When it comes to saying yes or no to new opportunities, Dave Chappelle leans on the late Maya Angelou.

On the latest episode of The Midnight Miracle, the stand-up star covers a lot of conversational ground with his Luminary podcast co-hosts Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def), including topics like the merits of awards, the role of money in an artist’s life, Kevin Hart’s ambitious stand-up goals and his own exit from the critically acclaimed Comedy Central series Chappelle’s Show.

Angelou’s name came up during the chat about awards when Chappelle paraphrased Angelou’s much-repeated quote that goes like this: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” He called the metric “almost singular” and said it’s always his go-to.

“There’s two things that I think about: What does that feel like and, of course, the greatest cultural impact, right?” he said during the episode, one that was recorded in front of an audience at the Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa Valley last summer. He then applied it to awards, specifically music’s highest honor. “Michael Jackson swept for Thriller. He won for every Grammy he was up for, except for one, which was best song. What beat Thriller for best song? Anybody? Does anybody even know? ‘Every Breath You Take,’ by the Police. Take it easy. My point is what difference does it make? The best song is a completely subjective metric.”

On Hart, Chappelle said he’s “very impressed with him as a comedian,” adding that he doesn’t believe Hart gets the credit he deserves for his proficiency as a stand-up. “He’s, like, actually incredibly good at it. But Kevin, from early on, had a very specific notion about who and what he wanted to be, and it was big. You know, he plays stadiums. Everything in his mind is big. It was a choice,” Chappelle explained. “Him being big was a skilled shot. It was a hole in one. ‘I want this.’ He said exactly what he had to say the way he had to say it to be exactly what he wants to be.”

The trio also discussed money with Bey kicking off that segment by saying, “I like money. I love money. Delicious. It goes with everything I want to do. OK? I’m not afraid of money. I’m not ashamed of having money. I’m just not going to do anything for it. I’m not going to betray myself for your money. Because when the money is gone, which it inevitably always is at some point. You can’t die with it. You can’t. Everything that you have will go. What you do have, that you live with, is your own feeling about yourself. Everything is not for sale, everybody pays a price.”

Chappelle said he agreed with Bey’s sentiment and it’s the reason he walked away from his star-making sketch series. “That’s why I quit Chappelle’s Show. If I finished the show under the circumstances at that time, I don’t think I would have ever been the same,” said Chappelle, who previously told Oprah Winfrey that he walked away from a $50 million deal because he grew uncomfortable with the “socially irresponsible” sketches he was doing at the time. “Something inside of me that I needed, I would have had to let go of it for that, and I couldn’t let go of it to keep going.”