Michael Wood Jr.: Michael Wood, Jr.

00:04yes and we're live welcome back Mr wood thanks for having me back buddy good it's been a wild year um for people who don't know Michael was a former um you were for well you're never really a former Marine right isn't that one of those things where you're Marine you stay Marine I don't quite buy that I was get out if I if I would have stayed maybe but uh for the Marines who agree with that okay you were a marine uh former uh Sergeant in the Baltimore more police department and you came on the podcast a while back and exposed some pretty eye-opening information about how the the whole system sort of works in this uh sort of a kind of a closed loop in in Baltimore where the same neighborhoods are having the same kind of crime and the same sort of scenarios over and over again and that was a really important podcast for me and it was really important podcast for a lot of people

01:00that listen to it because they got exposed to the inner workings of police departments by someone who you I was really happy how honest you were about all of it about the thrill of chasing people and all all the the the cool stuff about it and we scheduled this podcast quite a while ago and it's kind of crazy that you're coming in the weekend after these insane shootings in Orlando and um I'm absolutely not happy that that happened but I'm happy as happy as I could be that you're here while this is all going down and we get to kind of talk about these these moments these insane moments that happen it seems like every few months or so some new insane moment happens where some person usually a man blows a fuse and uh winds up killing a ton of people I don't know what if anything and I'm hoping maybe you'll have some insight what if anything could ever be done to stop something like this

02:12well this is where we get into the mic RS a dirty liberal thing and and we're going to start talking about gun control because I I don't know what else we can talk about your only other option is to continue a cycle of more and more Force upon one another so so what we know for sure without a doubt that the path we're on it is only a matter of time before this record is broken right so what we're doing will result in that but we have this anti-intellectualism in America that just won't take that evidence and apply it to to what we know is going to be the end result like it we have countries that have done gun control they don't have mass shootings we have mass shootings literally on the daily in America you just don't hear about them all so mass shootings generally characterized three or four more casualties something like that but this happens every day in these cities does

03:09it really yeah you don't hear about it when it's a backyard barbecue shooting in the hood right right yeah so you could think of it as that um a lot of people don't categorize those as mass shootings because you think of mass shootings as someone going into a crowded place and killing a bunch of civilians or or innocent people I should say whereas um they think of those kind of uh shootings in the hood as rival gangs uh people competing over drug dealing territory things along those lines which is another point because you were running for you you wanted to be the head of police of Chicago is that still going on no I mean they certainly uh the corruption went in and so we could tell that story real quick what they did is they did a national search so the laws in Chicago said that this uh appointed police board has to do a nationwide search and then they give

04:03three names to the mayor the mayor investigates those people and then chooses one so I predict that they weren't going to go with me I'm too far ahead still U that that no one's really ready to take that bite yet but it's still something we could have talked about and they would have had the opportunity I figured they would pick that uh I figured they would pick a black guy who was educated and not from Chicago uh that was my pred ition and that's who the police board did CH choose they chose a guy from uh Atlanta who fit that bill to the tea he was going to be um the black guy that represents the police department but still totes their line um I'm thinking of a word that everybody knows and I'm just not saying it so you can all pick up on what I'm suggesting you're saying Uncle Tom yeah and and some people have an Uncle Tom and he's a nice guy so if you have an

04:56uncle and his name's Tom don't worry about it so that's what they're going to look for something that will uh visually uh seem satisfying but can structurally be exactly the same uh they they so they chose that guy and the mayor still said yeah I don't want that guy I going to choose this guy that didn't even apply and that's who's the commissioner now so who is this guy that didn't apply he was a couple ranks down um already in the agency he is uh he said that he has never seen misconduct or corruption in the Chicago Police Department in his entire 20 some year career oh he uh is intimately tied into a cheating scandal uh a promotional test another thing which you could solve easily so um his friends like wife or something got number one on Lieutenant test which is extremely uh qualifying so to say and as soon as the information comes down that he actually was the one that

06:02was developing the tests had the answers and then she gets this super high scorer out of nowhere and you know as when everybody says oh come on we've seen this before we know what it is so you could solve it you could retest them right and see who does it but of course of course not so they're not going to do that they're they don't have any interest in exposing things so if I'm going to come in there and I'm going to say all right that's it we're going to be transparent I don't think there okay so now when you say that you were a little too far ahead what do you mean by that well it's seems the people of a city or of any area have to be pushed hard enough to to have that change like they have to have that breaking point where they say that's it we're going to do something different because what I really push is for civilian controlled policing I want you

06:49guys to tell me what what should be done which is a huge drop in power so that's that would require a mayor that's willing to give into the people that have pushed hard enough to say look I'm going to relinquish control of my Essential armed wing and I'm going to give it to the people and so has that ever been done before nothing that I'm aware of not in America it certainly hasn't so who's going to be the city that takes that leap it has to come it has to we all know it so it's a matter of F Well what they've tried to do in some areas like uh in New Jersey in particular is force these people to integrate more into the community make them walk the beat which is you like you you don't hear about that anymore now everyone's in a car and you're driving around this closed up vehicle whereas before everybody was walking around and you were sort of like oh there's officer

07:39Mike you know he's a part of the community and it became normal to see these people they developed friendships with the people that were in their neighborhood that they were patrolling and it sort of ingratiated them more um I think having a bunch of people that you don't know patrolling your streets with guns in a car just driving around and you know hardly ever getting out unless they're arresting somebody that's that's a little odd right well yeah but I I don't see that that that the foot patrol is the solution to that because what they do is they put a facade on it so they make it look like foot patrol but it still has those essential underpinnings of of being motivated to go and make AR rest and to get the stats so I did foot patrol for like 6 months and that's what it was was just being thrown into to get drug arrests I didn't know anybody or meet anybody it was

08:34still those same pushing to get somebody put them in a in a prison cell do the paperwork go back out and do it again so what we really need is to change the incentives and disincentives so that no matter what the role we're still going towards that objective that actually serves you right um I had Dave Smith in the other day excuse me um Dave Smith who's a hilarious standup comedian and he's also uh on this podcast called Legion of skanks he's a Libertarian very smart guy but he was he was bringing up a point about New York after the shootings in New York where a bunch of cops had gotten shot um um there was this sort of uh cool off period where they had just stopped arresting people for and the arrests like loose cigarettes things along those lines just dropped substantially and people were really excited about that they were like look this is like a good step like this is

09:30really how it should be the police shouldn't be glorified Revenue collectors just arresting people for the the taxes lost on loose cigarettes and that's what killed Eric Gardner right precisely yeah I mean it's disgusting it's it's not it's not policing gu not hurting anybody policing should be protecting and serving right I'm really glad that you brought up that instance in New York so what that is is direct evidence against what the head of the FBI has said Comey who's coming and he's pushing this Ferguson effect right so the idea around they're saying oh we have crime going up in these different neighborhoods because there's this Ferguson effect that the the cops are laying back so they're not being as proactive and because they're not being as proactive then they're not rocking people up so so stats are going up and we know that if you have a theory and

10:21there's you know one situation that says your theory is complete crap well your theory is complete crap and that's what New York was so New York they they steep back and they they wanted to be like oh look how much you need us and the stats didn't show that the stats showed lower crime they had less calls for service everybody was happier with what was going on because that is it it's we want to say that policing should prevent things and it's just not possible police are there to clean things up and to investigate after the fact every arrest should be viewed as a failure of the system we shouldn't praise and arrest that is when we failed that's an interesting way of looking at it um I think another way to look at it that's maybe on more common ground is you're you're with people when you're when you're around them all the time and you're like what's

11:14going on over there boys you know like that kind of you're with them you're creating tension and tension creates arguments it creates crime it creates resentment it creates anger all those things contribute to Crime 100% And when you with people over loose cigarette or any sort of nonsense petty crime that nobody gives a about that kind of stuff is it's not good for anybody it's not good for the relationship the police have with citizens it's not good for the perception of the citizens of the the way they view the police it makes them view the police as these these thugs which citizens though a significant amount of the citizens in this country very much like that the facts that police do that well they don't live there right but if they were poor and they lived in those communities they wouldn't feel like that right so so that's you you always do this you hit on

12:01these big issues because you're just like well wait this is obvious it's right in front of our face yeah and what they're doing is is they they are funded and you know so you have a mayor in Baltimore the mayor directs the police department's uh way no matter what city you're in and what that person is doing is they're serving those those rich people they're serving uh the mass voters of the area who just have that mentality still that they want those animals caged and to pen them in and to keep them there so as long as it doesn't affect us then who cares right and that's really what you're hitting on there is that they I don't know that more of this country doesn't want our police to be that way I think they they're happy about it I think you're probably right but I think they're misinformed and I think they have this this incorrect understanding of uh how that affects the

13:02people that these cops are interacting with and that that it actually does probably create more crime and then on top of that you I think there's also the problem with that those people that are in those poor communities could just as easily be you or I if we were born into those situations and we're talking about like giving people an opportunity to get out giving people a possibility to get out uh and and do better and and improve their situation their standing in life well if they're getting with all the time that's not going to happen if they're in a a terrible poverty Laden Crim Laden Community good luck with that good luck getting out of that it becomes almost insurmountable and I think it's real convenient for people to be outside of that and and look at those folks and go well those people need to stop doing crime what you need to do is just lock

13:50them all up well that's that doesn't seem to make sense it seems much more likely that the best way to handle that is to lock come up less and to sort of somehow or another try to calm that area down and I don't know how you would do it I mean whether it's through some Universal basic income idea which I've been paying a lot of attention to that lately and trying to uh explore those ideas and see if I can wrap my own they're going to call me a socialist and you're talking about minimum it wasn't my idea it was you know it was an idea that Eddie hang uh brought up on the podcast and I initially laughed at him I was like but nobody's going to go for that and then I started reading some articles on it and I started thinking about it and the financially the issue is where's that money come from and you're obviously going to it's a ton of money that's going to have

14:37to somehow or another come out of something else and I'm not a I'm not a financial person I don't understand economy I'm not an economist so I'm not the person to do the the numbers but when I think about it like objectively as far as like from a social stance uh when people have less problems when bills are paid paid easier when they're more relaxed as far as like where food's coming from where you know basic needs are covered they're less likely to commit crime so it just makes sense that you would have to spend less money on law enforcement less money on prisons less money on jails and that perhaps that could translate there was a great article written by um see if you could find it Jamie there a some prominent libertarian who wrote this piece about Universal basic income it's the the idea is essentially giving people $133,000 a year and then if you

15:32give Americans you know just essentially a th000 bucks plus a month and then if you did that you would take care of a shitload of problems that we have in inner cities and crime and all this and he uh sort of outlined it and made a uh a pretty interesting case for this idea um but of course you've got a lot of people that want to go on and on about welfare babies and and and people that are juking the system and buying cigarettes with food stamps and you know things along those lines but it's like this callous sort of approach to dealing with really poor people in really bad neighborhoods and one of the things that you brought up about Baltimore that made it so disturbing was that black people had to buy houses in these areas they would not sell houses in certain areas to black people and that this was like a law and this was actually written down this is not not like everybody conspired

16:29this was something that they actively set out to do they this idea of caging them keeping them in they they they literally did that through paperwork right and that's uh so things that you're talking about and like that sociologist that that has that study we we know these things so what what you're observing is is things that the scholarly Community has known for a long time and is trying to to get these things out there so that people understand this it's not even a matter of how much is this going to cost because we're already spending the money and we're spending a lot more this book this is why I brought it with me because I just finished going through it it was just put out so this is by a John topkins researcher and Stephanie Duca who's a friend of mine you know so everybody knows that I am saying it but she they did a study they followed Baltimore youth around for well over a

17:25decade I think it was like 15 16 years and their path that they go through and part of that was it cost $27 billion to America every single year for disconnected youth so that's just youth that don't have a drive and don't have a focus of where how is that money how does it trickle down so they don't chase things right so you get stuck in this this this idea that you can't escape this neighborhood because we have so many blockades in the way there are stories that go through they they they ATT track like 10 and some people parents having kids in these neighborhoods and moving them out and what happened to them and the two biggest pushers for the success of the of uh any kid in these cities was that they had um an identity project which means uh they're finding their passion and what they're going to go towards because they don't know these passions

18:20they don't know that a photographer like Devin Allen A friend of mine in Baltimore can can come out and do things for their community and can actually achieve that dream so once they see it and it's possible and you start taking the hurdles down like the hurdles of where they live and the hurdles of the arrest for the bag of weed or for like you said the the talking yourself into jail because the cops messing with you every single day and you're you're saturated with police in these neighborhoods you start taking down these barriers and these kids Excel and that it goes completely against the narrative that we're hearing that these kids don't have motivation and they can't push out a 80% of these kids that grow up in the city never touch the streets or have anything to do with it they're getting high school degrees at 4 or 500% the rate of their their parents

19:09it's just that what we keep doing is we keep getting them behind and they're still fighting super hard but we're still throwing more and more hurdles in their way so the money that the you're talking about how much it costs for these disconnected youths this is all in prisons and this isn't even prison this is just the lack of their productivity from achieving what they can achieve and what it's costing us to you know then take care of what the The Fallout is in that that that just that microcosm we're not throwing in locking up everybody else we're not throwing in the parents we're not throwing in all this other stuff just youth that don't have a passion well this is one of the subjects that's come up over and over again on this podcast because I've always tried to figure out what it is that keep keeps people from trying to socially engineer these um these environments and

20:04make them better for the people that live there like we're always concentrating on all these other countries we're concentrating on you know helping Afghanistan and you know rebuilding Iraq and all the stuff that we do humanitarian efforts all over the world right what about our own inner cities I think they do I think they're misguided so what we end up doing is we we have this idea that we're rich and often white and we're going to come in and we're going to like have the hand out or we're going to give them what we want or we're going to show them the right way and that's not the answer the answer is to ask what they want and provide the structure and platform for that to take place so when these uh smart people that haven't been in there they'll look at Stats and they'll look at the paperwork and they'll say oh we just need to move people out and

20:53relocate them or we need to the the idea was all right well we'll put them in this big tower and we have resources around them and everything will be fine and we're making sure they have their own Police Department so everything will be will be good but then the police start locking everybody up and you just you you get into that cycle again because you're not giving the identity project even to adult adults where you can say whether it's comedy or whether it's photography or no matter what you have to have that goal that Vision because the all they see is that their future is in dealing or in a prison cell and they keep being told that if they do the right things they can move on but when they do the right things are um sometimes good intentions have put up the roadblocks that prevent them from doing that so but but how do you sort of engineer for lack of a better term a

21:46whole society like how do you give them goals how do you how do you expose them to all these possibilities and how do you set up paths you just said the word expose mhm they're they're isolated they don't know right but how do you do that though I think social media is helping a ton so they can see and interact with people that are different from them and they can see oh look this kid from New York he did get into this school and he has this job now and now I can maybe go work for his company or whatever it is they see these examples of success and then they start to pick them up and chase them and that's what these the stats in all this book are showing that it's it's staggering how much effort these kids are putting in to their goals it's just that we're actually setting up the prevention of it by doing things like uh okay we charge uh a a blackhead in the city you know

22:45you charge him he commits a a homicide because he was defending his sister from getting raped but when he gets a prison sentence we know that that prison sentence just slams him but when it's a white kid from Stanford you know what happens so it's it's kind of this I don't want to push empathy all the time but there is that that empathy angle but it's just kind of helping people get where they want to get instead of pushing them where you think they should be they'll find their own paths it's like we're we treat poor people like they're children and they're not they're poor people um there's there's a dude who works at The Comedy Store who was a um criminal defense attorney and uh he resigned he stopped doing it because he got tired of his when he was bringing cases to trial if it was a white guy the white guy would get you know whatever 6 months for an identical crime a young

23:38black guy would get 10 years and he was like you got to someone's got to tell me what the is going on here because all I'm looking at is systematic racism I'm looking at institutional racism he was like this is just over and over and over again I'm confronted by the same kind of people the same age brackets but completely different types of sentences and uh what's the mentality behind it and he said everybody wanted to just bury their head head in the sand and he couldn't do it anymore it was so I mean when the guy talks about he's like smoking cigarettes and freaking out because it was just hu 10 years of his life and it was just too much he couldn't do it anymore um that kind of is almost insurmountable when you you're you're living in that world and you're one of those people that get sent down the river for 10 years for something that you know if you were a

24:28white Irish kid you would get 6 months or you know a much lesser sentence that alone has got to be a gigantic hurdle for someone living in these environments and it's not saying that people shouldn't be punished for crimes they definitely should be punished for crimes but sure about that they also should be well pun absolutely should that be our view should that be our view what do you think they should do about murder should punish them or just give him a hug it would certainly depend uh on on the situation but I I I can't help but keep coming back to the fundamental idea that our criminal justice system is based on punishment like that that's not a moral system it's like the death penalty right we know that these things don't work so now now do they get rights taken away so what I would like to see is let's take for instance we know that it cost so and

25:17so thousands of dollars a year to house somebody I think 24,000 depends on where you are though so a college degree from an online school that's accredited which we can all do easily right now would cost way less than that so put them in a in a in a cell and you keep them around but you treat them like human beings you give them an identity a goal where they can achieve something and they actually because right now we send them into a prison of punishment and what happens when they come out they're in a worse situation so now we've created a greater criminal than we had before so our goal is supposed to be some kind of Rehabilitation that this is a better person when they leave than when they go in but we have that in us we want these to pay well certainly for murder I mean for the families of someone that they victimized they don't want this person to come out better not even all

26:08victims feel that way though you know and it it's so there are plenty of murder victims who who their parents have gone and asked for leniency for for the person or asked to not give them the death penalty because that's pretty rare though it it is yes yes most people want revenge but we have to to look beyond that because you know when when you're sister gets in a fight and kills your neighbor who's your friend or something like that you're not asking for the death penalty right because it's close to you well problem when it's others we we do that to others we wouldn't do that to to the ones we know well threats to society th those that's the real issue with some people white black whatever someone's a so sociopath someone's a psycho they're a threat to society like U the guy who killed all those people in the theater in Denver that's a psycho I mean that

26:54that guy needs to be locked up forever right okay not you well what do you do about a person like that I mean how do you how do you take a person like that and do you give him goals in prison do you try to give him an education I mean obviously he's got why do so think about that he could become not not him obviously like you saying he has mental illness but somebody else you could educate them while they were there and they can contribute to literature they can contribute to science they can give back to some Society in some way is that financially feasible how much more money would it take to make prison a safer environment for people that are locked up I mean the idea is that we're supposed to be protecting the rest of us from those these people that have committed these awful crimes right someone's committed rape someone's committed murder or armed robbery we

27:38separate them from us because we don't want them to victimize any more people then goal number two is Rehabilitation and that goal is overwhelmingly a failure overwhelmingly if you look at the statistics that it's been attempted yeah that's a good good point I mean well there are I mean Rick Ross the guy we've had on before the real Rick Ross not the the rapper guy um he I mean he learned how to read and literally figured out what was wrong with his case in prison heis do that though a lot of them won't give them any access that some do you know so there are wardens out there that are progressive and are thinking of these things so that shouldn't really be on the warden huh there should be some sort of a standard Nationwide where we should look at it as a culture as a society as a civilization and say hey you know what what should we be trying to do to try to make these people better

28:30people right and you do that when you arrest them though so what we say now is when he goes and shoots or when someone rapes we are not looking at it at that as that failure so if you if you were running this business and an asset a facet of your business failed then you would want to have an analysis and you would want to say all right let's do a regression and figure out what went wrong and you would want to fix that for the next time but we don't do that we just go all right throw that one away and continue path is normal we shouldn't be so focused when we arrest somebody to figure out uh how we're going to throw them away for the longest we should be figuring out why it happened so we can prevent it for the next person but we that's what it doesn't seem like we actually care about solving the crime we're just keeping these wheels turning so if you commit murder then I want to

29:18know why I want to know the scenarios that led you up to that because the only way that I can actually prevent that is not Minority Report it's finding out what that hurdle was that moment that you said this and finding ways to prevent that as much as possible or reduce it for other people and a lot of it must have to do with the developmental period that you go through when you're a young person and what you're exposed to as a small child I mean and that stuff becomes so deeply ingrained in a person's mind to try to reverse that boy it's so much harder than to try to raise someone correctly the first time all that's in this book they talk about that is coming of age in the other America that I mean they talk about these things where that's one of the the predictors is how much exposure to violence that these kids have had when they were going between the ages of

30:07zero and 10 and so when they got them out of the city and they gave them opportunities then they got exposed to less violence the really crazy thing in this study is that we found out that the kids that were in the city that didn't get help they also fought their way out at an actually a higher rate so we did these nice things and we have to tweak it but like our nice things that we did actually didn't pan out in the same results as kids that were just fighting on their own uh so explain that yeah yeah it's wild so they had these Housing Voucher programs where they would the idea was to take people out of those neighborhoods and put them into nicer neighborhoods where they would be exposed to less things and they would have neighbors around that that did things and that was very beneficial when when that happened but about an equal percentage of those kids went back ended

30:57up being the lcome areas and get involved into the streets and then the ones that fought themselves out on their own ended up at a higher slightly higher percentage actually getting out and being exposed to less because of their own individual efforts and the control group trying to get out of there so while it says that the programs need some tweaking but it shows that that it's counternarrative that these kids aren't trying and that they're not succeeding to get out like they are pushing super hard to make something of themselves and it and our cultural idea is like oh look these kids are not doing anything they're just tur into drugs and they're just dealing and surprisingly they're not it 12% of the kids raised in Baltimore in this study ever spent and these are in the worst neighborhoods it's E and West Baltimore ever spent a moment on the streets doing any criminal activity 12%

31:49staggering I I I'm shocked I feel dumb because I did the same things like yeah that's all they're exposed to right but it's it's not they're fighting out like crazy and we're the ones stopping them from coming to fruition well not us Society we're responsible right like so I mean here's the thing it's like how much effort is actually being done to try to fix this I mean how many people are actually thinking about it how much money is actually being spent to try to fix this it seems like there's so many problems in the world that to concentrate on bad neighborhoods or crimer ridden neighborhoods it's so low on the list of things the world's worried about the polar ice caps are melting polar bears are drowning you know there's there's so much we're worried about on top of that they're trying hard as hell to keep it the way it is though who's trying hard

32:39governments are in Baltimore for example there's this this patented thing that uh a professor from Morgan State Lawrence Brown uh is really into this and tracks it all down but there's a white L we call it the white l in Baltimore it goes down through the rich neighborhood and comes across through the other rich neighborhoods by the bay and then there's the Black Butterfly which comes off to the sides East and West Baltimore and it looks like butterfly wings dispersing out poverty and black uh people in the city and what this is in every single aspect that you're going to find where the where the money goes for schools where the bus routes are where the free buses like the white neighborhoods have a free bus and the black neighborhoods have to pay for their bus really yes so we have all these things that no matter what you think of this white out in this black

33:28butterfly come to fruition um on where resources are allocated and what problems are how is that possible that white people don't have to pay for the bus than black people do that seems ridiculous let me tell you that they it's the neighborhood because Reas it's the neighborhoods you know so they're not serving the white people they're serving those upper class neighborhoods but is it a in is it a tax issue is it a property tax issue where they spent money for the buses no it's all Baltimore City all the money St so how the could they justify they they just do it like and nobody cares I mean it's it's so people should follow him it's boroc on Twitter he he lays this out in so many different Avenues you you just you have to be willfully ignorant and not realize that this is going on at bore doc mhm okay that's uh that's insane now how much of it is um dealing with uh prison guard

34:21unions and and police unions that are trying to keep business as usual because that keeps people employed well that's a significant portion and you're seeing that with the NRA and you're seeing that with the the police unions and like you said the correctional unions where and like see even them they don't have these bad intentions what they have is job preservation everything comes back to those incentives and disincentives so they're fighting for their job and that's all they're thinking well we want jobs we want safer conditions I want to make sure that this is a big company that blows up so they're going to put their money towards politicians that's support them that's just the way it's goes it's the way it's always been as long as we have money in politics you can't get away from that well the most transparent example of that is marijuana that we've shown time and time and again

35:07with a million different studies that marijuana is not dangerous or if it is dangerous the danger that it it poses is so minimal it's so small that consenting adults should be able to do whatever the they want with it and yet prison guard unions and police unions still Lobby to keep the drug laws exactly the same way they are because that ensures that you're going to need a certain amount of guards you're going to need a certain amount of police officers that's counterintuitive I mean that's that's dangerous for a society because that sets up this US versus them mentality where it doesn't need to be where you're te telling people there's a certain forbidden plant that they're not allowed to use we've decided this we're going to keep it this way even though it's completely illogical even though we know the history of it and we're going to do it simply because people want to keep

35:57their jobs instead of trying to figure out what other jobs these people can do like shouldn't there be a way you could take some of these people that are prison guards or police officers and give them a job with a commensurate income that's involved in helping communities something positive something setting up Community programs I mean how many guys that are cops are also into martial arts or into fitness or into something else or you know anything where they could teach people in these communities set up community centers and give people high-paying jobs to establish really good environments for development for growing and give people a chance to be exposed to maybe one of these things that could be these paths that you were talking about yeah I mean that I have obviously I'm going to have zero objection to that I mean that that's a great way of going about it and cannabis is

36:50obviously the shining example of complete ill logic they just did a new study where they tracked people for 30 years you know what health problems they found what gingervitis bad breath yeah they just didn't brush their teeth yeah hippies didn't brush theiry breath hippie so that's what the that's what the study people said they said the same thing like but that probably just because we're in a certain segment of the population and it doesn't have anything to do with the Cannabis that's hilarious so we know without a doubt that that that's the case but what we we can do is so say you still want to do that and we only have to change him that far to to get him away from the J even though that that's probably the biggest chunk that's everything up is the drug war but if we spend that money instead of incarcerating them we can spend the money in education so for

37:37every million dollars that's spent fighting the drug war on the supply side there's a 100 kilogram reduction of of Supply so uh if if you have you know the kilograms of cocaine coming over the Border if you fight it with Force you know you fight the supply side then you get a 10 G kilogram reduction but if you spend that same million on the demand side educating people you have a reduction of 100 kilogram whoa so we that's where where's this from I I don't know somebody can look it up it's it's really easy you'll find it right away uh that's very logical though and I it makes sense to me so so we know that if you just educate people and tobacco is the shining example of that is tobacco rates have gone down like crazy now let's take the air Gardener situation out of that the large part of that has been because of Education so you educate people out of drugs educate people you

38:31know like they say all the time if if heroin's on Amazon right now do you order it no I don't want to order it I don't know about Jamie I'm Jin freak he loves it he gets a bunch of different styles he mixes them up right so so it's prohibition that messes us up yes and we know that and when you have prohibition you're not determining uh what happens to the drugs all you're doing is determining who is Distributing the drugs because they will be distributed the question is is it the government and I.E the people doing the distribution or is it the black market the gangs and the mafia well as long as it's under prohibition it's the black market the gangs and the mafia we we literally know this there's nothing to discuss and yet we continue with this anti-intellectualism and denial that that's kind of it it's it runs throughout our society in America uh speaking you know about the guns you

39:24know we're dealing with the same thing where it's just constant we have evidence we can prove things empirically and we still just continue to do the opposite for for reasons I just can't get my mind wrapped around like it's we're I feel like I'm fighting denial and it's been like a year that I'm fighting this denial and talking on radio shows constantly but yet I you know a couple months ago we pull up the internet and the FBI director is pushing the Ferguson effect and it's just like like how do we get past this well I think that we're dealing with two completely different subjects right the the gun um control subject is a very different subject than trying to figure out how to elevate people in bad neighborhoods um the gun control subject is you know if you look at the statistics of how many Americans have guns how many rounds of ammunition there are how many armed people there are in

40:17this country and then you look at how many crimes there are how many gun shootings there are it's relatively small very small we're dealing with massive numbers people compare yeah I mean if you there's 300 million okay there's 300 million plus people in this country so if you look at this this blip on the map where every few months someone goes crazy and kills a bunch of people um if we really had uh an armed problem in this country the logic that the anti-gun control people use would be that you would see way more shootings and you would see them all the time if we really had a gun control problem you have so many armed people if it was a real issue but the issue what they try to say and I'm not picking a team here but what they try to say is that what we're dealing with is just massive numbers of people massive numbers of people the the number 300 million is so hard for the average

41:17person like you or I to wrap our head around what that means in terms of the the volume the sheer volume of people and how many guns there are out there there's many guns there's more guns than there are people in this country which is even more insane and the the people that own these guns for the most part are law-abiding citizens that don't do anything wrong why take away their rights because some dude like this in Orlando goes crazy and kills 50 gay people okay you set up a couple premises there and the one of them was that they have a right to that weapon right which I'm going to argue to the end of the day that they don't okay um this the Second Amendment is clear well regulated militia it's literally clear it says it in black and white well-regulated militia and even if we go past arms even if we go past that forget that I'm not a big fan of the

42:11Constitution and leaning on it because that the world has changed dramatically we're we're in a whole new situation rethink with the evidence that we have now let's not rely on the document that's that's parchment somewhere decaying right so written with a feather right that's why that they made it amend so the first thing is that they have that right I don't think they have the right and the second is that that number is acceptable I so what you're trading in there is what are you getting so if you have an equation where they can have these guns so what are you benefiting and what are you losing tell me what as a society we benefit from handguns and rifles well the people that have been able to protect themselves against dangerous crime the people that have been able to stop people from breaking into their hom stealing their property harming them physically or protecting

43:03their loved ones so when you talk about ratios there's 30,000 handgun crimes in America every year right that's it the documented ofo shootings 30,000 so wow I thought it was way more than that so if we take the percentage of people that defended themselves I mean you got 5 to 10 cases a year like that doesn't actually occur but what are they defending themselves against those people with handguns and rifles so you're in you're trapped in this circular logic where you need a gun because I have a gun and then eventually Jamie says well those have a gun I want a gun too and we know where that goes we literally know it keeps getting more and more and more now if we have this Perpetual Society where everyone has everything and everything's perfect but that's just not going to happen we're going to have strife and a lot of these guns are concentrated in a few

44:02people's hands that have 200 guns you know dudes that have 50 guns I know dudes that have 50 guns I know a dude who has so many guns Justin I'm talking about you my buddy Justin has so many guns he doesn't even know how many guns he has right so they have those in plus he's a giant he's 7 feet tall and he has 150,000 guns so they have they have them in a safe or they have them out in Rural America yes but they're not even like interacting with people like to have the Strife well he's a a Firearms Enthusiast and he is also a guy with a squeaky clean criminal record what's the argument against him being able to be a Firearms Enthusiast and possess all these guns because of what is done to our society you he just wants to have something and I don't want to talk about him particular unless he's here I know but I'm just saying it cuz he's my friend right so anybody anybody

44:52what are you gaining so there's an equation in one one side of this equation we have 30,000 handun victims we have a society that's gripped by fear we have dudes that can go get an AR-15 and Days Later light up a nightclub and do a hate crime we know that that's going to happen and we know that as the future progresses that that this 103 casualties of this shooting is going to be superseded by a bigger shooting that that's going to happen because you know we got to break the records right so and we're going to have more and more guns that keep coming in and keep coming so that's on the right hand side of the equation and on your left hand side of the equation for for having guns the argument is well I like them well there's also the argument that a well-armed society is a polite society and that if there were people that had guns in that nightclub they would have

45:38been able to prevent that crime by taking that guy out they were eight cops I mean that was the same thing in Denver like if there were cops there but the cops were getting shot but didn't the cops get to a point w wasn't there a hostage situation I mean I don't know the details about Florida so it's a it's really problem this were true cops wouldn't get killed right they have the biggest army that's on our streets so if more guns we keep having more cops with more and bigger guns then it would stop right because the cops the cops R roll in armored vehicles with AR-15s to combat juveniles on Madam and Maul during the uprising but don't more cops shoot more criminals than criminals shoot cops don't more cops kill more people that are trying to commit crimes than those people cop that's predicated upon the premise that they're trying to shoot the cops and they're absolutely

46:28not they're trying to get away some of them sure your ones that are actively trying to shoot cops are super small because you got to remember you're saying that cops are getting shot they do get shot right right right but what I'm saying is yes but isn't that sort of an argument that being when there is one guy with a rifle that he purchased legally and a bunch of cops and a bunch of cops the cops still get shot right but a lot of those guys but a lot of those guys that you're talking about this one guys like remember the North Hollywood shootout mhm that's famous of course armed to the gills and wearing body armor and all that they were the cops were just so outgunned as far as Firepower sure so our answer is that they get more Firepower right no I'm not saying that's the answer that we keep having this is one of the reasons why these cops are getting shot they're getting shot and

47:20killed in that situation in particular because they're walking around with 38 revolvers or 9 mm Glocks shot because that guy has armor and a AR15 that's what I'm saying it's not that they aren't inadequately armed they would be their handgun would be perfectly fine if we didn't have AR-15 saturating our streets well that guy I don't even think he had an AR-15 he had something like heavy that's all you need yeah so like that's what I'm saying which by the way it's the same gun as an M16 folks it's the it's a military weapon it's the same gun that was created I think it was created in the 50s to deal with the AK4 7 there was an HBO uh part series on Real Sports recently that talked about it they were talking about AR-15 but any 223 can do that damage that's a semi-auto and we get caught up in the assault weapons right right and the assault weapons are going to keep you having better aim

48:13they're going to keep you having a higher magazine capacity going be a little more reliable weapon but a a hunting rifle with a 10 magazine Clips that's a 223 and it's a semi-automatic is going to do the exact same level right of damage that we're talking about so my position on gun control is is extremely simple you want your guns for these other things like say hunting right bolt action rifles and shotguns there you go everything that you can that's on your on the proun side that they want to achieve can all be accomplished by shotguns and bolt action rifles well yeah I I see that argument but I also see the argument that Hunters would use in that situation that if you limit the amount of rounds that guy can have in his gun or the ability to fire off rounds quickly you're limiting their ability to make a quick follow-up shot on an animal that would kill that animal

49:06yeah and so if you have somebody that's that dedicated right I don't have a problem with that personally so if you have somebody that we want to establish this high standard so say say we have this super high standard where this guy he can get his big gun that he uses and is well trained on and he's gone through a super long process of back grounds and he's all checked out that I I don't have the objection to that but like say his gun gets stolen you don't get it anymore you're done right so you have to maintain this high standard in order to have such extreme privilege and I'm fine with that like people that have C4 and explosives you know there are people that can legally carry debt cord and C4 to blow up buildings they're not a big problem to the rest of society using their debt cordin C for to to hurt people so if that that's a a unique class class of

49:57individual yeah I see what you're saying so you think there should be more stringent testing and background checks on people that are getting guns yeah especially uh those kind of high powerered ones or handguns we we we get caught up a lot in the high powerered because they're they're capable of that mass destruction but it's the handguns that cause the fear in society every single day because they're so easy to conceal yeah that's the whole problem is the concealment that you can just pop it out and use it you don't know who has what and so everyone comes a threat because you have this small death device on you that anybody can do anything and it's just like we got to go back to that equation like what is on the other side of the equation of 30,000 handguns and 300 plus uh mass shootings per year the other side of that equation is is that ridiculous idea I mean if you can figure

50:47out something for me other than I like collecting guns and I think they're cool and it's my right then then I'm willing to hear it I just don't hear an argument beyond that well the only argument is that a person who is not a criminal and a person who doesn't have any ill will in their hearts and just enjoys Firearms should be able to have them just like you should be able to have a truck that you could just drive through a crowd of people with if you wanted to yeah but so the argument there that you can have the truck and the truck is capable of of harm well so just like a knife but a knife has a cadrillion other uses so on that other side of that equation when the you could say well what do we need a knife for well it's to chop up food it's to skin a deer it's to do a thousand other things the the AR or something like that is for one purpose and one

51:39purpose only and that's to kill a human being well that was what it was designed for but people use them for hunting they have a better rifle to use than that for hunting well the the thing about hunting with those is that you can pull the trigger many times like for hog hunting and things like that there a lot of people actually prefer sure so let's say you even want to do that again we're talking about that higher class person and so higher class Hog Hunter yeah higher class that's pretty sure that's not an actual thing um like so you want to go shoot it and you want to shoot those those animals right go check it out from your parks and wreck and go use it it out yeah check it out yeah you said you just wanted to use it right what what do you mean by that check it out right so say you could store it at an Armory like an Armory that who runs the Govern going run of course good Lord or

52:28it could be the private the private rifle range okay right well that's how it is in a lot of places in Europe we know how to do this we literally other countries have done this Australia is the shining example they had one mass shooting said this and they have n sense right but you can get a rifle in Australia okay and this is something that gets bandied about many times so I actually had to do some research it's not impossible to get rifles for hunting in Australia you could super hard it's difficult yeah but Australia also has less people than California in an enormous chunk of land yeah but we we have other countries take China China's four times our population doesn't doesn't even hit the radar screen on the amount of aison people they have imprisoned or the amount of violence they have that's true but China is well was until really recently it's a

53:18Communist dictatorship that was run with an iron fist it's I mean think about tenan square and what happens when people rebel against the government there it's a it's a completely different sort of culture is it is it different than what happens here like really though I mean if you stand up against the government what's going to happen to you here well it's not just standing up against the government I mean they the people they don't have much power over there neither do it's Anarchy we live in an oligarchy like we we've proven that that's another thing we've proven so Princeton did a study where they tracked 19,000 cases of laws that were going on uh and going through Congress so uh what they found out is that public opinion on whether a law gets passed or not for instance gun control which over 80% of NRA members agree with increased gun control and background checks and things

54:07like that we don't get it passed Congress at all it doesn't have any bearing on public opinion doesn't have any bearing on whether a law gets passed but if you have donors that care about a law getting passed then it's going to get passed and even when public sentiment is completely against the law being passed if the public if the donors want the law passed they still have a 30% chance of getting the law passed I think what the NRA is trying to do is they're trying to prevent the slippery slope they're trying to establish laws and keep them in place so that establish rights that are already in place right keep them in place because they worry that if you start increasing background checks if you start ramping up any sort of restrictions on gun owners that it's a slippery slope that will they'll never get back they'll never get the freedom back but what I mean I don't know what

54:57that freedom is we're all afraid to go somewhere we don't have freedom in this guns saturated country we're all afraid we're not well hold on no we're not no we're not we're not you don't think people are afraid but no I don't I don't think people are generally afraid the fighting to keep the guns but hold on you're saying we're all afraid as if every day when you go to the movies you're worried about a mass shooting every day when you go to the wall We're Not Afraid we travel freely occasionally things like this happen and they're horrific and they're terrifying but people aren't generally afraid we're not all afraid to do things I just don't think that's true I don't know so why then would we all want to protect this so much well the NRA's position the NRA's position is that liberals Democrats whatever they want to take away your right to own a gun the NRA

55:47does not want that so they spend all their money they do all their lobbying they do everything they can to stop any new restriction from passing and to stop anyone who is trying to take away guns right so so the way you frame that is that they are trying to protect their rights and they want to preserve this thing but I don't don't see it that way a lot of people what those what people that are fighting against guns like so so me I I have guns I like shooting I enjoy it I'm good at it I made a career out of it right but at one point in time I did enough research and enough understanding that my ultimate goal is that we have a safer society and that we protect people but the way we protect people empirically is to not have these guns nobody has the the gun crime that we have nobody in the entire world that's a developed country has the gun crime and incarceration rate and

56:47everything that we do we are the worst example in the in the developed world of how to do this every other example is a better example than what we we do but we're continually trying to stay into into this same mold that we know is failing I want to protect people and the evidence says that in order to protect people we can't have handguns and assault rifles sat I said the damn assault rifle word again but we we can't have semi-automatic rifles out there like crazy that enable Society to have that risk I mean those those on the other end of that straight bullet is a 9-year-old girl who's bleeding out to death in the city and I just I don't want to get like rude with people but the idea that you want to go shoot something I just don't give a about that when you see the destruction close to you and suddenly Gabby gford can go for for gun control after it

57:41touches you know or somebody like that whenever it touches you suddenly we start to care if if right now a mass gunman comes and starts shooting up the rest of this building and they they kill Jamie we're all going to care a hell of a lot more why Jamie how come you don't die because I didn't want to die and die you didn't want to die Jamie doesn't want to die Jamie under the bus Jam's a good guy please nobody shoot Jamie and I think I think we would all take a slightly different perspective once it touches I think you're right and I think that's an issue with all sorts of crimes and uh that's also an issue with poverty and bad communities is that it's not touching the people that are that just want to be safe lock those people up get them off the street they're in my way mhm um I think you're right in that regard I mean I don't know if there is a perfect answer to getting

58:29rid of 300 million guns or controlling 300 million guns I just want to stop making them yeah like let's just stop making them so one of my ideas what about gun companies them they're making a they're making dare they're making a weapon of death I don't care about what they want so we know guns can last hundreds of years if you take care of them right so if we stop making them their value will all go up mhm and then we're get it concentrated and I know the Libertarians be like my God all the rich people are going to hold the guns I get it whatever they're not going to use them we know that so let's make them more valuable so they're not worth $200 on the street so that uh you know a gun uh a disrespect beef or a drug war beef can lead to that shooting I want to have you sit down with someone who is a gun proponent good luck what do you mean good luck I've been here for a year

59:18doing this day in and day out challenging everyone from Sam Harris to whoever they're not going to they're not going to do this the evidence is on my side they're not going to do what have they're not going to have a debate because they certainly would I could definitely set that up set it up okay well I could set it up my friend Justin 100% you can get to do this please because he needs to give me that push back that other people need to hear and if he's right on a position I will absolutely change okay well we're definitely going to set that up then um I'm going to bring in Justin because Justin's very articulate and uh don't be intimidated because he is a giant he does have a thousand guns or something like that but he's a nice guy he's a very nice guy he's a good buddy um and he he is a like I said a Firearms Enthusiast but also a really nice guy

60:00that has no criminal record never done anything wrong and very articulate very smart very well read but he's going to say that people like him should have the guns right and he's he's right well he is right yeah I mean he's never done anything with those and he's a wrong dude to break into his house every once in a while you're going to need a dude like him to kick down a door right yeah okay we know that so I wouldn't argue if he's going to say he needs you know we need this Elite uh members of society that like SWAT teams or something like that that can handle these situations of course we do well he's a competitive shooter he does contests and stuff like so he's going to say well they should shoot like me well I sure he's right like if they can handle it and they're professional as as him you're not going to get a push back from society because nothing's even

60:41going to happen but it's what I'm saying is that he's not doing anything wrong and it's something he enjoys like when do we decide and I'm just putting this out there I'm not taking a stance because I don't understand it myself uh and you know people saying that I'm anti-gun or proun or I'm I'm pretty neutral on this I also own guns but I I see the problems I definitely see when something like this happens in Orlando and some crazy can go in and just shoot up a nightclub and kill all these people we got a real problem I don't know how to solve that real problem I'm sure some people would say Concealed Carry Permits so these people in the nightclub could shoot out that guy but you got gunfight in a night Club yeah more people are going to get shot well not only that most of the people that get involved in these gunfights will be their first gunfight so you're going to

61:34your pants you're going to get Target Panic you're going to miss you're going to hit people it's going to be a lot going on glad you're saying that yeah I mean it's not as simple as I had a gun if you had a gun you'd probably wouldn't be able to point it at people and if you pulled the trigger you'd be lucky if you hit someone right in front of you so where where was that shooting um it was relatively recent it was out of college and there were two marines on base on the college campus with weapons and they didn't engage because they they said hey look I was only going to make the situation worse the cops weren't going to know who I am if I had my weapon out I could have missed and done something else and two guys that were in their actual right state of mind that were armed decided that engaging was more dangerous and it's actually empirically more dangerous

62:19that if you engage you're more likely to die and something just you're going to shoot some body else or the situation is not going to be resolved we we we literally know this people have done this they've done studies where they've tried to take people and like simulate it and it never pans out yeah but that's engaging with a an instance where you're not involved if you are involved you absolutely have to engage you're going to get shot like if you're if if these guys are in this building people are coming after them you have to run like so all the evidence says that if you run that's your best bet for safety and like we don't want to do that right because that's a move please I'm down for being a someone's shooting I'm all I'm want the hero there's like this delusion of hero ship you know that somebody's going to save the day and sure you may find that happen every so

63:08often it's wait a minute have you not seen Sylvester Stallone movies because it happens all the time is that Pro that is a problem right is that's a super problem that they think they can shoot people in the leg while they're running and like that well it's also like we've developed this sort of idea of what goes down in a gunfight based on fiction not based on reality the amount of people that have actually been exposed to a bullet hitting a live thing is so small sound yeah oh yeah they don't realize how loud that is if you sh shoot with with headphones in your whole life they go ahead and start clacking off 15 rounds with without ear protection on you you'll be ringing you can't even understand what's going on you have to be well trained in that environment and understand like cops aren't even in there the first time they get in real gun battle cuz they shoot

63:53with ear earplugs in and everything the first time they're shooting their gun it they're hearing the sound and everything else so yeah I mean you got those people like everybody that I was in the Marine Corp with doing fast team I I don't think they're going to get any gun crimes and I I think they can handle situations but these are a a certain segment that needs to live up to a high standard well not only that those are people that have been trained and they've they've developed this understanding of firearms it's so deep most people just don't get to that it's like the average person who watches a UFC fight and thinks they can kick someone's ass and then if you fought against a trained martial artist you're like you really don't know what you're doing that's kind of the same thing and when you compare someone who really like my friend Justin really

64:37understands Firearms versus the average person who goes and buys a gun and thinks oh I'm safe now I got this gun maybe maybe maybe but statistics say that you're more likely to shoot a family member in in a fight or yeah suicide which you know the other thing people that's a wonderful analogy I love that you you did that cuz I mean it's a Perfect Analogy almost for MMA and who can handle a weapon as well but well it's all about undo confidence you know and perfect so like here's here's the thing I've always wanted to tell people that feel that way we can I can tell you you can have a gun on you right now and we can set this up in the morning and I can tell you walk around your day as normal at some point in time today I'm going to take that gun away from you right I will get that gun it's going to happen because you you're not going to be able to protect it and you know I'm

65:33coming so then why are you actually think you're safe that you have that gun on you you're just as long as you're fighting against the inferior opponent or you're in this situation where you have distance and you have all these things like just like in an MMA fight it's it's not going to go as you planned it I promise so what what are you saying look as far as like you're going to take the gun away from say say you wanted to have a concealed weapon on you right and say you're standing in line at the bank you're going about your day as normal I could tell you at some point in time I'm going to get that gun from you and I'll get it cuz you're everything's about surprise so when the bank robber comes in well it's not surprise if you tell them you're going to get it well sure I'm just giving you 24 hours well I'll be jacked up on Aderall for 24 hours yeah but think

66:17about the life you're leading then to keep that gun safe you definitely would be well makes it an adventure right but that's the thing is you're bigger than me you can be ready for it it's I'm sorry you're just not going to be because it's just going to come out of nowhere so when people have these guns are you like really good at disarming people or something no more than anybody else would be if you learn how a holster works if somebody goes for my gun I'm punching them in their face they're going to come from behind you we're going to be standing in line at a where's my gun behind me is it right here so they're going to come from behind they're going to grab it sure you can have a but how hard is it to get a gun out of a holster there's certain holsters as long as you know the holster works it's cake okay what is that one holster where If You Yank on it it

66:54doesn't work the triple retention holsters yeah I'm really going to see your gun if you have one of those cuz those are pretty darn big what if I'm wearing a puffy coat sure I I I guess you can figure out ways to get around it I'm going to relent then but you're just not actually safer I know a dude who keeps several guns on him all the time and two knives he's got a knife in his boot he keeps several guns on him all the time he's been hitting the head a bunch of times though it's just some people think you just you can't you can't think that that's what's going to make you safe it's your mindset that it's your it's your awareness of your surroundings it's your ability to make logical decisions okay but you're talking about a very specific case where someone's trying to take your gun away right but that's the thing is you're in a you're in a bank I don't even need a

67:38gun CU odds are there's going to be one there and that's what we we have so like a big thing of policing is you don't get into like Jiu-Jitsu kind of of wrestling matches because of that gun right because no matter what fight you're in there's always a gun there and it's the same thing with non- cops right you don't want to get in a fight as a cop because if the the evidence shows statistically that if they get that gun from you they're going to use it on you right that's going to be no different from you if they get that gun from you they're use it on you right right so why would you want to be in a fight with somebody well that's a wrestling match right so you're saying that I tack you and fight the gun you're introducing that potential for you dying and there's a high possibility yeah and you didn't have it before you literally are making yourself more at risk I mean

68:33the statistics are clear on this that if you bring a gun to this fight the odds are against you even higher now because most people that bring uh if even if you bring a knife to a fight a significant portion of those people get the knife taken away from them and gets used on them I can't tell you how many cases we've been where you're trying to figure out a stabbing call and come to find out you know they they tried to do the stabbing but they got that taken from them and they got stabbed themselves so once you introduce that that potential you're more dangerous yourself but this is again you're talking about non-trained individuals and it sort of brings us back to not responsibility don't want to fight hard on those really trained people I I get that yeah you know that that's fine and that's like it's not a right at that point it's a privilege so it's like

69:21driving the car driving a car is not a right it's a privilege so if these people want to earn that privilege so be it but it becomes a problem doesn't it when a really crazy person earns that privilege I mean if someone hasn't done anything yet criminal I me there's been several people that have committed mass shootings that didn't do anything before they did that shooting I mean yeah so so you're still left with those you still decided as a society that on that side of the equation you're willing to accept that amount even though it's a lesser amount you've decided to set that amount and if we can just move to a point where we can accept a lesser amount that would be wonderful but we're we're continually accepting an ever increasing amount more people buying guns more people buying ammo hm so what is the solution then in your eyes well I would like to stop

70:10manufacturing I would uh like handguns and rifles to be banned and maybe that has to take a long time not rifles just just uh semi-automatics I perf banned meaning you can't own them anymore no let's not go yeah see uh so It's Tricky then it becomes a privilege so likees your Twitter accounts getting attacked right now it happens all time you liberal P you're never taking my gun so you have to be those people that earn that privilege the idea that it's a right it's just I think I think we get caught a lot in that it's just even if it like we were saying earlier that I think the evidence is there that it's it's actually not your right but if it is like can we rethink that I me what is the Second Amendment read it exactly Jamie in its form please so we can but and again the idea that we keep the Constitution and the Bill of Rights exactly intact some that was

71:08created hundreds of years ago before any of the variables that we have to deal with in society today whether it's variables about privacy electronic communications whether it's the variables about the power and the ability that guns have I means we're dealing with a totally different world they made this back when people had muskets we really need to consider that and by the way they had just gotten done fighting off a totalitarian regime and had expanded and become their own country oh there we go Second Amendment of the United States Constitution reads a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed see that's pretty clear the right of the people to keep and arms not be infringed yeah but a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people

72:05to keep and be arm shall not be infringed if they are a well-regulated militia but it's not saying if it's saying capital letter A a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of the free state so they're establishing that it is important that you have a well-regulated militia being necessary well-regulated that's the weird term well-regulated militia what does that mean it's a national guard is that what they're saying though because it's saying the right of the people to keep in bar arms they the people of the state though so the idea that you're what does the people of the state mean they're just people no because but that's what the states are I mean we the people that's the country right but this is a free a free state what that means is they they worry that we might be invaded and taken over by England at the time government or the government any

72:53government it's against the federal government right so that's a a state being able to defend itself against the federal government because they still were lingering with that that that from Britain you know I don't know if that's what they meant when they said a free state is that what they could pull that up again so I could see that please it's I mean look it's kind of weird arguing about this because if we we had to do this over again I mean this is obviously something that was established as we said a long time ago if we had to do this over again if we had establish Lish new new amendments or new rights I don't know how we would rate but that's a prepositional phrase a well-regulated militia that means everything after that is in regards to a well reg militia so if I said and then Joe and everything in that sentence would be about Joe it's a prepositional phrase I mean that that's

73:43exactly what they mean well a well well-regulated militia meaning that there's a bunch militia meaning regular people civilians gathering together to form some sort of a shift Army yeah being necessary to the security of a free state now when they say a free state this is back when what were there three states or something like that 13 is it should have been 13 then the first ones were 13 right the first initial States the right of the people to keep and bare arms shall not be infringed see it's a nobody talks like that you you know today in 2016 if you wrote a a sentence like that be like hey what are you trying to say you know you know what I mean I mean people Thou shalt not four score and 16 years ago what speak normal all right it's um the right of the people to keep in be arms shall not be infringed is the one that everybody clings to the people of

74:42the Free State though is that that's definitely what they meant uh because they did that back then you know they they formulated those those bu but they're saying shall not be infringed the right of the people but remember that's the federal government government shall not infringe that right against the state no it's not saying against the state it's saying the people to protect the security of the Free State the right of the people to keep in be arms shall not be infringed right the people of the state right but what they're saying is that Bo annoying for people listening we got to do the car chase story after this that we owe everybody oh that's right that's right a well-regulated militia being necessary so they're establishing that a and again if you're angry right now you're I'm you I'm riding my congressman you are trying to take my guns we're just trying

75:30to we're trying to unpack this amendment okay a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state so they're establishing that we need a well-regulated militia to make sure that we don't get taken over by tyranny the right of the people to keep in bare arm shall not be infringed I don't know man I mean I'm not a constitutionalist by any stretch of the imagination nor I'm a scholar of the Bill of that seems pretty clear the right shall not be infringed okay so I'll give you let's say we give you the the right of the people is what they mean is that the people can hold the arms until they're need it to form this militia well that's weird but that's that is what it sounds like to me hold the arms yeah so the people right of the people to keep and bear arms right so they have the guns right and so they can have them it's just that so that they

76:22can formulate a well-regulated militia later if need it oh so it does kind of read like that as well I don't know about that you don't think so no the right of the people to keep in bare arm shall not be so the people have the guns that's what I'm saying and then the idea could be that they meant that you can have the guns in case you need to formulate the militia to fight tyranny it could be read that way in case yeah yeah well it's just not giving you any options it's saying shall not be infringed scroll down what is it saying what is the Second Amendment actually say it says the exact same I was that's what is the definition a modern definition of the the rights granted by the Second Amendment is there any like sort of legal nobody's agreed on this thing yeah it seems like these that wrote that they made it so weird right but even if you can get them like they certainly weren't

77:14talking about AR-15s and they weren't envisioning a government with 5,000 nuclear weapons right and they weren't envisioning 300 million people the IDE Prozac the idea of fighting the government just really seems weird like so what you're saying there so I was in the Marine Corps what you're saying then is that if they make a law like Trump gets in the office and he says all right that's it we're going to crack down on our people you think that I'm going to come after you for that come on come on like the the some people the people in our military will not do that these generals aren't going to do that they're not going to command their their members to do you'd have a military coup you probably would but you will have some people that are willing to comply but you are saying that your friends and brothers and sisters that are in the armed forces are going to turn their

78:04guns on their friends and family get the out of here well that's interesting because you could make that same argument about the police you're saying that your friends and brothers and sisters that are in the police are going to turn their guns on the civilians they do they do but that's a small amount of people that are affected so if you're talking about affecting the entire country then those people will have that personal effect because it's not just they're turning on their own family right they're not just make the same argument that a small amount of non-compliant people would be the ones that the military would have to go against yeah I mean I guess if if you have that kind of scenario sure it's kind of the they're literally say they were to come take all the guns right and they were going to do it by force you're also saying this huge Force for one the

78:47military is not allowed to operate on our soil but they already do they're already rolling the National Guard through cities if you look at any sort of well you that's a well reated militia yeah but you look I mean when you look at the tanks and some of the the the military vehicles that they're using in some of these Riot drills mil police is a separate it's a separate argument well it is a separate argument but it becomes military then I mean you're talking about war machines sure that's something that clearly wasn't envisioned and so I would rather you didn't open up that c that's another C of worms man and where is this going right yeah this is it's a very unusual sort of a debate because I see both sides I I absolutely see both sides just remember that equation though the both sides of that equation where they can be logical one side of that equation is

79:45death well and the other argument would be that protecting yourself against death is a right but we know that if you want to have a safer Society if you want to live in Australia you have to get rid of the goddamn guns yeah but Australia is so different than us I just don't buy that so small I don't buy that buy it this way buy it this way how many mass shootings have there ever been in California besides San Bernardino take San Bernardino out of the mix how many let let's adding black people in the hood that we don't hear about okay mass shootings yeah daily in this country daily so you're going to get them every you know week or two week in California do they really get them every week or two weeks in California course yeah you just don't hear about them because you're talk because they happen in compy no one gives a right and you're you're talking about people who

80:34are criminal shooting other criminals and that's one of the arguments that gun control anti-gun control people use against people that talk about how many people get shot is how many people like when you look at the numbers of people that get shot in this country they're also calculating the number of people that are shot by law enforcement officers no they don't oh sure they do no they don't even get counted as they don't even get reported to the FBI the guardian just figured out how many people got shot the 2015 is the first year we figured out how many people got shot by police in this country okay but it is 2016 and we do calculate that now no the newspaper does it the federal government or nobody when you look up statistics of how many people are killed by guns every year they do include bad guys killed by cops no what no so let this is an argument that Ted nen and

81:21these don't count as homicides either well we're not talking about homicides just talking about if they kill them it doesn't count it doesn't count no doesn't count against our homicide count because it's considered Justified Justified homicides don't count but deaths they don't I don't think they use the word homicide when they're counting firearm deaths interesting point let's follow that up because this is what uh Ted Nan and Pierce Morgan I can't believe I'm using Ted Nan as an example War Pi well he's a piece of but he what his argument with Ted Nan he got shredded in that argument cuz he he went into it unarmed with facts and nent spew out every point he can and by the way he would argue with you all day sure but that's that's arguing with a crazy person he's allegedly allegedly a little crazy let's not go withg there's certain people I'm willing

82:07to call out from time to time that'll be one of them you think Ted nja is crazy what what do you think is crazy about him have you seen him talk like he's clearly crazy he's going to argue that until the end of the day you could he's one of those people you can put the evidence in front of him day in and day out and he'll just move the goal post and move the goal post and no one's interested in having an argument with somebody that's just going to continually move goal po I don't know about all that I don't know if he would move the goal po see the one thing that he makes coherent arguments about is in fact against gun control what what do we got there Jamie um I'm halfway looking through something but I got this uh from The Washington Post this article that starts with the year of 1,000 people nearly being shot by police that sound is annoying but um it says right here

82:48they sought to compile a record of every fatal police shooting in the nation as of in 2015 something no government a had done it started after Michael Brown's shooting when they started looking into it British newspaper did that godamn comies or whatever they are it's Washington Post the post sought to compile a record this is a Washington Post the guardian started it mhm but it says the post sought to compile a record of every fatal police shooting in the nation in 2015 something no government agency had done the project began after a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown of Ferguson Missouri and August of 2014 provoking several nights of fiery riots blah blah blah race Remains the most volatile flash point in any accounting of police shooting although black men make up only 6% of the US population they account for 40% of the unarmed men shot to death by police this

83:39year the post database shows in the majority of cases which police shot and killed a person who had attacked someone with a weapon or brandished a gun the person who was shot was white hm interesting that's that's interesting in the majority of cases in which police shot and killed a person who had attacked someone with a weapon or branish a gun the person who was shot was white but a huge disproportionate number three and five of those killed after exhibiting less threatening behavior were Black Or Hispanic so meaning they valued the life less of people who were Black Or Hispanic they were quicker to shoot them with less threatening behavior than they would with white people regardless regardless of race in more than a quarter of the cases the Fatal encounter involved offic is pursuing someone on foot or by car making chases one of the most common scenarios in the data H that's

84:32interesting it's interesting it's shooting more white people but I guess there are more you have shoot more white people it's 60% of the population it's probably more than that right I don't know how many white people are there it's getting down it's going down slowly brown people are their way up to the top well uh we joke about that how what is that movie um where everything goes crazy oh God stupid come on which one Michael Douglas no Mike Purge no oh idiocracy yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so like the silly we know we know that the more educated someone is the less kids they have right and as soon as you do that you go oh no we're all the smart people don't have kids right and everybody that's poor has more kids mhm so like that's what another reason why we have to educate yeah well that's the counter to overpopulation that when they look at the charts and graphs that when you uh

85:30in industrialized nations when they become more closer to the first world they have less children China yeah but it's also they're also working more and grinding MH it's not necessarily good might might be better off being poor with a bunch of kids and be happy all right so we know that the most likely time to get to a shooting is in a Chase yes so we owe a Chase story and we should lighten this up a little bit okay let's so this is a story this is a story that we just got sidetracked from the the first conversation we're in the middle of talking about it and we never got to it right so all right uh we were talking Jamie and I earlier about it' probably be pretty cool we can probably pull this up on street maps so let's go to the 1800 block of West Pratt we can actually look at it okay be interesting so anybody who's got their finger on the send button right now

86:25ready to send an evil email or a Twitter just relax this is a debate folks this a conversation I know you wish you were here so you could yell at Mike or me I don't know you've said a pretty uh you made a couple points that I didn't even think about that were pretty darn Liberal oh I'm pretty liberal I'm a confusing if you're trying to pigeon hole me I'm a I'm a liberal hippie who owns guns and hunts and loves weed and gay people I love I love everybody all right can really do can we go to okay so this is the uh right so go down to that red awning and turn around first of all how dope is Google Maps crazy where we're traveling through Baltimore right now on Jaime's computer this is madness when we're seeing people's license plates and that's so weird that they can do that they can just zoom in they've caught people coming out of whouses and yeah they have people have sued cuz the Google

87:24yeah the Google C drove by right when they're just lighting up a cigarette all right face to the laugh Jamie okay so this is a really dilapitated neighborhood in Baltimore we don't need to necessarily see it but we're dealing with d a space h o o d okay I'm sorry go left and go down the street a little bit more by the way since we're talking about Baltimore shout out to my brother John R of Baltimore all right so this is one of my Ground Control MMA go there learn how to fight all right so I'm going to tell the story if I could get my my bearings right because it doesn't seem like I'm going to be able to pull it off it's okay all right so anyway I'll just tell the story so one of my favorite times ever uh best night I ever had as a cop we were working the major K Squad and we had been assigned a a new uh vro which is a violent repeat offender Target to go after you're going to hear

88:29a lot of these uh in a lot of Chiefs are starting to push this out again which is the violent repeat offender where they they have people with um so they they do like this predictiveness that these are the people that were are likely to get shot or likely to do shootings or something like that so we want to focus all of our enforcement efforts on them to get them on anything um doesn't work but regardless that's what I was doing at the time and and we had a guy set up to there's a bar and at the bar we knew that this gang would go in and out of this bar so we had a guy sit in covert in a van and watch the bar cuz we our whole intent was to take PCT you know take pictures document who was going in try and see some associations and me and another car we were hiding away just waiting to see what he would report maybe we could follow somebody things like that and

89:23we're talking and it's been hours we're around like hour 10 sitting there nothing going on and we had a secure channel so we could just talk back and forth on our radio and they're talking about sports or something it had to be soccer or baseball because it was something I didn't give a about so everybody's bitching going back on the radio just talking trying to pass the time and then the guy watching in covert he goes finally hear him coming over he say guys would you shut the up shut up they're robbing the store next to me right now I'm watching them I can see that it's a Sil 38 in the dude's hand robbing the store shut the up and get over here so we're like all right all right all right all right so he's calling it out and these guys running they get into a getaway car and go around the block and we get behind them so we're following them and they you

90:10know this is a fresh robbery so they got handguns in the car and everything do they know you're following them no so we have one more cars and we're following behind him and we're in this area where uh you have the one District to the left to the West the Southwest you have the Western District to the north and you have the southern to the left so they call it the tried District but we're kind of in this area where our Communications are going to be weird because these are all different channels so I'm riding with the sergeant I was a a detective at the time and I say to him uh I'm going to get on Southern Channel you get on the Southwest and coordinate that way we can call this out so I get on the radio and I'm calling and like I need a 1031 uh on the southern Channel and everybody keeps talking I'm like we're trying to find I need a 10:31 on the southern Channel

90:56and I look at him like why the won't they shut up like I don't understand cuz it's a 10:33 you like oh okay so get on radios all right 10:33 yeah I don't even know what 10:31 is to this day so 10:33 is an emergency so I get on there and we're we're calling it out the car is going west down uh Lombard and we're we're following it we're coming up to the shopping center turns left on shopping center the car is full of people it gets to the go goes through the shopping center and it stops at a stop sign but there's a car in front of it and we're thinking all right we're going to have to light it up here but that car like it always moves right as soon as we hit the lights you can you can bet that car is going to move right so we hit the lights anyway and the car stops in the front where the stop side is so they can't get past right so they all bail out uh one runs to there's four people

91:50in the car one goes one way one goes back the other way one goes for it one goes behind and I jump out of the car because uh let's all right so I leave my radio by accident I drop it because let's be honest I I see a guy running with a gun out of a car and I'm still like in Jack Rabbit mode you know I'm I'm going I'm well that's when people shoot people right I'm get right I'm getting them so I take off without the without my radio chasing this dude going behind the shopping center the sergeant he forgot to put the car in park so he knows I don't have my radio he's starting to panic about where I'm going he has to dive back into the car to put it on Park so it doesn't hit the the suspect's car and then the non-suspect car in front of them the the everybody goes running I I'm chasing behind him and I've got my gun out and I'm running and I'm saying you know hey I'm going to

92:46shoot you know you better stop now but I could tell he when he's running it's pure panic like I had a moment of empathy for him like you could he was just like running with that gun in his hand I'm like yo you better drop it we're running some guy comes out of the woods from behind the shopping center it's a cop from the southwest who heard us on the radio playing close cop so the guy throws the gun and he tries to throw it up into the roof of the building but it like pathetically just hits the building and falls down and uh the guy coming out of the woods I yell at him to get him well I run and back go back and get the gun you got to get the gun first uh if you're smart because that could end up with somebody else's hands or or whatever and get him back and so at that moment unbeknownst to me all those districts were like all coordinated it was like this moment of of serendipity

93:43and policing southern district Patrol came up and got one of the guys and like Western Patrol got one of the guys and Southwest Commander was in the area was there and that drug unit was there helping me and we caught every single person bring them back we got like four guns we get everything we roll them over it's the people we were looking for by mere coincidence half the gang that we were looking for to go into the bar robed the store that was next to our guy in covert and we started our case there which ended up being completely successful because we had this huge jump start of just dumbass luck that does sound like dumbass luck cuz you called 10:31 instead of 10:33 you forgot to put the car in park you left your radio behind that and that's typical you know so that's the way it is and that's a situation where you do shoot like people shoot in that situation right but think

94:38people think I haven't been there who are these people that think you haven't been there you know who they are all over the Internet the Twitter trolls and stuff or or people want to get credit to other cops you know they think oh you're just talking about Baltimore you've never actually done anything what did you actually do and those are the situations where you get into these shootings right where you could have easily shot that guy who is running with the gun and that's what right the statistic show happens a lot of the time that would have dramatically affected me dramatically affected him and everyone around but what this kid was doing in the end was being part of a drug deal trying to do robberies trying to eat and survive and yet we had those guns so you have this poverty and you have this fighting for resources and so they chose that to to rob the

95:29store and to be in in in these gangs but if they didn't have those guns how differently would that have been probably quite a bit Yeah so so when you talk about saturation I mean like look in that incident we got lucky everything went fine it had potential to fall apart luckily we were all competent in in that unit but sort of thanks I was the youngest one I was I was the got me some slack uh but you had you know 30 guns going around in that situation and it's just like oh you don't like England doesn't do this you don't see other countries like this where this all could have just went Bonkers because we're trying to respond to a situation in a way go after people and put them in C because we have this these guns everywhere and they're fighting for these resources but that's where we have to stop and say why are they here right what got us to this point instead

96:27what we continue to do is we just throw that group into jail and the very next time it took us like six months to take the whole group down we got everybody federally indicted but as soon as we do that the next group just steps up because we didn't take a moment to look at the causations well you know the old argument if you outlaw guns only Outlaws will have guns right well I mean that's circular logic too it is but when you're dealing with a supply that already exists in the hundred of millions it's pretty logical actually yeah I mean it's going to happen but youd have to go door too and dig into people's basement right but if you make guns all legal then uh then the only people that have guns are law- abiding people what do you mean no if you make completely legal well if you completely legal criminal that what you mean yeah so that's why it's a circular

97:15logic so no because those the criminals are still criminals even if the guns are legal it's not everyone's not a law-abiding citizen that has a gun if you give a gun to a criminal right but if you don't have the law in place to make it criminal uhhuh and that's the saying we're saying well only bad guys will have guns if we outlaw them all right well yeah because we outlaw them all I mean that's just it's it's circular logic so if we have the law first because you're not changing the gun ownership you're just changing the law right but you're already we've already made it illegal for people that are felons to possess Firearms yeah but when you have that level of saturation obviously it doesn't work right right but it gets back to the same issue like how would you ever Poss it's like trying to get you know it's like taking a bucket of water and throwing it into the ocean and trying to

98:05get that fresh water out like how do you get out the guns that are in stop adding salt so that's the thing it's like we can't instantly solve it we just have to stop doing it the wrong way that's like the drug war I mean you you've been into the drug war so you know without a doubt it doesn't work but what are we still doing and like it's well we're slowly moving away from that sure but we can stop right now I mean like you can literally just stop just as quickly as we started it we can say okay we're not going to imprison people for those offenses if they get into crime and they shoot somebody well then go after them for the shooting but what we do is we put that law in there and we make it you know like we're creating this we know what's wrong and we know to just stop this so with the guns you know if you just stop manufacturing them we'll get somewhere

98:57if you just stop locking people up for the drug war we'll get somewhere and improving that but we're not we're just keep doing the same it's been a year since I was here and we discussed these drug war issues we haven't really moved the bar much well the only thing that it is up for ballot in several different states marijuana of course not not other drugs and slowly but surely it will become legal throughout the United States most likely now Washington DC is legal there's a lot of places that are legal now that weren't legal before and then it's on the ballot in November in California and several other states I believe is it other states as well but Cal marijuana is just one really benign law I mean it's really it's it's a rather benign substance in many ways it's not it's not a dangerous thing it's not a real threat or harm to society guns are way more dangerous sure so moving that

99:53changing that but we're creating that you know so we create the guns are being used because of the drug war right and then we have people that are dying over heroin overdoses because of the drug war and notice we've had a lot of improvements on people dying over heroin overdoses now that it's in Massachusetts and stuff what do you mean in Massachusetts they are uh like the cops uh aren't arresting there's a there's a chief there that decided he was going to be smart and he wasn't going to lock up the heroin users he was going to get them into to treatment has had excellent success well the heroin problem that was uh one one of those CNN shows was detailing what actually went went down oh it was Anthony Bourdain show they were talking about how what what really happened was so many people got addicted to oxycottons because of prescription drug uh companies pushing that

100:45where people you know people are like little small minor injuries and they're prescribing pills that are opiates and highly addictive they're no different than heroin I mean like literally they're heroin and so that's money and politics issue again we're not fighting the those drug dealers who are getting everybody uh hooked on Heroin we're fighting the drug dealers that are in the cities still yeah that's a gigantic issue of course um and then these people when they started to crack down on oxycontins that is when heroin moved in to take its place cuz these people were sick they needed their pills right they get their pill so then they got heroin instead right yeah I don't know but I mean so you want to move on to some reform measures or what's been going on the last year yeah definitely yeah um all right so let's talk about what happened as the year's gone on um after

101:39I left here uh obviously people picked up and had that you know the Joe Rogan effect that they everybody always talks about when after they talked to you other people started to pay attention and I went back to Baltimore um and this dude sends me an email and it says they arrange it through leap that he's going to come visit me and he wants to talk about a movie oh Jesus and so he comes that's how they corrupt you Hollywood gets you and we talk about some of these ideas a very good movie idea that he has trying to kind of put some of these things into an emotional appeal that people can understand and comes close to them but what that did was is it it uh pushed me to get more involved in Baltimore so I could uh get the PE other people involved in the project that would have good ideas and would really know the streets well and would know the activism path and what was going on with

102:38black lives matter and everything in there and so I've reached out to a bunch of the activists and we started forming these tight-knit groups and come to find out this dude doing the movie is Matthew kovich and I don't know if he's going to do it yet or not but he's like this big star in France and thinking about doing a sequel to a movie he made called leang which really talks about these kind of things in France France had a very similar hypers segregation problems in ghettoization 20 years ago and ended up having riots and they they did a lot to fix it and that's what what he's kind of went doing like a 20-year reunion of that but getting involved in Baltimore and meeting everybody I really have been like in a school um of of understanding of what the cities need and what people are trying to fight for and what the black lives matter movement really means um I I just

103:34didn't I I had all a lot of those same preconceived notions of like you know being a white hero kind of thing where you go and you help and like you're bringing your skills down and you don't realize the things you're saying and how you play into to privilege and things like that and getting going in there with them uh my my walls against Muslims got got torn down because I ended up meeting Muslim activists who were really treat using religion to uh do the the right things you know the good things The Selective of course but getting involved in in the movement to the point where uh we're having these these groups and we're doing things like uh having panel discussions and we did like uh stopping for people so that they would see what it was like to actually have somebody come up on you and search through your pockets and uh we've been doing documentaries uh we've been doing

104:32protesting where there's a I met this lady Twanda Jones who her brother was killed by Baltimore police officers a couple years ago and she's been protesting every single Wednesday for two and a half years fighting for her brother Tyrone West I guess is why they do it on Wednesdays and he uh he was beaten to death by Baltimore cops like literally beaten to death and we wanted to have things like where we say why don't we have people protesting good why is it always got to be like burning down the CVS or something like that where's all the good people and like I was just flabbergasted that they were everywhere in in in what everyone thinks is the worst of neighborhoods was just filled with people trying to do the right thing and trying to to fight for justice and doing it in the most peaceful manner her brother was beaten to death by cops and what she does his peacefully protests

105:24every Wednesday for 2 and A2 years and doesn't get any attention for that when they have other cops that were those same cops uh beat this guy Abdul Salam uh in front of his kid doing the exact same kind of aggressive enforcement and it what it opens up kind of went way of going about it is I got to see the other side and that really has affected me that being a cop you you lock him up and you put him into the cell or or you take in the court and the case goes or whatever you don't think about what that does on the other end you never see and then I got involved in the communities and I saw the other side I saw what it was like for a guy that came back from being imprison and in solitary confinement for 3 years and having no hopes of of uh resources like not getting them jobs and having to fight just to get anything because he had that that record uh you you get to see that

106:21you know those people you locked up like they have families who were profoundly affected by everything that happened and they're gone for these years and it's just it's it's been a really like I get a like aggressive and when we're talking about these conversations about guns and like cuz those deaths on that other side of that equation that became real as can be to me like those are people now that I know and I know the families of the of people who were on the other side of that and it's really pushing that that's what we we we need to just really do we got to stop being these tribal creatures that can only see the those fellow humans that are right with us that we associate as being our team like we're all that team and we have we have to start having empathy for what these things do to other people we have to see this cops don't see what their actions do in order

107:13to step up and say hey we shouldn't be doing this we have to get out of this denial bubble and being involved in the city has just giv me this huge check on on on all my privileges and everything that we have we don't understand how much advantages we have in life it's it's it's ridiculous the amount of factors that people have to fight against that we can't even register and this is all fairly new to you yeah man I me like I saw it evidentially but to see it in person like the work that so the photographer Devon Allen uh you can pull up um Devon Allen he he took a picture of my daughter that's from a protest that's going to be in and uh he's doing this project now where he took the Time Magazine cover uh shoot so if you ever saw the Time Magazine during the uprising where it says 1968 and it's crossed out and says 2016 because looks he took that picture as a as a a young

108:14black kid that used to be a drug dealer who picked up a camera as his identity project kind of thing he didn't know what an identity project was at that time I didn't know what an identity project was at that time but he picked up the camera and started taking pictures and he got that picture and he's well known now but what he did was is he took that and now he used the publicity from all that and he gets so this this is Deon Allen he gets all these um he start this project at this community development called pen North and he collects cameras now for all these kids not that he's getting paid he collects ceras from around the world brings it in and now he runs a thing going through in Sant Winchester where Freddy gray was killed he Tak takes those kids in and teaches them photography and gives them that project so they have something they can grip

109:07upon on and they have something they can build up on but what what's sad about that is that this is Devon who has no resources who is the kid who was a drug dealer who has everything bothering him and he is investing in those communities and trying to provide those things to give people that that identity where they can climb out of it and they can become they can see that vision of being a contributing member to society and like that's what we all have to do to give back these neighborhoods that's part of the way of fixing it is if when people want to help you literally have to go down there and say how can I help and do things like that because what he's revealing is that we all have a skill his skill is photography but your skill is is or comedy or talking or however you want to go you have these skills that you can teach and you can pass on so other people can see an

110:00identity some people can sew some people can do uh whatever it is we all have these skills and that's like how we help if you want to be somebody that helps these cities you go down there and you help Supply that identity I could just see how many white Knights are saying I'm going down to the hood right now and I'm going to help I'm going to just find them up no pants but but teeth so at pen North we created this thing that well they created this thing called the safe Zone and what that is it was all worked out with everybody you got to treat everybody like humans they worked out with the with the drug dealers and everything that's going on and they participate in keeping this area of the city completely safe so that everybody can come down there and you would if you go to Baltimore you want to be a white knight you come down the bottom and reach out to an activist and

110:49you want to help it's not dangerous you you will be fine and there are plenty of people that will help you and guide you through on what you can do to contribute to make our society a more whole place well obviously Baltimore is on the other side of the country there's got to be places around here that uh need some sort of a similar doesn't matter where you are yeah they're all the same all these cities are the same they're facing all the same problems and uh that has helped me build this reform measure so my application for Chicago is completely up if you want to pull out my website Michael awood jr.net let me ask you this had you gotten the position in Chicago you were trying to be the police chief of police in Chicago right M if you had gotten that position in Chicago what would you do what is your idea I mean I'm sure you have a grand plan right so

111:38there's 38 pages of that okay on this but if you could kind of uh break it down for us well the the first thing we have to do is we have to give that power away and I think that's a condition that I have to have in order to take the job now I have a friend uh who was a actually a driver when we were in Chicago who was a cop uh and he told me that what's going on in Chicago was that they had some pretty highlevel drug dealers and gang leaders and then they caught those guys and imprisoned them and when they imprisoned them it created a power vacuum and in that power vacuum over the last few years you're seeing significant ramp up in crime or people tried to take over these areas that were under control by other people similar to what happens when you see when we take over countries like Libya creat this power vacuum and now you have a case to almost you say Well it's worse without

112:34Gaddafi than it was with him that's sort of what this guy was telling me about Chicago is that accurate possible um one of the big problems with policing is we think we can narrow things down and we can like find a soul causation and there just simply isn't any soulle causations there's never Soul causation in anything when you're dealing with a mass amount of human beings uh everybody has different reasons you're not going to be able to do everything perfectly and those things can happen perfectly uh plausible that it could have happened a weird theory that I've started to uh recognize is that actually in this study they uh the Stephanie Duca study they talk a lot about how um these kids uh are really more passionate now and they're get exposed to more and you can see that their work ethic is actually higher than it was we think that they're not working but they're achieving things

113:31at 3 to 400% of what their parents achieved so these kids are ambitious and so if you don't have any other options around you have a more ambitious population that's now doing drug dealing and taking over territory what do you mean by they're achieving things 3 to 400% more than their so you have um so uh the average in um I want to go like in the '90s for for high school diplomas in college for residents of a neighborhood like Sant toown or these East and West Baltimore neighborhoods worst that you can imagine in your head as far as resources go they the these kids are actually achieving uh so say their their parents got 10% High School diplomas these guys are getting 40% High School diplomas their parents were getting uh you know 2% college degrees these guys are at like 25 30% college degrees so they're really excelling but they're not achieving because of all these other

114:31barriers as you know um so a guy a black guy with a college degree is slightly less likely to be employed than a white guy with a high school diploma in a criminal record so even they're giving these promises that if they play by the rules then they'll get these things at the end just like poor White America in West Virginia is and and what what happens though is they're being they they see these examples of with social media or whatever and and they're understanding that if they push hard that's they're they're told they're push hard and they achieve these things then they'll get these rewards but they're not getting these rewards they're just not there so if you have a more ambitious population and they're turning to drug dealing and to Crime well it's just as likely that they're also more ambitious and dedicated to their criminal endeavors as they were to their

115:23college achievement right so they're better criminals because they're working harder in school each generation improves right yeah is there but there is there any Improvement in in terms of crime rates well I mean there there are crime is still dramatically dropping and we are we live in the safest era in human history right now we get caught up in a lot of this and I mean sure that's a guess that's a weird argument for The Gun Guys where they can just say hey we are in the safest envir time in history ever we have to not get caught up in the fact that if like you said the odds of things happen especially compared to the rest of History because of the sheer numbers you're dealing with well it would seem like crime the percentage of people taking crime have probably still are about the same and then or or the amount are the same but the population is grown right so you have a lot lot

116:13less crime percentage wise than you ever have before but if your criminals are that much better well they're still going to be ious but are they that much better but it seems like it's so much easier to catch them doing something now than ever before other than physically catch them but I mean so much easier to no that's that's really contrary to evidence so yeah I mean homicide clearance rates from the 80s were in 80 90% and now they're down to 30 to 45% what is that from I I think that's from a breakdown of community relations because we think that comp comps comps aren't the answer the community is always the answer and so if you want to solve a crime you have to have these good relationships with your communities in order for them to even trust you otherwise the streets are just going to handle it themselves right if the police don't provide Justice well then they

117:03will right so if they can't turn to the police that's another Factor you get there's tons of factors in here and a lot of arguments could be made for what it is but the the conviction rate has dropped dramatically and and the homicide clearance rate has dropped dramatically police are not solving crimes at the rate they used to now when you look at an area like Chicago that has a lot of violence connected to the drug war or to the drug trade I should say illegal drug selling it's also lack of resources too though so the drug trade fills in for a lack of resources very good point and that's a point that doesn't get addressed that often right that's a that's a very good point now what can be done what would you have done had you got that position well well so the first thing I have to do here here's my model and my fundamental model is is uh think if you had a business and you have a a

117:57board you know you you have your Board of Trustees or whatever you want to call it I want to be a civilian leader of the police department like a CEO and I want to have like officially 49% of the power of the agency and then we have like seven people on this panel who come from the city who live in these neighborhoods I don't not sure precisely how we pick them out we can't appoint them because then they just become cronies um we have some issues with vot voting that that we may have to work out the details on but the the ultimate principle is that we would have the majority of that board would be from the poorest of the neighborhoods around so you would create a board and what would what would be the picking criteria to create this board would it be you and other police officers would it be has to be the civilians so the civilians pick the people that are on they would have to

118:46pick them themselves I think I think we have to have a vote I this is I don't have that thought completely out yet okay uh but the the majority has to come from the poor populations covering the base of whatever is good for the weakest Among Us is good for the strongest among us and then those boards while I run the agency I can only argue to them they have 51% of the control I have all these things I want to argue for right but it's fundamentally not my agency okay so the you would almost give most of the control to the rest of the people and they would work with you right they're I'm the CEO they're the board they're going to come up with we're all going to discuss how we want to approach issues and I'm going to bring my science I'm going to make my cases as much as I can on the right way to do things but if they want to do things another way it's

119:36their agency and that's the that's what I would has that ever been done anywhere not that I'm aware of so your your idea is so radical and so way out there and that's part of the problem with getting people to accept it so they would have to take a huge chance and and if it failed it would be their failure whereas if it fails right now and they do business as usual here's the trick Joe okay it's a total cop out in a manner because the failure isn't my fault right but I'm saying the failure would be the board's fault because they have the agency so if the people are responsible they can't at the mayor right because they did it it's their agency it's my job to serve them it's not my job to serve a mayor right it's my job to serve them and Carry Out they want to achieve so I will work at achieving what they want to achieve and establishing the milestones and

120:28incentives that they think are better for their neighborhood because they may do things which could dramatically uh have impacts like such as hiring like so right now guys won't hire because they have a drug complaint or something like that or they have a prior arrest record well I think if you get all those poor neighborhoods together they're going to say look we know that's that's bull crap like that arrest doesn't stop you from being get a good cop that's ridiculous and we can let those people in and they can take that risk as a whole Community we can decide these things so you're saying make former prisoners or former criminals turn them into police officers not that far but sure I mean some of them so the difference between them and me we know is the color of my skin in the neighborhood I grew up in I could have easily had the criminal record that

121:13they have I think pretty much anybody could yeah right I mean that's and that's a hard pill to swallow for folks who have that pull yourself up by your bootstrap mentality but a lot of who you are and what you are is luck yeah yeah just being born in this country an extreme Advantage yeah being born poor in this country is really way luckier than being born in the middle class and a lot of other countries right so this board that we have how long do you think it's going to take before they end the drug war it's going to take a day yeah but they can't do that because it's a federal decision especially you're talking about the city of Chicago it's not even the state of Illinois of course we can we can yeah who's going to stop you well the federal government we don't enforce laws we don't enforce your law period boy good luck trying to pull that it's legal the feds have to come in and

122:03do it themselves the feds would have to come in and enforce the laws they can come in and do it right but they don't have the resour they were doing in Colorado for a while yeah they tried that it didn't work out right well Colorado is a perfect example where the money was so good with the plan that was initiated where they're they're making more more money from taxes with marijuana than they ever did with alcohol which is bananas beyond the money you have a reduction in crime and in juvenile usage of marijuana and in drunk driving yes yeah lowest instances of drunk driving in more than a decade it's pretty interesting it's pretty interesting because it just shows you but it was predictable yes well for people like you or I but not for the people that were arguing against it they thought it was going to be chaos and hippies and they're going to light the

122:48town on fire and each other in the streets and everybody thought it was going to be horrible but you're talking about a different drug when you're talking about Chicago you're talking about heroin and you're talking about cocaine you're talking about methamphetamine you're talking about MDMA these are different drugs and they have health consequences as well so the legalization or the prohibition what the the pl what they have right now is obviously not working the real problem would be if they decided to not enforce the drug laws and they decided to in some way you know air quotes legalize these drugs what would take place is you're going to have some blame be placed on some deaths on your new laws and that's going to be paraded out in front of you this is you're responsible for the death of this young girl she never tried heroin but because it was available at 7-Eleven

123:43she started snorting it and now she's dead somebody say that you're going to get that that's not the the model the model so you have prohibition and we like we were saying earlier you know what what prohibition does is just determing that they sell it okay it takes the hands and puts it into the black market yes so well yeah heroin is a terrible drug but what makes heroin so bad is its lack of Purity and the environment in which you you get it well also the addictive properties of it which is why oxycotton even though it's pure and very measurable still has a terrifying effect right but what kind of consequence did you say that was you said it was a health consequence well it has a it has a a criminal consequence unless we make do well oxycon certainly do there's a lot of people that get arrested for illegally possessing and selling and distributing it's a huge

124:36issue right right right I understand I mean the drugs period they're a health issue they're not a criminal issue they're not a prison issue they're a public health issue so we treat that with health professionals not with jail sales and police so while May it's not like I'm saying that the drug dealers can go out there and just deal it that's not what I want I want a doctor handling everything I want it moved into just no different than alcohol well the problem with the doctor handling is that's what happened in Florida and what happened in Florida they developed this environment where they didn't have a database where they the doctors and the pharmaceutical companies were all in cahoots and they said look let's just sell the out of this and the stat statistics were staggering there was more prescriptions for oxycottons and opiate painkillers in Florida than the rest of the United

125:31States combined I know that is nuts but what were they doing with it they were selling it they were taking it they selling it illegally around the um oxycotton Express that documentary that showed that these people were bringing it from Florida Upstate into Georgia and Kentucky but they don't have that market they wouldn't have that market in Chicago with me right so Florida couldn't do that because you wouldn't have a market to sell it in so the only reason that that I'm just confused how take away the market the only reason that exists right is because they can go sell it on the black market so if you take away the black market as being the distributor then so you would allow people to just sell it no no no only doctors only doctors right for those certain drugs for so cannabis or something like that we need to put in in a in a model similar and we have things

126:23in like Portugal where what Portugal does they just decriminalize it so they don't put people in prison cell for possessing it and if you want to still go after the dealers as a half measure you know like that's a half measure I'd have to swallow that I don't completely believe in but we can work those things out me and you if you're the panel and I'm the CEO we can work these things out and come to a position where we're like okay let's try this and if you if you want to go by the incrementalism then we see that that's okay just like in in Colorado already is proven that the Cannabis model is is fine right so we can start with the Cannabis model and move that in and then we can say all right well let's put cocaine into this model and then see how that goes if you want to be incremental about it I'm fine with that the Cannabis model the the problem is the

127:15innocuous negative effects are just it's just really there there's almost nothing there's so little to fall on but we don't make that case with alcohol or or tobacco that's true but tobacco is not a good one because it's a long slow death as long as it's as long as it takes a long time we can accept it I mean that's how we look at it it's almost like what we're doing how much that costs I mean the cost of tobacco is extraordinary on our healthare system oh no doubt about it right and when you think about alcohol that's the real argument because alcohol is one of the easiest drugs to kill yourself with people I think there's a staggering number I think it's like 10,000 people drink themselves to death every year just in this country which is really pretty shocking and that doesn't count drunk driving uh alcohol rated violence and all the other things that go along with it the problem with

128:07making heroin or cocaine with decriminalizing it but then go going after the dealers is then well okay if these people get hooked on it where are they going to get it then well they have to go to a doctor I mean just the way we have to do it so it becomes treatment but it then becomes exactly like Florida but remember what we do know we do know that every million spent on the demand side reduces by 100 kilog right so we have to keep focusing on education I don't if those people that got hooked on oxy and became heroin addicts if they had the education that this was the path they were going to go on you got to believe that a significant percentage of them wouldn't have gone that path yeah I mean now we're all aware of it and I know plenty of people now that the doctor says here's some oxy and they're like no no no no give me something else what do you do with people that are so dumb they

128:58just want a party you got I mean some of those things you got to let them party just like you got to let them drink themselves to death yeah what are you going to do that's a hard pill for people to swallow but it's better than put them in a prison C yes it is what do you got going on Jamie drinking too much can excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths in 2.5 million years of potential life lost what does that mean I guess like you're saying drunk driving ACC in the united St 2.5 million years are oh people's lives that's a weird statistic from 2006 to 2010 shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years yeah okay so it definitely okay that's life lost meaning you um you drink yourself into an early grave that's a weird thing to AR but the 88,000 deaths over a period of uh 4 years that's that's harsh but that's what we were saying I mean that

130:00it's essentially a little bit more than what I was saying but we also know the solution to that or a solution to a significant portion of that education education and legalization of marijuana those things we empirically know we know those will improve the situations but instead we continue to do things we know don't work right right so I'm a scientist I am interested in what works I'm going to argue for what works and someone else can argue against it but that's going to be what I continue to argue for I don't have an emotional position or on it I I'm following the evidence right we we we literally know these things not only that there's also a drug that is illegal that has a significant impact on addiction it's called IA gain and ibigan which is being used in treatment facilities all throughout South America and Mexico with massive positive results uh is illegal

130:55in this country for no apparent reason and it's yeah I've heard that the people that do that are just like that's it as soon as they take it they're like I don't want it anymore it's completely out well it it rewires the way your brain concentrates or the way your brain is affected by these substances it rewires addiction I mean I'm not the one to explain how it works Au will be in this week and he'll probably be the best person to do it I got another one this is from The Washington Post this statistic of how many Americans drink every week you want to read that what little thing right here up to 10 drinks per day what up to it says the top 10% of American adults 24 million of them consume an average of 74 drinks per week or a little more than 10 drinks per day holy compared to about 30% that don't drink at all holy how many of them are doing that because cannabis is

131:49illegal well I'm sure quite a few but quite a few you know look there's a lot of obviously you know I'm a marijuana Enthusiast I love it I think it's awesome I I want a spark one up right now thinking about it I'm a big fan uh but some people don't like it they don't like the abrasively introspective properties of cannabis they don't like the paranoia they don't like all the vulnerability feelings that you get from it I like those those are good for me my personality I have I'm I'm to typ Bay aggressive you know I I'm good with a a a a substance uh a compound uh that sort of like calms that down and Mellows me out and gives me a different perspective I enjoy it and I think it's good for people I really do I think a lot of the things that people associate with the negative aspect of cannabis the particularly the paranoia I think that's good I really do I do I think we need to

132:46feel more vulnerable I think more feeling more vulnerable is better for you because it enhances a sense of community and friendship and love in a lot of ways and it it it bonds people together I think this idea that you're an individual that you are uh you know you're a lone Rebel out there kicking ass and taking names you're doing it all by yourself that's all eroded instantaneously by cannabis it just said no no no no you're a talking monkey on a spinning ball flying through Infinity you and you're like ah I'm scared I'm going to die someday I can't agree with you more I think I think those are really important qualities for our entire race the human race I think they enhances more Community type feelings and thoughts and I think that's the opposite of with some drugs like stimulants do stimulants I've always avoided stimulants I'm not a fan other than coffee um I've never really

133:42tried them but I've seen their effect on other people and I've read about their effects and it's not what I'm looking for I don't want to be cocky I don't yeah I I'm trying to fight whatever urges my body and my personality have to sort of lean towards that but I think that people that get involved with speed people that get involved with Coke those are people that are like unduly confident it's I think that's a bad drug for society and it's a it's a drug that is very selfish in its effects like the the the the impact that it has on people they become really selfish and nasty and I'm not into that I I think that alcohol for some people is a is an escape from the reality that they find themselves in and they don't know how to get out and I think education like we were talking about before allowing people to have access to the stories and the the TA the consequences that other people have

134:39experienced from taking that drug will help them what kept me from doing coke when I was young was having friends that had problems with it and that educated me I was like I don't want to be like that guy I don't want to have that happen to me me I see what's happening to this person some people don't get exposed to that and instead before they know it they're already in it they're trying it when they're 15 next thing you know they like it too much next thing you know they're looking forward to doing that because it provides some sort of an escape from the pressure of the consequences of pursuing a dream of chasing down life or of not having a Direction That's Another one not having like you were saying the the identity that you're focusing on whether it's this gentleman that was a photographer or someone that wants to be an athlete or someone else that wants to be an

135:23author whatever it is this one thing that you're chasing if you don't have that thing this this sort of futility of life is very overwhelming to some people and they want to escape that pain the pain of not knowing what the you're doing and I think some of that I mean this is going to go way out there but I think some of that goes back to the hunter gatherer genes that we have in our in our our own bodies I think we're in a lot of ways we're prisoner to the needs of the past and the needs of the past were we were very goal oriented you had to go out there you had to pick the right amount of foods that you could eat you had to hunt the animals or catch the fish and that was the goal and we were very goal oriented in that way you had to go out there and do that you had to work hard and then through those goals you get this feeling of satisfaction well when you're just getting food and

136:14it's it comes to you when your job involves doing something that's not rewarding in any way shape or form and this is what you have to do to get that food you've sort of taken out all the natural reward systems that our bodies are designed to to sort of gravitate towards and unless you find a passion unless you find an art or a craft or a trade or some sort of a thing that excites you mentally and stimulates your creativity and stimulates your ambition you're left lost and there's a lot of people that are just left lost and unfulfilled and unsatisfied and I think those types of people gravitate towards alcohol and a lot of other drugs as an escape and that's a part of the problem with Society was how we view drugs we view drugs as an escape rather than an enhancement or rather than a perspective en enhancer we we view them as oh this guy's weak he needs a drug

137:12yeah I I I think I think you're spot on I don't know how you can argue that but it it like ties all together so I I know you sound like liberal I I mean you plurally sound like liberal hippies when you like start putting all these things together but these things really do tie in together so you have the alcoholism because people aren't finding their identities so we should be doing things to like help people create identities if we want a safer environment right so it's not about taking those people and put them into prisons as you articulate it it's about finding that passion or educating them to do something and and so if you want to help or police or or whoever want to help you have to be addressing those kind of issues and I think so people one thing we've noticed throughout throughout human history is that when um things are really tough and there's no resources right the the

138:09leaders of the oppressed like so say it's really easy to use um black segregated neighborhoods right now you it's easy example well it's not just easy it's an awesome it's a very good example so the masculine members of a society that can't achieve something they turn to making everything about masculinity and dominance and and accepting of the of that lower realm and they start to treat uh intelligence and education as effeminate or or weak and and so you have a that's that that plays into the culture of where you have the guns and everybody has to you know the disrespecting culture and this is my corner kind of culture so we have those kind of benefits that are factor also in in leveling the playing field for everybody and contributing uh so one of the things that we're doing right now is we're building a a studio like this in Baltimore and and it's called a radio

139:11revolver and that'll be my Shameless plug so GoFundMe radio revolver we still need a few more thousand dollars to figure fix everything up what are you doing so we are making it so we have a video recording like Skype session we have the a podcast whole setup like this for with eight mics and we're trying to set everything up we have local artists that are painting everything in the inside let me stop you right now eight people are going to talk over each other never have more than two okay okay we've made that mistake many times we have these fight companions with four and they're my best friends and we're all yelling over each other I tried to watch one of those the other day I was like oh my God I'm getting a headache sometimes they're those are pretty fun you guys are loose oh we get hammered they're they're ridiculous but I'm just saying if you have eight people really it's

139:58like you ever heard that expression one um one boy one boy's work two boys half boys work meaning that like if you have two young kids together and they're working on something they're just going to start talking and it's not going to get done one's going to yeah if you have one kid that's digging a hole he's going to actually get that job done but if you have like four people nothing gets done that that that's really the case okay I'm definitely going to write that down it's eight people's too many so one of the people that I met was uh if you ever heard serial podcast Jamie do you know that that sure so okay you listen to that no I don't but I'm aware of it the first season is about aad SED who's wrongfully imprisoned right now in Maryland still right so his definitely wrongfully I think so uh well so regardless of whether you get a point of whether he did it or not I'm honestly

140:49unaware of the case what what was accused of so uh in high school at 17 of murdering his ex-girlfriend uh a classmate at Woodland High High School um the evidence regardless of of whether somebody wants to argue about whether he actually did it or not the evidence is is is extremely clear that you do not have the evidence to put this individual in jail period it's not there his best friend is the partner with me for radio revolver and we ended up being connected for cuz I helped out on that podcast for a while and you know we we have this community that we form now so he's helping me with this and this is an example of how you use your privilege and sensationalism so I was sensationalized by what I said before right by the the cops hitting people and all the things they did and and probably what I'm most proud of is that I instantly switch from that

141:40sensationalism to how we fix things and what the reform measures are and we don't even talk about that sensationalism anymore but don't you think the sensationalism was important because it it brought you to people like me was critical yeah right so the successfulness of turning that around into something productive part of that is is this radio revolver so if you have privilege and you have an advantage of something what you have to do is you have to build platforms for other people build structure so that other people can rise not just for yourself and the idea behind this is we we'll have the network so it end up being turn key it's in a a room that anybody can come in at any time and if the community me the community members we already have them tied in I think we're we're going to have a problem with who we cut out versus who we're going to let in and

142:26we're creating the entire infrastructure under one umbrella for them to come in and have their voices heard and get their message out there they can build a podcast they can build a video uh like a TV show type of thing and none of this is ever going to cost any of them anything and if they succeed and we end up getting to a point where we're in the red then we just start taking all the profits and distributing them out to whoever you know fortunately has the podcast that does the best or whatever and and but the point of that is is is that you have that that is going to enable at least 10 to 20 identity projects so somebody else has to come in and do the other end of that take whatever you have and do that same kind of thing if you have money then we can take the money and we can do something good with that if you have that skill then you can come into a place like

143:16we're building or a place like pen North and pass that on that is really what we have to do as an individual level and if so I would always love it if people would help me out with radio revolvers so we can get that finished so you're what you're going to do is you're going to put together a podcast and through that podcast you're going to have people tell their stories you're going to expose the rest of the world to the the plight of these inner cities and the the positive stories about people rising out of them and your friend the photographer and a bunch of other people that you can get exposed to so I think one of of the most important things for a young person is to believe that they can somehow or another be successful um I remember when when I was young we were poor I always identified with being a poor person and I never thought that I would be anything

144:03other than a poor person because I would see people that were wealthy and they they always felt so different than me they always felt so anyone who is successful I shouldn't even just say wealthy just a normal person like you know like someone who lives in a normal house with uh you know a garage and that you know like wow that's a that's a person that the America aspires to they feel different than you if you're from a broken home if you are from poverty and my case obviously was nothing in comparison to the extreme poverty that a lot of people face but I still remember feeling really insecure and really um disconnected from successful people I think that mindset is very difficult to overcome it's very difficult it's very difficult to believe that you can achieve something it's very difficult to believe that you can rise from no matter where you are if you continue to work

144:58and you continue to pursue your goals and you can avoid all the pitfalls of negative aspects of society you can do better you can do better and you can feel satisfied in that and to give people these opportunities to see people who have done the very thing that you're aspiring to do is massively beneficial because it gives them sort of like a little bit of a blueprint yeah I mean and and that's exactly the point when you say these things I I you may as well just be me saying them uh I agree with you completely I mean it's in critically important that that we set these up for people and and they can do that and they do that now and it just reminds me when you said that like they come up to my house and like that's like success to them and that's what I am I'm a dude with a single family home and a garage and not really yeah I don't have any money but but but that is all

145:50anybody ever really needs and wants mean you can get a giant ass house but let me tell you something at the end of the day it's just your house you know that it's just where you live it's if is it comfortable is it safe yeah that's what everybody really wants yeah definitely that's really what it's all about and one of the most positive aspects of doing this podcast is running into people that I've met that said hey man I've been doing stand-up comedy for 3 years now I'm actually a working comedian I I I did it from listening to your podcast I knew that I could do it because you told me that anybody can do it if you just try that you I I used to suck and I tell everybody I always I was terrible you but you keep chipping away at it and just listening to your recordings and all that jazz I've run into a million people that have started doing Jiu-Jitsu now I

146:35mean it's it's not a million but it's not accountable anymore I've ran into so many people that hey man I just got my purple belt started listening to you guys you know now I'm competing my my my lifestyle is so much healthier I eat cleaner everything's better my life is just I used to be depressed it's so much more positive so I take great satisf I would say Pride but it's not the right word it's great satisfaction it feels awesome to talk to people that have looked at this little sort of blueprint that I've laid out and said look anybody could do this you can do this like whatever patterns that you're following because the people that you're around are in these negative patterns you don't have to follow those patterns it's one of the beautiful things about social media and the Beautiful things about the internet is you can kind of choose what you follow I mean you could go and just

147:20follow negative stuff all day long you could concentrate on negative and you could be one of those people who goes on Twitter and just bombs on people and shits on people all day and that that's going to be your point of focus but you're not going to get any better at anything doing that you're not going to have a better life you're not going to feel better you're not going to be happier you're not going to spread any any anything beneficial anything positive to anybody but you can take a choice to not do that and a lot of times you need to see that someone else has done that in order to help you do that I hope you're inspiring others cuz you're kind of inspiring me right now like thinking about how many identity projects that you led even though they were maybe not even been obvious to you because you've gone and used this platform to do these things I think it's

148:06highly honorable of you that you use this platform so that I can talk about these things about BLM black lives matter and about police reform and things like that that's like the the typical like prototype of what what we're talking about you you were doing great work by by doing that well it's helping me a lot too honestly I mean I think everyone's life is a constant Journey you're you're unless you just stay sedentary and you don't go anywhere and you don't take any new data your your life is all about re-evaluating the way you think or evaluating it or enhancing it or adding to it or removing some negative aspects of the way you think and one of the best ways that I found to do that is expose myself to interesting people like you or like any of the other people that I've I've had the pleasure and the opportunity to to talk to on this podcast you get this I

148:57mean I've had three-hour conversations with 800 well not 800 people but 800 times and having those kind of conversations it forces you to think it forces you to like one of the things that Eddie Wong was saying that really resonated with me is that he likes to write he writes every day and one of the things that the reasons why he likes to write right is it makes him solidify his own thoughts he thinks about his own thoughts and it really sort of like allows him to really really kind of examine them and and go in depth as to how he really truly feels about something and really get a a cleaner perspective instead of just I think a lot of people me included I've been guilty of this in the past we operate on momentum we just get a path you're on it for some whatever reason and then you just sort of stuck and you just sort of behave that way and think that way and

149:51you don't ever examine it you don't and writing allows you to really pause and look at that podcasting does the same in a lot of ways it allows me to pause and really think about some of the things that I've attached myself to or not attached myself yeah and it's recorded you're never going to be able to hide it's not just recorded this shit's live right so it is you it is it's you it's who you are you know and or for good or for bad and you get to see negative aspects of the way you think and the way you talk and then you get to see the repercussions from those and you get to consider like why did I think that way was I just was it just a knee-jerk reaction was it just uh you know was I tired that day was I not respecting the medium was I uh not respecting the power of these thoughts and these conversations most likely a combination of all those things but through the

150:44personal growth that has uh been afforded me by the podcast it's helped me in as much as it's helped anybody it's it's helped me tremendously and having these kind of conversations with people like you are a giant part of that oh thanks I I don't know how to take that kind of stuff never really into that uh but I don't know I can't I can't sing your Praises enough for having that kind of mentality and being uh the alpha Mal that is vulnerable and lets other people see that it's okay th those things are important uh it's okay for for the tough guys to let their guard down and be introspective and to be people that are willing to help and reach out it's it's entirely admirable um like chank is another person that I've gotten close to you've had him on here right Jen J say his name right yeah I'm glad that you say it right he he jokes about that how like people that

151:38have known him his whole life say right it's Jank like a Jay right yeah well The Young Turks what what they've done is they've developed this sort of alternative media platform that's outside of the mainstream media but it has arguably as much impact when you look at what they've been able to do on YouTube and they're one of many you know there's a lot of people that are pushing unusual ideas on the internet um The Amazing Atheist is another one I've really enjoyed a lot of his stuff lately um TJ is a really bright guy and he puts out some really interesting wellth thought out videos you got a p or something what was that what's I giv aite address just about CH we got Jen Jesus he's I got to go see him this week just don't call him chank so uh putting our money where our mouth is we got locked up this year you guys got locked up yeah in DC arrested Jam got the pictures of it Jen did too

152:36you got arrested together yeah we got arrested together what you get arrested for for sitting in for democracy spring is that uh serving or protecting um does that would have been serving do you um do well you yeah do you guys get um AR arrest records for that okay so I you still get in Canada I guess Jen does a real legit arrest record um so I fought it because it was in DC right cuz it's close to you it's close to me I can fight it so they ended up dropping the charges on me okay um we had got a phone call that there was no way they were going to put me a chance to speak in a uh recorded public forum like that what they said yeah yeah yeah so they Dr what were you protesting the getting money out of politics so um we're not people like Jen and I are not just talking out of our asses on this we we mean it um and so we went and we participated in the March and got

153:36arrested in Washington DC and why did you get arrested for what was the charge uh like loitering or some uh I forget how they completely worded it and so it's because you were protesting in a public area and blocking traffic or something that's what they said uh there was nobody trying to go in or out of the capital and that's where we were right but they wouldn't be able to if they did want to because you guys are in way oh okay well that's kind of loitering right but that does get attention to what you're trying to say it's the largest mass arrest in DC history it's was like uh 200 and some of us that got arrested the first day wow like 450 overall um so we have we have some good pictures of it if Jamie the website's not working I don't it's Maywood photography Ma a e w o o d oh that that's my fault I'm sorry um so what were the cops like when they arrest you

154:28they like I'm sorry this is we got to arrest you or they being dicks some of them were still being dicks unbelievably considering it was uh when you see this crowd so they were treating you like an actual criminal even though it's pretty obvious you're trying to campaign against something that's something that nobody really thinks is a good thing money in politics right the lieutenant said Hey I'm GL that you guys are out here doing that this really the lieutenant said that holy but these are capital police um I've sang their praises before uh but they don't face a lot so they had there's there's Jen so that's uh Captain Ray Lewis he also was arrested he wears his uniform to he's a retired Philadelphia uh police officer and he wore his uniform and got arrested in his uniform Jesus CHR they took his sign threw it away and they Char what does it say what does the sign say

155:23massive civil scratched out disobedience is next warning massive disobedience is next what does that mean well because I'm uh assuming what he means by this but right now the disobedience is civil right right so we're protesting we're doing things like this but like I'm flabbergasted that the black community in these neighborhoods hasn't really said enough is enough yet like the idea that we they have children and family members dying in these streets well they're probably scared to get arrested man they are but I I just there there's a Breaking Point that's coming and that's that's what he's trying to say is and what I've tried to to hold on don't scroll what's up with the dude with the nose ring the going on there oh he's a uh he's an actual uh I can't remember what tribe he's from and he participates in a lot of these things and what about the dude with the musket

156:16scroll down there j i I don't know him I think he has a side I don't know that is it's wood it looked like a musket when I was only seeing the tip of it what yeah the tip of the I thought it was a just a musket a tip never just a tip don't fall for that uh I don't know what you're saying dollars in what is that scroll down dollars in politics SC scratch out so it's essentially just a bunch of people standing in a place where the government didn't think you should be able to stand right and and we got of keep drawing attention to this money in politics cuz I really think that's the root I mean it's the root of everything can't end the drug war because of this we can't right move anything forward we can't do you know police reform because of this democracy spring they're calling it yeah that was the one day different groups did different days so it was a

157:02whole week long this was the the first day was the biggest day and you'll have me in handcuffs at the end eventually H but so now how how long did you have to stay in jail for just the night oh how annoying people snoring it wasn't a real jail there were so many people that it was just like they were keeping us in like animal pens it felt like uh so we would just be like penned off like they they took us to a different place and had like uh like fences like portable fences and they would like P you like so it's not like you really couldn't get out you could get out if you wanted to it was just I guess I could have if I really wanted to I wasn't going to go for for an escape charge this is so silly it seems like so such a dumb way to handle it everybody's smiling getting cuffed Jesus Christ so as you see it's a pretty white crowd white as so I think that helps on

157:55the way the the police act it's like some people just psych to be hanging out with Jen yeah you know it's weird so I mean that's an example of another thing I mean you can go and you can participate in these things so if that is a passion of yours like that's another identity thing that we have you can you can go and these groups there's all these groups out there and like you're saying that these people feel lost and they're turning to to other things but we have all these things out there and and if you don't have one just create one like they're out there like the tyt family like your family like black lives matter we have tons of of movements going on that that you can do something positive with no matter who you are okay so tell us one more time what's the name of this podcast and when do you hope this thing is going to start so name of the podcast

158:45the the radio right now is called it's called radio revolver and that's just the umbrella why radi revolver guns yeah we had that play So revolving door like a prison cell is how I I envisioned it they wanted to use like a gun logo and I was like no no no no no you can't do that radio revolver podcast Network all right so here are some of the friends that I've made that are activists around and there will definitely be ones that are in there we were doing a serious show when we took that picture and so the donating is uh for equipment and for rental space and all we have space was donated by sod it's a basement of his house all blocked off and and done so that's not an we have that done um so what do you need uh we're still just getting the last bit of equipment U we have some of the local artists painting the walls now oh great and and so we're close we I mean like

159:29maybe $3,000 and I'm and and we're we're set well let me know when you guys launch and I will absolutely tweet it out let everybody be aware of it the first one is going to so again part of the part of the thing that we're going to do is we just take advantage of of me right and the publicity mhm so the first one is going to be a joint project with undisclosed who is uh affiliate with serial story and all and and that one's going to be U misconduct which is going to be one of the series we have so there's going to be multiple podcasts okay one of them is going to be misconduct and then you'll have like the photography one or you have a public health one like Doc Lawrence Brown is is going to do a public health one so you're essentially building like a whole station whole station okay great right and so everybody that wants in you know as long as you learn what you're doing

160:18and everything you'll be able to to have your voice heard in whichever manner you want that's a great idea because you know this is one of the easiest ways to get a message out and a message that you know you you when you hear someone talk man and you you hear their words and you get to know them through the hours and hours of conversations you get to know them in a really deep intimate way you're a shining example I mean you walk around and everybody to you they know youd people hug me I don't even know I'm like hey what's up how you doing right so the first one's called misconduct which is going to be a series and I'm going to do the first one and it's going to be uh the killing of Freddy gray so we're what we're going to do for that is go through the story and when we first go through the story the first episode will start and we start telling what

161:02happened like so these cops are in this neighborhood and Freddy gray is in this and then we go but wait why does it look this way and then so like somebody like Doc Brown will come in and we're go over through the history of segregation how how the neighborhoods are formed the way they are why the cops are all why the citizens are all black and and we'll go explain that story and then the next episode I'll start over again start telling the story and when we'll hit the next hurdle which will you know be something like well why are they going after him for the drugs you why are they chasing him so so then we'll break down the history of the laws and why they why that is done the way it is what policing philosophies have led to this until we finish out the entire story and everybody can understand the Nuance to what happened behind the murder fretty Grant all right man well listen thank

161:52you very much appreciate it and we'll definitely want to do that thing with my friend Justin y if he's down we'll have a a gun control ho down up in this I'm certainly down and uh we'll definitely promote your podcast as soon as it launches radi revolver so go to gofundme.com RoR revolver go and contribute and you can follow Michael on Twitter Michael Wood Jr is that what it is on Twitter Michael awood J Michael awood Jr on Twitter thank you appreciate always good see we'll do it again definitely thank you folks we'll be back soon bye big kiss m