Sam and Shaan share their personal reactions to the George Floyd protests and nationwide unrest. Shaan talks about his own experiences with racial profiling as an Indian-American, and Sam describes watching his Black wife process the moment. They discuss Trevor Noah’s “social contract” framing as a way to understand why people riot, and reflect on what it means to lead a company through a moment of collective grief.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Opening: Processing the Unrest [00:00:00]
Sam: You know, one great quote — are you seeing the unrest and protests and looting where you live?
Shaan: I’m saying it because I’m just glued to Twitter. Me too. I’m just scrolling and I can’t believe my eyes.
Sam: It is so sad. There’s so many different things going on at the same time, and the shitty part about that to me is that everybody pulls a different meaning away from it. If your bias going in is — you know, if you’re racist in one way, you’re going to look at this and say, “Oh man, they’re rioting and looting and this is awful. What about those small business owners? Why is their store getting smashed?” And then if you’re somebody else looking at this, you’re like, “Dude, people are sick of it. They’ve hit their breaking point. This has been going on for so long — the police brutality — and I totally understand what’s going on.” And then other people are looking at it and asking, “Why are these other malicious groups hijacking the movement and just inciting violence?” — antifa, or some people believe Russia, China, whoever it is dropping pallets of bricks off trying to bait people into violence. Some people just trying to make the world burn.
So there’s all these things mixed together, and I think whoever you are, you’re going to select the evidence that supports your feeling. You’re just going to see more evidence towards your view, and it’s going to make people more divided.
Sam: My friend shared something — it was like four circles. One was: “I’m pissed off about the racism in our country, and Black Lives Matter has a point.” Another was: “I’m pissed off that businesses are getting destroyed — this is not the right way to do it.” Another was: “I’m pissed off at the police because I think most of them are good, but a few bad cops ruin it for everyone.” And then I forget the fourth one. But at the center all the circles had a little bit of overlap, and it was like “you can be here.” I was like, that’s exactly how I feel. I’m angry. It’s sad.
Shaan: What was the fourth circle?
Sam: I don’t know what the fourth one was. It was really great though.
The Quote That Stuck — A Thousand Good Cops [00:03:30]
Sam: You know, I think it’s really crazy. There are a whole bunch of things you learn from these experiences where you’re like, “Oh, that is a nugget of wisdom or a bit of empathy I didn’t have before.” One great quote I saw: when you have a thousand good cops and ten bad cops, but the good cops don’t police the bad cops, then you still just have a thousand bad cops. And I believe that. That sort of applies to my life too — in any situation where I stand by and do nothing while injustice is happening, that makes me complicit in my own way.
Sam: And then the fourth circle was something like: George Floyd’s death was murder, the police should be held responsible, I think most cops are good but police departments are corrupt and there are some bad cops. Looting businesses and destroying property hurts the cause. I empathize and I agree with Black Lives Matter protesters and believe in their right to be heard. And right in the middle: “I am here, and this is sad.”
Shaan: Yeah. It’s really crazy. I know people don’t listen to this podcast to hear talks about socioeconomic issues and racism, but I think this affects everybody. It’s very different than anything that’s happened in my lifetime — riots breaking out across the nation, all simultaneously. Things really do feel like they’ve hit a breaking point, for many reasons. I also think the fact that people have been cooped up at home for the last three months doesn’t help, because that’s a bunch of water boiling over at a certain point.
Sam: I agree.
Sam: When His Wife Broke Down [00:06:30]
Shaan: I agree. I don’t even love discussing this stuff — I do think about it a lot, and I tend to try to talk about the positive — but let me bring something up that I haven’t brought up, and I want to hear your opinion.
This doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t validate or invalidate anything I say — but my wife is Black, my family is Black, I’ll have Black children. And this was the first time where I was at home with Sarah, my wife, and she broke down. She was like, “I don’t know where I fit in on this.” Because she’s a successful Black woman, and she said, “I haven’t had a lot of racist things happen to me.” And it was just a total mind-f*** because I’m like, what am I supposed to do? I didn’t know what to feel. I was like, I don’t know what to do. It was incredibly exhausting.
Do you — you’re Indian — do you consider yourself white or not white?
Shaan: Definitely not considered white, and nor does anyone who sees me think I’m white. But I get what you mean, in the sense of: do you feel that you’re privileged or prejudiced against? I think that’s a different way of looking at it.
Shaan: Growing Up Brown in Tulsa [00:09:00]
Shaan: My sister — I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is not the most open-minded and racially friendly place. When she was in kindergarten, students would draw a picture of a pig, write her name on it, cover the body in brown mud, and give it to the teacher. The teacher laughed. My sister always remembers this: she was maybe six years old, and she vividly remembers the teacher kind of laughing and saying, “No, no, no, put it away” — but being involved in it.
Sam: What’s the pig have to do with it? Just like — brown, dirty, in the mud?
Shaan: That sort of thing. And my sister went home to my mom asking, “Why can’t we be white?” Just a kid trying to understand: why am I different? What does it mean? Why do other people think we’re worse than them?
I personally never experienced that because I luckily moved from Oklahoma when I was really young and went to different places where it was less so, or I just got lucky with who I was around. But when 9/11 happened, it was not fun to be a brown guy.
Sam: Are you any religion? Muslim?
Shaan: No. I would be Hindu, but I’m not religious. But I do grow a beard pretty quickly. When you go to the airport, I don’t think you think about how you look that day — whereas I think about that. I’m like, look, I’m not trying to get hassled for no reason. Let me think about this before I get on this flight. I had friends who are Muslim who had their house keys taken away by TSA because they were like, “This is potentially a dangerous thing.” And they’re like, this is my apartment key.
On Attitude and What You Can Control [00:12:30]
Sam: Does that make you angry? Where does that leave you?
Shaan: I’m not angry about it. I have this opinion — my personal philosophy, if you were gonna boil it down to one thing — is that the only thing you have control over is your attitude toward the present moment. That’s disempowering and empowering at the same time. Disempowering because it’s like, I can’t control anything that’s going on. I can’t control how other people feel, how they’re going to act, the results I’m going to get in my life. But it’s empowering because the one thing I control is my attitude toward the moment. That becomes a superpower — no matter what the situation is, I can decide what my attitude about it is going to be.
So when something shitty happens, when someone says something shitty, when I get that extra pat-down going through TSA clearance, the meaning I put on that is my choice. If I put on the meaning that I’m less than, that I’m being wronged, that doesn’t help me — it makes me feel like sh**. So I just decide not to feel that way.
But I know that on the grand scheme of things, I get off pretty light. It’s very different from never feeling safe going for a jog in your neighborhood. There are levels to it, and I haven’t experienced those levels, where it would be very challenging to put a positive meaning on what’s going on.
Sam: Talking to the Company [00:16:00]
Sam: Yeah, it’s just a confusing time because you feel so many different emotions, and some of them are opposite. I talked to the whole company today — we’re small, maybe twenty or thirty people — and I was like, “I don’t know what to say, other than if you guys ever feel out of place somewhere, at our company we’re going to make you feel safe. We hire all types of people.” I wasn’t sure if that felt weak, like barely anything. I was like, I don’t know how to handle this other than “you’re safe here.”
Shaan: I think that’s the right approach, because it’s not about having the answer or the wisdom or the most heartfelt speech. I think it is important if you’re the leader to show up as a decent human being in that moment. Just say, “Look, I understand — I’m also feeling this crazy mix of emotions. I just want to do my best with this, and we’re going to try to do our best at this.” It goes a long way to just be a decent person and try to be present and visible there, versus shying away from it, which is what a lot of people do.
Sam: Yeah, it’s crazy. I have a feeling that once I have children my opinions are going to change a lot — not my opinion, but I think I’ll learn a lot. Like, having Black kids, or part-Black kids, I think I’ll maybe see something I didn’t really see.
Trevor Noah’s Social Contract Framing [00:19:00]
Sam: One more thing — did you watch the Trevor Noah thing on YouTube?
Shaan: I did not. I’m typically not a fan of his. I think a lot of what he says is the wrong take, so I tend to avoid him. But I would watch it if you suggest it.
Sam: I watched this thing — and I don’t think he’s that funny — but he brings up what’s going on and says, “A lot of people are looking at this and saying, ‘Well, this isn’t right either.’ Of course the police should not murder citizens — that’s wrong. But also, rioting and looting and destroying things is also not right.”
His point was: think about what society is. A society is essentially a contract — an agreement amongst a group of people about what’s right and wrong, what behaviors are tolerated, what behaviors are not. So what you’re saying is that one side of the contract keeps breaching it, regularly and without recourse. And if you just see this other party keep breaching their side of the contract, then you also have no desire or incentive to uphold your side of it.
He goes: you’ll see somebody who’s homeless and they don’t go out and murder people, because they’re in a bad position. They say, “Look, these are the rules of the game. I’m losing in the current game, or I haven’t been able to get to an advantaged position in this game, but I still respect that we’re in a game together, and there are rules.” He goes, “What you’re seeing now is that a group of people — Black people in America — feel like the contract has just been breached over and over and over again. Unnecessary and unjust violence against us. And so now we’re going to breach the contract too, and we’re going to make it very known what it feels like when the contract is being breached for apparently no reason.”
That made me look at it differently — when somebody is either protesting, whether it’s peacefully or not, when somebody’s rioting and creating an unsafe environment. It kind of explained to me why somebody would behave that way. If you feel like the other party has just terminally breached the contract and there’s no recourse, then it’s like: I’m going to breach it too, and we’ll see how it feels. Now both sides feel what it’s like when the societal contract gets totally breached.
Closing: Feeling Like the End of the World [00:23:30]
Shaan: I definitely feel the tension. It definitely feels like — almost like the end of the world a little bit. Like a small taste. In the same way a new puppy is a small taste of having a baby, it’s like — if everything I believed in is going to come to an end, it’s going to start looking a little like this, you know?
Sam: But within every sad story there’s also an inspiring story, where people are waking up the next day and going and cleaning up the city, and people standing together. I think there’s a lot of really positive things going on too. That’s the silver lining, that’s the other side of the coin — where is progress being made?