The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Social Justice & Change with Devin D. Thorpe, Author & Utah Congressional Candidate 2020

Episode Date: July 12, 2020

Social Justice & Change with Devin D. Thorpe, Author & Utah Congressional Candidate 2020 Devinthorpe.com Amazon Link

You're listening to the Chris Voss Show Podcast. We interview the smartest people in the room, the CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators to fill up your brain and make you better looking. Here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in.

We've got some great guests that are coming up on the show. We always have the best guests every time, though. We have Eddie Glaude Jr. is going to be on to talk about his book about james baldwin uh i've been reading and studying and watching a lot of stuff on james baldwin since coming across him from a prior author uh where the fire i forget the name of the book but you probably heard it so anyway watch for him to be on the show this next week and a lot more exciting guests book authors etc etc today we also have the most exciting guest, Devin Thorpe. He's a book author of multiple books. He's a speaker. He's been on the show before. He's also running for Canada for Utah's third district for the

congressional. He calls himself a champion of social good. He's a Forbes contributor who wrote about eradicating poverty, improving global health, and reversing climate change. He's produced 1,200 episodes of his Your Mark on the World show featuring change agents including Bill Gates. His books help people use money for good, and he's helped nonprofits raise millions via crowdfunding. Previously, he had a 25-year finance career and was a U.S. Center staffer. He earned an MBA at Cornell after graduating from the U. You might be too smart to be on the show. Look at this resume.

What am I doing with you? He frequently finds himself on airplanes, probably not so much anymore. This might be an old bio. That's right. And he's usually grateful to be in the middle seat. I think that's probably changed. I mean, you end up by – welcome to the show. That's right.

Hey, thank you for having me, Chris. It's fun to be back. You're very generous. Thank you. Next time we have you on, we'll have to eradicate that last sentence. Of course, hopefully the next time – well, we want to have you on sooner than that. I don't think we're going to have a thing before we get you on again. But it's wonderful to have you on.

Thank you very much, sir, for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. And so you're running for office. How's the running for office thing going, if we can get that in? Well, you know, it's an incredible experience. You know, I had a sense of how difficult and challenging it would be, how much work would be involved. And, but boy, I tell you, I could only see 10% of it, really.

It has been, I think it isn't crazy to say it's been two, three, four, I don't know, 10 times more difficult than I thought it would be. But I get up every morning and I remind myself why I'm doing this. This isn't about me. This is about people, people who are experiencing job loss because of COVID. It's about people who are experiencing illness because of the pandemic or any other kind of illness. It's about people who are suffering because of the actions of our current administration. It's about people who are worried about our planet and who are suffering as a result of climate change. You know, there are a lot of reasons to get up in the morning and get to work on this, and those reasons fire me up.

So it's hard, but I'm doing it. We intend to win. Yeah, definitely. Utah's going blue, baby. This is happening. All the red states are flipping this time. Hey, give us your dot com and plug some of your books, if you will, real quick. Well, thank you.

So the website is devinthorpe.com, D-E-V-I-N-T-H-O-R-P-E.com. And yeah, I've written a bunch of books, including Your Mark on the World, which was a brand I've used a lot over the last decade. But that was a book I wrote about using your money for good. And I wrote a sequel called 925 Ideas to Help You Save Money, Get Out of Debt, and Retire a Millionaire. And that book has been downloaded over a million times. It's been a very, very popular book. I am honored to see that. Oh my gosh, it's been so satisfying to see people read that and to hear from people that, you know, it changed their lives and, golly, saved the marriage. Wow. And so I'm grateful that that's worked out. I also wrote a book about crowdfunding for social good and a book on

corporate social responsibility called Adding Profit by Adding Pur purpose. So kind of covered the waterfront of money for good subjects. Awesome sauce. If I'm buying a lot of pizzas, is that money being used for good? You know, more than you think. More than you think. Note to self, Devin Thorpe says, pizza's good, not pizza bad. So, Devin, you know, just curious off the top before you get into topics, what was it like to interview Bill Gates?

I think I saw that episode. Yeah, it was, of course, a special experience. And although I usually did my interviews in this format, just like you, Chris, same identical format. For that one, I went to meet Bill in Spokane, Washington at a Rotary conference. And we sat down with the, in addition to Bill, there was the president of Rotary International at the time. And we just had a great three-way conversation. And it's phenomenal. You know, one of the favorite moments for me was I asked Bill Gates, you know, what are your superpowers? And I said, what is your superpower? And he really named three. Blue screen? No, I'm just kidding. He claims, you know, he brands himself as an impatient optimist, but it was interesting that he called out patients as one of his superpowers. He said, you know, it takes time

to do this stuff. He said, you know, we started working on a new vaccine for polio eight years ago. It's going to take a long time to get it in the field. He pointed out that at the time we talked, he was anticipating a new vaccine or the first vaccine for HIV to be approved in the months following our interview. And he said it will have been 25 years. Well, the remarkable thing about that was it wasn't approved. And as if, you know, a few months later, to punctuate the point he was making is that dealing with these, the world's biggest challenges like climate change, poverty, and global health issues requires some patience. I would also, you know, I appreciate his, his branding. He calls himself an impatient optimist. And I think it also requires a little bit of impatience as well.

So anyway, it was fun to talk about that. And then he, he talked a little bit about his ability to organize people. And then he acknowledged that having a lot of money was kind of a superpower, which I thought was honest. of money was kind of a superpower. Which I thought was honest. That seems to probably make a difference, yeah. Yeah, it probably does make a difference. Give you an edge. Give you an edge there.

Yeah, I was going to say Windows 10 blue screen was a superpower. That's the screen of death. But I would probably categorize myself as an impatient pessimist yeah not only i'm pissed off that the world's going to shit but i'm really fucking angry about it no i just no i i hear you chris uh you know uh you and i were talking just before in fact we started talking yesterday really about this Roger Stone commutation of his sentence by President Trump. You know,

your reaction to this is really healthy. You know, this is a really big deal. Yeah, I was depressed yesterday, Friday and depressed. I must have been big deal. Yeah. I was depressed yesterday, Friday, and depressed. I must have been gamed. Yeah.

Go ahead. You know, you're right to react that way because it is so scary. You know, in a way, I think Americans will accept this as just one more Trumpism. But what it reflects is an absolute fundamental disrespect for the rule of law. It reflects a deep and abiding disrespect for our criminal justice system. It suggests that there are two separate justice systems in our country one for friends of donald trump and one for everyone else and that is scary stuff because what if you're not a friend of donald trump yeah i mean i i'm not sure friend is uh is the correct word i think the the word is lacoste nostra or fucking criminal accessory.

Yeah. I mean, somebody on Twitter today, they said, would the U.S. government be better off if the mob ran it? And I'm like, well, I used to live in Vegas. You saw the way mob ran Vegas. Cheap food, great entertainment entertainment work for me yeah yeah it's as soon as the corporations moved in they ruined vegas so fuck how it is scary and and there is evidence there is evidence that uh you know we have seen it in so many different ways there's

evidence that the president has a disregard for the fundamentals of the constitution yeah i don't even think he's ever i would bet you a million dollars he's never read it um i'm not sure he knows how to read well clearly he knows how to read a teleprompter i just don't know how they put it in the big black letters so um there's been a lot of interesting things we want to talk about social justice, black lives matter today. And some of the things that are going on. In fact,

I'm just reading here. I believe this is off of I've got too many screens open evidently or too many computers going. This is off the Washington post feed. Trump confident Roger Stone left over thousands of inmates seeking clemency. And just the fact that he, like I say, the consensus has been that if Roger Stone spends a day in jail, he's going to start squealing and probably start flipping state's evidence. So they had to do this.

I just didn't expect him to do it until the end of the thing, but what's most depressing right now is he seems to know he's going to lose the election. There's different election polls that have him at a 1% chance of winning. All the states that are red except for Utah are starting to really turn blue, and I'm hoping they'll elect you so we can get that bluer. Thank you. But I think even Utah is going to flip. I think so.

You know, Utah is a deep red state. It is deeply conservative. But Utahns have never been as enamored with President Trump as other red states have been. And so it's easier for Utah to flip blue this time than for other red states. And I expect, I fully expect that Joe Biden will win Utah and take that little bundle of Utah Electoral College votes. And I'm excited about that. And I'm excited about what that means for, you know, Chriserson and the other democrats running in utah this year i think chris peterson has a good chance of beating cox i mean

cox just seems like a kind of a nerdy little guy to me um and he had a lot of i mean he's basically herbert's right-hand man who was a trumper um it's just insane to me that any state can look at a leadership in a state and go, well, we're in a pandemic and our attorney general has us trying to overturn Obamacare. Sure, that sounds fine. Just the ludicrousness nature of that whole thing is just insanity. Yeah, it is nuts that our Attorney General, Sean Reyes, is suing the federal government to end Obamacare at the same time the citizens of Utah decided to vote to expand Medicaid under the provisions of Obamacare. And overwhelmingly, Americans and

Utahns agree that they want to keep the protection around pre-existing conditions that the Affordable Care Act provides. So the law is actually very popular, even in Utah. And so for the Attorney General to sue against the will of the people, the federal government, is just a waste of money and an affront to Utah voters. And here's the thing. The people no one's even really talking about or thinking about, what's going to happen if they overturn Obamacare and all these people get thrown off their insurance or don't have

insurance because they're broke, they can't pay their co-pays, they can't pay their cobras because they're going to have layoffs going through this thing. When they try and get insurance again, these evil insurance companies are going to call COVID-19 a pre-existing condition because there's damage that COVID-19 does to people, as many people, and not all people, but many people. There's some people that have what they call a glass lung situation where their lungs are damaged and they may not notice as much when they're young, but when they get to your and my age, that's when you kind of start feeling your lungs and going, wow, you know, I mean, I have certain body parts, kidneys and livers that saw a little too much vodka over the years and they're not real happy

with me these days. And, you know, I have to keep placating them to be like, I, uh, I won't drink anymore and just please stick with me. Okay. I just, uh, let's see if we can work this out. Please, baby, baby, stay with me. Um, and so I think a lot of people are going to have those lungs. And so insurance companies are going to have those lungs and so insurance companies are going to go oh yeah oh you got coven that's a pre-existing condition baby and they either won't cover you or they'll uh they're going to hit you for more and people just people just aren't even thinking about where we're going to be in a year from now or two years from now that's why i'm encouraging people to vote for people like you and people that are going to responsibly lead us through what is going to be a financial crisis.

I mean, within a month, already in Vegas, there are people that I know that are sleeping in cars because they did everything right. They had a job. They weren't bums or anything. I'm not knocking bums, but I'm just saying this is their story and they did everything right they got laid off they applied for their unemployment they worked for years unemployment was so backed up and so behind because the states couldn't handle the massive of applications and stuff and then you know all the stupid paperwork they have to go through uh normally they at least make you wait i think it's like at least eight weeks and you're like who can most people americans can't live without eight weeks for money and um and there's still the checks didn't come so there are people that have lost their homes already or

being kicked out already and then evictions are going to start more uh they're already starting now and they're going to start more i think is, as most states, the blocking of evictions and stuff. And it's going to be brutal, man. It's going to be worse than 2008. It's going to be really freaking brutal. And I don't see anything going on. I think the thing that frustrates me about Donald Trump, excuse me, is the criminality of it all, just the sheer lawlessness of it um and uh maybe we would be

better off with uh with the mob um you know at least the mob only killed each other that the people that were in the mob so like i don't know they just whack other people in government leave the rest of us alone you know the mob didn't usually go after normal people. Yeah. It is scary to think about our federal government being run by someone who has no regard for the law, thinks he operates above it or beyond it or outside of its reach. And so far, the federal government has failed to prove him wrong. he's gotten away with almost everything that he's tried to do that's illegal uh and and that is scary that's scary you know i i've been on an interesting journey recently um and uh let me see if i can pull some of this up um i had i i like eddie glott jr i mentioned he's going to be on the show soon, but he had done a book on James Baldwin.

I never heard of James Baldwin before. I skipped college. I mean, look at me. Seriously, do I look like I'm brilliant? So I'd seen his book, and I'd seen him promoting on Morning Joe, which he normally is on. And I thought, well, that's a weird-looking fellow, that Mr. Baldwin dude. And I thought, well, I'll find out what more about the book is when it comes out.

Eddie's a brilliant thinker. Um, and, uh, and just the serendipity of the moment, you know, what's going on with Black Lives Matter. And, uh, we were, you know, we work with a lot of, uh, book publishers. We just picked up O'Reilly. They send other book authors to us. Uh, we have a huge slate of people coming. And they sent us their catalog, and I picked like 20 books out.

One of the books was called The Fire Upon Us, and it's a story about James Baldwin and William F. Buckley doing their big debate in 1965. And to do my research for the show, I didn't have a copy of the book yet. I took and watched the video of it, which thankfully you can get all this stuff on video. Yeah, yeah. And so I was just blown away. In fact, I was so enthralled and started watching more James Baldwin videos,

I almost said I showed up late for the show. That's bad. And so we had a great discussion with nicholas uh buccola uh so if you haven't got a chance to check out the fires upon us it's a pretty amazing book and then uh i got into eddie's book um and uh about james baldwin and it's called begin again something about james baldwin um and i started reading more about the experience of James Baldwin, African Americans, especially back then, and actually African Americans, what's going on. A lot of it is a, is a, you know, we're still in the same sort of problems today. And people don't understand what

being discouraged, what being held down, what being, what seeing how the rule of law only applies to some people, applies to other people. A lot of African-American people grow up that way because they know we had another author on who's African-American before Nicholas. And he talked about how, when I grew up as a kid and discovered that I was black, most people do around five or 10, I think it's involved when said he said, you know, I, I, uh, I found that one out of three black people will end up in jail and I had three brothers or two brothers and myself. He said, so literally as a child,

I had to look around and go, which one of us? Can you imagine having to think and grow up with that statistic and sort of thinking in your head? And I'll go on just a little bit here. So I, you know, I wrote one of my best friends who's a brilliant attorney in SoCal and I, and I forward him something about how, you know, this is really breaking the rule of law. And he's like, yeah, now the laws, law system is country is the greatest thing ever. And I said to him, I said, you don't understand. I go, when people see the breaking of the rule of law they do one of two things they get discouraged and they sometimes flip and just go you know what fuck it if everyone's going to be a criminal if the president be a criminal i'm gonna go be a criminal too why do i even care uh i've actually had friends that have done that they've gone from being democrats and trumpers

because they just got tired of not making all the money and they're just like screw it i'm gonna do it i actually have video one of them making that announcement on periscope um i i saw the trumpers of course including young people who are very impressive impressed by donald trump and they're like hey let's go rip everybody off and make all sorts of money and screw everybody and this is the way we're gonna be like donald when we grow up. Young people. And I got to tell you, two times, the first time it happened somewhere early in his thing, some criminal stuff he did, and then this time, it made my brain sit down and go, why the hell do I care anymore? Why the hell do I care about being moral?

Why the hell do I care about being ethical? Why do I care about doing the right thing? Because this guy is the president of the world and just screws everybody, doesn't pay anybody, does criminal stuff. Why should I stop scaring? I know how to be an ugly, evil businessman just like him. Why do I care? And, of course, naturally you have to come back to yourself and go, okay, well, calm down, Mr. Mr. Dude there. And let's remember who we are and, you know,

and, and being good to other people and, you know, do unto others what you want to do. And remember there's some principles here that you live by. But what a lot of people don't realize is the damage that does to the psyche on all of those fronts. Oh yeah. It is really scary. And you know, you talk about James Baldwin and that relates so directly to this. Ever since President Trump all but admitted to being a racist by talking about good people on both sides after the Charlotte experience, when we literally had avowed racists on one side and people who were opposing racists on the other side.

And he's talking about good people on both sides. We've kind of known his true colors. And we've seen that in recent weeks, right? With the peaceful protests in Lafayette Park. And there's a little nuance about this story that doesn't get told. Only people who've worked and lived in Washington appreciate this, but there are peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park every single day. There are no days without protests in Lafayette Park because people have been going there every day, as far as I know, and sometimes it's small, right? Sometimes it's just one clown with a big sign railing on the president for this or that, but usually

there are at least three or four of those clowns, and sometimes they have little groups, and so I mean, it varies by day what's there, but there are peaceful protests in Lafayette Park every single day. So for him to act like today we need to bring out the military and use tear gas and all the rest to clear out the park is incredibly inappropriate. And just, you know, it's a story for middle America to scare people that, you know, Antifa is coming. And he said that, right? And people believe it. I have visited rural towns in Utah that are worried about Antifa coming to their town

and making bedlam. And it's just just it's nuts and it has a fundamental racist tinge to it that we have to call out um and so i think you've you've led us to a very important topic that's what i'd say yeah the failure of the rule of law. And, you know, the things I've seen in both these books from Nicholas Spicola and Eddie Claude Jr., the thing I've seen in a lot of the videos and stuff, I haven't gotten in the writings, but I do a lot of work. And what I'll do is I'll play the YouTube videos behind me. And I really fall in love with James Baldwin's work.

Not only his work, but his delivery. He has an intelligent and emotional delivery that appeals to me. One of the people that I really like is Christopher Hitchens or like when he was alive, God rest his soul. And I used to just listen. I just sometimes I just play in the background, just listening to him debate stuff because he was just so intellectually brilliant. And I'm like, I want to be him when I grow up, but I I'm running out of time uh

but uh no one of the things that james talks about is is what we're experiencing right now with black lives matter it's this nothing has really changed much in 55 years of uh the civil since the civil rights experience and what we're seeing now in black lives matter i mean i did have a really great day for two days when i saw black lives matter painted in front of the drunk tower that was that's one of my highlights this year which is pretty bad because i don't know man i you think they're anything i don't know give me birth to a child or something i don't know that's my highlight but i'll take it because good for good for fucking everybody uh it was even more beautiful to see the five members of the so-called,

what was that thing that he was trying to get them in prison even after they've been proved that they weren't the five members of the Central Park Five, I think it was called. That's one of the things that most influenced my life that Donald Trump has done was the outrage he helped to foment against these innocent black kids in New York City after he accused them of wilding and raping this woman in Central Park. And, you know, these five kids maintained their innocence and have been proven since to be innocent, but they all spent a decade in prison, and in no small part because of the anger that Trump fomented in 1990 around this rape that was committed by someone else.

Yep. And it was beautiful that they were, I think they were with Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, but they were there painting the Black Lives Matter. Were they there? Yeah, they were there. I saw the picture and I was like, this is awesome. And then I saw another picture, Bill de Blasio's in the middle, and he's flanked by, I guess, the five kids, was like, this is awesome. And then I saw another picture, it blew all the balls, he was in the middle,

and he's flanked by, I guess, the five kids, or they're grown people now, but flanked by them and they were putting, you know, the first rollers down. But the thing that James Baldwin talks about is how discouraging it is to grow up in racist America, racial America, and have, and to very early on come to grips with,

you know, you grow up as a child and you think what you were like as a child. You know, the world is an oyster. It's an adventure. You have all these weird fantasies because, you know, I mean, when we were kids, I think at five, we tried to dig to China. We just thought that was somehow possible. I did that. Did you dig the pit and yeah like i don't know about five feet down yeah yeah exactly yeah and then we realized how much work that was and we're like we're

it was like a project that we had going for years we're like we're gonna eventually get to china it's just uh maybe another hour digging or something yeah we really had that fantasy going. But then at a certain age, you realize and it triggers it. I remember, anyway, you grow up and I remember one of my first early pictures of Martin Luther King was him with his young son, and he's standing next to a cross that was put into his front lawn and burned, you know, by the KKK back in those days. And I remember just staring at the picture, and I've spent a lot of time looking at it over the years, and just wondering what a father has to do to explain to their child as to why daddy's lawn has a burning cross on it.

I can't imagine what that's like. I can't imagine the discussions I'd have to have with my children. And so, you know, moving forward to where we're talking about social justice here and social things that are going on, I hope Black Lives Matter is going to continue, and I hope all those people registered to vote they're out protesting um but it seeing the monuments come down studying as to why it's important these monuments come down uh there's streets that need to be renamed schools that renamed one of the discussions i'm going to have when any eddie god jr is on is uh different things that we need to change to really come out of this because it's more than just tearing down these monuments.

There's a lot of stuff that has to be done. Oh yeah. Yeah. What I think about this issue and there are lots of aspects to it, but two of the aspects are implicit bias that we all have and need to sort of wrestle with personally. And then there are institutional elements of racism. And I want to use a couple of examples. Will you allow me to share a couple of allegories?

So on implicit bias, I have, my wife and I go get fast food way too often. And when we go to get fast food- It sounds like an implicit bias to me, buddy. Yeah, right there. But when we do, it's my job to go get the sodas. And for a long time, we always got the same size soda. And I had, because we don't get the same soda, I would get hers and put it in my right hand, and I would put mine in my left hand because hers is more important, and the important things go in my right hand. And that worked very well.

But then we started getting different size sodas. All of a sudden, for no good reason, she started getting a small soda, and I started getting a large soda. And I was stunned at how difficult it was for me to put her small soda in my right hand. Because my brain was saying the small soda is not as important as the big soda. But that was in conflict with this other presumption that my brain had that her soda was more important than my soda and should therefore go in my right hand. But it was clear that my intuition, my instinct was always to put the large soda in my right hand and the small soda in my left, which violated my rule. And it was amazing to me that I'm kind of a small guy. I certainly identify myself as small. And so to have this conscious or unconscious thing in my head that I didn't ever know was there, that big is better than small. And it's a strong

belief that's foundational. And I had no idea it was there. And I think our brains are full of that kind of stuff. And some of it is racial, some of it is sexist, and we don't even know it's there. And until we're ready to acknowledge that those things are there and begin wrestling with them, we are perpetrators of the problem individually. And I think it's true for you and me. I think it's true for police officers. I think it's true for elected officials. I think it's true for everybody. So I think implicit bias is a problem we all have to deal with.

And that's part of the problem. Then there's this other thing called, you know, the institutional racism. And some of that we don't see, right? It's not like it's obvious because the very few laws are written in such a way that they call out their racist bias. But let me give you a really good example. So again, with an allegory, the story goes that a young woman was making a pot roast and she, you know,

cut off the end of the pot roast and threw it in the pot with the, the big piece of the pot roast. And her boyfriend said to her, why do you cut off the end? And she said, well, I don't know. My mom just taught me to do that. And so she called her mother and said, mom, why do we cut off the end of the pot roast to put it in the pot? She said, I don't know. My mom just taught me to do it that way. And so she called her mother, who's now an old woman, and said, Mom, why do you cut off the end of the pot roast before you put it in the pot? And she said, well, because it doesn't fit if I don't. So for generations, women had been cutting off the end of the pot roast because that's what was done, right?

Without appreciating that the only reason was the constraint of a particular pot generations before. Now, we have the same thing with the Electoral College, right? None of us ever give any thought to why it's there, but the reason it was is because in 1789, when we created our constitution, blacks were not allowed to vote. Slaves were not allowed to vote. And so slave states who had large slave populations, but small white populations were grossly underrepresented on a simple popular basis. So the Electoral College was an elaborate way to get around the fact that most of the people in the South couldn't vote.

And so a popular election of white people in the United States at the time would have grossly underrepresented, they felt, the views of the white people in the South. And so the electoral college is fundamentally racist. And we continue to see that problem today. It's the populous states, by and large, where minorities live. And populous states are disadvantaged by the electoral college. And less populated states, whether they're on the East Coast or the West, tend to be advantaged. So Vermont and New Hampshire and Utah and Idaho and Montana and Wyoming, these lily white states where our votes count two or almost three times as much as a Californian or a New Yorker's vote. And so there is a hidden racist effect

and a clear racist history. And yet it still continues to exist in our law, and we think of it as a benign artifact of our Constitution or a blessing of some sort. And in fact, it has these deep racist roots and a racial bias that still menaces our country today. And see, that was one of those things that's that that hides behind a lie that has a deception to it um you know for years i i i was always taught that it was because of that way just to be fair to states that had lower populations i didn't understand the racist thing you know the same thing with the uh confederate statues like i just figured somebody

idioted put them up after the civil war in the South. They're really proud of that stuff. Okay. Yeah. Whatever. Come to find out, you learn about Jim Crow. You learn about the sons of, I believe it's called the daughters of the Confederacy that put a lot of these things up that lobbied to have the push,

you know, and that this was a back push from them against civil rights being given to more African Americans and everything else. And you start learning about these, these tinges, these true truths behind, you know, these, these false narratives that we have are false belief systems. You know, one of the things that this helped me study on this journey is manifest destiny and,

and some of the other belief systems that we have, Jim Spalwin talks about a lot of this stuff. Where we have these belief systems, Eddie Glaude Jr. talks about it in his book a lot, calling it the lie off of what James Spalwin spoke about. And as a nation, we have these crazy beliefs about our nation, all these, what you mentioned, implicit biases and stuff. and a lot of times we don't know the truth what's great is we're learning that you know i learned about the daughters of the confederacy back when we first had that first discussion back when i think charlottesville when they're trying to tear down the the things

and and tearing down these monuments is important because there are people in our communities that have seen these repressive tools that they were designed for. The redlining of naming certain streets after these Confederate generals were designed to keep certain people from moving into those neighborhoods. There was an African-American gentleman I saw. He was on TV or something. He mentioned that his father would never drive down, you know, Robert E. Lee Lane. He made it a point that he would never drive down that street because it was named African Confederate General. And so black people were oppressed in this manner and also kept from buying homes in that area. And that was the conceived of intent of that thing and hopefully

we'll we'll keep this push of protest going with black lives matter to where we can really understand the history of racism the one thing i love about what james baldwin talks about is is as white people we can't come to we can't get away from the light we can't we can't get away from the lie. We can't, we can't come to, um, we, we, we've got to cleanse ourselves of, of why we do this, why we have these biases, why we have racism, what have we done to contribute to it? Um, I know that the recent thing with the kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, uh, which, uh, one of my guests earlier brought it up, it was a modern day lynching that we all had to watch and that was the real horror of it and why it moved so many people sadly that we had to go that far but what it did was it showed us how out of control and of course the brutality of police

and the and the institutional racism like you talk about we got to see that happening. I was just watching a Van Jones show where he's in and it was talking about how we have one-third of the... we have a very small amount of the population of the world. About 4%. We have a fifth percent of the population of the world, but 25% of people incarcerated in the world so the u.s represents five percent of the world's population but our prison population represents 25 percent of uh of people in the world that are in prison so we're just like

we're just like a giant prison complex, basically, America. And now you can kind of see how the cops at the racial prejudice level, they help feed the courts, which help the courts do their thing, and then people put in prison. And most of the people in prison are blacks, are Hispanics. And you can see the whole flow of what's making the prison industrial complex what it is today and the racial institutionalism of that yeah and you know the arguments for police reform are so clear? We just have to watch what happened to George Floyd. And it's agonizingly painful to watch. As you say, it is a lynching, right? But once you see that, you recognize there

is a need for reform. And it's not because all cops are bad. In fact, I think there are very few bad cops. And I think the duty of our police officers is a sacred duty. And I'm so glad they're there. I mean, if we're being honest, none of us want to live in a world where we can't call 911 if there is a real problem, right? If there is someone breaking into my house, I want the cops there really, really fast. And I respect and honor police officers, and I'm grateful for their service. But that doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't reform some of what happens. And I think training and holding people accountable for misbehavior, as in the George Floyd case, I think those are important first steps. But I think there's an opportunity for us to look beyond that and say, are we putting cops too often in situations where cops are not required? Is there someone else, someone who's not armed specifically, that could be sent into a situation to defuse it? And let me give you a personal

example of what I'm talking about. I was visiting a national park last weekend and I was approached by an officer, a ranger, but who was wearing a gun. And he said, what are you doing here today? I'm like, what do you mean? What am I doing here today? I'm looking at the natural beauty of the planet and I'm wandering around. You look subversive. Yeah. I look really subversive. And, and it made me nervous because he had a gun. And so I was thinking that his question was, are you up to no good? Right? I

thought that was the intent of his question. As I interacted with him more and watched him interact with other people, it became clear that I thought he handled it a little bit clumsily and having a gun on his hip made me nervous and others, I think, as well. But what he was asking is, are you going to go for a long walk today? And if so, I really need to insist that you carry enough water because there aren't enough of us to go rescue all the morons who wander off into the desert without enough water because there aren't enough of us to go rescue all the morons who wander off into the desert without enough water. And it happens every day. Right. And so he was there to be very

helpful. Yeah. It would have been so much better if the guy who was trying to be helpful didn't have a gun strapped to his hip. The conversation would have been completely different for me. And I just thought to myself, what if I had been a Native American from nearby and felt threatened by this white officer carrying a gun? What if I were a black fellow in from Detroit, visiting Utah and watching, you know, marching through this national park. And this guy with a gun comes up to me and starts asking what I'm doing here. I mean, what could go wrong with that? I mean, it just strikes me that there are plenty of opportunities for us to change that dynamic by putting people without guns into many of the situations we now send police officers, when people are having a mental health crisis,

perhaps even into some domestic violence situations, because guns come out because guns show up. And if we can throttle that back, I think that that will be better. Anyways, we need to investigate and explore all of those options for reducing the number of situations we send guns into. And I think we need to look at implicit bias. I mean, where these cops, once they find out they are racially tinged, where they have racism and, you know, they kind of out. And we all do. And break a nut.

But, I mean, I've had some cop friends that I've heard them talk. They weren't like friends' friends. They're people that knew me from the clubs. And I've heard them talk about what they like to do on the job, and it's not pretty, and it is targeting, and they go looking every day for trouble or to screw up someone's life. But we need to break down and look at all these different forms and factors as to how racism is in our institutions, starting from the cops.

I read a great report that Reuters did on the problems we have with judges. It turns out there's a lot of judges that pull a lot of crap, do a lot of stuff that probably would land any other person in jail and they get away with it. And some of the racial targeting of people of race that they give them, you know, extra sentences or extra punishment beyond what they would normally give to other people.

We've seen some outrageous examples of that. Like the, the young white kid who raped the girl and got like, what was it, three days in jail or three weeks or something, three months, and then got out. And then, you know, you look at the rest of the record and you're like, hey, what's going on? But we look at what the costs are to society. And I can't remember who I've been listening to recently and talked about this.

But when we look at the cost to our society of these damaged families, who was the gentleman at the Wendy's who they killed through the drunk driver thing? I'm just, Arbery? There's just so many names now I'm running. I can't remember them all. But the gentleman who was killed for drunk driving, I watched the video of him talking about what it was like to be incarcerated, what it was like to be away from i think he had three young daughters um and he

couldn't be with them growing up and and the reason he ran and put up a fight and i'm sure he was a little drunk so he wasn't probably in a straight mind i've been there uh is because he didn't want to go back he knew that that violation would bang him back on parole right back into jail and uh and he panicked and and and lost his mind but that's not a reason for killing somebody um and and so when we we look at at what that causes with our mass incarceration rates and you're right i've watched cops a million times i used to watch cops when i get depressed because i'd watch like two hours of that thing and i'd be like well i'm not that white guy in the trailer with the wife beater shirt off uh who you always know is going to jail whoever has their shirt off and cops when they show up at the trailer home that guy's going to jail um and and so and so

there are situations and i don't know what the statistic is, so I'm just going to guess, and someone can call me wrong if they want. But cops being called out, like, say, for example, domestic violence situations, I would guess that nine times out of ten, it's just a disagreement that's gone too far. And everything else. I've actually had the cops calling me twice for disagreements that I had at my house. And it was a gal that I was trying to get removed. She had an alcoholism problem. And I had found her the first time I was, you know, telling her that she needed to move out of my house because she was drinking $100 bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon because she needed to get a $5

bottle of vodka. You know, I was finding out what alcoholism was. It wasn't fun. And, and so she was trying to get me kicked out of my house. So when I asked her to leave, you know, she went to the neighbor and said, Oh, Chris is talking abusive. And then whatever they called the cops. When they, when they come out, you know, a lot of times the cops are just like, Hey, you know, can you work out or can we go to another place? Clearly when the cops showed up at my house, they just like hey you know can you work out or can we go to another place clearly when the cops showed up my house they could see you know she was like going like this from the base and they're like well this guy is clearly sober and she's clearly out of her mind

um uh it's kind of sad she died of alcoholism years later um but uh i would say nine times out of ten when the cops come out there that really could be a social, unless it's like a violent situation where someone's actually getting hit. It should be a social worker and a social worker could easily sit down. And instead of just saying, Hey man, one of you go to jail and one of you don't, or, you know, one of you go to another place, a social worker, sit down with them and go, okay, here's what we're going to do since I came out. We're going to put you in a family counseling program and i'm going to sit down and we're going to have

some psychology sessions and we're going to work out what your thing is and we're trying to make a roadmap to maybe have a safer better marriage yeah and that would be better because like what you mentioned i've seen the same thing on cops as soon as they show up with guns you know the emotions get amped up even far which are already too far above uh same thing with homeless people i've seen a few homeless people killed because eight cops showed up and somehow escalated a situation with some guy who's uh you know just a homeless person they turn that into a murder uh just just because they amped it up. And seriously, so much is to show up and help that person. But yeah, there's so much in what I've been looking and learning at

with the Black Lives Matter movement and changing what's going on in our society. There's so much we have to deal with. Some of it's the shame of it all. Some is the acknowledgement that some of the things we believe and what we do are wrong um and it's quite the journey and it's it's an interesting journey that a lot of us have to go on i mean since 2015 and starting to hear in 2016 you know realizing reading what breitbart was and the white nationalist movement. I had no idea what white national was before Trump. Um,

uh, you know, learning about their context, learning about their keywords, like culture. This is our culture. And you see Trump saying that all the time. And that's why I had to learn from Trump.

I'm like, what is he? Why is he always seeing that culture word? What the fuck is that about? You know, I never put anything into it, but then I find out, oh, shit, these are like the code words for the white nationals, KKK dudes.

And then I got to go, oh, crap, man, am I using those things? Am I using those words? Oh, man, culture has got to go out of my vocabulary. And, man, I don't want, you know, all the things that they talk about, all their code words and stuff. I mean, I just learned the other day that, you know, I knew about the okay symbol recently and kind of what, you know, that was white nationalists. I'm okay. That was white nationalists.

And I didn't learn the other day till Mary Hart did on the show. And someone showed that what this double eight means that they do with the okay symbol is stands for 8-8. Kyle Fissler. I didn't even know that until just the other day when the South Dakota thing. And so learning about it, it's like, I'm not even going to make that the OK symbol for the rest of my life. That's never just going to happen.

But learning all about this stuff, I mean, this is the journey we've been on. And I've been on this journey now since 2015, where I'm like, okay, do I have implicit bias? What do I have implicit bias with? One of the activities I did a few years into Donald Trump was I started walking around and looking at faces when I go to the store of everyone and I would and I would have this conscious thing and I'd be like okay so what did you just think what did you feel what were your belief systems about that person because you looked at their face what is your what is your thing which is hard for me because I'm a comedian so when I look at people's faces or when I look at people sometimes I you know the comedic brain kicks in i want to do jokes and it's not mean it's not racial i'm just you know i mean look at me i mean look at me i look

like a trump voter like a fat white trash dude if you put shades on me i look like a fucking cop in a car i mean come on man i know i know my place in the food chain but but seriously though i i looked i looked at people that gave me fear and when I looked at them or looked at their face, I went, I'm kind of scared of that person. And then I would go, okay, so why do we have that? Why do you feel scared about that person? Well, they kind of look subversive. Well, who looks subversive?

You know, you're at this store. And unfortunately, one of the things that I realized is that, and there's some science behind this, that we look at faces as a way of determining stuff. This is very tribal. This goes back to our beginning of time. We do it for breeding, where we determine our faces and people that we feel that might be good people in the breeding pool. In fact, women, when they go through their menstrual cycle, um, there's different times of the month where they'll be attracted to a guy with a very cut jaw. And then other times of the month where they won't,

um, you know, we, we read a lot of stuff about how we, okay, can I trust this person? Is this person going to kill me? You know, I'm going back to caveman days. You know, a lot of that in reading, you know, how people are coming at you and whether or not they're on the good, you know, are you the tribe that's going to kill me or the other tribe, you know, the whole caveman thing. And so we look at faces. I mean, we study faces when we look at news, TV, all those sorts of things. We look at faces and we like faces we study faces when we look at news, uh, TV, all those sorts of things. We look at faces and we, we like faces that reassure us and stuff as opposed to maybe faces that don't like, you know, um, there's certainly, I mean, if you look at Marilyn Manson and you look

at your mom, probably gonna have a totally different reaction as to, you know, what your perception of that is. And so I, I started looking and walking around at what my racial implicit bias was, where I would look at people and be like, Oh, that person must be you, whatever. And started thinking more about what that meant and how it was impacting me or driving either potential racism or just, just, just stupid shit that I thought, you know, that I'm just like, why do you think that way?

That's dumb. That person is just probably a normal person, you know, whatever. So we all have to come to grips with this. Yeah, we do. And so part of the solution is for us to all own our role in it, right? That's part of it. So, yeah, there's a lot to be done. And that's the good news, right? In this situation is this discussion, as I think about Black Lives Matter is now five or

six years old, and it's aging well, right? Because we have gone from a principle to remind us all that black lives, in fact, do matter and that there is a problem with that, that some people seem to behave in ways that suggest they don't. We've come from that key principle, that new understanding. And we're moving really progressively, I think, toward more actionable, implementable solutions that can help us actually address the problem. I'm excited about that. And there are a lot of things that we can do. And a lot of it's community-based and it's different. You know, the Black Lives Matter movement in Moab has a 12 point objective list that they want to accomplish. And a lot of it in Moab is centered around not the African-American community, but the Native American community that is marginalized in that community. And it's exciting to see the,

that maturity and, and the specific actions that people are now talking about that can be taken in the community to elevate marginalized people and create a more inclusive egalitarian community. It's exciting. That's beautifully said. That's what I want. I want to see this thing continue.

Of course, we need to remove Trump from office for this to continue. I really feel, and I'm going to pull this from a number of future guests, but I really feel like his intention was was to turn us more racist and go back to like a 1950s sort of racism you know even bannon talked that they were fine with creating a race war um invading it and i really feel like donald trump at his core is a kkk deep-seated racist um and i think you can see lots of evidence even going back to 1970s and his father and when they got sued by the Justice Department over fair housing and black people discrimination. But I really feel he's tried to taint our pool to pull out all the closet racists which he has done a lot of that

um these people feel free to run around and scream whatever they want we're seeing the karens of course now that are almost daily on twitter it's just every time i see a new one i'm like i just want to go punch a white person in the face um and uh these white people in the face, I should say. But I think he's really tried to drag us back, and I think a lot of his voters have tried to do the same thing. I think he's trying to make us a more racist nation to go back to an era that he's more comfortable with. And I think that's failing, and I hope it's failing, and I want it to fail.

And I'm really concerned that if he was to gain election for another four years and we weren't going to take the Senate, I'm hoping that the back, the backup on this, even if he wins election by some God knows what, but we would at least get the house and Senate so we can just impeach him out. Um, but, uh, my, my hope is, is that we get rid of him. But, uh, so, so number one, my belief is that we get rid of him. So number one, my belief is that he was trying to do this, and he was hoping that we would rise to the king. And that's why he's going deep right now with the racism.

He's trying to pull out as much as he can of the racist people that show up, and he's trying to turn us as far to race him as he possibly can to to get us flipped to his switch and we're not doing it and we're fighting back and we're standing up for people that uh are minority in our country and we're going you know what we're we're with them and you're not going to get to bully these people anymore um The other thing that the next step of that is, is, is, now I've forgotten my point, but the first step is he wanted us to take us down that road and make us more racial and a more racial kind of, I mean,

he'd probably be just happy as shit if we had colored fountains and bathrooms again. I don't know, but I do know this. In Utah, I'm seeing a real passion around the concept of Black Lives Matter. And the vast majority of Utahns accept that principle. They share that hashtag. They believe it. And they don't want to live in a racist community. They don't want to be racist. They want to reject racism. And I think that's important that, in fact, that is becoming

a shared objective. We've moved a little bit past, collectively past this argument that there is no racism. There is no structural racism. There is no real problem. Utah is moving past that. And that is the first and huge step toward solving it, right, is acknowledging that there's a problem and work and beginning to play a role in the solution. And I think the majority of Utahns are squarely in that camp. It's exciting for me to see it. And I'm excited about the implications of that because it is, I really truly believe, it's people like me, it's Democrats, it's Joe Biden, it's Chris Peterson, it's Greg Skouras, it's people like that that are going to be fighting for implementing the real kinds of changes that most Utahns want to create a society without systemic racism. As you wrap up, I'll throw

you what my second part was. I finally remember what that was. Did we have to go through Donald Trump to come to grips with our racism? Boy, I don't know. That's a profound question. I hope the answer is no. But the fact is we can't change whether or not we have to go through him. We can only change whether or not we have to go through him for the next four years too. And I don't want to be glib,

but I think Americans are fired up like they haven't been in a generation or more, and he will not be our president in January. Because I remember going through Obama, and I was like, okay, well, we've got a black president. I voted for him, not because he's black, because he reported change and all the stuff he's going to do. And I'm like, you know what? This guy's going to go in there and, you know, new government.

All right, sure. Yeah, I love his ideas. You know, the fact he was black was cool. But, you know, he was cool. He was awesome. He was brilliant, intellectual, great speaker, great motivator. I really bought the change, man. I bought the change.

And so a lot of people kind of fell back and went okay well you know this is good we've this helps racism and beats it back and we're on our way you know i didn't think racism was beaten but uh the question i had is is that we had to see the world go so dark uh in 1965 when james ball was around we had to see, you know, the people beaten on the Birmingham Bridge. And we had to, you know, see dogs be put upon black people. And once that made the TV sets, the whole world went, holy crap, what's going on in the South, right? But we had to see that ugliness. We had to see the ugliness of a man dying before us, George Floyd, in a choke-out position where it just came out that he was saying,

I can't breathe, I'm losing oxygen, and the cop says something to him like, well, you know, you're wasting your breath talking because you should probably reserve your oxygen because I'm going to kill you. Basically, this is a tent. So it saddens me that we had to go to a dark place, a very dark place. We had to stand at the precipice of becoming some sort of KKK, you know, 1950s sort of society to beat back racism, to say, holy crap, this is really something we have to deal with. And I'm hoping that 55 years from now, we won't be going through this again to learn this lesson

that we seem to just never learn. Yeah, yeah. Well, I am optimistic that we are learning it and we are going to implement great changes. And chief among those is we're going to vote in a new president in November. And I will take your optimism, sew it on a pillow, and I'm going to cuddle it at night and hope for the best. There you go.

Because I need all the optimism I can get at this point. Good, good. So, Devin, thanks for being on the show and having a great conversation with us for Social Good. Keep up what you're doing. Give us some plugs again for your books and your website. So the website is devinthorpe.com, D-E-V-I-N-T-H-O-R-P-E.com. And, yeah, I wrote Your Mark on the World, 925 ideas to help you save money, get out of debt, and retire a millionaire so you can leave your mark on the world,

adding profit by adding purpose, and crowdfunding for social good. There you go. Check him out, guys. He's been on the show twice now. So he's in the running for the Chris Voss Show SNL robe that you get, I think, after five appearances or something. Yeah. Isn't there a jacket?

Jacket, robe, I don't know. It's probably going to be an ugly ass green jacket like they give the Masters dudes. I never figured out what that's about. That's an award? Maybe a Chris Voss hat is all I need. Maybe a Chris Voss hat. We'll have to make some Chris Voss hats

and give those out or something. That's probably better than a robe, but I don't know. Neither one will get you laid. Anyway, guys, I certainly appreciate you guys for being on this show. Be sure to watch for our future guests. We've got a lot of great book authors coming up on the show. I just look at the schedule. It's just amazing.

Be sure to subscribe to the show at dcvpn.com and chrisfosspodcastnetwork.com. We look forward to seeing you in the future. Stay safe, wear a mask, and we'll see you next time.