Started From The Bottom with Justin Richmond

SPEAKER_02: Pushkin. SPEAKER_11: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate. AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_03: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein and on this show you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_08: These days there are tons of studies exploring what it takes to keep people happy at work. And the science shows that to be happier, workers need to feel appreciated and valued. They also need to feel protected. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss and more, the Hartford has flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the diverse and unique needs of your employees. Learn more at the Hartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_02: I'm Malcolm Gladwell and today on Revisionist History, I have a special treat. I'm going to play for you an interview I did with an old friend and Pushkin co-conspirator, Justin Richmond, who you may know from our music show Broken Record, which Justin has made happen since the beginning. But now Justin has his own gig. He's the creator and host of a new podcast called Started from the Bottom. It's a show about origin stories, particularly the origin stories of men and women of color, how they climbed their way up the ladder, the obstacles they overcame along the way. And for this episode that I'm about to play for you, I turned the tables on Justin and I interviewed him. We did it in front of a group of students and faculty at Medgar Evers College on the side of the old Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York. As someone of West Indian heritage, let me just say how gratified I was at the heavy West Indian turnout for this. And in good West Indian fashion, they asked some pretty good questions at the end too. So here we go, my conversation with my good friend, Justin Richmond. Hello, hello. SPEAKER_04: Is this on? Check, check. Yep. This is the race. So welcome. This is the first time I've ever done anything like this. And it is certainly the first live taping of Started from the Bottom. So thank you so much for coming. SPEAKER_02: Welcome. Thank you so much for doing this. Not at all. It's my pleasure, Justin. I've long dreamed of being on a stage with you. SPEAKER_04: I can't imagine that's true. SPEAKER_02: But it's very nice of you to say. I hope this is the start of many of these, Justin. But I think the premise of today's is that I'm interviewing you, right? Isn't that our plan? We want to get the Justin Richmond origin story. It's a little introduction to me, I guess. Which I love these things because I'm a firm believer that if you want to get to know somebody, even if they've done a lifetime of interesting things, if you just do the first 20 years, you get most of what you need. SPEAKER_02: It's surprising how much you can glean from. So let's start. Let's do the Justin Richmond analysis. And I wanted to start with the thing we have in common. Now, you might look at us and say, what on earth do they have in common? But we do have one very significant fact in common, which is we're both the product of biracial marriages. Yeah. That's right. And I wanted to start with that. First of all, you're more obviously biracial than me. I don't know how that happened. I'm a little more subtle. My dad would say it's his genes. So tell me about your parents. Let's start with those two. How did they meet, Justin? Let's start with that. SPEAKER_04: They met at Compton Community College. So he grew up in Compton. And my mom was there. I don't even know why she was there, but she was there. She was friends with someone there. And so she was there. They met. Where did your mom grow up? My mom grew up in a city called El Monte, which is by Pasadena. My mom grew up on the racetrack. Her dad was a racehorse trainer. So she grew up on the racetrack. And yeah, they're very different people, even to this day. And it might be because they've never seen them together. But my kids still cannot wrap their heads around that. My parents are my parents. There's any relationship between them or ever was. They were never together. They were never married. They just liked each other. SPEAKER_02: So how long were they together? SPEAKER_04: Off and on about five years, four years. SPEAKER_02: So you have very few memories of the two of them as a couple? Very few. SPEAKER_04: Early on, I remember being over at his house, because I have two half brothers. So early on, I remember being over there with them, going to Disneyland on occasion. But yeah, the memories are very sporadic early on, of them. SPEAKER_02: And you were raised by your mom? SPEAKER_04: Raised a bit by both, but primarily by my mom, yeah. SPEAKER_02: And where are you growing, in Long Beach? SPEAKER_04: Yes, in Long Beach. And then at five, my mom moved to the city of Orange, which is in Orange County, which is about 20 minutes south of Long Beach. SPEAKER_02: What is Orange like? SPEAKER_04: Orange, as far as places in Orange County go, is pretty diverse. There's a large Latino community there. But aside from the Latino population, it's overwhelmingly white. And that was a change. Even having white parents, even having my mom being white, and having that whole side of my family be white, I'd never thought of it that way until I showed up. She moved there right before I started, month before I started kindergarten. And I remember my first day of kindergarten, I rolled up and I had a, this was 94, so I had a Power Rangers shirt on, thought I was real cool, Power Rangers lunchbox. I really thought, I was nervous, but I thought I was fresh, I thought it was good. And I'll never forget this kid who was in line in front of me, looked back at me. And this is the first time, again, I'm not really realizing the differences between us yet, but he turns around and looks at me and goes, are you poor? Are you poor? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was like, what do you mean? And he's like, you look poor, are you poor? And I was like, what the, I was just deflated. I didn't know exactly what to think about it at the moment, but I was just deflated, just because you're a five-year-old, you're going to kindergarten, you're trying to, we had just moved, and I thought I looked good, but apparently I looked poor. To fuck, I still remember his name. Did you tell your mom? Yes, I did, that I remember. That I remember, I remember going home and talking to my mom, and yeah, I mean, that's when, I think her hope was that it would take a little bit longer for those dynamic, for that dynamic to set in, right? But that's when we had, when she started talking to me about the fact that I am now at this overwhelmingly white place, and many of the people I'm going to be around are likely growing up, if not out now racist, SPEAKER_04: racist things being said in their household, they're going to be parroting those things back. SPEAKER_02: At that, if I asked you in, say, middle school, to how you would describe yourself racially, what would you have said? Black, I knew I was black. You just, you? SPEAKER_04: Because of my experience, because of that experience, going to the, so, you know, off, I would say off and on between kindergarten and ninth grade, I was going to overwhelmingly white schools, and you know, these are places where I would get called nigger, you know, so when you're getting called nigger, you know what you are, you know, and then, I go talk to my dad about it, he go, well, yeah, well, you are a nigger, so, but you know, that was like his way of trying to be like, yeah, you are a nigger, so. You know, so, I definitely knew what I was, SPEAKER_04: I knew I was black, and where it got, well, I say where it got difficult was when, probably in junior high, when it was teachers who I think sort of interacted with me differently because of my color, you know, like I had, I got in a lot of trouble because I grew locks, and I remember they wanted to kick me out of school. There was a neo-Nazi kid named, I'm gonna name names. I love how you're naming all these people like, SPEAKER_02: on the bulletin board, where are you, man? SPEAKER_04: Right, and every day with him, you know, it was go back to Africa, and it got to the point police got involved, you know, and he never got kicked out of school somehow, but I would say the point SPEAKER_04: in junior high is when teachers, I started getting just weird comments from teachers, and weird, nothing I did was ever good enough. There's always a perception that I was lazy, and that's when I think, because I was always a smart kid, and because my dad played football, and because I was so tall, I was always tall, the perception was always that I was gonna go and be an athlete, but from an early age, I realized I wanted to cut against that. Like, I didn't want, okay, cool, yeah, I can play ball, I can do that, but what I realized I really wanted was to show people, like, early on, I kinda got this need to prove people wrong in me, and so I felt like I always wanted to be, I always wanted to be the smartest person in the room at that point, as a young kid, and I didn't always have the confidence that I was, but I deep down somewhere I wanted to be, and by the time I got to junior high, and the teachers were sort of, I had these odd interactions, I think that's when I started to, that's when my interest in education started to wane, and my, I would say my pride in myself started to wane. SPEAKER_02: How many black teachers did you have in your public school experience? SPEAKER_04: Zero. Zero? SPEAKER_02: Did you think it had something to do with it? SPEAKER_04: I think it has a big part to do with it, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely, you got it, and that's the premise of my show, if you're not around, if you're not around people who look like you, who are successful, and my dad, God bless him, he was in the NFL, to this degree was a success, but my dad, and I love him, but he also has a very small way of thinking, and so I never really felt like I had someone. SPEAKER_02: What do you mean by a small way of thinking? SPEAKER_04: For him it was always like, yeah, just go be a cop, that's your money, you can go be a cop, you can get 100 grand a year, with overtime you can make like 120, what are you doing with this college thing, what are you doing with school? He couldn't get that I wanted to be, that I wanted to be an educated brother, he couldn't get it, I'd say, and a lot of my family didn't, it's difficult to talk about, because in so many ways they were successful, but at the same time, I knew there was a level of life that I wanted to achieve that no one in my family had achieved. My dad wanted me to go be a cop, because he's like, that's guaranteed income, and you can do it, but I just had other aspirations. So it was a weird thing between growing up in a white world that didn't necessarily believe in me and growing up in my black family in a black world that kind of had a way of thinking that wasn't, they didn't understand what I was trying to do. Yeah. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: Your dad's not, he's not 100% wrong. SPEAKER_02: Being a police officer, I'm not saying you should have done it. I'm just saying from his position, being an LAPD officer, assuming that's what he's talking about, that is a good job. SPEAKER_04: It's a great job. I mean, in terms of like, if you look at just like income and like what you could provide for your family, like it's a great job. It's the means of, there's an entire generation SPEAKER_02: of largely black men who grew up in LA for whom the LAPD was the stepping stone. I mean, you got a job in the LAPD and then your kids got to go to college. I mean, that was like, he's reflecting something that was real, right? No, it was a real thing. SPEAKER_04: And I don't, at the time I was very, I was always upset when you bring it up. Now I understand why he did. But when you have a dream and something you want to accomplish, hearing things like that don't instill confidence in you. SPEAKER_04: Because I'd always have to hear these questions, like, well, what if school doesn't work out? It's like, well, what do you mean? What if school, like, you know what, like by the time I get to college and I'm meeting people, I'm like, I can very much tell that this isn't their experience that they had. Like, well, the school doesn't work out. It was just expected, you know? SPEAKER_02: Is it your dad, does he not think you're smart enough for college or does he think the obstacles facing a young black man are too high? What's his theory? SPEAKER_04: I don't know. My dad thinks he's the smartest man in the world. So, and I think based on, he also thinks he has the greatest gene pool in the world. So I think based on that, he knew I was very smart. That was his belief at least. But with my dad, I think it very much had to do again with like his perception of what was possible in the world. He grew up in a place called Ujima Village in Compton, which was a housing project that closed down because the soil was toxic. Like they didn't know it at the time, but the soil was toxic. So people were getting sick and cancer and dying, babies being born deformed. And I think it was also a sense of maybe his dreams were limited too, or his dreams were big, but I would say his dreams were at some point, I say his dreams were crushed as well. My dad did get kicked out of the NFL. The story as it's been told to me, is my dad got drafted by the Colts in 84, I wanna say 85. SPEAKER_04: And the team captain, a white dude, called my grandmother a nigger. That's when my dad whooped his ass. He got reprimanded. They had a team dinner. It happened again. My dad whooped his ass and he was kicked off the team. And I think when that's what happens to your dream, I think you start to worry in some way about- Was it his dream? SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. Does he still have regrets today? I'm sure he does. SPEAKER_04: I don't think he regrets that. I don't think he regrets whooping the team captain's ass or anything, but yeah, I think he wishes it turned out different. Absolutely. SPEAKER_02: Does he understand what you're doing now? SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah. You know the first time he really got it? Well, he got it when I got into Berkeley. He was shocked. I was shocked. My whole family was shocked. SPEAKER_04: I couldn't believe it too. So much so that I remember I drove up. I drove up to, I wrote the counselor. I was like, listen, I gotta talk to you. I didn't wanna do it over email. Didn't wanna do it over phone. I needed to look this lady in the eye. So I was like, hey, can I meet you? And she's like, yeah, sure, sure, sure. Come down this date this time. Drove up to Berkeley. And yeah, sat with her. I was like, look, I got this deferred admission. This is real? Yeah, yes, this is real. Hold on, hold on, Justin, Justin. You're living in Orange County. At the time I'm living in LA. In LA. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: So you drove six hours to Berkeley. Yeah, six, seven, eight, yeah. To ask a official of Berkeley whether your acceptance that it was real. SPEAKER_04: I came that far. I wasn't gonna lie. And then also try to figure out how to run a place up there and pay admission just to not. So I drove up there. And you know, is this real? And she goes, yes, this is real. So I go, so I can start January 15. Yes, you can. As a philosophy major, yes. Okay. And I can switch my major if I want once I get in. Yes. SPEAKER_04: All right. You know, and then, and I'm kind of trying to work up to also like, so then I ask her, I say, listen, I'm gonna be honest with you, okay? Like, I don't have a high school diploma. I don't have a GED. I don't have an equivalency. So you should like, so based on that, now you already said this was real, but based on now with this new information based on that, is this really, can I really come here? We skipped a step. SPEAKER_02: The step we skipped was you didn't graduate from high school. No, I left at 14. SPEAKER_04: At 14? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I left at 14. SPEAKER_02: I also didn't graduate from high school, but that's because my mom called the principal and said, Malcolm won't be coming in. He's more productive at home. That was it. So everyone was like, okay, fine. Like that's, you know, that's a very, that's the world I grew up in. It was sort of forgiving, understanding, do what you want kind of world. Wait, you left high school at 14 to do what? SPEAKER_04: Yeah, nothing good. Yeah, nothing good. I would say I was pretty beat down by that point, you know, confidence wise, I just didn't know what I was doing. So yeah, left and I was just doing my own thing. SPEAKER_02: What's your mom doing when you're doing this? So here's, so what happened was, SPEAKER_04: so basically my freshman year of high school, I was so rock bottom with my confidence. I had basically like a zero point something GPA. Like I had no GPA. It was literally zero point something. And the only, the highest grade I got was, I thought it was a C, but it turns out it was a D. I got a D in journalism. And the teacher pulled me aside. He's like, look, Justin, you're too smart to fail. You deserve an F. I'm not gonna give you an F, I'm gonna give you a D. I was like, oh, thank you, Mr. Moller. But it was like a zero point something. So they said, you're gonna have to go to continuation school, which was just like a school, like, you know, for fuck ups. And my mom was like, you're not a fuck up. So you're not gonna go there. I go, okay. She's like, I'm just gonna have you stay home. And this, it sounds crazy, but I gotta give her credit. SPEAKER_04: Because it didn't work for a bit, but then it really worked. She's like, I'm just gonna have you stay home. You're gonna read the paper every day while I'm at work. I'm gonna come home. You're gonna have a little report on a couple items you read. And of course, you know, for the longest, like, I just took advantage. I didn't do it, you know, like I just didn't, she didn't want me being with fuck ups because she already could see, I think, that my confidence was shot and that was just gonna be worse. So she pulled me out. I took advantage of it. I didn't do much until I was like almost 16. Common story, I feel like for a lot of people, I got a copy of the autobiography of Malcolm X and it really reignited my ambition. So then at that point, I enrolled in community college because I didn't really want to deal with, like trying to start over from my freshman year of high school. So I enrolled in community college and just did that for about four or five years until I could transfer. I transferred, so I started that at like, just before I turned 16 and I transferred to Berkeley at 21. SPEAKER_02: Oh, I see. We'll get back to Berkeley and how things turned around for Justin in a moment. SPEAKER_11: AI has the power to automate, but if it's using untrusted data, can you trust the results? Your business doesn't just need AI. It needs the right AI for your business. Introducing Watson X, a platform designed to multiply output by tailoring AI to your needs. When you Watson X your business, you can train, tune, and deploy AI all with your trusted data. Let's create the right AI for your business with Watson X. Learn more at ibm.com slash Watson X. IBM, let's create. SPEAKER_02: Do you know that right now, as you listen to this, there's an astronaut named Frank Rubio in some tiny spacecraft way, way up there in space. He left for the International Space Station in September of last year, thought he was going for six months. And then once he was up there, NASA called him up and said, actually, Frank, we want you out there for a year, 371 days to be exact. My question is, if you're NASA and you pull that bait and switch once, how do you recruit the next crop of astronauts? I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly, eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts, if you're NASA, is hard. 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SPEAKER_06: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_03: Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_02: Back to my conversation with Justin Richmond at the Edison O. Jackson Auditorium at Medgar Evers College. Justin was finding his place in Berkeley. So you have a kind of loss of confidence and do you get it back in Berkeley? At Berkeley? SPEAKER_04: Yeah, 100%. Gabrielle Williams right here. I met Gabrielle at Berkeley. She was doing her PhD. We met at the Black Student Lounge, where it was like her student job thing and she was listening to music. So we connected. There was a professor there by the name of Ricky Vincent. He was like the preeminent funk music scholar and was writing a book on the Black Panthers and I had a strong interest in the Panthers. So between like Gabrielle and Ricky Vincent and all these other black folk that looked like me that I could relate to. And for Gabrielle coming from LA, Southern California, there was just a lot in common. SPEAKER_04: It definitely 100% helped me but she also has helped me through a lot because there's many times I've called Gabrielle, including when I took this job at Pushkin, like should I really do this? This is a smart move. And she'll have to talk. When I got into grad school, man, should I really take out these loans, Gabrielle? I don't know, it's a lot of money. Like I don't wanna be in debt. And Gabrielle's like, Justin, just come on, that's what you're supposed to do. That's what you're going to school. You gotta pay, unless you can afford it, take the loan out and go. Yeah, I definitely got a ton of confidence back there. Not that I'm the, you know, and then slowly along the way ebbed and flowed as new situations arose. I sort of fell into journalism because I couldn't get a job after college. And I kind of went in wanting to be a professor. By the time I got to Berkeley, I was like, I kind of wanna do my bachelor's, get a PhD, then teach. But then I sort of fell out of love with higher education just because of the bureaucracy element. Sorry, Alexis and Peter, you know, you guys are wonderful to have us here. But I would talk to Gabrielle, I would talk to my guy, Ricky Vincent, and sort of be like, well, what is it that I like to do? Well, I like the idea of writing and connecting with people, communicating to people. I like the idea of researching. And so that's when like the idea struck to do journalism. I started getting involved with radio around town, KPFA, which was the Pacifica station in Berkeley, the campus station. Took a journalism class. So I kinda, and it just snowballed from there where I fell into journalism. But by the time I get a job, I'm 25, I'm at NPR, and my girlfriend got pregnant, who's now my beautiful wife, Danielle. We now have two beautiful kids, Corinne and Ella. And I was making like $30,000 a year NPR, paying back loans and about to have a kid. SPEAKER_04: My confidence, I'd say at that point, sinks back to all time low. And I have a friend named Drew who took me to Cuba. It was just like, I sense you're kinda going through it. Let me take you to Cuba. This is when Cuba opened up. I was like, I can't really afford it. He's like, I'm gonna pay for it. You sent me back whenever. So me and Drew went down. And this is the most random incident in my life. This is the most random thing that ever happened in my life. We're in Cuba, in Havana. I've driven to Mexico twice, but other than that, I've never left the country. And I run into Quincy Jones in Havana. And Quincy Jones, I'm like, damn, that's Quincy Jones. I go, hey Quincy, can I get a picture? And he goes, yeah. And he doesn't get up, so I was like, okay, I'm gonna sit down and take a picture with Quincy. And he started asking me, what's your sign? I go, Leo. I go, Leo. He goes, oh, I'm Leo Risen. Cool, I don't know what that means. He just starts talking to me. And we have like a three hour conversation. We have dinner. You never told me that, SPEAKER_02: because you and I met Quincy like five years ago. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that was a full circle moment for me, because we ended up going to Quincy's house. But I had like a three hour dinner with Quincy Jones in Havana. At my lowest point, I'm making like no money, I'm broke. My wife was looking at me crazy, because why are you in Cuba running around? She didn't know if I was maybe gonna or not gonna come back or what. But I met Quincy, and from that, he was like, oh, you're a cool brother, man. He gave me his card. SPEAKER_04: Normally I wouldn't have reached out, but I felt, I was like, okay, this man discovered Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith, Ray Charles. So I was like, what am I gonna do? Not reach out? I could use all the help I could get. So I reached out to Quincy, and was like, look, Quincy, I realized I didn't wanna reach out with nothing. So me and my friend Sonari Glinton, one of the few black men at NPR that sort of took interest in me right away, sort of noticed when I was there that I needed his guidance. We decided I shouldn't just go to him with nothing to offer. So I was like, look, I'm a journalist. I work in NPR, I work in audio. Everyone, it's 2016, podcasting is sort of new, but people are starting to have them. You've done everything from, everything across media that you could possibly do, except for podcasting. We can make you a podcast. And he was like, great. So it wasn't that easy, but was a couple meetings, finally got into a great, got to sign some paperwork. I still have it framed. It's like me and Quincy Jones signature, which is the craziest thing in the world to me. But what happened was I couldn't sell the thing. I realized I didn't know the first thing about business. I've been flying blind my whole life, just trying to figure things out. I'm taking out loans. I don't know what I'm doing. And that's when the idea for this show occurred to me. SPEAKER_04: It's like, if I could just talk to, if I could talk to someone else, some other black man who has like money, Magic Johnson, Byron Allen, who at that time just bought the Weather Channel. I was like, I bet they could tell me what to do. Cause I was in these rooms just like realizing like, I don't understand this jargon. I don't understand the speak and I'm failing. And so it really occurred to me at that moment, how important having people who look like you, who you can point to in your life, you can point to a successful at this particular thing, how that can really be, it's not the only way to figure things out, but it's man, it makes things so much easier. SPEAKER_02: Let's go back a moment and say, what's the version of your life where you wouldn't have suffered that kind of crisis of confidence? I can't imagine. Give me a version. Give me a version where it's easy. SPEAKER_04: In the United States, SPEAKER_04: I don't know. I don't think you can have it easy being born black in the United States. I don't think it's possible. I would say best case scenario is, you're like a Carlton type or something from Fresh Prince or something. We're like, okay, you're successful, but like are you really, how successful are you if you're not acknowledging the whole part of yourself? So it's hard for me to answer, but I guess in a scenario where there is no, and this is interesting, I'm also thinking about this for my kids now. They're getting a much different life than I had, access to different kinds of people and education and two parents who are supportive of each other and supportive of them together. So I think, but I guess for me, it really is hard for me to imagine, but maybe I guess the best case, it's funny, I used to dream that I was like a, as a kid, that I was like a Huxtable, which is maybe a little controversial now, but like maybe that would have been a best case scenario. Dad was a doctor, mom was whatever in a brownstone. SPEAKER_02: Give me the worst case scenario. So you don't get into Berkeley, what happens? Is that the key moment? SPEAKER_04: Nah, probably getting the Malcolm X autobiography, because I was in a pretty bad spot there. But I'll say before I came to Pushkin, I almost gave up. Again, when you don't have examples of success around you and you don't have people who can teach you about money and how to, not even in a gross Uber capitalist way, but just how to accumulate it so that you can have the things you want and need in life. I didn't have that, so I almost left journalism, even though I love it and I wanted to be in it, almost left it. I had a job offer with ADP, the payroll processing, to do outdoor sales for ADP, because I was like, well, I'll just go do sales. I'll make some money doing sales. I almost took that offer. And that was maybe six months before I got an email SPEAKER_04: from you, from Mia Labelle and from you, to come work for Pushkin, which I would say changed, again, my trajectory thanks to you, Jacob Weisberg, Mia Labelle. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, man, because it was also bleak then a little bit. Because also it was tough then, man. SPEAKER_02: We'll take a quick break and get back to Justin's story. 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The Hartford Group Benefits makes managing benefits and absences a breeze, providing world-class customer care to ensure that your employees are treated like people, not policies. The best part? The Hartford offers flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the many diverse and unique needs of every employee. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss, the Hartford has got you covered. So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The buck's got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. We're back with Justin Richmond. In making sense of people's life stories and trying to figure out what's the difference between a, in America, between a black life story and a white life story, one of the things, and it's very, very difficult to convince, persuade white people of this fact, is it's how many strikes you get or how many chances you get. If you are an upper-middle-class, well-educated white person, you get like 10 chances. You can screw up nine times and the system will catch you every time and start you over again. And if you're in the same position as a young black person, you maybe get two. And I remember, this is a weird example of this, but there's an incredibly interesting book that was written about a suburb of Buffalo, a wealthy suburb of Buffalo. I think it's Williamsville, I'm not sure, Amherst. The book, I think, is called The Safest City in America. It was about how there's no juvenile delinquency in Williamsville. And the reason is not that there's no misbehavior among juveniles, it's that they just call us something different, right? It's hijinks, it's sowing the wild oats, it's oh, so-and-so just has to learn to be, it's everything is getting, everyone gets so many different chances that no one ever looks, never comes to the definition of juvenile delinquency. And like that thing, this question of how many chances you get, it sounds, listening to your story, that you were very close to running out of chances. SPEAKER_04: It's even more than that. It's like, I didn't even know that I had chances. And maybe I didn't, I never knew I had chances. There's a point where, I guess in your example, the difference would be in those instances, those kids in Buffalo, they're thought to be behaving badly, whereas when you're a black kid misbehaving, you're bad. You, yourself, you're bad. Absolutely, definitely. Like you're a terrible person. You can't succeed, you can't do, none of this is for you, you know? SPEAKER_04: So that's where I was at, which is a pretty bleak place. SPEAKER_02: So my father, who passed away a couple years ago, but actually today, weirdly, is his birthday. My mom always says to my dad that his motto was, nothing bad will ever happen, which I've thought about a lot. Partly that's a function of his personality. He had this kind of unstoppable and thoughtful personality. But he was also a, came from a stable English family. He was well educated. He was very intelligent. The system always worked for my dad. He was a nice person. He was dependable, he was charming. He was, people liked him. So it made sense that his theory of life was nothing bad will ever happen. My mother would imagine, you know, she's a mom, she would imagine all kinds of horrible, and he would just, he would look at her uncomprehendingly and it's like, no, no, no, no. Nothing ever bad's gonna happen, right? And it was essentially true of, like in that message, I was just thinking as you were talking about your dad, the difference in messages sent to the two of us at a young age, I have this dad who just thinks, it didn't even occur to him that there's ever gonna be any, you know, detour off the runway. Yeah, man. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, something about opportunity and there's something about the way in which society asks you or demands that you think about yourself, you know, it's like, sometimes you don't even get an option in how you wanna think about yourself. SPEAKER_02: I feel like the one thing that I don't, maybe it's fine this way, but the transition is still really, the way that your life kind of turns around, I don't think it turns around, it's not like people are living a life of crime, but you know what I mean? Like something happens. I've not incriminated myself on this. So, man. Something happens that's really kind of interesting and mysterious to you in your 20s. SPEAKER_04: It was like, yeah, between, it was just building up my confidence, I guess, between 15 and now. I'm still trying, you know, like, from that time I did drop out of high school to just getting through college, what motivated me was a sense of failure. I was like, man, if I don't get a college diploma, like, I would have an eighth grade certificate, like, what is that gonna do for me? So that was kind of like this real, it wasn't like a carrot type of motivation. And then I was like, well, then I couldn't get a job and then I started interning and I got into grad school and then that gave me another, okay, now it's grad school. I gotta figure out grad school's big, scary thing and do that. And then I get out of there, I get right into this job at NPR and within two months, like, my girlfriend's pregnant. You know, and it's like, now it's like, well, I gotta figure out how to provide. So, like, my whole, I feel like every step of my life up until recently has been about how do I just, how do I not fail? And that's sort of been my motivation to succeed. And I'm trying to figure out a way now to be motivated now that, like, that's why I'm on this journey of just trying to talk to successful people. I've been lucky enough to be, you know, first time we met in Santa Monica. I was like, damn, I can't believe I'm gonna go meet Malcolm Gladwell, that's crazy. And, you know, we had a very lovely conversation. I just remember being like, I can't get out of here without asking, like, how did you get comfortable having money? And I asked you that. What did I say? You're like, I just wanted to be able to do my own thing. I wanted to have my freedom. I wanted to be able to, I never wanted people to assign things to me or to be told what to do. And so, and I was like, damn, that's a great answer. You know? But that's largely why I'm still trying to figure out this world and this life and navigating different things. So that's why I'm doing this and talking to people like Charlamagne the God and people like Suze Orman and just different people who, you know, against the odds, against all odds, like, figured this thing out, you know? And my hope is that people listening to it, it inspires them not only to take big swings, but also to seek out real world, real life mentorship. You know, like, obviously, I want this to be a platform of mentorship for people. So hopefully you walk away having learned a lot and feeling boosted. But also, like, I think, you know, you need to have real life mentors. And I've been lucky enough to have so many. Gabrielle, you, Jacob, all kinds of different people. I'm hoping as I try to figure this out, people will figure out along with me. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: That's lovely. Well, thank you, Justin. Well, let's do some audience questions. One of you, one of you. Q&A if there are any questions. SPEAKER_04: They could be for me or Malcolm. SPEAKER_05: Here comes someone, yeah. Thank you. My name is Kevin Nesbitt. I'm an educator, one of the administrators that create the blockages you talked about. No, but thank you so much for the way you presented this. You're a good bureaucracy, I gotta say. I'm a good bureaucracy, yeah, good VP, as I call myself. I've had many friends that come from biracial families. And I think as someone that does not come from a biracial family, there's always this belief that there's some sort of protection that you might receive from your whiteness if you choose to adopt it or if you choose to embrace it. Because I appreciate the way that you said you understood immediately you were a black man and that you had no choice. Because even if you wanted to imagine something other, society told you, no, you're a black man, right? And you gave many examples for that. But I have other friends that throughout their journey, they've been able to say, well, it's not that it's a choice, but it's a little messier than that for them because they are both black, they're both white, and they grapple with what that means. Did you have any moments where you felt that having a parent that was white actually enabled some moments of protection or other, as Malcolm described it, maybe one more choice, one more set of options? That's my question. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I guess I don't wanna speak for other people, but my belief is when I hear these stories is just that there's a bit of them deluding themselves perhaps. But hard to say, I don't wanna speak for anyone else, but I didn't feel that. Maybe if I'd had a different mom, maybe it would have been different, but I was never allowed to think that anything different. Great, thank you. Yeah, yeah. This is my grand theory of biracial marriages. SPEAKER_02: There's a big difference between black father, white mother and white father, black mother. Which would be your? Yeah, we are actually very different kinds. Historically what a biracial marriage was was a white man and a black woman. That was the acceptable form for society. Goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. That's what it was. It was never the reverse. And only really recently have you seen black men marry white women. And I think the road is a lot harder both for the marriage and the children. It's a lot harder when your father's black and your mom is white. It's society looks at it. Yeah, and I think if I reflect on the cases, SPEAKER_05: I'm thinking about my friendships it was largely what you described. Traditional. Traditional and maybe the household of the fathers whether separated or not later on there was some sort of protection that dad would, you'd have another outcome, right? You have another choice. So I just wanted to hear a bit about that. SPEAKER_02: I think society views a black man, white woman as being subversive and in a way that they don't view the reverse as being subversive. Thank you. Yeah, that's true. SPEAKER_10: Hello, firstly, thank you Malcolm. And Justin, you guys are, it's just been a joy to have you here and I've just enjoyed this whole conversation. I just wanted from you Justin, like a soundbite or maybe just like a quick statement, like words of advice from one biracial man to another biracial man, just how to like navigate the professional world and how to just keep your bearings and keep yourself grounded. Man, I'm not. SPEAKER_04: Listen to my show because I think there's people far greater than me that are gonna be given advice but I would say to this point in the instances where I haven't code switched I've always been much more successful. I don't know if that's because I've been lucky but also some of it comes down to my, like I also think you shouldn't capitulate. So also like if someone doesn't want you, like I do have imposter syndrome yet and still it's like I do somewhere in me have this belief that like I can't help but be myself and I think as long as you just are true to yourself whatever that is, however you view yourself, identify yourself, behave like yourself, like I think that's all you can do and I think in those instances like just knowing that you bring a lot to the table being you, then you do you being someone else and if you don't you'll find out, right? Sometimes it doesn't pay to be me in certain situations I've found out but okay then fine that one's not for me, let me go to the next situation where it is good for me to be there. I was at NPR before I was at Push Game with Malcolm and that was a place that I was authentic to myself but it didn't feel like that was, it wasn't appreciated and so I got out. To go where you're appreciated. SPEAKER_10: To go where you're appreciated, yeah. Thank you. SPEAKER_02: We have one more question. Oh, one more question. SPEAKER_07: Gentlemen, thank you so much. So you both men are biracial and I wanted to ask Mr. Gladwell, Justin identifies as black and yourself. SPEAKER_02: I don't think about it. I think that's the difference between having, I have a West Indian mom, Justin is an African American father. If you're West Indian, you don't think about race in the same way. It's not this omnipresent thing in your life. So I was, I just think of myself as, I don't know. When I grew up, it was never forced, I mean, I was never forced to answer that question. My mom thought of herself as a Jamaican, not as a white person or a black person. So I don't have a kind of easy answer to that. SPEAKER_04: You had a couple layers because Jamaican and then growing up in Canada, which I feel like is probably very different than. Yes, Canada again, I never got the racial experience SPEAKER_02: of as all of you and everyone in this room knows the racial experience of living in this country is just profoundly different from the racial experience almost anywhere else. Would life have been different SPEAKER_07: if you were darker complexion? SPEAKER_02: Probably, I guess, although, well, black people always know that I'm biracial, white people don't necessarily know. So it would have made my, I have to tell my favorite story ever along these grounds is I was running down, I went for a run one day in LA and running down Ocean Boulevard and this black guy in a gorgeous open, Porsche 911, like one of those tricked out ones, like one of these incredibly handsome black men looks at me, sees me running, stands up. So he's like, he's through the roof of his car, raises his hand like this and says, I love what you do, bro. So like, I get a lot of love. So if I was darker, would I get more love from black people? I mean, maybe, but I can't see how I get even more than I already get. Thank you very much. SPEAKER_04: All right, thank you so much guys. And thank you to Medgar Evers College, higher education is wonderful. SPEAKER_02: This was the perfect way to launch Justin's new show Started From The Bottom. And I urge all of you to subscribe to it right now and never forget, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, you hear all story, no ads. Believe me, it's worth it. Thanks to everyone at Medgar Evers College for hosting Justin and me, especially Alexis McLean and Peter Holliman. Special thanks also to Keshall Williams, our associate editor, who is also a Medgar Evers alum and had the wonderful idea of bringing us there. Revisionist History is produced by Leeman Gistu, Amy Gaines, Kiara Powell, and Jacob Smith. Today's episode was produced by Keshall Williams, David Jha, and Amy Gaines. Our show runner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Ben Toliday, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special thanks to Julia Bart. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. commonly used, I can not be your member of your ethically included member of your on-home tax me, while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_09: Hey, hair enthusiasts. Picture this, perfect curls at the push of a button. It's the new Infinity Pro by Conair Curl Secret Ceramic Auto Curler. This tool makes styling effortless, delivering perfect, long-lasting curls every single time. Choose from three preset curl types and directions for your desired look, and five temperature options for all hair types. And don't worry about tangles. Our anti-tangle tech and ceramic barrel keep hair smooth and protected. Hair goes in, curl comes out, just like magic. Get effortless curls with the new Curl Secret by Conair, exclusively at Ulta. SPEAKER_12: Do you hear it? The clock is ticking. It's time for the new season of 60 Minutes. The CBS News Sunday Night tradition is back for its 56th season with all new big name interviews. Hard-hitting investigations and epic adventures. No place, no one, no story is off limits. And you'll always learn something new. It's time for 60 Minutes. New episode airs Sunday, September 24th on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.