How To Pull Yourself Out of the Matrix | Thomas Chatterton Williams (Replay)

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu | Replay: How To Pull Yourself Out of the Matrix — with Thomas Chatterton Williams
Release Date: October 21, 2024

---

Episode Overview

In this electrifying and deeply personal conversation, Tom Bilyeu sits down with Thomas Chatterton Williams, acclaimed memoirist and cultural critic, to explore the themes of identity, the realities behind contemporary racial narratives, and the hidden levers that truly determine progress in societies and individuals. Williams draws from his own complex background, the profound influence of his father, and his experiences living both in the United States and France to bring radical clarity to urgent questions of race, class, purpose, and what it takes to genuinely “pull oneself out of the matrix.” Together, the two probe how identity is formed and can be transcended, challenge prevailing social assumptions, and detail how fiction, mindset, and rigorous self-examination may offer paths forward.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power of Narrative and the Fiction vs. Nonfiction Divide

[01:14–10:58]

• Williams’s Writing Journey: He describes the struggle and eventual abandonment of an early novel based on a real-life Long Island stand-your-ground shooting, realizing he was “stuck in the facts of the story and not able to get into that kind of realm of imaginative play” fiction demands [01:55].
• The Role of Genre: Williams admires writers like Baldwin and Camus who are “not limited to any genre” and aspire to bring artistry and intellect to whatever form they choose [06:10].
• Creative Process: Both reflect on how creative development often involves discarding early, imperfect work, and learning to be unafraid of failure or “bad writing” [08:21].
• Nonfiction vs. Fiction: Williams notes that “fiction writing... has to have a kind of density that in nonfiction writing can be filled in with just the facts” [07:14].

2. Identity, Upbringing, and the Shaping of Mindset

[10:58–26:53]

• The Influence of Williams' Father: Born in segregated Texas, Williams’s father “pulled himself out of the Matrix” through relentless reading and education, hiding in closets to read Plato’s Dialogues by candlelight against social pressure [15:58, 17:21].
• Importance of Naming and Self-Concept: Williams was named after poet Thomas Chatterton, a choice his father made “because...if I wore his name, I would bring honor to that name” [22:47]. Williams passes forward the tradition of deliberate, meaningful naming with his own children, embracing “unpinnable” identities [23:28].
• Malleability of Identity: Both Bilyeu and Williams agree that “identity is malleable,” and that people’s mindsets and sense of possibility are shaped, but not predetermined, by their environment [14:14, 26:53].
• Global Perspective on Race: Living in Paris, Williams observes how racial categories are contextually constructed and arbitrary— “there is nothing, there’s no necessity to it. It could be otherwise. If you move elsewhere, it may very well be otherwise” [26:53].

Notable Quote:
“My dad received early on Plato's Dialogues from a neighbor that was tossing it and had no idea what he was reading. But he became obsessed with the idea that it was through books that he would like transcend his circumstances.” – Thomas Chatterton Williams [15:58]

3. Rethinking Race, Class, and the Real Obstacles to Progress

[34:33–46:27]

• Defining the Beautiful Outcome: Bilyeu emphasizes starting with a clear goal (“if you can’t define the goal in a single sentence, then we’re in real trouble”) and aligns with Williams on aiming for a society “where the color of your skin means as little as the color of your hair” [35:12].
• Progress and Pitfalls in the US: Williams expresses both inspiration and wariness regarding current American racial discourse—quick reform is possible, but “I am very afraid...that differences become reified and more important...that terrifies me” [36:45].
• Physics of Progress: The hosts argue for a testable, metric-based approach to change—requiring open hypotheses and freedom from ideological taboos [41:25].
• Race vs. Class: Williams argues that many issues attributed to race are more accurately rooted in class, particularly police violence and generational poverty, and highlights overlooked groups like Native Americans [46:27].

Notable Quote:
“I want race to recede from being a salient aspect of our lives together.” – Thomas Chatterton Williams [35:12]

4. Mindset Mastery: Poverty, Potential, and ‘Mining for Astronauts’

[50:05–64:45]

• The Hidden Cost of Wasted Potential: Bilyeu describes his manufacturing company’s success hiring people with criminal records, uncovering extraordinary untapped human capital—“the next Elon Musk is here in Compton...but they will never do anything with their life because they're pointed in a direction that doesn't make any sense” [56:04].
• The Role of Exposure: Both men reflect on how “poverty can...crush your sense of plausibility” simply through lack of exposure to alternative possibilities or role models [58:36].
• Kids, Adults, and the Circle of Change: They debate whether interventions should focus on children, adults, or entire families. Williams argues, “the kids are never in a vacuum...the whole family has to be taken care of” [63:18].
• Comparing US and European Models: Williams notes that in France, a robust social safety net ensures “life can never get as completely precarious and kind of tough and awful as it can get in the US...there is a kind of floor below which you can’t go” [65:24].

Notable Quote:
“With poverty, I think that what you see is just crushing your sense of plausibility. No one group has any monopoly on talent or genius.” – Thomas Chatterton Williams [58:36]

5. Parenting for Confidence and Flourishing

[72:15–79:27]

• Intergenerational Lessons: Williams reflects on his father’s commitment—“my father on the weekends, in the summertime, on any school break, I had to study five, six hours a day with my father” [76:46].
• Building Confidence in Children: The key is “talk[ing] to her as though her point of view really matters”—Williams hopes to combine inherited discipline with modern emotional awareness to help his daughter become self-driven [76:46].

6. Desire, Purpose and the Architecture of Fulfillment

[79:27–116:21]

• Autonomy, Craft, and Living the Good Life: Both find fulfillment in autonomy, controlling their time, and immersing themselves in craft—whether in writing or business [82:42].
• Building Desire: Bilyeu shares his process for “building a raging inferno of desire”—it starts with a small interest, builds through earned mastery, emotional reframing, and connects skills to real outcomes and purposes larger than oneself [108:11].
• Reciprocal Fulfillment: Both discuss that the most profound sense of joy (in work or relationships) comes from “requited love”—effort that gives back real results, whether in publishing or transforming others’ lives [110:11, 115:33].

Notable Quote:
“Desire is actually one of life’s most important questions.” – Thomas Chatterton Williams [115:03]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Exchanges

• On Identity and Reading as Escape:
  • “He would hide in his closet with a flashlight and a candle and read books until they made sense.” – Williams [15:58]
• On Racial Categories:
  • “If you move elsewhere, [your identity] may very well be otherwise...race is actually a lot of things beyond just any set of physical features or any ancestry.” – Williams [26:53]
• On How Society Should Function:
  • “If society worked as raw capitalism or as sports do, where it just tries to locate talent wherever it is and with an eye towards maximizing it, that would go a long way towards alleviating some of these problems.” – Williams [99:38]
• On Meaning and Craft:
  • “The good life, I think, is doing something you would do if you didn’t get paid for it. And then if you get paid for it...it’s the gravy.” – Williams [82:42]
• On Building Desire:
  • “All I have to do is point them at an educational paradigm and they can become a beast.” – Bilyeu [100:08]
  • “It starts as an area of interest...if you build a skill set that does not have tangible real world outcomes that allow you to survive...it will never matter.” – Bilyeu [108:11]

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 01:14–10:58 — Williams’s early writing, the fiction/nonfiction struggle, and lessons on creative failure.
• 10:58–26:53 — His father’s legacy, identity, naming, and transcending the “matrix” through education.
• 26:53–34:33 — Life in France and the locality of race, changing perspectives through lived experience.
• 34:33–46:27 — What is the ‘beautiful outcome’? Rethinking the path to true equality and the risks of reifying race.
• 46:27–64:45 — The overlooked role of class, practical experiences “mining for astronauts,” and the difficulty of breaking generational cycles of poverty.
• 65:24–72:15 — European social models vs. the US: the importance of social safety nets and creating “floors, not ceilings.”
• 72:15–79:27 — Parenting, confidence, positive reinforcement, and the unpredictability of flourishing.
• 79:27–116:21 — Building desire, the architecture of fulfillment, autonomy, and the role of deep, purposeful work.

---

Final Thoughts

This episode provides a powerful synthesis of memoir, social critique, and actionable wisdom. Williams and Bilyeu converge on the critical insight that identity, potential, and progress are malleable and must be reimagined in order to build a “functioning multi-ethnic society.” Whether through the right to redefine oneself, the importance of exposure and encouragement, or the necessity of “mining for astronauts” in every community, this conversation consistently returns to the core theme: The future belongs to those who can challenge the headlines, look beyond surface narratives, and see and unlock the real—and often hidden—riches within themselves and others.

---

Recommended: Read Williams’s books “Losing My Cool” and “Self-Portrait in Black and White” for deeper context, and connect with the ideas discussed for tools to challenge your own perceptions and ignite real change.

Transcript

[A]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[B]

All right.

[A]

Thomas Chatterton Williams, what is up dude? Thank you so much for joining me, man. Just went through both of your books and actually how many books have you published?

[B]

I've published two and I've thrown away one novel that I worked on for three years.

[A]

That's interesting fiction.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Right. After Losing My Cool came out in 2010, I began working on a novel that I guess after three years of labor I realized was kind of ill conceived or I didn't have at the time the skill set that I needed to make it what I wanted it to be. So then my daughter was born, I put the novel aside and I was like, I have to make living again. So that's when I started writing the next book.

[A]

So I have to ask, what was it that you were trying to do? What was the novel about?

[B]

The problem was it was it was a piece of fiction that was inspired by an event that actually happened. It was actually about a shooting that happened on Long island in 2006, I want to say where it was a kind of standard ground shooting where an upper middle class black family lived in a mostly white and Italian neighborhood and late at night some white teens came to the property to beat up with bats. The son of the homeowner there, and he approached them in the driveway and ended up shooting one of the kids. He was sent to jail and convicted and then Governor Patterson commuted his sentence. And so this was kind of like the factual basis that I tried to imagine a slightly different story with. But I found myself, maybe it was coming from just having written the memoir and thinking very factually about My own life, I found myself kind of stuck in the facts of the story and not able to get into that kind of realm of imaginative play that I think you have to do to really write the best fiction. And then, you know, it's easier, kind of. I learned this the very painful hard way. It's easier to toss a project and start again than it is to kind of revise some things that seem permanent to you in a piece of writing that's really interesting.

[A]

So I don't know how much you know about my background and everything, but so most people think of me for what you and I are doing right now, which is interviews, conversations, but I actually, my mission, the thing that I'm totally focused on is fiction, like 100%, or I should say 98%. And then the 2%, which is what I've become known for, is the part that honestly I was doing just as a way to gain attention for what I was going to be doing on the fiction side. So I went to film school, got my degree in film, graduated this is late 90s, and it'd be actually really fun to talk sort of 90s hip hop, that whole culture. Obviously you come at it from a very different perspective than I do, but I was obsessed and so graduate, no idea how to make a film. And this is all pre YouTube. So if you wanted to make even a no budget film, you're talking about a hundred thousand dollars. And I did not know anybody that had seen that kind of money, so I had no idea how to raise money. I hadn't, I just literally even had to get an agent, just seem utterly beyond me. And it was the catch 22 of if you want to direct a film, you have to have already directed a film. And it was like, well, how the hell does that work? And so I had hoped that going to film school was going to give me that, that the project to show people that I could handle it. But I ended up totally screwing up my senior thesis film. And it was just an abomination. And so now I'm super stuck, long story short, because my audience has certainly heard this many times, but decide on, not on a whim, but like basically to go get rich so that I could make my own films and have money. Right. Like it'd just be so easy. And I actually. Right, you know, super simple. And I thought that it would take 18 months, it took 15 years, but it actually worked. So now I'm, I'm like actually trying to build that studio and, and I'm thinking, okay, now That I know what I know about marketing. And I'm trying to. Because almost no matter how much money you've. You've made, there's not enough to build a film studio. You're going to have to, like, tie into the industry. It's just way too expensive. And in trying to get into that, I thought, okay, within my skill set, like, what do I have that would allow me to be interesting, to open doors, to connect with people. And so that's why I started doing. Well, I should say I started doing this to communicate to my employees and then saw the opportunity to spin it out into something bigger as like a marketing vehicle. So when I heard, because you actually mentioned in your book that you were writing a fiction book, I didn't realize you'd officially thrown it away. But I thought, that's really interesting in terms of voices, people that I hope will come up with something to even speak to. What we're going through now is my theory. My hypothesis is that you can go a lot farther with fiction, which hits people at the limbic level instead of the sort of logical part of the brain. And if you can get them in that emotion, like you can convey something that you can't convey in a more memoir or a full frontal sort of logical assault, do you plan to pick that back up?

[B]

Yeah, I always kind of. I tend to agree with you. I always kind of had this idea of a writer. The figure of the writer that I always really admired and wanted to emulate were the people like James Baldwin or Albert Camus. These are people who didn't really think of themselves as being limited to any genre. They could write a play, they could write a novel, they could write a piece of reportage. They could write a nonfiction collection of essays. And the important thing was that they had ideas and they had a kind of artistry about how they transmitted those ideas. And so that's the kind of writer that I aspire to be. But fiction was a little bit harder than not hard. I don't want to say harder. It's a different mode of expression. And I think you have to learn how to change gears, and you have to understand what's demanded from you in a particular project. And so I think that I was probably just not. I was super young when Losing My Cool came out, and I think I just didn't have.

[A]

How old were you when you wrote that?

[B]

Like, 26, 27.

[A]

Whoa, dude.

[B]

I was 26, 27 year old in terms of, like. I had lived abroad for a year. I had spent two Years working as a paralegal. Then I went to grad school for journalism, and I sold Losing my Cool while I was still a student. I had published, like, one op ed in the Washington Post. And then suddenly I was writing a book. And I kind of learned how to write a book as I was writing it. And then I thought I could just go straight into a novel. But I think I needed to just, like, season or marinate a bit more before the fiction would feel. There's a way that fiction writing, because you're creating the whole world out of nothing. I'm sure you know this. It has to have a kind of density that in nonfiction writing can be filled in with just the facts, you know? And so I felt it just didn't achieve this kind of. It didn't have the kind of weight that I thought I could get with nonfiction writing. But I'm hoping that I'll get there. I feel like writing is one of those things where you're not as good as you want to be until you can no longer write. Whoa.

[A]

I'll definitely agree with that. One of my favorite quotes is from Seth Godin, and he says, people tell me all the time I'm not a good writer. And he's like, awesome, show me your bad writing. And he said that nobody ever can produce anything because they're paralyzed. They're afraid they're going to be a bad writer. They write a bad sentence or a bad paragraph, and then they just stop and they just don't recognize that, yeah, sure, some of your early stuff is going to be bad. So obviously I had written sort of at the film level or, sorry, film school level, and then I had written screenplays outside of that. I'd even been paid to write screenplays at one point. But when I came to writing my first comic book under my own company, I was like, whoa, man. I took 15 years off, like, building the business was extraordinary, but I literally put my artistic life on hold. I stopped watching movies, like, everything that was, like, supposedly what I was building towards to get good at business. I had to fucking shut it off, man. I just had to, like, really pour myself into that world. And in doing that, just wasn't pushing myself forward as a creative. And that ended up being more difficult to get back into than I wanted to be true. But I was just like, you have to do this. You have to put it out. You have to just have deadlines, hit your deadlines, get it out. And yes, to some extent, you're going to, like, cringe at page one, hopefully is worse than page 100. But if you don't clock that time, if you don't tell those stories and see where the edge of your skill set is, you're just never going to move forward. Yeah, totally.

[B]

And I think that page one actually in my case ended up being way too good compared to page 100, because I had, like, refined page one for the course of three years, over and over and over again. Every day I would start writing, I would just rework what I had already done. And so, like, the beginning was extremely possible. But, you know, nothing's ever wasted. My father always emphasized this to me, parts of that novel. What I was saying was that I wasn't getting the imaginative space I needed. I was kind of stuck in the realm of my own experiences too much. But part of those passages that I thought I was putting in, the voices of characters, they were actually my own experiences. And a couple scenes made their way into Self Portrait in Black and White as my own kind of experiences and memories of my father. So nothing's wasted. And I think that there's a lot of merit in learning what your limits are, what you can't do as well as what you can do. And it kind of. It's all grist for the middle. It's all like a means for moving forward.

[A]

I'd love to pick back up. You mentioned your dad. He is a very prominent figure in both of your books and seems like a super interesting guy. Is he still alive?

[B]

He is. My dad is turning 83 this summer. Whoa.

[A]

Rad story. So one of the things that I found most interesting in your book is, is the sense that identity is malleable, which is an obsession of mine. I agree. Aggressively agree. And one of the things when I was. So I've worked in the inner cities a lot, both as, like, I don't know, I guess you could call it sort of social worky. I was a big brother for a kid for eight and a half years. Grew up in South Central Los Angeles, black kid. And that was my first foray into. I came from like, almost. Almost rural Tacoma, Washington, and coming and spending time in like, South Central properly, because I went to usc. So usc, man is in the ghetto like you are legitimately, like, you go two blocks. And when I was there, it was far worse if you went two blocks off of campus. It was crazy. And so I used to go and tutor him. And then he ended up moving to Compton. So I was going back and forth to Compton. And then I ended up having a facility that Was like, right on the Edge of Compton. Had a thousand employees who grew up hard as hell. And so spending a lot of time in that, I really became obsessed with this idea of, like, there are people here that are far smarter than I am. Meaning, like, to define intelligence as the ability to process raw data quickly. I was like, they can process data faster than I can, but I've been more effective in my life by sort of worldly standards than they have and why. And that's when I got obsessed with mindset. But a huge part of mindset is identity. Like, how do you view yourself? And I remember one of the kids coming to me and saying, dude, like, this is crazy, because I was trying to get him to read. Which, of course, is something your dad was, like, super forceful with you about trying to get him to read. Because I'm like, there's so many ideas you don't understand. Like, you've got this crazy perspective that's really limiting you. So getting people trying to get them to read and then trying to get them to think of themselves differently as being like, your brain can learn whatever you pointed at. But kid came to me and said, you know, this is crazy. You're having me read all this stuff. Totally different perspective. Love it. And he was like, my mom once said to me, the world doesn't want someone who looks like me to succeed. And I was like, God, like, that's so the way that. That. A hundred percent. And I was like, dude, I get it. Your mom does not mean ill a thousand percent. But, like, you can't ever repeat that to yourself ever again. Because it's doing this weird thing where it's. You're not taking the actions that you could be taking. Like, even if the world is working against you.

[B]

Right. You're not.

[A]

You're still not taking the actions that you could take to make the best of that situation. Which your dad, to me was like, holy Christ, what an amazing example. Give people a little bit of background on your dad and then, like, what he. How he raised you guys, which I think is utterly fascinating.

[B]

Yeah, my father is, you know, he's the most inspiring person that I have been around, but he was also, like, in my neighborhood, he was like, figure and beyond my neighborhood, he was, like, a figure of inspiration to, like, a lot of people who came around our house. A lot of. He mentored a lot of my friends, and he taught a lot of kids who would come to study with him. He has a PhD in sociology, and by the time that I was born, he was no longer working in anti poverty programs, which is what he did in the 60s and 70s. But by the time I was born in the 80s, he was running basically like something that it doesn't do it justice to call it like SAT prep students would come to study with him in our house and they would like sit in the living room with him and they could study for their SATs, for their GREs. If they were at that stage for their LSAT, they would often study in subjects like physics, calculus, philosophy, literature. And he was kind of like, he became like a kind of guru figure for like a lot of students of a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds and social classes. But we ourselves money was never. There was a lot of education in my house, but money when I was growing up was never abundant. So my father was born in 1937 in segregated Texas. Never knew his own father, and his mother was 17 when he was born. So he kind of had to raise himself. And the way that he figured out that he would transcend his own circumstances was through book learning. He got that idea in his head very early.

[A]

Tell me about that. How did he get that idea? Like to me, you've seen the movie the Matrix.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

So in that movie they talk about the first guy who pulled himself out of the Matrix. I'm not that guy. Like, I did not pull myself out.

[B]

I'm not that guy either. That's my dad. He pulled himself out of the Matrix.

[A]

How, like what was, did he ever tell you, like what connected for him?

[B]

He says that, you know, he was profoundly aware that he didn't have a kind of parental structure. He knew that he was alone very early and he was, he says that in, you know, he lived in a segregated neighborhood. But you know, it was also there was. He reminisces fondly on aspects of this. There was like class diversity in his segregated neighborhood. Not everybody by any measure was poor and somebody was having a garage sale and getting rid of books. And he was a six year old, seven year old staring at the books and the guy gives him a beat up copy of Plato's dialogues. He said, how old is he? Six or seven is what that's like. The foundational story in my house is that my dad received early on Plato's Dialogues from a neighbor that was tossing it and had no idea what he was reading. But he became obsessed with the idea that it was through books that he would like transcend his circumstances. And very quickly his people told him, don't read. Actually they were like, you're going to get up above yourself, it's going to cause you trouble. And they put it in kind of dark terms that a black boy wasn't really his place. So he would actually hide in his closet with a flashlight and a candle and read books until they made sense. And like Aesop's fables were extremely important for him.

[A]

Really fast. I wanna. One thing that you said in your book that really fucking hit me was when your mom said to you, you don't know how your dad grew up. He used to have to hide in the closet with a flashlight to read. Man, that, that's like you want to talk about something I take for granted, like my, my family all but it was just assumed you're going to college. Like they never said if you go to college. It was like, yeah, it's so interesting. So sorry, keep going. I just that that moment really hit me in the book. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with ple time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[B]

I mean you put it the best. He pulled himself out of the matrix and he was the first in his family to get any sort of education post high school and ended up getting a doctorate in sociology. And he instilled in me the idea very early on that I could and also kind of I ought and must pursue the life of the mind. He was very into sports and he encouraged athletics in us. But the idea was that you have to cultivate your mind, especially if reading or writing comes easy to you, then pursue that. And he named me after a poet, Thomas Chatterson, and kind of incept it in my brain very early that being a writer was not something foreign to my identity. You talked about identity before, that I could be this, that I wore the name of a writer and that if I liked writing that should be something that I could do. And I thought about that a lot in recent years because I'm a father twice over now. I have a six year old daughter and an almost two year old son. And it's such a gift to give somebody a belief in themselves. You know, naming is such an important thing that we do. And so much of who you think you are does derive from the identity that you wear. And like, I guess, you know, it's a corny name. Where I grew up, Thomas Chatterton, it was definitely something that got me teased in school. But also in the back of my head, it was, you know, an awareness that I wore the name of a great writer. It's interesting.

[A]

That specific writer, though, is interesting. The story, at least you tell in the book. I had never heard of Thomas Chatterton. But the story that you told about your dad sort of calling out to you and saying, do you know who you're named after? And it was like a child prodigy, right, who ends up killing himself at 17 because people didn't believe that he actually could write that well. Did you ever ask your dad why that poet, of all the poets?

[B]

I did, and his answer was really interesting. He said that I had, you know, he said that Thomas Chatterton, who was a fatherless boy, his dad died when he was very young, and so he grew up very poor and lost any kind of the social benefits that he might have had and was, you know, reduced by his class to what felt to my father as a kind of a very blacker, metaphorically black existence. You know, he had no network capital, capital, no social capital, but he had ambition, drive and some wit. And he wrote extraordinarily well. And he was so young that people didn't believe that the writing was his. And so he, in a sly way, he started publishing these extraordinarily polished poems and saying that he found them in the church, in the attic of the church where his father was employed before he died. And people believed that he was finding these kind of amazing medieval documents. And then once they found out that they were not actually medieval documents, then he got this reputation of being a forger. And it's unclear how he died, actually, my father. The main story is that he, in despair, drank arsenic and killed himself. And he became this kind of symbol of neglected genius for the Romantic poets. And there's a beautiful painting of him in the Tate Gallery in London, where it's called the Death of Chatterton. This beautiful boy in his terribly crappy apartment who's just poisoned himself. But I've actually been to Bristol, England, where he grew up, and I've been talking with members of the Thomas Chatterton Society because I got obsessed with this. And the prevailing theory now is that actually he wasn't that desperate. He was actually pretty good with the ladies, and he had contracted syphilis and was trying to cure himself and drank something that went wrong. But in any event, the reason why my dad named me for him was because, you know, he felt that he had a very tough life and that we often name our children after great men and wealthy men and important men. But he wanted to name me after somebody who didn't have that kind of prestige. He wanted to name me after somebody that maybe if I wore his name, I would bring honor to that name.

[A]

Wow, that's intense, man. I love that. How did you decide to name your own kids?

[B]

My wife. Now, my wife disputes. My wife and I both, we love the Wire and we love the name Marlo. And, you know, she's French and I'm American and we were trying to find names that would. That would be pronounceable on her side of the family and on my side of the family. And so that eliminates quite a few for both English and French and Marlo just. It works in both languages. And we like the idea of giving a girl a kind of masculine name. And then my. Why?

[A]

Tell me, tell me why that's interesting.

[B]

I'm not sure. I think that there's just something about not being bound, you know, I think I really do believe that naming influences personality and there's nothing wrong with having a hyper feminine name. But I thought that it kind of interesting to give a girl that. She's ambiguous racially. She's ambiguous in national terms. And, you know, she has a. She has a name that, if you see it on a piece of paper, you wouldn't exactly know if it's a boy or girl. She's unpinned downable in certain ways. I thought that there was something to that that I liked, you know, and I just like this kind of. In my mind, I always think of the Wire when I think of her name.

[A]

That's cool. I know at one point you had considered giving her a very different name. I forget the exact example that you use in the book. Why did you guys end up moving away from that? What was the name that you guys were going to call her?

[B]

So I was, in a way, I was kind of thinking that it would be a kind of way to push back against the kind of notions of respectability that are forced on you. And also, you know, just it would be kind of way to step out of the racial component of naming. I was going to give her, or I was thinking about giving her a stereotypically, quote, unquote, stereotypically black name. Especially considering the fact that, I mean, to get into this, we'd have to talk about the fact that my father's black. My Mother's white. My wife is blond haired, blue eyed. And there was a high probability when she was pregnant. I was starting to realize that our children, it would be difficult to see that they wouldn't project a kind of phenotypically black presence in the world. And so I toyed with the idea of giving her a kind of culturally black name. But ultimately my wife just rejected that. Not out of the feeling that the name wasn't good, but out of the idea that, like, it's a lot to put on. Like kind of challenging society's preconceptions is a lot to put on a young kid, especially in a foreign country where people aren't even going to understand what that's in reference to. So we came back to Marlowe.

[A]

That is the thing that I find so interesting about your story is you're now living in France. And the way that that gives you perspective on race relations in America, which having only grown up in America, you sort of think, oh, this is what it's like everywhere. And then for you to be sort of looking back on the outside and seeing something different. How has your sense of all of that changed? Like, I remember, so my wife is British and I remember I was in England one time and trying to be respectful, I referred to a black guy there as African American. And my wife starts pissing her pants with laughter. She's like, he's American. And I was like, oh my God. It had never occurred to me what I was actually saying, that that was so specific to my country. And you've talked about how race is local or geographic. I forget the exact term used. But your story really brings that into stark relief.

[B]

Yeah, so I've lived in America for 30 years and I've lived in France for almost 10 years. And in America I'm read as essentially a light skinned black dude. In France, I'm often mistaken for being an Arab. Same features, same kind of. I'm still myself. But who I think of myself as being and what my local culture reads me as is not what I'm necessarily read as here. And it does impact the way that you begin to see the necessity of your racial identity. There is nothing, there's no necessity to it. It could be otherwise. If you move elsewhere, it may very well be otherwise. And so, you know, I started to unpack the whole. I guess what I'm trying to say is that living in France, there's a very specific black white binary that obtains in America. It has nothing to do actually with the amount of melanin in your epidermis. It's a way of reading people and categorizing them that is very much rooted in the history of having slavery within our national boundaries and having an idea of whiteness that has to be kept pure. And so that's why you can have even children who look like my children, blond haired, blue eyed, very light skinned children. In southern states, until relatively recently in our nation's history, those people could quite easily and with no cognitive dissonance be called Negroes. And they could be even enslaved in certain times because race is actually a lot of things beyond just any set of physical features or any ancestry. It took me kind of stepping out of the all American skin game, as Stanley Crouch calls it, to see the specificity of what America does with race. And then as I started to think about it and study it and think of this book and think of the ways that my children were challenging the notions of the black white binary that I grew up with. You know, you look at a place like Brazil, and Brazil is almost the exact opposite of America. In America, one drop of black blood has traditionally held to make somebody black. In Brazil, a drop of white blood makes somebody not black. So you can have a superstar footballer like Neymar, who's darker skinned than I am, same kind of hair texture as I have. Who anywhere in America would be a black guy? You can have him sit down for an interview and people ask him if he's experienced racism in soccer. And he says, I've never experienced racism. It's not like I'm black or anything like that. My dad's black, I'm not black. You know, it's the exact opposite way. But in America, you can have the president of the NAACP present as whiter physically than you do because it's the exact flip. The script is flipped. In France, they're not accustomed to thinking of race in terms of if you have a drop of black blood that would dominate your identity to the, to the exclusion of your other ancestry. So I found myself in so many. I just. When I first moved here, I found myself in so many conversations where I was explaining the logic of the one drop rule to Europeans who were neither into it or not into it. They just had never thought that way before. And as I tried to explain, explain the logic of it, it seemed less and less compelling to me. That was even before my daughter was born.

[A]

That is super interesting. One thing you said in the book, that man, because I don't have kids, I've never really thought about, but you're like, you become your children as much as you are your parents and grandparents. And I thought, whoa, that's fucking interesting. So your kids, does your son, does he look as white as your daughter?

[B]

I would say he could even potentially look whiter than she does. Her hair is a bit curlier than his. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So that's interesting.

[B]

We have friends that we visit sometimes in Sweden. When my kids go to Sweden, they can blend in completely with the local population. It's like they're really, really blonde hair.

[A]

Yeah, that. That is really interesting, given that they're, what, a quarter or 1/5?

[B]

I mean, they would be. I did my DNA. So my dad, like most black Americans who descend from southern slaves, is not 100% descended from Africa because there was so much genetic mixing in the south, but he's about 80%, which is right on average for the population of Americans deemed black. My mother's about fully northern European and I'm about 59% or so northern European descendants. So my kids are like 20, something like low 20s in terms of strictly West African ancestry. But to look at them, very few people, very few people anywhere can see that. There's something that I see. But most people, they don't read them as having any kind of blackness, visible blackness in them.

[A]

Yeah, that's really.

[B]

I want to be clear. I'm not saying that they make me white. I'm saying that they shatter my belief in these categories as having real and important walls around them. I don't believe that you can be a different race than your biological child or your biological parent. It seems absurd when you actually live that. So when I say that your children reach back and change their identity, I mean something that made sense to me. A Jewish friend of mine told me there's a saying that a Jew is not somebody whose grandparents are Jewish. A Jew is someone whose grandchildren are. And I thought about that a lot. And I think that there's something in there that speaks to an understanding of the malleability of lineage and that you have to guard against. If you care about preserving whatever you consider to be the purity of a group, then you have to guard against the very, very, very easy ways in which it can fall apart, because it is actually not. We are all. And as soon as you get outside of, like, the kind of control of the fences, then that mixedness rises right back up to the surface.

[A]

From taco night in Tulum to sushi

[B]

in Tokyo, every bite is rewarding and pulse worthy.

[A]

With MX Gold's 4X Membership Rewards points

[B]

at restaurants worldwide Wherever you dine, points are piling up. So bring your friends along for your next course. Because it's not all about the posts,

[A]

it's about the company and the memories.

[B]

How can Gold from Amex sweeten your next food moment? Learn [e-mail] Explore Gold terms and points

[A]

cap apply if you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-granger. Visit granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. Are you paying attention to what's going on in the US right now?

[B]

Very much so, yeah, very much, yeah.

[A]

It's it, it is very surreal to sort of be in the middle of this and to see it kick off. And I'm curious to where do you think this goes? Like, where do we go? My obsession is how do we get a beautiful outcome? What is a beautiful outcome? Right? And so I'm always telling people, start with the goal, man, what is the goal? But if you can't define the goal in a single sentence, then we're in real fucking trouble because you won't know how to steer towards that. And I would be very curious to hear what people think is the single sentence description of what the beautiful outcome

[B]

you say is actually something that not enough people do say, which is what is the end point we would actually like to achieve? What is our vision of the society we would actually like? And then how do we the steps in between where we are now and that vision. For me, clearly the vision of a society I hope to get to is one in which the color of your skin, the color of your eyes means as little as we attribute to the color of your hair. That your physical appearance gives me as little information about who you are, what your loyalties are, what your affinities, talents, abilities, capital, social capital, what any of that is. I want race to recede from being a salient aspect of our lives together. I want to live in a functioning multi ethnic society where these differences aren't really important. What I'm afraid we're moving towards, even as we may be making great strides. Like I'm very inspired by the kind of conversation that is suddenly, almost unbelievably possible right now about police reform. That's extraordinary. The kind of progress we've made in the debate about police brutality in the past two weeks, the willingness. I mean, Mitt Romney marching in Washington with Black Lives Matter. I mean, that is something. But I am very afraid that the kind of mood on the left is not one of getting into a society where racial identity differences mean less, but actually that they become reified and more important that everybody kind of. You cannot transcend your whiteness. Your white privilege is something that you constantly have to be aware of. And my blackness is not something that I can transcend because the nation is fundamentally a white supremacist premises project, and it cannot not be. All we can do is kind of get into a truce or something. That terrifies me. France is certainly not a perfect society. But the fundamental principle here is what they call the Republican ideal, that there is. There are no separate groups, that everybody in France is French. Now, is that the case in practice? Of course it's not. But if that's. That has to be the. That has to be the horizon towards which we want to move, I think. And so I'm both. I'm both, like, motivated and uplifted by what I see in the States right now. And I'm also very concerned.

[A]

Yeah, I think that that's a pretty good summation. When this all started going off, I was like, yo, like, this could really be that moment of change. Like, people are so focused on, you know, how we find that way forward, but there's some weird undercurrent of, like, one of us, one of us. Like, you have to fucking say a certain, like, party line. And my thing is that that just isn't how progress works. So the irony is about, I don't know, two months ago, I wrote a document for my company called the Physics of Progress. And what I meant was, how do you. How do you make a more thriving business? Like, what is. What is the science of that? Like, removing all of the vague intuition, like, hey, we should probably focus on this. Hey, we should probably try that. It's like you just end up in chaos. How do we. Like, how do we boil this down to just, what is it? What, what is true? Like, what is true, regardless whether I want it to be true, you want it to be true, whatever anybody thinks, like, just what is fucking true? Like, we are in a grounded reality. Even if this is a fucking simulation, the simulation has rules, right? So this is like coded shit. So, like, what. What do you really actually have to do in order to make progress? Now, when I say I did not think Anything cultural about that? I was just like, what, what tests do we run to get our cost per acquisition down? Like how do we test to improve our thumbnail quality to get our views up? Like, what are the metrics and what does that all look like? And let me tell you, usually the thing you think is going to work has second and third order consequences that are surprising and you never saw coming. So it's like, okay, look, you don't know anything, you have an informed hypothesis. Rad. I love it. Like get as much data as you can, form a hypothesis. But the whole like I even put in this document, I put the very like Webster's Dictionary definition of what a hypothesis is. And the punchline is basically, this is your best guess. It's something you think might be true, it's worth like pursuing, but you don't actually know. And it's like, that's how we make progress. You have an informed hypothesis, your best guess, but then you test it. And the idea behind testing it is then you have some metric by which you say either we made progress or we didn't. And it's like, if you don't have all of that, if you don't have the end state that you want, right? We talked about goals earlier. If you don't have the problem, if you don't understand the problem that you think stands in the way of that, a hypothesis on how to overcome that and what I call lever actions, like what are the thing you actually do? It's not a feeling or a vague idea, it's you fucking do it. You abolish police, you defund police, you create a new police force, you do something that changes the legalities around it, like whatever, what is the very concrete thing that you were going to do? And then what metric is that designed to impact? If it's number of police brutality, if it's graduation rates, if it's single parent families, like I'm open, I don't fucking know what the answer is. I'm just saying, like this is the physics of progress. There is going to be a metric you care about that you think is either the end state that you want or the leading indicator to the end state. And then you fucking run the experiment and you see, did I get the result I wanted? Yes or no? If you got the result and you keep going down that vein, your hypothesis was correct. If you didn't get the result that you wanted or something you didn't expect, or there's some knock on effect that goes somewhere that oh shit, I wasn't expecting that. Then you fucking start over with a new informed hypothesis, hopefully better informed, because at least it may have been a mistake, but at least you have new data and you do this over and over and over. But if you're only allowed to put forth certain ideas and everything else is fucking taboo, then it's like we're, we're not going to make progress because that, that just defies the physics of how things get better.

[B]

You're absolutely right. Yeah. And I don't. That's what makes me very concerned about this moment. I'm. I don't know if. And I'm not sure if it's conscious or not conscious. I don't know if everybody wants to make progress the way that you're met, that you define it. I think that there's a lot of catharsis in the moment. There's a lot of justified anger. There's some resentment. There's a desire to, I think, keep people on the hook or keep the country on the hook in certain ways, but not necessarily necessarily to get just to that better outcome and that's it. And to measure how far we've come, because we have come quite a far away. I mean, I was horrified by this video, but this is not actually the America that my father grew up in. It's just not. We've made extraordinary progress. Generation matters.

[A]

Yeah. He had to sit in a closet with a flashlight to read. It's like. And I mean, just obviously that is the most minor of minor examples of what sounds like a brutal.

[B]

Not just because his aunt was just an eccentrically mean lady. It's because she worried somewhat, justifiably that people in the racial caste society could be offended by an overly bookish black queen. That there could be physical consequences for that. I mean, she had that fear rooted in a kind of state sanctioned racism that we have progressed out of. I don't mean to say that the society doesn't have extraordinary racial problems that are really, really disturbing, especially when you see them from abroad and you're kind of outside of the craziness of America. I just mean to say that if you're not measuring, if you take this kind of absolutist line of critique, that America is fundamentally a white supremacist society and almost can't, almost irredeemably so, and that white supremacy will be the kind of governing logic so long as there is an America. Ben, I'm not sure that you want to make a better society so much as you just want to have that kind of that indictment recognized and validated. And then you seize on. You seize on events that reinforce that narrative, and you might dismiss countervailing evidence that could indicate a more optimistic outlook.

[A]

Yeah, that would really be heartbreaking. But I, for a second, want to talk about. There's an intoxication to rage. There's a certainty in rage that in my life, I have glimpsed precious few times. I'm not a guy who gets angry very easily, but when I get angry, I realize there's. I don't feel cowardice. Like, there have been times in my life where I feel cowardice. And I'm like, man, if I could just get mad about this. If I had righteous indignation, all of that would go by the wayside. And you actually quoted Malcolm X in your book. And I wrote it down. There's so many fucking quotes in your book, dude, that I wrote down. It took me like twice as long to read your book because I was transcribing so much of it. But the quote was. And I'll paraphrase, I won't get the exact quote, but when you step on my toe, you. You forfeit your right to tell me how to get you off of it. Or when you step on my foot, you forfeit the right to tell me how to get you off of it. And I thought, yeah, yeah, like, if. If. If you perceive that this is an indemably racist society and it can't be redeemed. Irredeemable racist society. Excuse me. And you have been held down by that fucking flip the board, man. Like, they're. While I actually. I want to get to where the conversation is more around class, which you again quote in your book, you say something along the lines of, forgive me, I'm paraphrasing again. But oftentimes in America, we talk about race when what we really mean to talk about is class. And I thought, fuck yes, dude. Because so much of the work that I've done in the inner cities, I've dealt with probably more Hispanics than I have African Americans. So I'm like, I see the same sense of, like, why I can't do anything with my life. What do you mean? Like, there's that sense of, like, of just all this raw potential, but nobody is pointing them in a direction where they can turn that into skill set, which to me is the great, like, loss. The just the hemorrhaging of human capital is because people aren't put on the path of turning potential to skills.

[B]

We waste extraordinary quantities of human capital in America. James Baldwin wrote very eloquently about what does it mean when a ninth of the country is just never even expected to amount to anything. It's just pragmatically wasteful if you want to have the best nation you can have. But to your point about race and class, I really do think that the kind of the blanket of identity that we throw over every single issue sometimes is useful. But oftentimes it obscures deeper realities that we might need to address if we actually wanted to make progress. So George Floyd wasn't. It's not simply that George Floyd was a black man who was killed by the police. He was a poor black man who was killed by the police. That matters that he was a poor black man. He died over a counterfeit $20 banknote. That doesn't happen to you if you've had opportunities in life to have gainful employment. He, from what I understand was out of work after the coronavirus kind of shut the economy down. You know, he wasn't able to have the kind of savings that a middle class professional would have that would get him through that. I'm not saying that you can extricate his blackness from whatever was going through Officer Chauvin. Chauvin or Chauvin or however you pronounce his name, Derek Chauvin's mind. But I am saying that I don't know of any situation where not poor, where a professional black man has met that fate. I'm not aware of the case of that. So today you have in Missouri, you have a 25 year old white woman who was shot at an intersection by a police officer and killed. That story I read this morning, the Kansas City Star. It's not a viral story. About 1,000 people are shot per year in America, which is an extraordinary number when you consider that like 55 people have been killed by police in Wales, like in the 21st century, you know, for real, like 1,000Americans are shot per year and killed. And about 500 of them are white. About 250 of them are black. Disproportionately, the police kill black people. But in total terms the police kill an extraordinary amount of white people. This woman, the 25 year old woman was shot in her car, killed. She was headed to work a night shift at a convenience store. She was a poor, she was a poor white woman. You know, I can't think of any well to do white person that's been shot and killed by the cops. The police in America brutalize overwhelmingly poor people of all ethnicities. The group that gets disproportionately killed by the police more than any other is Native Americans. Much more than. Much more.

[A]

Dude, the numbers on that are terrifying. It's like six to two, right? For every.

[B]

It's. It's like 10 for Native Americans. Like 10 out of. I don't have the number. It's like.

[A]

I think I'm quoting your book. It was for every six Native Americans, there was two African Americans killed. If I remember right. It was jarring. That. I'll leave it at that.

[B]

The exact number escapes me, but it's. Blacks are twice as much as whites and Native Americans are almost twice as much as blacks.

[A]

Yeah, that's so going back to the physics of progress, my thing is, okay, well, if we want to solve the problem, first we have to figure out what's generating the issue. There's a lot of things going on. So there's real racism, just like straight up racism. And then there's police brutality, which is a separate issue. Maybe commingled and intermingled certainly at some points, but not others. Poverty, to me is. And this. This is a bias of experience, for sure. It's just. That's the thing. I've encountered so much. I spent a lot of time with people that have really struggled to generationally struggled to get out of that. And seeing the. And this. To a hammer, every problem is a nail. This is very much that for me. I'm well aware of that. But because to get my own life turned around, I had to address mindset. I've just spent so much time learning about the brain, learning about how to think and then how to apply that into action and all of that and how you can turn your life in different directions because of that. And when I. It's funny, there was a time where I would talk about this stuff so openly and just never got pushback. And I know now I'm going to start getting pushback on this. But what I used to. I have been saying this for years. I have never gotten a negative comment about it. And now watch. This video is going to be replete with them. But generational poverty has everything to do with the mind and very little to do with money. So it's like you could go from like, my level of wealth is unrecognizable to my family. In fact, ironically, one of my cousins just found out like three weeks ago that I'm wealthy. She had no idea. And she was on the phone, like, with my mom. At first she thought my mom was joking and she just like, kept Going. But the kid who was lazy, the kid with big ears, like, she's like, that's who we're talking about, right? And my mom was like, yes, yes, yes, he's been very successful. And she was just like, what? She couldn't understand. So my family, for as far back as you go, is lower middle class. That's sort of where my family hung. I did not grow apart, I did not grow poor. But it was like, where I've come now is so different than where my family has been for as far back as we know how to go. So it is. The amount of change that you can make in a single generation from parent to child is pretty staggering. So when you see that people aren't escaping that. And then, and this is the core part of my thesis, I want people to hear you said, oh, God, I forget the words. You just said it too. Just like, from a functional level, the society that you want to build, you should be what I call mining for astronauts. So imagine this. You've got this white kid. I've had this encounter with the inner cities through this kid that I big brothered for. But I'm very young, so I think I started with him when I was either 18 or 19. And so by the time I lose contact with him, I'm only like 26. So I was a late bloomer. So for me, it was like, I'll call that the sort of dumb period in my life. So I was really ineffective at helping him. The one solace I take is I showed him somebody loved him. And he did not have that until that moment. So I'm very proud of that. But that's sort of my only encounter with that. And then as I get older and I start this company and it happens to be in manufacturing, Manufacturing will put you in the worst neighborhoods wherever you are. So it puts me in sort of Compton and Compton adjacent. And I'm now meeting people unlike anybody that I had grown up with. And as I'm going through this, I'm like, I believe. And I say to anybody who knows me, I believe. It doesn't matter who you are today. It matters who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there. Okay, well, Thomas Chatterton, if that's true, why don't you hire people with convictions, with felony convictions? Nobody will hire them. Hey, you're in a bad neighborhood. If you put that word out, you get a lot of people. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. So we put out on the street, hey, we will hire people even if they. We will consider someone for employment. You still have to be a badass motherfucker, but I will consider you for employment, right? I'm not hiring just anybody, but I'll consider you for employment even if you have a felony record. We had people lined up around the building and they were coming in. So I ended up having former drug dealers. I had this one guy who was a drug dealer at that moment. He was trying to use me as a front for his drug money. Dude, this. But this, this guy is one of the most extraordinary humans I've ever met in my fucking life. So he comes in, in. We were growing so fast with so many employees or people coming to interview. I was having to interview people multiple at a time. Now I'm like the only white kid. I used to refer to myself as the crazy white kid. So I've got all these Hispanics, black people and me, and so they're coming in to interview. And in the middle of this interview, he's fucking mad dogging me like crazy. And I realize, you and dude, this is a guy I did not grow up tough. I'm not a tough guy at all. But I knew if I was going to fucking survive in this environment where I was around gang members, hardcore motherfuckers, like, I really had to be on my A game. So anyways, mad dogging me and I'm like, I know if I back down, it's going to be a problem. So either I just get him out of there. But there was something, you know how I can just see in somebody's eyes like this fucking guy's bright. So I'm looking at him and I point at him in the interview and I'm like, you, you've got anger management problems. And his fucking jaw dropped on the floor. And I said, come with me for a walk. So I'm walking with him and he was like, I have to know how you did that. And I was like, did what? And he goes, how did you know that I have anger management problems? He had driven to the interview from a court appointed anger management class. And I was like, dude, the way you're looking at me, it doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to figure out that you're like an angry dude. And he was like, that's fucking crazy. It's crazy. And I was like, look man. Because he started to get really nervous and he was like, there's something I have to tell you. Because I was like, if you want this opportunity, I'm gonna give it to you. I can tell there's something about you. And he was like, there's something I have to tell you. And I said, look, I know you've been arrested, right? You've been arrested for drugs. You've been arrested for violence. What is it? And he was like, yes, you know, and I've served my time, but I'm out. And I said, look, I don't care about that. Don't ever bring that shit on my floor. But if you come and you work hard, like, fuck, yeah, man. Like, I'm really trying to do something here. So he comes in anyway, I earn his trust, and he begins to tell me, like, what his life really is like. And he was like, yo, this was just supposed to be a front for my drug money. But he was like, you're opening my eyes. You're getting me to read all these books. Books. He was like, this is fucking amazing. And so I started asking him questions about drug dealing. And I'm like, this fucking guy is an extraordinary entrepreneur. And I was like, you sell risk, though. And I'm like, get out of this business immediately. I said, as stressful as my life as an entrepreneur has been, no one has ever shown up with a shotgun to steal my protein. And they had shown up at his house with shotguns to try to take his drug money and his drugs. And I was like, it's too fucking dangerous. Just get out. Like, use these talents and skills. Anyway, he ended up having an extraordinary career with us, has continued to go on and do amazing things after us. And so I become. This is a long, long story to tell you. I become obsessed with this notion that I call mining for astronauts. And I was like. I don't know why I called it that, but I was like, the next fucking Elon Musk, the next Einstein, is here in Compton. But they will never do anything with their life because they're just pointed in a direction that doesn't make any sense. People are telling him, no one wants you to succeed. People are making fun of them for reading books. Like this. This same kid that I just told you that story got in a fucking fist fight because he started reading books. And I was like, what? Like, that was so bizarre and so foreign to me. I just couldn't imagine. So I'm like, whoa, this is the whole an ouroboros. You know, the dragon eating its own tail. I'm like, you're never going to hit escape velocity if, or best way to say it, crabs in a bucket. If people pull you down for trying to educate yourself. Where do you go from there? So anyway, all of that was about like, there are extraordinary humans. And if you want this ideal society and the next Elon Musk or Einstein really is there, the things that they can create, that they can build, but you have to uplift them. And so that has become my obsession. So with my skill set. How do I uplift people in that situation?

[B]

I mean, example is so important. He needed to see what a successful business, successful legal business was. Right? He had to get in your door and be exposed to how you were making your business work. And I think that part of what is so powerful about poverty is that you're never exposed to somebody who's doing something that you may not even know you want to do, but that you could do very well. And that's kind of what I was talking about when it's just like I was never around anybody who was a professional writer in the way that I ended up wanting to be. But my father gave me some kind of confidence that made it seem plausible to me. I think that what poverty can do is just through lack of exposure is just crush your sense of plausibility. And so, yeah, I mean, what you're talking about when you're mining for astronauts, you're talking about the simple fact that no one group has any monopoly on talent or genius. And when we only favor certain groups and certain classes, we throw away just as many Elon Musk's that are naturally born in the world as are found in the well to do, well educated classes. It's crazy. It's a terrible way to govern a society.

[A]

It's a terrible way, terrible way to govern a society to get what you want. But the only thing I care about is what the fuck is the way out. Like, how do you really. So honestly, the irony of ironies is my professional life, starting, I don't know, four years ago, five years ago, was how do I take somebody who is, who is actively antagonistic to a growth mindset and help them change. Do you know Jeffrey Canada?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay, I'm fucking obsessed with this guy. I gotta get him on the show. Because it is entirely possible that I have made a mythology of what he actually thinks and believes. And I talk about this guy more than just about any human on the face of the earth. And he, in my interpretation of his work, what I heard was, which is why I'm so eager to ask him directly, is give up on adults and go after kids. And it's like, dude, sometimes. And I'm now playing with an idea that is beyond my wisdom, I would need to explore this more. And so this is one of those. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing right now, certainly for my business, by talking out loud and dealing with ideas that I'm not yet capable of wielding well, but I'm not going to ever get to the point where I can wield them well if I can't talk about them. So bear with me. But when I think about how we really begin to get out of this scenario and build mindset for people who are antagonistic and going younger and trying to plant ideas at the age of imprint, like, that's everything that I've oriented my life to. And the thing that I'm not sure that I'm playing with well, because that part I think I get is a lot of what we're struggling with, that if we just said, I can't save the people who've already made up their minds to not go internal and solve this problem. And I just have to focus on people that haven't solidified their mindset yet. And the thing that Jeffrey Canada. And again, this is my recollection of what he said, but that when he really stopped and looked at what held people back from success, the difference between middle class and the poverty in the inner cities was the number of words they hear by the age of 5 and the ratio of positive to negative. And I was like, fuck, can it really be that simple? Like it. And obviously that's. That's a sort of abstraction from what's really happening, which is you're developing the language centers of their brain and buoying their spirit. And if developing the language centers of the brain and booing one spirit is all you have to do, but you have to do it when they're young. It's like, can it really be like, I do and don't want that to be true. I don't want it to be true because I'm. I don't have kids, so I'm just much more drawn to adults and the plight of adults. But at the same time, I want it to be true because then it really looks like you could do something.

[B]

Well, the thing is that. And I thought this was Jeffrey Canada, but maybe it's another school of thought. The thing is that to get the kids, I think you kind of do have to also target the adults because the kids are never in a vacuum. You know, it's very difficult to actually. Because the children at some point have to be at home and the Culture of the home matters so much. It's very difficult to just intervene. My father actually, like, his philosophy was always that when he was running his poverty programs, his philosophy was always that you try to holistically give the whole family confidence. So you try to get in any way that you can. You try to get the parents involved in the education, but also involved in their own sense of purpose and their own sense of possibility. Try to help them with jobs, try to help the kids. And as a unit, they can kind of see a way forward. Because even sometimes I think that there can be resentment when it is understood that the child has a different class, possibilities in the family. There can be some type of, like, people can sabotage themselves. So, I mean, I'm certainly not an education expert, but my feeling is that it's hard to extricate children completely from the family unit. And so it's a chicken and egg thing. How do you get the kids if the parents aren't right and had it, and then the kids become the next generation of parents. So it seems like the whole family has to be taken care of.

[A]

So how the hell do we do that?

[B]

How much money did you make?

[A]

I don't think enough to throw money at the problem. But let's pretend that if this problem is solvable with money, then I always tell people, if you have a problem that's solvable with money, you don't actually have a problem. So is this something that we can.

[B]

I think that it's not. It's not a problem that's solvable with one person's money.

[A]

The biggest, but even the government's money, like, I'm down. Like, let's say that we give you a trillion dollar check. Is this solvable with a trillion dollar check?

[B]

It might be very vastly improvable. The biggest difference I've noticed living in Europe, not just in France, in Germany or wherever you go, having the ability to have high quality child care because the state subsidized child care in France that is free if you're poor and is not very expensive if you're middle class, is such that your children will be getting those words and will get a base level of kind of education that that's quite sufficient to develop. The health care is free. So you have this kind of. I don't mean to paint Europe or France as utopia, but you do have this way in which life can never get as completely precarious and kind of. And kind of tough and awful as it can get in the United States. Just brutalized in West Baltimore, you don't have that actual kind of inner city situation where. Where it's just like almost like a Latin American kind of inequality. I think that that makes a massive difference, you know, like money, a certain level of money, but also the belief that a kind of. The society benefits from having a kind of floor. You know, there is a kind of floor below which you can't go. I often have conversations with friends who are French and have lived in America. And in my experiences in theirs, it seems that, yes, in America you can get a Jeff Bezos. You can get really high. There is no ceiling in America, but there is also no floor. And in France, you're not going to get as high as that, but you're also never going to be quite as degraded. And I think, you know, that's a different idea of what the good society is. You know, I put my kids. My kids are in public school. The level of education and the level of education in the daycare, not just with books, but, you know, the meals they receive at school, the way they learn to eat, the way they learn to be open to flavors. I actually think that matters quite a lot. Understanding how much of the world is accessible and legible. You know, in Losing My Cool, I write about the fact that I didn't know, like, an extraordinary amount of foods until I got to college. And, you know, I didn't even know what this kind of typical French bread called a baguette was until somebody asked me to go find in the store and I realized I couldn't find it because I didn't even know what he was talking about. And it's like a stupid little thing, but it's actually like a way of thinking about something much larger. It's a way of thinking about how much of the world do you inhabit? You know, And I think it, you know, I'm just kind of amazed as a parent now by how much we are willing to think the state should not just provide for you. You know, and I know I'm not getting on. I don't mean to go in. I'm not even saying that. I'm just saying that there's a kind of way in which, you know, and you look at what happened under coronavirus, you're throwing away from a pragmatic level, a lot of talent. If. If a very talented female, Elon Musk, can't work because she's stuck at home and she has no one to watch her children. I mean, this is. It just seems to me that in so many ways we don't provide possibilities for people to reach their potential.

[A]

Yeah, I will definitely agree with that. You start getting into very complicated waters in terms of. And this is interesting. This is where we have to run tests and look at data. So when you think about creating what social programs, in fact, this is the right way to think about it. What social programs gives you the ideal outcome? And I will say, obviously, defining ideal outcome is going to be critically important for me. Creating equal opportunity to show up and play. That's what I value. I'm not. I'm definitely not saying that I represent anybody other than myself, but that, to me, is what is interesting. Because I still want to see motherfuckers go hard on that field. Like, I am not interested. Like, I need to know. And that was my thing at Quest. Like, look, I don't give a shit if you were in a gang. I don't give a shit if you sold drugs. I don't care if you've been to jail. It's like that shit is what it is now. To beat you up forever about your past seems absolutely useless to me. But I fucking care a lot about how hardcore you are about your job. Like, are you helping the other people around you? Are you lifting them up? Are you trying to be the best at your job? Are you pushing yourself every day? Because I'm gonna show up and play for you. I want to make sure that you show up and play for me. And I used to take the hardest job on the line and then get everybody else excited, right? So that people could see, I'll never ask you to do something I'm not willing to do myself, that I will do a fucking brutal job. And yet be upbeat, be energetic. Cheer people on. I used to come in early and stay late. I would teach anybody anything they wanted to know about entrepreneurship. Literally anything. If they wanted to build a competitive nutrition company, I would and did teach people how to do that. I was like, I will hold nothing back from you. I will teach you everything I know. And in making myself available like that and demanding that they fucking come play to win, not only did the business thrive, but like that group of people, that is the most fun I've ever had. And fun isn't the right word. I'm gonna use it for now. That's the most fun I've ever had in business. And the reason I say fun is I'm not a guy with a big social circle. I'm sort of heads down doing my thing. I'm introverted. I'm all in on my own life and what I'm trying to achieve. But at that moment it happened to be. I had to play a team sport. And so I had all these people that I loved and cared about and I was going to, you know, six year old birthday parties and baby christenings and I mean, just like all kinds of crazy stuff because I'd become so integrated in the lives of my employees. It was a very, very interesting time. But what made me so fiendish about my relationships with them was they were hardcore. And it's like that is where that's what I need to be excited to create systems. It's like I need to know that there's. That there's encouragement is probably the right way. There's encouragement to get people like excited to push themselves. And I don't want to be punitive. I want to find a way to get people amped up. I think your dad had that hard time with you and your brother and was it Charles? Is that the name of the, the guy that your dad was tutoring for?

[B]

Yeah, that was my best friend in high school. Yeah.

[A]

So how did he end up getting you guys? Because Charles has gone on to do some pretty interesting stuff, if I remember right.

[B]

Yeah, he, he, the. The name is Charles in the book, his name is Carlos. In real life, he went to Harvard Law and he. And he has a wonderful career and family for himself and studied at Oxford and lots of wonderful things.

[A]

So how did your dad get you guys to click over?

[B]

I think that it's complicated because it didn't work. My dad, what he was trying to do, it didn't really work with my brother directly. My brother completely rejected education, which is probably also predictable. If you ran this experiment, a lot of times you make education the be all end all in your house and like X number of children will just flat out drop out of school, which is like. You rolled a dice in my house. Like I embraced and wanted to make my father. I just wanted to do what I thought my brother was. I wanted the opposite of what I saw my brother doing because it made life easier at home for me. And that's probably actually how it began for me. And then, you know, like, I'm sure you understand this very well. When you start getting good results, it makes you more invested in it and you like it. So I tried to not get in trouble the way my brother did. I got a good grade, felt good about that, saw that my dad was pleased, did it again, you know, in this kind of positive reinforcement loop. My brother actually, though Is an interesting story because he did everything that you're not supposed to. The only thing that you could really do in my house to mess up was to not go to college. He didn't go to college, but he had absorbed. The household that we grew up in was extraordinarily intellectual in a real way in that, I mean that if you came to the dinner table, you would have to discuss ideas and you would have to defend a position and you would be challenged and you'd have to articulate it and you couldn't just mumble a one word answer that wouldn't get you. That wouldn't work. So my brother actually absorbed quite a lot and you know, he banged around dead end jobs. But he had a kind of entrepreneurial way about him since he was a young kid. And he eventually, you know, in his 30s, he sold a startup and he did, you know, he didn't, he's not Mark Zuckerberg, but he did well enough that my dad said something that really struck me as beautiful. He said that my brother taught him there were many other ways of making a success of yourself. And it's not because my brother had made a bit of money, but it was because he had built something. He had a vision that he pursued and he saw it through and he realized it. And it was a vision that my father missed. He didn't see it at all. He didn't see the possibility that was there. And so it's a form of flourishing and that's what he was really trying to teach us how to do. And in his way of understanding the world, the only way that you could reliably flourish was to have a kind of education that came through university in a traditional way of book learning. But the world is, there's many ways to do it. And so, yeah, I mean, how do you motivate a kid? It comes back to, it always comes back to. I think people have to have confidence in themselves.

[A]

So now the question is, how do you give somebody confidence or how do you help them develop confidence as a parent? How do you think about this with your own kids? Like you, dude, you're so fucking thoughtful. Like listening to your book Losing My Cool especially and hearing how you redefined yourself was fucking awesome, dude. Like, there's something about people that can write a killer memoir and your memoir is fucking killer that is astonishing to me. Just the level of self awareness and how you're able to then put that into action. So I have to imagine you'll bring that that sense of awareness of how you move around your kids and how you act and what you say. And as somebody who is very drawn to chess, I'm guessing that you see moves, you know, three and four moves out. So how do you think about being a father and imparting this stuff to your own kids to make sure that they walk away with confidence and knowledge and a path to flourish?

[B]

I'm trying. It's quite demanding, actually. The kind of attention that my father gave us is something that I've been aware of the past three months in quarantine where we've been trying to homeschool our 6 year old daughter, for example. And I just realized it made me really appreciate what he's doing. He put an enormous amount of himself into our development. And so what do I do with my kids? I try to do some of the things that he did with us. And you know, I don't, you know, it's like, it's tough, man, really tough. I don't know what to say. I want my daughter to succeed, but to live up to my father's model of kind of like walking her down that path is something that I'm still. I'm working on myself to become that kind of selfless parent. It's really something. And it's only in retrospect that I'm now even beginning to appreciate the scale of the commitment that he lived. I mean, to give you a concrete example, like my father on the weekend, I used to think of it as a kid that on the weekends, in the summertime, on any school break, I had to study five, six hours a day with my father. And that was a drag. As a parent, I'm realizing that he was spending five, six hours of his day making courses for me and working through them with me, and that he could have been doing lots of other things that I like to do now that I'm an adult and can control my own time. And so it's kind of, you know, it was a sobering experience to replace my daughter's teachers for the past three months and to try to juggle that with also earning a living and also trying to see friends and do things that you like and consider, you know, it's quite a lot. But what I try to do with my daughter is I try to talk to her as though her point of view really matters. And I think that, that already I see that she has a kind of confidence and she has a kind of way of thinking that if I can just get her to have a work ethic, I think she'll be okay, but, you know, it's very difficult. You have to want it as well. You have to. At some point, my father couldn't actually make me sit in the chair and spend the time studying. He could make life hell for me, and he made hell for my brother. But at some point, you actually have to want to do it yourself, and you have to. You have to see it through. So, man, being a parent, I wasn't expecting, like,

[A]

yeah, dude, I really thought about having kids. It's one of the things I think I've been most thoughtful about in my life. I put more thought into that than my career, than just about anything else. And thankfully, I always had, like, a slight intuition around just, like, the sheer amount of time and energy that that would take. And that was one of the things that really gave me pause, was, man, I like my life. I like my life. And in fact, this was one of the big things for me. So I was so serious about building a business and a big business and really controlling my life. I had. Growing up, I had real issues around people being able to tell me what to do, people being able to tell me what I could and couldn't have, my parents not being able to afford things that I wanted. And sure, a lot of that is just the silliness of being a child. But the problem with authority had always persisted. So in trying to create a business, it was largely about controlling my life. I didn't like being an employee and somebody else having control over me. I didn't like not feeling like an adult, which later I would substitute with the word autonomous, I didn't like. I realized that autonomy is a very, very, very important thing for me. I need to be able to control my life and decide what I do when I do it and all that. So I, like, really, really, really poured myself into the business. And when we were thinking about having kids and I was reading every book that had ever been made on rearing children and getting into that, and I thought, you know, this is interesting that their proximity there's no substitute for. So at some point, you just have to spend time with your kids. And I thought that would make me feel like I wanted to be at home, and I want to be at the business, growing the business. So if I don't have a child, there's nothing that pulls me home. My wife and I built a business together, so it was like that was a joint operation with the woman I love. And so I get a lot of time there, and that's deeply fulfilling for both of Us. And if I had a kid, I would start to feel guilty about not being home with the child, and rightly so. It's like that is a commitment that warrants time. And this is interesting. I actually didn't bring this up for this topic. But it becomes a question of ought. How ought I live my life? Which was the thing that you said. Philosophy posed those questions to you and became the only thing in philosophy that you cared about, which was how ought I live my life? And I want to hear, like, if you have sort of a idea around, is there a universal ought? I certainly want to know the ought for yourself. But that's what it ultimately came down to for me. If I had kids, I ought to be with them. I ought to spend time with them. And I didn't want that pulling me away from the beautiful things that I already had in my life, the things I was trying to build. And so, on my deathbed, I will without question regret not having children. But if I had kids now, I worry I'd regret them now. So that ultimately became the deciding factor. But to that notion of ought. I'd love to hear more about your philosophy on life and what matters and what the good life is.

[B]

Yeah, well, the good life, I think, is doing something that you would do if you didn't get paid for it. And then if you get paid for it, and you have to get paid for it, if you get paid for it, it's the gravy. I think that my kind of path to writing sounds a lot like your path to starting a business, except that I get paid a lot less for it. But it's autonomy. It's controlling my day, it's controlling my time. It's controlling my headspace. It's not having somebody else controlling my headspace. And it's ultimately, I think, you know, the kind of pride and satisfaction that comes with a craft where you enjoy the process. I really enjoy every aspect of organizing thoughts, getting them onto paper, eventually having that be laid out by people that care about how it looks. And then having it appear in a printed publication that someone can hold, and then maybe a reader reads it and says that it resonated in some way. I'll never get over that feeling, or the feeling of coming by a newsstand and seeing. Seeing a piece of work that was in your mind, now in the newsstand. I mean, those are things that just fill me with extraordinary sense of fulfillment, you know, wrestling with words and ideas. I still sometimes amaze that I can spend my time that way because I'M quite aware of how bad a job can feel in so many situations and how it can be something you don't want to do. So for me, that's flourishing. That's the good life. That's how I ought to live my life. But then when I think about the way that you set up the question, I think about someone like Jonathan Franzen, who's an extraordinarily successful writer, probably much more successful than. He's much more successful than just about anybody who's going to write is going to become. That's just a fact. And he said I would never be able to be what I have become if I had kids. I'm just, I'm just. I'm certain that I regret that I miss that. But I had to be this way to do what I did. And you know, that might be true. It might be the tragedy of life that you could have several paths that would be quite fulfilling, that would provide you glimpses of flourishing and that there is not actually a single good life for you. So you kind of have to accept that there would be regrets and trade offs with any path you choose. Now that I have my kids, they filled me with something that I didn't even know I had no idea that I would want so much before I had it. Because you can't really know something until it's there. So it's almost impossible. The thought experiment. No longer. I used to run the calculus before my wife gave birth. But once the people are there, then you realize that this is the life for you and then the other life advantages. And maybe I publish fewer books and maybe the books I publish are. I've devoted less of my full attention to them because I'm running around trying to homeschool my daughter. But it works out right. For me, that's very much still the good life. Even if there's some type of trade off, that's a necessary part of the equation.

[A]

What I love about that is the way that you approach it from a true philosophical standpoint of having read the great minds and being able to formulate your own thinking and going back to like what's happening right now. I think one of the most important things, and for me engaging in the conversation has been about avoiding cowardice and wanting to actually formulate a thought. Not that I have like some secret agenda. All of my thinking has been about the individual. It's been about businesses and. And now I'm like, okay, but I've spent a lot of time learning how to think and how to process A problem and can the process that I go through, can that be useful? And in your book, one thing that I really, really resonated with, partly because I was equally enamored with hip hop like you were, obviously for very different reasons, but I was. It's interesting. So. Well, let me tell you why I was drawn to it. So I was drawn to it because I was a very weak kid. I was physically weak. I was emotionally weak. And it presented. It's funny, a Jewish guy ended up giving me the key insight into why I loved hip hop so much. And he said, white music is all about anxiety, and there's no anxiety in hip hop. And I was like, holy fuck. He was like, hip hop is always. It's bravado, it's aggression, it's dominance. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, this is the ultimate escape from feeling scared, weak, frustrated, and really just felt. And also, quite frankly, in this, you may understand this more than the average person. I don't even normally bring this up to people. The turn of phrase that I. As a writer, I am obsessed with words. I'm obsessed with words. And I for sure, like, what is the. Like, maybe everybody has a gift. If that is true, I can just assure you the gift I have is verbal. I have a. Whatever amount of energy I put into verbal things, I will get a disproportionate return on that energy. So I've always been attracted to words. I am not a synesthete, much to my dismay, but for me, words have texture and they have rhythm. So, like, a certain word, like bubble is actually a bouncy word. Like, I experience it as a bouncy word. I can feel myself sort of bouncing off the bees. And because of that, I can structure sentences that have a rhythm or that have a texture or are sharp or staccato. And I never thought about it that just. Like, I've always had that sense. And so hip hop sort of takes that to the extreme. And I came into hip hop at a time where they were transitioning from really simple rhyming patterns to, like, compound syllables and things, where they were rhyming the middle of words and things. And so that was intoxicating to my mind. And then also, I guess the last piece was. It was so. I love change. I'm a change junkie. And that touched on something. It was so outside of how I was growing up, you know, like, I could legitimately, and I wish it were any other song right now, but it's like I can recite the Lyrics to fuck the police, right? That was just. I grew up on NWA, I grew up on 2Life Crew, run DMC. All. All of like that. That era I got into. Oh, the. Do you know who the boogie boys are?

[B]

I don't actually.

[A]

Oh, oh, you. Because you. You're a little too young. You're just enough younger than me that you probably miss these guys by three or four years. But they have this song called Fly Girl. You can find it on YouTube. I've checked. And at least where I grew up, if kids wanted to fuck with you, they would start repeating everything you say. And I could shut that shit down in an instant because I knew the lyrics to Fly Girl so well, I could repeat them at hyperspeed and nobody could keep up. So it was just like the linguistics, the turn of phrase, the rhythm, the counterculture. It was different than anything that I knew. It was so fucking interesting. And so I got drawn deeply into that. But anyway, the reason I bring up hip hop is in your book is you start talking about how you were just enamored by the philosophy, the culture of it all, the way that it drew you in. And then you got into philosophy, which was fucking hard and it was brutal. But it laid this foundation for how to think. And once you could think for yourself and generate your own original thoughts, you looked at the lyrics and the culture of hip hop very, very differently. And I thought that is the human experience, when it's done right, that you go lay a foundation for how to think and it becomes unpredictable what you will think after that. And I'd love to hear more about that experience and how you think about that and how you're still pushing your own knowledge and not sort of getting into traps of. Well, I thought it before and therefore it must still be true.

[B]

Well, yeah, I mean, that's a good way of putting it, that I philosophy and studying philosophy opened the world and opened interests to myself that I didn't know I had and made me look back at the kind of. Didn't make me dislike the music that I had loved my whole life. But it made me think that the vision of what my authentic self was had been limited and that I had been participating in a kind of limitation of myself, my friends and I. I mean, part of this is because hip hop in the 90s was also like a lot less worldly than it is now. And since at least Drake, mainstream hip hop has had a high level of anxiety stolen into it. Drake definitely brought a kind of anxiety that was lacking before. In addition to the bravado. But there was a kind of street authenticity. Authenticity, street credibility that was very much tied up in your racial authenticity in the 90s, early 2000s, where to realize yourself as a kind of. Or this is the way that my friends and I often thought about it. To keep it real was to kind of keep it street in certain ways. And studying philosophy just made me question the whole basis of that because. And not just philosophy, but literature. You know, you mentioned Dostoevsky earlier when we were speaking. I just saw myself, and this is what art can do. I saw myself in certain Russian characters that were written in the 1800s. That was a realer depiction of some of my inner states than I had had from anybody I'd ever met in my town who looked like me. That's not a knock on other black kids. I've since read, you know, depictions of myself in James Baldwin, who died when I was six. Or, you know, in every ethnicity that you can think of. I've discovered people that can represent exactly who I am or who I think myself to be. And that's the human condition. No one group owns all the wisdom. And I guess the way that hip hop kind of operated as a secular religion in the 90s culture I grew up in, it made it such that things that were outside of its purview were not real or were not authentic or weren't really applicable to you. And so it had the effect for me, certainly of putting kind of blinders on me. And that I was very much. You know, it would have struck me as obsessed, absurd that I would be living in France right now talking to you, because I couldn't understand why that would. Somebody might do that. But why would that have anything to do with me? You know, I've gotten pushback with that. My first reading for losing my cool, I was in Atlanta reading, and of all people, like, Killer Mike showed up and he was just in the crowd. And, you know, he was very. He was cool as hell in the crowd. He was pushing back in the Q and A. And he was saying, I tend to agree with much of your cultural critique, but I just don't think that what you're talking about is hip hop culture. You're talking about street culture. And, you know, I've thought about that a lot. There is a kind of overlap between, you know, like, someone like Talib Kweli is not who I was having in mind when I was thinking of the total, like the kind of narrowing pressure that hip hop culture can exert on a young black guy trying to think of himself in the world. But the mainstream culture that kind of, like, dominated that day, you know, was the vision of blackness as necessarily only being at home in the street. Yeah, that. That's a long way. That's a long way of answering your question. I hope that, you know, I hope that made sense.

[A]

It definitely makes sense. And I'm certainly not tense at all about long answers. This is. This is such an interesting topic. It's not something I ever really. I didn't think a lot about, like, and I'm not sure why I never really thought about it. But obviously what's going on now is begging a question of how do we think about the problem? How do we lay a foundation to process through this? I don't think anybody has the answers right now. I wouldn't expect anybody to. But if we're thinking well about the problem, then we will be able to work our way to a great solution and have the beautiful society on the other side of it. If our thinking. If the foundation upon which or the way in which. That's a better way to say it. If the way in which we think about any problem is malfunctioning, then the solution we will get to will be a broken solution. And with the critical moment that this is where we could have this beautiful outcome or we could have a fucking horrendous outcome, it's like, man, I want to make sure that the way that we think about it. And so reading your books, because I'm reading them now in the middle of this, right? I'm not reading them five years ago, where it may have been, oh, that's like, really interesting, but apropos of nothing. Whereas now I'm like, fuck, this is like. This is so important how we define identity. How we think about who we are. How who we think we are is malleable, and it changes. And so how do we. How do we begin to think about this? And also, like the way that you defined your ideal outcome. Like I am about it. That. That is. Literally, you've said it better than I could ever hope to say it. But that's because I have been in my own life. I have obviously been, you know, the. This is water for me as being the majority, being a white kid, especially in Tacoma. Jesus. It's like you can really take it for fucking granted there, right? But there have been so many times in my life where I've been the minority. So whether that was when I was Big Brothering and I was in the, like, in one of the worst school districts, In America. Whether that was at Quest in the first year, where it was, it was God, man. I mean, what was the company? 80% Hispanic. I mean, it was just like massively, massively Hispanic.

[B]

And

[A]

being in those positions, it wasn't like. I used to think of it in very jokey terms. And that could be because I was just blind to it, that it's never been a problem for me. So I didn't think about it. But I never thought myself better because I was white. I was so mercenary. I was like, who the fuck is the smartest person here who can answer this question? Because I know my limitations. I am so. I don't. A long time ago, almost 20 years ago, I realized to feel good about myself and get rich, I had to stop worrying about being smart. And I had to just start saying, I'm the learner, I'm the learner. That's it. I'll learn from anybody. I don't give a fuck. Like, whoever has the right answer, I want to hear from you. I will sit at your feet. I will gladly look up to you and praise you, no matter who you are. I need that information. And it was like, it was like that. It was like this. I need to know, like, you have some secret that you can. Because my fucking house was on the line. I didn't have time to worry about being right. I only had time to find the right fucking answer. And so it was like, who's got it? I don't give a shit. So. And look, so anyway, I, I guess deluded myself into thinking that everybody was as mercenary as I was and just wanted the fucking right answer and wanted like the. The smart shit, like, somebody speak up. Somebody knows this, Somebody understands this. I don't fucking understand it, so give me the juice. So anyway, now in this moment where it's like, there, there is going back to one of the first things we talked about, the intoxication of rage. That there really is an underlying problem that there are people for whom society is not working. And what the fuck do you expect them to do now? I don't think that it is. It serves them, certainly long term. It does not serve them to riot, to loot, to be violent. I don't think it serves people to get rid of the police. I think that would be a fucking catastrophe. But I get the rage. I get how powerful rage is. I get how, from an evolutionary standpoint, that shit is useful. And so it's like, it is a tool. Don't be surprised that people are reaching for it. But Now I'm like, but how do we get to the other side, to the beautiful outcome?

[B]

It's interesting how you put it in terms of being mercenary and just seeing how you can benefit through cooperation or through seeing potential in everybody. I guess it's a kind of interesting. I mean, if society worked as raw capitalism or as sports do, where it just tries to locate talent wherever it is and with an eye towards maximizing it, that would kind of go a long way towards alleviating some of these problems, I imagine.

[A]

But when people hear you say that, they're going to hear fingernails on a chalkboard, right? So. And there is, there is something in that that's crazy. And so my thing is, okay, the part in there that's crazy is Thomas Sowell. I know you know who that is. He says, no, no, the, the market just puts a price on discrimination. If you're willing to pay the price for discrimination, then you can discriminate. And I thought, whoa, that's so true. Like, even in apartheid South Africa, you had people that were hiring more blacks than they were allowed to by law because they're like, well, I can get this done for cheaper. So of course I'm going to do that. And there are parts of this puzzle that the market forces will do you well. But then there are parts where this is going to fall down. And I can tell by the way that I'm speaking that I don't have a full grasp on where this actually goes awry. But if people. Here, here's what I think people have to understand. There's two parts of this. There is the. The human brain's ability to process raw data quickly is not evenly distributed, but it's not unevenly distributed across races. Okay, so you're gonna find what, what I define as genius. The ability to process data quickly, raw data quickly. You're gonna find that everywhere, doesn't matter where you look. But worldly knowledge is also not evenly distributed. So my thing is, okay, well, wait a second. I get this person, they've got raw potential for fucking days. And you're telling me all I have to do is point them at an educational paradigm and they can become a beast. But if you just look at the state of something as it is today, then historic inequities will carry forward forever because you pass on this non useful mindset. Now, if I could clone your dad 100,000 times and put him into all these families, that to me is. It's a non sequitur because it's not real, but it's like that actually would, in my estimation, solve the problem. It would take a generation, but it would solve the problem because you would find all the people who could process that data quickly enough, what I call meeting minimum requirements. Okay. There are people that are not smart enough. They will never be helpful. It will always be a problem for them. And my fucking heart breaks because they didn't do anything, but they just won't ever be able to cobble together a useful mindset. But, man, if you could light those people on fire, then you would get a radically different world because. Oh, God, you said this in your fucking book. Oh, please. Do you remember the quote where you're talking about if the. The school that you played basketball for very briefly? Do you know what I'm talking about?

[B]

Yeah, yeah. What I was saying when I realized how they were approaching the game of basketball? Is that what you're talking about?

[A]

Yeah. Oh, God, I'm going to fuck this up. You said it so well. I'll give you the starter and then I'll let you go. You said they were so ferocious. They played like their life depended on it. And I had this feeling that if they were as obsessed with curing cancer or solving. Oh, God, what did you say? Immortality, the way that they are about basketball, they would actually solve those problems.

[B]

And.

[A]

And, dude, you want to talk about something? I recognize a human condition in that fucking statement.

[B]

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Your memory is actually. That was basically verbatim, actually. Yeah, I really, you know, I was 16 or 17. This was in the 90s, the team that was regularly the number one team in America. And I was working out with them, wondering if I wanted to transfer and play with them. And I would have been at the low level of the level that could have been on the team, whatever. But it just. I had a profound revelation that what my father was trying to show me was making sense and that I guess I just couldn't picture that kind of effort towards something where statistically so few people could ever make something out of it. And I imagine that so many of them, if they approached studying like that, could get to Yale, could do lots of stuff, you know, because that's. Actually, that kind of effort would pay off much better if applied differently. But it's about exposure. I mean, what do you see when you're. The conversation is interesting because we keep coming back to a few key points. And one of the things that I think conditions these outcomes and what was tragic for me in the book that I. That I mention is that the Number one player in the nation at one point was on the team, Anthony Perry. And then when I got to Georgetown, he was on the team at Georgetown. He was a top recruit. And by the end of Georgetown, because of the vicissitudes of fate or whatever, he didn't even get drafted, you know, and that was just the end of the road. And all of that effort led to an outcome that I found kind of tragic. And I just felt that, yeah, you know, exposure. What you see in some of these social contexts is that the only way that your effort can be rewarded is by putting into a very few kind of pursuits. And it never is even shown to you that you could apply that kind of tenacity in other ways. That would be much more high, High yield for you. You know, there was. There would be much more likely to be high yield. Yeah, I don't.

[A]

I don't know that one. That is one of those things that haunts me. So when you look at somebody like Schwarzenegger and do bodybuilding is hard. I don't know if you've ever, like, really gotten serious about weights. That shit hurts. And it hurts a lot. And it takes so much consistency, it's inhuman.

[B]

100 burpees before this interview, so I was proud of myself for that, and

[A]

rightly you should be. That, that is. It's actually. That's actually pretty hard. I wouldn't want to do 100 burpees, I'll be very honest. What I find interesting, though, is basically every other bodybuilder has been unable to transfer that to other areas of their life. But it is to get onto the Mr. Olympia stage. It is an inhuman amount of effort, consistency. Even if they're taking just insane amounts of steroids, it doesn't matter. You can't inject yourself with steroids and get big. You have to inject yourself with steroids and then work out like your life fucking depended on it. And these guys do it for years and years and years and years and years. It is unbelievable. But they don't ever transfer it to something else. And that. That is haunting to me. And the only thing that I can make sense of is desire. So when you were describing the basketball team and how obsessed they were, I was inspired. I was getting excited. And I don't know that that's what you wanted me to take away from that description, but I was like, dude, I aspire to be that monomaniacal. And just like, when I set my sights on something, I just am an unstoppable machine who truly plays like my life depends on it. And my thing is, that is why no one predicted my success, because I had to learn how to do that. And there are, I'm sure there are things in your life, realizations you've had, things you've done that you realize and you're like, I want to tell everybody about this. Because if they would embrace this truth, which has nothing to do with Thomas Chatterton and has everything to do with being a human, they would radically change the outcome of their lives. And for me, realizing that desire is a process was one of those things that you could start with no desire today and over the next six months build a raging inferno of desire. I tell people how to do it all the time. Most people don't do it, but how

[B]

do you do it?

[A]

So people expect to turn inward and find something that they already want so badly that they can't see straight because they hear stories about, you know, the basketball player knew he wanted to be a basketball player at 4 years old or something, and they think, oh, shit, bummer me, I didn't have that thing. But that's not really how the human condition worked. What probably happened to that four year old is they wanted to impress their parent or their neighborhood, or they were enamored by somebody they saw on TV and one of their uncles said, oh my God, that person's amazing. And I aspire to be like them. And they were wearing Jordans or whatever so that kids like, I want to be admired the way I want my uncle to look at me, the way he looks at Jordan. And so what they really wanted was something very real, very visceral. And it happened so young and so early that they didn't realize what they were really doing. So once you realize, oh, I'm going to turn inward, I'm not going to find anything like glowing ember of desire. I'm going to turn in. And there are things that I'm more interested than others. Cool. So everything starts as an area of interest. Now, as you engage with that area of interest, some things will give you more energy than they take. If they give you more energy than they take, that's going to be the area that I'm going to say, here's where we're going to be able to build a raging inferno of desire. So, okay, cool. You have something where there is a natural reaction to it. So if you naturally don't react even a small blip to anything, okay, maybe I can't help you, but you've got this natural blip there now you're going to go down the process of gaining mastery. Because, dude, this, this is where people fucking fall off. Failure to recognize this one thing breaks everything down. Passion is like love. Love cannot be unrequited. Then it's just obsession and it's. It's a dark energy. It doesn't feel good to love somebody, to ache for them, and they don't ache for you back. It's fucking gnarly. I've been there. But to. To long for somebody who longs for you, it's a light energy. It buoys you up. It feels so fucking good. It gives and gives and gives and gives. It is unreal. To love somebody to the core of your being is one of the greatest joys life will ever fucking give you. It is extraordinary and is why most people probably should have kids. Because to get into that sort of beautiful relationship is fucking joyful. I get it now. I happen to have that with my wife, so I know it to the fucking ends. I know what that's like. It's amazing now. It is because it is reciprocated that it's fucking awesome. Skillset is like that. If you build a skill set that does not have tangible real world outcomes that allow you to survive not only yourself, but somebody else, it will never fucking matter. But if you found this thing that gave you a little bit more energy than it took, and you go down the process of gaining mastery getting so good you can't be fucking denied. And there are real world consequences to that skill set. Now all of a sudden, you're out there doing some rad shit that affects people in a way that matters to you, with a skill set that is unique to you, that you worked your ass off to build, and now it lets you do things. Think about your fucking dad. Think about how he feels about Carlos or how he feels about you, or how he feels. The countless other kids that he touched and is like, fuck, man, I put myself in a closet with a flashlight and I learned. You haven't even mentioned here he had 10,000 fucking books in, like, a normal house. When I think about having 10,000. 10,000 books is a lot of fucking books. That's bigger than most bookstores. So he's got 10,000 books. It's fucking unreal. And so he's poured his heart and soul into these books. But he's actually. Which is why, of course, he spent five to six hours with you. Because he's like, fuck, man, I worked so hard to do this. And now it's gonna have real World consequences. Think about how proud he is about what you've done and put out. And when his other son fucking sells a business, he's like, oh my God, it worked. You know what I mean? Like, how fucking good would that feel? So my thing is he's probably more interested, especially now, if he was still young, he'd be more interested in helping the next kid. Cause he sees, holy shit, this works. And I'm actually able to do something that has these incredible outcomes. And I'm like, now if you attach meanings and significance to that, okay. When I was 18, I wanted to be a rich film director because I like movies. Movies are rad. I want to tell movies, yeah, that's cool. But it was really about getting rich. Now once I said, holy fuck. I've worked in the inner cities, I've seen these extraordinary humans who will do nothing with their lives. But I can actually do something. My unique skill set about all the things I had to do to get control of my mind. How I've learned about business, how I've learned about story. You put them all together and now I can fucking hit an 11 year old kid with this story. Like Yoda fucking changed my life. I'm not joking. So to give another kid that kind of shit, that's going to change their life. Now I'm fucking hyped. So I think about and I feel bad saying his name so I don't say his name anymore because I don't want to fucking throw him out there. But the kid that I big brother for, for eight and a half years, terrifying story. I'm so heartbroken that I didn't realize what was happening to him. But I decided, I decided to build the desire I needed to see this studio through. That I had to say, I fucking failed this kid. Now that was a decision. I didn't used to think of it like that. I used to think, oh my God, I showed this kid that somebody loved him. And when I set about building the studio and I realized the odds are so stacked against me, I'm risking my fortune to do this. Like, what the fuck? Why am I doing this? I knew I needed a why? I need a desire. I needed to want it so fucking badly that I was going to push through any fucking obstacle that got in my way. So, okay, how do I do this? I'm going to take the kid that I big brothered for and I'm going to put this at the center of my life and I'm going to remind myself of how much more I could have helped him and done for him if I hadn't been as ignorant as I was back then and not seeing what was happening and not knowing how to empower himself, I didn't know how to empower myself. So now that I have all of that, can I, like, save that next kid and make sure that I don't fail another person like I failed him? And so now it's like, I've said it out loud so many times, but it was a conscious choice of how to marry purpose to this skill set that I had built. But it was all like. It started as an intellectual exercise of marrying this thing. It was real, right? But I reframed that story. I associated it with impacting somebody that age of imprinting. And then after, I don't know, probably two and a half, three, no more. Three, three and a half years of deciding, okay, cool, I need to tie that. I need to really rethink about this and make it emotional. I recorded this video called My Master Plan. Why I'm doing what I'm Doing. I promise you, there was nothing performative in that video whatsoever. I was completely caught off guard. But in that moment, I really cried. I was really upset because I realized, fuck. I had taken this intellectual thing about how I'd failed this kid, and I had made it emotionally real through this process of marrying this purpose to the skill set that I had built, of fanning these flames, of saying, by leveraging the skill set, I can really have this kind of impact and, like, thinking about it, telling other people about it, reinforcing in my own mind. And then it became real, because that's how the human mind works. And so I'm like, fuck, man. It's exactly what I did back at Quest to Marry. My desire for a nutrition company with my desire to save my mom and my sister, put them together, it becomes this emotional thing anyway. It's a lot of fucking words. People are here to hear a lot more from you than they are from me. But that's how you build desire, man.

[B]

I mean, I need to keep that conversation going with you because building desire, I think, is the secret to happiness in what you're pursuing his work. But it's also the secret to fulfilling relationships with your spouse, with your kids, with your. With your refueling, re channeling and reimagining. Desire is actually one of life's most important questions.

[A]

I will go so far as to say it's the most important if you want to be effective.

[B]

Yeah, that's. It's interesting what you say. No, I Mean, that's like, something that I've just been blessed in my career not to have to. I haven't had to make myself desire writing. I guess it was something that. It's the question that you proposed about whether you have a requited love or an unrequited love. Writing was something that I didn't have to think very hard about falling in love with. But when you think about how you make meaning in life beyond just your work, you have to keep finding new ways to light the fire of desire. That's really deep, what you said.

[A]

Thank you, man. Well, dude, I will let you go. I cannot tell you how much I was impacted by your books. They are fucking awesome. You are a voice that the world needs right now, man. There are a lot of voices out there, I'm sure. But I saw you first on Coleman Hughes podcast, and I was like, who the fuck is this guy? The way that you're approaching this issue, I think your life experience has just made you uniquely capable of walking people through how you think about not getting trapped by a sense of identity. It's amazing. Keep doing what you're doing. Keep writing. And if you ever decide you want to write a comic book, I better be your first phone call. I'm ready, dude. I am ready. So, yeah. Anyway, thanks for coming on the show, dude. Thank you for sharing the way that you think with the world. It's rad.

[B]

Thank you so much, Tom.

[A]

You got it, brother. All right, man. Take care, everybody. Fucking read everything he's ever written. I assure you, you will be richly rewarded. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, everybody. Thank you so much for listening. And if this content is delivering value to you, please go to itunes, go to Stitcher Rate and review us. That helps us build this community, and that is what we are all about right now. Building this community as big as we can to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible. And you guys rating and reviewing really helps with that. All right, guys, thank you again so much. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.