[Python] Why must I cast int to bool before checking "is True"?

In my url.py file in Django, I have the following line:

if bool(settings.DEBUG) is True:


This works well because settings.DEBUG == 1 therefore it equals True after the bool() function. However, I needed to add the bool() to make it work. The original line was not working and the original line was:

if settings.DEBUG is True:


This always evaluates to False, even when settings.DEBUG == 1.

Why is the value 1 evaluating to False when I do not cast it explicitly to bool?

In other words, why doesn't "1 is True" evaluate true?

Note that I am using python 3 in case that matters to the answer.

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