Hey everybody.

Welcome to Politico's off message podcast from Cleveland.

So we decided to get the hell out of the security perimeter for this one.

Our last guest was Ted Cruz. So I was thinking to myself,

who would be the person that we could get that would be the exact human opposite of Ted Cruz?

And we settled upon a hero of my youth, somebody, I am, I will admit, I'm never really nervous before these

interviews and I'm never really that excited after him.

But this one was totally different.

I'm talking about Chuck D.

The front man for public enemy, you know, the seminal rap group, the Led Zeppelin of hip-hop.

Chuck D. is with, is in Cleveland sort of running counter programming to the Republican National

Convention with his band, Prophets of Rage, with Tom Morello, uh, from Rage Against the

Machine. And we were just kind of reaching out to him. And he invited us over to the other

side of Cleveland to the Agarra ballroom as they were setting up, uh, doing a sound check, uh, to kind

of talk politics, to talk music. And the truth of the matter is he's about 70 years older than me, but we really grew up in New York at the same time. I have never had more fun than in this interview. It's kind of all over the place. So Chuck D. was setting up a series of interviews today because, you know, he is, he was an Air America host. He's very political. He started off kind of being a Malcolm X guy, and he's still pretty radical.

So he was doing – you know, so the British – particularly the British press really digs him.

So he was doing an interview with The Guardian, and then he was doing a hit with Nightline.

So we get in there, and his management completely misunderstands how we do our job, which

is kind of easy to do because we're weird. And they're like, okay, you got 10 minutes. And we walk

into this ballroom and they're testing out the smoke machine. So the entire ballroom and it's,

it's a theater, I'd say, about a thousand fifteen hundred seats and so the whole place

looks like it looks like we're walking uh through a you know a hound of the baskerville's set with

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