Rafael Casal on Building Something Real

W. Kamau Bell (0:15)

Hey, everybody, it's me, W. Kamau Bell. Welcome to Episode 21 of Who's with Me? My podcast that is based on my Substack of the very same name. As always, if you want to keep up with me, the best way is to subscribe to my Substack. Just go to Substack. You can download the app.

Follow me, subscribe to Who's with Me. You can subscribe for free or you can throw me a few dollars because I got a lot of children.

How are you going to do it? Anyway, this is Episode 21 of my podcast, Who's with Me? My guest today is my friend, Rafael Casal. Rafael is a director, a writer, a rapper, a musician. Did I say actor? A showrunner, an activist, an advocate for the East Bay of California, the whole Bay Area, but specifically the East Bay Area of California.

He's one of those people who has a lot of slashes in his name, but it's working the hell out of all those slashes. You may have seen him in the TV show Loki.

He's most famous for his film and series Blindspotting, which he did with his best friend, Daveed Diggs, who was in Episode 5 of Who's with Me? He's just a good dude. I met him and Daveed when they were first promoting the film Blindspotting. They reached out to me and called me and said, hey, do you want to help us promote this film? I did a moderated conversation with them. That was the first time I met them in real life, and I've been in touch with them ever since. These are just two great dudes. We already talked to the first great dude, Daveed Diggs, and today we're talking to the second great dude, Rafael Casal, Berkeley Zone. We'll get more into that later.

Also, I'm done with promoting stand-up dates for a while. Yay. I did the Stanford Comedy Club. That was fun. I did the Stanford University. Our national nightmare is behind us of Stamford versus Stanford.

I did Stanford, brought my mom, called Stanford out for its use of AI. So that was sort of a little bit of a news story, so I called Stanford out for that. We also talked about consent on college campuses. Felt like a good place to do it. And, you know, I did the things I do. And my friend Nato Green was there. Dr. Seema Yasmin was there. And it wasn't that far from home, so it was nice. Right now, the number one thing you can do to say, come out, how do I support you? Pre-order Rock, Paper, Scissors, Cheese. We're supposed to get actual copies of it tomorrow afternoon as I tape this. So hopefully next week I will have physical copies of the actual book. I'll be making videos. Me and Adam Mansback will be making videos with it. We'll be doing a lot of things. Got a lot of ideas, ways to not just promote the book, but just promote bookstores, independent bookstores. You know, I love independent bookstores. I actually just wrote a Substack recently about independent bookstores. The bookstore Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis. I was there when I did my series on Substack. I spent three days in Minneapolis.

So yeah, we're going to do some things. So real quick, before I get into the meat of what I want to talk about today, I don't know if you know this, but a lot of comedians, we make a little bit of extra money by royalties. We get paid for our comedy running on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. So SiriusXM takes our albums and then they have a channel that they've had called Raw Dog Comedy for years now. And they would play comedians, famous comedians, up-and-coming comedians, comedians you never heard of. Because if you have an album or a special, they would take that and they would play the tracks on their Raw Dog Comedy channel. Well recently, and you got paid royalties for it, that's the important part. And you would sometimes get checks like, ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho. And as a working comedian who's not super famous, it can make a big difference. You can be like, now I can have, I can go to the doctor. So recently, that channel has transformed into a Sebastian Maniscalco comedy channel. Sebastian Maniscalco, one of the biggest comics in the country, if you don't know, sells out arenas. He makes movies with Robert De Niro.

He's a huge, huge touring comedian. He's always on Forbes' top list of money-earning comedians for the last probably five, six, seven, eight years ago, maybe 10 years, who knows? Huge media. So now the channel is in his name, but they've cut back from the 800 comics they used to run on the channel to 300 comics. And apparently, from what I'm understanding, a friend, Mike Kaplan, he's a great comedian, said that those 300 comedians are overwhelmingly just household names and legacy acts. So it's gonna be super famous comedians, and then apparently like Bob Hope is one of the comics on the channel, so you can find out what Bob Hope thinks about stuff.