Manu Meel: The Accidental Unifier

Manu wasn’t planning to dedicate his life to preserving our democracy, but a riot broke out on his college campus and he accidentally became a unifying force for all sides. Today, he’s trying to unify the country as the CEO of BridgeUSA, whose chapters at 50 colleges and 24 high schools equip the next generation with the skills to navigate conflict and find solutions across differences. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
You take somebody my age. Born in December of ninety eight,
I'm twenty four. I was I think two years old
when nine to eleven happened. I was going to middle
school when the Great Recession happened. I was graduated in
high school when the twenty sixteen presidential election happened. I
graduated college in twenty twenty when the pandemic hit the
capitol riots happened, and you had the Trump Byen election,

(00:29):
and now it's twenty twenty three. Not a great sample
size of democratic progress and growth.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Like that's the leg fat That's a really fair comment
when you look at.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
It from that lens. I don't think it's necessarily meant
to excuse the skepticism and the critique, but I think
it's meant to demonstrate that if all you know is
a house on fire, then there's basically two options. One
you either try to will up and put out the fire,
which is what myself and my fellow young we doing,
or you escape the house, which is frankly a very

(01:04):
understandable notion.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney.
I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, a father, an entrepreneur,
and I've been a football coach an inner City Memphis,
and the last part unintentionally led to an oscar for
the film about our team. It's called Undefeated. I believe
our country's problems will never be solved by a bunch

(01:35):
of fancy people in nice suits talking big words that
nobody understands on CNN and Fox, but rather an army
of normal folks US, just you and me deciding Hey,
I can help. That's what Mineu Meal, the voice we
just heard, has done. Mineu wasn't planning to dedicate his

(01:55):
life to preserving our democracy, but a riot broke out
on his college campus and he accidentally became a unifying
force for all sides. Today, he's trying to unify the
country as the CEO of Bridge USA, whose chapters at
fifty colleges and twenty four high schools create spaces for

(02:19):
students of all stripes to openly and constructively discuss political issues,
equipping the next generation with the skills to navigate conflict
and find solutions across differences. Manu brings me hope that
his generation can do this better than my generation has done.

(02:40):
And I cannot wait for you to meet him right
after these brief messages from our generals sponsors. Manu meal, no,

(03:11):
Manu meal, Manu Manu, yes, sir? Is that right?

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yes, sir, that's right. The second one my new meal.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Welcome to Memphis. I hope you enjoyed your sandwich when
I was starving and you ate it in front of me.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
You know, I had to, I had to buy the
sandwich specifically to show you off. But Dora is vegetarian
and only at Alvocado in it, so I don't think
it would have filled you up.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Well, not only would you not filled me up. I
hate avocados, so I would have spit it out.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
Good. Good. That's that's very anti California of you.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
I have nothing to do with California, so this is perfect,
and it's it's very West Coast of you, sir.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Yeah, yeah, I definitely. I feel like I flew in
today and you and I were just talking about like
carbon sequestration and trees, and you gave me a full
lesson on it, and like I feel like if you
mapped my carbon footprint, I would look like a freaking
weird tech guy, you know, but I may For the record,
I maybe like half the money maybe a.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Third, maybe a third. Well, nonetheless, welcome to Memphis, Thanks
for coming to be with us and hang out at
the FedEx Forum. Yeah, are you going to be a
Grizzly fan now?

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Definitely? Not?

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Definitely not.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
What are you The elevator is broken in the way up?

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Well it was, but.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
That's a bad sign.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
I have a secret. It wasn't broken. You weren't a
fan something?

Speaker 1 (04:26):
They were like, I'm not in with John Moran.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Well, what kind of fan are you? So?

Speaker 1 (04:31):
I'm a Boston Celtics fan. I used to be a
Leaguers fan.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Well, then you should be a little bit of a
Grizzlies fan because Marcus Smart is now a Grizzly and that.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
Makes that makes that makes me less.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
He didn't leave on his own, accord, y'all traded him.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Which is a bad call. It is a bad call.
He had the heart, He had the heart and the soul,
no kidding, he had guts. He felt like a normal
person on the team.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
It will be lovely having him to beat the Celtics
next time we play them.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, is that true? At least at least, hey, at
least we've got a championship or two.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah, you do have those. No, but we're coming.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
I really do appreciate being here, I think Memphis. I mean,
you give me a history lesson too, on the on
the zoom call that we had. But I'm somebody that
loves history, loves places that have a lot of transformation,
and I don't take the time for granted.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
There's a ton here. I wish you could stay a
little longer. I love to show you around. Let's talk
about you, though, because that's what we're here for. First,
what'd you grow up? Tell me? Tell me about little Manu?

Speaker 1 (05:36):
I'm still little young also, yeah, I'll tell you right.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
How about five to fifteen year old Manu?

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Okay? Cool? Five to fifty. Actually the interesting stuff is
one to five.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Five. Yeah, I think it's all interesting, but one to five.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
So my parents moved from India. They were in a
New Delhi, northern India. They moved to the United States
in ninety seven. I was born in December of ninety
eight in Central Archie. Yeah, yeah, December night. My colleague,
my colleague, I'm very My colleague is a two thousand baby,

(06:16):
a millennium baby, and so I can only imagine how
young I must field ninety eight because when she says
two thousand, I'm like, man, that's young.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
She's only two years.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
But yeah, no, I'm I'm totally young, which is why
when you were like telling me about Little Minu, I
was like, that's presumptuous of me to be like, but
I was. I was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Then my mom and my dad. My mom especially had
a really hard time settling in She, you know, her
entire family was there. She's very extroverted, she really cared
about family, and she had a hard time stay in

(06:47):
the United States, and so she actually went back with
my dad and the thought about, you know, potentially staying
in India. And I distinctly remember my mom telling me
the story. It's something I'll always be grateful to her,
fore Coach Bill, which is that she walked me past
this like school where I would probably go to school,
and it was there was like couch on the side,
and it was in India, in India, in New Delhi.

(07:08):
It was dirty, the doors were rusted, and she was like,
there's no way this guy's going to grow up here.
And so she basically bucked up and she and my
dad flew back to the United states where my mom
did all of her stuff to be a doctor. But
the reason why that went to five years important is
because I actually then lived with my grandparents in India
for those five years on and off, and so I

(07:30):
lived with my dad's side in New Delhi. I lived
with my mom's side in a village close to a
state called Haryana. And then I came back to the
US after those five years and basically moved around every
two years until what.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Did your mother and father get their doctorate?

Speaker 1 (07:47):
So my mom became a doctor and my dad was
a computer scientist. It's a classic Indian.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
I don't computer side to the doctor is the classic
in family.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
It's a classic in duane family. And then look at me,
look at what happened.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
To Well, we don't know that yet, so let's not
go there. But so why were you going back and
forth then? If because? And why were you moving every
two years? Because clearly they were earning well, I mean
they had their degrees in all right.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
So I mean I I certainly did not. We were
not poor, but my dad's job was unstable for some time,
so we would move because of that. Then my mom's
job would change. I lived in New Jersey, lived in
Staten Island, New York, came back to Jersey, moved around
there twice, never spent again more than those two years,
and then basically went to high school in Lexington, Massachusetts.

(08:43):
And so you talk about money, what's interesting is every
move that we made, we actually my parents started earning
a little bit more money, a little bit more money.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
And they're chasing the American dream a little bit.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
They're chasing the American dream. They're chasing the American dream,
and not just the American dream, but they're chasing I
think just a I think they were just chasing a
foundation for where their kids could just make the most
of their sacrifice.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
I get it.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
I think that was it.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
That's a beautiful thing, that is the American dream, especially
for immigrants what your parents are. Yeah, but you're an American,
you were born here.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
I was born here. But what's fascinating is when I
came back at the age of five, I like, was
this like, first of all countries like India. And this
is me saying it is somebody that's from India smelled different.
I landed here and I just smelled like India. It's
a very distinct smell. It's like when you come live
in New York City or you live in Texas, you

(09:34):
live you live in a village, you know, or you
live in a farm you work on a farm as
opposed to and I had like when when you're oftentimes
in an area where there's a lot of dust, your
hair gets all matted and it sticks together, and so
I like, did not I think my first language was
Hindi even though I was born here, And yeah, man,
it was. It was fascinating to try and fit in.

(09:57):
It was it was hard.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Let's be real. Yeah, five years old trying to fit
in is not fascinating. That is not the word a
five year old would use about trying to fit in.
And I'm interested in this because I think it's your
main to what you're doing now. Actually, as I've thought
a lot about your story, believe it or not, I
have thought about a lot about a lot about it. Well,

(10:19):
I mean, you're in this interesting place, that one you've
grown up basically in India. You're an American, born in America,
grown up in India. You even said your first language
is probably actually Hindi. And you move every two years,
and the moving every two years and your parents trying

(10:40):
to get you the best opportunity in the world and
they're chasing the American dream. And I get it, and
that's beautiful. But I got to believe you had a
hard time fitting coming up, and that even if you
started develops some relationships and two years are gone again,
what was that like?

Speaker 1 (11:01):
I mean, that's where the I hope as a five
year old, I was using the word fascinating, because then
I would be actually an odd kid. Then there's no
chance of me fitting.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
A seven year old would say it would suck, not
that it was.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
I'll tell me what the difference, though.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
In hindsight may be fascinating.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yes, it definitely sucked. I just my temperament is one
where I just have a hard time. I just don't
really try to associate negative emotions a lot of that
type of stuff, because it really did make me who
I am today. But that's only looking in hindsight. I'll
tell you, you know, trying to fit in, trying to
make friends, I mean, it did suck. I think I
used to. I had almost a bully in every sort

(11:38):
of stage. And this is something that I credit my
parents a lot with. You know, my mom had that
philosophy of if someone punches, you punch them back twice
and make sure they'd never get up. And I had
a real I mean, do I look like somebody that
can touch back twice? Lets less be real? Do I
look like a kid that can punch? I can punch
back my words? But that's only now I was. I
was like chubby, I was pudgy. I I did not

(12:00):
have that capacity, and so really it did suck. And
what sucked most about it, actually, Coach Bill, was that
I feel like you oftentimes have this feeling of America,
like in India, especially whenever I would go back after
coming here. I distinctly remember I was like seven, ten
thirteen people back home and say like, man, like you're

(12:22):
in America, Like that's that's the dream, that's the place.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
Now was I think you were like fortunate lucky?

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah? Yeah, I mean you're you're basically you know, like
you're the you know. And that did not mirror the
reality of our life, which was that I lived in
apartments my entire life until we got to like eighth grade.
I grew up with my siblings in one apartment. Again,
fitting in was one where like kids would pick on

(12:49):
you if you take the this is so funny when
you asked me how to pronounce my name. Part of
the reason why I stopped really caring was because it
became such a subject of like intrigue and making jokes
that I was like, you know what, we got to
figure out other ways to keep going. What's interesting now
that I think about this is that it made me
somebody that understood how to just create space for people

(13:11):
to be idiots for a little bit so that you
can better accept them, they can better accept you, and
you can actually get somewhere. And the last thing I'll
just say on this point is you learn how to adapt.
And I think one of the things that I fear
a lot about the work I do now, and I
don't want to skip ahead, but like when people see
this like young person that can be super charismatic and

(13:32):
they talk and all of that, I know what that creates.
I know the vibe that gives off. It's like, oh,
this must be a trust fund baby, or this must
be whatever whatever. And frankly, my life really helped give
me the impetus to do the work that I do
because I think there's a lot of kids out there.
I mean, you worked with a lot of them in
your past that are just trying to fit in and
they're looking for space.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
So yeah, So.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
What you just said is the discovery that I was
trying to reveal, is that the podcast that came out.
I'm going to timestamp this, Alex, so no griping. He
hates when I time stamp stuff, so he's going to
have to just get that's producer stuff. Alex can just

(14:18):
relax on this one. So today's podcasts So we Are
podcast released every Tuesday. And the reason I really even
started thinking about you again was this podcast. And it's
about Stacy Horst and very shortly and if you guys
listening now haven't listened to it, go listen to it.
It's gripping. Her kid was autistic Asperger's level one and

(14:45):
this child, at sixteen, because of being bullied and ostracized
because she didn't fit because of her social limitations, she
took her own life and at sixteen absolutely floors me
when I think about what that family has done to

(15:06):
honor the legacy of their daughter. But as I was
thinking about you, obviously I'm not saying you were suicidal
or anything, but what I am saying is for the
son of an immigrant from India who goes back and
forth and is living and growing up with basically two

(15:26):
different cultures and moving every two years. I've got to
believe that you saw some of the worst in what
human beings can do and say and act towards one another.
And I just want to know if that's true, and

(15:47):
did that in some way compel you to have empathy
or compel you to have what is that like?

Speaker 1 (15:56):
I think it forced me to find perspective because I think,
and again this is sort of my mindset and temperament
is I think oftentimes when you're experiencing hardship, and here's
the fact, you know your heart, you might be experiencing hardship,
I might be experiencing hardship. One of ours might be
relatively more. And yet that doesn't take away from the

(16:17):
fact that you and I both suffered hardship, right, So
any hardship that anybody's ever suffering is real, and that's
your hardship, and that's real trauma. That's real challenge. For me.
I often feel like the best way for me to
cope with that is to put my suffering and my
challenges in context.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
There's put it in context. Put it in context, and
you're telling me at thirteen you're learning this.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
No, No, this is something I learned after. I'm talking
in hindsight. No, at thirteen, I was mad, mad, and
but again my temper was not so much mad. It
was just more subdued, quiet, with drawn, with drawn, insecure.
I oftentimes ask, you know, people that knew me then,

(17:00):
like I was never somebody that you pick out in
a class and you're like, this kid's gonna do all right,
or do something. They're average, middle, middle of the pack.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
That's very un Indian.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
Yeah, I'm very Unindied in many ways, you know. I
The only the most Indian thing about me is that
I actually stay very close to my culture. So I
love you know, my grandparents. They basically raised me for
those first five six years. And my grandfather he passed,
the one that really like was somebody that gave me
a lot of values over time, and he really felt

(17:34):
like another father figure. He passed away last year and
I haven't been able to go back to India since.
But I'm going to go in two to three weeks
and finally go back to that home. Witnessed the and
one of the things he would always say is he
would say two things to me, and this is why
I'm actually starting to think about this. He'd say two things.
One is he said, you need to you need to

(17:55):
think about God. And the second thing he would say
to me is that you were great. And I say
that with the context of all of the crappiness that
we went through as a child, there are very few
people that I felt like gave me the real motivation
or sense of self at that point. I needed somebody

(18:17):
to say that. And I used to make recordings of
him saying that, because now that I reflect, it really
gives me that sense of purpose to keep doing. So
all of that to say that I'm very un Indian
in some ways. In the Indian immigrant community, there's a
term called ABCD American born confused. They see and by

(18:41):
the way, shout out to my friends who gave me that.
And then right after that, I whip out the Hydian man.
They can't handle it. They can't handle it, like this
guy's not that your grandfather.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
You say. Instilled values.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Instilled values what valus? The first value that he instilled
than me was be fearless, fearless, fearless, love he was.
And again it's something that I actually if you ask
me what is my weakness, my strength is the ability
to empathize with people and try and care because I
love people. To me, when you said, like you've seen
the worst human need know you know? To me, I see,

(19:15):
it's just ignorance. You know, everybody's got their issues. I've
been I'm sure I've been an add to some people
in my life not even knowing it. But the weakness
for me that is I sometimes don't know when to push.
I sometimes don't know when to be honest with what
I think. And he was somebody that served in the military.
That was his way of climbing the social ladder in India.

(19:36):
Basically did two things in the sort of the societal
stratification that my family was in, which is either be
a farmer or you go in the military. So you
went into the military. He fought three wars. He I remember.
There is one story that he always used to tell me,
which is I used to be scared of ghosts like
most kids. And he's say, you say not that used

(19:57):
to be my nickname for me. He say, you know,
this morning I was in the shower and a ghost
walked through the door and he he the ghost massaged
my legs, he washed me. There's another ghost that came out.
He drove my car with me. He basically said, all
these ghosters butlers, And I was like, the ghost of

(20:18):
your butlers. He's like, yeah, don't you know that the
ghosts are going to mess with you until they realize
that you can't be messed with and then the ghost
here before you. And so the first thing he always
told me was be fearless, and it's something I deeply appreciated.
And the second thing was faith in God, something that
he believed a lot in. I'm not that religious right now,
but I'm back on the hunt. I'm back on the search.

(20:40):
And the final thing that he would always say is
work hard, not for anybody else, but just for yourself.
And it I mean he was He had eight siblings,
I think seven or eight siblings, and he basically was
the engine for our family on my mom side to

(21:01):
move up in society.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
He sounds like a phenomenal guy.

Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, he's a good guy, and I.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
Can see the regard. You can see your face changes
when you talk about him.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
Yeah, yeah, I haven't actually ever talked about him. Publicly.
But like, what I appreciate about the space you're doing is,
you know, just create space for that honest conversation. And
I know that most people have somebody like that in
their life hopefully, and it's good. It's important to have
people like that.

Speaker 3 (21:27):
So yeah, we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
So where do you graduate? High school?

Speaker 1 (21:51):
Twenty sixteenth?

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Sir?

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Where twenty sixteen in Lexington, Massachusetts?

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Lexington, Massachusetts, which.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
Which by the way, is basically it's a public school,
basically a private school, really comedy school. There's literally a
hill in Lexington called Nobel Prize Hill where the Nobel Prize.
There's seven Nobel Prize winners that live in Lexington. Good grief,
it's freaking insane.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Insane. Okay, So you say you're an average student, but
you went to cal Berkeley, so you're full of crop
because average students don't go to Berkeley. Yeah, so how
does that work?

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Average is relative? I see?

Speaker 2 (22:29):
Now this is very Indian, but I have an Indian
friend who would get a's and a's and a's and
they'd have one a minus and their parents would ground
them for an A. This is where the the the
the world and the expectations are stressful.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yeah, this is something I benefit a lot from, which
is that I had very little expectations for my parents.
They did not imposed much on me. I didn't do
all no and actually, if you pull up my transcripts,
I had mostly bees throughout high school. Actually I was
never that type of kid. When I say average, it's
because and this is again a personal story, and this
oftentimes sounds out of touch, but it depends on where

(23:15):
you grow up and what you're doing, what community you're in.
Lexington was basically a feeder school for Harvard and MIT.
That's where everybody lives.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
And it's that type of everybody, you mean, like most
of the kids, not.

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Most, but sixteen kids in every class wow, which which
tells you the environment that it was. It's a pressure cooker.
But for me, again, it's about perspective and context. I
love competition. I love to compete. I love to be pushed,
and so for me, it was it didn't feel like pressure.
It just felt like you're not as good as you

(23:49):
think you are, and so pick yourself up and start
working hard. And here's the thing though, is I was
I was so bad in the classroom, Like you say
so bad, how bad, can you be? You went to
cal First of all, I got waitlessed. I barely got in.
I barely got out too, by the way, and so
I barely got I barely got out. I barely made
it in. They tried to keep me there then, But

(24:13):
for me and my brain never worked in the class.
It was just I was never I have to work
three times as hard as you to get it. Get
like a B plus I get it. Yeah, you know,
all right, but I do.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
It's effort and all that. So I got to interject
this quick story for you. It's hilous. Let me here.
So when I was coaching a Manassas, this dude came up.
Well nobody. My first games that Manassas had three people
at them. Yeah, I mean we were four winds years
wait years, oh man, dude. Two thousand and two is

(24:47):
about the first year, and literally three people in the stand.
It'd be two thousand on the other side. And we
had the bus driver, I bet, principal, and a lady
named this guy who was like eighty year old graduate
of Manassa who never missed a game. That was it.
As we started winning and kids started coming and getting better, yeah,
more fans more people and people from the neighborhood would

(25:09):
want to help out, and most of them were well intentioned,
and some of them were like dudes that wanted to
relive the glory days that I didn't have any time for.
One of the well, those dudes showed up and said, hey,
you know you didn't need help coaching. I'm good on
the d line. And I said, well, let's talk about that.
And I said, you know, what did you play ball?

(25:29):
He said, yeah, I played a Cow. Now, now this
is a guy who's from North Memphis who didn't have
a job, and said he went to cal Well Carol.
And I said really, And I said you played football
Cow and he said yeah. And I said, wow, that's interesting.

(25:53):
And I said, so you graduated from Cow. He's like,
oh no, no, no, I left early. Hold it, I left early.
I went overseas to chase that big money and played
in Canada football. Hold it. Listen to what I just said.
I went overseas to chase the big money and went
to Canada.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
Hey, there's a great lake.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
Last time. Look there wasn't an ocean between col and Canada.
At which point I said, thanks, man, we'll give you
a call if we could use you. But that was
pretty much my full exposure to Cal from Memphis.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
Have you ever been to Berkeley?

Speaker 2 (26:30):
What's up?

Speaker 1 (26:30):
Have you ever been to Berkeley?

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (26:31):
Once, It's a crazy place when you go, you're.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Five six years ago, just passing through. Lisa and I
drove up the coast and did the one. Well, yeah,
we went to Pepperdine, saw that campus, went to Cal.

Speaker 1 (26:44):
How do you think? Do you see how freaking beautiful
that campus was?

Speaker 2 (26:47):
Pepperdine?

Speaker 1 (26:48):
How do you get any work done on the camp?

Speaker 2 (26:50):
How do you how do you ever leave when you're
on when you're midway of campus? Yeah, and there's deer
or walking across the campus and the campus is blow
you and then there's the Pacific Ocean. But worst go
to a baseball game. I wouldn't ever watch a ball
get pitched because you got the it's gorgeous, it's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
I give a speech. I gave a speech up there,
and midway through I forgot my words because the sun
was set over the beauty. Let me just say like,
there's look, you could hear me talk. That's much more.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
Yeah, it's absolutely you went up and you went so
But that's my question. You show up to Cow, right, yeah,
first blush feel how'd you feel when you got that
the campus? And you know, how did how did this
eighteen year old kid who's moved all over the place
went to this crazy competitive high school against Cow? What
were your first impressions of it as a kid as

(27:45):
a freshman? I mean, what was that long?

Speaker 1 (27:47):
And the context here, by the way, is like I
grew up in a village in India interspersed.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
Yea, and you showed up to America with Maddie up
stay here.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
And Staten Island. We lived in an apartment where like
we would play a game of what cockroach is the
fattest that you've seen today? Like, so I'm giving you
context because it's fascinating to see. And this is again
credit to my parents. You know, we have complicated family dynamics.
But putting all that aside, that's something that you know,
nobody can ever take away from them and their hard work.

(28:16):
But given all that context, I get come to Berkeley
and what's interesting is, first of all, Berkeley's like the
size of a small country. Like there's like sixty thousand
kids there. It's it's like ut it's huge, It's massive,
and the second thing is that I came as a
somebody that's probably going to be a pre med student, right,

(28:36):
And you and I talked about this, and I had
done debate in high school, and I really got this
bug of like I kind of liked this idea of
beating up people with my words, you know. And I
was like, I kind of liked this idea. And I
wasn't that great. I was average. Again, I was average.
I had never found my thing, and so I had
this debate thing. I'd come in as kind of a

(28:56):
pre med person. I took my bioclass. And the crazy
thing about cal was that, again, it puts you in
your place. What I love about public schools in this
country as opposed to private like Ivy schools and which
just came from the University of Notre Dame, which is
a beautiful private school, is that how do you win
in an environment where there's no advisors and no coddling

(29:16):
sixty thousand people? You have to fight for it. And
that was essentially that first semester. It's crazy, though, is
second semester. I had this inkling President Trump had just
been elected. I had that political bug, like I was
interested in politics, because of debate, but I was still
interested in sort of trying to do the med thing
because of my parents and also because I felt like

(29:37):
that was something that I wanted to do as well
at that time. And then we had so Trump. We
had at this pre met thing and campus is crazy.
Berkeley is oftentimes known as the Republic of Berkeley. You know,
it's politics are off the charts, and it started becoming
a centerpiece for a lot of tumult and a lot
of those things that you today Sarah culture war issues.

(29:59):
At that point, we're at the forefront of campus, but
not mainstream. February second, twenty seventeen, the College Republicans invite
the speaker to campus by the name of Milo Annapolis.

Speaker 4 (30:10):
All right, hang on, yeah, you're getting there. Yeah, but
first yeah, and we're going to this next You're competing,
you're trying to find your place, you're fitting in. Your
mother wants you to be a doctor, and you're being
pre mad and you're doing that. But you love debate,
and clearly you have an inkling toward an interest in

(30:34):
the public debate. Maybe not politics, but not the politics,
but the public debate. Yeah, well, you're in the right
place because it's Berkeley. Yeah, because they will protest protesting.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
They protest everything.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
They will protest, protesting.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (30:48):
If they're protesting, let's protest their protest.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
That's my joke about Berkeley.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
Well, it's true, right.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
And sometimes the things that they protest are it'll make
you pause. She I mean a great example.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Give us a ridiculous protest.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
Well, in this case, they weren't. Actually they were just
made up in issues so they didn't have to go
to class. And again, this is like tall my, this
is not me throwing shade at cow. Like. There's a
lot of people that protest legitimate things. We have a
lot of union stuff there. All the employees are unionized.
There's a lot of action.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
I'm not saying.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Coach Bill. Let's just say that Berkeley holds the record
for how many publicly nude people I've seen absolutely, it's
a fact. Being a protest or are you protesting protesters?
I know I've seen protesters be nude. I've seen protesters
protesting nudity. I've seen people, animal rights folks doused in

(31:44):
fake blood on campus, you know, sitting in a cage,
a fake cage. I've seen uh, Christian preachers stand there
talking about the fact that, like the heavens are going
to break tomorrow. You know, Berkeley is a place that
tracts interesting people that like have deep convictions, crazy people,

(32:08):
and normal people that are just trying to get a job.
And and I fit that ladder most ladder category, I.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
Think I would protest naked people protesting?

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Would you be naked doing it?

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Have you seen me? No?

Speaker 1 (32:30):
Fly?

Speaker 2 (32:32):
No, not this guy. Suffice it to say, though, if
you're a freshman and you're rolling up to this atmosphere, man,
it's it's twenty sixteen.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
Just happened.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
Yeah, it's got to be a little bit of culture shot.
But the other thing I would think is that after
a while, you get a little numb to the protest.
It's almost like, hold it, Why did anybody protested today? Yeah?
When they, I mean, is so common that they almost
lose their bite because everybody's always protested, like whatever. But

(33:09):
that changed on the day you're about to tell us about,
because this became more than a protest.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Yes, so tell us about.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
This day that ultimately changed the direction of your life.
But first, a few messages from our sponsors.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
If you were telling me this is what I would
be doing what days it till you know, October third,
time stamp.

Speaker 2 (33:41):
There you go, Alex, I know what the guests did.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
I can't see the day guy.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Sorry, you know what. That's too bad. He can get
over it. Yeah, we're on October third today, so of
normal folks at a full fledged timestam. Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Alex is like the time portal guy. Yeah, but essentially. Yeah,
February second, twenty seventeen, I was walking back from the seminar.
One other thing I didn't tell you was because I
was waitlisted to college. Berkeley has sixty thousand kids. Now
it's even more. I'm pretty sure they don't have enough
housing for students, so they have a homeless student population,
believe it or not. No, I'm being serious.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
Somebody I should protest that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
See that's what I'm saying. If you protest everything, you
lose the bite on the issues that actually matter.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
Like that's it.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
So that's the problem. You've solved Berkeley's issues in like
ten minutes, and so essentially I would be So. I
was a part of this program that they've now shut
down called the Fall Program for freshmen San Francisco now Berkeley.
If you know anything about the geography. Berkeley's on this
side of the bay and San Francisco's on this side
of the bay. Nobody told me that for the entirety

(34:48):
of first semester, every morning at seven am, they would
bust me on the F bus all the way to
San Francisco to take class. I was so average that
when I got there, I wasn't good enough to take
class in Berkeley. And so I would take a bus
every morning with some of my friends that are now
still my friends. The F bus, show up to FPF
Berkeley or fps San Francisco, take class there, and then

(35:10):
bust back. You know what's really ironic. By the way,
now I live two blocks from FPF at San Francisco now,
but that's a whole nother thing. So I'm doing this
bussing thing. Second semester. They're like, okay, now you can.
You've earned your spot, we've enrolled some new kids. You
can take classes on campus. So they starting classes on campus.
Now I'm walking back from this math seminar, right, and

(35:30):
so it's February second, twenty seventeen, so we're about three
weeks into this semester. I'm walking back and that day
that day specifically, I remember I wanted to walk. I
love sunsets and nature's a big thing for me. And
so the way that the sunsets in Berkeley, the way
that the main street telegraph intersects on campus, you can
see the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean right above

(35:51):
the Golden Ape Bridge. It's beautiful. Wow, it's amazing. And
the bridge is very far away, which is it's a
much better view, but because Berkeley's all the way across
the bay, but you can see it in the distance.
And then suddenly I hear like helicopters flying overhead and
shouting in the distance, and I have the exact same
reaction you just did, which is like, it's Berkeley. You know,
we protest everything. You know, somebody's getting protested. Hopefully it's

(36:15):
a real issue. And then this cafe window is broken
in an inside where it was a cow dining hall
where the food, where the food is surface students, and
inside it said CNN you see Berkeley students protest free speech.
I was like, wait, this is actually something different. What
was crazy was that the film crew that was filming
that was standing right next to me, and you're seeing it,

(36:36):
and I'm seeing it, and that was like the breaking
the fourth wall, where you know, like most of us
are usually the normal people are just observers of politics,
you know, of media, all these things. Suddenly I actually
felt like a participant. I went from me an observer
to a participant. And so then the question became what
do I want to do next? Well, as the curious, angsty,

(36:57):
pre med interested political Berkeley student I was, I was like,
I'm going to go into the middle of it. And
so I heard the shouting. We went into Sprouplaza and
I have these pictures on my phone still, and went
into sporal Plaza and there you had hundreds of students
protesting this guy's speech. Now you're like, who's this guy?
What's a speech? The speaker came to campus a Miley

(37:18):
Annopolis at the College Republicans invited. Now, for anybody that's listening, Milo,
is this like random kind of provocateur guy. He's not
interested in good faith conversations. He's basically been sidelined now
at that time.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
But he was heavy, right.

Speaker 1 (37:32):
He was heavy at that time. He was very big
at that time, and he would do this college chour
thing where he would basically show up and like provoke
angry college liberals and like say stupid things about them
and get them really angry and frustrated in some ways
actually like attack them. Basically, he made a living out
of bullying people.

Speaker 2 (37:49):
That was his thing, and which, let's be honest, there's
nothing good about.

Speaker 1 (37:54):
That, nothing good about it. Well, he did nothing for
his cause, but it's his right, which is right exactly.
So what happened you go to it's right. What's fascinating
about Berkeley's Now this is twenty seventeen, right, these protests
are happening. Students are protesting in defense of my fellow students.
What we found out was also that outside groups came

(38:16):
in because the other thing about Berkeley is it attracts
a bunch of people. So a lot of far right
people show up, a lot of far left people show up.
It's basically a way for people to get a platform,
and so all these people start showing up. The history
now of this place is in the sixties, Sprout Plaza
was where doctor King spoke, It's where Mario Savio started
the free speech movement. At that time, the liberals were

(38:38):
on the side of you know, at least the very
extreme ones are on the side of free speech, and
so it was such a fascinating cultural ship. You could
see it happening in front of you. It's almost like
Memphis in some ways. You know, you go to certain
places and they've changed completely. And I saw in those
protests violence. I saw students crying. I saw a journalists
whose face was punched, his nose were broken in the

(38:59):
stores are shattered. There was hundreds of police officers, they
brought in California State Police CPD.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
And let's let's be candidate. This is all because people
who didn't agree with what this far right guy had
to say. Yeah, we're doing everything they could to keep
him from saying whatever it was he wanted to say,
which is the irony of the opposite of free speech.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
So there's two things I'll say to this, because this
is a little bit of a copy. And this is
where actually people get hold up because they're like, all right, so,
Coach Bill Manu, are not talking about this far right
person being protested. They must be a bunch of conservatives
that care about free speech. And that's not the message,
because first of all, free speech should not be a
liberal or conservative values and American values a human value
more and Secondarily is that free speech is throughout history.

(39:53):
It's the value that people use that feel like they're
under attack because it's your weapon, it's your access card
to society. Sixties, it was those anti war protesters and
liberals and civil rights activists, so for them, free speech
was a thing. Now a lot of conservatives on campuses
feel under attack and so it's their thing. What we
have to recognize is that free speech is a value
that moves the society forward. And it's very shortsighted to say, well,

(40:14):
Manu and Coach Bill are talking about this farraka and
kicked off. This is where I signed off on this podcast,
because it must mean that there are a bunch of
conservatives that want, you know, liberal kids see it hurt.
So here's the two things I'll say now about that moment.
First is you and I the intent of those protests
was to shut down my Low. We're now six years later,
we're still talking about him. That protest single handily raised

(40:37):
this guy's profile to the stratosphere.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
That is interesting and true his name.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
You and I are only talking about him because he
got protests that day. That day, if nothing had happened,
I probably would not be doing what I'm doing, and
you and I probably would have never met.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
And we sure would be talking about this guy.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
And this Greek British dude would have no relevance. So
that's first thing is let's try to understand and let's
not let this moment convolute our tactics. And the second
thing is the question of like, well, who's allowed to
speak and who's not. This is where I think it's
a little bit of an onus on the people that

(41:14):
are inviting these speakers and bringing on these people. It's
you know, what's your goal, what's your intention? I do
think that a part of it is to stir the
pot a little bit. You're trying to provoke a little bit,
you know, if you actually want real conservative thought on
that campus at that time, bring somebody semi serious, you know.
And simultaneously, for my liberal friends and folks, recognize that

(41:35):
protest is very important, but at that moment us protesting
him only led to not only more violence, but the
campus can be shaken. I think it cost the university
a million dollars in damages million and a half and
forget the UC systemic.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Well, in my understanding is a lot of that was
caused about people that weren't even Berkeley students, and they
were masked.

Speaker 1 (41:55):
It was outside And was I not masked, Yes, a
lot of them were masked. It was outside groups. And
what that also did, by the way, was it set
a precedent for an how over the next three four
years you would see rallies on campus and in communities
that had nothing to do with the students, but people
knew that if they went to Berkeley, it's just a cultural,
iconic place, and so they're going to get attention.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
I want to tell you a story about my alma mater. Yeah,
James Meredith was the first black man admitted to the
University of Mississippi, and Kennedy was the president then, and
there were three days of riots and people died. What
they found out that BI found out after they did

(42:39):
the investigation, is that the student body was there doing
what student body does, but the gunfire and the true
violence were from people from four different states, not from
the University of Mississippi. So while there was protest and

(43:00):
there it was the heart of the civil rights question,
and there was all kinds of things that went on
that were wrong that hopefully history will show that we
continue to try to do well with and continue to
prove on the point is the vast majority of the violence,
everything came from outside the city, outside the state, and

(43:23):
the outside the campus. But what happens is situations like
that give a theater and a platform to the crazies. Yeah,
and it sounds to me like that's what happened to
cal that day.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
Have you heard the term conflict entrepreneurs?

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Oh? Yeah, so sure.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
One of our good friend's name is Monica Guzman and
her friend Amana Ripley Amanda wrote this book, I think
it was last year or two years ago, called Healthy Conflict.
And one of the things that comes up in that
book is that right now, the people that divide us,
And this is something I say a lot. Is my
assumption and belief is that I think, Coach Bill, the

(44:06):
people that divide us understand human nature better than the
people trying to bring us together.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Oh. I think I think you could. I think you
could fill gymnasiums full of those people who currently work
in our in our national media and with that one skill, yep.

Speaker 1 (44:25):
And I call it the outrage industrial complex. And the
idea behind that is that people understand that you and
I have a much stronger propensity to hate each other
than love each other. I think hate is like gasoline.
It burns really quickly, but it disappears also pretty quickly,

(44:46):
but it's very quick. It's high propensity. I think love
is like rocket fuel. It takes a wild ignite, but
once it ignites and sustains, it's very strong. And I
think the problem right now is because our attention spans
are so minuscule, because you know, you and I have
to go after this podcast and produce all these short clips.
People can't watch things more than ten seconds because we

(45:08):
barely ever now interact with people that are different than us,
because you know, somebody who lives in Washington, DC and
somebody that lives in Richmond only probably drive between those
cities and have never interacted with anybody between those two cities.
For all of those reasons, and the siloing and the
fact that are politicians are capturing and capitalizing on that.

(45:29):
You've got people that are turning us into tools for
their money, and then you and I are giving up
on each other because we're buying to their bullshit. And
that's basically the moment. So and that's what those people,
those people that show up the campus. That's what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (45:44):
Before you were in school. One of the things that
I learned when I was a young man was this
price I may vehemently disagree with everything that comes out
of your mouth, that I will fight to my death
for your right to say it. That was a very
strong American ideal for many, many, many, many many years.

(46:06):
And I think we've lost it. And I think that's
what was lost in Berkeley that day.

Speaker 1 (46:11):
Why do you think we've lost it? Because you've seen
America much more than I have. You've lived here longer,
You know things. What's your assessment?

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Money and power? Money and power? I think there's I
think there's an enormous amount of power and wealth that
has been generated in places like New York and our
media centers, and an enormous amount, far too much money

(46:39):
and power generated in the halls of Congress, and that,
like you say, people have developed a unique skill and
a keen understanding that I can generate more money and
power if I can divide. Because if I can scare
the hell out of people and divide them and get

(47:00):
them into my camp, I can use that fear to
generate more power from myself and therefore more money. And
I believe narratives and politics are crafted in order to
sustain and grow that money and power. And I think
we got to fix that, which is why your story

(47:23):
is so important, because after all, this happened in col
something happened inside of you, and it leads to what
you're doing today. So tell me about I think it
was twelve of you, right, tell me about that.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, you know. By the way, I have to say
one thing, the fact that you just recalled it was twelve.
Just for anybody that's listening. Coach Bill is a busy,
busy man. The fact that you remembered that means a
lot to me. It means that that's a tough thing
to do. And somebody that also does this and learning
from you and hearing from you. I think one of

(48:00):
the things that you're doing powerfully, especially in this conversation
but in general, and what I think is part of
what we need to try and flip this problem in
the set is you're making somebody feel like the story matters.
Your story does matter, okay, But the point is that
right now, I think a lot of people just feel purposeless.
I think a lot of people feel lost.

Speaker 2 (48:21):
I agree I don't know that. I don't know that
I'll agree with you a lot of people feel purposeless,
but I absolutely agree with you that a lot of
people feel lost. And I don't mean lost inside their
own homes, but I mean lost in our culture. Yeah,
And unfortunately, that's our freaking culture. It is not DC's culture,

(48:42):
it is not New York's culture. It's our culture. And
until an army of normal folks take that culture back,
we're going to continue to feel lost in it. And
I think that's a shame. And I think that's that's
why you're here, is because I think the work you're
doing is one of the things that helps fix that.
But I got to have our listeners here. Why the

(49:03):
twelve and what you did? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah, So those twelve people were essentially not an army
but a squad.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
You were a beat up two. We were smaller than
we Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
We were a squad.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
Squad.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
We were a squad with a squat of Berkeley people,
of Berkeley people, which is very not formidable and so
so essentially what happened was that next day, right after
after after the protests, after.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
The were mace noses were broken, a hundred some thousand
the police jumped in, they shut down campus helicopters, and
ultimately the campus decided, well, this guy can't speak, it's
too dangerous, and they pulled them.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
Yeah, they pulled them.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
So for the day, the protesters won. But as you
so well put it, we're talking about them six years later.
So ultimately they lost. They won, they won the battle,
and they really lost them.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
They lost the war. They lost.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
The next day, you and the twelve.

Speaker 1 (49:59):
So me and the twelve uh Sholes, we should there
were those, there were, there were. It's funny. So I
did not know any of these people. And the next
day what happened was that all these students suddenly were rattled.
I mean, imagine your campus just goes upside down overnight.
You have like every television crew there every.

Speaker 2 (50:18):
Day, and even in a place where protest on protests big,
even in this was like kind of like out.

Speaker 1 (50:28):
I don't know the exact fact here, but I'm pretty
sure it was one of, if not the largest protests
since the sixties anti war protests. Wow, So in terms
of damage, in terms of impact, in terms of narrative,
and the next day essentially it was a very human emotion.
It was I mean I just felt bad for campus.
That was it, and I think a lot of people
felt bad. And so we started doing was a lot
of kids started showing up to Sprout Plaza and we

(50:49):
essentially started just picking up the trash, picking up the
broken bottles. These kids, I thought, I was so proud
of that community at that time, and showed me the
best of humanity. It was like, you know, forget all
of this for a second, like let's just let's just
help out our community.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
That's you know. Now, that reminds me of the of
the of the the the citizens in Ferguson afterwards that
were out in the streets cleaning up the pres and
it didn't matter which side of that you are on.
They were just trying to clean up.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
Our community was hurting.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
That was it.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
And and that's where the human of our democracy comes in.
And so there then after people started picking up stuff,
these like mini groups of people started forming just naturally.
And each of these groups people were like saying, like,
you know, I can do this to help or what
just happened? And I, because it's Berkeley, called them therapy circles.
And so these kids are all like, you know, commiserating
and all of us are commissering together and suddenly randomly

(51:40):
go into this one circle and there's a couple of
people there and they're like, hey, you know, we were
thinking about creating this organization that was focused on bridging
political differences, and this just happened. Talk about political differences,
this is a tsunami. And I was like, well, what
if we And we were like, what if we created
a like literally in this group, It's like maybe our

(52:02):
first event could be let's just talk about this. And
essentially what we did was a couple of days later
and between this interim, I essentially circulated this petition on
campus because there's this bad rap going around that UC
Berkeley students were violent, and it wasn't enough students, it
was just the random people from the outside. We circulated

(52:24):
this peedition, published it on the news that said UC
Berkeley students condemned violence. I had circulated across campus, and
again it was just like my tiny attempt to like
try and do my part. It wasn't anything substantial. Then
we held that discussion and man.

Speaker 2 (52:39):
How many people show up?

Speaker 1 (52:40):
So this is crazy. So mind you, I have like
no background in organizing or anything like this. Like the
closest I've been organizing is you know, like dissecting a
frog in biology class. Like there's there's literally no intuition here.
All we did was we started flying on our dorms
and we like through flyers all our friends. We say, hey,
like we're gonna host this ussion. And a bunch of

(53:01):
people are like, is this a civic architecture frat? Because
it was called Bridge Berkeley, It's like, which bridge are
you going to build it? I was like, do I
look like I can build a bridge? And so we
like we we held this discussion and I think like
eighty to seventy five to like eighty five people showed
up in a classroom that was meant for I think
thirty people. And give me the demographics, yees say, this

(53:22):
is what's cool about it is the people that came
were some of the people that invited the speaker. It
was some of the people that protested the speaker. There
was some faculty there, there's some administrators there. It was
a real group of some of the key stakeholders in
that environment and everybody. What can you imagine, imagine you're
holding a town hall meeting, You're attending your local pt

(53:43):
or school board meeting and something very controversial happened. What happens,
everybody shows up with their guards up. It's like, we're
ready to fight or I'm ready to like not say anything.
That's exactly what happened. And this is where the group
of us that helped organize this, who're now some of
my best friends and still work on this organization bridge
USA with me. What we did was we just relied
on our instinct. It's like, Okay, imagine you have a

(54:03):
room of a bunch of stodgy people that hate each
other and probably misperceive each other's intentions. How do you
help them break through? Well, let's start just talking about
our vulnerabilities in story.

Speaker 2 (54:13):
Here's an idea. Let's have a conversation.

Speaker 1 (54:16):
Have a conversation.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
Let's have a civil, non threatening chat about importing stuff
and see what we think of one Now.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
You sound like an alien? No, I sound like what
an alien?

Speaker 2 (54:27):
Well, what I'm saying to you I have said in
keynote speeches, I've said in stages. It's in my book.
It's it's the fundamental tenet of my book, Against the grain.
We got to go against the grain of societal preconceived
notion that if you don't think like me, you must
be my enemy. And we got to get out of

(54:48):
our vacuums and our comfort zones and talk.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
So I agree with all of that. And as a
young person, when somebody says, so, what's your innovative product,
I'm like nothing, I like, what are we innovating? And
so like when you say that, like I have to ask,
like I always ask people that have much more life experiences. Mean,
I'm like, to me, it just sounds like family dynamics.

(55:12):
I'm like, let's talk to each other. To me, it
sounds like two parents, you know, navigating a divorce. You know,
this stuff is not complicated, And I think, like in
this hyper technical environment, and that's what happened. Actually, I
think our naivy tae in that moment organizing that actually
helped us. It sounds like it, yeah, because we were naive,
We're like, well and.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
It was it was it was legitimately a heartfelt outreach. Yes,
And nobody convinced you yet that that was stupid.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
Yep, yep. And we had no idea the challenge we
were embarking on. But that's the best part is when
you start a journey I mean, when you were coaching
that football team, I bet one of the tenants of
it is, don't look how far away that championship is.
Stay by day.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
We'll be right back. When you get these people together
and they start talking about their realities, and I can
imagine you've got a college Republican and you've got somebody

(56:24):
who'd formerly been naked protesting about some animals or something
in the same room. My belief set is, and I'm
testing this with you, my belief set is that we
all want safety, we all want health, we all want
our families to do well. We all want our children
to be better than we were now. We all may

(56:46):
think there's fifteen different ways to go about that, but
we all ultimately kind of want the same maslov hierarchy
it needs to be filled. Does hearing that people want
the same thing although they want to go about getting
it differently, Does at least hearing that people want the

(57:06):
same thing have any kind of calming effect on the room?

Speaker 1 (57:11):
It does, But I think what helps even more is
to share each other's suffering.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
Learn all that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
I actually think that the most powerful tool, the knife
that cuts through hot butter, is vulnerability. I think when
you and I actually can see each other's vulnerability and
have a no bs honest understanding that this was your
hardship and this is why you are what you are,

(57:39):
and here's an example of my vulnerability. I think suddenly,
what it does is it makes us fundamentally human.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
Which means that empathy leads to understanding exactly.

Speaker 1 (57:49):
And that's when you can start talking about common values,
because I think it's the difference between showing and telling.
And you know, when I talk about my childhood growing up,
imagine if the only thing you talked and said to
the amazing people that are listening to this right now
is when you went to a competitive public high school
next to Harvard Mit, then went to cal Berkeley, now

(58:10):
leads a nonprofit organization, and he flew in from Chicago today.
The thing, this guy's probably an asshole, you know. So
what you did was You're like, all right, let's like
actually go through your life. Let's have a conversation about
who you are, why you do what you do. Tell
me about your grandfather. I'm sure not all that was
relatable to everybody, but pieces were. And I think vulnerability

(58:35):
devastates and creates the pathway for love, it is so strived.

Speaker 2 (58:38):
So in this room or people vulnerable? But why why
do people come to you know what? I think? I
know why. I'm gonna answer my own question. No not,
I'm gonna let you answer, but I'm gonna tell you
what I think. I think heios maybe the shock of
what happened on campus allowed people to maybe be vulnerable
in that moment.

Speaker 1 (58:59):
Yeah, So that's I would say seventy five percent of it,
which is it got so bad that people for a
second orre like, let's just exit this game and like
understand that real people were hurt. You know, this is
not funny games anymore. This is real. This is what
happens when you invite somebody protests and it all becomes

(59:20):
a cocktail. So that's a piece of it, is that
when things get so bad, I think people come back
to it. But the other piece of this was that
they actually did not show up ready to be vulnerable.
As I said, most people showed up with their guards up.
It's very natural. So that's where I think leadership comes
into play. That's where the people that are in that
room of the model what you're looking for. And the

(59:41):
first thing that we did the twelve of us that
were helping to organize this, where like we shared our
story forget all this, like we talked about this is
where I come from, this is who I am, this
is what I believe, this is why I believe what
I believe, and you suddenly create a norm of honesty.
It's as simple as if everybody in this room wasn't

(01:00:01):
wearing shoes and I walked in, I'd probably take off
my shoes. Okay, everybody's not wearing shoes. That's the norm.
It's a best setting a norm. You set a norm
and then you enforce that norm, and you enforce it
and you say, hey, look, if you don't want to
follow this norm, I'm sorry, this isn't the space for you.
No problem. We don't have to do that to anybody.
Because when people started seeing each other share, then you

(01:00:22):
kind of feel I can't be left out of this.
It creates social pressure and it also says, well, hey,
I want you to hear my story. I want you
to hear my story. And that's essentially what a bridge
discussion does is it creates a space that is safe
for liberals and structured for conservatives. Say that again, safe

(01:00:46):
for liberals, and structured for conservatives.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Why do liberals need safety and conservatives need structure?

Speaker 1 (01:00:52):
I'm not smart enough to answer that question, but I
know that's what they want.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
So that's just I gept conjectures. But you don't even
like to create those divides. But the reason I'm saying
very openly is because again, it's about meeting people where
they are, right, So we've created the space. The second
part about the space is that it's peer led. So
there isn't some faculty facilitating this. There is some it's

(01:01:17):
the members of your own community. Right. It's like if
you have something that happened in your school board meeting,
you want the teachers there and the teachers talking to teachers. Right.
It's peer lead, no power dynamics. The third thing that's
really powerful about this is you're setting these norms. Each
Bridge discussion is four norms. You listen to listen, not
to respond. You don't interrupt our outside conversations. Each of

(01:01:38):
us represents ourselves, not larger social groups. So you don't
represent all white Americans. I don't represent all the confused
dacs out there.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
And and you know, do you realize there's plenty of
confused white people, Well, please, that's for you to decay and.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
Confused America, you should change the name of that. But
but in case anybody's wondering whether they see is a
word for Indian people that Indians use in Hindi. And
then the fourth norm is that you respond to the argument,
not the person. So like let's say you said that,
so you said.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Something, is the definition of civility.

Speaker 1 (01:02:21):
Yeah, But Hare's where I'll push back really quickly is
we never use word civiility. And the reason we don't
use the word civility is because I think that we
live at this moment where a lot of people are
hurting and they want change. Left or right doesn't matter
a lot of people. There's a reason why the conflict
entrepreneurs can make money off of that. And so what
we found is we initially used to call it civility

(01:02:44):
because that's what makes sense to me as well. But
what we found was is people started hearing the word civility,
they thought, oh, this is some kombaya, let's hold hands.
Civility does not invoke that feeling of healthy conflict. Because
what we're doing these discussions is oftentimes the objective is
not for you and I to arrive at a common understanding.
Oftentimes it's for you and I to understand why you

(01:03:06):
and I disagree with each other, because that gets us
somewhere right. And importantly, we can't lose the fact that
if we want more and more people to have these dialogues,
these conversations, they have to feel like they're entering the space,
not having to feel like that they're grind down their edges.
Show up with your edges, show up with your fight.

(01:03:27):
The problem is not whether we're fighting. The problem is
how we're fighting.

Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
Of course, in other words, it's okay, I mean, it's
not what you say, but how you say it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
It's not what you say, it's how you say it,
but also how you engage. So all of those four
norms right, listen, to listen rather than to respond is
not telling you to suddenly disband your ideas. Saying listen
to your ideas for a second. Right, when I say
respond to the argument, not the person, show up with
your argument. But just because if Coach Bill says something

(01:04:00):
that you disagree with, that does not make Coach Build
an evil person. You might think the argument's dumb, and
that's fine. Let's have that conversation. But right now we're
not even having a conversation, right.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
I love this. You are putting into practice stuff that
I've talked about for years. I mean, I absolutely love this.
So we got we gotta tie it together. Though. Sure
you have this first meeting. What happens after that, we.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
Have a second meeting where five people show up. Nobody
showed up. I'm honest, So nobody showed up. And this
is part of again, normal people doing stuff like you know,
this is when you're building something. It's really hard to
build anything or do anything. Nobody showed up. And the
reason why nobody showed up is because a lot of
rumors started flying about what happened in this space, and

(01:04:53):
a lot of people people didn't want to believe what happened,
and also probably couldn't couldn't believe what happens, especially at
at Berkeley at Berkeley. And then what we did was
we said, well, let's actually intentionally pursue this because I
don't know what it is. But I love. What I

(01:05:14):
love about my work the most is I love the
idea of somebody walking into a room, sitting down, and
leaving ten twenty thirty minutes later, completely changed about their
expectations of somebody that's different than them. It is like
one of the coolest experiences.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
That is one of the coolest things.

Speaker 1 (01:05:34):
It's transformative, and it doesn't happen everything sometimes at backfires. No,
it died, but that's the arduous process of building. And
so what we did was we held the next discussion.
Five people showed up. Were like, damn, we didn't market that.
We didn't do anything. We just assume people are going
to show up again. Now it's like two weeks out
of this event, right, and so classic marketing, you gotta
step in, you gotta start building. And so we were like, hey,
let's actually build an infrastructure here. So we got a

(01:05:55):
team those twelve people, we all took our roles. We
started doing our thing. Each of us was doing something.
And then what happened was we had one faculty member
sitting in that discussion named Bill Shireman same for her
name as you. And Bill Shyrman, who's now the chair
of our board, was sitting in the back of the
classroom and he knew these two people at Notre Dame
and at Colorado Boulder Notre Dame. This guy named Roj

(01:06:17):
Karma and Colorado Boulder, this woman named Courtland Carpenter, and
believe it or not, they had built something called Bridge
CU and Bridge n D because the idea of bridging
seems like a very normal metaphor. And they connected and
they started creating this thing. They were like, what if
we built this on different campuses. And Bill came up

(01:06:38):
to us and said, well, let's make this full on
Bridge Berkeley and let's combine everything. And so we're like okay,
And so we started doing this stuff. But we weren't
thinking about a national organization, no vision, nothing, But we
just kept holding those discussions. People started showing up. It
became a name on CAM.

Speaker 2 (01:06:54):
And the people that are showing up Yes, there's some
faculty and all that there, but.

Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
We're talking about college case college kids. And here's the
other thing. Just to quickly fast forward, just so people understand.
Now they're thinking, well, this must be probably for just
elite college kids at Berkeley and Harvard and Stanford. No,
we have yet to have a single IVY League school chapter.
We now have high school chapters. We have sixty college chapters,
twenty high school chapters. We're growing almost five six chapters

(01:07:20):
a month right now on the goal is to scale
that up because the demand is really high. But the
other thing I'll say is on the college side, the
goal is, let's go to our community colleges, Let's go
to our vocational schools. One of our best chapters, one
of the top the first seven chapters, is a college
nam Lynn Benton Community College up in northern Oregon the
border of Lynn County in Benton County. And the point

(01:07:42):
of all of that is for me to say that
this work is highly not only accessible, but normal people
are doing it, not just elite college kids. And that's powerful,
because that's powerful.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
But doing it is getting a grouped together of people
from all different walks of life, religious, political, social, and
cultural belief sets and talking.

Speaker 1 (01:08:10):
It's just doing the American experiment. That's it. There's literally again,
there's nothing profound about what I'm doing. I am so
looking forward to the day when somebody's like, you know what,
I'm going to steal this IP, because the moment they
steal that IP, the country's can be back on track.
Because our IP is just human nature. It's like, let's
have a conversation, talk to each other. And then I
look forward to the day of like retreating to the

(01:08:31):
medical books.

Speaker 2 (01:08:31):
Give me one of your greatest stories of a meeting
that you've experienced and watched two people from alternate realities,
fine commonness.

Speaker 1 (01:08:41):
So I'm going to give you another Berkeley story because
it connects actually a couple of things to talk about.
Connects to the student homelessness question, it connects protesters, and
it connects the power of a group discussion.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
Was anybody naked?

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
Nobody was naked? Nobody nobody was though the well, I'll
tell you a context. So a couple of quick context facts.
Berkeley is this place called People's Park. Now, People's Park
has a lot of interesting people in it, to say
the least, and it was basically a place created in
about the fifties sixties that now has become this massive

(01:09:13):
ground for you know, everybody from like drug addicts to hippies,
to people that want to live in Berkeley to homeless people.
It's just a thing now. As I said, Berkeley is
also a massive college and there's a homelessness problem with
students because there's not enough space for university to build housing.
And so twenty nineteen, which was our junior year, so

(01:09:35):
this is a fall of twenty nineteen. I might be
wrong on the month, but fall of twenty nineteen, I'm
pretty sure this crisis speaking, the university proposes let's build
a building on People's Park, and man, it started a
whole nother shin dig right. They're like People's Park, this
is the people's place it's been around. And oddly enough,
in this case, the students are actually protesting the very core,

(01:09:58):
you know, interesting People's Park because they're like, Yo, we
need housing.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
Yeah we need housing, but not here and so and so.

Speaker 1 (01:10:06):
But a lot of kids also wanted that housing because
they were like, we just we need a place to live.
And Berkeley rent. Just to give you context, by the way,
I lived in one of the cheapest and most crime
written parts of the city where like the next year,
tragically a student loss his life, like down the street
eight hundred dollars a month rent, Wow, eight fifty that's
the cheapest. So it's just giving context for how crazy
the housing is there for student for student, and there's

(01:10:29):
no dorms beyond freshman year, so you got to live
in that rent or you're you got to figure something out.
Point of all this is, we said, hey, let's let's
host a discussion. Now there's a wonderful part in organization
that your your audience might be interested knowing because you're like, hey,
we're adults. We don't we're not on college camps. What
do we do. It's a great part an organization called
Braver Angels that has these associations across the country, and

(01:10:50):
so we called them up because we're like, this could
be a really big discussion, and so they have this
thing called the Brave Angels Debate, where it's very similar
to Bridge discussion with some sort of caveat. So putting
that aside for a second, we're like, let's hold a discussion,
and let's hold this debate. Let's bring everybody in. So
we invite the homeless students, they show up. We invite
the protesters in People's Park. We extended an invitation of

(01:11:15):
the administration, but I don't think they showed up. We
invited some Berkeley city officials and we had a room
of I would say seventy five eighty people that were
all sort of key people that were affected, so not
like randoms that have no personal stake in the issue,
like actual people out of opinions. And it started off
just like the Milo thing. And this is a common
pattern when you put humans together in a room that

(01:11:36):
fundamentally mistrust each other and have the guards up. How
are they going to show up not ready to communicate
by the end. So this initial person was like, I'm
going to protest this. He showed up, sat down, and
then stood up and said I'm going to protest this.
I was like, ed, give it a moment, just give
it a chance. He's like, no, no, no, I'm going to
protest this right now. You know what's hilarious is by
the end of this conversation, Coach Bill, that guy was

(01:11:58):
participating the most in conversation. He was one of the
homeless people that came and he brought his posse of
people and they were jumping in. You got homeless students,
you got cow students, yet homeless people, you got end
by the end of it, we actually broke some common ground.
And what came out of that discussion was a real
proposal around what could be done. And I don't remember

(01:12:21):
the specifics, but the process of it was like I
was like, this is again, time and time again. We
underestimate how common we are, and we overestimate how different
we are, and we've completely given up on the process
of this to the conversation. And so now we'll tell
you what my challenge is. My challenge is what we

(01:12:43):
experienced after that mile event where only five people showed up,
which is, you work in the lumber business. If a
tree falls down in force, nobody saw that tree fell,
it never fell. Nobody sees his work happening, and they
only see the crazy people in the news. They're never
going to believe it. And so we have to do
and what you're doing with this podcast is build a
cultural movement and a change where you're empowering everyday people

(01:13:07):
to say that that's not okay and this is possible.
So sorry, that was another tiree, But like that was
one more example that often sticks in my mind that
I think brings up a lot of different parts of
the story.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
And from all of this is born Bridge USA.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
Bridge USA.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
We'll be right back tell us what Bridge USA is today.

Speaker 1 (01:13:46):
So Bridge USA is an amazing group of young people.
Our entire team is under the age of twenty six,
recent college grads. I graduated in twenty twenty and each
of us had many different things that we could have
done with our line. And I had some good mentors
and people that were like, you know, take the risk,
and I love this work, and so we jump right
into it twenty twenty one full time from Berkeley, and

(01:14:09):
since then we're now a team of about fifteen people.
We have about sixty college twenty high school chapters. Last
semester we engage about three thousand, five hundred students across
our semesters and campuses. And I think that's nothing. It's
a great data point. But our goal is to reach
two hundred and fifty chapters.

Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
And the which would be then ten thousand students.

Speaker 1 (01:14:31):
It would be it would be around twelve thousand students
a semester.

Speaker 2 (01:14:36):
Wow, And all with the goal all of getting young
people who have been infiltrated with social media and parents
and whatever goes on in the schools and professors and
teachers and the national media and all of which have

(01:14:57):
shaped these very impressible minds to come together and talk
and talk.

Speaker 1 (01:15:03):
But I'll say two other quick things. One is it's
not just young people talking. This is about creating norms
change in this country. What I mean by norms change
is this is about what I call the hopeful majority,
which you call the army of normal people to essentially
be heard. That's it. It's what Ronald Reagan did, so

(01:15:29):
Newke Gingersh did with the moral majority. It's what Nixon
did with the solent majority. It's what Barack Obama did
with change Yes we can, It's what Trump did with
the populist right. Is our fundamental task, and I think
challenge is to give power and voice to the sense
of fear, the eggshells that everybody's walking on, the desire

(01:15:51):
to have human connection and yet that does not exist.
That's our objective and the reason why I think young
people are so crucial to the effort is take any
social movement. I'll give you three. Civil Rights movement. One
of the key things that kicked it off were four
students that walked into their local F. W. Woolworth outside
of North Carolina and set it in the lunch counters.

(01:16:12):
It was like a Mendela the nineties South Africa. It
was a contingent of young people that allowed him to
achieve tremendous cultural power. The fact is that I think
young people have a lot of cultural power, and I
think old people have a lot of material power. And
if you combine the cultural narrative power and a material
power into one. It's really powerful. The only other thing

(01:16:34):
I'll say with respect to our broader objective, and this
is where I'll defend my generation a little bit. And
then every generation's got their tests. Just for some contexts,
I was born in ninety eight, and people will often say, like,
why does a lot of gen Z either seem highly
skeptical of politics or does not care or is so
buried in their phone, or does not believe in the

(01:16:54):
possibility of democracy. In fact, there's a poll created by
the Harvard instut of Politics two years ago that said,
I think it was like forty seven percent of young
people are like fifty one or something. It was pretty sicizable.
It was like, they don't believe in the power of
democracy as a system for creaty change that was born
in ninety eight, which.

Speaker 2 (01:17:10):
By the way, I've read and I god do that
that is heartbreaking to me.

Speaker 1 (01:17:16):
So again this is a simple marketing challenge. It's like,
all right, that's the problem set Why so we can
meet them where they are. You take somebody my age
born in December of ninety eight. I'm twenty four. It's
twenty twenty three right now. I was I think two

(01:17:37):
years old when nine to eleven happened. I was going
to middle school when the Great Recession happened. I was
graduated in high school when the twenty sixteen presidential election happened.
I graduated college in twenty twenty when the pandemic hit
the capitol riots happened, and you had the Trump byden election.
And now it's twenty twenty three. Not a great sample

(01:17:57):
size of democratic progress and growth.

Speaker 2 (01:18:01):
Like that's the lett That's a really fair comment.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
So I say that now many people, So I talk
to a lot of people in the sixties that were
in Berkeley at that time, which was also very tumultuous time.
That was probably the most comparable decade in some ways
to what we're going through right now. And when you
look at it from that lens, I don't think it's
necessarily meant to excuse the skepticism and the critique, but
I think it's meant to demonstrate that if all you

(01:18:28):
know is a house on fire, then there's basically two options.
One you either try to will up and put out
the fire, which is what myself and my fellow young
leaders doing, or you escape the house, which is frankly
a very understandable notion, and so how do we challenge it.
That's our objective.

Speaker 2 (01:18:48):
I think that's I think it's really well stated. A
lot of wisdom from a twenty four year old kid
who you know from India.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
Hey, we're not that bad, you know, Hey India, there's
a hot take. And so India's world's largest democracy. It's
also it's got a lot of corruptions.

Speaker 2 (01:19:11):
It's the world's largest country. I think just this year
it took over China and population right, yeah, yeah, so
a democracy makes it. It's the world's largest anything.

Speaker 1 (01:19:20):
Yes, that it is. But part of the reason why
again I became very invested in Bridge is because we
saw how dysfunctional the democracies too. But the other thing
about India is I think this is something that I've
been seeing over the past couple of years because when
I started twenty seventeen, when we started doing this, my
mom would be like, She'd be like, not, there's there's
no Indian people out in politics. And weirdly, I don't

(01:19:43):
know if you've been seeing this, but there's a lot
oddly's leave well Hale, Nikki Haley, Kamala Harris Ramaswami. We
had on the podcast, Bobby Jindle, you speak the guy
in the Louisiana Bobby, You've got the vake Morphew's.

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
Nobody sleep at on these Indians.

Speaker 1 (01:20:00):
I know, Hey, hey, this is a hotter draft pick
than the Memphis Grists.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
So here's the deal, dude, I mean, grow up born American,
grow up half Indian, half American.

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):
Be The.

Speaker 2 (01:20:20):
Revelation about your grandfather's impact on you, I think is
significant because you talk about a normal guy that your granddad,
and to have him be such a significant imprint on you,
I think is telling. And to go to Berkeley and
having grown up apartments in your immigrant family chasing the

(01:20:41):
American dream, and here you are, at twenty four, having
lived that reality and then gone through probably the biggest
protest thing to happen at Berkeley in forty years, and
to now be heading up and organizations specifically meant to

(01:21:03):
fix our American democracy. I think it's a beautiful, ironic
tale and speaks to the power of an army of
normal people and what it can do if someone wants
to get involved or hear more about it, how they
contact you.

Speaker 1 (01:21:21):
I appreciate that you think this is going to be
a cop out but if you go to contact at
BRIDGEUICAD dot org, that email goes straight to my inbox perfect.
And when I'm late, it's like eleven pm in some
hotel room far away in like Kansas or something, and
I'm sitting there and I'm lonely. That's what I do.
I read that in box.

Speaker 2 (01:21:41):
That's good and really contacts easier than MANU.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
So exactly, just just call me contact. I'll say one
last very quick thing, which is as you were telling me,
like you're repeating the twenty four year old thing and
us doing all the stuff and all that. The reason
why it gives me bumps is like and I don't
know where this comes from for me, Like I genuinely
have no idea, but I love this place. This you know,

(01:22:08):
when we used to when we were growing up in
in India and then we would move back and forth,
and then I would travel back and forth. It was
really interested to being an army medic for a very
long time and it was a thing in my family
a lot. Like I used to ask my grandfather like
should I join the Indian military? Should I join the
American military? What do you think should happen? And he
was like which house feeds you? And I said, well,

(01:22:30):
you know, what do you mean? He's like, which soil
do you live on? What soil cares for you? You
know who showed up at our doorstep when nine to
eleven happened in India to check on you? Can you
believe that State Department sent somebody to a state in
India out of the consult because they were doing checks
on foreign citizens. And you know, I love history, and

(01:22:56):
all of us play an extraordinarily insignificant part in history.
You take your footnote of who your favorite leader is
in American history or whatever. They maybe get a sentence
in the Book of Human History. We all have a
small part. But what's so amazing about this place is
we're trying to imagine. I told you there's a society

(01:23:17):
of three hundred and thirty million people that are all
different from each other. And you're now a thousand years
in the future, and you've studied the species called humans
that have exists for one hundred thousand years. And in
those ninety nine thousand years, they were violent, and they fought,
and they lived in tribes, and they were essentially not
what you see today in society. And that's their history.

(01:23:38):
And now you're saying, these three hundred thirty million people
are trying to live together, heavily armed and giving each
other a voice, and living a system of governance where
you and I are valued. That is the most ambitious
experiment in the history of humanity. And just the last day,
our team had just hired a few new people and
we were having all hands meeting. Now'll end with this.

(01:23:59):
We're like, you know, why do you do what you do?
And I said, like, look, you know one of our
mentors that passed away last year, name was Rob Stein.
He talked about his legacy when he was dying, and
he was somebody that gave us a lot of knowledge.
And he said, you know what I most care about
as I pass away now is not the things that
I did, but the things that I think people like
you will do. And that really changed my perspectives. I said,

(01:24:20):
you know, our team, I said, imagine now you're eighty
years old, You've thankfully got get grand kids. And they
asked you, what were you doing in the twenties, you know,
one of the most divided times in American history, And
you said, I tried my best to try to solve
one of the most pernicious problems the country's faced, and
maybe you failed, but that's a proud answer. And so
I love this place. I don't know where it comes from.

(01:24:42):
I wish I was faking it because it would make
it so much easier for me to walk away from it.
But this is humanity's best shot.

Speaker 2 (01:24:51):
And that, my friend, is why you are absolutely a
member of the army of normal folks.

Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
You're a build the army.

Speaker 2 (01:24:58):
You're a guy who sees a need and fills it.
And it's an amazing story. And I got to tell you,
it gives us fifty five year old goosebumps to look
at a twenty four year old kid say I love
my country and I want to make it better. We
just need a whole bunch more of you, bro, And
the work you're doing is phenomenal, and I hope people
will start chapters, support you, financially, check you out, and

(01:25:24):
let more people know about the fact that all these
twenty year olds run around here are not anti democratic
change the world in the worst way possible. People. There's
a whole host of guys like you that love this country,
that want to make it better and are not trying

(01:25:45):
to do it in a vacuum, but rather in a
very inclusive way. I've always said we can be a
forward thinking, evolving society without abandoning the core principles that
got us here in the first place. And I really,
genuinely I think you aren't embodying me of that. And
congratulations to what you've done so far. I can't wait

(01:26:06):
to see where you go. And I really appreciate you
joining me today.

Speaker 1 (01:26:09):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:26:10):
We've got a country to build, and thank you for
joining us this week. If Manu or another guest has
inspired you in general, or better yet, to take action
by starting a Bridge USA chapter, by donating to them,
or something else entirely, please let me know. I'd love

(01:26:35):
to hear about it. You can write me anytime at
Bill at normalfolks dot us, or call or text us
at nine oh one three five two one three sixty six.
And if you enjoyed this episode, share with friends and
on social, subscribe to the podcast, rate and review it,
become a premium member at normalfolks dot us. All these

(01:26:59):
things that will help us grow an army of normal folks.
Thanks to our producer, Iron Light Labs, I'm Bill Courtney
and i'll see you next week.