Jamil Jivani： Author of ＂Why Young Men＂ (o2bFzK2EdIo)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=o2bFzK2EdIo

Music Today I have the good fortune to be speaking with Jamil Jivani Jamil is a Torontonian He’s an author, lawyer, activist, and host of the Road Home podcast which was launched just recently December 2018. He recently completed the 7 Province book tour visiting thousands of young men across Canada in partnership with the Michael Pinball Clemens Foundation He’s 31 years old, grew up in the Toronto area, raised by a single mother Considered illiterate in high school at age 16, had the highest grades at Humber College by the age of 18 Scholarship to Yale Law School by 22, was a lawyer by the age of 25 He’s taught at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, worked with JD Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy To start a non-profit in Ohio, corporate lawyer at Tories LOP, leader of police reform and voter education initiatives He had a book published by Harper Collins last spring in Canada The book was Why Young Men Rage, Race, and the Crisis of Identity, US International Publication by St. Martin’s Press in May 2019 He’s also, and unfortunately, been diagnosed with cancer, battling stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer Been on chemotherapy drugs and undergoing radiation therapy since February So we have a lot of things to talk about, Jamil and I So we’re going to start conversing as a consequence So thanks a lot for making the time to talk with me Thank you for the invitation So why don’t we start with your book and your tour? Yeah, well, the book came out actually just a month after I was diagnosed with cancer So it’s been a last year of a lot of highs and lows The highs have been incredible because I’ve had the privilege of, like you, being able to go around and speak to people about my book and my ideas Certainly not as large audiences as you have But being able to go to places in the country that I think young men need to hear stories of self-empowerment And what individual agency can accomplish And share that experience with… In areas where I think books are often not seen as relevant to the lives of everyday people I think I’ve been able to learn a lot about the disconnect between the literary industry and everyday Canadians And I think that’s true in other countries as well Where books sometimes aren’t written for an audience of people who might most benefit from those ideas And I feel very privileged to have been able to go around and talk to people about the struggles young men face The tools that are often given to them in terms of how to overcome those struggles And also the tools they find in the absence of better options You have a copy of your book just behind you You should maybe hold it up so that we can all see it Yeah, let’s take a look Yeah, so here’s the book The US edition will have a similar cover Yeah, it’s been a heck of an experience I think there’s something very humbling about people caring what you think about anything, quite honestly And there’s a responsibility that comes with to take the opportunity of an audience And do something meaningful with it And I’ve tried my best to do that with the book And I’m excited to do that in other countries next year as well So you said something interesting about books And it’s something worth delving into a bit You know, the number of people, the proportion of people who buy books is relatively small And it’s not like books are everybody’s friend So the active literate audience is actually a rather small minority of people And one of the things that’s quite cool about YouTube, let’s say, and also about podcasts Is that it enables people who might be intimidated by books But who are perfectly capable of understanding relatively complex ideas to access them another way And it is really too bad that reading is a minority taste Because while it’s such an effective means of communication But at least these other channels have been opening up I agree, and I think perhaps most effectively books are a conversation starter You know, the idea of putting ideas out there And then being able to go to a city you’ve never been before And people have a starting point in which they can engage you And talk about their lives and your life and what’s similar and what’s different That’s maybe the most powerful part of a book to me I actually think a lot about it in the sense of, you know, the most read book, for example Like the Bible and texts like that Which I think their greatest power is in trying to offer some sort of shared kind of moral universe for people of different backgrounds and ancestries And in different parts of the world to kind of come under, right? And I feel like with a book you have that ability, I hope Which is to tell a story where you have no real say or power and who picks it up But you hope that it’s powerful enough and truthful enough That whoever picks it up is going to feel like they’re part of that conversation So maybe you could outline for us the main points of your book And also talk about how it grew out of your experience I mean, part of what’s really quite remarkable about your biography is the apparent disjuncture Between your status hypothetically as illiterate at age 16 And then, you know, a very high academic achiever by the age of 18 It’s like, so I’m curious about the interplay I’m curious about that period, about how that happened and what it meant But then also about the journey that you took, so to speak, on the road to writing this book Yeah, when I was 16, I would maybe describe myself as someone who was in the depths of despair Right? I was a really angry person My father had left my family My mom was raising me and two younger sisters by herself I was in a neighborhood where I saw what I regarded as a lot of unfairness Things like racial profiling by police officers, disproportionate, poverty, a lack of job opportunities This is in the suburbs of Brampton where most of the people in my neighborhood were Newcomers to the country or children of newcomers And I was kind of, I think, being weighed down by a perspective that encouraged Hopelessness and victimization in my life So I was a cognitively capable young man That’s how you go from illiterate to a Yale Law student in less than six years But what was missing was the desire to show those good parts of me to anyone So what do you think it was exactly that produced that sense of despair that possessed you when you were 16? I mean, you outline some of it You lived in a neighborhood that was, well, an immigrant neighborhood And you saw what you regarded as manifest social unfairness But then it’s obviously the case too that for some reason when you decided to I don’t know if you dropped that idea or transcended it You did something different And all of a sudden your life took off in a variety of extremely positive directions How do you account for that initial possession by that set of ideas? And then more importantly, how do you account for the fact that you somehow managed to, let’s say, escape it? So for my situation, I think this describes a lot of my peer group as well Not having a father around and the kind of dysfunction that often comes with Put us in a position where we were looking at a lot of the wrong places for cultural leadership And pop culture, right? Hip hop, gangster movies, things like that filled the void in our case So the tools I was given to understand my life, to explain my frustrations Were tools that encouraged me to, I think, live with a certain kind of Victim identity as my default, right? That I could, for example, believe that being a gangster and a criminal was acceptable For me and my peers because we experienced unfairness, right? The way the world treated us determined the kind of morals that we picked up Right, so it’s justifiable revenge in some sense against an unfair system, right? Yeah, or at minimum it winds up becoming Just you lower the expectations of yourself, right? You walk around thinking that what you know to be good is something that you don’t have to achieve You don’t have to strive for goodness because the world has put you in this unfair position And therefore anything is possible, everything’s fair game Okay, so how much of that, I’m curious about that I mean, it’s a common human attitude to adopt that sort of perspective And plenty of people have reason to be doubtful about the appropriateness or fairness of their Life and their situation But you know, there’s two things there that get tangled together, I think And one is a sense of thwarted justice, right? And that might be the optimistic viewpoint that people look out in the world And they see that it’s unfair and that bothers them morally And there’s nothing wrong with being bothered that way But the problem too is that adopting that victimization stance And worse, maybe adopting a stance that justifies a certain amount of antisocial or criminal attitude Towards society given its unfairness also provides young people, let’s say young men in this case With an excuse not to do their best and not to put effort into anything And I think that that excuse is often masked by self-justification that’s associated with That hypothetical striving for justice You know, because it’s one thing to be upset about social injustice But it’s another thing to use that as an excuse not to strive forward And right, because there’s a psychological element and a sociological element there that are at play So tell me what you think about that And then tell me how you progressed despite having that attitude Accepting that attitude or having it inculcated Yeah, I think you’re exactly spot on You know, like later on in my life when I was a university student for example I would hear all of the same arguments over again But you hear them differently when you have the privilege and opportunity of being at a university, right? When you hear about how rigged the world is and that history has burdened you And opportunity is fleeting because of what you look like or where your parents come from In a university environment people take those as, you know They pat themselves on the back for making those assertions Because they think they’re virtuously looking at the problems of the world That we often overlook or take for granted But when you’re in the thick of it, when those problems are your life When you have a choice to make every day Do I tell myself it’s worth doing my homework and going to school Or do I just stay home and smoke weed in the basement? Do I make the effort to see how the little bit of agency I might have in a difficult circumstance Could make the difference of where my life turns out That’s when those talking points become a potential Kind of poisonous moral environment for you to live in Because there’s a psychological concept that my friend JD writes about in Hillbilly Elegy In the context of poverty in Appalachia called learned helplessness, right? And I think that’s a lot of it Which is you disassociate your actions and behaviors with the outcome of what you experience in life And when you get to that point It’s really hard to find the motivation to work hard or believe that There’s meritocracy at all in the world around you Right, but the funny thing is about learned helplessness, you know And this is something that I think it’s really reasonable for us to delve into Is that in the animal experimental world Which is where the concept of learned helplessness emerges What happens is that to produce learned helplessness What you do is you punish an animal for any sort of active behavior No matter what it does, it’s hopeless And it truly is hopeless, right? Because the animal keeps trying But every time it tries to do whatever it’s going to do It ends up being punished And sooner or later it will just cease to act And that has been put forward at least in part as a model for depression And I think there’s a certain amount of validity to that Although depression is a very complex concept The situation you’re describing is somewhat different Because what you pointed out was that When you were sitting at home as an adolescent, let’s say And you had the choice between doing your homework And putting forward your motive agency However forceful that might have been And justifying doing something like slinking off to smoke dope And avoiding your responsibilities You could justify the avoidance by making reference to the fundamental unfairness of society But that isn’t the same as actually having tried really hard a dozen times Or a hundred times and failed each time It’s more like the premature presumption of learned helplessness And I do see this very frequently among young men Is that they’ve adopted this attitude that The world is such a catastrophically unfair place And life is so unjust in its fundamental essence That there’s no sense even trying to begin with That you’re only a fool if you do that Yeah, I agree I think what happens is you see other people’s failings Or other young men, whether they’re your peers or people you even just listen to in music Or you see on television or whatever the case You see their attempts and failures as evidence of your own, right? And so if everybody you know has struggled, for example To go to college or university Then that is in some way you trying, right? You don’t see a distinction between your own efforts and those of other people That’s how I would describe my mentality at the time Which is, for instance, I could turn on the news and see a story About, let’s say, when I was a really young kid Seeing Rodney King get beat up by police officers in Los Angeles, right? And that could stick with me and become an example of what someone like me Would have gone through but for not being there at the time, right? And so you see that example and you internalize that as an instance of Well, people like me, when we walk around the street, we get treated that way by cops So I might as well have gone through that too Because I see that as an example of me potentially asserting myself in society And then paying a deep price for it Right, so that’s the price paid for For adopting a certain dimension of identity And I think it’s inevitable to do that to some degree Because we do belong to different group identities But you’re saying that you classified yourself, let’s say Or you saw yourself in the same group as someone like Rodney King You saw that the group that he was attributed to You believed that that was a valid group attribution And then drew conclusions that weren’t favorable to your own striving And that also still sets you up so that you’re not really testing yourself against the world, right? You’re starting out with these assumptions about the primacy of group identity, let’s say Now, I’m curious about that too because you also talked about the negative consequences of fatherlessness And one of the, so I’m inferring from that That you see a link between the presence of a father And an antidote to that socialization by what? By popular culture, group identity, something like that I mean, we know that fatherlessness isn’t good for people by any measure It’s a catastrophe Yeah, well, I think if you’re in that frame of mind Where those instances of group identity start to tell you something about yourself Then having a man in your house who’s not getting beaten up by the cops Is automatically a way to complicate that, right? Having a man in your house who looks after his kids and goes to work And takes responsibility for his family and his community Who shows you how to love a woman and be kind to people That is a complication of a worldview that might otherwise think that every other man Who’s not your dad has something to teach you about who you are Okay, so that’s interesting So the idea is something like And I believe this, like one of the things I’ve noticed about kids Who are, let’s say, neurologically intact So maybe these are, there’s lots of reasons why People can develop psychological disorders and some of them are physical But imagine that you take a child who’s physically healthy And you put them in a given environment My intuition has been that A child needs to have at least one positive role model within imitation distance Now sometimes he or she can sort of piece that together fragmentarily Also from popular media images You know, the images of the heroes in movies and so on But it’s really helpful to have at least one person in your immediate environment Who is manifesting the pattern that characterizes individual success And so maybe it’s something like If that positive role model isn’t there Then the easiest default is to a victimized group identity Does that seem reasonable? I think it’s reasonable, especially if you’re from a community And you share an identity that has been there for a long time That has been very strongly associated with victimization in the first place And I think that’s a big part of it is When I was a kid and thought of myself as a black man That immediately came with a certain kind of baggage of historical and present-day victimization And because my father is black, my mother is white So him being gone and in some ways being my kind of connection to a black family I was very vulnerable to how blackness was being presented to me Because I didn’t have a black person in the house showing me something different And the blackness that I was presented was one that was deeply tied to victimization And one that was constantly excusing any poor behavior we might have Maybe not more than any other group of people But associating any poor behavior we might have with history It’s this idea that you are inheriting low expectations of yourself and of your behavior And you don’t know what it would look like to look in the mirror and not see a victim What would that even be? And it also provides that avenue for justification that we already described So let’s look at this two ways There’s an old psychoanalytic idea of secondary gains So if we’re going to be critical in our analysis about victimization culture We might ask, well, what benefits does it bring to the people who adopt it? When I mean benefits, I don’t mean long-term, iterative, high-quality benefits I mean short-term payoffs, let’s say You know how it is, if you have work to do and you avoid it, that’s a short-term payoff It’s a benefit because you don’t have to do the work There’s a medium to long-term cost But I’m very curious about the element of victimization culture that justifies I think antisocial and avoidant behavior is probably the right way of putting it Now, where I grew up, I grew up in a working-class community And I had friends and associates who ranged from pretty decent kids to pretty solidly planted In the delinquent camp And generally the more delinquent types had a whole handful of rationalizations for their behavior And it’s very dangerous to have those rationalizations at hand Because most forms of antisocial behavior, or avoidant behavior for that matter Very bad medium to long-term strategies So anyways, what negative psychological elements of yours do you think the victimization narrative supported? And what positive aspects did it suppress? Well, the negative ones it supported were wanting to be mad at my circumstances And to not see any way I might be responsible for changing them Right, yeah So justification for anger I was looking for that justification The other thing that it does, and I don’t know if it was unique to me There are variations of it in everybody But it just means that you don’t feel the burden of solving a problem It’s hard to walk around feeling like if you worked a little bit harder If you listened to people who care about you If you just made the effort and put the time in That maybe things could be different That makes you feel responsible for that And that comes with the possibility of failing, right? It’s scary to think that you could do something And if you don’t get it, then you’re failing at it Yeah, so that’s another interesting thing about that assumption of learned helplessness Is that if you don’t try, as Homer Simpson told Bart If you never try, you can’t fail Right, right, right So which is very comical So that was definitely, I would say, a negative part of my thinking That wanting to see myself as a victim supported In terms of the positive stuff that it kind of pushed down I think it meant that I, for example, was willing to put my mom through some really I did some really difficult situations where she had to stress and worry about me and what I was doing And I would later learn that I have a positive power to actually bring value to her life And to make things easier for her and to help her raise my sisters and things like that Those are strengths that I had That is a desire for responsibility and to be part of a family that I had That I didn’t learn about myself until later on Because I couldn’t see myself as someone who had assets, right? Who had strengths to offer others It was always about what other people were doing to me And not about how I might positively affect somebody else Or at minimum, not negatively affect them Which is definitely something Well, yeah, so one of the things that’s interesting with regards to the conversation about responsibility Because one of the things that I’ve been talking to audiences about all around the world now Is the idea that maybe we find the sustaining meaning in our life Precisely through the adoption of responsibility And you know, you talked about reasons to be terrified of responsibility And I think those are valid reasons What if you try and fail? Especially when there’s a fair bit of evidence around that that might be the most likely path And it is in some sense Because you have to often try a lot of things before you succeed Even if you turn out to be a successful person But the price that you pay for abandoning that responsibility Is that that is where you find the meaning in life That can buttress you against the fact that life is unfair And what would you call? Tipified by suffering and also by malevolence and betrayal You know, you talked about discovering later in life That you could be a positive asset to your family And that’s a big discovery, man It’s really something to be able to wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night And think, well, you know, at least I’m doing something positive for the people that love me To not have that’s really a bad thing Absolutely The other thing is you tone You kind of tune out a lot of the people in your life Who might have really important things to say to you, right? Who might possess some genuine wisdom But because what they’re saying doesn’t line up with the ideology you’ve Unknowingly in most cases clung to so strongly You don’t hear them And so the good people in your life that actually might be able to teach you something And put the right idea in your head and plant a seed that could grow into something beautiful Those people become less important to you And instead the folks who are manipulative in some cases Who want to tell you negative things And want you to believe that you can’t do something You are destined to suffer until the evil system around you has collapsed People who tell you that or variations of that message Are the folks that you hear from And that’s sad because when I look back there were good people in my life And there were people who at my school who did do really well And I would say in fact maybe most people in my community made really good decisions And cared for each other and did really good things And yet I was trapped in a world where I couldn’t see them They didn’t even exist in my narrative about my life Those people were either anomalies or they just didn’t They were not part of my worldview at all Yeah well the thing is too is that people who start down the bad road let’s say The bad road say that’s characterized by irresponsibility, avoidance And like a kind of a cruel rebellion Cruel and counterproductive rebellion You know they’re also they also tend to be quite annoyed and irritated by counter examples And so they are likely to manipulate someone else A younger person for example or their peers And then, yeah so think about this I think that’s absolutely out of family marriage Truly associated with you know inf Fervenus And just what broke your mindset How important does it have to you Or been your background Because the older younger generation Just necessarily As Danielended said You are just donc Estevan Since coming out of high school It’s that social caused A trans씨dentiary and kind of find my voice comes out of some things that were completely unintentional, right? So I get to this point in grade 11 after I rewrite the literacy test that we have to take in Ontario public schools. I am finally considered literate, so that means I can finish high school. And I get very desperate to earn money because I didn’t see a future where I could earn money legally. I thought I would have to be a criminal and I genuinely believe that was my destiny. And so I come close to buying a gun and I ask a friend for it. He quotes me a price. He says, let me know when you want it. And I go home on a day where I thought I was going to feel like a million bucks because I finally had this tool of a criminal enterprise that I had been looking forward to. And I wind up just like crying my eyes out and I was devastated and I was scared. And I thought if my mom found out I had a gun, she might give up on me and disown me. So that’s interesting. So part of what called out to you when you were making what would have been a life-changing decision was the violation of the intimate relationship that you had, the love that your mother had bestowed on you. So you felt deeply by all appearances that you were betraying that. What else brought you to tears? Because you said you thought that one possibility was that you’d feel somewhat triumphant at finally managing this task and joining the cast of Outkast, but that isn’t how your conscience responded. No, my conscience responded with a fear knowing how owning a gun sends you into a spiral I had seen other people go down. You know, when you own a gun as a young man, especially if you intend to use it, you wind up having problems with people who have guns. And all of a sudden, just to walk around the street, you feel like you have to carry a gun on you for your own safety. Like if you look at the lives of young men who wind up either victims or perpetrators in inner city gang violence, those are often young men who are committing what they call retaliatory violence, right? It is a web of responding to trauma and killings. And I was very scared I would be in the middle of something like that. The other thing that really bothered me was a concern that I was so angry at police officers for how I’d seen them treat my father when I was a kid and the treatment that I had experienced in terms of being followed around at the mall or followed home from the bus stop and seeing things like I mentioned, you know, the Rodney King beating and having that be part of how I saw how the world worked. And it represented a certain kind of, almost like a disturbing rite of passage, right? As a black man, I felt like, well, when that happens to you, that means you’re growing up because people are supposed to think you’re dangerous and a criminal. And so there was a sense of- Yeah, yeah, well, the thing is, you know, there’s even something about that that’s true because I think that people are supposed to think that you’re dangerous when you grow up. The question is, what do you do with the dangerousness? Because you don’t wanna be naive and weak. It’s not helpful. Absolutely. But there has to be a pathway to strength that isn’t associated with catastrophe. Yeah, well, in my case, it felt like I had already, I had already felt like I was being treated like someone who carried a gun around. And there was something that really, where I was almost disgusted by myself with the idea that I might validate that stereotype by then doing that thing. Right. And so there was this like conflict. It was a mix of shame that I felt, right? A mix of fear and a certain sense of, you know, worrying that I might never be able to come back from that decision. And so what the positive effect all of that had on me is, I wound up isolating myself from my social network. Like all the friends I had who I’d spent years talking tough with and sharing, you know, gangster fairy tales and things like that. I wound up just not being able to show my face around them. Like I was scared they would think I was a punk, I’m a chicken. So you decided not to purchase the gun as a consequence? I did not, no. Okay, and so, and that- And my life changed really quickly because all the people I was skipping class with, I didn’t wanna see anymore. And the people I was smoking drugs with, I didn’t wanna hang out with. And the people who, you know, I wasted so much of my time with, the people who we cultivated that kind of victimization identity together no longer were part of my life, except for a few outliers. And so I unknowingly put myself in a situation where I could just think about the world differently. And I started to go to class seriously for the first time. And I wasn’t a good student overnight. Like I finished, I had to do day school and night school to graduate on time. And I just so badly wanted to get out of that building, the high school. So I just left. And the way to leave was to get my credit. So I graduate, I wind up at Humber College in one of the transfer programs. Well, let’s go through that in a bit more detail because it’s really quite a remarkable story. So, okay, so you had a choice point in your life. And the choice point was whether or not you were gonna, well, become armed and dangerous fundamentally. Yeah. And take that particular path. And you decided not to. You had a crisis of conscience. You decided not to. And that allowed you or forced you, hard to say which, to alienate you from your peers. But that must’ve been very lonesome. Like how did you put up with that? Yeah, it wasn’t easy. And this is actually one of the hardest things that I talk about with young men who are going through similar experiences as I’m describing in terms of negative peer pressure. It’s really hard to accept being alone. And I don’t know why I was able to do it, quite honestly, because I look back and I think, I’m not sure at 31 I could do it. Yeah, right. Exactly. That’s exactly why I’m asking. It’s quite, because it’s a huge transformation, not only to start buckling down at school, especially at that age, because you had 16 years of not being disciplined, let’s say. And also isolating yourself from your peers at a point where arguably there’s nothing more important than that peer association. So, and what did your mother make of this? I mean, all of a sudden you weren’t seeing your friends and you were studying. I mean, she must’ve been shocked. I’m not sure she knew what was going on, to be honest, because we didn’t communicate much. Like we lived in the same house, but she was so busy just trying to get to the next day and pay the bills and make sure we had a house and everything we needed that I didn’t really have an adult in my life who was providing any supervision, right? For example, my mom never signed off in all four years of high school, she never signed off those papers you’re supposed to sign acknowledging you saw your kid’s report card, because I would just forge it and bring it in. And she never said anything because she wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t say anything to her. And so we had this period of time where we were just ships passing in the night. We had barely any interaction, but she still, there was a phrase you used in your conversation with a group of boys for the BBC radio at a boxing club, where you said you need someone in your life who represents the light at the end of the tunnel. And that’s what my mom was to me. Like even when we didn’t talk, even when I was angry at her for picking my father and putting me in a situation where I had a parent who rejected me and I resented her for it. And yet she still had this belief in me that never went away. This belief that some point Jamil could be better than he’s proven himself to be. Right, so she was that light. Okay, so that’s interesting. So it wasn’t just her, it was also the fact that you had someone around that actually had more faith in you than you did. Exactly, yeah. And I think that’s such a key part of what young people need. I agree, man. You really need that from a parent, eh? If you get that from both parents, you’re unbelievably fortunate, but you desperately need it from at least one person. Someone’s gotta believe in you. Yeah, so the reason I get comfortable, I guess, with loneliness is, and this is I think the role that the internet, I think still plays in people’s lives, which is when you break away from an in-person social network at a school or a workplace or whatever the case, the internet becomes the place where you can find an alternative social network. And in my case, I was on these hip hop metronome message boards all the time when I was a kid. I was always online reading about hip hop and like conspiracy theories. And I got caught up in a lot of like nation of Islam doctrine and propaganda. And those ideas were especially helpful, to be honest. In some cases, I think they delayed my ability to shake off the victimization identity I had adopted. But what it did do for me was it just gave me an alternative place to belong. Those became the social networks I had, were online relationships. And I think that was part of how I was able to adjust away from my friend circle, was that I just had a bunch of stuff on the internet that I could go to and feel like I was connecting with people in another way. Okay, now also now you said something interesting. You said that you really wanted to get out of that building and that speaking about your school, but the way that you chose to get out was to graduate and pass was to accomplish the tasks. Now, why in the world did you decide that that was a good idea? I suppose that’s also because I wasn’t sure what else I would do. Like at the point, you know, I was a kid who, I did my grade 10 career project, my careers project, saying that I was going to be the Canadian Shug Knight, right, who’s a gangster, who started a record label that produced Tupac and Snoop Dogg and these guys. That’s what I thought like my future was gonna be like. And when that gets like taken from you, because you realize this game of chicken you’ve been playing with yourself, you’re going to lose it. And so you get off the train tracks, you don’t really know what else to do. And I just thought I have to just walk the path that was available to me, which was just go through school and get it done. That’s a brilliant observation, I think, because one of the things that people have often asked me when they’re directionless is, well, what should I do? And the answer is, well, you take the best path that’s laid out ahead of you, right? If you don’t have an option, staying where you are, staying in despair and not moving forward is a very bad option. If you have a bad pathway forward, or a suboptimal pathway forward, let’s say, but it’s at least forward, then that’s the one you should choose. And so you decided that you were gonna buckle down and get the hell out of school and you were gonna do it by passing. Yeah, well, I didn’t feel like I was choosing to do it by passing. I just thought that was my way out and I wasn’t sure how else to get out because if I dropped out, I don’t know what else I would do. So in the process of trying to rush out, I’m working as a dishwasher at Red Lobster, I’m taking night classes, I’m taking day classes, I’m trying to get out of my circumstances as quickly as I can. Guidance counselor says to me, but you don’t qualify for many programs. You were streamed in the applied system, which was what we call in Ontario, which means you can’t go to university, you’ve got to go to community college, but your grades are so bad, there’s no community college program you could get into except for what they call a general arts and sciences program, which in some ways is almost like what grade 13 used to be in Ontario, which is you would learn a lot of the things you should have learned in grade 12, but didn’t. And so I go into that program and I would say what changed for me immediately in terms of my academics was, this was the first time I had college professors who said to me, here, you’ve got to write this 20 page essay, you get to decide what it’s about. And it seems so simple, but it was a breakthrough for me because what that meant was the part of me that was interested in hip hop and the nation of Islam and conspiracy theories and all that stuff I was doing on the internet that no adult had ever seen before. No, my mom, my teachers, no one had ever seen a part of me that could think critically, that had curiosity intellectually. That part of me and the version of me that was going to school merged for the first time. Well, thank God, that’s the huge advantage of higher education is that is exactly what should happen, right? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And that’s what I try to tell young men all the time is, you might be going through a hard time in high school and it’s hard sometimes to know how life is going to be different if you just stay the course because you have no reference point to explain it. But in my case, it was absolutely a meaningful shift. The idea that I could write 20 pages about Malcolm X or about Tupac, all of a sudden, the writing ability that I had never shown people before started to come out and my analytical thinking and all, it was just, it flowed out of me. And literally in less than a year, I went from barely getting out of high school to getting the highest grades in all of Humber College. And that was not something that ever felt deliberate. I was just kind of stumbling around in the dark and hoping things are gonna work out for the better. My mom, for example, when she came to my graduation at Humber, like she was shocked that I got the president’s medal for highest grades. Like she had no idea that I was actually a completely different person by that point. Well, you said something interesting too about what you were doing in high school. You said that you were attending classes during the day and at night and you were working as a dishwasher. As a dishwasher, right? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that’s interesting too, because one of the things that’s very useful, I think to point out to people who are in a situation that’s analogous to the one that you found yourself in is that there is something to be said for trying to make yourself so busy that it’s absolutely ridiculous. To take on a big burden, that’s part of that burden of responsibility. It’s like, okay, can I go to school during the day and can I go to school at night and can I also work at a job? Can I do all that? Because the answer is, I’ve seen this time and time again with undergraduates who start to work in my lab. It’s like they’re already taking a full course load and they’re busy and some of them also have work. They have part-time jobs and then they come and work in the lab. And so then they’re so busy that it’s just ridiculous. And then they have to get organized and they can’t waste time and their grades almost inevitably go up, not down. Yeah, and it’s one of those things where before you get to a point where you get busy like that, you have no idea you’re capable of accomplishing so many things. And then it starts to become normal to achieve. It’s normal to say, oh, I could set out and accomplish something in a given day or a given week. Well, it also becomes something that’s really interesting to experiment with because once you start realizing that your capability for responsibility exceeds your original expectations, you start to become curious about what the limitations of that are. It’s like, oh, turns out I can do a lot more than I thought I could or that people told me I could or that I was willing to believe. Well, how much more could I actually do if I really got my act together and got disciplined? It’s like, there’s a purpose. It’s like, what are you made out of? And how do you find out? And I think you really need to find that out as a, you certainly have to find that out as a young man. You probably have to find that out as a person in general, but it’s absolutely crucial for young men to find out that there’s far more to them than they think. And you can’t find that out without burdening yourself. You’re right, and it’s the opposite of what we were talking about earlier in terms of that fear of failure, right? Because it’s saying, I’m gonna push myself to the limit and explore where that line of failing is, and you’re not running from that line. No, you’re running towards it. You won’t see where it exists. Absolutely, and the funny thing is about running towards that line is that as you walk towards it, it recedes. And as you get more disciplined, the probability that you’ll fail gets smaller and smaller. Perfect example of the pathology of avoidance, right? Because avoidance of that just makes you weak. Yeah, absolutely. And the transition from Humber College to York University, it’s just kind of a continuation of what you’re describing, right? It’s running to the line, and it’s me continuing to say, okay, maybe that 12 years of evidence I have of being a really poor student could be proven wrong with every assignment that I do, right? And believing that if I try in this class and I get an A, and all of a sudden getting an A stops being an anomaly. It starts to become normal, right? And then when you don’t get an A or a B or whatever you’re hoping for, you start to feel that sting of disappointment because you actually have higher expectations of yourself. And your professors who didn’t know you back when you were a knucklehead getting into trouble, they only know you as the guy who came into their class and tried hard. And so they start to speak to you as someone who could do really well too. And all of a sudden your life becomes- That’s one of the things that’s so lovely too about being able to go off to somewhere new, you know? Because you can leave your past identity behind you. I found that such a relief when I moved from the little town that I grew up in, because I went to a community college for the first two years of my education as well. And I had an experience that was, well, yours is more dramatic by quite a substantial margin, but they’re not dissimilar. I was so relieved when I got to college that I could start to write and think about things that I was actually thinking about, that it was like a complete transformation. But I also had the chance to leave my old personality behind, at least some of it, you know? Some of it that I didn’t wanna carry ahead with me. And that’s another thing about moving forward in the world is that you can leave the old and insufficient you behind and that can be hard on you and hard on people around you too, but man, it’s such a relief. Well, it’s life itself, I would say. It’s the opposite of despair. I think that’s absolutely right. And as much as you can create the circumstances for that to happen in your life, even if you don’t have a chance to move somewhere new or go to a new school or get a new job, but just convince yourself that renewal is something you get to decide and get to control. I mean, it’s so powerful. Well, that’s the opposite of being a victim, is to notice all of a sudden that you have the capacity to transform yourself, despite, at least to a large degree, despite external circumstances, or sometimes even as a consequence of leveraging them, because it isn’t always obvious that having an impediment is a catastrophe. Sometimes it’s a, what would you call it? It’s a call to action. It’s a challenge. Absolutely. And in some ways, the challenging periods of my life that we’ve covered provided a roadmap for what I would do with the remainder of my academic career, which is I would pursue opportunities where I could imagine going back in time and solving some of the problems I had experienced, right? And that I studied international development and nonprofit management at York. I went and did a law degree because I thought the law was relevant to my life. And insofar as it made a difference in how I wound up and how some of my peer group did in that I was lucky to not be involved in the legal system. So yeah, I mean, it was a call to action for me. And I think it gave me the motivation, but also the toughness I would need to push forward and do things that I had good reason to believe were impossible. Because the victim narrative is something like, well, you’re so little compared to what’s arrayed against you in all of its historical catastrophe, right? Which is like the evil father. You’re so little that you don’t have a chance. And that’s not good because you’re not that little and what’s arrayed against you isn’t that big. I mean, it’s not that it’s not big because it is big, but it’s that you’re nowhere near as little as you might’ve been enticed to think. Exactly. And I think what you’re describing is very, like I think most people hear that and would agree with you, but they just selectively apply it to different people in our society. Like they wanna tell some of us because of our circumstances that that’s less true for some than others. And that’s what really got to me. Yeah, well, that’s the sort of thing that really makes you wonder where the true racism is. Yeah. And as I travel around Canada and I go to other countries and I speak to young men who are in some cases, very difficult circumstances, I see over and over again how they’re being denied that belief, that they’re being told that that belief is somehow competing with recognition of unfairness. Yeah, I heard that described as John Henryism. It’s a new form of pathology identified by psychologists is the belief among minority young men that personal effort and sacrifice and responsibility will actually produce positive outcomes. It’s actually for exactly the reasons that you just described because it runs counter to the victim and oppressor narrative. It’s actually being treated by some people now as a form of psychological disorder. Wow. Yeah, wow. Yeah, and that like, and when you say those things, right? When you go to people who are in difficult circumstances and remind them even to some small degree that that individual agency might matter, right? That it could affect their outcome, that they do not have, they’re not destined to a life of suffering. People, there are a lot of people who get threatened by that, right? I mean, they feel like you’re undermining the narrative that they desperately want to be true, which is that that young man has to suffer until everything else changes, right? That until we get rid of capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy and all these other evils, right? Quote unquote evils of our society, that you cannot have a good life until that is first dealt with. And asking people to sit around and wait for a kind of activist class to create this utopia for them. I find that to be very immoral and very bothersome because I see the biggest obstacles I have to getting my message out to young men are people who I would describe as victim celebrators, right? People who really, really wanna celebrate when we’re losing because it fits their narrative. But ideas that might help us win are a lot less attractive. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so now you went off to York and what happened when you went to York? Well, I always jokingly say my life got really boring really quickly because I really just studied and did everything I was supposed to do. I am actually surprised by how hard I was able to work in those four years. I was very careful about picking classes that I thought would build on the momentum I had picked up. So I wanted to study subject matter that would connect to things I previously learned because I still had a certain insecurity about going too far from where I had proven myself. I don’t know if I could have taken an economics class or a biology class or a psychology class because those are just subjects that didn’t come, that I wasn’t sure I could handle. So I was very careful about picking things I thought I could do well, things that in my free time I was thinking about, right? So issues around poverty and discrimination and activism and tackling social issues, whether that was in the kind of Canadian context or elsewhere, those are things that I felt comfortable with. And so I picked classes that fit that mold. And as I got more and more confident in myself, I started to branch out into other areas. So I would take an econ class or a class in marketing for nonprofit organizations or things like that. And I had a, you know, my whole life up to that point was on one street that Steeles Avenue West, which is on the North end of Toronto. And, you know, where my mom lived, Humber College and York University are all off this street. So my world was very small in the sense that the same bus routes I had taken as a teenager were the same buses I took to Humber and the same buses I took to York. I got very much in a comfort zone there, right? Because I was saying to myself, okay, this is the world I know, this is the world I understand. I can be successful in this world. And so I clung to it. And I didn’t really do much to branch out. You know, I still worked in restaurants as a line cook and a dishwasher. I worked in warehouses. Even when I was getting A’s, I didn’t think for instance, to apply to like a prestigious internship or to work at the university. Well, you wouldn’t have known even, you know, like when you come from a background like that, it’s, you know, when I went to University of Alberta, I didn’t know any people who had had a graduate degree. I didn’t know how to go about doing that. And so the idea that I could do that was really something that was quite new. You don’t know the pathways, you know, I mean, you can figure them out, but if that’s not right in your milieu, well, you just don’t know what basic steps to take, you know? Exactly, yeah. There was this idea I came across in one of the international development classes I took, but it’s an anthropology concept called the capacity to aspire from Arjun Appadurai at NYU. And it stuck with me because he uses it to explain how people achieve social mobility in India. And I think it applied really well to my life in Canada too, which is, you know, your imagination grows with the more paths you see in front of yourself. And we all might have a similar destination in mind in terms of what a good life looks like, right? I want a better house, a better car, someone who loves me, someone to love, but some of us have a better sense of the directions, the steps it takes to get to that destination than others. And that idea stuck with me because it helped explain both the difference between myself and some of my peers in university who were more accustomed to opportunity, but it also explained the difference between me and my friends who were not in university and were not making some of the good choices I was, and we’re still dealing with the consequences of how we grew up. Well, I have this program that I developed with my colleagues called Future Authoring Program that helps people develop a vision for their life along some of the dimensions you mentioned, and then also to put together an implementable strategy. And we’ve never been able to tell if the utility of the program lies more in walking people through the actual process of developing a vision and a genuine strategy, or suggesting to people that they’re actually capable of doing that. Right, so I often think it’s the latter. It’s like, because the idea that you are a self-transforming agent is an unbelievably powerful idea if it grips you, right, or if you allow it to grip you, that might be another way of thinking about it. But it is certainly an idea that you cannot have, or that you can be prematurely cynical about, which I think is, well, that premature cynicism is really what the victim narrative feeds. And I think it’s unbelievably mentally damaging to young people. It really hurts them. Okay, so you went to York and you did real well, and then how did the idea of law school pop into your mind? And did you have encouragement for that? I mean, you had to go write the LSAT and all of this. It’s quite a daunting process. It is. It was actually a very practical decision for me because I looked around and saw that no one who studied what I studied at York was getting a job in the field. And in many cases were working the same jobs after they graduated that they had when they were a student. So I thought to myself, I need more education. Like I lost, you know, I felt like I had given up a lot to get to that point. Like I lost a lot of the friends I grew up with. I worked really, really hard. I changed my life in a way that it felt like betting on myself. And I was starting to become nervous that the bet might not pay off if I’m 22 with a university degree and no job, but I have a bunch of debt, right? And so law school and business school were the things that I thought about in terms of they’re playing on some of my strengths in the sense that I can read and write well, but they seem very practical in that they lead to a job. Like they’re supposed to prepare you for actual work. And I wound up writing the law school admissions test first of the two. And I did really well kind of shockingly, to be honest. I did not expect to do so well. It was the first standardized test I had ever done well on. And I was just, you know, and to the point where I did not write the business school test because I was like, didn’t wanna test my law too many times. I just thought, okay, like take what you can get, you know? And then because my whole life was on Steeles Avenue West, I was expecting to go to the law school at York. Like that was just it fit where I was comfortable. I knew what bus I would take to get there, you know? The limited set of experiences I had made, like even going to University of Toronto seemed like a foreign world to me. The idea of going downtown was like, this is just not a place where people like me should be hanging out. I just didn’t feel comfortable there, you know? And so I thought I was gonna apply to York and if I had been admitted there, luckily I would have definitely gone. But I had this like chance meeting with a history professor, David Blight at Yale, where I was speaking, there’s a town in Southern Ontario called Buxton, North Buxton, which was founded by families who came to Canada from the Underground Railroad. And they host a conference every year at one of the churches that they set up. So I was presenting some research I had done on Black Canadians at this conference and this Yale professor who was the keynote showed up early enough to hear my presentation. And after I was done, he walked over to me and he said, well, that was really good. What are you gonna do after graduation? And I said to him, oh, I wrote the LSAT. I think I’m gonna go to law school. He said to me, you should apply to Yale. And I thought like, this guy was a superhero to me because he was teaching at a university that I’d only seen on television, you know? And so in my mind, it was like, I said to him, like, are you sure? And he was like, yeah, I think you’d be a competitive applicant. And I was like, wow. So his belief- Yeah, no kidding, wow, eh? Yeah, like his belief in me in that chance interaction where I’ve never seen him since, but we only interacted for a couple of minutes, but that meant so much that I thought, wow, if this guy thinks that I have that ability, I might as well apply to Harvard and Columbia and all these other schools because, I mean, he knows what he’s talking about, right? He’s this like superhero from Yale. And so I apply everywhere and I get in everywhere. And- Jesus, that must’ve been a shock. Yeah, it was like winning the lottery. Like I just- Yeah, no kidding. I was, yeah. Yeah, and like, you know, and then being able to tell my mom that not only did I get into those schools, but their generous financial aid policies would mean that we would actually be able to afford it, meaning we wouldn’t have to pay anything because we had no money was like, she, I think like everything she ever wanted for me came true in that moment, you know? And it was a really, yeah, it was just a special, special day. Yeah, no kidding. That’s quite the miraculous situation that is, man. Yeah. And it’s one where I consider myself very lucky and fortunate to be able to have walked down that path. Yeah, well, brave too, man. You did do the applications. You put in the work. Yeah, that’s- There’s good fortune there for sure, but it’s not like it just, it’s not a lottery. Well, it is in a sense, but you bought lots of tickets and you- That’s true, yeah. Yeah. You gotta buy a lot of tickets to win that lottery. That’s right, that’s right, that’s right. Yeah, and you know, as I described, you know, the bet I made on myself, it paid off, right? I mean, the idea that I would ever be, like I now would have an education where I could choose the job I had and I wouldn’t just be given whatever was available to me. I mean, that is really what I was looking for, right? Like that kind of stability where I could say, I’m an employable person. The financial challenges my mom went through, I will not have to go through. And I might even be able to do something for her and other people. Right, no kidding. There’s something, man. That’s what attending Yale meant for me. Okay, so now then you went to Yale. How’d you do at Yale? I did well. I had a different kind of experience though, you know? Like I really killed myself for four years studying at York to get there. And part of the appeal for Yale to me was, you know, I had read those stories by, you know, Bill Clinton where while he was getting a law degree, he was actually living in New York or Arkansas or in London. Like Yale was a place where if you didn’t want academics to be your primary focus, you could be doing other things. And because the grading system is generous and because the culture there is encouraging of you to kind of be impactful in whatever way you can be. And so it was a very alien environment to me. And I think, you know, I look back and I think some of that bravery you just credited me with, I feel like maybe I was a little less brave there because I really didn’t feel comfortable there in a way that I never got used to. Being around wealthy people was really hard for me in terms of just feeling inadequate all the time. You know, that’s one of the problems with those Ivy League schools is that, you know, it’s funny because almost everyone who ends up at one of those schools feels inadequate, at least on one dimension, right? Because no matter how rich you are, there’s someone richer. And if you’re rich, you’re not as smart as your roommate. And if you’re as smart as your roommate, you’re not as smart as your professor. And like they’re very weird institutions because they aggregate people who are remarkable across a number of dimensions. And so everyone who attends them tends to feel, well, like they have imposter syndrome. I really noticed that among the undergraduates at Harvard. Because they’re used to being the smartest kids in their classes. And then when they’d show up at Harvard, you know, they were no longer guaranteed to be the smartest person in the room, that’s for sure. Yeah, I think that that’s exactly what I observed at Yale. I mean, thankfully for me, I failed before. So I wasn’t too worried about getting a bad grade, you know? That wasn’t really the concern for me. What more so was the concern was, I really felt uncomfortable with what I saw as like privilege, right? Like I in some ways felt like in danger of being a sellout, of being someone who grew up with very little. And then being welcomed with open arms by this like opulent institution that was surrounded by people who were living like I used to, right? I mean, the neighborhoods around Yale, the New Haven, our neighborhoods were. Right, right, Yale’s particularly striking that way. Absolutely, yeah. And so, you know, I would walk around campus and walk out of campus and I would see that young men living like I used to live would be stopped by Yale security all the time, or would be treated in a very hostile way anytime they came too close to some of the Yale buildings. And it just, you know, I was really unsure what to do with that, you know? Do you embrace that? Do you just start sucking up to the professors and become, you know, part of that scene? Or is there another way? And I spent three years trying to figure that out and I’m not sure I really did. Part of how I reconciled it all was I took, I was part of a project where you could work as a volunteer high school teacher in some of the local neighborhoods. And so I used to teach constitutional law to grade 11 and grade 12 kids at some of the rougher high schools. And that was my way of feeling like whatever Yale was giving me, I was immediately trying to give it back to somebody else. I didn’t know how else to… Well, that seems like a good approach. How did that work out for you? Well, it worked out well in the sense that I did get a lot of, you know, unique and amazing opportunities as a Yale student. And I did, I think, have the chance to be useful to a lot of other people at the same time. So the balance, I think I was able to strike it. But I certainly look back and think, you know, if I was a little bit more prepared, if I knew people who could have introduced me and oriented me to that environment, I think I could have gotten more out of it in the sense that I would have known what actually mattered. Like you spend, just as you described that collection of remarkable people who’ve done so many things, part of how they cope with their inadequacies or their feelings of inadequacy is they are so prone to groupthink, right? Because the way you deal with feeling inadequate is to just try to be like everyone else but better, right? And so you wind up in this like, like for example, Yale prides itself on the diversity of its student body coming into an entering law school class, right? So all the different schools they went to and their experiences and the countries they’ve worked in and all that. And yet more than half of Yale students will have the same job when they graduate. They’ll be law clerks working for a fancy judge somewhere. And then most of those people will then go on to work at a fancy law firm. And so it is this process where if you come in from a different place and you try to resist the groupthink, you’re going to inevitably graduate feeling like you missed out because you’re gonna be reminded of all the amazing things your classmates are doing. And you’re not sure if walking a different path is gonna pay off for you, right? You’re thinking to yourself, well, I didn’t take that clerkship. I didn’t take the job at the fancy law firm in Manhattan. Am I gonna kick myself for that for the rest of my life? And that was what was weighing on my mind when I graduated. Like I was so stressed out because I was like, am I gonna regret how I played this hand, you know? Okay, so what happened? I wanna talk a little bit more about what happened after you left Yale. You ended up at Tories eventually. But I also wanted to turn the topic to something slightly darker as well. I mean, you’ve also been suffering from a very, what would you call it? Well, a burdensome illness for the last year, burdensome and terrifying illness for the last year. And I wanted to touch on that at least a little bit because it’s a hell of a second part to the story that you just told, right? Because you emerged from a very desperate initial orientation to a degree of remarkable success, I would say academically and practically. And then you got walloped, you know? It’s like you’ve done all this work and you put yourself together and you’ve helped put the world right and you’ve changed your attitude. And then all of a sudden, when things are going well for you, you get cut down and I wanna go back to that. I wanna go to that because I’m curious about how you’re coping with that and how you’re managing it. But let’s talk about what happened after you left Yale first. Well, when I left Yale, I tried to work in the corporate world and do the community service and kind of activist work that I was really passionate about. Because Canada is a hard country. I mean, one of the biggest differences, I would say, between coming back here after graduation versus staying in the US is where you can create a career for yourself. There’s just a lot more options in the US to be a professional advocate for youth or to work on some of the issues we’re describing at a research center or to do this and that. In Canada, there’s few options. A lot of them are government-oriented, which is something I’ve always been a bit cautious of. I’m not a big fan of how top-down a lot of Canada works because of the power our governments have. And so I had a hard time feeling like I fit in. So the way I thought would work best for me, the honorable way to approach that problem in my mind was, I’ll earn my keep with a management consulting job or a corporate law job and then work with youth and work with police officers to change policies and things like that on the weekends and in the evenings. And I did that for a couple of years and it was exhausting. I mean, it was hard to do everything. And I wound up taking a job teaching at York University because I thought it was a way for me to do those things I was passionate about full-time. I found out, as I’m sure you know, that universities also are not places that you get to always focus on being useful to other people. The work I wanted to do, I had a hard time balancing with the expectations of playing up to university politics and doing research that I, or being tempted to do research, I didn’t think would actually be helpful to anyone in being part of academic pursuits that I don’t think are immediately relevant to people in our society who would benefit most from quality research. And so it was hard to balance all those things too. And I was in the process of figuring all of that out, I suppose, when I got diagnosed with cancer. I spent, by that point, I was a couple of years into teaching and it happened at a time where I was already hoping to kind of rethink what I would be doing with my career because I didn’t feel like university life was the long-term solution for me. And then cancer hit me and it’s given me a lot of time to, I guess, reflect on that and think about what I want to be doing when I get healthy again. Yeah, so you have stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Yes. And that also caused spinal fractures. So it’s really quite the catastrophic mix of symptoms. And you’ve been being treated for that since last February. So the first question is, what were the symptoms that led to your diagnosis and how did you find out what was wrong? Yeah, well, one of the things people say about men is that we don’t seek help. And I guess I might be an example of that because I had pain in my neck for months and in my lower back, and I just didn’t take it seriously. I just thought, all right, well, I just turned 30 and I thought maybe this is what 30’s like. You got neck problems and back problems. Yeah, well, you’d never leap right to the catastrophe. Yeah, so I wound up going into the hospital to get it looked at. And I also had a swollen lymph nodes, which I also didn’t take seriously because I just thought, oh, it’s not a big deal. And it turns out those things are related because in the lymph nodes on my left side is where a tumor had started to grow and that tumor, and the cancer spread from that main tumor into some of my bones. And the neck pain and back pain I was feeling were caused by the cancer. Cracked the two parts of my spine, one in the neck and one in the back. So I wound up at an emergency room visit, which I thought was going to be fairly simple. I thought, I didn’t have a doctor. So I went to the emergency room thinking I was going to get antibiotics prescribed to me for the lymph nodes being swollen. And I wound up being held for a week because they had to do a bunch of testing on what was going on. And that’s how I basically found out about the cancer. I was at a pretty high risk of paralysis at that point because of the injury and the possibility of the spinal cord being affected. Thankfully that didn’t happen. And in a weird way, my bones wound up kind of fusing together. So they’re never going to be normal again, but they’re stable enough that I won’t have those problems at least. But then I went through like chemo and radiation for most of the last 10 months. And I’m just, a couple months ago, I finished that up. And it’s, you know, it’s been, it’s been intense. I think I revisited a lot of the harmful places that my mind used to be when I was younger. The temptation to be like resentful. Yeah. You know, I put a lot of work into my career and to have this happen in prime kind of earning years, to have my income cut drastically when you’re the, by far the biggest breadwinner in your family, the first one to finish university and first one to become a professional. And I, and there was a part of me that really wanted to go back to that place where I would just see myself as a victim and be angry at everybody and be angry at God and be angry at life for, you know. Yeah, the problem with that is that then you end up with the illness and being angry at God and at life. Yeah. You know, which, like, it’s not, it’s not like I’m making light of your motivation for feeling that way because, you know, that’s a hell of a thing to have happen. And it’s a blow that would destabilize anyone. And the fact that you started revisiting that same dark places is anything but surprising. You know, I think what’s surprising mostly is that you didn’t stay there. Yeah. But I’ve watched with really ill people, you know, it’s really bad to have the illness, that’s for sure. And it can be ultimately bad, but to also have that embitter you and bring back your cynicism and make you not so much desperate as rage-filled and angry doesn’t help the illness. And all it does is make your situation worse. And I think worse for everyone around you as well. That’s also something terrible about being sick is that you tend to feel like you’re a, like an intolerable burden on the people around you as well. It’s another bit of guilt you have to bear along with being ill. Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And I, that dark place was tempting for a lot of reasons, but one of which was it just made it, you know, being sick, it’s like you have no one to get mad at, right? It’s like, who’s the face of that, right? And you wanna find someone to blame. Like you wanna have something to point to and say, this is the cause of my misfortune. And it’s not like I had, you know, lung cancer or something where it’s like, oh, you know, I smoke too much, or I have some sort of behavior I could associate with being ill. I mean, when the doctor told me I was sick, she said to me, you know, I asked her like, how is it possible that I’m this sick? I don’t get it. I have no problems. And she said, you know, it’s just bad luck. And that’s a hard thing to- Yeah, it’s part of the random stupidity of life. And I think that’s a hard thing to accept for sure. But what it also did was just kind of like, there was a message that I needed to hear from people when I was getting out of a dark place when I was younger, right? When I was getting out of high school, I needed people to believe in me. I need people to think I had a brighter future than I thought I might have. I needed people who still had like an unwavering faith that I could be helpful to the world. And when I got diagnosed, I needed that just as bad. Like I needed that sense from people that you’re not just this like burden that now your mom has to stress about you and it’s not like she doesn’t already have a whole bunch of other things to worry about. It’s that despite this illness, you still have a lot to offer the world. And people who had that message, I mean, you’re one of them. You sent me an email thanks to a mutual friend shortly after I got diagnosed and it matters, right? It matters when people say to you that, as you said earlier, it’s a call to action that you’ve got a personal catastrophe now that you have to deal with. And in doing so, you’re gonna learn a lot about yourself and what you’re capable of. Just like trying to overcome- Well, you talked earlier about that capacity to aspire. And it’s like the idea that you should battle on against insuperable odds is in some sense an idea that it’s got a certain amount of hopelessness about it under some circumstances because there are times when you battle and you lose. And it’s even the case that you lose if you battle as forthrightly and courageously as you possibly can. But the truth of the matter is, is that there isn’t a better strategy. That’s the thing, is that first of all, the strategy works most of the time, or if any strategy is going to work, that’s going to be the one. And nothing is certain in life. And so not every strategy ever works 100% of the time, but it’s still the best you have. And you decided apparently to rescue yourself from the second descent into the hole of hell, despair, let’s say, to continue to try to aspire forward despite the fact that you’d been thrown another tremendous obstacle. Yeah, well, what’s been really good for me is I’ve really focused on being around people who have their own challenges. And I credit a lot of the young men I’ve spent time with since my book come out for putting my mind in a place that was actually positive and productive. I spent time with boys who are going through the challenges I had when I was a kid, far worse in many circumstances. I spent time with people who are fighting poverty or abuse, kids who are in the foster care system, kids who have not even a mom that I was blessed to have. And being around those young men, young men who’ve come out of jail and are trying to do something different, young men who are figuring out how to grow up on the spot because they now have a kid they have to be worried about. Being around those young men in every city I’ve been able to travel to has really made it hard for me to feel sorry for myself and also hard for me to discount what, you know, I don’t know where my physical health goes from here. I’m still not, you know, in remission yet, but it’s really hard for me to put myself at the center of a victim narrative, which I know is tempting. And I’ve talked to other cancer patients who are similarly tempted to look at life that way and to say, there’s still a bunch of young men who I could be useful to. And the idea that I might say something to a guy who just got out of jail or a guy who doesn’t think he can be a good student or a guy who, you know, is in a university where he feels in over his head and that maybe I could say something that could change how he thinks about himself and put his best foot forward. Like that’s been worth living for, quite honestly. And that makes the cancer feel so irrelevant by comparison. Yeah, well, that’s a hell of a thing to have accomplished as far as I’m concerned, but I think it’s dead right. You know, I mean, life is a hopeless business and we all die in the end. The question is, what do you do? What do you do in the interim? And everything that you can do to put things in a more positive place is a credit to your integrity fundamentally. And it’s integrally associated with the meaning that does sustain you in very dark times. Absolutely. And I think that, you know, the confidence that I had in, you know, individual agency and personal responsibility and the power of how you choose to think about the world and how you interpret the adversity you go through, the confidence I had in that from growing up and from the academic research I’ve done and the life I lived has only grown exponentially since I’ve been sick because I now see it in my own life on a regular basis, but I also get to see it in people who are facing far more severe physical challenges than I am, people who I share a hospital room with or people who I see when I walk, you know, through the cancer center. And it’s like, and I see what they have to tell themselves, the, you know, the rules they have to live by to have, to get through the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis and get to somewhere positive and constructive. And that’s, you know, it’s incredibly inspirational and it certainly makes it, you know, frankly, the limited patience I had for people who undermine or want to downplay the importance of that way of looking at life and that way of orienting yourself to the world, that patience is far thinner than it was before. And it wasn’t like I was very tolerant of that, you know, before I got sick either. Well, you know, it seems to me that that’s probably a pretty good time to bring this discussion to a close. What do you think? Is there anything else that you have to tell people? I mean, I’m kind of curious about how you had the opportunity to talk to all these young men or how you’ve taken that opportunity. Well, a lot of it has been, you know, people who read the book and want me to come speak to students or youth that they work with. But it’s also been because a couple of charities, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and the Pinball Clemens Foundation, both of whom work with young men across Canada and also in the United States and other countries, they’ve organized opportunities for me to come speak to young men who they think would benefit most from hearing from me, young men who are struggling to find their way, who are having a hard time in school, who don’t have parental support or mentors. So that’s where a lot of the opportunity comes from, is, you know, people who, I guess, feel like my story does resonate or would resonate. I think a lot of it is people who also recognize the institutions they’re part of, might not always understand young men or know how to respond to their needs. Because, and this is a problem that you’ve tackled head on in many cases, I think they recognize a need to encourage young men to do well, but don’t know how to do it because the conversation around encouragement of men has, in my view, been undermined and poisoned in many ways. I mean, even we have a prime minister here in Canada, Justin Trudeau, who, you know, goes to international summits and recklessly speaks about men using, you know, the buzzwords that he thinks are going to get him an applause. Yeah, that’s when he was talking about the dangerousness of working men. Exactly, yeah. I mean, it’s absolutely appalling. Yeah, well, and when you live in a country where that passes as leadership of your nation. No kidding. You know, people, I think, don’t know what to do about the struggling young men they see, who actually aren’t, you know, they don’t symbolize male privilege in the ways that our prime minister might think they do, right? And so people are looking for other ways to engage and speak about young men, and I’m trying as much as I can to offer that. Yeah, well, some words of encouragement go a long ways. I mean, I’ve been stunned over the last year at, you know, discovering how rarely so many people are encouraged and how starving they are for a few genuine words of encouragement. And well, it’s like you said, even when you met that professor who told you that you could maybe apply to Yale, it’s just that chance encounter, a few words. And you said that, you know, you’ve also realized how important the things that you say might be to people, and that that’s led you some strength to go on even, you know, during your current times of travail, let’s say. It is so important to put forward a message of encouragement to young men and say, look, you know, get your act together for Christ’s sake. There’s a lot more to you than you think. And the world’s crying out for you. It needs you. And that irresponsibility, there’s nothing about that that’s noble or justifiable, even though you have your reasons to feel embittered and victimized. It’s not the point. Of course, the world’s harsh and brutal, but you’re someone who might be able to prevail nonetheless. And that’s really something. Yeah, I would say it’s not just something, but in some cases, it’s everything, right? Yeah, that’s right. It’s everything. That’s exactly it. The difference between giving the world the best you have to offer and giving the world nothing. Yeah, well then you might be ill, but at least you have a clean conscience. Absolutely. That’s not something, man. Yeah, and that’s maybe the most valuable thing of all. Yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. Well, look, Jamil, it was a pleasure talking to you. Same to you, Dr. Petersen. Yeah. Thank you for your time. Look, and best luck, eh? I’m hoping things go well for you, but it’s a remarkable story that you told. It’s really something on multiple dimensions. And so like more power to you as far as I’m concerned. And I hope that lots of people watch this and realize that like you did, that there’s a hell of a lot more to them than meets the eye. I hope so too. Good, I hope we meet again. Me too. Thank you, Dr. Petersen. You bet, man. Good talking with you. You too, all the best. Yeah, same to you. Hey, let’s take a look at your book one more time. Okay, okay, here it is. All right. Available in Canada now and the US and other countries next year. Great, why young men, race, identity, and? Rage, race, and the crisis of identity. Why young men, rage, race, and the crisis of identity? Yeah, all right. Well, I hope you get a massive boost in sales as a consequence of our discussion. Thank you, I hope so too. All right, man. All right, take care. Give your mom a hug for me. I will do that. She’ll be very glad to know that we had a chance to talk about her too. All right, ciao. Take care.