In this episode, I sit down with former NBA player and freedom fighter Royce White. We talk about his early life growing up in the streets of Columbus, Ohio, how he became a baller, and how he went on to become one of the most decorated athletes in the history of the sport. We also discuss his upbringing and how it shaped him into the man that he is today, and the impact it has had on his life and the lives of others around the world. I hope this episode gives you some insight into what it means to be an only child in today's society, and what it takes to be a freedom fighter and stand up for the truth. Don t let anybody hold you back, just do it. Amen. -Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican Presidential Candidate, is running for President in 2020 and is running on a platform of standing up and speaking for the Truth. Let s talk about it. - We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak the truth, let s talk the TRUTH. -Let s talk truth. I m here in our home base in Columbus with somebody I ve been really looking forward to talking to. -Royce White, former NBA Player, Activist, Freedom Fighter, and Former Member of the Ohio State University, and Presidential Candidate - I m in Columbus, OH and I m so excited to have him here in Columbus. - Thank you for having me! Thank you, Royce! -Reedy White, Rachael, R.J. White - R.I.P. R.S. ( ) R.A. (R.S., R. ( ) ( ) R. ( ). ( . . R. J. ( .R. ( ), R. M. ( , R. S. ( ) ( . (R) ( ) & R. C. (C. (M. (A. J.) (R). ( ) . . . (R.) ( ) and R. A. (J. (P. (S. ) ( ), (J) ( . ) (RJ ( ) ? ( ) ) . . . ( ) , R.) ( . , , ( ) . , J. J . (J). (C) (J ) (J.) (P) (T)
Transcript
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00:00:00.000I was a kid that came up an only child, watched mom work and struggle.
00:00:03.000We're in the middle of a mental health epidemic in this country that I personally believe is driven by the vacuum of national values.
00:01:00.000Some people are familiar with it, but I thought we'd dial at least a couple minutes, even to your pre-NBA days, and then we'll spend a lot of time...
00:01:09.000In your experience of how you got drafted and what came after that.
00:01:14.000But tell me a bit about your upbringing and what led you in the path that ultimately got you to the dream of many kids in this country joining the NBA. Well, I think my childhood and upbringing is a very important part of my story and helps people understand the uniqueness of my position now to be able to speak on the things that I speak about politically, culturally, societally.
00:01:36.000I was an only child to a single mother, working class single mother.
00:01:46.000I come from a family of women that were In the beauty care industry, right?
00:01:51.000So you're talking about a lot of women who are in a cash business and they pay bills with their tips, often have to make ends meet, live check to check.
00:01:59.000My mom paid rent with her tips, right?
00:02:13.000But I was fortunate, although I was an only child, I was a part of an extended family that had multi-generational roots across the Twin Cities area.
00:02:24.000And the Twin Cities is a unique metropolitan area.
00:02:27.000If you know anything about the Twin Cities demographically or geographically, Minneapolis, which is the biggest city in our state, is only a 400,000 person population, right?
00:02:41.000But the metropolitan area is 15th in the country.
00:02:45.000So we have suburbs that go on and on in neighborhoods and small cities, and I was fortunate enough, because of my extended family, to grow up in neighborhoods all across that place, which gave me a lot of cultural diversity in my perspective on a number of things.
00:03:02.000So, you know, I was a kid that came up an only child, watched mom work and struggle to make ends meet, but I had an incredible group or community of men That also helped guide me through my journey in becoming a sportsman, but also a young man in general.
00:03:20.000What did you think you were going to do when you were in junior high school?
00:03:44.000No, my success came from hard work, dedication, and getting with the right coaches who helped me understand the importance of practice, right?
00:03:52.000And so I was a guy who, once I started to really get the ball rolling athletically, I prided myself on my body, being in shape.
00:04:01.000I used to do a lot of core conditioning work on my own, push-ups, sit-ups at home at night, toe-raisers, we call them, wall squats, things to help me be strong.
00:04:18.000And once I realized I had the potential, once I was given the encouragement, you could say, from somebody who I respected that said to me, you could actually do this if you do ABC, I was self-motivated then.
00:04:32.000Before that, I was just a regular kid with family and was enjoying being a kid, you know?
00:04:38.000So then you get to high school, then you bloomed a little bit, found yourself.
00:05:42.000And we'll come back to that theme later on, but even early in your life, do you think that that early exposure to being in that spotlight Played a role in creating that anxiety that stayed with you later in life.
00:06:01.000Well, anxiety is an interesting thing.
00:06:03.000The human mind is an interesting thing.
00:06:05.000The human psychology is a very interesting thing.
00:06:08.000It's hard to say, did the chicken come before the egg?
00:06:13.000You know, it's one of the places where exploration and research will still pay dividends for humanity.
00:06:19.000But I can say I remember early struggles with anxiety well before the spotlight was ever on me.
00:06:25.000It had to do with my own internal thinking, the way that I looked at the world and feeling that something wasn't right or that danger is ever present, which it was in the communities I came from.
00:06:45.000By the time I was 16, I had my first full-blown panic attack, which came from smoking marijuana for the first time.
00:06:53.000It was when you smoked for the first time that you had your panic attack.
00:06:56.000Yes, I was fortunate that in my household, my mother was adamant about not letting people in the household that did any form of drugs or alcohol.
00:07:05.000She was not a drug or alcohol user herself, and she kept that out of the house.
00:07:09.000So it wasn't until I was a little bit older and had the chance to move around on my own more that I encountered the opportunity even to smoke marijuana.
00:07:17.000And when I did it for the first time, I had a full-blown massive panic attack.
00:08:13.000And one of the things that kind of was a thorn in my side was I realized that me and my mother didn't have good health care.
00:08:22.000Or at least in my mind then, I thought that was a big deal at 16. And so when you get your first panic attack, well, we can discuss if it's a big deal, but when you get your first panic attack and it feels like you're having what many would describe as a heart attack, and you know you haven't necessarily had all the proper checkups, your mind goes to...
00:08:53.000Yeah, and he fainted because all of us thought he had asthma.
00:08:58.000They labeled it activity-induced asthma.
00:09:00.000But really he had an artery that was being restricted by two valves that was causing him to not be able to have the proper flow of oxygen-rich blood.
00:09:12.000And so it was effectively asthma of a sort, but it was from a birth defect, not normal asthma.
00:09:30.000And after that, I would have panic attacks for about four months straight, three times a day.
00:09:35.000And so, for anybody who's ever had panic attacks, it's kind of laughable to those who don't really deal with it because they don't understand how physical it is.
00:09:43.000But I tell people I've looked death in the face thousands of times because it actually feels like you're dying.
00:09:49.000In fact, it's it's so much simulates dying that if you go to the ER with classic panic symptoms, they have to do a variety of tests to rule out that you're having a cardiac event, which speaks to how magnificent the human body is right in the mind.
00:11:42.000But because I come from that place and because I was at the University of Minnesota, which was already then predominantly liberal, They didn't like that my childhood friends from the neighborhoods they claim they're trying to protect followed me and hung out on campus with me, which is very interesting.
00:12:12.000So you felt like because your childhood friends were showing up on campus because you were going to college close to where you grew up, You were also something of a star by then, I suppose, on the basketball team otherwise, right?
00:12:32.000Black men are accepted by liberals if they can be the symbol of white liberal resent and vendetta against white men, or Americanism, or Christianity, or any number of things.
00:13:00.000But only if you made it through the application process of our university.
00:13:05.000Only if you have a student ID. It's funny that they don't want us to have voter ID, but in order for black people to come hang out on campus, you would need a student ID. Fascinating.
00:14:28.000And she never said that she thought I took it.
00:14:29.000In fact, her laptop was returned on the following Monday.
00:14:32.000This was a weekend party on a Saturday.
00:14:34.000And her laptop had been returned to her already.
00:14:36.000Well, the University of Minnesota Police Department thought it fair and wise to accuse me of doing it anyway or having something to do with it.
00:14:42.000And then they drug this case out while they investigated me being a possible suspect.
00:14:59.000They held the investigation open until the season concluded, and our AD made the statement that I could not play until this was resolved publicly.
00:15:08.000So they knew that if they kept it open, I wouldn't.
00:15:12.000And at the end, they came back and they charged me with trespassing at a dorm I lived in.
00:15:32.000Filed for a petition to be able to play right away.
00:15:35.000Didn't get that granted, so I had to sit an entire year and watch my teammates play without me.
00:15:39.000And then the next year, I played at Iowa State, and I was the only player in the country to lead my team in all five major statistical categories.
00:15:46.000So the year off didn't hurt your skills?
00:17:39.000Okay, so while that's happening, I'm getting interviewed one day in Ames before a game, and it's just a regular ESPN, we're covering the Cyclone success, and I let slip that I was dealing with anxiety.
00:17:52.000Totally by accident, you know, because the guy was asking me what my pregame ritual was, and I said, you know, this is what I do, boo, boo, boo.
00:17:58.000I wake up, I go and watch the last game and try and reference things I want to do better, and go and watch a little bit of this team so I can scout them and see what they're going to do.
00:18:22.000This was ESPN. It was ESPN. Yeah, it was ESPN. And so, but at that moment, when I said anxiety and I caught his reaction, I realized that I had, that the anxiety thing...
00:18:32.000And so, it became one of the biggest and most covered stories of that college basketball season because no players had really talked about struggling with anxiety It's not one of these you're supposed to talk about.
00:19:57.000First off, I go through this draft process, and everywhere I go in the draft process, we go to these cities and we have these individual workouts where you go against a set of other three or four other guys that they're comparing you to in the draft.
00:20:10.000So I'm going city to city, and they're pulling me in the bag to do my individual interviews, and all they want to ask me about is anxiety, which I'm welcome, open.
00:21:15.000I would love to dive into that rabbit hole, too.
00:21:20.000So, a child, my family physician that first diagnosed me with anxiety disorder, we had conversations leading up to training camp, which is held October 1st, coming up here for the NBA. And...
00:21:35.000She wanted me to reach out to the team and try and open up a dialogue to create the same type of Program, for lack of a better word, agreement, understanding that I had had with Iowa State.
00:21:47.000And that agreement with Iowa State in regards to my anxiety, which she also helped build, was just to have a real direct line of communication with my coach and the team doctor and the team trainer about where I was on a daily basis.
00:22:01.000Because sometimes with anxiety, for example, I have anxiety, free-floating anxiety.
00:23:10.000They have a full banned substance list that, by the way, includes anti-anxiety medication, which I was prescribed for, benzodiazepines, Xanax, for flying, right?
00:23:21.000For flying, specifically, is when you use it.
00:23:47.000Like, how is there the drug list at the end of the tunnel And penalty for being on those drugs, but there's no upstream attention to the thing that leads people to do drugs.
00:24:02.000And then shortly after, you know, we got into a huge public standoff about the need for mental health policy in the NBA. And basically what they brought me behind closed doors and said is, you're right about mental health.
00:25:27.000I mean, after that year, they promised that they, they promised if I return to play and stop the standoff about mental health policy, which all their doctors, this is another interesting one.
00:25:37.000I'm trying to paint a picture of why I came to where I am in this liberal edifice, this edifice of liberalism in American politics.
00:25:48.000All of their experts, medical experts, agreed that not only was a policy possible, but it was necessary and that it would be easy to create one and it would be very limited liability for them because everybody's worried about liability.
00:27:45.000Remember now, I'm a top five talent, no physical injuries, no legal problems, never been to jail, never been convicted of a crime, no rape charges, allegations.
00:28:01.000After you dropped from the Houston Rockets?
00:28:03.000The behind-the-scenes part is David Stern and those guys basically sent their emissaries to come and talk to me in a room and say, look at all the money you're going to pass up on.
00:30:19.000But also, players should be able to seek out their own independent mental health professionals, right?
00:30:25.000because there is an obvious conflict of interest that you could point to if the professional is hired by the team.
00:30:32.000So a player should have the ability to dispute that opinion and go get their own independent opinion or a couple of independent opinions that come to one consensus.
00:30:53.000So now they create the policy that basically mandates every team have a mental health professional.
00:30:58.000But, and Adam Silver went on Bill Simmons' podcast back in 2017 when this whole crisis was popping off and said, we want players to use our mental health services, but I can't guarantee that if you use our mental health services, it won't come to be, it won't, it won't be held against you come free agency.
00:31:19.000This is how people who are in positions of leadership miss the very important role of leadership in governance.
00:31:27.000The NBA office and Adam Silver as the commissioner is a governing body.
00:31:31.000What Adam Silver should have used his pulpit to say is, we believe mental health is a very integral piece to the overall health of our players.
00:31:38.000And we are making it a priority by ensuring that they have access to mental health professionals as players in their workplace.
00:31:45.000But if they don't want to use it, that's fine.
00:31:48.000However, If I, as the commissioner, find out that any of these teams in our NBA community are going to weaponize mental health against their players in free agency, I'm going to come down with the full power of my position.
00:32:03.000I'm always a fan of getting the best arguments on the table and then addressing them.
00:32:07.000I don't know what the policy is on physical injury, but I suspect what he might say.
00:32:13.000So it had been Stern before, but then now we're talking about Adam Silver having taken over as commissioner of the NBA. Just for people who aren't following the NBA to know.
00:32:25.000But now Adam Silver has taken over, so he's the NBA commissioner.
00:32:29.000And he might say, let's say he were here, that, well, if you're suffering a knee injury or Achilles heel tear or whatever, that that would be held against you in free agency.
00:32:56.000Like if you have panic attacks and you can't play because you have panic attacks, that's like having a knee that doesn't allow you to play.
00:33:04.000The point was none of these, none of these NBA GMs or, or, um, owners or scouts had any general basis of information about mental health to be able to determine whether a mental health issue is incapacitated.
00:33:22.000Because I think that's a consistent position to say that You know, you're going to be valuable to a team based on whether or not you're able to play and perform.
00:33:32.000But the irony is that for all of the emphasis put on protecting the physical health of a player as an asset for that team, there's a deep underinvestment of both resources and just basic knowledge to be able to do the same thing for somebody that can stop them from playing.
00:33:48.000It's almost the self-interest of the team, right?
00:33:53.000The most ironic part is the individuals like you or I who are outspoken naturally, right?
00:33:59.000We would be more likely in the pool of players to step forward and be honest about what we're dealing with to give them the data to be able to form their opinion and attitude and protocols around mental health.
00:34:23.000Actually, now that it occurs to me, my first think would be, let's say I'm an NBA owner.
00:34:27.000To me, if the league is going this way, this is an opportunity as part of building a high-performance culture that protects its players to really double down here, right?
00:36:24.000And so what they actually did was they weaponized the lack of knowledge around a topic like mental health to be able to weaponize it arbitrarily whenever they so choose.
00:36:34.000So they didn't want to draw a hard line.
00:36:35.000The blur helped them in their desire for corruption when necessary because...
00:36:41.000Most of the players are dealing with mental health issues, but they would never say it.
00:36:46.000So now you're actually going to end up penalizing the one guy who told you about the problem in free agency, and you're going to miss all the people who are dealing with the same issues.
00:36:56.000Now they're going to resort to other things.
00:38:39.000And Daryl Morey tweets, fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.
00:38:43.000And then he goes through his own version of, it's almost, maybe it's a version of karma, but he goes through a whole version of being cast as a pariah by LeBron James.
00:41:35.000China is a convoluted problem that has many, many layers.
00:41:40.000But effectively, Hong Kong is the left...
00:41:45.000The pro-freedom democracy Hong Kong movement is the leftist BLM movement here in many senses, right?
00:41:55.000And China, who I am vehemently opposed to, the CCP and their influence in our country, Their problem with Hong Kong is that it was a bastion to Western power in China.
00:42:06.000The same way they had earlier gotten Shanghai, they had dealt with their Shanghai problem.
00:42:13.000Because Shanghai used to be the epicenter of American Thai and American ambassadorship and power to China, the CCP. So Xi Jinping cut that off.
00:42:51.000So when you watch it from that angle, you can tell that the average American citizen who's watching Twitter and NBA Twitter and the reactions that many times cross over in politics, They have no clue what to make of Hong Kong, let alone Daryl Morey making that comment.
00:43:04.000So that's the political spectrum we're dealing with today, is many of these things have such deep roots that when these surface sparks pop up, people are pinballs.
00:43:30.000And so don't be one of those billiard balls.
00:43:32.000You're not one of those billiard balls.
00:43:33.000But that's what I tell young people across this country, the same thing.
00:43:36.000So that was in 2019. 2020 is when the George Floyd, post-George Floyd BLM issues come up.
00:43:41.000You're familiar with my version of this in the corporate world, having read the book.
00:43:45.000Tell me about what your reaction was at that time and what your journey was through that.
00:43:52.000I'd already come through the NBA 10 years of fighting the landslide of liberalism that had corrupted the NBA. And would you call yourself at this point in time a conservative or not necessarily?
00:44:25.000Well, I didn't really leave, but I'll just say in my own personal life, you know, there's a metric, a measure of what a practicing Catholic is supposed to be doing on a daily, weekly basis.
00:44:34.000And then there's people who are still going to church, and then there are people who don't believe in God at all, right?
00:44:40.000But anyway, I'll say that I'd already seen this landslide of woke politics and liberalism through my fight with the NBA. And I had a huge problem with it.
00:44:50.000I had a huge chip on my shoulder against the entire mainstream liberal establishment because I saw mental health.
00:44:56.000Which I don't like to even say mental health.
00:44:58.000Mental health is another way to say the human condition.
00:45:00.000Where mind, body, and spirit converge into our perceivable existence.
00:45:05.000And when you say we don't care enough to make policy about the human condition, what you're really saying is we don't really care about humanity, which is in alignment with their technocratic sort of post-human society movement, which is really what we're dealing with at the highest levels of globalism, right?
00:45:21.000Is we have to find a way to live forever.
00:45:24.000So I've spent 10 years dealing with that.
00:45:44.000And I thought watching the video, because the Black Lives Matter movement had This was a buildup.
00:45:53.000George Floyd was the buildup after Trayvon Martin.
00:45:56.000George Floyd was the climax of what began with Trayvon Martin.
00:46:01.000And I had watched Black Lives Matter Do their political moves.
00:46:10.000And I had watched the NBA players jump on board at different times, but then sell out when it mattered most, where the hard lines should have been.
00:46:20.000George Floyd is killed, and I feel the same sense of...
00:46:26.000Sadness and outrage that every American citizen should have felt watching the video.
00:46:30.000The government is too big and the police state is dangerous.
00:46:34.000And they've been dangerous for a long time.
00:46:36.000It's only now you get to see it on Facebook Live.
00:46:38.000And it doesn't matter what that man did.
00:46:42.000Within context, right, if you rob a bank woman at gunpoint and you're fleeing with the gun and you got it pointed at an officer, when you're handcuffed with your chest on the pavement and you have no chance to run, let alone be a harm or danger, am I an American citizen?
00:47:01.000Am I a Roman citizen, as they would say in the Bible?
00:47:03.000Do you have the right to beat and bind a Roman citizen without a fair trial?
00:47:07.000And I know George Floyd was on fentanyl, and I know he had a previous criminal history, and so too may be the same circumstance for all of us, including yourself, if you continue to tell the truth the way you do.
00:47:19.000And when the truth becomes deemed illegal, you will want a person like me out there in the streets that looks at a situation where the police state reaches too far and goes, that's not right, I don't care what you say he did.
00:48:59.000So I'm watching this and I go, I'm not going to let them control the narrative.
00:49:02.000I'm taking my protests to the Federal Reserve.
00:49:05.000Because to me, the Fed and this sort of economic Ponzi scheme that's been run on both black people and white people a few neighborhoods away, but conjoined by economic policy, is the whole system is guilty that you guys are chanting at the rallies.
00:49:23.000You just don't understand that the Fed should be a target because your Marxist liberal professors down the street the other way at the university have intentionally taught you not to look at the economic...
00:50:18.000I mean, because my thing was, okay, we have a corporatocracy.
00:50:23.000We have a bunch of young, affluent, educated white liberals that are infatuated with this conversation about justice and freedom.
00:50:30.000But somewhere in their education, There was a glass ceiling or a threshold placed on them venturing over the line of what many would call conspiracy theory or accepted narrative about the institutions that preside over us.
00:50:52.000Um, I said, if we're going to talk about justice, if we're going to talk about the system, if you guys want to talk about the system, if you want to talk about policing, if you want to talk about the military industrial complex, because to me, policing is the lowest rung of the military industrial complex.
00:51:06.000Not to say that police officers are doing the bidding of the military, knowingly, but the police are the lowest rung of the military industrial complex.
00:51:15.000So you're saying let's ratchet this up one rung and go to the...
00:52:44.000This is common cause with, I think, what many libertarians in this country and I think what many conservatives in this country feel now, too.
00:54:47.000And so I'll tell you, just to wrap up George Floyd, is eventually the BLM and Antifa community leaders who are there to sort of stifle and shape and direct the anti-establishment spirit of common folk in the metropolitan areas.
00:55:05.000Eventually, they got wise to it, and they hit me with the litmus question.
00:55:08.000And the litmus question is, all across the country, the LGBTQ. So I want to talk about the Fed and economic tyranny.
00:55:16.000They're like, no, no, no, no, you got to check the box here.
00:55:17.000No, the thing is, how do you feel about transgenders?
00:55:21.000And I say exactly what I feel about the LGBTQ. They're citizens.
00:55:56.000And that's what I was trying to tell people.
00:55:57.000But anyway, the nonprofit leaders and the BLM activists, you know, they kind of, you know, discarded.
00:56:04.000They were not going to let Royce lead any more protests or don't participate with him anymore.
00:56:10.000And so I kind of backed off because I knew that the damage had been done.
00:56:14.000I had poked the hole in the wall that needed to be poked.
00:56:18.000And then the 2020 election in January 6th.
00:56:21.000And when January 6th happened, I looked and I tweeted, I said, you all are just mad that you didn't do it.
00:56:30.000And I'm not saying every aspect of it.
00:56:34.000This is how the pendulum swings and you and I both know how sophisticated the security state is in the intelligence community in the deep state.
00:57:00.000But in general, you know, when you look at just the overall attitude towards protest, I thought it was abhorrent what the Congress and the Senate had to say in the wake of January 6th.
00:57:12.000Because what they effectively said to American citizens everywhere is, under no circumstances should your frustration with us, under no circumstances should your frustration with us and our corruption, our crony capitalism, ever come to our front door.
00:57:29.000Under no, and they even said it explicitly.
00:57:32.000Who was the black guy who helped lead the January 6th ex post facto?
00:59:22.000Either we're in the last hour of freedom or we're not.
00:59:26.000Let's be clear about it and let's talk about what's next.
00:59:29.000So then what led you from there to the doorstep of your Senate race now, which I am Certainly after this conversation, I'm going to be following much more closely.
01:00:50.000We are faced with an enemy that has undermined every aspect of our Constitution, of what it means to be American, undermined the value of our citizenship.
01:01:51.000Well, I'm going to be watching that race very closely.
01:01:56.000I am proud of you for having the courage to tell your story on such a Diverse range of issues over your career.
01:02:06.000You don't need my advice on this, but I share this as a reflection, not as advice.
01:02:13.000Don't shy away from the mental health element of this now.
01:02:20.000We're in the middle of a mental health epidemic in this country that I personally believe is driven by the vacuum of national values, faith, patriotism, hard work, family.
01:02:34.000And if you can play a role in helping to fill that void of purpose and meaning, but tie your own personal journey into it, I think there could be a really powerful conversation in this country, not just in Minnesota, but in this country that you can help spawn.
01:02:50.000And I am happy to continue this one if this is helpful in elevating this, not just within Minnesota, but to a national stage about what's actually driving that mental health epidemic, not just amongst athletes or NBA players, but across this country today.
01:03:04.000And I think there's something deeper going on at the heart.