Michael Wood Jr., a former Marine and Baltimore police sergeant, returns to The Joe Rogan Experience to argue that gun proliferation and aggressive policing—like the "Ferguson effect"—fuel violence, citing $27B in lost productivity from disconnected youth. He dismisses private gun ownership under the Second Amendment’s militia clause, proposing production halts to curb 30,000 annual handgun crimes, while Rogan questions widespread fear of shootings. Wood Jr. advocates for community-controlled policing, like his Chicago reform plan, and decriminalizing drugs via Portugal’s model, linking crime to systemic barriers. His Radio Revolver initiative aims to empower marginalized voices through storytelling, with the first series dissecting Freddie Gray’s case. Both agree: real change demands dismantling reactive policies, not top-down fixes. [Automatically generated summary]
For the Marines who agree with that, okay, you were a Marine, former Sergeant in the Baltimore Police Department, and you came on the podcast a while back and exposed some pretty eye-opening...
information about how the the whole system sort of works in this sort of a kind of a closed loop in in Baltimore where the same neighborhoods are having the same kind of crime in the same sort of scenarios over and over again and that was a really important podcast for me and it was a really important podcast for a lot of people that listen to it because they got exposed to The inner workings of police departments by someone who was...
I was really happy how honest you were about all of it, about the thrill of chasing people and all of the cool stuff about it.
And we scheduled this podcast quite a while ago.
And it's kind of crazy that you're coming in the weekend after these insane shootings in Orlando.
And I'm absolutely not happy that that happened, but I'm happy, as happy as I could be, that you're here while this is all going down.
And we get to kind of talk about...
These moments, these insane moments that happen, it seems like every few months or so, some new insane moment happens where some person, usually a man, blows a fucking fuse and winds up killing a ton of people.
I don't know what if anything, and I'm hoping maybe you'll have some insight, what if anything could ever be done to stop something like this?
A lot of people don't categorize those as mass shootings, because you think of mass shootings as someone going into a crowded place and killing a bunch of civilians, or innocent people, I should say, whereas they think of those kind of shootings in the hood as rival gangs, people competing over drug dealing territory, things along those lines, which is Another point, because you were running for—you wanted to be the head of police of Chicago.
He is intimately tied into a cheating scandal and a promotional test.
Oh.
Another thing which you could solve easily, so his friend's wife or something got number one on the lieutenant's test, which is extremely qualifying, so to say.
And As soon as the information comes down, that he actually was the one that was developing the test, had the answers, and then she gets this super high score out of nowhere.
That's when everybody says, oh, come on.
We've seen this before.
We know what it is.
So you could solve it.
You could retest them and see who does it.
But of course not.
So they're not going to do that.
They don't have any interest in exposing things.
So if I'm going to come in there and I'm going to say, all right, that's it.
Well, it seems the people of a city or of any area have to be pushed hard enough to have that change.
Like, they have to have that breaking point where they say, that's it.
We're going to do something different.
Because what I really push is for civilian controlled policing.
I want you guys to tell me what should be done.
Which is a huge drop in power.
So that would require a mayor that's willing to give in to the people that have pushed hard enough to say, look, I'm going to relinquish control of my essential armed wing, and I'm going to give it to the people.
Well, what they've tried to do in some areas, like in New Jersey in particular, is force these people to integrate more into the community, make them walk the beat, which is, like, you don't hear about that anymore.
Now everyone's in a car, and you're driving around in this closed-up vehicle, whereas before, everybody was walking around, and you were sort of like, oh, there's Officer Mike.
You know, he's a part of the community, and it became normal to see these people.
They developed friendships with the people that were in their neighborhood that they were patrolling, and it sort of ingratiated them more.
I think having a bunch of people that you don't know patrolling your streets with guns in a car, just driving around and, you know, hardly ever getting out unless they're arresting somebody.
Well, yeah, but I don't see that the foot patrol is the solution to that because what they do is they put a facade on it.
So they make it look Like Foot Patrol.
But it still has those essential underpinnings of being motivated to go and make arrests and to get the stats.
So I did Foot Patrol for like six months.
And that's what it was.
It was just being thrown in to get drug arrests.
I didn't know anybody or meet anybody.
It was still those same pushing to get somebody, put them in a prison cell, do the paperwork, go back out and do it again.
So what we really need is to change the incentives and disincentives so that no matter what the role, we're still going towards that objective that actually serves you.
Dave Smith, who's a hilarious stand-up comedian, and he's also on this podcast called Legion of Skanks.
He's a libertarian, very smart guy.
But he was bringing up a point about New York after the shootings in New York where a bunch of cops had gotten shot.
There was this sort of cool-off period where they had just stopped arresting people for bullshit.
And the bullshit arrests, like loose cigarettes, things along those lines, just dropped substantially.
And people were really excited about that.
They were like, look, this is a good step.
This is really how it should be.
The police shouldn't be glorified revenue collectors just arresting people for the taxes lost on loose cigarettes, and that's what killed Eric Garner, right?
I'm really glad that you brought up that instance in New York.
So what that is, is direct evidence against what the head of the FBI has said, Comey, who's coming and he's pushing this Ferguson effect.
So the idea around, they're saying, oh, we have crime going up in these different neighborhoods because there's this Ferguson effect that the cops are laying back so they're not being as proactive.
And because they're not being as proactive, then they're not locking people up so stats are going up.
And we know that if you have a theory and there's one situation that says your theory's complete crap, well, your theory's complete crap.
And that's what New York was.
So New York, they stepped back and they wanted to be like, oh, look how much you need us.
I think another way to look at it that's maybe on more common ground is you're fucking with people.
When you're around them all the time and you're like, what's going on over there, boys?
You know, like that kind of shit.
You're fucking with them.
You're creating tension.
And tension creates...
It creates arguments.
It creates crime.
It creates resentment.
It creates anger.
All those things contribute to crime, 100%.
And when you fuck with people over loose cigarettes or any sort of nonsense, petty crime that nobody gives a shit about, that kind of stuff is not good for anybody.
It's not good for the relationship the police have with citizens.
It's not good for the perception of the citizens, of the way they view the police.
They are funded and, you know, so you have a mayor in Baltimore.
The mayor directs the police department's way, no matter what city you're in.
And what that person is doing is they're serving those rich people.
They're serving the mass voters of the area who just have that mentality still that they want those animals caged and to pen them in and to keep them there.
So as long as it doesn't affect us, then who cares?
Right.
That's really what you're hitting on there.
I don't know that more of this country doesn't want our police to be that way.
I think you're probably right, but I think they're misinformed.
And I think they have this...
This incorrect understanding of how that affects the people that these cops are interacting with, and that it actually does probably create more crime.
And then on top of that, I think there's also the problem with those people that are in those poor communities could just as easily be you or I. If we were born into those situations, and we're talking about giving people an opportunity to get out, giving people a possibility to get out.
And do better and improve their situation, their standing in life.
Well, if they're getting fucked with all the time, that's not going to happen.
If they're in a terrible, poverty-laden, crime-laden community, Good luck with that.
Good luck getting out of that.
It becomes almost insurmountable.
And I think it's real convenient for people to be outside of that and look at those folks and go, well, those people need to stop doing crime.
What you need to do is just lock them all up.
Well, that doesn't seem to make sense.
It seems much more likely that the best way to handle that is to lock them up less.
And to sort of somehow or another try to calm that area down.
And I don't know how you would do it.
I mean, whether it's through some universal basic income idea, which I've been paying a lot of attention to that lately and trying to explore those ideas and see if I can wrap my own...
It was an idea that Eddie Huang brought up on the podcast, and I initially laughed at him.
I was like, what?
Nobody's going to fucking go for that.
And then I started reading some articles on it, and I started thinking about it.
Financially, the issue is, where's that money come from?
And you're obviously going to—it's a shit ton of money that's going to have to somehow or another come out of something else.
And I'm not a financial person.
I don't understand economy.
I'm not an economist.
So I'm not the person to do the numbers, but when I think about it like objectively as far as from a social stance When people have less problems, when bills are paid easier, when they're more relaxed as far as where food's coming from, where basic needs are covered, they're less likely to commit crime.
So it just makes sense that you would have to spend less money on law enforcement, less money on prisons, less money on jails, and that perhaps that could translate.
There was a great article written by some prominent libertarian who wrote this piece about universal basic income.
The idea is essentially giving people $13,000 a year.
That if you give Americans essentially $1,000 plus a month, and that if you did that, you would take care of a shitload of problems that we have in inner cities and crime and all this.
And he sort of outlined it and made a pretty interesting case for this idea.
But, of course, you've got a lot of people that want to go on and on about welfare babies and people that are juking the system and buying cigarettes with food stamps and things along those lines.
But it's like this callous sort of approach to dealing with really poor people in really bad neighborhoods.
And one of the things that you brought up about Baltimore that made it so disturbing was that black people had to buy houses in these areas.
They would not sell houses in certain areas to black people.
And that this was like a law.
And this was actually written.
This is not like everybody conspired.
This was something that they actively set out to do.
So things that you're talking about, and like that sociologist that has that study, we know these things.
So what you're observing is things that the scholarly community has known for a long time and is trying to get these things out there so that people understand this.
It's not even a matter of how much is this going to cost, because we're already spending the money, and we're spending a lot more.
This book, this is why I brought it with me, because I just finished...
Going through it.
It was just put out.
So this is by a Johns Hopkins researcher, Stephanie DeLuca, who's a friend of mine, so everybody knows that I am saying it.
They did a study.
They followed Baltimore youth around for well over a decade.
I think it was like 15, 16 years.
And their paths that they go through.
And part of that was it cost $27 billion to America every single year for disconnected youth.
So that's just youth that don't have a drive and don't have a focus.
So you get stuck in this idea that you can't escape this neighborhood because we have so many blockades in the way.
There are stories that go through, they track like a hundred and some people, parents having kids in these neighborhoods and moving them out and what happened to them.
And the two biggest pushers for the success of any kid in these cities was that they had An identity project, which means they're finding their passion and what they're going to go towards because they don't know these passions.
They don't know that a photographer like Devin Allen, a friend of mine in Baltimore, can come out and do things for their community and can actually achieve that dream.
So once they see it and it's possible and you start taking the hurdles down, like the hurdles of where they live and the hurdles of the arrest for the bag of weed or for, like you said, the...
The talking yourself into jail because the cops messing with you every single day and you're saturated with police in these neighborhoods.
You start taking down these barriers and these kids excel.
And that goes completely against the narrative that we're hearing that these kids don't have motivation and they can't push out.
Eighty percent of these kids that grow up in the city never touch the streets or have anything to do with it.
They're getting high school degrees at four or five hundred percent the rate of their parents.
It's just that what we keep doing is we keep getting them behind and they're still fighting super hard, but we're still throwing more and more hurdles in their way.
This is just the lack of their productivity from achieving what they can achieve and what it's costing us to then take care of what the fallout is in just that microcosm.
Well, this is one of the subjects that's come up over and over again on this podcast because I've always tried to figure out What it is that keeps people from trying to socially engineer these environments and make them better for the people that live there.
Like, we're always concentrating on all these other countries.
We're concentrating on, you know, helping Afghanistan and, you know, rebuilding Iraq and all the stuff that we do, humanitarian efforts all over the world, right?
So what we end up doing is we have this idea that we're rich and often white and we're going to come in and we're going to like have the handout or we're going to give them what we want or we're going to show them the right way.
And that's not the answer.
The answer is to ask what they want and provide the structure and platform for that to take place.
So when these smart people that haven't been in there, they'll look at stats and they'll look at the paperwork and they'll say, oh, we just need to move people out and relocate them.
Or we need to...
The idea was, all right, well, we'll put them in this big tower and we'll have resources around them and everything will be fine.
And we're making sure they have their own police department so everything will be...
We'll be good, but then the police start locking everybody up, and you get into that cycle again because you're not giving the identity project even to adults where you can say, whether it's comedy or whether it's photography or no matter what, you have to have that goal, that vision, because all they see Is that their future is in dealing or in a prison cell, and they keep being told that if they do the right things, they can move on.
But when they do the right things, our sometimes good intentions put up the roadblocks that prevent them from doing that.
There's a dude who works at the Comedy Store who was a criminal defense attorney, and he resigned.
He stopped doing it because he got tired of his...
When he was bringing cases to trial, if it was a white guy, the white guy would get, you know, whatever, six months.
For an identical crime, a young black guy would get ten years.
And he was like, someone's got to tell me what the fuck is going on here, because all I'm looking at is systematic racism.
I'm looking at institutional racism.
He was like, this is just over and over and over again.
I'm confronted by the same kind of people, the same age brackets, but completely different types of sentences.
And what's the mentality behind it?
And he said everybody wanted to just bury their head in the sand and he couldn't do it anymore.
It was so strange.
I mean, when the guy talks about it, he's like smoking cigarettes and freaking out because it was just 10 years of his life and it was just too much.
He couldn't do it anymore.
That kind of shit is almost insurmountable.
When you're living in that world and you're one of those people that gets sent down the river for 10 years for something that you know if you were a white Irish kid you would get six months or a much lesser sentence.
That alone has got to be a gigantic hurdle for someone living in these environments.
And it's not saying that people shouldn't be punished for crimes.
It would certainly depend on the situation, but I can't help but keep coming back to the fundamental idea that our criminal justice system is based on punishment.
But we have to look beyond that because when your sister gets in a fight and kills your neighbor who's your friend or something like that, you're not asking for the death penalty because it's close to you.
There should be some sort of a standard nationwide where we should look at it as a culture, as a society, as a civilization and say, hey, you know, what should we be trying to do to try to make these people better people?
So what we say now is when he goes and shoots or when someone rapes, we're not looking at it as that failure.
So if you were running this business and a facet of your business failed, Then you would want to have an analysis and you would want to say, alright, let's do a regression and figure out what went wrong.
And you would want to fix that for the next time.
But we don't do that.
We just go, alright, throw that one away and continue path as normal.
We shouldn't be so focused when we arrest somebody to figure out...
How we're going to throw them away for the longest, we should be figuring out why it happened so we can prevent it for the next person.
But it doesn't seem like we actually care about solving the crime.
We're just keeping these wheels turning.
So if you commit murder, then I want to know why.
I want to know the scenarios that led you up to that.
Because the only way that I can actually prevent that is not minority report.
It's finding out what that hurdle was, that moment that you said, fuck this, and finding ways to prevent that as much as possible or reduce it for other people.
And a lot of it must have to do with the developmental period that you go through when you're a young person and what you're exposed to as a small child.
And that stuff becomes so deeply ingrained in a person's mind to try to reverse that.
Boy, it's so much harder than to try to raise someone correctly the first time.
I mean, they talk about these things where that's one of the predictors is how much exposure to violence that these kids have had when they were going between the ages of zero and ten.
And so when they got them out of the city and they gave them opportunities, then they got exposed to less violence.
The really crazy thing in this study is that we found out that the kids that were in the city that didn't get help, they also fought their way out at actually a higher rate.
So we did these nice things and we have to tweak it, but like our nice things that we did actually didn't pan out in the same results as kids that were just fighting on their own.
So they had these housing voucher programs where the idea was to take people out of those neighborhoods and put them into nicer neighborhoods where they would be exposed to less things and they would have neighbors around that did things and that was very beneficial when that happened.
But about an equal percentage of those kids went back, ended up being in the low-income areas and get involved into the streets.
And then the ones that fought themselves out on their own ended up at a slightly higher percentage actually getting out and being exposed to less because of their own individual efforts and the control group trying to get out of there.
So while it says that the programs...
Need some tweaking.
But it shows that it's counter-narrative that these kids aren't trying and that they're not succeeding to get out.
They are pushing super hard to make something of themselves.
And our cultural idea is like, oh, look, these kids are not doing anything.
They're just turning to drugs and they're just dealing.
And surprisingly, they're not.
12%.
Of the kids raised in Baltimore in this study ever spent, and these are in the worst neighborhoods, it's East and West Baltimore, ever spent a moment on the streets doing any criminal activity.
12%.
Staggering.
I mean, I'm shocked.
I feel dumb.
Because I did the same things.
Like, yo, that's all they're exposed to, right?
But it's not.
They're fighting out like crazy, and we're the ones stopping them from coming to fruition.
It's like, how much effort is actually being done to try to fix this?
I mean, how many people are actually thinking about it?
How much money is actually being spent to try to fix this?
It seems like there's so many problems in the world that to concentrate on bad neighborhoods or crime-ridden neighborhoods It's so low on the list of things the world's worried about.
The polar ice caps are melting.
Polar bears are drowning.
There's so much shit we're worried about on top of that.
In Baltimore, for example, there's this patented thing that...
A professor from Morgan State, Lawrence Brown, is really into this and tracks it all down.
But there's a white L. We call it the white L in Baltimore.
It goes down through the rich neighborhood and comes across to the other rich neighborhoods by the bay.
And then there's the black butterfly, which comes off to the sides, east and west Baltimore, and it looks like butterfly wings dispersing out poverty and black people in the city.
This is in every single aspect that you're going to find.
Where the money goes for schools, where the bus routes are, where the free bus is.
Like the white neighborhoods have a free bus, and the black neighborhoods have to pay for their bus.
So we have all these things that no matter what you think of, this white L and this black butterfly come to fruition on where resources are allocated and what problems are.
Well, that's a significant portion and you're seeing that with the NRA and you're seeing that with the police unions and, like you said, the correctional unions.
And see, even them, they don't have these bad intentions.
What they have is job preservation.
Everything comes back to those incentives and disincentives.
So they're fighting for their job.
And that's all they're thinking.
Well, we want jobs.
We want safer conditions.
I want to make sure that this is a big company that blows up.
So they're going to put their money towards politicians.
That's to support them.
And that's just the way it goes.
That's the way it's always been.
As long as we have money in politics, you can't get away from that.
Well, the most transparent example of that is marijuana.
We've shown time and time again with a million different studies that marijuana is not dangerous, or if it is dangerous, the danger that it poses is so minimal, it's so small, that consenting adults should be able to do whatever the fuck they want with it.
And yet, prison guard unions and police unions still lobby to keep the drug laws exactly the same way they are, because that ensures You're going to need a certain amount of guards.
You're going to need a certain amount of police officers.
That's counterintuitive.
I mean, that's dangerous for a society because that sets up this us versus them mentality where it doesn't need to be.
Where you're telling people there's a certain forbidden plant that they're not allowed to use.
We've decided this.
We're going to keep it this way, even though it's completely illogical, even though we know the history of it.
And we're going to do it simply because people want to keep their jobs.
Instead of trying to figure out what other jobs these people can do.
Like, shouldn't there be a way you could take some of these people that are prison guards or police officers and give them a job with a commensurate income that's involved in helping communities?
Something positive.
Something...
Setting up community programs.
I mean, how many guys that are cops...
We're also into martial arts or into fitness or into something else or, you know, anything where they could teach people in these communities, set up community centers and give people high-paying jobs to establish really good environments for development and for growing and give people a chance to be exposed to maybe one of these things that could be these paths that you were talking about.
But what we can do is say you still want to do that.
And we don't have to change them that far to get them away from the drug war, even though that's probably the biggest chunk that's fucking everything up is the drug war.
But if we spend that money, instead of incarcerating them, we can spend the money in education.
So for every million dollars that's spent fighting the drug war on the supply side, there's a 100 kilogram reduction of supply.
If you have the kilograms of cocaine coming over the border, if you fight it with force, you fight the supply side, then you get a 10 kilogram reduction.
But if you spend that same million dollars on the demand side, educating people, you have a reduction of 100 kilograms.
Well, I think that we're dealing with two completely different subjects, right?
The gun control subject is a very different subject than trying to figure out how to elevate people in bad neighborhoods.
The gun control subject is...
You know, if you look at the statistics of how many Americans have guns, how many rounds of ammunition there are, how many armed people there are in this country, and then you look at how many crimes there are, how many gun shootings there are, it's relatively small.
So if you look at this blip on the map where every few months someone goes fucking crazy and kills a bunch of people.
If we really had an armed problem in this country, the logic...
That the anti-gun control people use would be that you would see way more shootings, and you would see them all the time.
If we really had a gun control problem, you have so many armed people.
It was a real issue.
But the issue, what they try to say, and I'm not picking the team here, but what they try to say is that what we're dealing with is just massive numbers of people.
Massive numbers of people.
The number 300 million is so hard for the average person like you or I to wrap our head around what that means in terms of the volume, the sheer volume of people, and how many guns there are out there.
There's as many guns as more guns than there are people in this country, which is even more insane.
The people that own these guns for the most part are law-abiding citizens that don't do anything wrong.
Why take away their rights?
Because some dude like this asshole in Orlando goes fucking crazy and kills 50 gay people.
Well, the people that have been able to protect themselves against dangerous crime, the people that have been able to stop people from breaking into their homes, stealing their property, harming them physically, or protecting their loved ones.
And on one side of this equation, we have 30,000 handgun victims.
We have a society that's gripped by fear.
We have dudes that can go get an AR-15 and days later light up a nightclub and do a hate crime.
We know that that's going to happen, and we know that as the future progresses, that this 103 casualties of this shooting is going to be superseded by a bigger shooting that's going to happen, because we've got to break the records, right?
And we're going to have more and more guns that keep coming in and keep coming.
So that's on the right-hand side of the equation.
And on your left-hand side of the equation for having guns, the argument is, well, I like them.
Well, there's also the argument that a well-armed society is a polite society, and that if there were people that had guns in that nightclub, they would have been able to prevent that crime by taking that guy out.
And the assault weapons are going to keep you having better aim.
They're going to keep you having a higher magazine capacity.
It's going to be a little more reliable weapon.
But a hunting rifle with a 10 magazine clip, that's a.223, and it's a semi-automatic, is going to do the exact same level of damage that we're talking about.
So my position on gun control is extremely simple.
You want your guns for these other things, like, say, hunting.
Bolt-action rifles and shotguns.
There you go.
Everything that's on the pro-gun side that they want to achieve can all be accomplished by shotguns and bolt-action rifles.
Well, yeah, I see that argument, but I also see the argument that hunters would use in that situation that if you limit the amount of rounds that a guy can have in his gun or the ability to fire off rounds quickly, you're limiting their ability to make a quick follow-up shot on an animal that would kill that animal.
Yeah, and so if you have somebody that's that dedicated, right?
I don't have a problem with that, personally.
So if you have somebody, we want to establish this high standard.
So say we have this super high standard where this guy, he can get his big gun that he uses and is well trained on and he's gone through a super long process of backgrounds and he's all checked out.
I don't have the objection to that.
But say his gun gets stolen.
You don't get it anymore.
You're done.
So you have to maintain this high standard in order to have such extreme privilege.
And I'm fine with that.
Like people that have C4 and explosives.
There are people that can legally carry debt cord and C4 to blow up buildings.
They're not a big problem to the rest of society using their debt cord and C4 to hurt people.
Yeah, that's the whole problem is the concealment that you can just pop it out and use it You don't know who has what and so everyone becomes a threat because you have this small Death device on you that anybody can do anything and it's just like we got to go back to that equation like what is on the other side of the equation of 30,000 handguns and 300 and plus mass shootings per year the other side of that equation is is That ridiculous idea.
I mean, if you can figure out something for me other than I like collecting guns and I think they're cool and it's my right, then I'm willing to hear it.
Well, the only argument is that a person who is not a criminal and a person who doesn't have any ill will in their hearts and just enjoys firearms should be able to have them just like you should be able to have a truck that you could just drive through a fucking crowd of people with if you wanted to.
So Princeton did a study where they tracked 19,000 cases.
Of laws that were going on and going through Congress.
So what they found out is that public opinion on whether a law gets passed or not, for instance, gun control, which over 80% of NRA members agree with increased gun control and background checks and things like that.
We don't get it passed, Congress, at all.
It doesn't have any bearing on public opinion.
It doesn't have any bearing on whether a law gets passed.
But if you have donors that care about a law getting passed, then it's going to get passed.
And even when public sentiment is completely against the law being passed, if the donors want the law passed, they still have a 30% chance of getting the law passed.
They're trying to establish laws and keep them in place, establish rights that are already in place, right?
Keep them in place because they worry that if you start increasing background checks, if you start ramping up any sort of restrictions on gun owners, that it's a slippery slope that they'll never get back.
Well, the NRA's position is that liberals, Democrats, whatever, they want to take away your right to own a gun.
The NRA does not want that, so they spend all their money, they do all their lobbying, they do everything they can to stop any new restrictions from passing.
And to stop anyone who is trying to take away guns.
So the way you frame that is that they are trying to protect their rights.
And they want to preserve this thing.
But I just don't see it that way.
A lot of people, what people that are fighting against guns, like, so me, I have guns.
I like shooting.
I enjoy it.
I'm fucking good at it.
I made a career out of it, right?
But at one point in time, I did enough research and enough understanding that my ultimate goal is that we have a safer society and that we protect people.
But the way we protect people empirically is to not have these guns.
Nobody has the gun crime that we have.
Nobody in the entire world as a developed country has the gun crime and incarceration rate and everything that we do.
We are the worst example in the developed world of how to do this.
Every other example is a better example than what we do.
But we're continually trying to stay into this same mold that we know is failing.
I want to protect people.
And the evidence says that in order to protect people, we can't have handguns and assault rifles.
I said the damn assault rifle word again.
But we can't have semi-automatic rifles out there like crazy that enable society to have that risk.
I mean, those...
On the other end of that straight bullet is a nine-year-old girl who's bleeding out to death in the city.
And I just...
I don't want to get, like, rude with people, but the idea that you want to go fucking shoot something, I just don't give a shit about that when you see the destruction close to you.
It's suddenly Gabby Gifford can go for gun control after it touches you.
You know, or somebody like that.
Whenever it touches you, suddenly we start to care.
If right now a masked gunman comes and starts shooting up the rest of this building and they kill Jamie, we're all going to care a hell of a lot more.
I'm going to do this, please, because he needs to give me that pushback that other people need to hear, and if he's right on a position, I will absolutely change.
Okay, well, we're definitely going to set that up then.
I'm going to bring in Justin, because Justin's very articulate, and don't be intimidated, because he is a giant.
He does have a thousand fucking guns or something like that.
He's a nice guy.
He's a very nice guy.
He's a good buddy.
And he is, like I said, a firearms enthusiast, but also a really nice guy that has no criminal record, never done anything wrong, and very articulate, very smart, very well-read.
So I wouldn't argue if he's going to say he needs, you know, we need this elite members of society, like SWAT teams or something like that, that can handle these situations.
And there were two Marines on base, on the college campus, with weapons.
And they didn't engage because they said, hey, look, I was only going to make the situation worse.
The cops weren't going to know who I am if I had my weapon out.
I could have missed and done something else.
And two guys that were in their actual right state of mind that were armed decided that engaging was more dangerous.
And it's actually empirically more dangerous that if you engage, you're more likely to die and you're going to shoot somebody else or the situation's not going to be resolved.
We literally know this.
People have done this.
They've done studies where they've tried to take people and simulate it and it never pans out.
If you shoot with headphones in your whole life, they go ahead and start clacking off 15 rounds without ear protection on.
You'll be ringing.
You can't even understand what's going on.
You have to be well-trained in that environment and understand, like, cops aren't even in there the first time they get in a real gun battle because they shoot with earplugs in and everything.
The first time they're shooting their gun, they're hearing the sound and everything else.
So, yeah, I mean, you got those people.
Like, everybody that I was in the Marine Corps with...
Doing FAST Team, I don't think they're going to get any gun crimes and I think they can handle situations, but these are a certain segment that needs to live up to a high standard.
Well, not only that, those are people that have been trained and they've developed this understanding of firearms that's so deep, most people just don't get to that.
It's like the average person who watches a UFC fight and thinks they can kick someone's ass.
And then if you fought against a trained martial artist, you're fucked.
Like, you really don't know what you're doing.
That's kind of the same thing when you compare someone who really, like my friend Justin, really understands firearms, versus the average person who goes and buys a gun and thinks, well, I'm safe now.
I got this gun.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, but statistics say that you're more likely to shoot a family member in a fight.
So, like, here's the thing I've always wanted to tell people that feel that way.
We can...
I can tell you, you can have a gun on you right now, and we can set this up in the morning, and I can tell you, walk around your day as normal.
At some point in time today, I'm going to take that gun away from you.
Right?
I will get that gun.
It's going to happen.
Because you're not going to be able to protect it.
And you know I'm coming.
So then why are you actually think you're safe that you have that gun on you?
You're just as long as you're Fighting against the inferior opponent or you're in this situation where you have distance and you have all these things, just like in an MMA fight, it's not going to go as you fucking planned it.
So, like, a big thing with policing is you don't get into, like, jujitsu kind of wrestling matches because of that gun, right?
Because no matter what fight you're in, there's always a gun there.
And it's the same thing with non-cops, right?
You don't want to get in a fight as a cop because if the evidence shows, statistically, that if they get that gun from you, they're going to use it on you.
I mean, the statistics are clear on this, that if you bring a gun to this fight, The odds are against you even higher now.
Because most people that bring, even if you bring a knife to a fight, a significant portion of those people get the knife taken away from them and get used on them.
I can't tell you how many cases we've been where you're trying to figure out a stabbing call and come to find out, you know, they tried to do the stabbing.
But they got that shit taken from them and they got stabbed themselves.
So once you introduce that, that potential, you're more dangerous.
But it becomes a problem, doesn't it, when a really fucking crazy person earns that privilege?
I mean, if someone hasn't done anything yet criminal, I mean, there's been several people that have committed mass shootings that didn't do anything before they did that shooting.
And again, the idea that we keep the Constitution and the Bill of Rights exactly intact, some shit that was created hundreds of years ago before any of the variables that we have to deal with in society today, whether it's variables about privacy, electronic communications, whether it's variables about the power and the ability that guns have...
I mean, we're dealing with a totally different world.
They made this shit back when people had muskets.
We really need to consider that.
And, by the way, they had just gotten done fighting off a totalitarian regime and had expanded and become their own country.
Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
See, that's pretty clear.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Yeah, but a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
I don't know if that's what they meant when they said a free state.
Is that what they...
Pull that up again so I can see that, please.
I mean, look, it's kind of weird arguing about this, because if we had to do this over again, I mean, this is obviously something that was established, as we said, a long time ago.
If we had to do this over again, if we had established new amendments or new rights...
Well, a well-regulated militia, meaning that there's a bunch of militia, meaning regular people, civilians, gathering together to form some sort of a makeshift army.
Okay, so I'll give you, let's say we give you the right of the people is what they mean is that the people can hold the arms until they're needed to form this militia.
Right, but even if you can get them, They certainly weren't talking about AR-15s, and they weren't envisioning a government with 5,000 nuclear weapons.
Right, and you're talking about people who are criminals shooting other criminals, and that's one of the arguments that anti-gun control people use against people that talk about how many people get shot.
When you look at the numbers of people that get shot in this country, they're also calculating the number of people that are shot by law enforcement officers.
He's one of those people you can put the evidence in front of him day in and day out and he'll just move the goalposts and move the goalposts and no one's interested in having an argument with somebody who's just gonna continually move goalposts.
I'm halfway looking through something, but I got this from the Washington Post, this article that starts with the year of 1,000 people nearly being shot by police.
That sound is annoying, but...
It says right here, they sought to compile a record of every fatal police shooting in the nation as of 2015, something no government agency had done.
But it says the Post sought to compile a record of every fatal police shooting in the nation in 2015, something no government agency had done.
The project began after a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014, provoking several nights of fiery riots, blah, blah, blah.
Race remains the most volatile flashpoint in any accounting of police shooting, although black men make up only 6% of the U.S. population.
They account for 40% of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year.
The POST database shows...
in the majority of cases which police shot and killed a person who had attacked someone with a weapon or brandished a gun, the person who was shot was white.
Hmm.
Interesting.
That's interesting.
In the majority of cases in which police shot and killed a person who had attacked someone with a weapon or brandished a gun, the person who was shot was white.
But a huge disproportionate number, three in five of those killed after exhibiting less threatening behavior, were black or Hispanic.
So meaning they valued the life less of people who were black or Hispanic.
They were quicker to shoot them with less threatening behavior than they would with white people.
Regardless of race, in more than a quarter of the cases, the fatal encounter involved officers pursuing someone on foot or by car, making chases one of the most common scenarios in the data.
Hmm.
That's interesting.
It's interesting that it's shooting more white people.
That when they look at the charts and graphs that when you're in industrialized nations, when they become more closer to the first world, they have less children.
So we have one more cars, and we're following behind him.
And we're in this area where you have one district to the left, to the west, the southwest.
You have the western district to the north, and you have the southern to the left.
So they call it the tri-district, but we're kind of in this area where our communications are going to be weird, because these are all different channels.
So I'm riding with the sergeant.
I was a detective at the time.
And I say to him, I'm gonna get on Southern Channel, you get on the Southwest and coordinate, that way we can call this out.
So I get on the radio, and I'm calling, and I'm like, I need a 1031 on the Southern Channel, and everybody keeps talking.
I'm like, we're trying to follow him.
I need a 1031 on the Southern Channel, and I look at him, and I'm like, why the fuck won't they shut up?
Like, I don't understand.
He's like, because it's a 1033, you fucking asshole!
Like, oh, okay, so I get on the radio.
You got the wrong number?
Yeah, I don't even know what a 1031 is to this day.
So a 1033 is an emergency.
So I get on there.
And we're calling it out.
The car is going west down Lombard and we're following it and we're coming up to the shopping center.
Turns left to the shopping center.
The car is full of people.
It goes through the shopping center and it stops at a stop sign, but there's a car in front of it.
And we're thinking, alright, we're going to have to light it up here, but that car, it always moves.
As soon as we hit the lights, you can bet that car is going to move.
So we hit the lights anyway, and the car stops in the front, where the stop side is.
So they can't get past.
So they all bail out.
There's four people in the car, one goes one way, one goes back the other way, one goes for it, one goes behind.
And I jump out of the car, because...
Let's alright, so I leave my radio by accident.
I drop it because let's be honest I see a guy running with a gun out of a car and I'm still like in jackrabbit mode.
So I take off without my radio chasing this dude going behind the shopping center the sergeant He forgot to put the car in park.
So he knows I don't have my radio.
He's starting to panic about where I'm going.
He has to dive back into the car to put it on park so it doesn't hit the suspect's car and then the non-suspect car in front of them.
Everybody goes running.
I'm chasing behind him, and I've got my gun out, and I'm running, and I'm saying, you know, hey, I'm gonna fucking shoot.
You know, you better stop now.
But I could tell, when he's running, there's fucking pure panic.
Like, I had a moment of empathy for him.
Like, he was just like, Fuck running with that gun in his hand.
I'm like, oh, you better drop it.
We're running.
Some guy comes out of the woods from behind the shopping center.
It's a fucking cop from the Southwest who heard us on the radio playing clothes cop.
So the guy throws the gun and he tries to throw it up onto the roof of the building, but it like pathetically just hits the building and falls down.
And...
The guy coming out of the woods, I yell at him to get him, while I go back and get the gun.
You gotta get the gun first, if you're smart, because that could end up with somebody else's hands or whatever.
And we get him back.
And so at that moment, unbeknownst to me, all those districts were like all coordinated.
It was like this moment of serendipity and policing.
Southern District Patrol came up and got one of the guys and like Western Patrol got one of the guys and Southwest Commander was in the area was there and the drug unit was there helping me.
And we caught every single person, bring them back.
We got like four guns.
We get everything.
We roll them over.
Fucking people we were looking for by mere coincidence half the gang that we were looking for to go into the bar robbed the store That was next to our guy in Covert, and we started our case there, which ended up being completely successful because we had this huge jumpstart of just dumbass luck.
But you had, you know, 30 guns going around in that situation.
And it's just like, oh.
England doesn't do this.
You don't see other countries like this, where this all could have just went bonkers because we're trying to respond to a situation in a way, go after people and put them in cells because we have these guns everywhere and they're fighting for these resources, but that's where we have to stop and say, why are they here?
Right, but if you don't have the law in place to make it criminal, and that's the thing, we're saying, well, only bad guys will have guns if we outlaw them all.
Well, the heroin problem, that was one of those CNN shows was detailing what actually went down.
Oh, it was Anthony Bourdain's show.
They were talking about how what really happened was so many people got addicted to OxyContin because of prescription drug companies pushing that shit where people, you know, people have like little small minor injuries and they're prescribing drugs.
All right, so let's talk about what happened as the year has gone on.
After I left here, obviously people picked up and had that, you know, the Joe Rogan effect that everybody always talks about.
After they talk to you, other people start to pay attention.
And I went back to Baltimore and this dude sends me an email and says they arrange it through Leap that he's gonna come visit me and he wants to talk about a movie.
And we talk about some of these ideas, a very good movie idea that he has, trying to kind of put some of these things into an emotional appeal that people can understand and comes close to them.
But what that did was, is it pushed me to get more involved in Baltimore so I could get the other people involved in the project that would have good ideas and would really know the streets well and would know the activism path and what was going on with Black Lives Matter and is it pushed me to get more involved in Baltimore so I could And so I reached out to a bunch of the activists and we started forming these tight knit groups and come to find out this dude doing the movie is Matthew Kosovic.
And I don't know if he's going to do it yet or not, but he's like this big star in France and thinking about doing a sequel to a movie he made called Le Hain, which really talks about these kind of things in France.
France had very similar hypersegregation problems and ghettoization 20 years ago and ended up having riots.
And they did a lot to fix it.
And that's what he's kind of doing like a 20 year reunion of that.
But getting involved in Baltimore and meeting everybody, I really have been like in a school of understanding of what the cities need and what people are trying to fight for and what the Black Lives Matter movement really means.
I just didn't...
I had a lot of those same preconceived notions of being a white hero kind of thing where you go and you help and you're bringing your skills down and you don't realize the things you're saying and how you play into privilege and things like that.
And going in there with them...
My walls against Muslims got torn down because I ended up meeting Muslim activists who were really using religion to do the right things, you know, the good things.
The selective, of course.
Getting involved in the movement to the point where we're having these groups and we're doing things like having panel discussions and we did like stop and frisk for people so that they would see what it was like to actually have somebody come up on you and search through your pockets and we've been doing documentaries,
we've been doing protesting where there's a, I met this lady Twanda Jones Her brother was killed by Baltimore police officers a couple years ago, and she's been protesting every single Wednesday for two and a half years, fighting for her brother Tyrone West, and I guess that's why they do it on Wednesdays.
And he was beaten to death by Baltimore cops, like literally beaten to death.
And we wanted to have things like where we say, why don't we have people protesting good?
Why has it always got to be like burning down the CVS or something like that?
Where's all the good people?
And like, I was just flabbergasted that they were everywhere in what everyone thinks is the worst of neighborhoods was just filled with people trying to do the right thing and trying to to fight for justice and doing it in the most peaceful manner.
Her brother was beaten to death by cops.
And what she does is peacefully protest every Wednesday for two and a half years and doesn't get any attention for that when they have other cops that were those same cops beat this guy Abdul Salam in front of his kid doing the exact same kind of aggressive enforcement.
And what it opens up, and I kind of went away with going about it, is I got to see the other side.
And that really has affected me.
That being a cop, you lock them up and you put them into the cell, or you take them to court and the case goes or whatever, and you don't think about that.
What that does on the other end.
You never see.
And then I got involved in the communities and I saw the other side.
I saw what it was like for a guy that came back from being in prison and in solitary confinement for three years and having no hopes of Resources, like not getting him jobs and having to fight just to get anything because he had that record.
You get to see that, you know, those people you locked up, like they have families who were profoundly affected by everything that happened and they're gone for these years.
And it's just, it's been a really like...
I get a like aggressive and when we're talking about these conversations about guns and like cuz those deaths on that other side of that equation That shit became real as can be to me like those are people now that I know and I know the Families of the of people who were on the other side of that and it's really pushing that that's what we We need to just really do.
We gotta stop being these tribal creatures that can only see those fellow humans that are right with us, that we associate as being our team.
Like, we're all that team.
And we have to start having empathy for what these things do to other people.
We have to see this.
Cops don't see what their actions do in order to step up and say, hey, we shouldn't be doing this.
We have to get out of this denial bubble.
And being involved in the city has just given me this huge check.
On all my privileges and everything that we have, we don't understand how much advantages we have in life.
It's ridiculous, the amount of factors that people have to fight against that we can't even register.
I mean, like I saw it evidentially, but to see it in person, like the work that, so the photographer Devin Allen, you can pull up Devin Allen.
He took a picture of my daughter from a protest that's going to be in.
He's doing this project now where he took the Time magazine cover shoot.
So if you ever saw the Time magazine during the uprising where it says 1968 and it's crossed out and says 2016 because he took that picture as a young black kid that used to be a drug dealer who picked up a camera as his identity project kind of thing.
He didn't know what an identity project was at that time.
I didn't know what an identity project was at that time.
But he picked up the camera and started taking pictures, and he got that picture.
And he's well-known now, but what he did was, is he took that, and now he used the publicity from all that, and he gets...
This is Devin Allen.
He gets all these...
He started this project at this community development called Penn North.
And he collects cameras now for all these kids.
Not that he's getting paid.
He collects cameras from around the world, brings it in, and now he runs a thing going through in Sandtown, Winchester, where Freddie Gray was killed.
He takes those kids in and teaches them photography and gives them that project so they have something they can grip upon on and they have something they can build up on.
But what's sad about that is that this is Devin, who has no resources, who is the kid who was a drug dealer, who has everything bothering him, and he is investing in those communities and trying to provide those things to give people that identity where they can climb out of it And they can see that vision of being a contributing member to society, and that's what we all have to do to give back these neighborhoods.
That's part of the way of fixing it, is that when people want to help, you literally have to go down there and say, how can I help, and do things like that?
Because what he's revealing is that we all have a skill.
His skill is photography.
But your skill is hunting or comedy or talking or however you want to go.
You have these skills that you can teach and you can pass on so other people can see an identity.
Some people can sew.
Some people can do whatever it is.
We all have these skills and that's like how we help.
If you want to be somebody that helps these cities, you go down there and you help supply that identity.
So at Penn North, we created this thing that, well, they created this thing called the Safe Zone.
And what that is, is it was all worked out with everybody.
You got to treat everybody like humans.
They worked out with the drug dealers and everything that's going on.
And they participate in keeping this area of the city completely safe so that everybody can come down there.
And if you go to Baltimore, you want to be a white knight, you come down to Baltimore, reach out to an activist, and you want to help, it's not dangerous.
You will be fine.
And there are plenty of people that will help you and guide you through on what you can do to contribute to make our society a more whole place.
Now, I have a friend who was actually a driver when we were in Chicago who was a cop.
And he told me that what's going on in Chicago was that they had some pretty high-level drug dealers and gang leaders, and then they caught those guys and imprisoned them.
And when they imprisoned them, it created a power vacuum.
And in that power vacuum, over the last few years, you're seeing significant ramp up in crime.
Or people try to take over these areas that were under control by other people.
Similar to what happens when you see, when we take over countries like Libya.
Creates this power vacuum and now you have a case to almost, you say, well, it's worse without Gaddafi than it was with him.
That's sort of what this guy was telling me about Chicago.
Right, so you have, so the average in, I want to go like in the 90s, for high school diplomas and college for residents of a neighborhood like Sandtown or these East and West Baltimore neighborhoods, worst that you can imagine in your head as far as resources go, These kids are actually achieving, so say their parents got 10% high school diplomas.
These guys are getting 40% high school diplomas.
Their parents were getting, you know, 2% college degrees.
These guys are at like 25, 30% college degrees.
So they're really excelling, but they're not achieving because of all these other barriers, as you know.
A black guy with a college degree is slightly less likely to be employed than a white guy with a high school diploma and a criminal record.
So even they're getting these promises that if they play by the rules, then they'll get these things at the end, just like poor white America in West Virginia is.
And what happens, though, is they see these examples with social media or whatever, and they're understanding that if they push hard and they achieve these things, then they'll get these rewards.
But they're not getting these rewards.
They're just not there.
So if you have a more ambitious population and they're turning to drug dealing and to crime, well, it's just as likely that they're also more ambitious and dedicated to their criminal endeavors as they were to their college achievements.
It would seem like crime, the percentage of people taking crime are probably still about the same, or the amount are the same, but the population has grown.
So you have a lot, lot less crime percentage-wise than you ever have before.
But if your criminals are that much better, they're still going to be ambitious.
Well, so the first thing I have to do, here's my model.
And my fundamental model is, is think if you had a business and you have a board, you know, you have your board of trustees or whatever you want to call it.
I want to be a civilian leader of the police department like a CEO. And I want to have like officially 49% of the power of the agency.
And then we have like seven people on this panel who come from the city who live in these neighborhoods.
I'm not sure precisely how we pick them out.
We can't appoint them because then they just become cronies.
We have some issues with voting that we may have to work out the details on.
But the ultimate principle is that we would have the majority of that board would be from the poorest of the neighborhoods around.
But the majority has to come from the poor populations, covering the base of whatever is good for the weakest among us is good for the strongest among us.
And then those boards, while I run the agency, I can only argue to them.
They have 51% of the control.
I have all these things I want to argue for, but it's fundamentally not my agency.
It's my job to serve them and carry out what they want to achieve.
So I will work at achieving what they want to achieve and establishing the milestones and incentives that they think are better for their neighborhood because they may do things which could dramatically have impacts like such as hiring.
Like, so right now, guys won't hire because they have a drug complaint or something like that, or they have a prior arrest record.
Well, I think if you get all those poor neighborhoods together, they're gonna say, look, We know that's bullcrap.
That arrest doesn't stop you from being a good cop.
That's ridiculous.
And we can let those people in, and they can take that risk as a whole community.
Well, Colorado's a perfect example where the money was so good with the plan that was initiated, where they're making more money from taxes with marijuana than they ever did with alcohol, which is bananas.
Well, for people like you or I, but not for the people that were arguing against it.
They thought it was going to be chaos and hippies, and they're going to light the town on fire and fuck each other in the streets.
Everybody thought it was going to be horrible.
But...
You're talking about a different drug when you're talking about Chicago.
You're talking about heroin, you're talking about cocaine, you're talking about methamphetamine, you're talking about MDMA. These are different drugs and they have health consequences as well.
So the legalization or the prohibition What they have right now is obviously not working.
The real problem would be if they decided to not enforce the drug laws and they decided to in some way, you know, air quotes, legalize these drugs.
What would take place is you're going to have some blame be placed on some deaths.
On your new laws, and that's going to be paraded out in front of you.
You're responsible for the death of this young girl.
She never tried heroin, but because it was available at 7-Eleven, she started snorting it, and now she's dead.
Well, the problem with the doctor handling is that's what happened in Florida.
And what happened in Florida is they developed this environment where they didn't have a database, where the doctors and the pharmaceutical companies were all in cahoots.
And they said, look, let's just sell the shit out of this.
And the statistics were staggering.
There was more prescriptions for OxyContin and opiate painkillers in Florida than the rest of the United States combined.
So cannabis or something like that, we need to put in a model similar.
And we have things in like Portugal, where what Portugal does is they just decriminalize it so they don't put people in prison cells for possessing it.
And if you want to still go after the dealers as a half measure, you know, like that's a half measure I'd have to swallow that I don't completely believe in.
But we can work those things out.
Me and you, if you're the panel and I'm the CEO, we can work these things out and come to a position where we're like, okay, let's try this.
And if you want to go by the incrementalism, then we see that that's okay.
Just like in Colorado, already is proven that the cannabis model is fine.
So we can start with the cannabis model and move that in.
And then we can say, all right, well, let's put cocaine into this model.
And then see how that goes.
If you want to be incremental about it, I'm fine with that.
And when you think about alcohol, that's the real argument because alcohol is one of the easiest drugs to kill yourself with.
I think there's a staggering number.
I think it's like 10,000 people drink themselves to death every year just in this country.
Which is really pretty shocking.
And that doesn't count drunk driving, alcohol-related violence, and all the other things that go along with it.
The problem with making heroin or cocaine, with decriminalizing it, but then going after the dealers, is then, well, okay, if these people get hooked on it, where are they going to get it then?
Drinking too much can excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths and 2.5 million years of potential life lost What does that mean?
I guess like you're saying drunk driving in the United States 2.5 million years of people's lives That's a weird fucking statistic from 2006 to 2010 Shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years.
Yeah, okay, so it definitely...
Okay, that's life lost, meaning you drink yourself into an early grave.
That's a weird thing to argue, but the 88,000 deaths...
Over a period of four years.
That's harsh.
But that's what we were saying.
I mean, it's essentially a little bit more than what I was saying.
Not only that, there's also a drug that is illegal that has a significant impact on addiction.
It's called Ibogaine.
And Ibogaine, which is being used in treatment facilities all throughout South America and Mexico with massive positive results, is illegal in this country for no apparent reason.
Well, I'm sure quite a few, but quite a few, you know, look, there's a lot of, obviously...
I'm a marijuana enthusiast.
I love it.
I think it's awesome.
I want to spark one up right now thinking about it.
I'm a big fan.
But some people don't like it.
They don't like the abrasively introspective properties of cannabis.
They don't like the paranoia.
They don't like all the vulnerability feelings that you get from it.
I like those.
Those are good for me.
My personality, I'm too type A, aggressive, you know, I'm good with a substance, a compound that sort of like calms that down and mellows me out and gives me a different perspective.
I enjoy it and I think it's good for people.
I really do.
I think a lot of the things that people associate with the negative aspect of cannabis, particularly the paranoia, I think that's good.
I really do.
I think we need to feel more vulnerable.
I think feeling more vulnerable is better for you because it enhances a sense of community and friendship and love in a lot of ways and it bonds people together.
I think this idea that you're an individual, that you're a lone rebel out there kicking ass and taking names, you're doing it all by yourself, that's all eroded instantaneously by cannabis.
It's just like, no, no, no, no.
You're a talking monkey on a spinning ball flying through infinity, you fuckhead.
I think those are really important qualities for our entire race, the human race.
I think it enhances more community-type feelings and thoughts.
And I think that's the opposite of what some drugs like stimulants do.
Stimulants, I've always avoided stimulants.
I'm not a fan other than coffee.
I've never really tried them, but I've seen their effect on other people, and I've read about their effects, and it's not what I'm looking for.
I don't want to be cocky.
I'm trying to fight whatever urges my body and my personality have to sort of lean towards that.
But I think that people that get involved with speed, people that get involved with coke, those are people that are like unduly confident.
I think that's a bad drug for society.
It's a drug that is very selfish in its effects.
The impact that it has on people is they become really selfish and nasty.
I'm not into that.
I think that alcohol for some people is a Is an escape from the reality that they find themselves in and they don't know how to get out.
And I think education, like we were talking about before, allowing people to have access to the stories and the consequences that other people have experienced from taking that drug will help them.
What kept me from doing coke when I was young was having friends that had problems with it.
And that educated me.
I was like, fuck, I don't want to be like that guy.
I don't want to have that happen to me.
I see what's happening to this person.
Some people don't get exposed to that.
And instead, before they know it, they're already in it.
They're trying it when they're 15. Next thing you know, they like it too much.
Next thing you know, they're looking forward to doing that.
Because it provides some sort of an escape from the pressure of the consequences of pursuing a dream, of chasing down life, or of not having a direction.
That's another one.
Not having, like you were saying, the identity that you're focusing on, whether it's this gentleman that was a photographer.
Or someone else that wants to be an athlete or someone else that wants to be an author.
Whatever it is, it's one thing that you're chasing.
If you don't have that thing, this sort of futility of life is very overwhelming to some people.
And they want to escape that pain.
The pain of not knowing what the fuck you're doing.
And I think some of that...
I mean, this is going to go way out there.
But I think some of that goes back to the hunter-gatherer...
Genes that we have in our own bodies.
I think we're, in a lot of ways, we're a prisoner to the needs of the past.
And the needs of the past were we were very goal-oriented.
You had to go out there, be able to pick the right amount of foods that you could eat, you had to hunt the animals or catch the fish, and that was the goal.
And we were very goal-oriented in that way.
You had to go out there and do that, you had to work hard, and then through those goals you had this feeling of satisfaction.
Well, when you're just getting food and it comes to you when your job involves doing something that's not rewarding in any way, shape, or form, and this is what you have to do to get that food, you've sort of taken out all the natural reward systems that our bodies are designed to sort of gravitate towards.
And unless you find a passion, unless you find an art or a craft or a trade or some sort of a thing that excites you mentally and stimulates your creativity and stimulates your ambition, you're left lost.
And there's a lot of people that are just left lost and unfulfilled and unsatisfied.
And I think those types of people gravitate towards alcohol and a lot of other drugs as an escape.
And that's a part of the problem with society was how we view drugs.
We view drugs as an escape.
Rather than an enhancement or rather than a perspective enhancer, we view them as, oh, this guy's weak.
I don't know how you can argue that, but it, like, ties all together.
So, I know you sound like liberal, I mean, you plurally, sound like liberal hippies when you, like, start putting all these things together, but these things really do tie in together.
So you have the alcoholism because people aren't finding their identities.
So we should be doing things to, like, help people create identities if we want a safer environment, right?
So it's not about taking those people and put them into prisons.
As you articulate it, it's about finding that passion or educating them to do something.
And so if you want to help, or police or whoever want to help, you have to be addressing those kind of issues.
And I think...
So people...
One thing we've noticed throughout human history is that when things are really tough and there's no resources, the leaders of the oppressed, so say it's really easy to use black segregated neighborhoods right now.
So the masculine members of a society that can't achieve something, they turn to making everything about masculinity and dominance and accepting of that lower realm, and they start to treat intelligence and education as effeminate or weak.
And so that plays into the culture of where you have the guns, and everybody has the disrespecting culture, and this is my corner kind of culture.
So we have those kind of benefits that are a factor also in leveling the playing field for everybody and contributing.
So one of the things that we're doing right now is we're building a studio like this in Baltimore, and it's called Radio Revolver, and that'll be my shameless plug.
So go fund me.
Radio revolver.
We still need a few more thousand dollars to fix everything up.
But I'm just saying, if you have eight people, really, it's like, you ever heard that expression, one boy, one boy's work, two boys, half boy's work?
Meaning that like if you have two young kids together and they're working on something, they're just gonna start talking shit and it's not gonna get done.
So, uh, in high school at 17 of murdering his ex-girlfriend, uh, a classmate at Woodland High High School.
The evidence, regardless of whether somebody wants to argue about whether he actually did it or not, the evidence is extremely clear that you do not have the evidence to put this individual in jail.
Period.
It's not there.
His best friend is the partner with me for Radio Revolver.
And we ended up being connected because I helped out on that podcast for a while.
And we have this community that we form now.
So he's helping me with this.
And this is an example of how you use your privilege and sensationalism.
So I was sensationalized by what I said before, right?
By the cops hitting people and all the things they did.
And probably what I'm most proud of is that I instantly switched from that sensationalism to how we fix things and what the reform measures are.
And we don't even talk about that sensationalism anymore.
So the successfulness of turning that around into something productive, part of that is this radio revolver.
So if you have privilege and you have an advantage or something, what you have to do is you have to build platforms for other people.
Build structure so that other people can rise, not just for yourself.
And the idea behind this is we'll have the network, so it ended up being turnkey.
It's in a room that anybody can come in at any time.
And if the community members, we already have them tied in, I think we're going to have a problem with who we cut out versus who we're going to let in.
And we're creating the entire infrastructure under one umbrella for them to come in and have their voices heard and get their message out there.
They can build a podcast.
They can build a video, like a TV show type of thing.
And none of this is ever going to cost any of them anything.
And if they succeed and we end up getting to a point where we're in the red, then we just start taking all the profits and distributing them out to whoever proportionally has the podcast that does the best or whatever.
But the point of that is that is going to enable at least 10 to 20 identity projects.
So somebody else has to come in and do the other end of that.
Take whatever you have and do that same kind of thing.
If you have money, then we can take the money and we can do something good with that.
If you have that skill, then you can come into a place like we're building or a place like Penn North and pass that on.
That is really what we have to do as an individual level.
And if so, I would always love it if people would help me out with radio revolvers so we can get that finished.
So what you're going to do is you're going to put together a podcast, and through that podcast, you're going to have people tell their stories, you're going to expose the rest of the world to the plight of these inner cities, and the positive stories about people rising out of them, and your friend the photographer, and a bunch of other people that you're going to get exposed to.
I think one of the most important things for a young person is to believe that they can somehow or another be successful.
I remember when I was young and we were poor, I always identified with being a poor person and I never thought that I would be anything other than a poor person because I would see people that were wealthy and they always felt so different than me.
They always felt so...
Anyone who is successful, I shouldn't even just say wealthy, I'm just a normal person.
Like, you know, like someone who lives in a normal house with, you know, a garage.
And, you know, like, wow, that's a person that America aspires to.
They feel different than you if you're from a broken home, if you're from poverty.
And my case obviously was...
Nothing in comparison to the extreme poverty that a lot of people face but I still remember feeling really insecure and really disconnected from successful people.
I think that mindset is very difficult to overcome.
It's very difficult.
It's very difficult to believe that you can achieve something.
It's very difficult to believe that you can rise from, no matter where you are, if you continue to work and you continue to pursue your goals and you can avoid all the pitfalls of negative aspects of society, you can Do better.
You can do better and you can feel satisfied in that.
And to give people these opportunities to see people who have done the very thing that you're aspiring to do is massively beneficial because it gives them sort of like a little bit of a blueprint.
And one of the most positive aspects of doing this podcast is running into people that I've met that said, hey man, I've been doing stand-up comedy for three years now.
I'm actually a working comedian.
I did it from listening to your podcast.
I knew that I could do it because you told me that anybody can do it if you just try.
I used to suck and I'd tell everybody.
I was fucking terrible.
But you keep chipping away at it and just listening to your recordings and all that jazz.
I've run into a million fucking people that have started doing jujitsu now.
I mean, it's not a million, but it's not countable anymore.
I've ran into so many people that, hey man, I just got my purple belt, started listening to you guys.
You know, now I'm competing.
My lifestyle is so much healthier.
I eat cleaner.
Everything's better.
My life is just...
I used to be depressed.
It's so much more positive.
So I take...
Great satisfaction.
I would say pride, but it's not the right word.
It's great satisfaction.
It feels awesome to talk to people that have looked at this little sort of blueprint that I've laid out and said, look, anybody could do this.
You can do this.
Like, whatever patterns that you're following because the people that you're around are in these negative patterns, you don't have to follow those patterns.
It's one of the beautiful things about social media and the beautiful things about the internet is you can kind of choose what you follow.
I mean, you could go...
And just follow negative stuff all day long.
You could concentrate on negative bullshit, and you could be one of those people who goes on Twitter and just bombs on people and shits on people all day.
And that's gonna be your point of focus, but you're not gonna get any better at anything doing that.
You're not gonna have a better life.
You're not gonna feel better.
You're not gonna be happier.
You're not gonna spread anything Beneficial.
Anything positive to anybody.
But you can take a choice to not do that.
And a lot of times you need to see that someone else has done that in order to help you do that.
I hope you're inspiring others because you're kind of inspiring me right now, like thinking about how many identity projects that you led, even though they were maybe not even obvious to you.
Because you've gone and used this platform to do these things.
I think it's highly honorable of you that you use this platform so that I can talk about these things, about BLM, Black Lives Matter, and about police reform and things like that.
That's like the typical, like, prototype of what...
What we're talking about, you were doing great work by doing that.
I mean, I think everyone's life is a constant journey.
Unless you just stay sedentary and you don't go anywhere and you don't take any new data.
Your life is all about re-evaluating the way you think, or evaluating it, or enhancing it, or adding to it, or removing some negative aspects of the way you think.
And one of the best ways that I've found to do that is expose myself to interesting people like you, or like any of the other people that I've had the pleasure and the opportunity to talk to on this podcast.
You get this...
I mean, I've had three-hour conversations with 800 fucking Well, not 800 people, but 800 times.
And having those kind of conversations, it forces you to think.
It forces you to think.
One of the things that Eddie Wong was saying that really resonated with me is that he likes to write.
He writes every day.
And one of the reasons why he likes to write is it makes him solidify his own thoughts.
He thinks about his own thoughts and it really sort of like...
It allows him to really kind of examine them and go in depth as to how he really truly feels about something and really get a cleaner perspective instead of just...
I think a lot of people, me included, I've been guilty of this in the past, we operate on momentum.
We just get a path, you're on it for some whatever reason, and then you're just sort of stuck.
And you just sort of behave that way and think that way, and you don't ever examine it.
And writing...
Allows you to really pause and look at that.
Podcasting does the same in a lot of ways.
It allows me to pause and really think about some of the things that I've attached myself to or not attached myself to.
I can't sing your praises enough for having that kind of mentality and being the alpha male that is vulnerable and lets other people see that it's okay.
Those things are important.
It's okay for the tough guys.
To let their guard down and be introspective and to be people that are willing to help and reach out.
It's entirely admirable.
Like, Cenk is another person that I've gotten close to.
Well, the Young Turks, what they've done is they've developed this sort of alternative media platform that's outside of the mainstream media, but it has arguably as much impact.
When you look at what they've been able to do on YouTube, and they're one of many.
You know, there's a lot of people that are pushing unusual ideas on the internet.
The Amazing Atheist is another one.
I've really enjoyed a lot of his stuff lately.
T.J. is a fucking really bright guy, and he puts out some really interesting, well-thought-out videos.
So they were treating you like an actual criminal, even though it's pretty obvious you're trying to campaign against something that's something that nobody really thinks is a good thing, money and politics.
That it was just like they were keeping us in like animal pens it felt like so we would just be like penned off like they took us to a different place and had like like fences like portable fences and they would like put you like so it's not like you really couldn't get out you could get out if you wanted to I guess I could have if I really wanted to I wasn't going to go for an escape charge This is so silly.
I mean, you can go and you can participate in these things.
So, if that is a passion of yours, I think that's another identity thing that we have.
You can go and put these groups, there's all these groups out there, and you're saying that these people feel lost and they're turning to other things.
We have all these things out there.
And if you don't have one, create one.
They're out there.
The TYT family, your family, Black Lives Matter.
We have tons of movements going on that you can do something positive with, no matter who you are.
Again, part of the thing that we're going to do is we just take advantage of me and the publicity.
So the first one is going to be a joint project with Undisclosed, who is affiliated with Serial, Story, and all.
And that one's going to be Misconduct, which is going to be one of the series we have.
So there's going to be multiple podcasts.
One of them is going to be Misconduct, and then you'll have the photography one, or you'll have a public health one, like Doc Lawrence Brown is going to do a public health one.
And so everybody that wants in, as long as you learn what you're doing and everything, you'll be able to have your voice heard in whichever manner you want.
That's a great idea because this is one of the easiest ways to get a message out.
And a message that, you know, when you hear someone talk, man, and you hear their words and you get to know them through the hours and hours of conversations, you get to know them in a really deep, intimate way.
So the first one's called Misconduct, which is going to be a series.
And I'm going to do the first one.
And it's going to be The Killing of Freddie Gray.
So what we're going to do for that is go through the story.
And when we first go through the story, the first episode will start...
And we'll start telling what happened.
Like, so these cops are in this neighborhood and Freddie Gray is in this.
And then we go, but wait, why does it look this way?
And then so somebody like Doc Brown will come in and we'll go over through the history of segregation, how the neighborhoods are formed the way they are, why the cops are all white, why the citizens are all black, and we'll go explain that story.
And then the next episode, I'll start over again, start telling the story, and when we'll hit the next hurdle, which will be something like, well, why are they going after him for the drugs?
Why are they chasing him?
So then we'll break down the history of the laws and why that is done the way it is, what policing philosophies have led to this, until we finish out the entire story and everybody can understand the nuance to what happened behind the murder of Freddie Gray.