The Bill Simmons Podcast - DeRay Mckesson on Ending Police Brutality, Plus 'Flying Coach' With Steve Kerr, Pete Carroll, and Gregg Popovich 

Episode Date: June 3, 2020

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by civil rights activist and podcaster DeRay Mckesson to discuss a plan he and his team at Campaign Zero have been working on to systematically reform police departments to combat police brutality. They discuss how the use of recently obtained data, education, and smart solutions can help bring about these changes (3:45). Then, Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll are joined by San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich to have a conversation about the state of our nation, how we got here as a country, our absence of leadership, and how we can take action to grow and bring about change following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer (46:17). Here are links to resources that DeRay recommends podcast listeners explore: joincampaignzero.org policescorecard.org checkthepolice.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the BS Podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. While some people in businesses are branching out during this time, there are places that are doing what they've always done, like ZipRecruiter, our presenting sponsor. Throughout all this, their mission has remained the same. They're still helping people find jobs, helping growing companies hire for their teams by bringing together candidates who need employment and employers looking for great candidates. ZipRecruiter is committed to helping our workforce stay strong. Let's work together. ZipRecruiter.com slash work together.

Also want to tell you about on the Ringer Podcast Network, we're at higher learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay. They did their second podcast on Sunday. It was terrific. They have another one coming on Wednesday. And two great voices that I think we desperately need right now. We also have a new podcast from Larry Wilmore, who recorded something that I think is going up right around the time you're listening to this one. I wanted

to talk about two different things that you could donate for, just in case you didn't know. I put on my Instagram, but it's actblue.com slash donate slash AB underscore MN. And that supports organizations fighting against racism and police brutality. It's a really cool website because they allow you to basically either they divide it for you evenly through things that include Black Lives Matter Global Network, Reclaim the Black, National Bailout, Black Visions Collective, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the National Police Accountability Project, Color of Change Education Fund, Unicorn Riot, Campaign Zero, Advancement Project, and the Marshall Project.

So if you check that out, you can donate, you can give whatever you want, and you can have them split it for you. We also have DeRay McKesson coming up in a little bit and he runs Campaign Zero and he's going to tell us all about that. They're up to something that's super important right now. Wanted to quickly mention,

on Sunday night, Rasil and I did a Shoot the Shit podcast coming off of everything that happened on Friday and Saturday night. We taped it before Sunday night really heated up and before really all hell broke loose and went to another level. And then Monday night,

Trump basically turned into a dictator. And I've been thinking long and hard about just my podcast in general on this platform and what I want to do with it over the next few weeks and months. And I think I just misread the moment on Sunday night. I was trying to do a shoot the shit, take your mind off things kind of podcast like we would always do on Sunday. And the moment was bigger than that. And I wish I had had an expert with us that we could have

bounced some questions off of and tried to learn from instead of treating the moment like we did. So I apologize for that. Look, I'm 50 years old. I still barely know what I'm doing, and I'm still going to make mistakes, and I'm still not going to throw a no-hitter every step of the way. The only thing I can do is learn from a mistake and try to get better at it. And I think the mistake on Sunday night was not bringing in somebody with us who brought a little extra knowledge to the table, which is what we're going to try to do here in a second here with DeRay McKesson. So

I want to use this platform to educate people and make them think and make them think about what's going on. And right now, there's only one thing going on. So that's what we're going to do. So here we go, first Pearl Jam. All right. Doraemon Kessin is here. He hosts Pod Save the People on Earl Friends Cryptic Media. And he is one of the people running Campaign Zero, which is launching a new campaign.

8can'twait.org. 8, the number 8, can'twait.org. And this is something, this has been, what, six years now of your life putting this together. Yeah. So I was on the original purchase in Ferguson in 2014. We were in the street for 400 days. And once those protests ended, I went back home to Baltimore and Freddie Gray got killed. But, but we stepped back and we were like, something is systemic. We don't know what the systemic is.

We don't know why this is happening all across the country in a consistent pattern across time and place. So we launched Campaign Zero, which was this idea of like, we can live in a world where the police don't kill anybody, right? It's not campaign half. It's not campaign almost.

It's campaign zero. And we were trying to figure out solutions. So for the past six years, we have been really laser focused on what solutions look like. And we know so much more than we did before. So for the people listening, I think it's important to note, I think there's two tactics going forward, for lack of a better word. One is, you know, the election in November, people know what to do. If you want things to change, there it is. The other one is just learning more about not only police brutality, but how to stop it. And, you know, I was on a zoom call that you had

today for a bunch of people where you basically laid out all this, a can't wait and you know, the mechanics behind it and stuff. And it's all of this simple stuff that you guys are saying would reduce violence by 72% with police. And all things that are easier to achieve than I thought, you know, that I realized. I didn't realize it would, you know, America change his mind on something in three days and stuff like that. So can you walk through the part where different cities, how easy it is to change some of this stuff? Yeah, can we zoom out though and just talk about the context that we sit in and like, what's going on with police violence? Yeah, let's do that first.

So, you know, just for context is that a third of all the people killed by a stranger in the United States are actually killed by a police officer. In March and April of 2020, the police killed as many people as they did in March and April of 2019. So COVID, quarantine, it actually had no impact on the police killing people, even though people were in their homes, even though there's a historic decrease in crime, like, because nobody's outside,

the police actually still kill the same number of people and at the same rate, which is sort of wild, right? So look at this. We're reminded, too, that 2019 was the first year ever where Black people were more afraid

of being killed by a police officer than being killed by community violence. Like, that is wild. So we look at this context and say it makes sense to us that this started in Minneapolis this time. You know why? Because in Minneapolis, Black people are 13 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white people. It's the highest racial disparity with regard to police violence that exists in the country. The average is three times. The average Black person is three times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person. It also makes sense to us why in St. Louis it started in 2014, because St. Louis has, since 2013, had the highest rate of police

violence across the country, right? So when we think about solutions, a solution has to do two things. It has to both change police behavior and change the outcomes. One of the things that does that so effectively, but is operated under the radar, is use of force policies. There are eight policies that we track across the country.

And these eight policies, when a department goes from none of these policies to all of these policies, it can result in a 72% reduction in police violence. And the beautiful thing is that they're already simple. So there are things like risk requires de-escalation. So it requires officers, if they can, put space in between them and another person.

If they can talk somebody down, it requires them to use different methods and tactics that might deescalate. Things like banning chokeholds and strangleholds seems really simple, but only 28 of the 100 largest police departments even ban chokeholds and strangleholds today. You said in your research, New York overturned that, right? Yes. What makes New York so interesting is that New York actually banned chokeholds a long time ago in the 60s. It was the first major police department in the country. New York is the biggest police department in the country to ban chokeholds. And then quietly after Garnet gets killed, de Blasio lifts the ban on chokeholds. And the way

that he lifts the ban is actually really sneaky. So if you read the New York City policy, it says Chokeholds are banned. And then on the next page, it says everything that was banned on the page before can actually be unbanned on a case-by-case basis of a committee that is for police officers. And you're like, well, that's not a ban anymore. If it can be unbanned on a case-by-case basis, it's not a ban. So Minneapolis, chokeholds aren't banned in Minneapolis, but in the majority of cities, chokeholds aren't banned. Only 28 of the 100 cities. And remember, there's a difference between a chokehold and a stranglehold.

A chokehold is your Adam's apple. It's your airway. A stranglehold is the muscles in your neck restricting blood flow to your head. Both have similar impact, but there are some places, for instance, that ban chokeholds and don't ban strangleholds. They both need to be head. Both have similar impact, but there are some places, for instance, that ban chokeholds and don't ban strangleholds. They both need to be banned. And then things like, is there a duty to intervene? So does an officer have a required to intervene if they see another officer engaged in

misconduct, right? And we want that to happen. The only way that those three officers got fired in Minneapolis is because activists pressed for a duty to intervene clause in the use of force policy in Minneapolis. So those other officers were held responsible because they didn't do anything as that officer in Minneapolis had his foot on Mr. Floyd's neck leading to his death, right? We also track, can you shoot into moving vehicles? Why should you be shooting into moving vehicles? You shouldn't, right? And that's common sense. You shoot somebody who's driving a car, they die. What happens to the car?

Keeps going and it kills somebody, right? So there are eight of these things and you can find them out. 8can'twait.org is what is launching tomorrow. It's a campaign about how do we make sure that we end these eight things? How do we make sure that we put in these policies? Because these policies will save lives.

So you found, and one of the things that was so hard with this research is you couldn't get a lot of the policies from the different police departments, right? You couldn't even find out what they actually had, you know, in their code of conduct stuff. Yeah, so what's interesting, you know, here's what we say, right. Is that it's a low bar that you should know the rules by which the police can kill you. We think that that is like sort of just like a low bar, but police departments all across the country, these are secret. Like they don't publish them.

So it took us a couple of years to even get all the use of force policies from the a hundred biggest cities. We had to fight some cities, some cities like El Paso, Texas, Birmingham. We had to actually find lawyers who had sued the city and we had to get it from them. This was not very easy, but we did it. And what's powerful about it is for the first time, we actually can compare policies across the country. This is the first ever database that has existed like this. And we've actually seen legislators reach out to us being like, finally, we have comparative data. Finally, we can actually see the language that exists in other cities. And that's actually really powerful. And then you also had the actual data on how somebody died seems to vary depending on who you listen to. So you

had to sort out all that too, right? Yeah. So, you know, there are a couple of databases about police violence. We manage the most comprehensive database about police violence in the country. The big one that people know is the Washington Post. Now the Washington Post database is, we like the Washington Post. They only capture people who got killed on duty by an on-duty officer with a gun. So Eric Garner is not in their database because he was not killed with a gun. Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis is not in their database because

he was not killed with a gun. If you remember Botham Jean, who was killed by Amber Geiger when she walked into his apartment in the middle of the night and shot him dead, she was off-duty when that happened. So that's not included in the Washington Post database. So our database is the only database in the country that's all on-duty, off-duty killings, all weapons where the police officer contributed to the death of a person. So our data has been used in over 1,200 studies just in the past three or four years, which is really powerful. And this data is data that we also have to clean and help fill in the gaps. Because in America, if you get killed by a police officer and the media does not write about it, then you don't exist. And that is sort of wild. So you're almost approaching this,

because I know FiveThirtyEight has done some stuff too. You're matching this data from different places and trying to paint this picture that becomes irrefutable after a while, right? Where you're just like, look, why, look at, uh, what, why did this department that has all these safer methods? Hey, what a coincidence. They're having less incidents. Um, why can't everybody do this? And at some point it almost becomes like sports where, you know, like in the NBA, it's like, Hey, if you shoot more threes, you're going to score more points. At some point, somebody is going to look at this data and have the same realization, right? Why wouldn't that happen yet? Yeah. You know, one of the things that is true is that the data analysis is pretty new. So we are the first people ever to crunch

data like this. It's the first database like this has ever existed. So some of it is that it's new. You know, when we identify that these eight policies matter disproportionately more than other things, like that's the first study like this has ever been done. So, You know, when we identified that these eight policies matter disproportionately more than other things, like that's the first study like this has ever been done. So, you know, there are a lot of, there are a set of legislators and other people who want to do right,

who literally just didn't have access to this information because it didn't exist. So we are sympathetic to that. But now that we know, it means that we must act, right? Like now that we know. So what's cool about it is that in almost every city,

the mayor has almost unilateral power to impact these changes today. Mayors and police chiefs can put these eight policies in place. They would save lives. That is a really powerful thing. And we want to normalize the fact that people can talk about policy, that people can look up the policies in their own state or their own cities. We start with 100 larger cities and then every city in California, and we are slowly branching out. And one other thing that you've learned is that police cams have not really worked to curb violence, which doesn't make any sense. But that's what the data shows. Yeah, so there are five things that don't work. So body cameras, the data is clear that they do not change police behavior in a scalable way. There are some studies that suggest that there might be minor changes to police behavior. But again, it's not in a way that we can scale. The next two are about training. So there are two trainings that are often bandied as solutions. Both of those change police officers'

attitudes, not their behavior. So the first is implicit bias. So implicit bias is a training where they uncover the bias that officers have about race or about gender or identity. And the best studies show us that officers who are predisposed to those messages going in come out with the greatest attitude changes. But in general, it doesn't change their behavior. Same thing with mental health training. There's actually very new research just a few months old about mental health training. And it shows that training police officers to engage in mental health crises in a different way doesn't change their behavior. We actually probably should just have mental health experts do that work.

The fourth is around the number of black officers. And this is actually where it gets interesting. The number of black officers does matter, but it doesn't matter until we get to 35 percent of the force being black. Wow. Why is that? So I don't know why it is. This is just what the research shows us. It's a very cool graph.

So you see it. It doesn't matter. the research shows us. It's a very cool graph. So you see it. It doesn't matter, doesn't matter, doesn't matter. You get 35% of the police department, and then it actually goes, the number of people killed goes down. Wow. The challenge with this, because the challenge which makes this

not a scalable solution is that only 12 of the 18,000 police departments that exist have over 30% Black composition. So it's just not a scalable solution. And the fifth is community policing. This is the one we hear a lot. It's this idea that if the community and police trusted each other more, that the outcomes would be better. And we have problems with this. We would say this idea is racist at its core, that it's only Black and brown people and poor people that we'd ever say, you know what? The police need to go play football with my kid to treat him like a whole human being. Or like, you know, why does the police have to take my daughter out to get ice cream to not shoot her in the forehead and

treat her like a child, right? Like, that's a racist idea. We never offer that idea around white people or people in affluent communities. Like, if you know them better, you actually not kill them, you'll treat them better. That will be unacceptable. But also the data is clear that community policing, it does actually change the attitudes of the police and it changes the attitudes of community members. It just doesn't change the outcomes with which they use force or the frequency with which officers use force. Those five things don't matter.

And one of the things you guys are really passionate about that I never really thought of extensively until you were laying everything out on the Zoom was, why do we need this many guns with the police? Why can't we deploy different people in the unit in different ways? And why can't some people just be cops that don't have guns? And why do we need this much machinery behind doing that job? Yeah, so that's a great question. So that don't have guns? And why do we need this much machinery behind doing that job? Yeah, so that's a great question. So we don't. So we think about the strategy as two-pronged. It's reduce the power of the police. And that's what we focus on with 8 Can Wait. That is about reducing the power that they have to inflict harm in communities. And what's powerful about that strategy is that the police will say things like,

if you restrict our ability to use force, then it makes us less safe. You don't know what it's like to be a police officer. And if you say that we can't use chokeholds and we're in a dangerous situation, then like this doesn't make us safe. What the data shows is that in the places with the most restrictive policies, the police are the safest

and community members are the safest. It also shows that there's no change in crime because the police will say, you know what? Okay, enact those policies and the city will be more dangerous. The data does not show that's true. But the whole second strategy is what you talked about. It's about shifting the role of the police and about shrinking the role of it. The second strategy is about shrinking the role of the police, right?

So when we look at the data nationally, of all the arrests that happen in the country, only 5% of the arrests happen for violent crime. Only 5%, right? That's an FBI number. That's not like a DeRay McKesson special. That is an FBI number for more than 20 years. Only 5% of the arrests happen for violent crime. But we staff and resource police departments as if it is 50, 60, 70% of arrested for violent crime. That's just not the case. So we don't need somebody with a gun going to a mental health crisis. We don't need somebody with a gun going to a car crash. We don't need somebody with a gun trying to find a missing key.

So we should shift all those resources away from police departments, and we should shift all those responsibilities away from police departments. And we should narrow the scope so finely so that the only things that we have, any sort of armed intervention is so small that like we don't need whole forces of police to do these things. And that is a real solution. That's not a Pollyanna solution. The majority of what happens with 9-1-1 is not things that require armed intervention. And we just don't need a police apparatus the way that we have today. So you said in 2014, I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest. I was running around face burning and nothing I saw looked like America to me.

You said that in 2015 about Ferguson in 2014 to the New York Times. You could take that quote right now and that would be everything that's happened over the last week. I thought 2014 was going to be this sea change moment in a lot of different ways. And not only was it not a sea change moment, it seems like the numbers have not gone down in any respect. What happened these last six years? Why didn't things get better, in your opinion? Yeah, so the numbers didn't go down. The numbers went up. The police kill on average 1,100 people a year. The number of people killed since 2014 has not dipped below the 2014 number at all. So what happened? You know, I think what happened with us is that we learned more than we ever knew, right? So now that we have the data, we know the analysis, like we actually know what the levers are. We didn't

know in 2014 what the structural levers were. We knew that there were laws, policies, and practices that we had a hunch that they were wrong, but we had no clue. We didn't know anything about police shooting conducts. We didn't know, for instance, there's a law in California that says that any investigation of an officer that lasts more than a year can never result in discipline regardless of the outcome, right? We didn't know there's a law in Oregon that says an officer can use deadly force if they think you just committed a felony or if they think you're about to commit a felony as well. We didn't know those things existed. We didn't know that in Chicago, they destroy police officer disciplinary records. Every five years, in Portland and Seattle,

the contracts say the officer has to be disciplined in the least embarrassing manner before the public. We didn't know that in Minneapolis, there's a clause that says that they can have community oversight, but the community oversight board can never have the power to discipline an officer. We just didn't know these structural things, right? We know now. And because we know, we can actually be more focused in how we press and how we fight on. And I'm hopeful about that, right? I think that 2014 was the awakening for so many people. I think about 2020 as a chance that we get the changes that people promised us in 2014, but didn't have the political courage to follow through on. Why do you think this became such a moment these last, I don't know, seven days?

If you had to say one thing, what would it be? Because for me, I would say the video was so horrifying and so inexplicable. It was literally watching somebody get murdered that I think people couldn't shake that. But then you bring in all these other things. And now you have where we are now. What do you think it was? Do you think it was something different? You know, I think that you remember 2014.

2014, we went to like a million. You went to a million panels. We read all this. It was people like we're building their understanding of issues around race all across the country. It was people listening to podcasts. People were just learning so much. I think that now it's like people know the information. They built their capacity.

2014, we were doing a lot of work building people's understanding about racism and structure, all this stuff. We don't have to do that now. We did it. That was actually the important work that happened over the past five years. So we're at a moment now where people are like, I get it. They saw that video. They're like, this is screwed up. Like, I want to, they are ready for action, right?

They already get it. And I think that's what you're seeing right now. Also, I think there's a set of newer people to the protest who are like, okay, we saw those people on the street last time. You promised them things and you didn't follow through, so we don't believe you, which is why people are staying in the street. And that makes total sense to me.

Do you think that the fact that Trump has become such a reviled president in so many circles actually helps this movement in a lot of ways because people want to rally around different things? I think that, you know, here's the thing. Trump is, there's not much positive or anything positive that's coming out of the White House from Trump, certainly around race injustice.

I'm also mindful that the police has very little to do with local, that the president has very little to do with local policing. There are 18,000 police departments. It's mayors, governors, city councils. Like that actually is where the power is. So we've seen Trump exercise the full extent of the president's power, which is like calling in the National Guard, potentially calling in the military to sort of screw around in cities.

And the DOJ does fund the majority of police departments, but the DOJ has never conditioned that funding on anything substantive. So the police, the president really doesn't have a big impact on local policing. The president does manage the three biggest police departments in the country, as you can imagine. They have Border Patrol, one of the biggest police departments in the country, ICE, which we know ICE detains more people than they've ever detained at the daily rate in the history of the country. It's about 60,000 people are detained each day by ICE. And then the FBI, which is a domestic police force. So these three agencies are managed by the president.

And that is not insignificant. But local police departments are really local issues. And the mayors have way more power than they want to let on with this stuff. These guys, you know, we have Garcetti, who's been on this podcast in Los Angeles, who's on TV every night. He has more power to change at least some of this stuff than maybe he's letting on, right? Yeah, so Garcetti,

so the police commission is an actual structure in LA and the police commission does have the, sort of has to be involved in any policy changes with regard to the police and the police department.

But Garcetti, the mayor, appoints those people. So the mayor has a lot of power. The mayor manages the police department. The mayor manages what policies would move and not. So yeah, the mayor has a lot of power. Mayors like to say, they like to be like, you know, we are, we're taking the lead from the police. It's a hard job, da-da-da. We want to create the pressure to say, they like to be like, you know, we are, we're taking the lead from the police. It's a hard job. We want to create the pressure to say community members have asked for these changes and want these changes to happen right now. And most mayors have the power to do that. No legislation, don't need a whole lot of hearings. They actually can move very quickly. All right. So let's take Garcetti because that's the one I'd probably know the best because I live here. Let's say he calls you and says, I need help. Give me three things I need to be doing right now. What are the three things you'd say?

So we want to ban, we want to put in place all eight policies and we want to do that very quickly. In LA, we also want to cancel a contract with Lexapol. So Lexapol is a third party that city 95% of the police departments in California outsource their policy writing to this police-led bank tank, and then they're banned. We want to ban that today. And then in LA, we want to do a set of reforms about how the police interact in communities. So there are things that seemingly are much smaller. So the LAPD stops Black people disforcing more than other races with no pretext, with no probable cause.

They just stop and search them. And the data shows that. So there are a host of those practices that we want the police to stop immediately in LA. Police unions have been written about a lot these last few days, and they have a lot more power than I think a lot of people knew with protecting officers, protecting people who made mistakes, all kinds of things. How does that get solved? How do we get everybody to be able to work with them so that they can try to solve this too?

Or do you think they're even interested in solving it? So the police unions are like a whole, that'll be a whole podcast. The police unions are really hard. We manage a whole project around police unions. It's called checkthepolice.org. So to show you the clauses in police union contracts that are really dangerous and don't help us out with accountability or public safety. And the police unions have been the single biggest impediment to these changes across the country. There've been a lot of police chiefs who really aren't awful, like who get it, who are fine. But union leaders have not been helpful when the rubber meets the road. So I'd encourage people,

if you're interested in the union stuff, to go to checkthepolice.org and check your police union contract. But in terms of what we do about them, the union strategy is a little bit more long-term. It's like a two to five-year strategy because most police union contracts last for about four years.

So we can't really renegotiate them until it expires, right? And then we can go in and do some good work. So in Austin, we worked with the protesters. They had to change their police union contract. They did it, and it was incredible. We're working similarly with people in Portland, Oregon right now to change the police shooting contract, but it's a longer strategy. I already named some of the clauses that exist in these contracts,

but it's really hard. And the contract is why in places like Minneapolis, half of the people who are fired get rehired. And that's a trend that we see all over the country. That's not an aberration in Minneapolis. That's actually pretty standard in a lot of cities across the country. And you were working in the Minneapolis school system when Ferguson happened. I sure was working in Minneapolis. I was working in Minneapolis public school. I lived in a lot of the major cities. So I'm from Baltimore and still am a resident of Baltimore and lived in Minneapolis when the protest started, lived in New York 12 years ago as a middle school math teacher. So yeah, Minneapolis is a hard place. I used to manage all staffing for the school system in Minneapolis. And even then, the racial disparities in the education system were so deep there, despite the fact that the city has enough

resources to offer a quality education to everybody. So, yeah. So you weren't surprised that this became ground zero? Not surprised at all. You remember that when we think about Minneapolis, it was they protested and consolidated with Mike Brown, and then there was the Jamar Clark protests, and now it's this. Do you worry at all about trolls and opponents?

The stuff you're trying to do is really important stuff. You're also going to have a lot of opposition. You're going to piss people off. Have you worried about your safety or anything like that? Yeah, so when I think about my own situation, I try not to stress out about it. The first person ever permanently banned from Twitter was banned for raising money to try and get me killed. The FBI is in my house. I've been sued by five police officers in two cities. We won all of those at the first level, got them all dismissed. And then an officer

in Baton Rouge appealed. And we are actually appealing to the Supreme Court right now because it was held that I could be, I could be held, it was found that I could be held civilly negligent for an injury that he sustained at one of the protests that I was at. So we will be hearing back from the Supreme Court any day now about whether they're going to hear that case. My phone got hacked. There was one day I was on a panel. Next thing I know, my phone says, please activate your phone. I'm like, this is really weird. I don't really understand. And then I realized that somebody has called Verizon.

I find out later that somebody has called Verizon, and they have used my social security number, which got dumped on the internet. They used the last four of my social to get into my account, posing as me. They tried to change my phone number on the phone. And luckily, you actually can't change your phone number over the phone, thank God. But they did change the SIM card over the phone. So they reset my Gmail.

They reset my Twitter account. They just wreaked havoc until I could get access to my accounts. Not too long ago, my address in Baltimore got leaked and I got about 70 food deliveries in the span of three days. You know, so it has been, it actually has been really, it's been, it's been a long, a long five years. And I know what I risked. I also know what so many other people have risked. But it is worth it because I think that we have a chance to change history. I think that we have a chance to change the trajectory of the country, to save so many lives. And that to me is worth it.

Are there a couple other people? I mean, you're probably the most prominent of all the activists in this particular space, but are there some people the last six years that have come along? Like, do you feel like you have people flanking you that have profiles that are growing and, uh, and are gaining the same kind of influence? And if so, who are they? You know, I think that the reality is, is that there are so many incredible, uh, leaders happening at the local state, but are like, there are so many good people. So I spend most of my time, uh, around, time around Brittany Packnett, who's an incredible leader. We met each other in Ferguson together so long ago. And Samuel Sinyangwe, who does all of our data, and he is just a star. I actually met Sam on Twitter,

actually. There were all these tweets about who is a leader and da-da-da, and I got tagged on stuff. And Sam was just a guy on Twitter. He was like, I want to help out. I was on my phone. I was like, DM me. He DM'd me some ideas. We got on the phone together. I was like, this makes a lot of sense. Let me know what I can do. Never met him before. So then we started working together. It was sight unseen. And then one day, I'll never forget, I'm still literally in the street. He calls me. He's like, I just quit. And I'm like, quit? We ain't got no money. We ain't got no... like, ah, what are you doing quitting? And he was like, I believe in this work. I want to figure out how to do this work with you. And we've been together ever since.

And it's just been, it's been great. So, so those are the two people that I spend the majority of my time with. But there are so many incredible people all across the country doing good work. How are you funding Campaign Zero and all the stuff that's coming out of it? So it's a good question. You know, we've gotten donations recently, which has been really helpful because, you know, we spent, it's funny, people would see me like on Colbert or something and they'd be like, they must have all this money. It's like the team that I'm closest to, like, we literally had an average of $160,000 per year the past four years that we split amongst ourselves and the people that we got to help us out. We called in a lot of favors. We had a lot of volunteers help us do

this stuff. That's why the websites are beautiful, but they definitely look like we made them in the middle of the night because we did. It was like, we just have to do this stuff really quickly. So we did it without a lot of money, without a lot of sort of pay resources, but with the best of intentions and the right focus. So this is actually the first time ever where we, you know, people have donated to us now, like, you know, there are all these donations and it's so, and that's really powerful, but that's actually the first time, like, this is the first time we even have resources. So it's funny because, you know, when you grow up poor, right, you're like, always, you're like, let me ask a favor for this.

So like the thought that we actually could hire somebody is so crazy because, um, cause we couldn't before, you know? Yeah. I was going to say, what would you do with more resources? Cause you know, I, I think if there was ever a time to raise more resources, it's right now. So what would you do? Like what, what would be, let's say you were able to pull in an extra 250,000 or whatever, like where would you spend that money? Yeah. So we're actually working on, so we launched a scorecard around California. So if you go to police scorecard.org, we rated all the police departments in California, really powerful. It's the first time that they'd ever been used to do that. So like, we're really proud

of that. But we're actually rolling out a scorecard hopefully soon that is all the police departments in the country in a city with a population of more than 50,000 people. It's incredible. It has taken us a ton of time to try and figure out to get all the data in one place because nothing like this has ever been undertaken before. So if we got money, we'd actually probably find help

to like scale that up really quickly. We've been doing, you know, I personally still code contracts every morning. Every morning I like get a new batch of police union contracts. I find the coding. I like put them in the right buckets because I've been doing it for, that's like what I do in our work. But we can actually train people to do that. And we would probably do that. We probably hire somebody to, to manage volunteers so that they could, so like, so that we can, all these people keep reaching out, being like, I want to volunteer.

I'm like, I just don't have a chance to do that right now. So, so yeah, so we would probably look for capacity. And we also, frankly, want to help build a cadre of policy experts on this stuff, because as organizers, we believe that the data, the policy that will change people's lives is something that anybody can understand. That we never will create a system

that says you have to go through me or come to me to do good work. So we want to redistribute this knowledge as quickly and as effectively as we possibly can. We just need support in how to do that so that we can teach these cohorts of people all across the country how to look at the data,

how to use the data, and how to frankly expand the data in ways that we might not even know. It feels like you're in the very early stages of doing something that will have a dramatic effect on a lot of things because the data at some point becomes irrefutable. And I think people are trained to read data now from whether you're a sports fan or whatever, you're just kind of used to this stuff. You think of where we were in the mid

nineties, even with like DNA evidence and the OJ trial and people like, what's that? I don't know. And now I think where we are in 2020, people get it. Like they understand that stuff. Uh, I had to ask you quickly about, um, you know, a lot of people, you've, you've, you've a lot of people in your life, a lot of celebrities and everybody who has a big platform is trying to figure out how to use that platform going forward. And I think there's pressure on famous people. Like there's never has been before, you know, like even Michael Jordan did a statement denouncing the George Floyd murder. I know we're supposed to call it death, but I'm going to call it murder. But all these people are trying to figure out, all right, people love me and respect me. How can I steer them in the right

directions? What kind of advice do you give whoever, a famous NBA player who reaches out to you and says, what can I do? How can I help? Well, we do with them what we did to you today, right? We walk them through what the data looks like and then what the solutions look like. And the reason that we don't just say like post this thing or do this thing is that you are smart enough to understand every single thing that we're doing. You get, you can do it. Right. And the more that we arm you with that information, the better ambassador that you can be for the cause, because what we don't want to do is like you post it. Then somebody asks a pretty basic question, but you feel like you don't really understand. And then you actually lose the message. These messages work better when you

can put it in your own voice. So when you can explain to people why the police shouldn't be able to shoot into moving vehicles, that matters up to us. So you're not just like DeRay said, it doesn't make sense. You know, it doesn't make sense, right? So when people reach out to us, we try to do these little work sessions that are like an hour long. And we try to pack as many of our friends or cohorts as we can in. Like you were in one that I think was pretty big or bigger than we've ever done. Yeah, that's what we want to do. We want to help people understand what it is because people are smart enough to understand.

Right. Give them the ammunition and then it's up to them how to use it. Equip them with all the data. Yeah, it certainly, it was eye-opening for me and I felt like I've been reading a lot of stuff really the last week and a lot of the stuff you brought up, I was just like, Jesus, can you do the thing really quick for just for the audience that you did on that Zoom about think of your safe place? Yeah. So there are two ways that we help people sort of reframe the concept because some of this is about structures and systems.

But the other half that's really big is the way people conceive of what safety looks like. That for a lot of people, people think of the police as sort of the thing that keeps them safe. So the first is, you know, I've been in a lot of rooms and people say to me, are you saying that the police should never kill somebody? And what I say to them every time is tell me somebody that matters to you. Tell me a kid that matters to you. Tell me somebody you love. When can the police kill that person? When is it okay for a police officer to put a bullet through your daughter's head?

What's the thing that she could do that you're totally fine with the end of her life? Is it a bank robbery? Is it arson? Is it petty theft? Is it a car check? What's the thing that you're okay with the murder of your child? And every time people are like, I don't know. And it's like, if you don't know, if every version of what your kid could do, they come home alive, doesn't mean that they don't have a consequence, but they come home alive, then every parent should have a kid that comes home alive at the end of the day.

The second thing is really pushing people to reframe their understanding of safety. So we ask people to think about the place where you feel the most safe. And then we ask them, are the police there? The police aren't there. The police are not in the space where you feel the most safe. And that's how we know that you know that safety is not about how many police officers there are. Safety is about resources. The places that are the safest are the places with the most resources. So the room that you felt the most safest in probably had, was probably secure. It probably had food.

There probably were people that you loved there. There were memories. And we think that everybody should be able to have access to whatever was in your space that made you feel safe. You know, we have an interview coming up after this one on this with that Pete Carroll and Steve Kerr did with Greg Popovich.

And I don't want to step on that, but he made a great point that I just wanted to throw you really quick. He was saying how people's attitudes toward police violence need to change the same way that it changed with drunk driving. And how we were in this point in the 60s, 70s, and even the 80s,

when people just got in the car and they drove. I know I did it in college, you know, because nobody was telling me it was a bad thing to do. And then mothers against drunk driving and all that stuff. And within 10 years, it changed and it changed in all of these ways where now it's not a good thing to do. People know that they don't, you know, you get a DUI, it could be something that hangs on you and you,, you could kill some, there's all these terrible things. Everyone, my kids are going to be aware of that when they're old enough to drive and they're old enough to go to parties and things like that. I was not as aware of it in the eighties. Do you think we get this way with police brutality? What happened with drunk driving? Do we get there with police brutality over the next 20 years?

Yeah, I don't plan, Bill, I don't plan to be fighting this issue for 40 years. I think that we'll fix this in our lifetime. And that's a big claim, right? Because when we think about the last 100 years of civil rights work, the police is one of the only institutions that has remained largely unchanged. But we know way more about the way the system is functioning than we ever have before. We just know the mechanisms. We know the the mechanisms.

We know the inside machinery. And I'm hopeful that if we put people out in the right direction, that we will get the outcomes that we want. I really do believe it. I think we just got to focus people. We think about 8can'twait.org as a first step, that there are a set of things that we'll be releasing, but this is like immediate. This is actionable. It's very clear for people. And we want people to understand that today, because it can change today. It can, you know, if there's anything that the Trump administration has reminded us, it's that the government can move as quick as it wants to. Whoever thought you could ban whole people from the country on Twitter, you know, we would have laughed at people if they had said that before. But again, the government can move. You know, you think about COVID. You know, the government told us

that like there weren't enough resources to go around. It's like we figured out how to feed whole cities, kids, breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a matter of days, right? Like the government can figure it out if it needs to, and we should force the government

to figure this out. So it's 8can'twait.org, but it's the number eight. The number eight. And it's partcan'twait.org But it's the number 8 And it's part of Campaign Zero Listen, tell people how to donate to Campaign Zero If you go to joincampaignzero.org Then you can donate there But there'll be a donate button on 8can'twait.org as well

So that you can donate there It's a project of Campaign Zero Campaign Zero is a 501c3 We have a tax ID number You can donate there. It's a project of Campaign Zero. Campaign Zero is a 501c3. We have a tax ID number. You can donate right there. If you don't want to donate via one of the link, you can just email me directly at deray.com.

Very easy. I really admire what you're doing. Thanks for coming on. Good luck with this. Thank you. We can win. Bill, I think we'll win. I can't wait to come back and talk to you and be like, whew, that was so hard. We did it. Really? Yeah, but we did it, you know?

We'll pour champagne on each other. Thanks again. Great. Cool. Talk to you later. All right. We're going to play the entire episode of Flying Coach with Steve Kerr, Pete Carroll, and Greg Popovich. But first, I wanted to talk about Full Sail University's Dan Patrick School of Broadcasting. You know Dan Patrick from the Dan Patrick Show, Sunday Night Football, the Olympic Sports Center. Being a guest on this show, he's teamed up with Full Sail University to offer an accelerated bachelor's degree in sportscasting. It combines hands-on learning, immersive projects, faculty with real-world experience to prepare

students for life in the media industry, and they brought in some of sports media's best to be part of the program, including longtime ESPN producer, multi-MA winner, and my good friend, Gus Ramsey. He heads up the program. They bring in pros like Sage Steele, Jay Harris, Kevin DeGande, and myself. I spoke to the students, I think,

a month and a half ago. I had a great time. In this program, students will learn sportscasting inside and out, on camera, behind the camera, podcasting, radio, interviewing, everything in between at Full Sail University's Dan Patrick School of Sportscasting. You can earn a bachelor's degree in about half the time, as short as 20 months, and you can choose to earn your degree online or on Full Sail's campus in Orlando, Florida. To learn more about Full Sail University's Dan Patrick School of Sportscasting,

go to fullsail.edu slash Bill Simmons. We're going to play you the entire episode of Flying Coach, which has its own feed, but I don't feel like enough people know about it. It's hosted by Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll. They had Greg Popovich on, and it was absolutely outstanding. I really wanted to get this out to a bigger audience. We ran it on our Ringer NBA, Ringer NFL show as well. But I think the most important thing with this is right now, maybe more than any other time in my lifetime, we need smart people who have led teams

and have put a lot of thought and energy and time into the concept of leadership and teamwork and planning ahead and building a culture, all things that would sound great right now for America. But this was an awesome conversation. Really proud to have it on the ringer. And here it is, Flying Coach with Pete Carroll, Steve Kerr, and Greg Popovich. Flying Coach podcast, Steve Kerr, Pete Carroll, and our special guest today, somebody who would normally be introduced with all kinds of accolades attached to his name, but I know him too well, so I'm going to cut the BS. Greg Popovich, thanks for coming on today.

Thank you for that, Steve. Appreciate it very, very much. That's not much of an introduction, Steve. It's great. It's perfect. Obviously, you guys got history. I have to be honest. I, uh, you know, I played for pop for four years, Pete and, um, and coached with him last summer in the world cup. Um, I've, I've never felt as nervous as I was today. I think I now understand the sideline reporters and what they actually feel as they go into NBA games, like

knowing they got to interview pop at the end of the first quarter. I'm kind of, I'm kind of antsy a little bit. You know, that's just a shtick, right? Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah. We'll talk about that at another time. Uh, obviously very, very difficult week, uh, in our country. And I think more than anything today, I just want to have a really open conversation with two coaches who have meant a lot to me in terms of mentoring and who I've learned so much from, and who are also really well connected to their players through relationships. And I just want to have a conversation on what's happening in the country, race relations, where we're heading, how we can actually create change in our country, and maybe what our small place is in that big picture.

And I think I'll start out, Pop, by just kind of asking you your feelings, your thoughts on the last week or two. That is the starting point, isn't it? Trying to figure out exactly how to think about this, what it means, how did it happen, How did we get here? What are the reasons? What did we miss? And all of a sudden we have another killing. So for my part, personally, as a white person, one who has obviously participated in the privilege that we have, and I think, you know, a lot of people's situations, a privilege that we have. And I think a lot of people's situations are privileged that they did not even know they had. It's sort of like you're, this will sound a little bit

hyperbolic possibly to some, but it's like we were born with innate white supremacy because we were born white. And as Ta-Nehisi Coates says, there's no such thing as white. You have to try to live your life like you're not white. It's very confusing to most of us. But if you were born white, you have a view of the world that does put you in a class of white supremacy. Whether you wield that power negatively or not is beside the point. And most of us don't realize that as we're growing up. It's not something that's in your face. Just like every community, Jewish community, black community, so on and so forth, it's not monolithic, neither is white

supremacy. I don't think I'm ever going to wield a Confederate flag or a Nazi symbol or wear a Ku Klux Klan hood, but that's one extreme of white supremacy. There are all sorts of levels. And I think the more that white people face that, the easier it will be to try to come to some understanding so that we can all live together and all prosper in justice. So as this happened, I just felt a deep sadness, a deep frustration, but also a horrifying embarrassment. As I looked at that officer's face with his hand in his pocket and the nonchalance with which he carried on, it for an instant just took all hope away from me for solutions. You know, I definitely won't stay in that state. But for a moment, it was like, my gosh, I'm thinking back to the hoses and the dogs in

the 60s and then, you know, all the Jim Crow and Rodney King and then all the deaths in between of young black men and women. And here we have a public lynching. And so the embarrassment, the sadness, the anger just welled up. But then the overriding feeling was, how in the hell do Black people and Black people with children deal with something like this? And what can we say or do to help the situation? So just in a nutshell, those were all the things that were going through my head. Yeah. And I think we've all been feeling that way to some degree, but especially us coaches who are coaching African-American players and coaching with other African-American coaches

and knowing their families. And when it's personalized and you can see the pain, it is so difficult. Pete, I know you have been in constant contact with your team through your Zoom meetings and with the recent, I guess, normally they would be called mini camps, but whatever you guys are calling them, you guys were having daily Zooms over the last couple of weeks. So what have your interactions been like with your team? of our longstanding relationships with our teams and our players and the backgrounds and always caring about them enough to want to know about their families and want to know where they come from and want to know what they've been through to try to understand them better and love them better as we go through the process of trying to make winning

teams. The connection is so deep and the understanding, as I have learned over the years, about the pain and the discomfort and the horrific burden that our players carry with them, the responsibility to want to do something, and knowing that we're in a position where maybe we could do something, it makes it such a challenge because it feels so helpless. I can identify with Pop saying that moment when he looked in the eyes of that guy and he just didn't care. It was just like a lost feeling. How can we prevent this from being a reality?

And so this is a wonderful opportunity, Greg. I'm so glad you're doing this with us because it's really, I'm hoping it's, you know, just three white guys speaking to white guys and let people understand kind of where we're coming from and share with them. And so the point, Steve, is that when in our meetings and as we go forward on Friday,

we just, we had to address what was going on because it was already starting and knowing that we were leading into the weekend that was going to be really heated up most likely and and and accentuated the craziness and all we came back on monday and went right to it again and and we break up and we we have our we have teams within our team so we have a kind of a setup makeup where we can really visit and let guys speak their hearts and talk about how this is impacting them and how it's affecting them. And so that we could all share in everybody's stories. That's the process that we went through. And we've been here before and we've been through this before for my younger players, the guys that are the rooks that are coming in.

It's an opportunity for them to hear from our leaders. And we have marvelous guys that speak on behalf of the communities and speak on behalf of their families and speak on behalf of themselves as teammates. They show the way for younger guys, how they can speak and talk. And it's okay in our environment to communicate it all in the hopes of just finding some kind of sense of of understanding you know and then how do we take the next step with this new experience that we've just lived through and it's it's so horrific as it is again it's again is what kills us you know and probably again it happened we were facing it again and unfortunately you know the fear of it happening again in ahead of us is just i just unbearable to me to think of.

But anyway, so the point is that we're trying to interact as much as we can with our guys and hear from them and listen and learn and grow and find a place where we can act and do something really positive, which our club has done that over the years. But we need to do more and we're never done. And we can't live. I know the white guys on my staff, as you said, we have a bunch of guys on both sides of the table here that have different issues and backgrounds. We can't live with an oblivious way of looking at this. We can't do that. It's the privilege that, like you said, Pop, white people have. There's this living in oblivious to what's going on. That ain't okay. And so I'm trying to convey that to my guys that we see it that way. And then we're trying to learn from each other and see if we can move ahead together.

So I want to eventually get to that point of, you know, what can we do? What should we do? But Pop, you brought up the reminder of the 60s, you know, with the fire hoses and the dogs. And, you know, for me, this was a reminder that Rodney King was 28 years ago. Um, you know, so the point being this has been going on forever. It continues on forever. Um, so, you know, why does it keep happening? Why has it gone on forever? I think one of the most important dynamics of all of this is the Civil War, and that was a long time ago. Stop it, right?

You know, this is something that is generational. It's 400 years in the making. I think has to be done before anything is an understanding and an awareness that there needs to be a reconciliation, an admission of guilt. And again, I don't, I don't think it should be, this is not a message of, Hey, all you white people, you should feel guilty. This is your fault. That's not the point, but this is the way our country is. It's our responsibility to admit that this is what's going on in our country. And let's look at our past and let's truly examine our past. And Pop, I know you've talked about that dynamic.

Any thoughts on that front? Sure. In a sense, it's important that, as you said, it's not admitting that you're guilty of something on the face, but silence or inaction or being oblivious makes you complicit. That's the point that a lot of people don't understand. As long as they are not yelling out the N-word or they're not the ones stopping somebody on the street, they're not in the trucks chasing a young black man down. So that makes them innocent. That's not the point.

The point is to be aware, as you said, of the past, of those centuries of treatment and understanding that emancipation didn't really do a whole lot because it was followed with reconstruction and Jim Crow and so on and so forth. And that admission, much like Germany has done in their special circumstances, is the starting point. It's like building a house and you start with the foundation. That admission has to be forthright, come from the heart. We're not going to reach everybody. That's an impossibility. So this is not an effort to be perfect, but it's an effort to make this happen. So it's a constant, and if this doesn't do it, I fear I don't know what will, but a daily, every incident that does happen has to be called out, whether it's by the government

or one of your friends that you're close to, but amazes you with some action or some words out of his or her mouth, everything has to be called out. It was a good little vignette I saw the other day, or it was someone speaking on one of the news shows about changing the culture. He talked about alcohol and driving drunk and how that culture changed. And now, you know, basically you're a pariah if you get caught drinking while you're driving. And mothers did that. That group changed a whole culture.

Our society really changed with that. So we do have the power as a group, if we stay on this, call it out, and be vocal all the time. And that small percentage of people that won't fall in the line, they really won't matter. If we can get this right to the point where the justice system changes, and we stop incarcerating so many, and so on and so forth, which I'm sure we'll get to later. But that's the starting point for sure. Black people have tried for a long time. It hasn't happened yet. And we're the problem. We're the fly in the ointment. Yeah, that's right. I couldn't agree with you more, Pop, that people in the communities of color, they know the pain and the reality. They understand that.

It's called upon the problem lies in the white communities not responding and not the awareness not being adequate enough so that we do see, hear, feel the indiscretions that are happening. And we act on it. We respond. Our conscience doesn't allow us to do anything but respond. And so there's work to be done because this oblivious nature is just not okay. And one of the thoughts that I'm having is that one thing would be that, okay, I'm a non-racist person. I don't act in that way in any of my actions in my everyday life. Well, that's not enough. We have to be anti-racist. We have to go the step further. We have to go beyond and act and take the action.

And it's going to be a challenge for people. It's hard to step in when you hear a conversation going on. You say, hey, can we clean that up a little bit? Or whatever you might say to acknowledge the fact that you're not accepting that which is getting carried on around you. We have to get bold about that. And I think that happens through knowledge and education and awareness. And we have to, that's why guys like us got to keep talking.

We've been through a lot together and in our stuff and we have to keep talking and and and allow for the mentality that that is a mentality that's necessary and we ain't perfect so we've all screwed up you know and not done well enough that's why i feel frustrated i'm not doing enough i'm not on it enough i can't get active enough to to create the change but i think we need to make progress, not just change. We've got to help progress down the road here and get better at what we're doing. And we've got to work really hard at it. It's really important for us all. I think one of the components to this whole awareness is just the education part of it., I think it's actually embarrassing, but a lot of American history has just been omitted from our textbooks. And, you know, I've had a couple of players who have

been really interested in race relations and politics and history. David West, who I know you coached, Pop in San Antonio, and also Andre Agudala. And I remember having a conversation with Andre a few years ago. And we were talking about race and this subject of admission of this great sin in our country. And he said, Coach, have you ever heard of the Tulsa race riots? And I said, no. It's a great example. Yeah. And he says, I said, no. It's a great example. Yeah. And he says, I said, no.

I said, and I'm immediately put on my heels. I said, tell me about them. And he explains this basically this incredibly successful African-American town called Black Wall Street. Everybody in town was, it was a really thriving town and there was an altercation between a black man and a white woman somewhere in Tulsa. And basically the whole town where these African-American people lived was attacked and dozens, if not hundreds were, were killed and the whole, whole neighborhood was burned down. I took American history in both high school and college, and I never, I never heard of that. Um, so what does that say? We don't even teach it to our,

our children. And so if we're not teaching this stuff, if we're not actually sharing the information that's important, how are we going to ever understand what people are, are actually facing? Right. 300 people were killed in that massacre. 300. Yeah. You couldn't, couldn't you just see that?

I think that there could be such value if in the educational system that we taught the history of racism in America or maybe history of racism. The effort it would take to get the curriculum there, to get the teachers and get the parents and the families to allow that to be brought into their schools, that whole process may be as valuable as the actual teaching that happens in the classroom for the kids. But without recognizing that history, without acknowledging it and calling it exactly like it is, what are we talking about? No wonder people don't know. No wonder people can remain oblivious. No wonder they can stay living in privilege. We're not even bringing out the truth. We just need to get the truth in front of us.

And then I would, gosh, I wish we could figure out how to get that in their classrooms, you know. Coach, it's such a great point. It's how do you hold someone responsible if they're just totally ignorant, have no idea about what has gone on. And that's why this pressure has to be constant by white people, whether it's whatever municipality you're talking about, whatever school board. Sure. That's a tough slog for sure. It's going to be difficult

to get something like that done, but it's a great point. And to begin it as early as possible is probably important. I was in a TV room the other day with my eight-year-old granddaughter and I was watching the news. She happened to walk in and it was the exact time where they were replaying this policeman with his knee on George Floyd's neck. And I didn't realize she was there. And I turned for whatever reason, I saw her standing there and she was just staring. And she said, Poppy, why does that man have his knee on that man's neck? What is he doing? And I was just, I was dumbfounded. I didn't, I turned it off. And then I thought, should I have left it on and explained it to her? Or how do I explain it to her now that I've turned it off?

And I made some feeble attempt, but I didn't know how far to go, how deep to go. What age is it? Is it, is she ready or not ready? And I thought, wow, that's a problem for me. And then I thought, what about a black family? Do you think they have a problem talking to their kids and figuring out what's going on here? So it's so convoluted and complicated that, as Steve said earlier, everything sort of fades away if we don't have that initial admission, that sorrowful recognition of what went on in the past and what has continued. And I don't know how many people are able to do it,

but even if they were the most selfish people in the world, it's for their benefit too, even if it's for the wrong reasons. Pop, you mentioned Germany, and I think it's a really important analogy because obviously what happened during the Holocaust is among the most horrific events of the world's history, if not the most horrific. Germany is now the strongest country in Europe, what, 75 years after the Holocaust, approximately. Can you share what you know about Germans' reconciliation as a country, as a government, after the Holocaust, and what they did, how they approached it? Well, I think the most important thing they did, and this is an obviously problem for us, this cannot be done. And what they did could not be done without leadership. It has to come from those people in positions of power, imagery. We follow and must trust our leaders until they show us otherwise. And it's pretty obvious that we've been shown otherwise in a lot of different situations here. So that trust, that credibility isn't really there. That's a problem we have that they took on and the leadership was dedicated,

truthful, transparent, heartfelt. And the public, and I always want to believe the majority of the public, they have good hearts. They want things to be done properly. They're not prone to listen to the bad angels. They listen to their good angels, but only if that leadership that's in power can direct them appropriately. And that's where it started. After that, there was a dogged recognition and oversight educationally, politically, in municipality after municipality to follow through, to make sure that education continued. And that's a big job. And I don't know at this point if, well, we're not up to it at this point. Yeah, we know that.

We're not up to it. So that's a problem. You know, the fact that they were able to make it through the first, like you said, they had the image of we need to do something about this and they worked their way through that process. There's so much good that comes through that processing just to get to the point. It isn't going to be easy, but wouldn't, I would think that three of us would all, from what we know, wouldn't we stand for, we need to see it somewhere in the educational system and processed with a real clear lineage of bringing it on through and taught in the school so that it just becomes a normal understanding and realization of what happened.

To me, it's just so obvious that I would jump on the table for that. I would think a lot of people wouldn't. I'm sure there's a lot of people that would fight it and make it difficult and all that. So that's okay. I don't worry about that part of it. Really, the effort has to start to get this thing going. The textbooks aren't even going to be ready to go because there isn't any, but there's plenty of stuff. As we send out a message for what we're talking about today, there's one really clear thought that we could support. Let's see if we can step this thing up educationally and make it available so that our generation

of kids coming up and our grandkids, Papa, I know exactly, we're talking about our grandkids right now. How do we speak to them? How do we help them understand? And we range from one to 11 right now, you know, we're trying to help them understand how they're going to take their next steps and how they're going to understand the relationships they have with the black kids that they grow up with. They're growing up with black kids in their sleepovers and their best friends and all. How can they handle what's coming down the pike? And if we don't give them tools, they're not going to be prepared for it. You're here, coach. I think the good news is the younger generation behind us is more diverse, more tolerant,

more aware than any generation above them. I truly believe that. Just speaking with my children who are all in their 20s, seeing their friends, hearing about what they're doing, and not just in their little circle, but reading about things nationwide, you watch the protests, the peaceful protests that are going on. And I know there's been a lot of violence as well and looting and there's all kinds of stuff going on. But if you watch, let's just say, watch a peaceful protest, the diversity in those protests is dramatic. And I truly can older white guys like us do? To me, that's what this comes down to is everybody in a position of power, corporations, entertainers, athletes, coaches, educators, people in the limelight, the more the merrier. But we truly need the leaders of big corporations to actually stand up and say, this has got to stop because they're the ones who can influence the government. And if that influence happens, that's how we can initiate some change. But the younger generation

coming behind us, they're ready for us to set the table. That's, those are, those are my beliefs anyway. Yeah, I agree with that, Steve. And there is, we know, we see the interaction that is existing that maybe didn't exist when we were growing up or whatever, where there is a much greater sense of relationship and understanding and even a more communal sense of our kids with other kids of other races and all. And that's, it's a beautiful thing. It's almost, how could it not happen for the positive? Well, if we don't, we have to jump to the top of this ladder here and get the people on the top end to open up the opportunities, to make the statements,

to make the declarations that will allow for this change. Because somewhere along the line now, this should have happened. It already should have happened and it didn't. And so there's issues here and there's concerns and there's efforts and there's some power to the messaging that comes down that has maintained it to this point. We're still fighting our butt off to get this done. But that's okay. It's okay. It's just there's things working against us here. So as we try to generate energy and momentum and all that, we have to, we got to move the people that are willing to move. And I think that Pop said that right off the top. I think that's really crucial. Well, I think that the responsibility, as Steve said, for those who have some sort of platform, whether you're an athlete or a coach

or an entertainer or a business mogul, all those people have to coalesce. They have to come together because it's a little more difficult now in some ways. When I think back to Martin Luther King Jr. boycotting the buses, well, that hurt people's pocketbooks. And some change happened because of that. It's difficult in today's world, in this corporate world, to make people's pocketbooks hurt the way that did. It seems like a small example, but the world has changed dramatically.

We just gave, I forget the figure, $150, $145 billion, with a B, dollars to real estate developers in this last package, in one of the packages that we just did these bailout deals. That's horrific. It's humiliating. It's ignorant. And a lot of journalists have printed it, and it's been out there, but nothing will be done. Just like after the 2008 debacle, financially, tell me how many executives are in jail because of it. So it's a depressing thing. But what it tells me is if it's that more difficult, it's even a greater responsibility for people like ourselves to make sure that we talk about it as much as we possibly can. And this educational point that you bring up, coach, is, I think it's fantastic. And I think it's a, could be a very valuable way. You think

about that sports team, that hockey team, that basketball team, that football team, whoever it is in that city, making a point about something like that and putting their money where their mouth is and engaging whatever corporate entities happen to be in that particular locality to talk to school boards and talk about education. Because there's always got to be pressure. Nothing happens. In the 60s, nothing really changed until all the people in America saw the hoses and the dogs on TV. They saw the way black people were being treated there. Now it became real. It's the same with the Vietnam War. People have to feel the pain to some degree before they act because, because as we've often said, we're way, way, way too comfortable. And unless we get people to be feeling more uncomfortable, it doesn't change. You know, Papa Boyce, I hate to learn the hard way,

but sometimes we just have to learn the hard way for our greatest lessons to come through. And let's look what happened this week. Look at the response this week. We know that this, we're trying to seize this opportunity because we can feel it because of the pain that was so clearly demonstrated. And like I said, I hate to learn the hard way, but sometimes that's the only way for the lessons to really drive home.

And, and so we just, we got to make it pay. We got to make this time pay for something really positive by reacting and responding. It feels, it feels like this is a tipping point. You know, Pop, you mentioned that in Vietnam and, you know, the pictures of the war, the pictures of the dogs and the fire hoses during the demonstrations in the 60s. What's different now compared to, say, Ferguson in 2014 after Michael Brown was killed? Why now do you think? Does it have to do with the virus? Is it exacerbated because people aren't working? Why is it all of a sudden feeling like this is it now? Or does it?

I've talked with a good number of people about that. Because why not two killings ago or four killings ago? It's similar to the argument about guns. Sandy Hook wouldn't be enough to see little kids killed the way they were. But it wasn't enough. And so it's always, to me, it's always a matter of how to, you might, as coach said, the hard way, how do you make people feel the pain? How do you do that? Well, it's got to be pressure of some sort. And usually it has been protests. Nothing happens because people are silent, because people are quiet. There's always got to be a reaction.

And I honestly think that, as many have said, that the virus has a lot to do with this. Because you're holed up in your house. You're already in a little bit of a semi-depressed state. You know, probably your mood probably is a little different than usual. You lost a little bit of energy in your step. You become a little bit more introspective. You're maybe a little bit more involved in relationships with your family and with your friends on the phone. You take a little time to check your priorities. And in the middle of that, we have a government and a president who has been the way he has, and we would waste way too much time talking about every little thing that he has said

or done. But even for people who I think initially voted for him, I have to believe there's a certain number of them who were disgusted by the behavior and at least really tired of what would go on day after day after day. And so it all kind of coalesces. It all comes together. And then the George Floyd murder was so in your face and the manner in which it was done, I think sickened even the most hardened, or I hope sickened even some of the most ardent Trump supporters, because that was a gut feeling that anybody with any kind of heart would have. It was primal. It was a primal feeling when there was an expressionless man doing this, actually adjusting his knee on this man's neck as he left his hand in his pocket. It was really not a lot of effort here.

I'm just doing what I need to do. And I think it disgusted a lot of people. And thus, you know, the protests came out, as you both have said, with all kinds of different people, all kinds of different races, which was heartening for sure. You know, one of the things, too, that supported, I think, the furor that happened here was the lack of justice immediately stepping in and claiming that this is right before our eyes and you're going to do what? You're going to delay what process? And it took us time to get the guys arrested and all that. And it still is. I think that response added to it. Had the response been right at immediate and, you know, it's easy in hindsight and all, but they should have jumped on it.

Had they, I think the response from the populations would have been different to some extent anyway. And it doesn't make anything right at all. But that's a real sickening part of it is that what we didn't react to and the white people that were, all the white guys that were sitting right there that could have helped out and they didn't and whatever. And I'm not, I don't know any of the guidelines or the rules of all this thing, but that response didn't help us. And we need a better response. We can't let, we got to know that that's what's going to happen next time too. We need to respond better because of what we're learning and what we know. How could we not learn these lessons, Pop, after all this time?

After all of these instances, there's so many examples. Your point is a great one, Coach. And just, you know, Armand Aubrey, that took, what, two, three months? And we wouldn't even have known until a video came out. Steve just talked about Tulsa, and nobody still knows about that, basically. A hundred years later, yeah. Yeah, you know, same thing happened in Wilmington, the Wilmington Lie. There's a great book out now called The Wilmington Lie. Same sort of a massacre, but nobody knows about it. And that delay, I think, Coach, makes a great point. Steve, the point you make about, you know, like we all would like to call for the people that are in positions who have influence and that could affect change.

But the other thought of it is, to me, is that everybody has an influence to some extent. And we need, yeah, absolutely on point. We need to get the people who can call some shots for us and make sure that they can help situations and the politics of stuff and all of that. But everybody has in their own dimension around them an ability to affect the right way to respond and the right outlook and doing the right thing and saying the right thing, making the right stand, as little as

it may be, if more people collectively, and I think that's what we're seeing. Look at the response in the protests. These protests are extraordinary. This is an extraordinary demonstration that we need to see. There's some horrible parts of it, but protest is awesome because people are expressing their views and their visions and they're willing to put themselves out. We need that to happen on all levels as well as reaching to the highest levels. And whatever we can do to influence that would be worthwhile, I'm sure. It's a great point. And part of that is having those uncomfortable conversations with the people who may not agree with you already. We all have people in our circle who are going to disagree with certain points on this. There can't be any disagreement about what we just witnessed.

We just witnessed murder, and this was not murder number one. This has been happening for 400 years. So, you know, these conversations have to be had at every level. You're right, Pete. And then I think there's so much that everybody can do, you know, donating money or time to grassroots organizations around the country. There's a million things you can do to help, but I think you're right. I think it's a collective effort. I want to ask you this, because this is, you know, Pop mentioned generally peaceful protest isn't going to get us very far. You, in the NFL, you witnessed this. We all did four years ago when when Colin Kaepernick decided to take a knee and protest of police brutality.

And not only was he basically shouted down, although plenty of people supported him. But, you know, the the you know, he was kind of left without a job and a lot of people just sort of forgot about him and the NFL has just moved on. How do you feel about all that and how do you reconcile all that with the fact that you're very outspoken and very passionate about the issues we're discussing right now. Well, I think that there was a moment in time that a young man captured. And he took a stand on something, you know, figuratively took a knee. But he stood up for something he believed in. And what an extraordinary moment it was that he was willing to take.

I don't know that he had any idea what the impact would be as it turned out, but what a symbol of courage and vision, maybe even as he was just learning it, to do what he did. But what happened from the process is it elevated an awareness from people that just took everything away from what the statement was all about, and it just got tugged and pulled and ripped apart. And the whole mission of what the statement was that was such a beautiful, it's still the statement we're making right today, is that we're not protecting our people. We're not looking after one another. We're not making the right choices.

We're not following the right process to bring people to justice when actions are taken. And so I think it was a big sacrifice in the sense that a young man makes, but those are the courageous moments that some guys take and we owe a tremendous amount to amount to him. I think this is where, you know, Pop, you mentioned leadership before and, you know, the kind of national leadership we need. You know, when Kaepernick took a knee, you know, the first thing that the Trump administration did was they staged the walkout by Vice President Pence, where he flies to the game in Indianapolis. And as soon as the national anthem starts, Kaepernick takes the knee and he stands up and he walks out. He makes a big show of it. And then ironically, Pence just this past week tweeted, we support peaceful protests. Well, no, you don't. You obviously don't. And Trump at the time called Kaepernick and all NFL players who were kneeling, called them sons of bitches,

said, get them out of there. If they don't want to stand for their flag, fire them. Get them out of this country. Trump yesterday in his comments says we support peaceful protest. So obviously we don't have the leadership to support people like Colin Kaepernick from the top in our government. But I also think he needed it from the NFL offices, too. I think he needed it. He needed more support from Roger Goodell and from the league office. But, you know, that's to me, it's really hard to look at what's going on right now with all the violence and the protest and not look back to four years ago and say, look, this guy was trying to peacefully protest and nothing came of it. The killings went on and nothing changed and he was actually ridiculed. So it's a real tough one to think about. Well, leadership, you know, encouraged go hand in hand. And we know we don't have that. When we have a leader whose main purpose in life is himself and anything that affects him is how he bases his words and actions. The only words that come out

that are somewhat inclusive are written for him by others that he speaks as if he just took a hit of castor oil and has to say it anyway because he has to mollify the idiotic things he said previously. So when the vandals did what they did, he condemned that, which anybody would. But as you both have said, he also condemned the peaceful protests with Colin Kaepernick. So he will use whatever he can to advance his own purposes. And the crowd around him is as bad or worse. All the sycophants around, they know who he is. These are the same people who said he was unfit, the same people who said he was crazy, but now they're willing to

carry his water. So that leadership is not there. And the vandals that were all wishing they hadn't done what they did, it's important not to condone that, but to still understand it, to understand the frustration, the anger, the hopelessness. And we're talking now about poverty, about injustice, about incarceration, about profiling, about police brutality. All this boils up and you're going to get some of that. It's going to happen. It's inevitable. It's logical. I'm not surprised by it at all. So somehow the culture has to change, just like it did with drunk driving. This culture that's a disease in all of our cities, and it's about policing. It's about policing.

This is not an occupying force. Black and brown people in our society look at them as an invading force, as they should, for all the reasons that everybody's talked and written about. Now we have tanks and grenade launchers and this sort of thing in some police departments. It's like the Soviets going into Hungary half the time when you look down the street now and you see the equipment. Why do we need that equipment? How is it not going to be a confrontational sort of attitude, at least mentally, in all these places? The cultures in all these cities have to change. And Obama tried to do that. He had a great program that was being implemented across the country

about policing, about training, about recruitment, all that sort of thing, about the qualified immunity they have, about the unions, and how ridiculous it is that you can hardly prosecute somebody, as we've seen. But what happened when the Trump administration came in, they threw that game plan in the toilet, just like the pandemic game plan. And we know all the reasons why and don't need to go into that. But that leadership, that courage that President Obama showed to try and help fix that has been thrown in the toilet. We have to start from the beginning. And as I think you said at the beginning, Steve, maybe this is a tipping point. Maybe that kind of pressure can be put on with people who have any kind of a voice at all. And as Coach said, even from the grassroots, everybody, it's not just the people who can be seen. But if we all do it and demand it, that policing situation can at least not be done behind closed doors. Because all those contracts are done, as far as I know, with mayors and police departments behind closed doors. They're not voted on. People don't know

about those things. And now we're stuck with what we have in all these situations where they can hardly be prosecuted. You know, something that comes to mind to me, Steve, is about, Pop's talking about leadership, you know, and being in the positions that we're in. We have learned that leadership is about the other people. It's about holding ourselves accountable to help those around us be what they can possibly be. And without that connection, there is no leadership. If you don't have the connection to the people that you're serving and hold yourself accountable for all of the people that may be listening to us, you know, that are in those positions, you've got to take those tough stands.

You've got to stand up for it and stand up for what you know is right and be willing to take the hit because it's the right thing to do. And then good things happen because you're doing things for the right reasons, you know, and you can make it through the hard times and you can rebound from the setbacks and the problems. But it comes from the principle of just serving others and doing a good job with it and letting yourself be scrutinized because we live with that and have the courage to suck it up and do it, you know? And so. No, it's a great point. And I think we're in an era now where athletes are really more likely to speak out, to make their voices heard than we've seen probably since the civil rights era. You know, Jalen Brown drove 15 miles or 15 hours from Boston down to Atlanta to join the protest the other day. You know, the Players Coalition

made up of some of the former NFL players, Anquan Bolden, Demario Davis. I know Malcolm Jenkins is very, very involved, work done, doing a ton of great work front lines in, in our inner cities, trying to help with these very issues that, that, uh, you guys are talking about. Um, Bob, do you feel, is it, is it any different now coaching than say, I don't know, 20 years ago when we were living in, you know, maybe before nine 11, when we were living in a much more sort of benign era? You know, I think that people are people, you know, people that have a different perspective. I think the players that we coach now,

I think they become a little bit more worldly sooner than in the past because so much has gone on. Our country has seen so much and the internet, the social media, they're so, they're so well connected. Oftentimes my players tell me what the hell's going on in the world. And then I go check it out because that's the world we have in the past. Everything was a little bit more insular. You just had your group,

your family, your team, your coaching staff, but it wasn't interconnected the way it is now. Kind of like the globalization we have in the world, we sort of have that in player. So they're pretty knowledgeable as to what's going on. And as you said, I think they're less prone to just accept things the way they are. You know, the players that you just mentioned on the coalition and other players in all the leagues, I think, are really ready, willing, and able to help out and try to make a stop to all the craziness that we see and to really focus on helping those places, those people that have less than the rest of us. Much more committed, I believe, and as you said, much more ready to speak out. But it's got to stay persistent or it's just going to fade away.

Pete, you feel that responsibility to help nurture that sort of activism from your players? Or is that something that just comes naturally and you let them go? No, I do. I want our guys to feel comfortable thinking for themselves and feel comfortable with their thoughts and feel comfortable about expressing their thoughts in our environments. We work to create a culture that allows for that to happen in hopes that they will find their voice and are willing to step out and do stuff. Our guys are really active in the community. The meetings that we just had on Monday were really, really went, interestingly, our guys talked a lot

about voting and they talked a lot about making, you know, making their voice heard and helping, you know, coaches admitted that, you know, they hadn't voted in the years past, but they were going to vote like never before. And the players were saying the same thing. And we're going to make sure that we help the people around us understand how important this is. I mean, think about that mentality. Our guys are so much better informed and so much smarter than they used to be because

they have so much information available to them. And, you know, like Pop said, they're way ahead of us, man, a lot of times. And we have to be open to learn from them as well. But I think that in my situation, I'm really promoting our guys to branch out and to reach out. And I'm not afraid of them to speak out. I like them to... I'll reel them in. I'm okay. We'll reel them in. We've had a lot of guys who've been pretty vocal over the years and I got no problem with that at all. They just got to be willing to come on back to the team

and come on back to the culture that they were in and live with us. But I think it's really important. And I don't know how somebody could be at their best unless we keep pushing them that way. We got to keep pushing them to find themselves and find their voice. That's a culture.

You know, coaches created that culture and that allows people to feel comfortable We've got to keep pushing them to find themselves and find their voice. That's a culture. Coaches created that culture, and that allows people to feel comfortable and to be transparent, to share ideas. And as you well know, Steve, that's what we've tried to do with our teams over these last couple of decades. And it makes for not just a happier family, but a family that feels responsible to each other. They enjoy being with each other. They're proud to be there. And if we can help that, whether that means, you know, having guests come in or certain books that are provided or discussions like Coach is having with his teams now,

it's our duty to do that. We have that responsibility to keep that sort of a culture alive. And the more those cultures exist, the better off we're going to be. To me, it's become more apparent how important it is to promote teammates and team. And more than ever, it's always been the team game for us in our sports that we've played. But more than ever, it's always been the team game for us in our sports that we played. But more than ever, the awareness of our guys to be great teammates is more valuable to me and more important to me than it ever has been in my coaching. And what that means is that if you're a great teammate, then you're concerned for others. And the great Bill Russell was in our meeting room, just like you're saying, Pop. We had him in a couple of years back. And out of nowhere,

he said, you know what it takes to be a great teammate? He said, you got to get up every morning thinking about how you can help one of your teammates be better. And I thought, holy crap, think of that awareness that you would have, that awareness that you wake up in the morning thinking about your point guard. You're waking up in the morning thinking about my wide receiver. What can I do to help that guy be great? Well, that kind of mentality doesn't have to only be on our teams. Why couldn't that mentality be what it feels like to be an American? That I am part of the team. I am part of this thing. And what can I do to help the people around me? You know, Kennedy said it a long time ago, you know, why would that not be as important as ever, as opposed to look out for what I got, protect your own, look out, you know, save me, you know. I just think it's such a, it's a clear thought that,

and it takes direction and leadership. And I know this too, Pop, you said that it's an environment of, you feel good about being there. You feel comfortable. You are a little bit happier because you know you're doing the good work you know you know you're helping people and that's that is so fundamental but doggone it's it's powerful and it's important and i i don't feel it enough you know around us i wish we could feel it more i wish we could promote it more wherever we go those are great points great points um i want to wrap it up since this is a coach's podcast you guys are both just touching on culture. And in my mind, having played for you, Pop, for four years, and Pete, having learned so much from you and having visited your training camps, the key to both of your respective

success is culture, 100%. It's the feeling in the locker room, in the gym every single day. It's not the X's and O's. Obviously, you got to have talent. You guys have both had plenty of talent, but it's just the vibe and the working environment and whatever that is that you feel every day. So I want to ask you, Pop, when did you figure that out in your coaching career? How long did it take from a young coach just starting out to right now? At what point did you figure out that that's what it was all about? I can't wait to hear this answer.

That's a great question. You're making me think back to the days when I was a coach of the Air Force Academy prep school, working for Hank Egan. And I was a wild man. The most important things to me were people being in the best shape they could be, just killing them out on the court. Maybe, you know, show I'm tough or whatever that might be. And we'd do the drills until their tongues were hanging out and we'd

repeat them and repeat them. And they had to be perfect. They had to execute those things absolutely perfect. Then practice was over. See you later. As time went on, you start to realize that that's really a shallow way to live. There's not a whole lot of satisfaction in that. And I would say that probably when I came to Golden State with Nelly, it was probably the first time I watched him or coach just talk to each player like he was their son. He was happy for him or he was disappointed in him. One of the two. And he'd say it either way, you know, say their effort stunk or their effort was great. He'd tell him in no uncertain terms. And then he'd put his arm around him. And then he'd laugh with them and they would needle each other, you know,

that sort of thing. So. And they'd probably have a beer together at some point. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe even during practice. sort of thing. And they'd probably have a beer together at some point. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe even during practice. You know, it's just, it's a maturation process. So you go from not thinking you know it all, but probably being scared to death that you're going to miss something. And, you know, back then it was a different culture. It was all about conditioning and you're going to, you know, the you don't need water philosophy sort of thing. And then as you go take a salt pill if you're getting a cramp, you know,

that kind of thing. And then you move on and then you realize that how much more meaningful it is when you actually know about that player or you can laugh with him or you can get on him, but he knows you're going to put your arm around him after the practice. And then he's just going to say, this guy's crazy. But I know he loves me. I know he cares. And then the satisfaction starts to grow. And then you realize that's the Holy grail, those relationships. Yeah, no doubt. Pete, I think I know your answer, but why not?

Same question. When did you figure out that dynamic of culture being the most important thing? You know, I don't know if there's a specific time. I got in trouble so much early in my coaching for listening and talking to the players and wanting to know what's going on with them. And I didn't fear that relationship. And older coaches, more classic coaches would say, you can't listen to your players. You can't talk to them. You know,

you have to make call all the shots and all that, which I always felt like I was, but I didn't, you know, and I saw way early in my coaching, I was there. And I kind of been in and out of trouble with coaching for a lot of years, you know, people not really relating or thinking we're having too much fun or thinking we're doing this or we're doing that. But I do think that when I got ready going into USC, you know, I had been fired enough times and, and it just, there was just a moment in there that there was an epiphany that I needed to get it as much, as true to my heart as possible. And my heart was about competing and my heart was about having fun. And I wanted to figure out how to connect all that, you know? And, and so, um,

I always cared about, you know, pop, you just, I'd hear you, you know, about loving the guys up and caring for them so much. And you even said that sometimes you treat them like your son. That's the way I look at it. I look at these guys, like if it was my own kid, what would I do? And how would I kick him in the ass if he wasn't doing right? And I'd hug him up as soon as I could or hug him up and then kick him in the ass or, you know, whatever it took to get him to be all that they, you know, could possibly be. And that's kind of, that's been the way, you know. And so with that comes a style. There's a style to how you, you know, you organize your building and how you organize your expectations.

And that to me is really, really ultimately comes back to caring. You know, I think that's, I heard it in Pop, too, you know, that you saw it in Nellie, that you care. Yeah, you can tell them whatever you got to tell them, but you do it because you care so much they need to hear it. You know, and you need to get it out. And then you're working through the hardships of what those messages and those lessons are. And sometimes they get cut. And sometimes you bring them back. And sometimes you bench them.

And sometimes you play. You know, all of those things that we go through, when it comes from a place of caring and loving them, then you can make it through almost anything. And I think it's where the best stuff happens. I think it's where the real magic occurs. And it's what makes it so much fun to be a coach and doing what we do. No doubt. No doubt. Well, I guess I got to share my epiphany moment. I was blessed to play for several Hall of Fame coaches. So I felt it when I was in college playing for Lute Olsen. I felt that culture. I couldn't define it. I was 18, 19 years old. I didn't know what it when I was in college playing for Lute Olsen. I felt that culture. I couldn't define it.

I was 18, 19 years old. I didn't know what the hell I was feeling other than this was really special. I think by the time I played, I got to Chicago and I played for Phil Jackson. That's when my mind sort of made these connections. Like, I get it. Like, this culture here is so powerful because Phil cares about us and because there's a genuine authenticity to what he's doing. uh, the same authenticity and the same genuine caring about me, about my family, you know, coming from pop. Um, and, and by the way, Phil and pop and Lute Olson couldn't be any more different from one another, but they were all, but they were all authentic to themselves and

they all had this, this beautiful culture that they had built. So I walked into my first coaching job knowing that that's what I wanted to achieve. And Pete, I don't want to embarrass you, but you were the one who verbalized all that for me. When I went up and visited you in Seahawks training camp before camp started, you helped me figure out literally verbalizing what I was experiencing when I was feeling the strength of those cultures. And so after I visited you, I literally put everything down on paper and sort of thought through everything, tried to design my practice plans so that, you know, this authenticity could come through and that the players would feel this certain vibe. And I took everything I do, I took from, you know, Pop, Phil and Lute. And I've been able to do it in my own voice and make it authentic to me, but through the experience of the guys I've played for.

So I'm a very lucky coach. I had a great set of mentors, and you two are each largely responsible for that. So thank you. Did you participate in any defensive drills in San Antonio? I don't remember. I was going to take credit for his shooting. I wish he'd let me give him a shooting.

I didn't get any credit for that at all. That's the only thing I care about. I just waited until Tim Duncan or David Robinson blocked the shot after I got beat on penetration. It all worked out fine. Still digging on him, Pop. I like digging on his defense. That's good.

He's still coming after me. Thank you so much. This like digging on his defense. That's good. He's still coming after me. Thank you so much. This was really, really fantastic. And keep doing what you guys are doing. It's so important for people to hear your voices and hear your thoughts. And I just can't thank you enough for everything you're doing in society and for all your words today. So thanks thanks guys. It's been an honor to be with you.

All right. Thanks so much to Zip Critter. Thanks to DeRay McKesson and thanks to Steve Kirk, Pete Carroll and Greg Popovich. We'll be back on Thursday with another podcast. See you then. I want to see them on the way so I never say I don't have feelings with them. On the wayside, on the way so I never say I don't have feelings with them.