East Palo Alto

I thought it was lazy booking by WWE.

Hey, you know what Royce Keyes was? A gangster in East Palo Alto.

So let's have him go back and do that again.

Let's just reprise Crime Time.

And wait a minute, they're getting free housing, free food, cars, et cetera.

So there's this kind of welfare resentment, which is not the most altruistic reason for being angry, but how come they're getting some and we're not getting – if you're going to give it away, why don't we get a piece of the action? Well, I think Americans have mixed emotions because in the inner city, and I'm speaking now when I go up to East Palo Alto or I go through West Fresno or I go through Stockton, cities that have large African-American population, when you look at who is running the stop-and-gos, who's running the 7-Elevens, who is running the gas stations, they're either from the Middle East or from India.

And the question then arises, why hasn't the black community in their own community have black enterprises? We know they can be very entrepreneurial because they were so in the 50s and 40s in these communities.

So they resent people who come in, and Americans are conflicted about it because on the one hand, many of these immigrants are very hardworking and they work under enormously difficult conditions of high crime, high maintenance, high insurance costs, high violence.

It's a weird place.

I feel like you talk about income divides, East Palo Alto versus Stanford, two genetically different worlds, right? Denning House, it's a beautiful woodclad structure.

The screen and the detailing in the screen, again, I'm going to go back to the same question that Princeton asked.

Take us through from the brief through the design process.

At the end of the conversation, he said, we decided together I should check out a meeting.

I was in East Palo Alto, California, and I found a meeting in the Menlo Park.

It was about a 45-minute walk, and it was a beautiful California summer evening.

And on that walk, I started thinking about my heroes.

So instead of paying 100, he would pay 200.

And then we could go give free CAC scans in East Palo Alto and other neighborhoods where they couldn't afford it or they were afraid of it or whatever.

And so now we have lots of companies in Silicon Valley.

I don't want to dox any of the companies that are doing it, but I would say major companies in Silicon Valley are doing this, that are doing the buy one, give one.

Um, and then, yeah, there's some, like, high-level Google and Apple people whose children I helped prepare for college admissions and stuff like that, and that was, that was, like, um, how I was saving up money to survive grad school.

[laughs] Um, so it was a good time working in Menlo Park and Redwood City and East Palo Alto and all those places, and also driving on 101, um, especially.

280, you don't get as many of those, uh, big billboards.

It's more of a scenic drive.

Well, close to my bottom, because I got sober on the 27th of June, I started partying like on June 19th.

And we had started off at the Juneteenth Festival in East Palo Alto.

And then we ended up in Berkeley.

And then we went to Oakland.