#808 - Michael Wood, Jr.

Joe Rogan (0:03)

Yes, and we're live. Welcome back, Mr. Wood.

How are you, buddy?

Michael Wood, Jr. (0:08)

Good. It's been a wild year.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

For people who don't know, Michael was a former, you were a former, well, you're never really a former Marine, right? Isn't that one of those things? Where you're a Marine, you stay a Marine?

Michael Wood, Jr. (0:18)

I don't quite buy that.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Some Marines do.

Michael Wood, Jr. (0:21)

If I would have stayed, maybe.

Joe Rogan (0:23)

For the Marines who agree with that, okay, you were a Marine, former Sergeant in the Baltimore Police Department, and you came on the podcast a while back and exposed some pretty eye-opening information about how the whole system sort of works in this sort of a kind of a closed loop in Baltimore, where the same neighborhoods are having the same kind of crime in the same sort of scenarios over and over again. And that was a really important podcast for me, and it was a really important podcast for a lot of people that listened to it, because they got exposed to the inner workings of police departments by someone who was, I was really happy how honest you were about all of it, about the thrill of chasing people and all of the cool stuff about it. And we scheduled this podcast quite a while ago. And it's kind of crazy that you're coming in the weekend after these insane shootings in Orlando. And I'm absolutely not happy that that happened, but I'm happy, as happy as I could be that you're here while this is all going down and we get to kind of talk about these moments, these insane moments that happen, it seems like every few months or so, some new insane moment happens where some person, usually a man, blows a fucking fuse and winds up killing a ton of people.

I don't know what, if anything, and I'm hoping maybe you'll have some insight, what if anything could ever be done to stop something like this?

Michael Wood, Jr. (2:11)

Well, this is where we get into the Mike Rhodes, the dirty liberal thing.

And we're going to start talking about gun control, because I don't know what else we can talk about. Your only other option is to continue a cycle of more and more force upon one another.

So what we know for sure, without a doubt, that the path we're on, it is only a matter of time before this record is broken, right? So what we're doing will result in that. But we have this anti-intellectualism in America that just won't take that evidence and apply it to what we know is going to be the end result. We have countries that have done gun control. They don't have mass shootings. We have mass shootings literally on the daily in America. You just don't hear about them all. So mass shootings generally characterize three or four more casualties, something like that. But this happens every day in these cities. Does it really? Yeah, you don't hear about it. Well, when it's a backyard barbecue shooting in the hood.

Joe Rogan (3:13)

Right, right. Yeah, so you could think of it as that. A lot of people don't categorize those as mass shootings because you think of mass shootings as someone going into a crowded place and killing a bunch of civilians or innocent people, I should say. Whereas they think of those kind of shootings in the hood as rival gangs, people competing over drug dealing territory, things along those lines, which is another point because you were running for, you wanted to be the head of police of Chicago.

Is that still going on?

Michael Wood, Jr. (3:46)

No, I mean, they certainly, the corruption went in and so we could tell that story real quick. What they did is they did a national search.

So the laws in Chicago said that this appointed police board has to do a nationwide search and then they give three names to the mayor. The mayor investigates those people and then chooses one.

So, I predict that they weren't going to go with me. I'm too far ahead still, that no one's really ready to take that bite yet, but it's still something we could have talked about and they would have had the opportunity. I figured they would pick a black guy who was educated and not from Chicago. That was my prediction and that's who the police board did choose. They chose a guy from Atlanta who fit that bill to the T. He was going to be the black guy that represents the police department, but still totes their line. I'm thinking of a word that everybody knows and I'm just not saying it, so you can all pick up on what I'm suggesting.