thought rapping was going to be the way to get up off that dirt road in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. That's why I got a tattoo on my arm. I got Wolverine from the X-Men tattooed on my arm holding a microphone in his hand. I got this tattoo when I was like—I don't even know, like 18, 19 something like that.
And I got it made by a dude named T. Willis. T. Willis was a tattoo artist in South Carolina. Tattoos weren't even legal in this time, but I got it tatted on my arm in his apartment. And the reason I got Wolverine holding a microphone is because I always loved Wolverine because I loved his healing powers.
I loved that he was able to heal quickly from things. This is me at 18, 19 years old, not knowing anything about no therapy, not knowing anything about the future journey I would go on of healing. This is just me back then being a young comic book lover, loving the fact that Wolverine had these healing powers and I had him holding a microphone because I thought the microphone was going to be what changed my life. Which it ultimately did, I just thought it was going to be through rap music.
The microphone ultimately changed your life. I also didn't know that you'd spent this really long stint on the radio from sort of 20 years old doing that internship right up until The Breakfast Club when you're 32 years old. So that's 12 years. But it's not just 12 years of work and graft and mastering your skill; it's also 12 years of rejection. Getting fired over and over and over and over again.
I got fired four times. I got fired from four different radio stations. I got fired from Hot 98.9 in Charleston. I used to do radio—I started my career at Z93, which I'm back on now, which is the actual heritage station. So The Breakfast Club is broadcast on Z93, so I'm back on Z93.
But I left Z93, which was the big heritage station in Charleston, to go work for an up-and-coming station called Hot 98.9 simply because my man George Cook, who's still a great mentor of mine to this day, he offered me a full-time radio gig. I was on Monday through Saturday, 7:00 to midnight.
I had to take that. Making what, I don't know, $19,000 a year or something like that. But that felt so good back then because I was able to show my mom a contract and say, "Look, I'm making a salary. I'm making $19,000 a year." That just felt good to say that I had a job that I had to be to every day, and not just a job—a job that she knew about because she would hear me on the radio.
What did your father think?
Oh, he loved it. I mean even when I was on Z93, that was a big deal because Z93 was the heritage station. Like that was *the* station in Charleston, so that was a big deal for him.
Was he surprised, having shared a jail cell with you at one point, seeing your delinquency through that period of your life? Was he surprised?
You know, it's interesting. I've never had those conversations with him. Even to this day, I've never had like that conversation with him like—nah. He might tell me he's proud of me, stuff like that, but we've never had like an in-depth conversation. Like my mom—me and my mom have had like those in-depth conversations.
My mom has told me things like, "You've accomplished more than anybody in the family ever thought about accomplishing." Or she'll show me like the taxes my great-grandfather—her father—yeah, her father, so my grandfather—she would show me like the taxes that he would have to pay on their land. So like just to put things in perspective for me.
And yeah, like she's—I share things with her. Like I share with her how much I'm making or how much I made doing something. I share things like that with her. And yeah, she's very always supportive and lets me know she's proud of me. I remember she gave me the best advice a long time ago. She told me, "Just be happy you're making a living."
Survival generation.
But the way she said it was basically saying, "This is how you stay humble." She was like, "Just be happy that you're able to make a living." And she's right, because you know how hard it is for some people to make a living? Like seriously, it's just hard for some people just to be able to afford some wings from the grocery store. It's hard for people—people can't afford daycare. Just little small, simple everyday things that you and I may be able to just take care of. There's a lot of people out here who can't. So you should very much be happy just to be making a living. So her telling me that puts a lot of things in perspective for me and has kept a lot of things in perspective for me. But no, me and my pops have never really had those conversations.
32 years old, you join The Breakfast Club, which is the first time that I saw you, heard about you, was entertained by you. But before you joined The Breakfast Club, something else became really sort of front of mind in your life, which is anxiety and panic attacks. And you talk about the first sort of panic attack you had while you were driving down Interstate 26 in South Carolina?
I-26, that was probably the first really, really, really major one. The first one I ever had was definitely in first grade. I'll never forget that. Memminger Elementary School. I can't forget that to this day. Like my mom dropped me off first day of school and I just could not calm down. I mean bawling tears, screaming like "My God!" I could not stop.
And now when I think back on it, I'm like, "Oh, I was straight up having a panic attack." I remember the look on my mom's face like, "What is wrong with—like what's going on?" But the one I had then—that was after being fired for the fourth time from radio. I was back home living with my mom. I think I was 31, 32.
My daughter was like one or two. My now-wife was back living at home with her parents in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. And I remember I was driving down I-26 going to Orangeburg to go see Lil Duval at a comedy show. He was at a comedy show in Orangeburg—I forgot what school it was.
And yeah, I just remember feeling that feeling that I've always felt my whole life: heart beating crazy fast, mouth getting dry, palms sweaty, feeling lightheaded, dizzy. Had to pull over, get some water, take a few deep breaths, and just told myself like, "Look, man, I'm going to go to the doctor yet again." Because I would always check myself in the emergency room whenever I would have those kind of panic attacks because I always felt like I was having a heart attack.
And so I went to the doctor and the doctor was like, "Nah, you're—your heart is fine. You got an athlete's heart." And then he said to me, he said, "Yo, you—you deal with anxiety?" I was like, "Anxiety? What do you mean do I deal with anxiety?" And he was like, "The symptoms you're describing sound like a panic attack." He said, "Have you had these before?" and I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "Are you stressed out about anything?" and I'm like, "Hell yeah!"
And so he was like, "Yeah, it sounds like that's anxiety." And then he was telling me some breathing exercises I could do to possibly deal with it. And in my mind, after he said, "Are you stressed out about anything?" the first thing I thought to myself was, "All I got to do is get another job and everything will be okay. I just got to get out my mom's house, get my family back in position, and everything will be okay." Next gig I got was The Breakfast Club. And so you think you fast forward three, four years—I'm having more success than I've ever had in my life. I'm making more money than I've ever made in my life. Everything is going great. But nothing's changed.
I'm still having the panic attacks, probably even more so now. Still dealing with bouts of depression and I can't figure out why. I just was not happy. And so that's what finally made me decide to start going to therapy. We started Breakfast Club in 2010. I think I started going to therapy around 2015, 2016.
How bad did your depression get in those early 30s?
Oh, they got bad. I mean they got bad. It got bad to the point where like—I was the guy who, you know, I love to laugh, definitely love to laugh, love to joke, love to have a good time. But then yeah, those suicidal thoughts just crossed my mind for no reason. Like literally for absolutely no reason. Like you, "Yeah, you want it—now's a good time to end it all." Like just literally randomly.
And you'd be like, "Yo, what was that?" You know, and even now, sometimes it'll cross your mind. And it definitely crosses your mind a lot when you have—like I had a friend who committed suicide, her name was Jazz Waters. You know, and we called her Jazz Fly. And me and her used to lean on each other a lot. Like she committed suicide during COVID.
And her and I used to lean on each other a lot. Like I used to call her like my wartime general. Like when it was like really time to get busy and really strategize some stuff, that's who I would pick up the phone and call. And we would always have these conversations about therapy and depression and anxiety and all of that from—I mean deep conversations.
I'm talking about we'd spend Sundays literally—I'd be in the backyard sometimes three, four-hour phone conversations, right? Like away from everybody—my wife, kids, everyone—just really having conversations. So when she did it, I remember sitting in my backyard and I heard her voice in my head.
And it was like she literally said to me, "You still here?" Like on some "Like you're still—like you're still there on Earth." And I was like—that like kind of just shook me to my core a little bit, right? And so it's just like I constantly do—not constantly, constant is a strong word, but yeah, those thoughts just cross your mind. I don't know if it's because—not because I actually want to do it or because I'm thinking about doing it, but because I've had people close to me do it and because I had those thoughts when I was younger. Sometimes I don't know if it's the survivor's guilt maybe or survivor's remorse of it all that just makes you think about it. Like, "What am I still doing here?" But then I got a million reasons to still be here. So that immediately makes it go away.
When you have a friend like that that passes in such circumstances, it's a complex range of feelings. Any—like I sat here with someone who described that exact same thing to me, their best friend who had said nothing to them, was always—actually worked on radio in the UK. Both of them worked on radio, then his radio partner one day died by suicide, never said anything to anybody, appeared to be fine. And the complex set of emotions that he's left with—the regret, the feelings of "What if? What if I'd said something? Did I reach out?" All those kinds of things. "Is there anything that I could have done?" All those feelings. What is that complex set of emotions that you—?
Yeah, you can't do that to yourself. You will, but you can't do that to yourself. Because like I was saying earlier when I talked about modeling, and you say the word role model and you're modeling yourself after people—you don't know what's behind all of those layers of a human. Like we're complex creatures.
To me, she was one of the most intelligent, brilliant, creative, strategic human beings I ever met in my life. And she was somebody that so many of us went to, and I never felt—I didn't guilt myself with that because I know that she would come to me with stuff too and I would always be an ear for her. Like I was always there for her.
But yeah, you—it is, it's just—to act like that to narrow it down to one emotion is crazy. Like you'll go through sadness, you'll go through anger, you'll go through happiness, you'll go through frustration, you'll go through thinking about those last moments that that person was here and you'll be saying to yourself, "I tried." Like I tried, that's all—that's what I know. That's what I do know. I know for a fact I tried. Like it's not like we didn't—you know, you didn't see things.
So it's not like we didn't try to get that person all the help and more that they needed. But yeah, it is—it's a very, very complex set of emotions. Something that you can't even really put in words. And not even something I'm trying to suppress either. Like it is one of those things you want to—you want to constantly confront. But it's just very complex, because you wish that you could have had—what you really want is you wish you could have talked to that person that day. You wish you could have had a conversation with that person that day. That's what you really wish.
And see where—see where they were at in that moment. And you—and hopefully if you—because you—I think everybody would probably do that. Everybody probably says the same thing. I probably say the same thing. Her mom probably says the same thing. Her father probably says the same thing. Her sister probably says the same thing. If I would have spoke to her that day, you know, I probably could have got her in a better place. But that's not the way the universe had it designed.
Your external life changes rapidly when you become a star on The Breakfast Club, but internally you say nothing really changes, if not anything it was potentially worse: the panic attacks, anxiety, the bouts of depression. A lot of people be surprised by that, because as you say, people think that you get the job, you get the money, you get the fame—bang, you're good.
Well, I was losing myself. Because you got to think: I'm still in survival mode. I'm still coming off being fired four times. You got to think what my journey was from 1998 up until that moment. Up until that moment, I'm just coming out of my mom's house, living with my mom in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.
I had just collected my last unemployment check. I'm scared to death. Everything that you saw was me was rooted in fear. It was rooted in, "I'm not going back to that." So whatever I have to do to not go back to that, I'm going to do. That's why you see the ruthless "anybody can get it."
It's still a lot of pain there that I'm probably projecting on other people. It's still a lot of hurt there that I'm projecting on other people. Plus, y'all done tried to fire me out of this business four different times. Y'all thought it was sweet when I was down in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, living back home with my mom. Now all of y'all got to feel my wrath. Like literally, that's what I was on. And when you getting rewarded for that, that fuels whatever that is. Until you realize—like for me, it was around 2015—you're like, "This ain't—this is not what I want."
How do you know that? How did you know?
I just wasn't happy. And I—at this time, now I got two kids. My oldest is like seven at the time in 2015, and my newborn had just been born. And I got married in 2014. So it's like, yo, "Am I really about to become my pops?" You know? Am I really about to become—even though I love this man, I despise the way he ended up treating his family. Us. Treating my mom.
And I'm like, yo, "Am I really going to be that? Am I really going to get caught up in this radio star—and I'm putting star in air quotes—lifestyle? Am I really going to get caught up in the women? Am I really going to get caught up in the drugs? Am I really going to get caught up in the alcohol? Am I really going to become a caricature of myself, this caricature that I created to protect this vulnerable young man named Lenard? Am I really going to get caught up in that and completely lose myself?" Am I going to do that, or am I going to get back on the path that I know I'm supposed to be on? Am I going to get back on that righteous path? So I chose to go the righteous path.
Sounds simple. Sounds like it was an epiphany one day. But that's a man speaking in hindsight. And I just want to—because there'll be a lot of people that are in that moment where they're looking at their life going, "Is this really who I'm going to be?"
Yeah, you're right, it's not simple because you'll constantly lie to yourself. And I think that's why so many people from the street always end up in the same situation. There's nowhere you're going to go in any ghetto America, USA, any rural town, USA, where an older person isn't going to tell a younger person: "You keep living like that, you're going to end up in jail or dead." My dad added the other one: "or broke sitting under the tree."
But everybody thinks they can beat it. Everybody thinks they can live a certain lifestyle and if they just do this, then that won't happen. Or that person was stupid, that's why they ended up like that. No, you live a certain lifestyle, you moving a certain way, all of y'all going to meet the same fate. And it's no different even in that space. Like I was absolutely about to crash. I knew it.
How?
I just saw it coming. A crash to me is losing your family. Your wife leaving you. I don't want that. Who wants that? I don't envy people like that. I don't envy people who—and I'm not knocking them in no way, shape, or form—but I don't envy people who lost their families because of infidelity and now they got to visit their kids on the weekend.
You were unfaithful to your wife.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
And she's the love of your life. I mean there's very few people I've seen—you've been with her 30-plus years or something?
26 this year. Absolutely. 26 years. Like we were kids. We literally grew up together in every sense of the word. Like literally, the first time I ever filled out an application at a radio station, she drove me because my license was suspended. Like we were together since kids.
Like literally. Like I was at her high school graduation, I was at her college graduation. Like I said, she—the first time I ever filled out an application at a radio station, she drove me. She went to college in Columbia, South Carolina; I got a radio job in Columbia, South Carolina. End up getting a radio job in New York; she ends up getting a job in New York City.
Like our lives were just like that all the time. We couldn't escape each other if we tried. And to be honest with you, I would never want to because that has been the one constant in my life. That has been my muse forever. That has been the person who's constantly made me want to be the best version of myself even when I wasn't the best version of myself.
Because when you ask God for certain things, He's going to give them to you. He or she is going to give them to you. So when you tell God, "This is what I want. I want to be with this person for the rest of my life," or "I'm looking for a soulmate," or "I'm looking for my Hope Brady," or "I'm looking for my Claire Huxtable"—He's going to give you that. But are you going to be prepared for it when you get it?
Same thing with any type of success. Yeah, God—He or she may give you that, but are you prepared for it? I think that a lot of us are get—a lot of us get things that we're really not prepared for. And when we get those things we're not prepared for, we don't hold on to them.
You nearly lost it.
I feel like I did. Absolutely. I feel like I did. It wouldn't have been worth it. Even if I would have continued to have success professionally in radio, but meanwhile my personal life—I lose my wife, I lose my family. That's not worth it. There's no way on this earth where that's a fair trade for me.
You start going to therapy. You go twice a week?
No, I always started off once a week.
When did you start going to therapy?
2016. Either late 2015 or early 2016.
Why therapy? Who told you that that was a good idea? I know a lot of Black men—a lot of Black Americans period don't seek mental health care. There's a huge disparity; it's almost a hundred percent difference between white people and Black people seeking mental health.
A lot of people. I mean, I'm a big fan of the TV show Girlfriends. Grew up watching Girlfriends—that's one of my wife's favorite shows. So when I would go to her house when she was in college, she would have that on and we'd be watching Girlfriends. And if you watch Girlfriends, a lot of them were going to therapy.
That's the first time I even heard of it. But then as I got older, talking to different people, they were all ranging from men, women. I remember having conversations with Neil Brennan, who's a comedian, and he was in an interview talking about the benefits of therapy. Or my young homie Pete Davidson—he was talking about it. My homegirl Debbie Brown—she was really into it, not just therapy but just all different facets of healing. If you know Debbie Brown now, you would understand why she was on that back then. She's one of the leaders in the mindfulness mental health space right now.
What's helped you to heal? If you look at the toolkit you've used—my girlfriend's alternative healing breathwork practitioner, super spiritual—she's helped me a lot with all of my early childhood stuff.
All of it, brother. I've done therapy, meditation, breathing exercises, I've done Reiki, I got crystals at home, I do plant-based medicine. All of it.
Ayahuasca? Psilocybin?
I've done an Ayahuasca journey. That's what I was talking about earlier when I said I went on a spiritual retreat earlier this year. And that was—man, that was very, very, very life-changing. That's where I got the revelation. The revelation was: stop lying to yourself and stop volunteering those lies to others.
It's like wherever you're at in your life—for me, it's just like I want to show up and be my authentic self at all times. Me—that's what I want to do. All the time. No matter where I am in my life, I want to present that. And being on that journey, it literally ripped away every single ounce of falsehood that existed. It just shattered it. I watched it in my mind like go up in flames. Literally.
What's the cost if we live with those falsehoods and those lies?
Depression. Probably constant anxiety. A whole lot of insecurities, a whole lot of imposter syndrome. Because I'm from the country, so I believe in simple sayings like "God can't bless who you pretend to be." And I think that constantly we got to check ourselves and make sure we're always showing up as who we are and we're not pretending to be some version of ourselves.
That's why if you read "Get Honest or Die Lying," I talk so much about social media in the book because I'm watching so many people lose themselves to social media. I'm talking about intelligent, well-educated, well-read academics are literally losing themselves to social media. You can have conversations with them and you realize all of their talking points are coming from social media.
Their thought process is being dictated by social media. These people care more about their relationships online than they do their actual relationships offline. I know people who are personalities who have like podcasts or who may have YouTube shows, and these people will literally be on Twitter all day, be on Reddit all day, listening to what people are saying about them, reading what people are saying about them, and crafting their thoughts just to talk to *them* in *that* crowd to just please *them*.
I'm like, "My God, how narrow-minded is that?" That's why for me, man, if you claim to be an academic or you claim to be a well-educated person, you claim to be an intelligent, book-smart person—I don't think you're that smart if your emotional IQ is that low.
If your emotional IQ is so low that people on social media can dictate how you move, how you think, how you talk—you're not a smart person to me. Smart people know how to disconnect from that. And smart people know how to go do some meditation to make sure that their thoughts are absolutely, positively their own.
I got people right now today hitting my phone trying to tell me how they feel about the new Kendrick Lamar record. I love Kendrick Lamar; I think he's fantastic. I think "Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers" in the future is going to be known as one of the most important hip-hop albums of all time. That one and Jay-Z’s "4:44."
But people are hitting me telling me their thoughts and telling me their opinions, and I'm blocking all of that. Because I listened to the record—I listened to it five or six times. I know what I got from it, I know what I feel about it, and I'm not letting y'all change my mind. But they're doing that because they know that tomorrow when I'm on the air, I'm going to be talking about it. So they're trying to curate my thoughts and they're trying to push my thoughts in a certain direction. I don't want that. I need my own clarity. I need to lean into my own discernment. What is my spirit telling me about this situation or this moment or this thing? That's all I care about.
That's given you a real big competitive advantage in many respects because originality is so valuable.
You're a hundred percent correct. That's why I laugh at a lot of these individuals because what also happens is they start whispering about me, right? And they start wondering like, "Why is this happening for him? And why does he get to do this? And why is that going on?" I tried to tell you: disconnect.
How you going to grow when you're not even watering your own garden? Because if you're getting on social media and you're reading what they're saying about you, and you're catering all your thoughts and all your talking points to appease those people, you're not watering your garden. You're literally trying to water somebody else's. So as you're watering somebody else's, that continues to grow and it continues to get louder and louder and louder. Meanwhile, you just stagnant.
It's scary though. It's scary to ignore and then to show up as yourself in a world where we're rewarding conformity with the likes, the claps—"Okay, you won't be canceled because you fit in." When you say, "Oh, I'm going to disconnect, I'm going to be myself, I'm going to be authentic," that is on—
Man, I get attacked all the time for thoughts, for opinions, because I don't go along with the mob. And I'm not even a contrarian in any way, shape, or form. I just know that nothing is black, nothing is white. There's always those areas of gray in the middle. There's nuance to everything. You can be objective about everything, right? There has to be a certain level of, "Well, let me see what this person is coming from." You got to hear both sides. To me, that's just common sense. I feel like the only way to get the real truth about anything is if you see where both sides are coming from. I can't just dismiss you as wrong because you have a different opinion than mine or you feel differently than me. I got to hear where you're coming from first.
There's no political party called "Nuance." And we're in an election year. I know this as well—if I wanted to go viral, I just got to do a hot take for either side. Because there's algorithms for that. There's a group of people that are going to pick that up and retweet and send it. But the people in the middle, there's no—and we're going into this election year now where as I've heard you say, there's really no great choices. But on that point you just said about being able to see the other side—what do you think about Trump?
§02Transcript — part 2
I think that—I mean I say this everywhere I go. I think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. I don't think that you should have anybody—especially in the United States—you can't have a leader of a country who said we should suspend the Constitution to overthrow the results of an election. I mean, he led an attempted coup of this country. Like we watched it, we saw it.
Yeah, I just don't think a person like that should be President of the United States of America. I think that if you're facing the type of criminal charges that he's facing—what is it, 88 counts or something like that now? If I was facing 88 counts of any criminal charge, I wouldn't be able to work at Walmart. Nonetheless, run to be President of the United States of America. So I just don't think that he's somebody that should be in that position. But I understand why he is in that position, because he's good at messaging.
What do you think about the people that follow Trump? Do you think they're good people?
Some of them. But see even that is a very broad question, right? Like when you say "What do you think about the people who voted for Trump?" Those people aren't monolithic. All of those different—all of those people, those 70-plus million people who voted for Trump, a lot of them voted for Donald Trump for a lot of different reasons.
I have actual friends who will remain nameless who I know voted for Donald Trump. And I know they're great people. And they're Black. They're also Black too. And they're not like Black conservatives. They're not in any way, shape, or form; they are Black, pro-Black individuals. And that's what I mean when I say having conversations with people, because you get to see why people do different things.
I know why that person told me they voted for Donald Trump back in 2016. Just like I know individuals now who tell me why they voted for him in 2016 or 2020. And you can't just chalk everybody up to being a racist. You can't just chalk everybody up to not caring about LGBTQ issues or whatever it is. People have different reasons and interests why they vote for people.
It might be one thing. It might be one interest that they vote for. That's what they always tell you, right? They tell you to vote your interest. So it's the same thing with a President Biden. I can look at a million things that President Biden has done that I do not like: the '86 mandatory minimum sentencing, the '88 crack laws, the '94 crime bill. All of that—there's a million things I can point to and say I don't like that he did this.
But if the one interest is to at least protect democracy in 2024—or if you're somebody who got their student loan debt wiped away, that might be it. If you're somebody who can afford insulin now because of President Biden, that might be the reason you vote for him. So it's just like, everyone has different reasons as to why they vote for different candidates. So that's why I don't even think the question is fair when you say, "Well, what do you think about the people who voted for such and such?" Like I'm not the person I vote for.
When we get to speak to those people, we understand their motives. Until then we kind of misunderstand them. And I see that crossover with you and your father, because eventually you had a conversation with him. You talked about that conversation at the very beginning of this one where you finally had empathy for him and his experience in his life. That conversation with your father where you rebuilt your relationship and finally understood him—did that help your healing journey?
Absolutely. A hundred percent. Because like I said, I never quite had the relationship with my father that I wanted to. And it's not too late; he's still here, right? But yeah, it did because I realized in that moment that he was just a man who was just doing his best. And he didn't have the tools that I have. He didn't have the resources that I have.
Even though he was going to therapy two and three times a week, even though he was on the 10 to 12 different medications. The state of South Carolina just started giving him a check. And we used to call that a "crazy check" back in the day—you just get a check for being crazy. Like I knew people who used to play crazy to get a check.
I remember when I went to my mom and said, "Yo, did you know Dad was going through all of this?" And she was like, "Yeah, I just thought he was playing crazy to get a check." So it's like all of those—if I would have known when I was young, if he would have told me all of those things when I was young, then I probably would have ended up on a totally different path much earlier.
I guess that's another example of like role models, right? Because I think a lot of times when we say role models, we think it has to be just about all the good a person is doing. But if a person has dealt with a lot of the things that you're going through—because a lot of this stuff is genetic, right?—if a person is dealing with their own anxiety, if a person is dealing with their own bouts of depression—my father, he was already in therapy, he was already on 10 to 12 different medications, he tried to commit suicide.
If he would have told me all of that when I was young, I would have known what I was dealing with. I would have been able to be like, "Oh, okay, I'm dealing with that." It's the same way you can see it in your kids. You can—when your kids are dealing with those things, you can look at them and be like, "Okay, I know—I know what that is because I went through that." To me, that's being that—that's good. Even though my dad was dealing with all of those issues, but him telling me—if he would have just told me when I was young, then that would have been a good model for me to follow because I would have known what it is I need to do much, much earlier than I did.
My last question before we go to the book for you. This is a question that I think is central to why especially men don't really talk about their feelings, or at least it's a question that I think we often just diminish. I wanted to ask you a very simple question. We ask each other this question every single day. How are you doing?
I right now, I'm doing great. I am blessed, Black, and highly favored. I'm doing fantastic. I just had a fantastic weekend, man. We were in Atlanta, Georgia, because I did my second annual Black Effect Podcast Festival. I have a podcast network called The Black Effect, and we're the home of like 30 various podcasts.
Everybody from the 85 South Show to Horrible Decisions, to Carefully Reckless with Jess Hilarious, All the Smoke with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. We have a bunch of different podcasts. And we just had our second annual Black Effect Podcast Festival in Atlanta. And it's such a beautiful event because podcasting is such a new industry.
And to be able to curate a space where it's like seven or eight of your favorite podcasts on stage—people are from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM at night, we got all the food trucks, we got the vendors, we got the merchandise. Like it's a festival. So to be able to have a real-life podcast festival, to be doing it for the second year in a row, to see this community of creatives just come together for the day—that's very fulfilling to me.
And another thing we do during the festival is we bring three people out from HBCUs. Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Nissan is one of our sponsors of the festival, so we bring these three kids out from these HBCUs because another event that we do throughout the year with The Black Effect is called the Thrill of Possibility Summit.
And we fly 50 HBCU students to Nashville and we just have a weekend of panels for them. We have different people who went to HBCUs who've gone on to have tremendous success in the world come and just pour into them all weekend long. So we had those three individuals come speak at the Black Effect Podcast Festival just to talk about the summit and how fulfilling it was for them.
The reason that gives me such a high is because I'm all about service, man. Like that's what I'm about at this point in my life. I say all the time: "If I'm building things, whatever I build nowadays, if it only benefits me, it's not big enough." And the things that I'm building now—whether it's my Black Effect Podcast Network, whether it's the company me and Kevin Hart got at Audible called SPH Productions, whether it's the book imprint Black Privilege Publishing with Simon & Schuster—I'm able to provide so many people opportunity.
Like we got staffs and presidents of our companies, and we're able to partner with people and write book deals and podcast deals and all of these different things. So it's just like, that is what is fulfilling to me. And then being able to take those resources and do things like the Thrill of Possibility Summit where we're pouring into these HBCU students. Or I got a nonprofit called the Mental Wealth Alliance where our goal is to get 10,000 Black and Brown people free therapy over the next five years.
I do an expo every year—I think I'm on my fourth year, fifth year of that—called the Mental Wealth Expo here in New York. It's a free event. I bring some of the best psychiatrists and therapists and spiritual leaders—
I've seen it. I own the domain name mentalwealth.com. So if you want it for free, you can have it. I bought it five years ago for a project and then I saw you post on Instagram an event called Mental Wealth. I was thinking, "Damn, I've got this domain name and he's doing something with it." So you can have it. It's just sat there. I'll send it over to you. I see what you're doing; it's incredible. I can't think of a better reason for someone to do with that domain, so yeah.
Thank you. So to answer your question: I'm doing great. And the reason I'm doing great is because I realize that your true purpose in life will come through service to others. Dr. Wayne Dyer says that in "The Power of Intention." I read that years ago and didn't understand what it meant—I read this 20-plus years ago and didn't quite understand that. Your true purpose in life will come through service to others. I overstand what that means now.
That's not the way culture's gone. Culture's become less religious, less community, more about yourself, your own goals, your own individual being. Less about others, less about a higher power. And it's so interesting because as I've had these conversations over the years—I was religious until I was 18 years old, my mom's religious, I was baptized, raised in a Christian household. And I lost that religion and with that you lose the church. And then social media made me more individualistic: "Get the Lambo." I was this broke kid, dropped out of university, trying to get the Range Rover Sport and the mansion. I got those things; the anticlimax—something's missing. Going in search of more. And I've almost found myself right back at the beginning again going, "Damn, I wish I was still religious." But what I'm searching for is what you've said: I'm searching for service in my life.
Yeah, because listen, I grew up broke. So when you grow up broke, I grew up watching my grandma—even if we didn't have much, she always knew how to whip up a lot of food. And so whoever was in the yard could come to my grandma's house and eat. Same thing with my pops: my pops was the guy who—they all liked frying fish. "You here, you going to eat. Hey, we got drinks, you going to drink." So to me, that was service. That was early versions of service. So I've always known that you got to give to receive. That's just how I grew up.
So being that I never had much growing up, I just always felt like that was the way for me to show up for people. Like do something for them. And now that I got a lot of resources, that's just amplified. I used to look at people that would put "philanthropist" in their bio and be like, "What? All you doing is giving money. Like what does that even mean?" But now you like, "I understand. I get it."
When you can go to your mother's alma mater, South Carolina State University, and say, "I am starting a scholarship fund in my mother's name, the Ford Family Endowment Scholarship, and I'm going to donate this amount of money—a large amount of money"—right? And I don't—you can look it up and see how much it was. By the way, it wasn't that large. Because Mr. Clyburn, who's a congressman here in South Carolina—I remember the day that we did it, we were both donating money to South Carolina State University because that's where his beautiful wife Emily went.
He literally said to me, "You should go first." And I was like, "No, no, no, you go first." And he was like, "No, you should go first." And I was like, "No, you should go first." He was like, "No, you go first." I'm like, "Alright." So I went first, you know, they hold up my check—I'll say it was a quarter million dollars, right? Blessed, I'm happy to be able to give that. Mr. Clyburn goes up: it's like 1.3 million. He goes up and I was like, "You were right. I see why you wanted me to go first." But my point with all that is: the fact that I'm able to do things like that, that means the world to me. And that's literally what I just want to do for the rest of my life. I want to be able to provide opportunities to people. I want to be of service. That's it. That's all we're here for.
It's selfish and selfless at the same time. Because as you said, by giving you get so much. And there's only so much you can get from the Lamborghini, right?
I've never wanted that in my life. And you know what's so crazy? I used to say that when I was broke. And when you say it when you're broke, you sound like a hater. Like you see a nice car and "I don't want that." "Well, you can't afford it." You know how when you know you really mean that? When you can afford it and you still don't want it. I don't want it. What the hell am I going to do with a Lamborghini? What am I going to do with a Bentley? What am I going to do with a Phantom? Like why? Why does that need to be in my yard?
You know what, I have to say, but we don't have—especially like I grew up on rap videos. I grew up on 50 Cent on MTV and all that stuff, and that was modeled to me. And it's modeled to a lot of young Black men as success. And it's so nice to hear people like you say, "Listen, you don't—that's not—in fact, you're doing yourself a disservice because it's a really bad use of your funds." Like go and invest. A lot of other people have a dad at the table who is an investor and knows to put it into this investment fund or this investment fund. And I think some of our role models growing up said, "If you get that kind of money, you go spend it on champagne in a nightclub and something else which is going to make it go to zero."
Yeah, most of that stuff is rented too. When you look at those rap videos, most of that stuff wasn't even—wasn't even theirs. So yeah, I've done that. I've gone to Miami and my partner E-Class—salute to E-Class, he's the founder and CEO of The Licking restaurants in Miami—he tosses me his keys to his big Benz back in the day. I drive it around Miami, I'm cool. I get my fix. I don't need to have one of those at home. That stuff does absolutely positively nothing for me in any way, shape, or form.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you in The Diary of a CEO is: What are you most afraid of feeling?
Ooh, shit. Grief. Grief, the grief of death. A hundred percent. The grief of death. That's the thing that—like if I was an actor—I would never be an actor. Well, I mean I guess I could be in 2024 if I wanted to be. But if I was an actor, you know how when they tell you that you got to cry on cue? Like it's—it's that. That's the thing that I dismiss out of my mind because it's just certain things like—I always say the things you want to happen in your life, you constantly think about and you speak about. The things you don't want to happen in your life, you don't think about, you don't speak about.
The thoughts creep up on you, but when they do creep up on you, you just got to push them out. But for definitely for me, man, it's that feeling of—that feeling of grief when somebody close to you passes. Like that is—man, I've had some like really traumatic things happen to people that I genuinely love. Like you—I haven't lost a parent, God bless, knock on wood. I haven't lost a parent. I haven't lost a mate—a wife, a significant other—that hasn't happened to me. But I've had that happen to people who are very, very, very close to me. I haven't lost a child, God bless, you know.
So yeah, people that have experienced that, I truly, truly, truly feel for them. And I know that we all will at some point. I hope I don't—I hope my kids bury me, you know. I hope my wife buries me. But yeah, that's the feeling that I don't want to—want to feel. Even though I know I probably will at some point in life, a long, long, long, long, long, long time from now. But no, you don't—you don't want to feel that.
Thank you. Thank you for so much. I think I can't imagine how many people's lives and relationships you've saved by making what many people would consider the brave and vulnerable decision to speak about your own struggles and to, as you've said, step into your own authenticity. That's what you do in this book, but that's what you've been doing long before you came here. You've been doing that for years now.
And it had an impact on me. Imagine that—I'm thousands and thousands of miles away in my own room. I'm feeling anxiety for the first time in my life and I see this man who I love watching—he's an entertainer—I see him of all people because he's a Black man, and Black men never speak on these things. I see him speaking about it and I go, "Damn, this isn't me being broken. This isn't something that I should hide. This isn't something that I should be ashamed of. This is something that happens to all people." And it's not evidence of my inadequacy; it's actually evidence that I'm a human being too.
You human, man. There's nothing inadequate about any of us. Like we're literally all spiritual beings living a human existence. And that human existence is going to go through a lot. But at the end of the day, like I think you said it earlier man, we all got to return back to spirit.
I love the book "American Gods," it became a TV show. And in the book "American Gods," one of the new gods was the internet—like "Internet Boy," social media. And I think that too many of us, man, are submitting our will to the internet. Literally. We're submitting our will to the internet. And if you talk to anybody who works in Silicon Valley, they'll tell you that the internet literally thrives off the seven deadly sins. The seven deadly sins—it thrives off of those. It is fueled by the seven deadly sins.
So if you're submitting your will to something that is fueled by the seven deadly sins, then what are you fueled by? And you wonder why the anxiety is so crazy. You wonder why the insecurity is so crazy. You wonder why the imposter syndrome is so crazy. You wonder why the depression is so crazy. It's because you're worshipping that.
That should be a tool. That's what you should treat it as: a tool. Like you wouldn't walk around with a hammer in your pocket and you wouldn't be pulling out that hammer all day and just looking at it and staring at it. You wouldn't be pulling up that screwdriver all day and just looking at it and staring at it. So why are we doing that with our phones? Why are we all in verbally abusive relationships with social media?
We will literally go on—especially when you a public figure—you'll go on these pages just to read people talk about how bad you are. These are all people that are dealing with the same things you're dealing with: the hurt, the pain, the anxiety, the depression, the insecurity, the imposter syndrome. They don't—it brings them joy to talk like that to you, in hope that it gets to you in some way, shape, or form. So why are we letting that in here? We can't have all these conversations about mental health and not really truly be protecting our mental.
Amen. Everybody needs to go get this book "Get Honest or Die Lying" and I think it's been one of the biggest inspirations for me to really get closer to being my authentic self in every sense of the word. And it's also made a really good case to me as to the power of that authenticity. Because people say "Oh, be authentic" whatever and they say that as part of their little like virtue signaling status games. But it's so clear to me that it's one of the greatest services you can do to yourself and those that matter most to you in your life. I'm going to link this book below; everybody needs to go and buy a copy.
And don't forget the "Why Small Talk Sucks" part. That is actually the most important part to me because what we just had here was a macro conversation. And I think a lot of times, you know, in this world that we live in, we're having too many small conversations. Like we make micros macros. Literally. And once again, that's what social media does. It takes these micros and it makes them macros.
And you don't realize that they're micros until you get out into the real world and you walk up to somebody and you talking like, "Hey, did you see such and such?" and that person is like, "No, I didn't." And you like, "What do you mean? It's trending number one on Twitter!" and they're like, "I don't know what the fuck you talking about." Like that's literally the world that we live in.
So when I say "Why Small Talk Sucks," I'm not just talking about like when somebody trying to make chit-chat with you—I hate that too, I can't stand it. But I'm talking about just those small conversations we have. We're talking too small, we're thinking too small. So this book is literally giving you some things to just simply talk big about, to think big about. That's why I end every chapter by saying "Let's discuss," because I'm not an expert at anything. I just got some experiences and I got some thoughts and I put them in that book and you read them. And next time you find yourself in a situation where you feel like the conversation is too small, I want you to say, "Yo, Charlamagne, Lenard, he said we don't got to do this. We can sit here in silence or we can talk about *this* in *this* way, in this large way." And hopefully, you know, when you start doing that, you'll start having more fulfilling conversations like this one I just had was with you.
Thank you so much. You're an honest—massive inspiration to me in every sense of the word. And you're so right about the small talk. I think my relationship wouldn't exist after five years if I didn't figure out how to start having big talk, uncomfortable conversations with my woman. And that's changed my life. It's made me better inside my head and it's saved the thing that I care about most in my life at the moment, which is my relationship with her. And a lot of men don't have the tools, they don't have the role models, and hopefully, you know, they can look to you and this book now as that guidance and that framework for how to model ourselves in such a way.
I have to say, I have to shout out your podcast as well, The Brilliant Idiots, because it's one of my favorites. I was watching the other day when you guys were talking about all the Drake and Kendrick stuff and Andrew Schulz was doing the little white thing and saying about the—it's just so hilarious and it's the best combination of podcast hosts.
Andrew Schulz is the best stand-up comedian in the business today.
I think he is the best. I bought his pay-per-view for his—when he did the online thing, it was incredible.
Oh, Infamous? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
Thank you so much. Really, really appreciate it.
Appreciate you, brother. Thank you.
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