All right, but let me talk about something that might get me in a lot of trouble. I'm developing a concept. Maybe somebody already has a name for it but I'm going to give it a name. I'm going to call it cultural gravity. Cultural gravity meaning that if you are a product of a particular culture, no matter which culture that is, and you want to rise above the average and be more successful in whatever way you measure that, if you want to get out of your culture, your culture has a certain gravity that's sort of sucking you back in, right? And that gravity works on a lot of levels. It's what people say. It's their history. It's bias. It's you know it's how much money and connections they have in that group. There's the attitudes. It's you know it's the family structure and all that. But every culture has a different gravity.

And it feels to me, and by the way what I'm going to say now I first heard from African Americans, so if I didn't tell you that first you'd say hey white boy why are you talking about things you don't know. So as best I can understand it, this is an argument made by very thoughtful African-American people who are trying to make a difference. And the idea is that the black community has a high cultural gravity.

Now by analogy you see it with this Bakari Sellers and the Ye situation here. Ye is doing something that is unambiguously positive, bringing attention to this serious intractable problem of prisoners and ex-cons and getting them jobs and putting them back into productive flow. He's doing all that stuff this week. And what is a far less successful black man doing? He's dragging him back. He's trying to drag him back. And you see this all over the place. The number of times you see other black Americans trying to sort of drag back black Americans who are either too white or they're not playing the game the right way or they're doing something they don't like. It just feels like there's a lot of cultural gravity.

Compare that to let's say the Jewish culture. And this will be obviously a stereotype so I'm not going to say this, I'm not going to pretend this applies to every single person in any of these groups. So nothing I'm saying is universal. But it seems to me that the sort of the narrative, the story, the stereotype for the Jewish community is you know why aren't you a doctor or marrying a doctor or are you a lawyer, are you a professional? Now that's the opposite of cultural gravity. That's almost like cultural propellant. It's like if you want to rise above the average everybody's looking at you and say can we help? What can we do to help you rise above the average?

If I talk about my own experience being a white kid in a relatively low income country setting in upstate New York, so it was very rural, forty people in my graduating class, ninety-seven percent white probably. And when it became kind of clear even in my youth that I had the potential to maybe do something, so for most of my school experience my teachers had sort of identified me early as somebody who might be able to do something. And I had the opposite of cultural gravity. I felt the culture lifting me. I always felt that the people around me who were primarily people like me, you know white people who didn't have much money, I felt support like an actual cultural support all the time. I don't know if I ever felt anything different.

I can remember you know a little bit when I was in grade school people would call me a nerd or something. They would call me a nerd because I had high grades. But it was never really cruel. It never bothered me like it never really felt like I was being bullied because it was always said with almost a compliment element to it. You know when somebody would say oh you yeah you know you brainiac you nerd it never was mean. All right it was kidding maybe. So yeah maybe there was some envy in there but it never seemed to be designed to hold me back. So I felt that my culture had no cultural gravity. As soon as the cord was cut, and the cord was you know my youth, so when you're young you can't go that far right because you're a kid you got to get through school and stuff. But the moment the string was cut on the balloon there was nothing stopping me. I had no cultural gravity. Everybody seemed to be rooting for me within my culture.

And I hear from smart African-American leaders that one of the biggest problems in the black community is kind of cultural gravity. That's this sort of holding you back. And you see this with Bakari Sellers' comment. Now I think this is a special case because it's politics and it wouldn't matter what color any of them were. You know that the left is going to be against the right. But it reminded me of this. It felt like Bakari was holding Kanye back.

And I saw a radio interview recently. I forget who the DJ was but it was someone who knew Kanye from the old days. And you know they'd come up together, knew him before he was super famous, before he was famous at all actually. And as they were talking during the interview I kept saying to myself I feel like he's trying to hold Kanye back. He's not saying it but I can feel the cultural gravity. Because he kept saying stuff like why can't he be the old Kanye? We like the old Kanye. You know go back to the old way. And I'm thinking to myself everything that that old friend of his was saying, the person who was very identified with the culture, there were literally friends back in the day, everything he was saying felt like cultural gravity.

I don't know if it's jealousy. Somebody's saying jealousy. I don't know if that's it. That's the simple answer right? It's simple to just say jealousy. But why did I not experience any jealousy? Why did my culture not produce any jealousy that I could register? It was almost entirely you go. I mean I feel there from my earliest experience that people were saying you know you go boy you do what you can do you know make us proud go forth.

Don't you feel there was something very different about Kanye? Hell yeah. So the comment there was don't I think there's something very different about Kanye? Yeah that's why we're talking about him. He's about as different as you can get. But the most distinguishing characteristic of him right now is he's made a stand against cultural gravity. Now he refers to it as a mental prison and I don't love prison analogies so it makes sense and it works for him and stuff but just personally prison isn't the analogy I want in my head. But he is rejecting publicly and at great personal and professional risk, he's rejecting cultural gravity. He's looking to get bigger and to make more of a difference and to help more. And who's holding him back? It's not white people. You're not seeing a lot of Trump supporters say hey Kanye stop trying to be useful in a positive way to change society. Stop doing that with your anti-intellectualism. You know, are white people saying that? White people say go Kanye let's see what you can do. Let's knock it out. Let's see what you can do. Totally rooting for him. Not everybody's rooting for him but it feels like white people are more lifting and more supportive of his change of topics to more of a political realm.

All right I don't know what to do about that by the way. So first of all I don't know if it's true and secondly I don't know what to do about it if it is true. So you know according to people who know what they're doing and have come out of those environments it's true but I can't verify it from my own experience.