Hasan Minhaj and Vince Staples Have an Epic Conversation | GQ

i'm not with espresso and all that fancy stuff give me a burnt ground like give me the coffee that they give the truck drivers right because their life is on the line so if it's good enough for them it's good enough for me that's how i feel are you doing an isolation or quarantine order nope [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] vince what's up man and living in you know a pandemic so this is our first time meeting i think we have a lot of people in similar camps that are like yo do you know vince and and uh i'm glad we could we could link up who are these people tommy the podcast i knew it was the podcast maven himself yeah i knew it was tommy it's always hey come to dinner no one wants to hang out with tommy all day no one's hanging out talking all day i love him though please keep this in the cut so tommy can see it he he knows i don't want to hang out him tommy calls me every probably every two weeks with the new ideas never the same why it is never a follow-up uh-huh but just he has a new idea of an amazing podcast that will change everything oh he wants you to join his podcast network i mean look i get along with tommy so if you can get along with tommy you don't get anybody that's that's how i feel all right what was one of his ideas was it just like yo you need to start a podcast it's always the same idea it's just a different basketball player and he put me on a group text with jj redick out of nowhere hilarious do you even know who jj reddick was of course okay okay but he was like do you know jj and i was like no and then i just got a text message to my phone uh-huh and was jj like when's the new album coming out or was it just like hey man what's going on now we were talking about um was talking about his basketball journey yeah via text yeah via text because you thought somebody in a group text you don't want to sing you know say anything you just ask them about themselves and people start talking yeah but i like jj reddick i saw her as a documentary they had some document about him and his sister a minute ago like about them growing up in the woods or something like that uh-huh i was a big fan of that bro the things you know you know in a very deep way and internet and i don't really forget much shout out jj reddick man i support him have you been listening to podcasts all the time it's my favorite thing so there's this podcast i've been listening to it's a spotify original podcast called renegades born in the usa uh it's with none other than one of your favorite musicians the boss of the boss bruce springsteen and uh president barack obama former president barack obama even the biggest one of the biggest musicians in the world and the former president have to have a podcast on spotify but one of the things they talked about that i thought was really interesting is that both of them felt like outsiders you know um did you feel like when you were coming up you know in the music scene coming from long beach you felt like an outsider in sort of like the la music scene it was a big disconnect because i didn't have anything really in common with a lot of the kids because like i said we're kids at that point in time and i come from like a long beaches you know even though it's the hood there's all these other things it's extremely diverse so it's like i always been like even though i've never been like my friends like yeah you live over here you go to school with us we play sports all these other things you're the homie we all friends right but going to deal with music in los angeles and not being that it being like caveats to relationships and you know this and that and that and then never being anything with any real implications or like of if anything getting further anything being life or death i didn't understand why everything was so such a pressure situation it's very very cliquish and quality and music people like you're from long beach like you're not really nobody lost me i never told anybody else from me wow i didn't even know where i was coming from so like y'all gonna see where they are and i'll be there so they just thought we was from l.a nobody knew where i was coming from that's funny because for for me the first open mics i started were in sacramento and there was this feeling with all the san francisco comics that like yo only road comics only like comics that aren't going to make it start in sacramento but that's just where i was i i lived out there and i was going to which is why i didn't tell anybody because i know i made that weird i knew it would be weird because it's just so far like it's long beach has a weird stigma with it's the weird city like so it's like you know people might not open up to you be warm to you but is long is artesia by long beach it's like long beach lakewood belle flopped in our teachers right here uh-huh and our teacher's probably like four or five streets like it's a really really small city yeah my mom used to get her eyebrows done at a place called ziba yeah i know you know you know get our teeth to sit outside it's like whenever we go to la i'd always want to go to cool places i'd be like mom let's go to like anaheim she's like no we're going to go to cerritos and um artesia yes it's getting harder it's a large population with long beach like everybody pretty much acts the same in that whole pocket so we didn't really understand that some of our friends were indian grown up until we met their parents like that's what that's about hilarious that's one thing about long beach everybody got the same voice as saying we're naturally we say the same words i'm one of our friends israel we didn't know his mom was mexican and then she picked us up one day and we were so confused yeah and we were like why didn't you tell us and he was like what i tell you that it's like well just just so we know like yeah cause now i feel like i've been like ignoring the whole society you know yeah so it's like you know especially that part artesia cerritos um bro when you pull up there like i you know when you're just outside like just like eating a samosa you're like yo if people drive by you're straight up in india oh it's all indian people no one thing i respect about california a lot when you go into people's pockets you're in a pocket like yeah the language on the buildings change yep you know i mean the stories change i think that's a very very understated part of you know this place it's dope yeah because just thinking about the fact that you have like these grocery stores where nothing is in english yeah and you know it's not a thing that people think about is just you know not even yeah i think it's a beautiful thing it's kind of cool that you can just go into a green tunnel and just transport it exactly yeah exactly there's so many small places like where i grew up at totally you know but diversity and acceptance was always a thing so like i don't know i guess in a sense you you would feel like an outsider if you come from a place where like everyone is outside are you trying to break into a medium yeah even with my music like people would look at me or like here i'll talk to her i'll treat people i keep like oh this this his story can't necessarily be true because he's too nice of a person he doesn't look like yeah he would fit that bill but that's like the point like people understand these experiences until you you say them and when you try to share your experience people might not always be receptive to it if you're not them it's like we live in such a weird vacuum i mean it's kind of like how president obama said in the podcast america is a place for all people you know it's it's a melting pot and it's it's we should lean on our diversity because you know especially traveling the world touring as you know as well you'll go certain places in certain states and there'll be a whole bunch of people that you never expected to see yeah it's like i remember my first time going to new mexico and i just was just shocked about it like the way that the houses looked the way the building is going what was in the restaurant you ever played missoula montana i've never played montana i've played montana multiple times and i'm like yo nobody's a nobody's going to come out b people won't get it but they they get it like it's it's kind of dope that it's always the place you think no one is yeah and just like it's kind of cool knowing that all right there's just a bunch of weirdos who may connect with what i'm doing i mean some random places that were so just good experiences boise ithaca like um columbus ohio yeah albuquerque like just the middle of arizona cities i don't even remember chico california like i've been so many random places where you know yeah i've been a chico on the ground yeah yes it's crazy bro these experiences man like i just wish you know more people could have them but one thing that is being shown to a podcast and you know just how far reaching we couldn't be from a digital space is i think we're in a point moving towards that everyone can experience a little bit of this based on things that they digest and like relationships that you can make like it doesn't take much to start a podcast it doesn't take much to start you know a music career comedy crew just got to kind of have that kind of faith even though we don't know each other and this is our first time meeting i was telling you this like right when we came in you have a very dark comedic sensibility like i actually see you more as a comic than musician i hear that a lot i think i'm like a pretty bright like you know bubbly person to be honest but you consider yourself to be an optimist man all the time i get the nihilism thing a lot but i don't really even necessarily know like what that means like because nothing has any meaning because you have to apply meaning to things yeah like as the world changes and stuff like that so i don't really look at it as if you know since there's no meaning there's no hope it's like if you can see somebody like you know we name things we create things and we change them as we go like nobody really knows what they're doing so if nobody knows what they're doing then that should allow you enough you know freedom to kind of figure out your own path or kind of figure out what you want to do in life because a lot of the times man i feel like people just kind of fall victim to kind of being like hopeless or like distraught or like feeling despair and like all that cute if i know for a fact that nothing means anything i'm going to go find something and i'm going to make it whatever i want it to be and i'm going to mind my business if you're trying to get in the zone and you're about to go to the studio or you're just feeling like you're a little blocked and you want to write something who's on your spotify playlist like who are you listening to to kind of put you in a place where like all right i feel inspired to go make music as crazy as it sounds i promise you i never listen to music i get it no i get it i was in the podcast a lot yeah but like i'm more of a writer type person than a musician i'm not really like i don't know anything about i don't know any instruments i don't know keys i barely even know how many bars it is in the song like it's so funny that you listen to podcasts it's it's so consistent that like musicians love podcasting comedy all that sort of stuff and comedians just want to be musicians like well i feel like i feel like you need a break from your reality but that's that's that's creativity in the sense like when you're when you're looking into something creative you're looking for a break in your reality well one thing i tell people all the time is like you know everybody's normal like no one's special and i think no one being special allows everyone to be significant if that makes sense so it's like if you think about everyone's daily track everyone's daily journey you can't just listen to songs all day you kind of have to know what's current in the world was current and so that's one thing i didn't know when i was on tour i don't know what's going on right so i can you you can't gauge kind of what's going on like it's more important to listen to people than to listen to music totally agree bro it's one of the best things about touring like you know i travel solo so when i land at an airport and i'm just like in a taxi just talking to the taxi driver first of all they have a way more interesting story than anybody in the city exactly like they got wild stories and then two they'll kind of tell you what's what with what's going on like rent's too high rents this blah blah blah this is what's going on with the mayor this is what's happening in the city people here in boston are this like touching the city that way is way more important to me than just like doom scrolling twitter when you become too famous and you're too disconnected from people things change yeah we don't understand that that's why yeah like the second you stop talking to people and just being around people in that city and just kind of get a feel for where they're at and what they're doing um yeah bro you just like you completely lose touch i have this thing they should ask every politician how much is milk right now like whoever's running for mayor right now in new york be like yo how much is milk right now and they should have three answers they'd be like this is how much it is at the bodega this is how much it is at like whatever the grocery store that you got and this is how much it is at the costco over the bridge in jersey some of these people like they have no clue you know what i mean [Music] what's your origin story like where did you how did you get into music i actually needed a little break from some things okay so i had to move to uh atlanta kind of for a cultural reset so to say all right until you know i was able to return some personal reasons hey man you know okay you know a lot of a lot of you know just having fun you know being a kid gotcha and um when i came back a lot of things that transpired that i didn't kind of like so i was trying to switch paths so to say okay so i had this kid that was our friend his name was uh dejean you know he had that one kid it's like a weirdo yeah and he's kind of like not like everybody else like we always liked him but he was like one of those kids he used to live by it was this kid named chuck he had a studio he had a house on janus they was recording and doing a little stuff and i would hang out with him it was never something i cared about no horrible okay um chuck had good beats though but at that point we were kids we were horrible you know you're not good with your kid yeah for the most part if you are then you know us and this isn't the story i was hanging out with them a lot trying to stay out of trouble whatever they took us to l.a because he was meeting sid for something they were doing like songs and stuff and they're like oh man uh we're doing a party at neck brace party and uh they was gonna get like five hundred dollars a piece or something like that and i was like i can do that wow and and that's that's what happened and here we are did you always have this voice like i feel like you and dave chappelle sonic we have such a great distinct voice you know it's funny it's a video on youtube like it's like a fight at the school i went to yeah and i said something in the back of the camera and one of the comments is is that vince staples i was real upset yeah so i pretty much had the same voice my whole life especially with comedy having a distinct like octave sound is so important yeah like you know i mean it sells the joke at least when i saw it looking like a joke totally having a distinct tone of voice in any medium really but you're selling yourself no matter what you're selling did you know you were good did you think like when you first started were you good i'm not really i mean i was better than everybody else but i wasn't good how did you know you were better like you just cause you would record and you could immediately that's horrible wow well i mean when you're a kid you don't have much of a life story you know what i mean so it's like there's nothing really talking about a lot of my friends all surrounded with just people and like when you're that young you have literally nothing to talk about now the funniest part about that is that i didn't make music about myself ever until like i should just like whatever the song was like they would tell me what to wrap about or tell them like whatever the context of the song was like this is the name of a beat and this is what the song is about just because at that point i was just buying time and hanging out before i had to go back home because i never really took it seriously like wanted to really be a rapper it was just like a pastime or a hobby or something did it all happen accidentally yeah 100 really i had never tried to like really make it like for me i was um in high school i was a speech and debate kid and i was kind of a knucklehead in class and my teacher shout out to miss takeuchi i'm actually still trying to find you miss t wherever you are just slide in my idea and call call me um she's retired now but miss takeuchi was basically saying you interrupt in class all the time i'll not send you to the principal's office if you just join the public speaking team it's a good teacher yeah she was really good and when i'd go to tournaments i could just make fun of the other kids and their arguments and like the all the judges were basically just parents who had to drive their kids to the tournaments and um they would always give me like 10 to 15 points higher they're like yo thank you for you know making it fun yeah just like it's super boring yeah you light it up you have like 15 year olds arguing about you know like fiscal judiciary committee policy and like a city and we don't know what we're talking about and so i was like nobody knows what they're talking about your dad is one of the judges that's a conflict of interest and uh i don't know why we're talking about you know fixing the city when like the gym that we're arguing in as like a a leak in the roof how did that translate into comedy and how did that translate into your comedic style and time again all that good stuff did it help you or did it hurt you more at the beginning so i graduate high school my freshman year college every every kid in the dorms has lime wire and kazaa on their computer and they're just downloading um everything i obviously wasn't because i'm i just like abide by the rules yeah that's illegal and i don't do anything illegal so it was all other people and i in fact i witnessed that you told him to stop and i said stop it i and actually my nickname in the dorms was um dcma take down notice so everybody in the dorms was was downloading stuff and um one of my roommates downloaded all these stand-up comedy specials and it was chris rock's never scared he was wearing this like purple velour suit and i just remember seeing everything that he was joking about like he was talking about the war and politics and and president bush and all these things that i thought you could never say and i was like wow he's doing funny speech and debate and everybody's like what and i'm like he's doing forensics he's just making it funny he has an argument he's just saying it in a funny way and um it kind of clicked for me in that moment and i didn't have any pop culture reference to stand-up comedy like my parents were immigrants they didn't let me watch cable tv i didn't get to see any of that stuff so i googled how to become a comedian it says call your local comedy club i google the local comedy club at the sacramento punch line there was this very famous comedian performing i didn't know who he was so i called the club i was like hi you know i'm hustling i'm a i'm an aspiring comedian i was wondering if i could open for dave chapoli this weekend and they were like what and i'm like on the website it says there's a comedian named dave chappelle he's performing i heard that if you want to perform you just call the club and you ask to have a guest set or an opening set and i just kept calling and they were they they kept hanging up on me they're like are you the dave chapley kid we're not talking to you or whatever and then i ended up going down to the club like tuesday or wednesday and i was like hey you guys kept hanging up on me and i'm trying to perform and they're like you're the dave chappelle kid i'm like yeah and he's like his name is dave chappelle we thought you were like prank calling yeah and then they're like just just show up to the open mic night so i just started going to the open mic night but i was actually too scared to go to the open mic night so i just went i bought a ticket and then like i sat in the front row and a bunch of the comedians were awful and i figured i'm like well if if they can be this bad yeah like i can do it too yeah i can be bothered about that good yeah it's always because i feel like a lot of times people are passionate about things you know necessarily not with a skill set especially at the beginning of it yeah but a lot of the skill set is just you know dedication and understanding and kind of taking yourself out of it because if you know you're not good then you'll get better but a lot of people just don't know that they kind of don't have it right away do you feel like if if the first people you met were really good you might have not done it of course but if they're like had you met tyler like had the first person you met with tyler would have been like yo maybe i shouldn't do this or maybe tyler's talk all the time tyler was horrible then too really he was the best one probably because he was the oldest but when i met him if you ask tyler about anything from that point in time he'll be like i hate that stuff really because you know over time you get access to certain things you learn certain things and now tyler's like a you know a musician musician at that it's like you're an aspiring musician then you're a musician and it's a big difference between those two so i think at that point in time like i never was like discouraged or anything like that like i don't honestly think i cared enough to ever like be affected in that way is it weird seeing your friends become famous i think it didn't bother me because they were never like my friends like only because i come from so far away so to me i didn't care about the music i just didn't want to be at home right so i was trying to find like an escape route we actually ended up living at my grandmother's house in watts so i was taking a blue line and then i was taking the red line it was easier to get to l.a you know every single like uh public transit yeah man i feel like some of the best comedy comes from the craziest that you've seen on public transportation people don't understand man like there's some really characters there's full-on like fights there's like there's like uh series regulars that come on if you want to survive on public transportation you have to build a relationship with the smokers because the smokers lived there and they kind of controlled the whole thing like it was this one dude that was always on the blue line i can tell when he was hiring when he wasn't if he's high get on his car because the police not coming to check tickets right if he's in there a while you know he might piss in the corner he might fall asleep you know you save 1.50 like you learned some life lessons on that train so what's this last year been like for you i'm i'm a homebody already i like staying at home so mean i never had a home really growing up so i was like outside doing something i had no business doing are you giving me a couch and like a tv and like some wi-fi you'll never get me to leave yeah bro it's been tough for me man my whole thing like for comedians the only way we get good is by being on the road in front of people on the road or in the city like this past year for me the benefit has been i've been around the kids a bunch you know um i have a three-year-old and a one-year-old we had a pandemic baby but the downside has been like this whole superpower this thing that i feel like is my whole identity i just haven't been able to do so like a bunch of us comics were kind of like yo are we still even good like can we even still do this do you think it's more about life experience though or experience in the space because like for me i've i think for five six years like and i'm not even exaggerating we probably toured 90 percent of the year from the time i was like 19 to like i was 20 something wow you toured that hard like we i think we probably had three tours a year like and you wouldn't you wouldn't even like come home you had an apartment or whatever that you wouldn't even i was funny i would come home and then move you know but it's like i had a couple of deaths in the family and i you know you take those breaks to decompress whatever right and then that rolled right into this and at first it was kind of hard i've recorded like probably my engineers had like 180 something songs since are you that prolific but you just come up with that much music i just record fast it's not always good but i can make a song like five minutes i've never really took my time to make songs how do you know like what's your internal compass like who do you play the music for but me to be honest because everybody likes everything that's just so annoying everybody people like to find like the brighter side of things and like i hate stuff like that like you either like it or you don't or like not even if you like it because the wrong person likes the right thing it can your life up so you know you kind of got to just i think it's just staying power um realizing what kind of i feel like means something at the present time because you can make this whole 2018 that's the greatest thing you've ever heard but if you wait six months to put it out it doesn't matter anymore so you can't have an ego and like you can't be too attached to it in the sense to where okay i made this song at the end of the year the entire soundscape of music changes now 80 bpm is too fast so you have to go i mean that that's a big thing in music it's just the time changing because like if even especially from a rap standpoint like it was five new rappers last year that most people have forgotten about in the year before and the year before and the year before everyone has these moments in time and these people are making music previously but certain people's success changes the trajectory of music so when those things happen you have to look at what you have and realize this might not be suitable for today's day and age is that terrifying just the speed at which music is changing and how do you have staying power as a musician because one thing i feel like we forget sometimes like it's not about you like even even even with comedy right it doesn't matter how good you think the joke is if nobody laughs nobody laughs it could be the most in-depth the most thoughtful most morbid ever but yeah they don't get it it doesn't matter they decide whether or not yeah i feel like it a lot of these younger kids you know i started making i was 15 and i'm 27 so it's been a long time these kids now don't necessarily think about themselves as much they're just kind of having fun with when i was younger bro and like you had a song you coveted that song you didn't want anyone to hear you wanted to leak that was a thing now people are playing records on instagram live and if people like it on instagram live then they'll put the song out like it's not as precious as it was once said to be and i think that that's a good thing because you know it's it's an experience it's like you know if you all got this joke but i don't want to tell it like one thing about you know dave they will try jokes out in front of three or four people and then 50 people 10 people and then he'll put it in a special but yeah he'll let it fly immediately but he won't be like okay this i've this is so precious i can only try it on the biggest medium i think that music is getting to that point now which i think is good for like the people that's creating it do you have a genre of tv and movies that you really with that you're like this is my i watch everything because it's like rom-coms the whole thing and i love you if it's on tv and is it interesting i'm watching it wow actually i was gonna i was meaning to ask you this because you you you love food and this says a lot about a person best diner do you with diamonds dinos has better coffee oh okay like i don't i'm not with espresso and all that fancy stuff give me a burnt ground like give me the coffee that they give the truck drivers right because their life is on the line so if it's good enough for them it's good enough for me that's how i feel facts [Music] so one of the things that we're talking about on the renegades podcast you know president obama and bruce springsteen for talking about their musical influences and it's so weird because when i was at the daily show jon stewart loved bruce springsteen so i'm a child of immigrants right growing up in the house all my pop culture references i'm the eldest so i didn't have a big brother or big sister to like kind of teach me things right so i remember john being obsessed with bruce and i started listening to like some of his music and this is zero hype i'm just listening to it for the first time he always has this like deep raspy voice like just like man we would just we were just kids from the city yeah and we had we crossed over that red bridge to the city we knew that we would leave in that small town behind i'm like why is this dude's voice so raspy on the road yeah i didn't i didn't understand it's the outfit i didn't but i didn't understand the whole like man we would just we were just two kids in a pickup truck and we we were leaving that small town behind i had no idea that he was the dude that like started that character when you listen to richard pryor and you're like oh a bunch of comics yeah were influenced by him look man one you just got to go to jersey man it's the jeans it's the t-shirt you know it's it's the blue springs it's the little read i only know about two or three songs really but you i think a big part of music is branding like i think that's the most important part and always has been in my opinion it plays such a large part in who you are yeah and i think that was the thing about a lot of dudes from that area like things were still being created i think in this point in time everything's already been done for to a certain extent you know what i mean but when you think about your sound what do you think it's linked to because i feel like there's this whole class of musicians now i can kind of see the lineage but you guys are just doing you before i started making music i didn't listen to much music like i had never heard a lot of albums from like a lot of the bigger artists like you know like you're saying with the parents thing i come up in an area of like uh ipod so it's like if you don't have one of those you can have a computer to put the songs on you had what you got at school it got to the point like what i knew was like mtv jams vh1 soul like when i started making music i started getting into other things and i kind of had the freedom of not necessarily having a favorite thing so i was able to make mistakes and kind of force certain things but as far as influences it's not necessarily for me it's more so seeing people complete their visions and kind of sticking to them so when you see someone's journey and you kind of see them doing things on their own terms and masterpiece you know certain people it makes you feel like you're a porter's head it makes you feel like you're able to create your own journey not necessarily see i want to do that but they did something that necessarily hadn't been done in that scope before and it allows you to put certain things in music like it allows you to see that it's okay to be truthful it's okay to be you know imperfect it's okay to be vulnerable in your music in a sense because you know when you give a song to someone you're not necessarily expecting them to relate to it as much you expect them to try to understand you so in order to do that you have to have you know that vulnerability you have to have the kind of disposition of just openness if you don't have an openness then you'll never be able to truly be yourself you feel like the the music you make and the people like your vince staples fans do you feel like your fans know you because that's the one thing that i noticed with with comedy like you know i took a big influence from the way kevin hart tells stories and pryor was a storyteller chappelle's one of the great storytellers they can kind of build things into this long arc my storytelling style's a little bit different but i actually am just kind of paying homage to what they've done like hey this is an eight minute 10 minute 12 minute story about you know the way i propose to my wife or this is a 12 minute story about like the day my my daughter was born i'm just straight up paying homage to what they did so that every kind of new chapter of my life as new things happen i can just tell new stories and i'm growing with the people who like what i do you know i think no matter what you always kind of pay homage because it's like a craft you know i mean like yeah but that's elevation but at the end of the day it all kind of grows from one specific thing and it's the first time it's been you know a joke is a joke no matter how you tell it you pay homage by telling a story but you don't view it as disrespectful to not tell the story the exact same way that they did it's also kind of crazy that nothing really is new person at all ever the one thing about comedy music that connor synonymous with that you have to kind of open up and tell the most uncomfortable parts of something yeah and that makes it relatable to people because if they don't have that experience they understand that uneasiness yeah and that's kind of what brings out the laughter it brings out you know the joy and whatever you know i feel like that's what one of the things that you do so well you kind of troll yourself yeah it looks like you know what i mean but but it's never that serious yeah and like i do that too in a lot of my stories where like yeah i'm the protagonist in the story but i'm losing yeah everybody takes themselves so seriously so if if you're the butt of the joke you're kind of low status everybody else in the story's high status they feel like all right we're rooting for you you know but we're all kinda living our life that way we all answer to somebody you know what i mean and we all have low moments and you know we don't need to be picked up when we're up we need to be picked up during our low moments so you know if you're vulnerable about those low moments you know you you show the similarities you know one thing i tell people about music is once you're on the stage you're on the stage the hardest thing is to get on the stage once you're on the stage you have nothing to worry about so if you're already there how do you connect with the people that are probably never go to the stage you've never had stage fright no never really never even when you're acting like when you're doing the vin staples show and you're like that's that's easy that's way easier than rapping wow way easier because it's not as dark and it's not cues and stuff like that like yeah it's way way easier than music one of the best thing that that's happened for me is fatherhood and and just having something outside of myself where it doesn't have to be about me everything that we do i mean like let's just be real we're surrounded by a crew cameras kids is one of the few things that i have in my life that my wife where they don't care about any of that stuff i'm there to service and serve them and be there for them in renegades president obama spoke about fatherhood and you know fear of disappointment and things of that when you're dealing with your children i know you just had another child yeah so do you ever feel like you could disappoint them or like there are certain pressures or how does that how does that work for you i totally get where he's coming from because being a dad is the most terrifying but most beautiful thing i've ever done in my life like it's one of the first times in my life i've felt like i can't die i know that's like morbid i feel you 100 my mom's always she's always on the phone with me don't say this don't joke about this don't piss this person off and i've always kind of been like i don't care i don't care and now that i have them like when they look at me i know they need i don't know what it is this is when they look at me i feel like they need me i'm the only person that cares about them unconditionally obviously me and my my wife so it's a terrifying thing because i know that i can't mess up i have to be there for them they see me for who i really am like there's no hiding from them whereas with show shoot whatever you know you can you confront a little bit you can hide with your kids know who you are can't put it on at all no man like they see every party they see how not punctual you are they see you angry they see you upset they see what type of husband you are you're exposed and so that's especially when you're spending so much time in the house with everything totally i know you had uh an amazing relationship with your mom like do you want to have kids is that something that you're looking i feel like or i feel like i never wanted to have kids when i was younger because i didn't know how long i was going to be around i think the older i get the more detached i kind of have from that thinking and that mindset but you have to like something special about kind of knowing that you're not infinite you know in a sense yeah i feel like you know i you wanna it's crazy because there's this whole camp of people right now that want to live forever and i'm like yo that's the most tragic thing ever you ever see like an old person at the grocery store and then they got like the i saw this dude he had some quarters in like four dollars and he didn't have a belt only after suspenders it just looked painful uh-huh i don't want to be 93 like yeah it's just kind of like i see life like an anthology series like let it be a mini series let it end i don't know man like it's already something i thought was like nah i'm not going to do it i mean maybe one day when i get older i like the kids the kids like me you know i'm king of the kids around but you know ask him he knows his kids love me more than anybody yeah i keep it fun i keep it light i watch the cartoons i give them the pretzels when they're not supposed to have them like you know yeah i saw i'm i'm a good hang when it comes to the children so you know maybe one day i might have my own but my kids are going to be crazy so that's going to be oh that's going to be a weird dynamic it'll be dope bro i can't wait for you to see it it's just it's just a cool thing you got to watch it because you understand what you probably be dealing with these kids are going to be out of their mind so you know have fun with them i love the kids man shout out all the kids so obviously this past year year and a half has been crazy things are starting to open up again have you seen anything in this past year that is making you you know go into 21 and 22 and beyond and go look i absolutely have to do this has there been anything kind of life-changing in in this quarantine that you want to things change from you know a point of view but you know everything's still the same you know what i mean like you said it before it's always existed i think it's important to not miss the moment and i think that's one thing that i noticed from the pandemic because people were so highlighted on the money that we were highlighting the small moments that we had not doing shows for a minute makes you want to do these shows and one of these people like of course there's a lot of people that you know that are regulars that come around and like i always wondered like how liz is doing like you know pete who used to come to our show early on he just got he just had his baby you know i mean it's like and you relations with people but it's like you can't miss these moments because you know you might not get them again but make sure that even if it's not the specific moment you know when you get another moment cherish it and try to live within it and not kind of look past it that's it for me man like i felt the same way there's so many things that i got to do that i wasn't really having fun while i was doing it i was so stressed about just doing it well and being able to just make it that i didn't really you know what i'm saying like don't i don't even eat the food in the green room i didn't i didn't celebrate any of it you know being so focused and on thing which is a good thing because it helps you get to where you are yeah but like we were saying no one cares about you like they don't the fans don't necessarily care if you stumble on this song or they see you stumble on this joke they just want to see you if you did one song and spent the rest of the show talking to the audience they'll say it was the best show they had yo so so straight up like if the best artist that you're a fan of just did a meet and greet that's really all they all people they just want they want you they want to meet billy eileen they want you to know that they exist and those are the moments that we're speaking of you know you can't focus the moment's not okay is this part of this song and this is listening now the moment is like the kid in the front like that said that they love you and they're crying it's like what the are you crying for like you said i was like y'all they're so weird like what's wrong with you people that's like i wish i would have paid attention more to those moments you know like i played two coachellas like and i don't remember anything before i played coachella now and after i got off stage i went home and i drove home you got in your car you just drove home you went to sleep in your bed yeah we went home that's hilarious well i got all day long i probably should have kicked it for a little bit uh-huh well you know it's always the next time it's weird for me man this this year has been wild in the sense that a lot of my friends that i grew up with a lot of people that i know um they're hurting man i remember older people would always tell me nobody's coming to save you this pandemic kind of showed me that like nobody is coming to save you at all the government won't come and save you you probably will get fired from your job like what do you tell people because you have so many fans that are like in their early 20s and you know a lot of the younger kids from my neighborhood is like where i saw it the worst and it's only because i'm going like we're doing these things i'm going like you know giving them groceries and like helping their moms do certain stuff and stuff like that but i saw like the rapid growth of like 15 year olds just seeing them change overnight and i'm telling you it took like six months if i'm able to run up like a 7 500 uber bill in two months just to keep you from you know getting hurt i know if it's 20 kids i could do that for it's 5 000 kids i can't you know what i mean like right so what happened to those kids we gave some money to um this initiative where they were just asking people for 500 to try to get wi-fi and computer access to the kids in long beach who had to go to school on zoom and it's like yeah the fact that this is what these kids have to do and a large percentage of these kids don't even have access to these things and then the library's closed it's like what do you expect these kids to do and it's like you said no one's coming to save them because the school doesn't care if you don't have a laptop they're not buying you one i'm a mentor for this thing called the boys club in new york basically it's a club five bucks a year if you're if you're a young man you get to go there and you have mentors and mentees kind of older brothers that um are there to help you with homework they got like a swimming pool it's crazy it's awesome right but one of the things that i'm trying to teach them is so much of what i learned in school was complete garbage that had no application to where the world is like people are like go to college get college debt put your head down get a job you know when my parents immigrated here in 82 they were buying into believing into that and my biggest fear is i got a three-year-old and a one-year-old i don't know what to tell them what to believe in i was really like raised to never believe any of that yeah like when i was in the 10th grade now to my mom i'm dropping out of high school she said okay and she understood so i had to leave too yeah and it's like that's not regular you know what i mean but it's not remember we were on tour once i was explaining a lot of people can't believe that i didn't graduate from high school and i was telling you know corey that it was a it was a basic normal thing in california and then we're in a room full of successful musicians like people that are touring and doing things and then he asked us you know who graduated from high school i think out of 15 people it was like two people had graduated high school and then we started looking into the numbers and seeing how broad it is like i think in in in the city like about um 40 40 44 to 45 percent of cambodian kids drop out of high school by the time they're 13. what's even sadder than like never having belief is like losing belief so then you get to the point where everyone's in the same pot and then we start to fight each other because everyone's unhappy i have two competing things that i'm trying to teach my kids the way the world should be and the way the world is and there's this there's a gap in between that and that's my been my biggest challenge as a dad my mom constantly apologizes to me constantly oh i'm so sorry you got to deal with this deal with this and in my whole life i never once had any gripes with my mother but it's the reality of the situation and i think if i wasn't taught reality then i would be nowhere right now you know you have to know where you sit in life you have to know how to get out of it and i feel like in america we constantly i don't want to know that we teach we teach self-importance but also like demeaning people like oh you should be great but you're worthless it's like that's what we do to people and then you have people far-reaching and trying that's why you have such a strong celebrity culture and all these other things like yeah when bad things happen in the world like people go to famous people would it be like what should we do and it's asking for we feel like yeah no we're not special unless we above and beyond [Music] thanks for sharing that you know being open with me with us with everything going on i think it's important for us to try to connect more with each other so happy it could be me here yeah thanks for taking the time bro man i'll see you next time at dinner with tommy yeah and then we'll go from there sure definitely i appreciate you yeah this is one of my favorite things i've done so i appreciate it cool thanks bro [Music] please use that tape that's the most yeah that's that's the one that's the most normal one you don't use it i would be so upset when i see

Channel: GQ

Views: 525,037

Rating: 4.9663043 out of 5

Keywords: epic conversation, epic conversations, gq, gq hasan minhaj, gq magazine, gq vince staples, hasan minaj, hasan minhaj, hasan minhaj 2021, hasan minhaj and vince staples, hasan minhaj conversation, hasan minhaj epic conversation, hasan minhaj gq, hasan minhaj interview, hasan minhaj vince staples, hassan minahj, vince staples, vince staples 2021, vince staples conversation, vince staples epic conversation, vince staples gq, vince staples hasan minhaj, vince staples interview

Id: ZJHSWPbZODA

Length: 41min 6sec (2466 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Nanthro]

We bringing back calling shit epic?

[u/ojoj888]

When the rapper is funnier than the comedian

[u/TypicalDelay]

Love vince interviews but the chemistry was pretty weak here kind of a snooze

[u/letswrapthisup]

Get Hasan away from hiphop. Great show on Netflix, but he’s insufferable with his oldhead opinions lol

[u/downtothegwound]

Vince does the best interviews tbh.

[u/Jon_Sommers_1998]

Yo the track that vince sampled him on is and always be one of my favorites.

[u/JimmehFTW]

Okay now this is epic

[u/Ghost_Of_Sun-Bat-Her]

Le epic Reddit moment

[u/HomerMadeMeDoIt]

Someone needs to pick up Hasan for a proper show. Patriot act had so much potential but was also a wild boy thing and Netflix couldn’t carry it no more.

Can’t see any publisher taking on the risks of patriot act tho