Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 404 - Officer Ryan Tillman

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Ryan Tillman is a Los Angeles, CA police officer and the founder of Breaking Barriers United, a company centered around improving relationships between police departments and the community, equipping and properly training police officers, as well as mentoring and leading children, teens, and young adults. Ryan grew up distrusting police officers and would have never imagined pursuing a career in law enforcement. He eventually graduated from the police academy as the 2nd highest performer in his class, and is now a seasoned police officer, entrepreneur, and family man. Reach out to Officer Ryan Tillman on IG: https://www.instagram.com/breaking_barriers_united/ Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Support the show by visiting our sponsors! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project podcast hosted by Mark Bell, co-hosted by Nseema Iyeng and myself, Andrew Zaragoza. This episode is recorded on June 26th and it is a phenomenal episode. Today's guest is an amazing man. He is a mentor, a police officer in Southern California, the one and only Ryan Tillman. Ryan, I mean, he was so charismatic, but he is an active police officer. So we were able to ask him some of the questions that we have been asking ourselves amongst just ourselves on the podcast. We have no experience in that department. So it was amazing having somebody that is in this line of work every single day. So we talked a lot about defunding the police,

funding the police, how much training the police receive. Again, because he's somebody that's in this line of work, he was able to answer everything. And I don't want to say he has all the answers. No one definitely has all the answers. But what he has to say is really compelling. It's impactful. And I think everyone's going to find a ton of value in today's episode. And like I said, we were able to ask him just questions that just like a general average Joe person would have, you know,

something as silly as like, how hard is it to handcuff somebody? Or do police officers always have to shoot to kill? Can't they just like aim for the arm or the leg? Again, it just, just really just an incredible conversation. I know you guys are going to get a ton of value out of this episode. Um, so if you guys do please reach out to us, reach out to Ryan. I will have his, um, social media links down in the description down below.

And lastly, before I get out of here, uh, if you guys haven't taken advantage, you probably either have just ran out of time or you have like a day or two. Right now, MarkBell.com is still offering a free 30-day trial. But the only issue is you have to do it before the end of June. And I don't have a calendar in front of me. But when this episode drops, you may have either just till the end of today or not. I'm not sure. But either way, MarkBell.com is a paid service.

And there is now two different tiers. But if you sign up right now before the end of June, you'll gain access to the entire website for absolutely free. You guys get to train with Mark. You guys get to train with Team Super Training. Again, a lot of people wish they could come visit Super Training Gym. Well, this is your opportunity to have Super Training Gym come to you. You guys can train and do exactly everything that the team does. Um,

you know, all every single day here at the gym. It's really, that's just really freaking cool. But again, it's, um, it's absolutely free,

but you have till the end of June to, to sign up and register. So just go to mark bell.com, sign up and you gain access to the entire website for absolutely free. That's it for me. Um, I know you guys are going to love this episode because we did. So, ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy this episode with Ryan Tillman.

Andrew Herbert has like one of like, it's so beat up, but he has like a really cool notebook. Like, I mean, it is like weathered. It is. It's like a disgusting old hat. Yes. Yes, it is. Some people really embrace like the hat just being super gross yeah i have three right now that are super gross i had a hat that like it was it's so gross it like turned into like it like looked like leather at a certain point said so much like gross shit in that you put it down on like the ground it starts walking away yeah you guys ever wash your hats i don't know it's a weird thing how do you wash a hat put it in the washer and then hang dry it no yeah washer or i heard some people put it in the uh

dishwasher dishwasher yeah i've never heard about that throw it in the microwave so it kills all the nasty stuff kills all the bacteria yeah then combusts when it gets in there yeah now the the last time a hat made its way into the uh the washer it came back like a like a baby hat like it there's no way it's gonna fit on my head now washed it on hot man it's basic i don't think i'm cold i'm too cheap to use hot water heck no i don't know i don't know about all that. I had that happen to a shirt one time. Oh, lucky.

I was like, this is why I can't have nice things. It was like a nice shirt from Nordstrom. Oh, nice shirt. I was like, oh my God. Andy's like, you should return it. I'm like, could you? That'd be so good. I'm like, could you imagine me going in and being like, hey.

Hey, throw me a couple of those mine bullets. Something happened to this shirt. Here you go. No. I'm not really going to throw it at you. Come on, man. For some reason, when somebody throws you something, it automatically hits you right in the dick. It's like a heat-seeking missile.

That's where they aim. Yeah, just heads in that direction. Yeah. No matter what's going on. All right. What's where they aim. Yeah, just heads in that direction. Yeah. No matter what's going on. All right. What's going down today? Your panties. Yes.

If you still wear panties, you have a problem. You shouldn't be wearing them anymore? No, man. Panties are... It's just like 80s. Just underwear are just out, period? Free balling Friday? Or just women's underwear?

Either free balling or boxers. It is free balling Friday. Can period free ball just women's underwear free balling or boxers it is a free balling friday can women free ball they can free flap maybe say maybe some of them can free ball who knows we don't know what we're dealing with anymore it's 2020 we don't know what's going on riding in the wind are we allowed to turn 2020 like in and like get like a refund i'd like to do that I'd like to do that. I'd like to do that. Fucking Kobe Bryant, man. That helicopter thing.

It just, you know? Starts to see you off on the wrong foot. Yeah, bad vibes from then on. I'm trying to ignore it, still living my life, but it's... Just trying to pretend none of it ever happened? Not necessarily that, but just not saying, oh, because of this, I'm going to stop doing everything I'm doing. But it still has roadblocked me from doing certain things. We had our wedding, but we couldn't actually go get our license or whatever.

So we're going to have essentially two wedding dates. You're still a free man. So I found a loophole y'all so escape yeah yeah all your money's still yours that's awesome that's right all of it very what's left but yeah anyways yeah it has been a rough year, but we're doing our best, you know, which is all you can do. Let me send out this link. Wham, wham. Alrighty. Trying to get some police on here.

Hear things from, you know, hear things from another perspective. Directly from the source yeah and i believe i mean he's on the same wavelength as like what we've been saying about like having like a good like representation on you know the police side to be able to communicate with the the uh the communities and stuff and you know that's kind of like what his programs have been all about is like kind of putting a face to the badge type of thing as opposed to just us versus them which is really cool yeah more of that stuff needs to happen but on a bigger scale because it's cool if it happens on like you know certain individuals do it but if it's not

widespread you get a lot of wild stuff happening like for example and again i'm not in favor of the defund the police argument but apparently in north carolina some uh this is stuff that fuels that whole defund the police fire right so over over air some cops are overheard saying we're just gonna go out and start slaughtering them niggers. I can't wait. God, I can't wait. That's their officers in North Carolina. Again, those are the micro situations that are fueling this whole defund the police

fire and it gets people enraged. Alright, we can hear you. Can you guys hear me? Hold on one second. Let me get this onto my... Alright, can you guys Can you hear me? Yeah, we got you. Hold on one second. Let me get this onto my – all right. Can you guys hear and see me? Yeah, we got you. Perfect.

Oh, shoot. Let me change that. Oh, there we go. All right, perfect. I'm good now. Yeah, great to have you on the show today. It's great to get different perspectives on what's going on in the world. And I'm sure you've been hit up recently

by a lot of people to hop on their podcast. I saw you on Bedros Koulian's show as well. I guess first off, let's kind of dive into just some of your background, if you could share some of your background with us and we'll get that out on the table first. Yeah, no, for sure, man man thanks first and foremost for having me on guys like my phone is being crazy lately man but uh but for good reasons man so uh my name is ryan tillman founder of breaking barriers united uh which is forming a bridge the gap between law enforcement the community um reason it is is because uh i am a police officer by day work 40 hours a week full time here in the lovely city of Chino.

And I have, you know, I'm married to, you know, my beautiful wife, Kimberly, and then I have three lovely kids, man. So I wear a lot of hats right now and been astronomically busy, man, but for good reasons. That's great. What made you start the what made you start the organization? great. What made you start the, um, what made you start the organization? So you got, uh, to go back a little bit about me, um, you know, I had no aspiration to being a police officer at all. I was actually, you know, harassed by some police officers growing up. My family members were harassed by police officers growing up. And so, you know, moving forward in life, I got married to my wife, Kimberly, and she got pregnant with our first child. And when that happened, I was like, you know, I need to do something else with my life.

At the time, I was selling insurance. I worked at Abercrombie & Fitch, which I hated. And so I started praying about it. And, you know, this opportunity came to light where my dad's friend was a captain for a police department, local police department. He was like, hey, Ryan, you should get involved in law enforcement i was like no i'm not working for the man i'm not about to be a pig like like negative that's not about to happen so i prayed about it and the door just kind of flew open from there and then once i got into law enforcement that was right around the time that ferguson i had happened and i was like man like this is crazy

like is this what i really signed up to do? So I had a conversation with my mother. My mother was like, you know, she was thinking about the whole thing. And she was like, I wonder if like, you know, after thinking about the situation, I was wondering like, would my son have done the same exact thing as the officer in Ferguson? And she was like, after thinking about it, you know, I know my son's a loving son, a loving husband, a loving dad. And he probably would have did it just because he needs, he wants to make a home safely to his family at night. So that kind of got my will spinning i was like you know the only reason my mom sees it that way is because it's her pumpkin like she mom always calls her pumpkin she's like her punk is a police officer now so she sees things differently so that got me

uh going on this whole concept of breaking barriers united which was to bridge that gap between law enforcement and community by allowing people to see the human behind the badge, but also exposing the bad behind the badge. Yeah, that's great. What are some of your thoughts about, you know, like police officers having more training, police officers having less training? We've been talking about that quite a bit on the show, you know, defunding the police, giving more funding to the police and trying to find kind of a happy medium between those two things well you just said it right now man what's going on in our country and the reason we're having so

many issues is because there's no balance right now like there's literally no balance you're there you have two polar extremes yeah one is like hey defund them and abolish them and you got the other that's saying no we're not trying to change so you know i'm 33 years old i've always liked to consider myself innovative an outside of the box thinker and so i i kind of really think that we can do both at the same time like you know we have this you know police officers are afraid of this term of police reform sometimes and it's like we shouldn't be afraid of it like we should always be trying to go forward we should always of it. Like we should always be trying to go forward. We should always be trying to change.

We should always be trying to adapt and do things better. And so that's all police reform is, is figuring out how we can do our jobs better. At the same time, you know, when we talk about defunding the police, I understand it. I've read many articles about it, about how it really means reallocating funds, which I'm all about reallocating funds.

But at the same time, we got to be smart with the reallocation of those which i'm all about reallocating funds but at the same time we got to be smart with the reallocation of those funds you know we having some technical difficulties today it's uh people people trying to censor us that's what's going on whenever you get to the meat it just got good right right when it got good yeah everyone starts to pick up well that that caller yesterday said that we were on rogan's level so now obviously we got a target on the back yeah see what they're trying to do to us yeah i love the fact that he uh you know there's not enough people that really take action and uh i could admit to being one of those people as well i try to take as much as much action towards things as i can

but how often do you find yourself kind of complaining about a particular situation, saying something and, and then really not doing anything about it. I like the fact that he started this organization to, you know, build up stronger relationships within the community. And I think that,

man, that could be, that could be huge. You know, if there's, if there's better relationships between the police officers and the actual community itself, I can't imagine how, how that can't help. I mean, You know, if there's if there's better relationships between the police officers and the actual community itself.

I can't imagine how that can't help. I mean, just imagine growing up and just having better feelings about the police officers, period, because they're at your little league baseball games or they're, you know, at, you know, picnics or rallies or whatever you want to call it. You know, they're just kind of part of the community. I think that could be great. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely necessary that they just widespread community involvement is, would help their, uh, their message get across to people. I've always been scared of cops.

Yeah. Yeah. Same here. I mean, my brother got in a lot of trouble, you know, so I saw a lot of stuff happen with him and I was like, you know, I just don't want any part of that. And then I just remember them coming to parties and stuff and like breaking them up. You know, the popo are coming. The cops are coming.

Like, you know, it was always like a negative. It wasn't never a positive. It was like the cops are on their way. It's going to be cool. Yeah. But I think it's a big part of it also. It's just like it's what you see. You know what I mean? Like as far as social media and TV is concerned, you a lot of times just see the aggressive side of police.

Whereas like, of course, that's not the majority. But that's what you see. That's what I see. It's you got to be careful. Or watching the show Cops. You know, they're not going to show like just pulling somebody over for a ticket, you know, and they're, you know, they got they they have a show. They have they're trying to have something entertaining. Yeah. Meanwhile, they follow Ronnie Coleman around for a few days and they show him and he just goes to a few homes and like, what's going on here? few days and they they show him and he just goes to a few homes and he's like what's going on here and he's super nice and he's you know he's he just kind of shakes his head and he's like man

you know we have to deal with a lot of you know weird crazy stuff but like literally really nothing you know nothing of nothing major happens it's uh things that are unfortunate but just calls that that he has to like respond to in between eating his chicken. Here I am eating chicken again and barbecue sauce. Yeah, I believe that they're, like, taking cops off the air now, like the show or whatever. I don't think it's going to be around anymore. And then I don't know if you guys saw it, but there was the video of, like, I think it was maybe just like a security camera but like of someone's house um they were uh they showed like their son or their kid you know a little black kid playing

basketball and then they saw a cop rolling by and he kind of like hides behind a car and it was like natural like obviously it's twitter so there's gonna be backlash on all sides you know so some of the people were like see like this is how like serious it is and other people are like well if you taught him not to be afraid of the cops by doing anything wrong he wouldn't feel that way but even i remember like never really doing anything bad and being like oh shit there's cops like so yeah i automatically thought i was doing something wrong well i mean if you're driving and a cop's behind you you you're guilty like even though you have done nothing wrong your tags are even up to date got your seat belt on you still feel like ah shit i'm i'm going 47 in a 45 right now or whatever it

may be you know my music always goes down i always slow down just a little bit i remember uh always like taking my hat off like whenever we're driving like if it's me and a buddy or something like oh shit i don't know why it's just natural like stop chewing gum just nope put your hat on straight or take it off completely yeah yeah it'll be interesting to see um you know if ryan profiles people you know in his in his you know day-to-day is his profile a particular car you know, in his, in his, you know, day to day, his profile, a particular car, you know, his profile. I mean, sometimes it's, uh, might be kind of age related, you know, sometimes it might

be race related. Sometimes, you know, um, it's all like, it's all just interesting stuff to, to communicate about, talk about. I would, I mean, I would think you, you can not like, or can't. I don't know how you, I don I would think you can not. I don't know how you avoid it. There's a car doing donuts in a neighborhood and then you look and

there's an old Honda Civic and then next to it there's a Corvette that's rear wheel drive. Obviously, you're going to be like, oh, that's the one. Sorry about that no worries we should we shouldn't have any more lapses anymore man my again trying to trying to work on the fly like i always do no problem at all man yeah we appreciate it man thank you so yeah we were leaving off with you talking about you know reallocating funds and kind of where to put

them and what are the best uh kind of options yeah exactly so we talk know, reallocating funds and kind of where to put them and what are the best kind of options? Yeah, exactly. So we talk about the reallocation of these funds and it's like, you know, we've got to be careful with what we want. You know, we need officers to be better trained. That's just a reality of it. I'm a former college football player and I always like to use examples. And one of the examples I use is, you know, if you go on YouTube right now, you look at Michigan, University of Michigan, they have this new facility, which essentially like when the football players get off the field, they go to this thing called the car wash. They take their shoulder pads off and then they put them on the rack.

Then they walk through this maze of showers. And then after they get out of the showers, they go through this maze of a pool, which is cold. And the whole idea and the concept behind that is that they want to help get their bodies quickly regenerated. So that way they can be ready to go for the next day, next game all that stuff so you know why would they have something like that in place well the reason they have it in place because they want them to perform at their most optimal level so we start taking away money from law enforcement and now and which a lot of

departments right now are already strained from a training standpoint because of their budgets then how much more qualified candidates do we think we're really going to have out there patrolling our streets? So I'm all about making sure that we put money into the social economy within our communities, without a doubt. I mean, we're already doing that for my department. We talk about putting money into homelessness and trying to give them resources as opposed to trying to arrest our way out of a problem. You're never going to arrest your way out of a problem, but I think we've got to be smarter with where we're getting the money from. I love what you said there. That's really interesting. You know, if you think about the University of Michigan, one of the bigger college football programs in the country. But there's many schools in the country that are

massive, you know, kind of quote unquote football factories like that. And there's millions of dollars spent on their weight room. And there's millions of dollars spent on their weight room. And there's millions of dollars, you know, that go into the recovery of these athletes from the high level stress of being a student athlete and of being a high level college football player. So it makes a lot of sense that they have stuff set up for these athletes to, you know, repair every single day. Meanwhile, back at the old police department, you know, you might have a curl bar, you know, repair every single day. Meanwhile, back at the old police department, you know, you might have a curl bar, you know, you got an easy curl bar, you got some weights that go up to 40 pounds. And there's not really an emphasis on, you know, fitness, not really emphasis on,

hey, guys, let's figure out a way like just imagine, I don't know what most police departments look like. But I would just guess that they don't have like a hyperbaric chamber or they don't have a sauna. They don't have, you know, some of these access to some of these things that or maybe even just have yoga, you know, in-house or something. And I'm sure that there's some programs that that maybe do some things like that. But that would be fantastic because, man, how do you de-stress yourself? I don't have any idea what it's like to be a police officer, but I can, I've seen some shitty stuff in my life, but not to the level of what a police officer has seen. And out of the things that I've seen, you know, seeing like a dead body and seeing like my dad in the hospital for 75, 80 days with

open wounds and like crazy, disgusting stuff that you can't block out of your head. I still have trouble till this day with those memories, with some of those, some of those things. So I can't even imagine what it would be like to see that day in and day out, see little kids, you know, dead from a car accident. People, you know, you know, fires and just all kinds of people being you know shot or or you have to god forbid you got to kill somebody i mean damn yeah we've had a couple of times i mean i've been on a lot of heinous stuff uh from drowning babies to crazy you know to death investigations i mean we had we had a situation where five teenagers burned in a car a few years

ago on their way home and you can smell you know the burning flesh and hear the screams so you know i was at a city council meeting a couple weeks ago actually and one of the girls was talking about this whole defunding the police because it was a large turnout and one of the things that they were saying was is you know look at their budgets they have this they have a gym in their own department and and why are we paying for them to have a gym? And I'm thinking in my mind, it's like, you know, you got to understand something. Like, the better, the more officers are in shape and fit, the less they're likely to utilize their deadly force because they're not going to become over-reliant on the tools on their belt. But, you know, the hands that they have or the feet that they have. So I just did a podcast with Henner and Gracie the other day.

We're talking about if we can just improve, you know, our defensive tactics through, you know, whether it be Brazilian Brazilian jiu jitsu, whatever it may be. Then now we decrease the odds of us using lethal force, you know, because we've got to go to our belt. And so we've got to change this way of thinking. But again, if we were to go to something like that, that requires money. So anything there needs to be more money to get officers doing that as opposed to less money. So, you know, because I'm telling you now, most officers are not going to go out on their own and try to get into some type of BJJ program or something like that just because they can't afford it. It's an expensive thing to do. So, you know, I understand we're in a unique position. For example, I was I had I had the pleasure of having dinner with Dak Prescott the other night.

And so we're talking. And as me and Dak were sitting down talking, we were he was that he asked a question like, you know, do police officers or they should, you know, be able to get incentivized to go to a gym or get some type of discounted membership at a gym or whatever it may be. to go to a gym or get some type of discounted membership at a gym or whatever it may be and there that is true for some places like a lot of times it's not though just because in our code of ethics there's something in the code of ethics that says we shall not accept gratuities which again because we're held to a higher standard i get it i understand that but from dax eyes dax like man like i get hooked up all the time because i'm the starting quarterback at the dallas cowboys you know how is it any different i was like you know what then that again it goes to the perception of it when somebody sees a police officer taking a discount at a local store or you know a starbucks or whatever maybe is looked at is looked frowned upon because it's

like hey he shouldn't be he's here to serve us we're paying him so again i'm the main one i tell people all the time like you know you know, I am here to serve you. Yes, I do work for you. Yes, I have every obligation to put you before my own needs. But at the same time, we got to be realistic with the expectations that we're putting on our police officers, because a lot of them are unrealistic expectations. And they're not taking into account, like you said, the totality of everything that we go through on a day-to-day base, especially trauma. That I don't understand because we have military discounts, you know, like military discounts are a thing everywhere, yet police officers don't get a

discount to a gym. Yeah. And you know, and some police officers, some police departments, they allow you to, like, they don't really, they're not big on enforcing that, but it's, if you look at our code of ethics, it says law enforcement officers, we will not accept gratuities. And so now it becomes a matter of what department wants to enforce that and what departments don't want to. And I understand some of it. I mean, some of it is like, you know, you accept gratuities from some person, and then you end up pulling over their mom or their dad or their cousin or them. And then they're like, well, hey, man, I hooked you up all the time. So, you know, you should hook me up now so i understand that side of it but at the same time we it shouldn't be as

scrutinized as much but we could only go there if we raise our standard as police officer because i don't want the the officer that shouldn't be a police officer accepting gratuities because again he's a tarnish to me so you know it's a it's a you know it's a give and take we got to be able to internally say hey we're going to raise our standards. So that way the public knows they have the best of the best serving them. But at the same time, I would love for the community to understand, like, hey, these guys got some crazy jobs. Let's give them a little bit more grace and mercy than we're giving them right now. Let's go over, like, a little bit of, like, procedural stuff.

Like, how hard is it to handcuff somebody? Like, to me, it seems like it's a very difficult task. like procedural stuff, like how hard is it to handcuff somebody? Like to me, it seems like it's a very difficult task. Do you think that that should be looked into more and maybe there could be some other way to subdue somebody than to get, I mean, it seems like once you have them handcuffed, it seems like you got them pretty good. But, you know, trying to handcuff somebody seems like it'd be very difficult, even if they, even if the person wasn't crazy strong that you're trying to handcuff somebody seems like it'd be very difficult, even if they even if the person wasn't crazy strong that you're trying to handcuff. So what's so difficult with handcuffing is actually nothing to do with the actual cuffing itself.

What makes it so difficult is the unpredictableness of the person we're dealing with, because when we go to handcuff somebody, we don't know if they're going to try to fight or they're going to try to flight, which is obviously flee from us. We don't know if they're going to try to fight or they're going to try to flight, which is obviously flee from us. And so with that being said, you know, one of the, I've heard before, one of the most dangerous things in, in our society is human nature. Cause you get, it's, it's the most unpredictable thing. Human nature is by far the most unpredictable thing. And so what makes handcuffing difficult is you don't know what's going to happen the moment you touch that person. And so that's one of the things that I, we, I'm trying to look at is like, when I'm going to go put that first hand on them, how are they going to, are they going to tense up or are they going to be relaxed? And so once you figure out, okay, Hey, they're going to be relaxed. Now there is a

technique that goes into it. And then hopefully you can, you know, go through with that handcuffing technique appropriately. But if they do tense up now, that's what happened. Now you're like, okay, well, what happens next? How are you going to respond to that next? So we got to realize a few things with the handcuffing specifically is that training across the country is way different. We talk about police reform. And I've always said, you know, we want to do some like legitimate police reform. Let's start with the training that we have across the board. I honestly think that the same standard, it should be the same same standard if you're a police officer in California than if you're in Timbuktu, Idaho than if you're in New York.

Right now, if you go from city to city, county to county, state to state, you're going to see different training and tactics no matter where you go, just because that's kind of how it's set up. In the state of California, we do have something that's called the California Post, which is the police officer standardized training. So you're going to get a level of consistency. But even from department to department, you're still going to have some type of differences. And so those are some of the things to consider is, well, if we are going to do some type of police reform, well, what's that police reform going to look like?

And I think we need to start with the standardized training. Therefore, going back to the handcuffing, you know that that handcuffing, no matter where you go, they're trained the same exact thing and they're trained exactly how to do it. You know, I'm curious about this because, um, especially since we were just talking about training here, we just had a military guy, Casey Mitchell on, and also heard kind of the same things, uh, sentiments from, I don't know if you heard the Jocko Willink episode on, on Rogan recently, but they were talking about how, um, about how it seems that I don't know how much training officers get on a year to year basis, how much they go back to training, sensitivity training, et cetera. But it seems that like we, there seems to be an echo of they're not getting

enough training often. It's like they get training and then they don't come back to it. Now, I don't know. Is that a truth? Do they really not really go back to training for a long time and they're just on the job all the time? Or is there any re-education on you need to be doing this? You need to be following this protocol. How does that look? Because you said it's not the same across the board, but is there any of that around at all? Yeah. So my department actually does a really, really good job as far as training. As a matter of fact, training is probably one of our core principles to our department. And so every four months, every four months, we, we have some type of training that we go through,

whether it's defensive tactics, whether it's mental health training, whether it's implicit or by implicit policing, explicit and implicit biases, no matter what it is, we're always going through some level of training. But there are departments that, you know, they may do defensive tactics once a year, they may, you know, only do they might fire their firearm twice a year, they, you know, there's a lot of things that, you know, police departments aren't doing enough of. And again, that not necessarily is a knock on the police department, but a lot of it is they don't have the funding to do it because you got to realize is that even though we want officers to be more trained while officers are training, crime is still going on. So at some

point in time, because crime is still occurring in the city, it's not like you can pull all the officers out of the field at one time and say, Hey, we're all going to train on this day. You got to pull these officers in on their day off. Well, okay. you pull them in on their day off. Well, that was going to require you to pay them some overtime because now you're requiring an officer to come in on his day off and do that. Let's say you pull him in while he's working the field. Okay, well, you pull that officer in while he's on his normal day-to-day job. Well, somebody has to come in and do the training. And so you're still going to have to pay overtime. So training costs money. And so, yes, I agree.

There isn't enough training in many places. We can always train more. As a former Division I college football player, we trained all day long. I mean, so much so that it was just so redundant that it was like, man, I'm tired. Like, waking up at 5.30 in the morning, then you go do weights, then you go do speed training, and then you go to class, and then you come back

and train again. That's because they want us to perform at our best ability and they had the money to back it up well why would you not want to put the money in a profession that could potentially take your life if the training is not on par for yourself um have you felt the effects because it sounds like to me that you're very much into the training and that you take care of yourself especially being like a former athlete as well. Have you felt the effects of training take over when there's been a situation that's been a little bit crazier or kind of out of hand? Yeah, man. Without a doubt.

Let me get my daughter one second. What's up? Okay, go tell mommy. Go tell mommy. Sorry about that, man. Yeah, have you felt the effects of training i love that oh it's great because i want you guys to see man like you know we're still dad we're still humans like anybody else so um yeah no i i've definitely seen my training take over um because of that life experience i'm actually doing some consulting for a group right now and you know about building stories.

And one of the things that we're talking about as far as building stories was this idea of tribalism and that, you know, officers, you know, they they go into this tribalism mode where us versus them mentality. And, you know, and historically that's been true in many cases. But one of the things that people aren't realizing we're not taking into account is what the officer's experience is before they got into the profession, what their life experience was like. So for myself, like I said, I was, I played sports my whole life. I grew up in a good neighborhood, but it was definitely, I would say lower income to middle-class neighborhood. So a lot of my friends had single parents growing up. A lot of my friends were arrested. I've had some of my friends killed when I was in high school that were gunned down. So I got the, I got all of that stuff. And so going back to that level of training in my life experience, when I'm in this particular

situation, my threshold for fear is probably a lot higher than somebody else's threshold for fear because I've experienced it. So it is very, very important to expose officers as much as they can, because you got to realize we can't also discriminate. Like I can't discriminate you because you've never had as much life experience that I've had, you know, just because you may have grew up in a good neighborhood, just because you never were exposed to being around, you know, black people or whatever it may be. That doesn't necessarily say, okay, you know, you're not qualified to be to fit this job.

Unless you make it that way. But again, that's probably never going to happen. We live in the United States of America. They, we want to fight for freedom. So at the same token is like, you know, we've got to be able to find this balance. So for me, of course, my training always kicks in. I'm not as big as y'all. I'm not as swole as y'all, man. Y'all, y'all, I'm not messing with y'all. But what I will say is that a lot of my instincts, that instinctual, you know, training kind of kicks in from whether it be from what I learned at the department or whether it be what I learned on the football field or whether it be from what I learned in the neighborhood when we were getting shot at leaving a graduation party. That level of training kicks in when I'm doing my job.

I'm kind of interested to know, have you ever had a major run in with somebody who's really well built? had a major run-in with somebody who's really well built like somebody who's who's like super jacked because i've just you know i just kind of uh wonder like uh if people that like exercise a lot even have enough energy to like put out like extra amounts of hatred uh beyond what beyond what they do in the gym you know oh without a doubt man and those guys, and that kind of goes back to the point of our mouthpiece is probably the most valuable tool we have. Like our mouth is by far your way out. Yes, exactly. Man, I'm not dumb. Like when I go when I talk to somebody big, like, I'm just real with them. I'm like, look, man, like, I'm not trying to fight you straight up. I'm not trying to fight you. If I have to fight you. I'm not going to lie. I got tools on my belt that I will have to use. And I'm not trying to use those, man. Let's just talk this out. There's probably a misunderstanding. And so I never forget, man.

I was on a call probably a few years ago. And we went on and this guy was not getting out of the car. He was this, you know, former military guy. I think he was a former Marine. And he was pretty jacked. And so he was knocked out marine and he was he was pretty jacked and so he was knocked out in some random girl's car and he was like the girls called us they're like hey he's not getting out of our car we don't know who this dude is he just sit in our car but we so so now we got

to go back to okay do you have a crime well yeah we have a crime this guy's not getting out of her car um you know he's drunk in public all these different things so i'm thinking like man like we can't not just walk away from this and say well sorry we're not gonna we're not gonna help you today so we gotta figure out a way so i i got my team my team got there i said look this is what we're gonna do i said i'm gonna try to talk this dude out of this car and see if we can get him to come out peacefully because then you could tell like dude was built he's in the military i don't know what type of training experience the dude has.

But at the same time, I said, this is what the plan is going to be. So we slowed it down and said, hey, look, I'm going to talk to him. If talking doesn't work, I need you to have your taser out. You're going to be on the other side. We're going to give him a few warnings. If he doesn't comply, we're going to deploy the taser. If the taser is effective, then you guys over here, we're going to pull him out from this end,

and then we're going to go into handcuffing mode. If that doesn't work, then we need a beam background ready to go just in case that's not working. So what I'm saying is, is I slowed things down, I talked through it, and then ultimately I was able to convince this guy to get out the car without having to use force on him. But sometimes we don't do that as police officers, we just are so quick to move things quicker, and then we also are not, you know, putting the necessary emphasis on our ability to communicate with people. So that's got to be one of the biggest qualities that we look for as police officers is like, how can you talk to people? How can you communicate to people?

Like I did before I did law enforcement, I told you guys I sold insurance. And man, one of the best experiences I have in my life is getting going door to door and having people tell me, no, no, no, no. Get off my get off my porch. Don't leave me alone. And so having to overcome those objections came with the level of me having to communicate. And so that's ultimately what's helped me in law enforcement as well. You know, I'm curious about this. Do you think from what you've seen, because I actually heard that you were second in your class, which is amazing. But from what you've seen in terms of what it takes to become an officer, when I hear talking about defunding the police, it seems that if that's done, number one, probably people don't want to be police officers right now because of how society views them. police officers right now because of how the, how society views them. But two, if there's a defunding potentially less pay, you're going to let lesser quality people that are going to want to even become cops. Now, if that's potentially the case, cause this is just my thought about it. Isn't it, do you think it's easy to become a police officer? Do you think it's too easy? Do you think there needs to be more stringent, you know, barriers to being able to actually do the things that you guys do? Or do you think it's already very difficult to get there as

is? Honestly, if you ask me, it's difficult. Very, very difficult. You know, could it be more difficult? Yeah, potentially. That was kind of like a two part question. So I want to go back to the first part of what you were saying, your statement, what you're talking about, if we defund the police,, you know, are we going to have the amount of people or the right candidates to get the job again, going back to balance and being realistic with ourselves, who's going to go out there and get a job that's not going to pay you much. And now you have to put your life on the line every single day where you have people that are actively out there trying to kill you. You're not going to get a lot of people and you're

going to get people that are like, hey, man, I have nothing else to do. So I might as well do this because I can't get a job anywhere else. Are those the people that we really want policing our streets? No, absolutely not. So we can't start lowering standards. I'm big on this. You know, we talk about getting more minorities into professions and I'm absolutely 100 percent on board with that. But at the same time, we've got to make sure we keep standards high across the board, whether you're white, black, Asian, whatever, no matter what it is, we can't lower our standard. Secondly, is it is very if people if every single officer went through what I had to do to become an officer is difficult. I remember we started in the academy with a class of about 68 officers and we graduate at the end at the end of the day, 42 officers. Now, granted, I've never been

in the military before. So and I know without a doubt, my level of training wasn't nowhere near to like a Navy SEAL or whatever it may be. And we still have people falling out day one, day two. But you know, what's crazy is, is in a lot of places across the country, we're getting away from stress academies. And I'm like, why? Like, no, like, that's not what we want to do. We have a stressful job. And a lot of our stresses aren't just coming externally. A lot of them are internal stressors stresses. So we need to see how people can respond under pressure. Because if you can still maintain a level calm under pressure, then that's probably somebody you want policing your streets. So I can tell you in California,

the standard to get become a police officer is pretty strenuous. You've got to go through a six-month training academy. And in that academy, depending on where you go, it's going to be very stressful. They're going to yell at you. I mean, I remember I had my first child the first week of the academy, and they loaded me up with all these memos, paperwork. I think I got about seven hours of sleep the whole week. Then throughout the academy, you're taking tests every single week uh every single week about

multiple tests and at that time like if you fail three or four tests you're out of the academy so you got that stress then they're yelling at you i mean if you don't do your boots right if you don't you know speak up if you don't have that command presence they're going to yell at you all day long then you're then you're doing physical activity you're doing physical fitness um then they pepper spray you they gas you they tase you so you go through all that and then Then you're doing physical activity. You're doing physical fitness. Then they pepper spray you. They gas you. They tase you. So you go through all that. And then once you graduate, it's not like your training stops there, at least if you're going to work at a city police department. Then you go on another six to eight months of field training, which is now you actually learning how to do the job in the field. And then so after all that's

said and done, you're still on probation for another 12 or to 18 months then after that probation is over then you still have quarterly training so the way i'm trained we get a lot of hours of training in but can i say that's the same for everybody across the board i can't you have departments right now across the country that they have people on patrol that have never even been to an academy because they need the bodies out there because they don't have any bodies yet but at the same time, they've never been to academy. So they're pinning academy. So they still planning to go, but yet they're hitting the streets without even having gone yet because they don't have the people in there to patrol the streets.

So we have a problem right now. And that's why I'm dedicated to changing perception. I'm dedicated to recruiting. I'm dedicated to expanding this education within law enforcement so people understand what the real needs of law enforcement are. I mean, like I said, going back to talking to Dak the other day, I mean, we're sitting down and he's a good brother. He's a really, really good brother. But it's just funny how, you know, there's a lot of misconceptions about the profession. And that's only because we don't do a good enough job as police departments educating our communities that we serve. don't do a good enough job as police departments educating our communities that we serve i actually had a uh a question i don't even know if there's even like a a way to answer it but like during the like boot camps and trainings and everything um you know you just said you guys are getting like sprayed and gas and all that stuff when you guys are going through the training is the um i guess

the feel kind of like hey we need to do all this because we need to be prepared for like what criminal criminals can do to us. Or is it we need to be prepared because we need to be able to protect and serve? Does that make sense? Like like is the I guess it makes total sense. OK, cool. Are they training officers to be scared? That's what it comes down to. Are we training officers to be scared or are we training them to protect and serve? Right. So, again, I would like to classify myself as a new age officer. And this is what I mean by that.

I'm somebody that was trained to respond to threats. So I'm always going to be hypersensitive. I mean, no matter what, I'm always looking around. I'm always looking at people's hands. I'm looking to see, can this person be the person that's going to kill me? Because we see those videos. And, and so I always, again, going back to the consulting that I'm doing, one of the things that they're trying to, they're trying to say is like, Hey, well, we need to get officers out of this mindset, uh, you know, officer safety first and,

and command presence because it's making them more militarized. It's making them more, Hey, you know, they don't care. And I'm like, no, you can do both. You can do both. Officer safety should always be the number one priority because you have those unknowns and whether or not it happens one time, two times, three times, it's always the unknown again, because we're dealing with human nature. Officer has to have a level of command presence. There were studies shown against people that use force against police officers. And they asked majority of them the same question. Why did you choose to fight that officer? And a lot of their responses were because they let me, because I saw in that officer's posture, I saw in their demeanor that they were going to allow me to fight them.

So yes, command presence should be drilled into that. But at the same time, I'm living proof that I can go out there and treat you with respect. I can leave with empathy. I can leave with love. I can leave with respect. But in the back of my mind, always have a plan to use force against people. So, yes, we got to be better at that within law enforcement is, hey, how do you do that? How do you lead with empathy? How do you lead with the respect? How do you lead with the love? But again, that goes back to my prior experience prior to law enforcement. I learned all that stuff growing up because, again, I grew up in a rougher neighborhood. I grew up around people. I understand the problems that people are going through.

I understand that a lot of times criminal criminality is brought on because you don't have money in the community. I understand that there's kids out there that all they know is how to be a gang member. They don't know anything else. So that allows me to slow my approach down when dealing with them and try to develop that rapport. But at the back of my mind, I always know like,

hey, if this does go south, this is exactly what I'm gonna do. So I don't think we should compromise officer safety. I don't think we should drop our command presence, but I do think we need to increase the level of training to say, Hey, look, you bet you got to be able to empathize. You got to be able to adapt to the people that you're dealing with and working on the streets. So I hope that was able to answer your question. Absolutely, man. That was great. Do you guys, you know, have a protocol in terms of like leveling up in terms of how aggressive uh the the person is um you know like uh if the person squares off with you and it's very clear

that they you know they want to fight you what's the procedure there and then also too like if someone let's say example one someone doesn't have a weapon and say example two, that someone has maybe like a knife or gun. So, yeah, we have this thing called the use of force continuum and the use of force continuum is essentially all these different levels of force on the same continuum. So you got less lethal, you got moderate lethal, you got moderate force to lethal force. You know, less lethal can be a controlling force, which is me grabbing somebody, putting them in an arm bar. You know, less lethal can be a controlling force, which is me grabbing somebody, putting them in an arm bar. That's, you know, that's what we call, you know, what we call them over here, drawing a blank now. Controlling force is called controlling force.

Then you got, again, moderate, moderate force, which may be a taser, maybe a baton. You know, we have our canines and you got the lethal force. So on that continuum, it used to be back in the day, like you had to go from step one to step two one to step two to step three to step four to step five you got to kind of gradually get to that lethal force and so i you know initially the concept the idea behind it is like yeah that only makes sense you should try to grab you know continually graduate until you got to use lethal force the problem with that is is that you can go from a situation that can go from not needing lethal force to lethal within a matter of seconds. Right. You know what I mean? And so it's not realistic to say that an officer should have tried to tase them before he went to utilizing lethal force. And so that's kind of why they kind of did away with saying, hey, we need to go gradually go from steps and just to say, hey, look, what's the perceived threat at the time?

And that's what this all comes down to is what makes it so difficult to judge one officer's action as opposed to another. You can add, let's just say it was you two on a call for service and one of you guys decided to use deadly force where the other one was like, man, I think we're good with just using the taser. But what it's going to come down to is your mindset because we all perceive threats differently. It is impossible to say that every single officer needs to perceive the exact same threat the exact same way but again it goes back to life experience man i in the black culture for me at least you know i grew

up you know in a home where you know we talk loud that it's just how we do my wife she always you know we always she always makes a joke it's like ryan why do you talk so loud and so a lot of people will perceive that as like I'm getting animated. I'm getting like all amped up. But it's not. It's just kind of how we talk with our hands. We use our hands a lot. And so when I go and talk to people like that, I can pick up on that immediately.

Like, hey, they're not a threat. That's kind of how they grew up. We just are very – we wear emotions on our sleeve. Whereas a person that wasn't around that, they may pick that up as being like, oh, shoot, like they're presenting some type of threat towards me that I need to respond to. So again, that's why I say we need to spend a lot of time on realizing where these officers are coming from. There are some departments like mine that do a phenomenal job. I mean, they go, we go above and beyond trying to get to know your mom, your dad, your cousin, your baby's

mom, your cousin's cousins, your neighbor, everybody, because we want to see these patterns of, you know, do they have the ability to make decisions? Are they frightened easily? But you have some departments that are so short staff that they got to get people in the door as quick as possible because they can't keep up with the amount of people that they're losing. Does that make sense? I know your organization, you said that you guys do, or you guys try to get officers into communities, but in other,

I don't know if they're called precincts or other, um, are they called precincts? Different locations? Depending on where you're at. So, you know, in California,

we, because we have one, although the department I work for is just one department, you just got the city police. But if you go to LAPD, yeah, you're going to have different precincts. So you'll have like the Crenshaw division or the Hollywood division, whatever it may be. You'll have different precincts. So when it comes to that, for example, Crenshaw, right?

Do these precincts try to put individuals in those areas that are familiar with the people in the area? to put individuals in those areas that are familiar with the people in the area? Like if you have a bunch of officers in Crenshaw and a bunch of like white cops from the suburbs policing Crenshaw, I feel like that's going to be a very different situation than people that might have actually been close to or from the area that are familiar with people. Do they try to place people strategically in those areas or you just get put where you put you got to deal with it? So I can only speak to what I know. What I do know is that there are police departments that have liaisons that their job is to connect with members of their own community. For example,

when I was in Dallas the other day, I just met this guy named Jaime, good, good dude. And he's a Latino liaison for the community. So his job is to go out to develop relationships with the specific group in his community because there's that relation just based off of race. However, when it comes to actually patrolling, you've got to understand, I mean, I think 75% of law enforcement, and my stats may be off on this, but 75% of law enforcement as a whole is still white males. but 75% of law enforcement as a whole is still white males. And so just by mere numbers, it's impossible to put the amount of officers we need into those precincts that reflect of other community. It's impossible because the numbers don't even make that up, which is why it's also equally important to change the perception because

we're like, well, if we want to get more minorities into these jobs, but minorities don't want to be cops because of the perception that staining the profession, then what are we going to do? That's why I'm so committed in going out there and changing the perception and whatever I do, whether it's through talking to high schools, whether it's talking to college students, whether it's talking to athletes, I got to be able to first change your perception on law enforcement. But once I do that, now it's my job to recruit you and help you get into the job. So that way, the more we do get more minorities into the profession, we can start going to an approach like that and say, hey, we want you to start going to patrol some of these streets. But at the same time, we shouldn't just start getting rid of white officers patrolling black neighborhoods because, again, if we want to break this racial barrier, we've got to be able to coexist with one another.

coexist with one another. So initially, yeah, it may be good to say, hey, let's get somebody that's a familiar face in there. But we also don't want to just rid that completely because, again, we want to be able to come together and understand our differences. I mean, I got, you know, my wife is Hispanic and Filipino. So my kids are half black or quarter Filipino, quarter Hispanic. You know, they're going to be all confused growing up throughout their life because like, well, who do I identify with? So we want to start breaking these racial barriers. We got to also be willing to coexist with one another. But at the same time, we've got to do it strategically. What do you think in terms of in terms of like some of these individual cases that we've seen arise more recently? Like what are some of the maybe common errors if you saw particular errors in like the Rashad Brooks case or in the George

Floyd case. I mean, the George Floyd case, I mean, it's just so obvious that there's a lot of errors. But like, you know, if you if you did see video and if you did watch and see a lot on these topics, what were some of the glaring things where you're like, what the hell? Like what? You know, I can't even believe that this this sort of thing just went down. Well, like you said, the George Floyd thing, without a doubt. I mean, there was no way to justify it. It was completely unjustified. There's nothing that was one of those videos where you don't need to go and get more video or you don't need to go or get more context. And it was blatantly obvious. And and one of the things that we've done in law enforcement for so many years, which I understand to an extent, because again, I'm in it, but we,

we, we try to defend, well, there's gotta be more to this. And again, a lot of, a lot of where that comes from is, is not because they're trying to back up their fellow officer in blue. A lot of it is because like officers, like, there's no way like this could just be that wrong. You know what I mean? Like, there's no way, like, that's not what i signed up for so when i watch that video it's like man like this is not what i signed up to do so there's got to be more tool because that's not what i represent so a lot of times that's where some of that comes from not all the time but some of the time the other thing that we got to be careful with doing is we got to be careful with you know elevating certain situations to the same level as the other. This is what I mean.

What happened with the Rashard Brooks one is we elevated it to almost the same level as a George Floyd case, because that's kind of what's going on right now is that, you know, everybody's so emotionally charged up. You have another black man that died at the hands of white police officers. And so that kind of leads to this level of thinking, which is where I'm going now is, okay, we have the Rashard Brooks one. Was it justified? If you ask me, I think it was justified, but could it have been prevented? And that's where we got to get to. I think it could have been prevented. I think again, going back to defensive tactics, BJJ, whatever it may be, more training on the ground. Could that have been prevented? Yes. I mean, tactically speaking,

you know, we had officers that allowed him to get back into his car and drive over to a spot so they can do a DY evaluation. I mean, the way I am is like, if I, the moment I think somebody is under the influence, I'm not letting you get back into a car. Yeah. What if he just, what if he just drove, what if he just drove away? You know what I mean? Like, that's crazy. Exactly. So we, we, so that's sort of in that, again, where I'm trained at, we would never allow that for you to get behind a wheel if we're suspecting you to be under the influence. So we could, those are things that could have been prevented, but the actual time where it came down to utilizing deadly force, the reason I think it

was justified is because you have a guy that's already showed a propensity for violence. He's already fought with officers. He's already disarmed with other tools. We are trained as police officers when using a taser, we avoid using, we avoid striking at the head because when you have electricity that's close to the brain, you can put eyes out with the darts that come out. We avoid the heart because there's this thing called the heart to dart ratio that if it gets close to the heart, it's not saying that it will cause death, but it's saying you have the potential that it could lead to some type of medical emergency. So these are all things that are, we're trained as police officers. So when you have another guy that has a taser that's using against officers, he's not thinking

about those things. So if he does make a successful connection with the officer, what if that officer collapses and hits and his head cracks the pavement or his head slams against the pavement? Now his skull is cracked. What if he is successful and now that officer, now that guy, Rashard Brooks, goes and grabs that officer's firearm? He's already showed a propensity for violence. So that's why I think at the time it was justified, but could it have been prevented? Yes. And so the reason I say we got to be careful is we got to treat every single incident involving police as an isolated incident. We can't lump them all in the same one because there's so many different things that go into it. isolated incident we can't lump them all in the same one because there's so many different things that go into it we again going back to mindset what was the mindset of that officer the moment

he pulled the trigger that's very very important because again going back to life experience well why did you feel this way again but we can't also be blind eye to the guys like george in the george floyd situation the the chauvin or chauvin, whatever his name is, because that was just pure evil. I mean, the guy didn't, the guy was, you know, you can see, you can clearly see that he had no moral, no morality, no ethics. You can tell that he probably has some preconceived prejudices against George Floyd or black men, whatever it may be, but that was just a pure evil act. So we can't turn a blind eye as officers to say, Oh, you know, no, we need more context.

We've got to be able to call a spade a spade. But at the same time, we can't be we can't be driven by political pressures in the community. And that's what we saw in Atlanta. Unfortunately, that officer was fired and prosecuted almost within a week. And so the same people that are saying disband police officers, you know, they need to be held to the standard or the same one that want the due process if they are charged with a crime. So we've got to be able to give officers due process just as much as criminals. When something like that's happening so quickly, you know, in Rashad Brooks case, you know, where he turns around and, you know, kind of aim the taser at him. I think people are like, well, he knew, you know, the officers knew that he took the taser and they may know and they might but when something like that happens so quickly uh i believe the second i'm not trying to defend anything that happened i'm just uh saying that the uh the second officer that came

onto the scene i believe is the one that shot the guy and when he uh shot him he might not have known what the hell he had because yes, they knew he took the taser, but the second officer never patted him down. The first officer did. And you know, they, they're getting secondhand information coming onto the scene. Yeah. The guy's, you know, the guy's drunk and here's the situation, but he doesn't really truly know. Obviously you're going to assume that officer number one patted him down,

but you don't really know what he has or doesn't have probably. Well, not only that, too, is the you got to think about the what's going on in the brain at that time. So when we fire a taser, a lot of people don't realize that when you make a successful connection, there's really not a lot of noise to it. But if you miss with a taser, it's like this loud pop. But if you miss with a taser, it's like this loud pop. And so you hear that pop. And what we scientifically has been proven that the body response, it takes a second and a half to perceive something. And it takes a second and a half to respond to it without you even actually realizing what actually occurred.

So you hear that pop. Well, is it safe to assume that that was a taser? Is it safe to assume it was a gun? We don't know. We got to go back to the officer's mindset. That's where the interviewing comes from. That's why I think it was wrong to say, hey, look, we're going to charge him for all these different charges right off the gate and go forward with it just because we haven't even done the full investigation on it.

We got to be careful with how we move forward on the incidents because I did a video breakdown on my Instagram a few weeks on my on my um instagram a few weeks back where these officers in vegas a couple years ago stopped this guy for stealing the cell phone and this guy was deflecting as officers are talking to him he's like why are you guys talking to me is there a reason and he's just going on and on and on so we talk about the whole mentality of just cooperate or just comply and some people hate hearing that like well why do i got to just comply or why do you say, in this situation, the guy's not complying. He's like, Hey, why do I got to do that? He's crossing his arms. You know, he's like, you know, Hey, well,

do you guys even have a reason to stop me? And so as the officer from the passenger side approaches the driver's side, that's when this guy reaches from underneath his leg, takes a firearm out and shoots both officers. He catches one officer twice, shoots him through the lung and he catches the other officer in his belt. Well, looking back at that video, what you're seeing is you're seeing this guy deflecting. You're seeing him try to figure out,

okay, how is he going to fight or flight in this moment? It's not about actually asking these officers or having a legitimate reason of why you guys stopped me. It was like, no, I know I'm in trouble. I got to try to stall as much as I can until I develop a plan for myself.

So when we say just comply, it's not because we're saying, Hey, you know, we're trying to be disrespectful to you. It's like, no, we don't know who you are. I don't know if you're going to be that guy that's going to try to shoot me, or I don't know if you're that guy that is really concerned about why you're getting that speeding ticket. Just real quick, going back to the, the Rashard Brooks situation, the three of us have never been anywhere close to anything like that.

On top of that, none of us have never been anywhere close to anything like that on top of that none of us i don't think have really done any kind of like um like uh training with shooting and stuff like that um so just in conversations like um when we we have we've talked about that on the podcast we we kind of ask a question that i hope doesn't sound too insane when I ask it, but would a police officer be a good enough shot to have seen Rashard running away and like aim for the leg? You know, it's that way. Oh, I love that question. You know, cause like we think about that. It's like, okay, that would have stopped him. He might've gotten in some trouble, but Rashard would potentially still be alive. But again,

we've never been there. So we don't know exactly. Is that even possible? So that's probably one of the number one questions I can get is how can we can't aim for the arms? How can we can't aim for the legs? Like, and I get it again. I was the same guy asking those same questions before I got into law enforcement. I was like, man, should this dude in the arm? Like we see it on TV all the time. I've seen Jack Bauer do it many times. I know y'all can do it. You know what I mean? And like we see it on tv all the time i've seen jack bauer do it many times i know y'all can do it you know what i mean and so we see these things but when you've actually

fired a firearm it's difficult as it is just doing it static i mean you sit there you stand there still you know seven yards away from that target and they say hey look put art put rounds here i can't tell you how many times either i've missed or i've seen my partners you look at they you look at their target like golly bro like where are you shooting at? And so then you induce stress into that. Now you make that a moving target. Now you talk about shooting on the move. Now that stress level goes up and it makes it even more difficult just to put rounds on the torso. So not even considering the arm or the leg. So then you also throw in other factors. Okay, well, what's behind the target? So let's just say, you know, we're on the Zoom call right now.

Let's say I was a suspect and you guys were the officers responding to me. And you guys, I presented some type of deadly force to you guys that's causing you to respond in deadly force. You guys just a few minutes ago saw my little baby girl walk behind me. Let's just say she was behind me when this is going on and you guys because of the pressure that's been put on us and saying hey look we want officers to start shooting in the arms and the legs well let's say you guys hit me but let's say it took you guys nine times to hit me well that one round that hit me is great but where are the other eight rounds so one of the things that one of the first questions that we get asked upon as officers

anytime you're involved in officer-involved shooting is one how many rounds did you shoot two are there is still any outstanding threats and three what direction did you shoot the reason i asked those three questions is because one they need to know how many shells they're looking for to make sure they're all accounted for and we are accountable for every round that comes out of our gun two the reason we ask if there's still any outstanding threats, because obviously for officer safety reasons. But the third one is, is are there what direction did you shoot? It's because they got to go and be able to do an area canvas and make sure that we didn't hit any innocent bystanders. So it is very difficult to train us. So the reason we train somebody said, you know, we got to shoot.

We're taught to shoot and kill. No, we're taught to stop it. We're we're shooting. We guys are, we're shooting, we're taught to shoot and kill. No, we're taught to stop it. We're, we're shooting. We're taught to shoot until we stop a threat. Meaning, Hey, the moment they're no longer perceived as a threat anymore is once you, it's when you stop. The reason we tell people to aim at the torso is because that's the largest part of a person's body, which is going to make our odds go up and making contact with that person, as opposed

to shooting them in the arm or the leg. Because again, we're still accountable for every person that's shot in the vicinity. And we've had people, unfortunately, killed at the hand of police officers as innocent bystanders because they were involved in the gun battle. So just because, you know, you know, I was aiming at the suspect doesn't mean that if I strike the innocent person behind me, it doesn't mean I'm still going to get off squeaking clean because now they're going to ask, well, did you, where were you aiming at? And if I tell them I was aiming at the arm or the leg, well, guess what? I'm going to be accountable well, did you, where were you aiming at? And if I tell them I was aiming at the arm or the leg, well, guess what? I'm going to be accountable for that.

Do you think maybe people in general need a little bit of a reform as well? Like just, just, uh, all people need a little bit of reform in terms of how we, how we, uh, deal with and how we perceive police officers. Like, um, maybe there should be a little instruction on like what the hell to do, like in, in communicating with somebody like yourself. If, if, if I was to, I don't know, get into a fight at a bar or something, get kicked out of the bar. And now we're in conversation. I mean, I might not be that logical because I might be drunk or something like that, but you know, what would be like, is there things that maybe the general public can be educated on that would be, you know, really helpful to, you know, kind of assist with some of this communication barriers? Without a doubt. So I do this presentation called the Initiative Workshop.

And that's why everything I'm talking about today is what I talk to the community about, whether it be high school kids, college kids, you name it. I talk about why I got into the profession. I talk about my bad experiences. I talk about my family's bad experiences. I talk about, you know, the training that goes into being a police officer. And then I put them through scenarios as police officers. So then we can have discussions like this when it's all said and done. So, yes, we need to do more training like that. But we also have to realize a lot of that training already exists. So a lot of police departments put on these things called the Citizens Academy. Well, Citizens Academies are great because you get to go inside of a police department, get to see firsthand what it's like to be a police officer,

get to learn about all the assignments, gang guys, the canines, the drug interdiction, no matter what it is. But you know, the problem with Citizens Academies is the people that we get at those academies are the people that are pro-police. So it needs to be the people that don't necessarily like police. Those are the ones that need to be in those citizens Academy.

Cause it's all good to be able to go do those citizens academies. But if we get the ones that are like our biggest fans, like, yeah, I love it. I love that you're here and all, but shoot. You got a dare. Yeah, we got you. Sorry about that. I got a, I got a phone call to me. I try to silence it real quick. Hold on one second. I'm trying to find, I can't find you guys. I don't know where the video went. We can still see you.

Oh, you guys can? Yeah. Oh, back to me. Here it goes. Give me one second. All right. Sorry about that, fellas. So going back to what I was saying is that it's all great and dandy to have those police fans.

I call them police fans because, trust me, they're all about it. They're the ones that ride around with the thin blue line stickers on and don't know anybody in law enforcement. But the ones that are needed are the ones that don't like policing so that way they can get more information. that way they can go and see what it's like to be an explorer. Uh, I have two stories and I'm going to try to, I want to tie them back together. One of the stories is I did a presentation a while back and I had this little black kid come up to me after it was like, man, officer, tell me, I just want to thank you for what you did today. He was like, man, I come from a family that's full of gang members and like what you did, I got to see things a lot differently. And so not only do I see it differently, but I kind of want to maybe go get more information to the profession. So fast forward, his mom reached out to me like a couple of weeks ago. It was like, Ryan,

my son is just like in love with police officers after that thing. And now he wants to go into being a police officer and being, getting into the Explorer programs and all these different things because of you. So I was like, shoot, there's me being able to change the kid's perception. And now she's like, Hey, I already signed him up for the next explorer program at with the city but then you on the flip side of that i got a really really good friend of mine close friend who i was like hey man why don't you come on a ride along with me he and mind you he's not pro police i was like why don't you come on a ride along with me he's like man why would i do that i ain't doing that

like i'm not i'm not trying to be like i don't want to know about y'all then i was like hey man why don't you come on my podcast man i don't mess with the popo like that. And I'm like, see, we want change, but yet we don't want to change. And so that's what's so frustrating is that we can't say we want all this change, but we're not willing to change ourselves. I had to do that as a black man in America. And I've had to do that as a police officer. I've had to be willing to change.

I've had to be able to accept realities. But I've also had to be willing to move forward and not be afraid to speak up when, when the right thing needs to be done. Got it. You know, I'm curious about this because for example, when you look at the George Floyd situation, right? Derek Chauvin, apparently he had like 17 or 19 derogatory marks, but he was still able to go out there and do his thing. You see in different cases where police do use deadly force and the public gets mad that they get off and that they're still being able to potentially serve. I'm curious, are there any type of,

is there anything that kind of watches and pays attention to police officers that have a record of not being the best as far as dealing with the community. Is there any are there any structures to watch those individuals? And then also, do you feel that there is a lot of protection for police officers that do end up doing the wrong thing that do end up accidentally killing someone because you know on the job um are there too much protections for them or are there are the protections for them correct it's like a double-edged sword so we we can do way better as a profession of trying to track the bad officers and getting rid of those bad officers. The issue, and here's the issue,

and here's the hard thing, is not just police work. I've talked to many teachers. I talked to one of my, as a matter of fact, one of my good friends, she's a principal at a school. And she was like, Ryan, you don't understand how hard it is to get rid of bad teachers. Like, she was like, the teachers union is so powerful that these teachers can do some crazy stuff and it's very difficult to get rid of them. So it's not just a police problem. It's just a problem in general, because we give so much, we, we, we give a lot of power for the standpoint of, Hey, we, we, there needed to be some type of protection for, for firing and all this other stuff. So one of my mentors, he always talks about this great Rhino or this black Rhino thing, which is like, we see all of these,

all this track record, this history of the you know this officer making a bad decision and everything like that and then the officer goes and does something terrible and everybody's like oh my goodness what happened and it's like you guys saw this coming for years but yet you never chose to do it and the sad thing is is like if we're being honest with ourselves you hear about an officer that does something that's out of policy or that's misconduct and you have officers that was like man i could have saw that coming and it's like well shoot if you could have saw that coming then how can we didn't deal with it so yes we can do better but the issue is again going back to that human nature

proponent of it is like no matter what job you're at you start developing relationships with people and you also have you have aspirations of advancing no matter what profession you're in. So if you have friends and you also have the aspirations of advancing, you know, it gets very difficult to start saying stuff against somebody because you don't know how are you going to be black sheep? Are you going to, are they going to turn your back on you? Is it the popular thing to do? And you asked me, it's the right thing to do. We need to do it, but it's a lot easier said than done. So do we need, it's the right thing to do. We need to do it, but it's a lot easier said than done. So do we need to get better in this department? Absolutely. There's that we do

need to have some type of ways to keep better track records of people, police officers and what they're doing. Are they showing a propensity? Derek Shelby should have never been on that street without a doubt. He should have been fired a long time ago. So we have to do better with that standpoint. But at the same time, though, there are many officers that are that are prosecuted. There are many officers that are fired. We just don't hear about it because the time it happens, it's already been so much time between the incident that we forget about it. A and two, it doesn't get as much traction. Like you're not going to have all these people come out and be like, oh, yeah, man, that officer was prosecuted after because, it doesn't get as much traction. Like you're not going to have all these people come out and be like, Oh yeah, man, that officer was prosecuted after. Cause it just doesn't gain

steam like it should. We, we had an officer a few years ago that did something that was very wrong. And my department never hesitated to get rid of that guy. Obviously they had to go and do an investigation. They had a dot, dot, dot, dot, all their, their T's across, dot all their eyes across all their T's before they did it. But once that moment came, they got rid of that guy. But we never heard about it like that. It was maybe a splash on a news segment, but then it was done. You know what I mean?

So it is happening at other departments more so than others. But, again, that goes, again, back to the standardization of officers across the board. That's why we should have some consistent standards because, you know, my department who does things the right way is great. But if you've got an apartment on the other side of the country that's doing things the wrong way, it makes me look just as bad as the wrong one. We're only as great, we're only as good as the weakest link. And so we got to bring the weakest link up. What about maybe like a psychological evaluation? Would that be, do you think that would be effective at all? Like every five years, every X amount of years? Yeah. I know it costs money, but just, just an extra, like, why would it not checking in with your man seeing like if, cause a lot of times some of my friends

have been police officers. They're like, man, I just had to get out. You know, I just got so frustrated with society and got tired of people lying to me and, and tired of being in these like crazy situations that I just, I just had to bounce. But it was good that they've recognized that of themselves. You know, the, the, the allure of being a police officer, it ran out. They weren't happy about their job anymore. And they were actually kind of more irritated by it than anything. So maybe some psychological evaluations or something like that might be something that could help. Without a doubt, you know, again, going back to my department and trust me, my department is not

paying me to say this. I'm telling you, this is my heart and what I've learned and experienced. We're very progressive. They've actually, we have counselors on call basically for anything. We have peer support groups. We have, you know, lieutenants that are leading up, you know, organizations within our department that are specifically designed at talking these things out. We just last week, my chief held this big old debrief, a department wide debrief to discuss the feelings of how we're feeling in law enforcement right now. And it was great because you had guys like me, black officers that were able to speak

up and say how we feel. But you also had, you know, white officers that were able to talk about how they felt. What other departments are doing things like that? I'm not saying that all of them are, but I'm also saying a lot of them aren't. And so that's very, very critical. Going back to my conversation with Dak and them the other night, they said, hey, how many times have people been psychically evaluated? In some departments, they've only had that done the moment they got started in the profession. So, well, I mean, you've been in the profession 20 plus years now, you've only been evaluated one time. So yeah, it's important to maybe have frequent checkups or check-ins, but again, going back to the whole defunding the police, that costs money. So where's that money going to come from? That's why we should re-evaluate

where we're talking about reallocating those funds. And the last thing I'm going to mention, because you brought up something that's critical, is people got to realize that only about 5% of the population that we deal with as police officers are really doing not what they're supposed to be doing. We all violate traffic laws. Like, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the actual crimes that we encounter every single day. You probably only got about 5% of the population that are actually out doing it. But you got to realize 95% of our time as police officers is spent with that 5%. realize 95% of our time as police officers spent with that 5%. So unfortunately, what starts happening is, is officers start to see out of the lens of the 5%, as opposed to the 95%. So what can

we do? So that way, they can continue to see the, you know, the world or the light in the eyes of the 95% of people that are doing things the right way. Well, the way we do that is by doing programs like I'm doing, getting out there talking to our communities, Jocko said something in that same podcast that we talked about earlier is getting these relationships with the community. You know, there's this old saying that says we got to get to know the community before we have to know. That's how you start and continue to see, you know, your outlook on life through the

95 percent of the 95 percent as opposed to the 5 percent. And that's so, so critical because when you get to that area, that dark area where you think everybody's a liar, everybody's going to steal from you, everybody's going to kill you. That's when you need to get out. I mean, when you start coming home and interrogating your family, your kids, like, no, I said, I know you lie right now. Then you got to be reevaluated. You know, man, the fact that you say that it's it's that's exactly what's going on right now as far as like social media and the police is concerned because you got a bunch of dedicated Instagram pages that are dedicated to showing police brutality. I had a conversation with a friend of mine.

Obviously, we're both black men, but he he is on the side of he does think a majority of cops are doing the wrong things. I'm on the side of I think that we're seeing a microscope of a lot of the injustices. I think that we're seeing a microscope of a lot of the injustices. And I'm not saying that it's okay, but we can't take these things that are happening and push them into being the majority. But at the same time, it's like, you know, when you look at the police report that was written up about the George Floyd situation before the video was seen, right? The police report said that, oh, yeah, he died in the hospital, blah, blah, blah. You see the video, he was killed right there. And then you see videos of cops planting weed in some guy's jacket in New York. And you see video of that happening. It's very difficult to, to trust them, you know? So it's, it's just like,

trust them you know so it's it's just like it it's a tough thing where we are socially in terms of trusting them man you're so right um i always tell people like if we can imagine a world where a camera followed you 24 hours a day seven days a week what will we see at your job what would the owner of that company see of his employees he would see some crazy stuff he would be like man this fool over here playing candy crush where he's supposed to give me that that brief in 10 minutes like because we all know like we all know there's things that shouldn't be going on we're all not perfect as human beings so what we have is a system in that where law enforcement, if you ask me, I love body cameras, body cameras, it saved me so many times. It saved me the other night. I had a guy that alleged I went to his house unjustifiably or unwarranted, which I never even went to the guy's house. So we have this guy that's complaining. He filed a formal complaint

against me alleging I did something, but because of the body cam, it saved me and it got rid of the complaint. But at the same time, we've become so dependent upon video that when we see this video is like, Oh, this is, this is all of them like that, you know, or if we, if it doesn't happen on video, it never happened. And that's a dangerous, awesome. Another dangerous place to be at is because we've got so reliant on these videos and actually saying, Oh, this is actually what's going on. I, one of the things that irks me the most, man, is looking at these Instagram accounts and seeing that they only post police brutality. I'm like, if this is all you're posting, what do you expect the world to start believing and

thinking about policing? That they're all corrupt. Of course, you're going to think that because that's all you see. So that's why I am on my page. I have a balance. I show both because if I want to be taken serious, I need people to know that I'm going to give it to you straight. I'm going to give it to you. If it's good, I'm going to give it to you as bad. I may not even have all the information sometimes. And so sometimes I may not say anything because I don't want to come out as, as potentially coming out as being wrong. But when you see such these polarized opposites, because you have those thin blue line pages, which all they're going to post is good stuff. I get it. I love it. But at the same time, the ones that don't trust, which all they're going to post is good stuff. I get it. I love it.

But at the same time, the ones that don't trust us, they're never going to come to your page because they know all you do is post the good stuff. But at the same time, you got the ones that I'm not going to call them out on here, but you got some of these pages where all they do is they post bad police stuff. And some of which is not even correct information, but it sounds nice. And so it's so dangerous in this place that we're living in is because majority of our society is getting their information from social media. So I've always said this with influence comes responsibility. Unfortunately, the people that have the influence aren't taking that responsibility. And so we got to be so careful in the information we put out

because word is bond sometimes. And you may be somebody in, you know, the middle of this country somewhere, you might get this information from a social media site and you're like, oh man, like that's what happened. Not even actually going out and doing your own research. So again, we gotta, we gotta be realistic. Unfortunately, we see these videos of police officers, but that's not a representation of the whole. I've been working in this job for seven years and I've never seen it. So either is one or two things happening. Either people are just like, hey, I'm not about to mess around with Ryan's around, which is a good thing. Or the other thing is people aren't really doing what they necessarily think we're doing.

When it comes to your own, you know, where you work personally, has there been any changes? Has there been anything in the last, you know, couple months or the last year or so that's changed any sort of protocol kind of based off of what's happening kind of in the outside world in other police departments? Or have you guys, you know, felt like you got good protocols in place and things are pretty good? At my department specifically, I think we've done such a phenomenal job of being progressive throughout the years that this hasn't really affected us. And it was evident with even our relationship in the community. We had a scheduled protest in our city and our police officers, we went out there and we helped block the lanes off form. We allowed them to march peacefully to our police station. we gave them a microphone and speaker so that way they can come and protest outside of our police department

we didn't have all these backlash and everything like that because we've sowed so much into our into our community at the same time we've always been on the forefront of we were my agency was one of the first agencies to have body body cams across the country we were like number two or number three agencies across the country i live in the city of uh well i'm not gonna tell you where i live yeah where is your police department yeah i work in the city for the city of chino and so we were one of the first agencies to ever have an implementate uh implement body cams that was super forward thinking we had this thing called the real-time crime center which is helping us get ahead of crimes before they happen so that way we can stop it. So it's kind of like my organization. The way I look at my organization is like that vacuum cleaner that nobody realized

they needed until they needed it. You know, you'll watch a vacuum cleaner on a commercial all day on TV. Like, man, you wouldn't even think twice about it. But the moment your vacuum cleaner breaks, you're like, man, I need a new vacuum cleaner. The moment, that's when that moment, that commercial comes back into your mind, like, man, like, I know where I can go to get that vacuum cleaner. Well, I've been doing this work since I got into the profession and I was scrutinized at the time by both sides. You know, I went through adversity by both sides, but I was consistent. I continue to show up to schools. I continue to get presentations. I continue to give presentations. And so when this situation with George Floyd happened, my phone started ringing off the hook. Not because they're like, oh, hey, there's this guy that wants to do something to stop things from occurring like this in the future.

They're like, no, this guy has been doing the work and I can trust him just based on his willingness to be unbiased and his consistency with giving us information. Do you think that for yourself or for the breaking barriers, uh, the breaking barriers, uh, do you, do you have to get like political? Like, do you like for you personally, uh, maybe when your police officer career is over, do you have to, uh, kind of, you know what I mean? Like, do you have to kind of push that initiative to be political and, and maybe get in front of some people that can really help? Cause it sounds like if your police department is, uh, doing things well and you guys are on the right track maybe you guys can just start to assist

other police departments around the entire country and one way to do that would be to get involved in politics i mean i've had so many people ask me like when am i running for school board when am i running for city council i I was like, Ryan for 2020, probably like, nah, bro. Like that's just not me. But what I can say is I can say is like, look, like we can try to influence, I can try to influence those that have the power. You know what I mean? Maybe one day I'm, that might be where God steers me into going into a line of politics, but not right now. Like right now my job is to continue to one, be active, serve as a police officer. The things I talk about are things I'm actually doing on patrol.

I train some people and I've had a lot of my trainees sit in my car. They're like, dang, bro, like you really are what you talk about. I'm like, yeah, man, that's the only way to be. So I have an obligation right now serving on the streets. But at the same time, with my platform, you know, it's my job to be able to talk to a lot of these influencers and be able to have the same conversations that we're having here today like i said going back to talking my conversation with dac man dac is a good guy and dac has a lot of influence and so being able to sit down with guys like that is how we start to stimulate change i was the same day i was talking to dac i was at an event called Hill America that was put on by Bishop Omar out of

Texas. And at that event was Deion Sanders, Mark Cuban, the owner of Raising Cane's. And I'm sitting on these panels with amongst all of these guys and being able to give another outlook on the realities of our society from an unbiased view. And one of the guys that sat next to me was a guy that was shot six times by police and he's paralyzed. So the mere fact that I can sit next to him, have these open conversations, be able to hug him, be able to apologize to him is the way that's going to start fostering the change that we need to see, which is going to start to bring the balance back to the society that we need. Do you think, because like a big part of the narrative going on,

especially again, I keep going back to this because it's spurring a lot of what you see. Not to be perfectly honest. We just know that he's an evil human being might not be racist. We just know he's messed up. But a lot of people are now pushing that idea of a racist cop to cops in general. Do you think that that is a and I know we're paying attention to your precinct, of course, but with your knowledge of the United States of cops around, do you think that that is a problem within policing or is it just bad policing? So I think it's a mixture of both. Historically speaking, do we have racial roots in grain grain and law enforcement? Yes. I mean, you can go back and watch any video from the civil rights movement and seeing officers, you know, spraying people with hoses, using their dogs to bite people unjustifiably. You can go back and see the racial, you know, you know, prejudices that have tainted the profession. But as the profession continued to grow and to evolve, what we started to see is a shift of not necessarily being racial policing,

but bad policing. So when we go back to the Derek Chauvin one, I, you know, people were saying that it was racist the moment they saw it. I'm like, how can we say that this is racist by watching an eight-minute video? The only way you're going to be able to tell this is racist is by going back and looking at his track record. So it's not to say that it can't be racist. We might find out later on that this was absolutely racially motivated. But we can't say it off of an eight-minute and 52-second video just because we don't know this guy's track record. So one of the things I say is we, we got to be called, we got to be careful in calling things racist because, you know, when we call things racist, you know, we call everything and we label everything as racism. How are we

going to know what's really considered racism? How are we going to be able to identify that? We got to be careful with that, man. We want to say everything is based off a race. Well, if everything is based off a race, then we know that's not a fact and so if it's not a fact then how am i supposed to identify what really was racially motivated so we got to be so careful with that man and like you know i'm black you know and people are like are you full black which no that's a story for a different day it makes a huge difference and that's what i'm saying like that irritates the mess out of me. It's like, well, why does it even matter whether or not I'm full black or not?

Yes, I'm full black. But why should that question even be one of them? So that's one thing we got to address. But the other thing is, is like, because I'm black, you know, yes, I've had adversity. Yes, I've had struggles. Yes, I've experienced racism. I told people, man, I've had people call me the N-word. I've had adversity. Yes, I've had struggles. Yes, I've experienced racism. I've told people, man, I've had people call me the N word. I've had people follow me. I've had people tell me

that I look suspicious. I've experienced prejudice just like any other person. But at the same time, I've never allowed it to hinder me from going to where I'm trying to get. I actually revel in adversity that I experienced because that adversity has made me stronger as a man. So we got to come back and say, you know what? I have either two options. I can either fold in the face of adversity or I can allow it to make me stronger and be better than the adversity that hit me. So that's what I've chosen to do. So I hate this idea that, you know, because of racism, we can't move forward. Yes. Have black people been oppressed? Yes. Have we had some type of, you know, systematic racism that's made it harder for us to move forward? Yes, we have. But at the same time, we can't continue to waver there. We have to be able to move forward. because what we're seeing right now is we're seeing police reform and I'm a B I had the ability to be a part of it. I had the ability to be a voice and dictate what that police reform

looks like. If I choose to run away, then you know what? I'm not doing anybody else's service. The only service I'm doing is by getting out because I should have never been in it for the first place. Cause that means I was in it for the wrong reasons. So I think this is the best time to be a police officer. And I've told that to people, we just got to be able to come to the reality and realize that, look, we got to be able to meet in the middle, find the balance that we need. So that way we can get away from these polar opposite extremes of one another and be able to move forward together. I agree with you. I think this is one of the better times to be alive and be in the United States, even though things are getting weird. You know, things things have potential to go real sideways real quick you know and hopefully hopefully it just doesn't hey you know things are changing white

people are telling me black lives matter i'm like oh okay i know my life matters thank you i appreciate oh man we were having we were having a good laugh because we were watching one of the comedians talk about uh the black lives matter movement and how people get and how inflamed they get when they hear Black Lives Matter. And he's like, OK, well, we can change it. And how about we just say Black Lives exist? He's like, can you all get behind that? Like, can we just admit that they exist, that we're around? Oh, man, it was.

We have like we have every ethnicity covered here at my gym. What I'm interested in, Ryan, from you is how far off do you think we are? It seems like we're so far off, but we do bodybuilding, we do powerlifting, and we know guys get super frustrated after a powerlifting meet. They miss a couple lifts that they thought they were going to get and they want to come back and they want to change everything. They're super frustrated. And it's like, no, man, actually, we've got a couple a couple of changes to make that will lead to much better progress next time around. But you don't have to change everything. You know, you have to switch things up completely. Do you feel like, you know, I know that, you know, racism and certain things are monstrous things to tackle. And it might take generations for that to be eradicated, you know.

But do you feel like in general in the police department that there's just some kind of like there's just some small tweaks we got to make and we'll probably be at least head in the right direction. Like, we're not like I feel like we're not like massively far off, even though it feels like the opposite. I don't think we're that far off at all. I mean, I'm living proof of that. I mean, the mere fact that I could be a black man in this profession doing as much change, I think is a step in the right direction. profession, doing as much change, I think is a step in the right direction. The mere fact that I go on patrol white police officers and see that their dedication to serving the community and the heart that they have to really make change is proof to me. Not everybody sees that I have that luxury. At the same time, do we need changes? Absolutely right. But, you know, a lot of the

radical agendas that we're trying to push, we've got to just be careful with. We're not far off the mark. We are moving forward. We are definitely moving forward, but we got to get away from polarizing this to be something that is not, again, we live in the United States of America. The mere fact that the two of you guys can sit together and have this conversation is proof of change. The mere fact that I have a Hispanic wife and a half, a half Hispanic wife and half Filipino wife is changed in and of itself.

The mere fact that we can have interracial kids is changed. We are not far off. We have a long way to go, but we're not far off. And so, again, I'm going to keep saying this word, but balance. Let's have balance. I mean, it's like I think right now saying F the police, F12, all that stuff is popular for people to say that. And I think that's why they're saying and not even realizing, understanding what it means, just because if they don't say it, they're not the cool kid on campus right now. So we got to get away from doing things for the likes, for the views, for going viral like we that's the society we live in.

Like, oh, my goodness, man, I've gone on calls recently. And it's so funny, man. I'll be having a conversation with somebody on the street and I look across the street and the whole, all the whole family got their cameras out because they're just waiting. Like, Oh, I want that next viral video of this officer just going off on somebody. Like, that's why they do it. When you have people recording somebody taking their last breath and they don't even think to try to render aid to a person, you know, you have a problem there. So that's the real problem that we have is being able to come back to our senses and reality and saying, how do I be a good human being? I mean, I can't remember a few years ago that rapper that, you know, was I think he was shot and killed in his BMW and you had all these people just walking around just filming it.

And I'm like, man, this dude is dying, and nobody wants to give this dude help? So that's where we got to get away from it. It's like, you know, everybody wants this viral video. Everybody wants to be the next one to go, you know, get all these views and likes. And it's like, man, like, get back to just being a good human being. You do that, man, you'll get the likes. You do that, you'll get the views. You do that, people will want to be around you. Without sounding like, hey, Ryan is a guy, Ryan is a man,

that's not me. I'm only the man I am because of my faith in my Savior, Jesus Christ. That's the only reason I am the way I am. But I just try to be the man I can be, the best man I can be. And that's just naturally garnish some of the attention so that way I can have a voice to be even better. So we got to get our priorities straight. Our priorities are all jacked up right now. Man, you got a great mindset. Were you raised this way or were you raised the opposite? No, I was raised, man. I had some great parents, man. My parents were, they really instilled in me the values, the moral, the moral values that I have today. I have a great wife. My wife's parents are phenomenal. So I've been blessed to have good people in my life,

but I've also been blessed to be exposed to people that didn't have the best life that I've had. And so that gives me that well-rounded approach and that empathy that I need to deal with people when I'm encountering them. Yeah, we need some strong parents. Oh, that's another podcast episode right there. We need to get back to using the belt.

Oh, there we go. Yeah. I'm all about it, man. I'll turn the other cheek if I show up at your house because you used the belt on somebody. Hey, I have a question that tends to be some people look at it as a myth. And I'm just curious, do cops sometimes have quotas for tickets? Because that's something you see that's floated around. And people are like, do they actually have a quota for the amount of things that like tickets they need to give out, et cetera?

Is there something like that? Some departments. So I'll put it like this. Some departments, they wouldn't call it a quota, but they have an obligation to go out there and get a certain amount of tickets to show that they're being proactive. That's illegal in California. It's wrong. We shouldn't be doing that because it gets officers doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. But you also have to, again, going back to balance, you've got to be able to have a measuring system to see what your officers are actually doing, too. So we do keep track of what officers are out there doing,

how many arrests they've made, how many tickets they've written, because if not going back to that, that the sky cam, I like to call it any, any other profession when that sky cam is out. I mean, what is it going to show you you're doing? If you, if you have officers that don't have any, you know, uh, expectations, you have officers that will go out there and sit out there and do nothing. Do nothing. I mean, I tell people every gun I found off the street, every gun I've gotten off the street, all the drugs I've taken off the street, it wasn't somebody that walked up to me and was like, hey, man, I got some drugs. Like, no, like I had to go out there and find it. I had to be proactive and do it.

You know what I mean? True story. Funny, funny story. One time. This is a true story. I was out on patrol one time and i saw this guy like looking for something on the ground and i'm like hey man like what's going on man how you doing you can tell he's been around the block a little bit he's like man i was like i was like what's wrong he's like man i'm freaking looking for the dope that i dropped yesterday i'm like oh i'm like oh okay cool you want me to help

you look for it here let me get my flashlight. Yeah, right? Let me grab that out. So, but the reality of it is, it's stuff that doesn't happen all the time. And so, like, we got to go out there and be proactive. There's a certain level of responsibility that we have to go out there and enforce traffic laws. You know what I mean? Should we be giving everybody a ticket?

No, that's where your discretion comes in. So we do track proactivity because we want to see, like, our officers out there going out there, getting involved in the community, enforcing some of their traffic violations and things like that but on the other stream is that you've got a police department's got to get away from mandating or expecting officers to go out there and write a level of write 15 tickets i'm telling you now i'm not i've never been a traffic i never write never liked writing traffic tickets do i occasionally

yeah but usually people they they they bought that ticket you know and i say they bought it because they cussed me out accusing me of lying all this other stuff so you bought that ticket i'm sorry player i can't help you with that one but usually i'm going to give a person a warning but i like to go out and get drugs off the street so the reason i bring that example up is because you may look at my statistics and see that hey ryan hasn't written any tickets but yet he's arrested seven people for drugs well that's because that's what i like to do that's what you know i'm aimed at that doesn't necessarily showcase uh you know the fact that i'm not living up to the department standards and no i just have a desire to do certain things so you know in certain police departments yeah i know l are not

lapd nypd had a lawsuit because they were forcing their officers to go out there and make certain stops that um that they they should have never had to do in the first place. So again, that goes back to the history and some of the systematic issues that our profession has faced, but we're moving in the right direction. And now is the best time as ever to start calling that stuff out. Looks like you do a good job staying in shape. What do you do for training? Shoot, man, that's just my genes right there. That's my blackness kicking in. Them genetics. for training shoot man that's just my genes right that's my blackness kicking in them genetics uh uh yeah no you know honestly man i try to uh i've always like i said i've been in in uh i've been in sports my whole life so you know am i working out as much as i want to no but i always try to have

a level of fitness whether it's going on a run hitting some weights um i've always lifetime fitness has always been a part of me it's just ingrained in me and it should be for every police officer out there i i honestly you ask me this is again talk about politics i honestly think you know law enforcement is the one area that we should be able to discriminate against a person's body size because your body size can ultimately you know contribute to the death of somebody else or the grave bodily injury to somebody else because you were out of shape so that should be the one place we should be able to discriminate with just because you know, we got we have a level of expectation to to be in shape and maintain a level of fitness. I'm not talking about whether you're short or tall. I'm talking about whether you're in shape

or out of shape. So it's always been important to me. I got to practice what I preach. Awesome. Yeah, great having you on the show today, man. That was, uh, that was, that was a lot of great, uh, insight and a different, uh,

a different, different perspective on things. So thank you so much. Appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me fellas. It was a true pleasure, man.

Just always good to talk to good brothers. Where are you guys located at? By the way, we're in, uh, West Sacramento. Oh man. Well,

I got to get up to West Sacramento, man. Come, come have y'all show me how to live, man. I, I ain't messing with y' Sacramento, man, and come have you all show me how to live, man. I ain't messing with y'all. I can see that. I can see that visually. What position did you play when you played football?

I was a DB, so I was always a short, fast guy. You know, I have a funny story. When I was in college, my hardest thing was to gain weight. So when we have to do weigh-ins, man, I would actually put like two and a half pound weights at my girdle. So when I stepped on the scale, I was perceived to be a lot heavier than what i was or i would drink a gallon of water so that way i i was i weighed a lot heavier then i would be using the bathroom

the rest of the day back to my normal weight could you intercept the pass from deck press cop oh he's like he's pretty damn good man that man. That dude is a beast, man. That dude. And, you know, I've always liked him on the field, man, but just getting to know him personally, he's just a good, solid dude. You could always tell a person that just has a genuine heart and a genuine heart to serve. And just being able to talk to him and his brother,

his brother's good people too, his whole team. I want you guys to know, man, that man is going places, not just in football. We both came to the agreement that, you know, for me, law enforcement, the vehicle for him, football is a vehicle, but it's not our destination. And that person is going somewhere. Cool, man. Yeah, it would be great to have you come up here. Maybe we can put on an event or something like that and, you know, make people more aware of a lot of the stuff we talked about today. Thanks again for your time. Appreciate it.

Let's do it. Thanks, fellas. I appreciate it. And I'll get with you guys soon. But thanks again for having me. Thanks for reaching out. And if you're somewhere out there listening to this podcast and you don't know anything about law enforcement, go get educated.

Go down to your police department. I'm sure they're not going to turn you away. They're not going to say leave here. If anything, they'll open those doors up and say, come on in. Well, we want to show you what it's all about. Awesome. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you, sir. God bless. Man. Wow. Yo, if there was any cop that we could have on that could explain things so damn well,

it was this man. He was amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, just so great great i think just a big takeaway again it's just like what what he mentioned you know i didn't think about it from that perspective that cops are getting that five percent of individuals that are coming in and then they have that lens and they take that lens and it's it's hard to not look at society in a certain way, but it's the same thing that we're currently doing. You know, we see this lens, all these Instagram real emotional during his TED Talk, and he talked about how he mistreated somebody.

He just wasn't compassionate to them because he studied, like, diabetes, and he studied, you know, he studied how this all happens. And he's basically, he didn't tell the person they were, like, fat and lazy, but that's kind of, he kind of just, like, shrugged them off, you know. And he was just like, you're, you know, it's like your own doing is kind of how kind of just like shrugged them off you know and he was just like you're you know it's like your own doing is kind of how he said it and uh he just realized like how like how shitty that was but he didn't realize that until he gained more knowledge and he gained more knowledge when he when he started to learn more he realized like wow that really was a crappy way to handle a particular situation and the reason that he felt that. And the reason that he felt that way, or the reason that he felt that way in that moment at that time was because of the same things that police officers end up dealing with.

They see the same crap kind of over and over and over. So imagine you see a person that's 100 pounds overweight. You see a person that's 150 pounds overweight. You see someone who's 75 pounds overweight. You see someone who's 100 pounds. And you're just like, you take it out on that that last person you're like hey you know what like you're just being fucking lazy like you gotta walk you got and you crush that person you know and you make the wrong like judgment call you make the wrong uh prescription and i think the same thing can

happen with cops if they're getting real irritable they're getting real irritated with seeing similar things happen all the time people are lying to them them. As he said, he saw people on fire. I mean, I just don't even know how you, I guess you don't ever recover. You live with some of those things. So that's why it's good that they do evaluations of these guys. But it's not trying to make defense for anything that's happened, especially recently, but it does put it into some better perspective and it's a big reason why this defunding the thing police doesn't make sense

you look at him you look at his precinct whatever it's called department um you see how well they're running things and you see that he even says that more change can happen but the fact that that's not across the board across the u.s that there are a lot of places that are just dumpy, there are a lot of places that are just horrible. That means we just can't take money away. If we want something that's going to help protect us when things do go wrong in our neighborhoods, in our cities, we can't take money away from it. This whole thing, it seems so emotionally driven. We're at a time period where people try to take away. People are trying to take away kind of like what seems to be like the end result, you know, and they're just because we have such a hard time interpreting things.

You know, I've heard people even say, hey, let's take away the word police, which is kind of understandable. Like, let's get a new image going. I kind of get it. But it's not going to solve the root problem. You know, the root problem is our interpretation of police. So if we're like, hey, the police have a new name, they're still going to have all the same players involved. They're still going to have all the same laws involved. And it's not really going to change anything.

You know, we've had professional football teams move locations before. The Raiders are moving from Oakland to Las Vegas, you know, this year coming up. They're still going to be the same team, just to have a different name. Maybe there's some tune-up on the way their uniforms look or some logos or something like that. But same thing with the police officers. You know, is there a way for them to be on the streets, patrolling the streets, where they maybe look a little less intimidating? Maybe. But again, you don't want to like restrict their job and make it harder just because we have a poor interpretation of police officers we need to figure out a way to educate so that there's not a poor interpretation

it's like that guy has a gun just in case some wild shit goes down and it's to defend me not to kill me you know and and if we can start to you know work on that then maybe we can start to head in the right direction but there are uh you know it seems like there's quite a few things to get worked out. And the thing is, is like, I really hope first off that a funding thing does not catch fire and that ends up being a nationwide thing. I don't think it will. I hope it doesn't. But if we do end up going the opposite direction and we're trying to go for reform, we're trying to fund more for better training. As a society, we have to realize that that's going to take a long time

because I think of like some of the worst departments that are probably ruled by pretty horrible chiefs or whatever, right? If something comes from higher up, it's like you need to do things this way. There is going to be resistance from certain areas and it's going to take years, right? But the thing is, it's like, even though it's going to take years, at least we're moving in that direction. I just hope as a society that we have the patience to be able to let things get better because it's not going to happen immediately. And that's what we want right now. Like you said, we're looking for that end thing, the end thing to fund the police, fuck it all up. Right. But yeah, they shoot people. So let's get rid of them or let's have less of them. Then there should be less problems.

But they're actually – the problems I would imagine would increase a lot. If you had less, they'd be more scared, more stressed, more overworked. And crime will go up. Crime already has. It already has. It already has gone up. I remember a few years ago, it probably was maybe six to ten years ago. And I don't remember why. I'm not sure if it was just the economy was weird, maybe 2008 or something or what year it was. I'm kind of drawing

a blank on when it was exactly, but they furloughed a lot of police officers. They laid off a lot of police officers kind of in a systematic way to where it's like, okay, you're off for two weeks and then you're coming back and then I'm off for two weeks and then you're coming, which, you know, it's like, okay, we're trying to spread the money around because for whatever reason there was lack of funds. I can't remember if it was the economy or exactly what was going on at the time, but man, what a horrible protocol, right? Like there's, there's things that we try to put into place and we don't understand what's going to be the implications of that. Imagine if you work a lot less and you're already under trained, uh, when you get back into it and you get back into the mix, every time you come back, I mean, you're going to be like, just like jujitsu, you take time off jujitsu and you

kind of like, Oh, I don't remember how to escape out of this. I mean, anyone who's ever done like jiu-jitsu or like a martial art or anything that really has like a drill or a protocol of you like moving a certain way and a certain procedural thing, it puts your brain in a knot. It like hurts your head. You're like, I can't remember what to do. And I can't even imagine what that would be like if you were in a volatile situation as like a police officer but what ended up happening one of the results of that was the situation that happened in davis where kids um young college students were on the ground on their knees with their hands behind their back protesting something. I don't remember what it was. And police officers sprayed them in the eyes with like mace. You know, people aren't in defense of the police. People aren't listening to the police.

But against the police, these were these were newer police officers because a lot of the police officers that were that they were trying to stop having work so much made a lot more money. And so they were trying to siphon the money back into the system by having, you know, OK, you've been on the force for 30 years. You make one hundred and twenty K like we're you know, we definitely need you to take a little bit of a break. I believe that was the case or they may been, they may have been just laying off altogether the people that were there longer. But what I do recall from the situation is just, there was a lot younger police officers with a lot less experience and even less training,

because they don't get that much training anyway. Because they just didn't, they didn't really have a lot of experience that handled that situation. And thank God it was just Mace, you know, which is horrible in and of itself. But, you know, it could be worse, right? Just Google searching around. It looks like it was maybe around 2014, unless this was a different situation. Oh, yeah. No, that sounds about right. So I guess the plan was to do a 10% pay cut for state workers to help with a $ 54 billion dollar deficit so newsom had proposed

this cut or whatever so i think that's what led to uh people getting furloughed and all that so if newsom ever becomes president i'm out of here i'm out of here i'm moving to canada but you know like he when he mentioned that um I'm out of here. I'm moving to Canada. But you know, like he, when he mentioned that,

um, there in certain areas, there is such shortage of cops that they'll take somebody who's still in the academy or who, who hasn't gone through all their processes and just put them on the street. That's just mind boggling to me. You put them on the street with a weapon that can take somebody else's life without the proper training to actually do it. God, like, again, let's think about what happens if we do defund more of those situations will happen. It's a very serious job. You know, it's, it's not like, uh, it's not really similar

to a lot of other jobs. I mean, a firefighter is a little similar. If you're a medical professional, it's a little similar. Uh, you know, if you, if you're somebody that works for the state and inputs information in the computer, that's way different. Like we could see how you work in the field. We don't have a lot of time to train you. So we're just going to push you along. We're going to see you're going to work with so-and-so today and you're going to learn from them. No harm really. Okay. You messed up someone's paperwork a couple times it's like okay well you know you keep doing that and you can't continue to work here or people that we've had

work here before where we're filming or doing photography they take bad photos or the videos are bad and they don't improve no harm like no one no one got hurt um every everything's totally fine we just uh we tried something and it just didn't work. But when it comes to police, we can't have stuff that, that's what makes it so difficult. We can't have shit that doesn't work. And in an effort to defund the police,

what will happen is we'll see the consequences of that. You know, there could be some good, there could be some good that comes out of it. There'll definitely be some bad that comes out of it, but maybe it will help us land right where we need to. But again, because there's people's lives on the line, it's just a risky thing. I hope that we really think about it a lot before we implement anything in particular. I think you hit the nail on the head, though, because I was thinking about that.

Like, we're going to swing so far in one direction that we'll see the ramifications and then we'll we'll slowly head back to a place of reason hopefully we don't have to swing way too far though before that happens but yeah yeah and when you were talking about patience it was reminding me about um when he was talking about that incident where somebody was saying that they want change but they don't want to change themselves you know like a lot of that needs to happen before someone else will change, you know? I think that's all all of us can do is really try to change ourselves. If we can, if we can have improvement with ourselves, then maybe we can share our experiences with other people, and it can assist them. You know, we can share the different things that happen through our lives

and our different experiences and then, you know, give some people some insight, give some people some new perspective on, you know, just the way things have worked out for you. And we can continue to all, you know, make some positive. It's not even necessarily just changes. It's more like just being open-minded to experiment with some new ideas or concepts and, and just being open to gravitating and going in that direction. You know, the thing I mentioned at the beginning of the show where like, uh, Sean King's the one who posted it, It was the audio of some cops saying, let's go and hunt down whatever, right?

It's like individuals who have a big audience need to be more responsible about how they put things forward. Obviously, you know that Sean King's an activist. Yeah, some stuff he puts out is great. And then some things where you're like, ah, I don't think that helps. I think that might hurt us more than anything.

Yeah, like it's good that it's known. It's good that that story's out. But when you that that story's out but when you when you when you form that that story to fit your narrative of defunding or this is how cops are it's like you're you're literally making things work because people follow you and respect your ideas but you're now doing that same thing where you're you're you're taking this this situation and you're painting the broad brush across all of all police officers you're you're grooming people to think in that way and that's that's a really really really dangerous way of thinking if we can if we can um like qualify

to something else it's just like when uh a white person sees things about black people on tv and then they paint the broad brush of black people being gangsters or black people seeing derrick chauvin or some like yeah your example of your example of being in africa and the guys were like thinking that you were you know you were a particular way you You're like, I'm not, I don't really, exactly. I like that music and stuff, but not all black Americans are, you know, whatever it is that you are portraying gangsters,

bloods, crips, et cetera. Like, and I'm not going to paint a broad brush of white people being this way, but we like literally like that, that way of thinking, especially is it's super popular.

It gets views. That's why CNN and all these all these channels are are doing that because it gets people's emotions riled up it's it's it's so messed up it's an it's it's insane uh watching fox and cnn it's it's like it's disgusting i think i i think it sucks you know i i sometimes like the entertainment value of them messing around about the different political parties, but I don't appreciate the fake news that goes on all day long. I mean, it's just absolutely ridiculous. They can't report on something without so much inflection about how they think about it. And it's just, I mean, that's crazy shame on all of us for allowing something like that

to even exist in the first place, because we're watching it. We're feeding into it. Like, if it didn't have ratings, it wouldn't exist. But we're purchasing that. We're asking for that. And it's interesting, when you watch a football game, you know, back when John Madden was a football announcer, John Madden was a football coach for a decade. He used to coach the Raiders. Now, when the Raiders would play another team and he happened to announce it on Monday Night Football, he's not allowed to talk about how much he loves the Raiders organization.

He wasn't like when they scored, he wasn't fuck yeah like in your face you know he now the the local radio announcers will do that you know the 49ers guys that are in the Bay Area that are on the radio and that brings a different experience but network television they don't they don't do that they're not allowed to do that and it's really weird you know people like somebody like al roker i don't know if the situation is still the same as it's always been but someone like al roker you're not going to see him come on tv on an advertisement you're not going to see him endorse something in particular and the reason why you don't see him endorsing something in particular is because he's not allowed to something in particular.

And the reason why you don't see him endorsing something in particular is because he's not allowed to. Newscasters aren't allowed to do that. But what they do all day long now is more lethal and is the same thing. It's just they're selling you on ideas. They're selling you on these memes that you're going to carry around and share with other people. And you're going to say, hey, look, you know, I can't believe they said this about Bubba Wallace or I can't believe they said this about bubba wallace or i can't believe they said this about like this situation and you're just

spreading around stuff that like the bubba wallace situation it's like i don't even know what to think of that that was really like weird and it was like it seemed like it was a thing then it seemed like it's kind of not a thing but it still seems like it's a thing it's like really looked like a noose though oh yeah no and then they're saying it's like a garage pull thing i don't i didn't see pictures i don't really know a ton about it but i'll just say like it got confusing yeah i'll just i'll just leave it at that it got it got to be confusing it's like what the hell is going on and all those people kind of like marched with his car and different things i mean i don't know yeah we're in some weird times, but I do think something needs to be executed against what's going on in the media.

That's at least on television. What people want to do social media wise, hey, like, whatever. It's kind of free form, I guess. And Twitter and some of the companies, they'll try to figure out YouTube. They'll figure out ways to uh move forward and and maybe um censor some of the content but on the regular news man i just don't think there's any room for that because how the hell are we supposed to get information i searched out for yourself but most people don't have the time to do that yeah i was you got to investigate you got

to be a researcher now unfortunately yeah i i think i was talking to i think it was carlos about like the news like they shouldn't be able to have like an opinion they should just only be able to present present you boring ass facts and that's it like they shouldn't be allowed to be sponsored by this or that and of course maybe it's more like the weather right yeah but precipitation is 80 it's uh like the weather, right? Yeah. But precipitation is 80 percent. It's 75 degrees out. But like maybe even have like like official news that is like boring as hell. And that's the only time that you can have like this little logo on your like TV station that's like official.

And then everyone else has their own shit. Right. Like it's like Fox News, but it's not like official like legit news you know i mean like i know that sounds stupid but let the other news outlets still get sponsors still make money still do whatever they want to do but if like i don't know like pbs or something can come up with like their own thing where it's like boring as hell but if you want to have actual factual information that's where it's going to come from. And they're not going to put persuade you one way or the other.

Yeah, I think network television tries, but they're owned by huge companies, too. Yeah. The CNN and Fox are cable networks. And so they kind of do just like with other forms of censorship. I mean, they don't they don't cuss and say the same words on you know network television that they say on you know cable and it's just but they're i just think they're yeah there really needs to be something done and it's not none of it's ever new you know so i don't even know why it's called news because it's not new you know like if when when there's not shit going down like there is right now yeah they're like teenagers having sex at six o'clock you know on the news and you're like what that's hold on is that that's news you

know like you're like that's what teenagers do that's like when their hormones kick in that's when a lot of shit goes down when you're a teenager so fucking of course if they said seven-year-olds are you know then then we would then we would have some news right oh god oh man hey but there is this uh there's this guy on youtube okay so he he like i think there there probably are better sources that i want to i want to look more for for on youtube but there's this guy named philip defranco he's a news guy on YouTube. He personally is left-leaning, but what he does is he'll spit the facts first.

Factually, this is what happened. This is how I feel. How do you guys feel? He won't butter things in or add anything. He'll say, this is literally what's being reported. I think that there are probably a lot of that, but they're not owned by networks,

right? You got to search those types of people out who will just give you what happened without their personal bias. So yeah, it's, it's on people. Yeah. I think some of the regular networks,

you know, like a CBS, NBC, ABC. I think they try. I think they, I think they try, but like I said, they're owned by some huge

corporations i think one of them's owned by like general electric so they're not gonna they may not give you like fake reports but they may not they they're they're definitely not going to report on anything that would hurt them yeah like if it hurts their bottom line they're you know they're not reporting it you know i i feel that that's very uh very true but again i don't know if they would like necessarily try to persuade you the completely wrong way but they may not share everything with you if it's going to hurt their uh bottom dollar bottom line yeah take us on out of here andrew thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Thank you, Ryan Tillman, for spending so much time with us.

I know we all learned a ton from this episode. So if you did, please share it with somebody. I'm sure you can think of somebody who can definitely get a lot out of today's conversation. Please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Bell's Power Project on Instagram at MB Power Project on TikTok and Twitter. We're on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn. I think that's it for right now. My Instagram is at IamAndrewZ

and Seema, where are you at? I'm Seema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube and Seema Inyang on TikTok and Twitter. Mark? I think all I learned is that black people have better genetics for being jacked and being in shape. Yeah, man. I'm still stuck on that because I asked him what he did for working on it. He just said, nah.

Yeah. It's a black privilege. Damn. Jacked privilege. We talked about that. Jacked privilege. Jacked privilege. Yeah.

Damn. Anyway, no, that was awesome having Ryan on the show. Thank you guys so much for listening. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch y'all later.