Bomani Jones
speaker
433 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 Dec
Bomani Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
I think the most interesting level of this, and I've talked about this on my show, is whom one believes is the predator in this relationship.
I think there's a tendency for people to look at it as this older man is the predator dealing with this younger woman. And I think that if you talk to anybody who has an older father, and this is not me, by the way, but if you talk to anybody who has an older father who's started dating a younger woman, they do not think that the older man is the predator, right?
Because the older father is the one writing all these checks and bankrolling the situation. Like, you'll talk to people whose dads are going, like, you sending your dad money and your dad sending that money to this little young girl that you're messing with.
I don't know. No, she clearly makes him feel alive. That's good. The thing I have learned in my travels, Matt, I believe that you will agree with me when I say it. It seems very simple, but it's the truth. People do what makes them feel good. The people who spend more money than they have, they feel good when they spend the money.
The problem is the good feeling of spending money doesn't last, but they feel good when they spend the money. People do the thing. We're animals in that regard. They do the thing that makes them feel good, and it is clear. She makes him feel Tony the Tiger great.
Yeah.
So it kind of depends on what we're talking about. Right. So for me, for example, I did a show on HBO called game theory. Um, we got two seasons. I think that is an unmitigated success. Like there was nothing that could happen after that show went on the air. Cause it's so crazy that we got to do the show in the first place.
Um, that I would look at that as not being successful because that was the one thing that I was like, we're so lucky to be here that when I had a deal for six episodes, I never thought about the seventh. Success was going to be about how I felt about those six. And then we got 10 more and it went the same way. I did a show on ESPN called High Noon with Pablo Torre.
That show lasted for about two years before they canceled it. That one, I would probably categorize more as a failure. It wasn't, I thought Game Theory was very good. High Noon was not very good. I don't think it was bad, but it was not very good. I think I was somewhat fortunate in terms of how I dealt with it, So there wasn't much time to think about it. There were a million things going on.
No, no, no. You're right. What I was not happy about in that time was I didn't have enough going on. Like I wasn't hurt by that fact, but I did know this. I was not going to be hosting a television show for ESPN ever again. And I was overqualified for any other job that you had for me to do on TV at that point. That wasn't it. So no, I was a little lost in the wilderness at that point, certainly.
And it didn't feel good. But after I flunked out of graduate school, which is probably the biggest thing that I would consider I did, that was a failure. What I realized was- I didn't know you did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't pass the micro qual to second go around. all that meant was that maybe just maybe I'm not a PhD level micro economist.
It's not exactly the biggest insult in the world, right? You know, like if that's the case, like I'm still qualified to teach college. I could still, there's somebody who could be a Nobel prize winner that I could teach in econ one-on-one who will appreciate the fact that they had me like all of those things I had to recognize in that moment taught me.
I don't have to be great at everything that I do, right? And so when High Noon didn't work, it was just like, okay, well, what are we going to do now? But what I learned was there's no stopping in this. There's no room for self-pity. And truly, if you have not slipped up somewhere along the way in this, it's because you're not trying that hard.
Like I've worked with people who have never had failures. And one thing they have in common is they're not trying that hard. Their ambitions aren't the same as mine.
Like, do you realize the level of ambition or the, what I learned in this, it sounds dramatic as I'm saying it about myself, but I do believe this took a little bit of courage for me to sit up in a suit at a desk for two seasons, telling jokes. I was doing the Trevor Noah job, the John Oliver job, the Bill Maher job, and I did it. I was getting better, and it could have been better.
I'm not saying it was the greatest ever, but we did it, and I think we did a good job of it. I think about that way more than I think about the end of it. That's crazy. That's just setting yourself up for misery.
The HBO show was literally my dream job. I don't care if I ever do a TV show again. I have checked off every box that I ever wanted to do. How in the world do you think you're going to make me feel like I failed by literally achieving a dream?
It is frustrating for me. It is frustrating on a larger level because I believe, and this is something you and I have talked about, um, about like our work and it's what I've taught. I've talked about this on the air when I guess hosted your show. What frustrated me most about him and what they do is I believe they have created a caricature of me that does not really exist. Right.
And so I do not work to achieve. I'm not in this to make white people like me. Right. But I also believe that we have more in common than people give us credit for. Like our friendship is a testament to the fact that I have more in common with the people who listen to you than I think that people realize if they'll just give it a chance and get over whatever trash they got in their heads.
And so what frustrates me is when somebody like Clay leans in on what this nonsense is and stops what connections we could actually make amongst ourselves as people. And I know we can because I did radio in Raleigh and I fought against all of this stuff early.
Showing 141–160 of 433 · page 8 of 22
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