Hey everybody, Kate Snow here. This is The Drink, my series all about how folks got to the top of their field. And I cannot wait for you to hear comedian Roy Wood Jr. You probably know him from his years as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Now he's the host of the CNN program, Have I Got News for You? He has written a

great book called The Man of Many Fathers. We talked over two old fashions. First time anyone has ever

chosen my favorite drink, by the way. We were at the Jupiter Restaurant in Rockefeller Plaza.

You're going to want to hear how Roy pushed through a lot of adversity to get where he

is today. A complicated father, an arrest in college, many nights spent sleeping in his car while he

traveled across the country to do stand-up. We bonded over driving K cars in the 80s, anyone, and loving

jigsaw puzzles. As always, you can watch all of our episodes online too

at NBCNews.com slash the drink.

Roy Wood Jr. Is this an old-fashioned? Oh, yeah, old fashions. Yeah, I don't know when I

transitioned to old fashions, but I feel classy not. When you're drinking dark liquor, you want to have a little bit of lightness to it because you want people to take what you're saying, serious. Yes. Because if the liquor get a little darker than this, this could turn to club shay-shay real fast. And I say they with respect because they just get club shay-shay, and we was drinking dark. In all the drinks we've done, nobody's ever chosen my favorite drink. The old-fashioned. Well, then that means that we're kindred spirits. There we go. Roy Wood Jr., you're a comedian. You were on the daily show for a lot of years as a correspondent. Now you've got, have I got news for you, the host of that.

We're in Jupiter and Rockefeller Center down the concourse. Yeah, yeah, down here next to the

ice rink that I never go on. I say it. You could do it right now. I would never ice skate again. I

tried twice, retired. I have this fear of falling and somebody skates running over my fingers.

Yeah, I get that. I get that. I think I have that same fear. And it feels irrational, but I feel like if I dug deep enough on the

internet, I can find something close to that and it would scare me to not doing it. But yeah, my point is I'm never down here.

Yeah, I got

you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. You have a book, The Man of Many Fathers. Yes. It's basically a tribute to your son or you wrote it kind of for your son, right? Yeah, but it end up being a journey for myself. Yeah. That's the thing about a book. Like with stand up, you know where you're going.

With TV, you know where you're going.

But a book, you're discovering things about yourself along the way. As you write. For me, the book started as a journey into basically leaving kind of like a little bit of a notebook of who I am in terms of my values for my son to pick up. And when I started looking at what

my values were, the more I realized I didn't get most of those from my father because he died

when I was 16. I got it from people within my community, people that I met only once, random

co-workers, comedians. And so it just became this beautiful monage of characters. And, you know,

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