The Real Problem With The United States Of America Montel Williams Reveals

0:000 secondsWe believe in this thing called the Second Amendment, but most people don’t even know what that Second Amendment means.
0:055 secondsThey think that they can indiscriminately have a gun anytime they want, use it anytime they want. That’s not true. Yeah, 2026 and we need to have open carry in Florida.
0:1212 secondsI need to have people walking up and down the aisles of grocery stores with guns on their hips.
0:1717 secondsIt’s ignorance, it’s stupidity. We’re not evolved at all as a species. Immigration is not an issue.
0:2626 secondsImmigration is not the problem. Racism is the problem.
0:2929 secondsWe don’t have an immigration problem, we have a race problem. We have a hatred problem. We have an ignorance problem. Education in America has never been about education.
0:3939 secondsI’d like to see mankind really make a real serious attempt at evolving.
Chapter 2: The Only Way Out Is Through and confronting social problems
0:4646 secondsI don’t believe man has much longer on this planet. I’m not talking hundreds of years. I don’t think we’re going to survive the next 60 years.
0:5858 seconds50 years.
1:001 minuteIf we’re lucky, 40. Hi, Montel. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
1:091 minute, 9 secondsSo, throughout your career, obviously, in the Naval Academy and spending time in the military and your show, and the common denominator of everything has been service.
1:221 minute, 22 secondsHas that been something for you as a little child that you always wanted to serve?
1:281 minute, 28 secondswhether it was the community, people, something greater than yourself?
1:321 minute, 32 secondsYeah, from the earliest age, I can remember.
1:341 minute, 34 secondsI was always, you know, literally a person who believes in doing things that are greater than yourself and, you know, doing something to leave behind that most people don’t attempt to leave behind.
1:461 minute, 46 secondsYou have a project, The Only Way Out Is Through. I love that. Tell us about that project.
1:511 minute, 51 secondsIt’s a project that we’re working on with another producer, and it’s about identifying those things. that have been impediments in people’s lives.
1:591 minute, 59 secondsI mean, we’re looking at everything from PTSD to gun violence across America.
2:042 minutes, 4 secondsAs a matter of fact, I just shot an episode of this program a couple weeks ago in Denver,
2:122 minutes, 12 secondsColorado, looking at how can we get our society to pay more attention to gun violence, you know, and instead of just paying lip service to it.
2:252 minutes, 25 secondsBecause that’s what we do as a nation is just pay lip service.
2:282 minutes, 28 secondsAnd the truth of the matter is that we’re never going to find a solution to gun violence until we as a society actually face the true fact that we have a problem.
2:412 minutes, 41 secondsWe believe in this thing called the Second Amendment, but most people don’t even know what that Second Amendment means.
2:462 minutes, 46 secondsThey think it’s that they can indiscriminately have a gun anytime they want, use it anytime they want. That’s not true. You know, the Second Amendment was put in place to…
2:552 minutes, 55 secondstry to help societally us not fall victim to a king and a queen and a monarchy that dictated everything we do.
3:053 minutes, 5 secondsIt was to be there so that if, in fact, you had to raise up arms for freedom, you did so.
3:113 minutes, 11 secondsBut now we look at it as if it’s, a fork on the dinner table.
3:183 minutes, 18 secondsYou know, everybody has a right to have a fork on your dinner table. Yeah. But not everybody has a right to take that fork and stab it in your friend’s face.
Chapter 3: Gun ownership, open carry, and the Second Amendment
3:263 minutes, 26 secondsSo the truth of the matter is that until we start to literally look at and listen to and hear from those who have suffered from gun violence, we’re never really going to understand what that does to people.
3:393 minutes, 39 secondsAnd so what this show does is it kind of looks at, we’re planning on looking at every one of the social ills that we have, from domestic violence to…
3:493 minutes, 49 secondsUm, um, poverty to hopelessness and try to figure out how we can help a person who seems to be in that situation understand that somebody’s been through it before you.
Chapter 4: Immigration, racism, fear, and division in America
4:014 minutes, 1 secondSo why not learn from what they took away from their journey? I love what you said about that hopelessness. I find that a lot since COVID.
4:114 minutes, 11 secondsThat need for more and more hope, I feel, is deep loneliness and need for community.
4:194 minutes, 19 secondsObviously, We’re dealing with gun violence.
4:234 minutes, 23 secondsHere in Florida, we have open carry.
4:264 minutes, 26 secondsYeah, 2026, and we need to have open carry in Florida. I need to have people walking up and down the aisles of grocery stores with guns on their hips.
4:344 minutes, 34 seconds10,000 years, and this is how far we’ve evolved.
4:384 minutes, 38 secondsWe’ve evolved, you know, 10,000 years ago, we took a rock and slammed it over somebody’s head. So our rock is in the shape of a gun these days.
4:464 minutes, 46 secondsHave we not evolved at all as a species?
4:504 minutes, 50 secondsI feel a lot of the issues, right? You talk about like immigration here. Immigration is not an issue.
4:584 minutes, 58 secondsWell, I always say this to people. It’s no big deal. until it happens to you or someone you love.
5:045 minutes, 4 secondsNo, when I say it’s not an issue, I’m trying to say that it’s just based on what we feel about immigration is based on ignorance,
5:135 minutes, 13 secondshatred, and fear, period. That’s who we are.
5:165 minutes, 16 secondsAnd again, have we not evolved?
5:185 minutes, 18 secondsYou know, since the time that we were in a cave looking over at the other person’s cave and figuring out that they got fired and we don’t, so let’s go take theirs.
Chapter 5: Why Montel believes the education system needs to be reinvented
5:245 minutes, 24 secondsTo say immigration is an issue is to say that America is an issue because America is a country filled with immigrants.
5:315 minutes, 31 secondsThis entire society, this entire country was built on immigration. But that’s not what we’re saying. Immigration is not the problem.
5:395 minutes, 39 secondsRacism is the problem. We don’t want those people who don’t look like us.
5:465 minutes, 46 secondsAnd who those us are are people who come from the northern hemisphere who think that for some reason that
5:555 minutes, 55 secondsthe lack of melanin and the lack of the ability to exist on this planet.
6:016 minutes, 1 secondfully, somehow makes you better than others. So we don’t have an immigration problem.
6:096 minutes, 9 secondsWe have a race problem. We have a hatred problem. We have an ignorance problem.
6:146 minutes, 14 secondsWhen we start dealing with those, the immigration problem goes away. What do we do in general about the education system? I think it’s completely broken.
6:236 minutes, 23 secondsAnd I don’t know, I don’t, I think in my mind solutions on a mass scale, okay, what’s the solution that’s sustainable over time?
6:326 minutes, 32 secondsStop throwing things under one umbrella and say, what do we do to fix this? Education.
6:386 minutes, 38 secondsFirst off, education in America has never been about education. People don’t know that schools were built in America to keep children from being raped on farms.
6:506 minutes, 50 secondsSchools were built in Europe to keep children from being raped in castles.
6:556 minutes, 55 secondsSchools were built because, at the time, we couldn’t control adults.
7:017 minutes, 1 secondto leave 12 and 13-year-old little girls alone. Think about that.
7:067 minutes, 6 secondsSo they had to find some place way off in the distance to send your daughter when she became eight years old or nine years old before she started menstruating so that the guy down the street wouldn’t rape her when she was walking to get water.
7:197 minutes, 19 secondsWe built schools in America when we were putting three and four and five-year-olds out in the fields and making them pick plants.
7:307 minutes, 30 secondsWe made these buildings, set them up as if they were little factories, came up with this idea of reading,
7:397 minutes, 39 secondswriting, arithmetic. Yeah, right. Didn’t think about teaching them any other skills whatsoever.
7:477 minutes, 47 secondsSo we have to go back and reinvent what education is all about. What is the idea of it?
7:547 minutes, 54 secondsThe idea is to teach a society.
7:597 minutes, 59 secondstools that can help benefit the society, then we need to go back and reinvent the entire wheel, don’t we?
8:078 minutes, 7 secondsBecause by sitting in classrooms, teaching them things that they’re never going to use in life, hasn’t done any good with dealing with how to teach us how to be better to our fellow man.
8:208 minutes, 20 secondsYou know, the term mankind is a really interesting term, isn’t it?
8:248 minutes, 24 secondsIt means be kind to your fellow man, not… I’m kind of like a man.
8:318 minutes, 31 secondsSo at some point in time, when we really figure out what it is we want to achieve with this thing we call education, then I think we throw the whole thing out and start all over again.
8:438 minutes, 43 secondsThere are people that are definitely trying to do that.
8:458 minutes, 45 secondsMy son showed me a picture the other day, 100 years ago, you have the classroom. He’s just showing me.
8:508 minutes, 50 secondsHe’s like, why do I got to go to school?
8:528 minutes, 52 secondsHe’s like, it’s the same. Everything has changed except for the classroom. Right. It’s like, what do we… What are we doing?
8:578 minutes, 57 secondsAnd really, everything has changed only because technology has changed. But it hasn’t changed.
9:029 minutes, 2 secondsIt’s still making you memorize things, regurgitate them back on a piece of paper, and never use them again.
9:119 minutes, 11 secondsWhat value is that? Why not determine what the interest is of the individual and then help them steep their brain in facts and material that will help?
9:269 minutes, 26 secondswith their interests. Not everybody needs to be a AI designer. Not everybody needs to be a computer technician.
9:359 minutes, 35 secondsNot everybody needs to be a surgeon. Not everybody wants to be any of those things.
Chapter 6: Childhood trauma, school integration, and learning to define himself
9:449 minutes, 44 secondsNot everybody.
9:469 minutes, 46 secondsSo let’s find out what the person really wants to do, to use, to contribute to our society, and then steep their brain with the information they need to be able to share that with others.
9:569 minutes, 56 secondsI thought about, I was thinking about what you said about mankind, and it came to me this year.
10:0210 minutes, 2 secondsIn the Bible, it talks about love thy fellow like they love thyself.
10:0510 minutes, 5 secondsI was thinking, I think the core issue is that we are actually loving each other like we love our, loving each other like we love ourselves.
10:1410 minutes, 14 secondsThe problem is we don’t love ourselves. Correct. That’s the problem.
10:1710 minutes, 17 secondsYou were very lucky at second grade to be able to see that, that you’re going to take charge of your life. That’s a very young age.
10:2410 minutes, 24 secondsBecause I know I was picturing just like my second grader.
10:2710 minutes, 27 secondsI’m like, wow, if he can see that. That’s tremendous.
10:3010 minutes, 30 secondsThat’s really, really great. And the only reason why I was able to see that was out of trauma. I’ll tell you why.
10:3610 minutes, 36 secondsI went to, I’m a product of busing, if you don’t know much about busing in America.
10:4110 minutes, 41 secondsBut back in the late 50s, early 60s, you know, trying to segregate schools, or sorry, trying to integrate schools.
10:4910 minutes, 49 secondsWe put this program together where we put little kids, mostly black kids, on buses and would ship them 10, 15 miles away from their home.
10:5810 minutes, 58 secondsto go to school so that that school wouldn’t just be all white.
11:0111 minutes, 1 secondAnd I’m one of those kids that got bused to an all-white school, you know, had to for multiple years
11:0911 minutes, 9 secondswitness the protest and the anxiety in the hearts and minds of those who felt as if their schools were being taken over,
11:1811 minutes, 18 secondsand had an incident with a teacher who tried to define me because of my race.
11:2511 minutes, 25 secondsThat made me recognize that that’s what she was trying to do when I was only in the second grade.
11:2911 minutes, 29 secondsSo when you say you look at your second grader that you have, think about an adult trying to define your second grader by the color of their skin.
Chapter 7: What Montel would most like to change about society
11:3911 minutes, 39 secondsAnd what could have been my choices, I could have been one of those kids that acted out and would have been considered special needs.
11:5211 minutes, 52 secondsInstead.
11:5411 minutes, 54 secondsI decided to recognize the false power that that person thought they had over me and recognize what I could do with the power that I had within.
12:0712 minutes, 7 secondsMontel, at this point in your life, what would you love to see?
12:1112 minutes, 11 secondsIf you had like your wish list, your top one or two things for society, for yourself, for your family, what is it that you would like to see?
12:2112 minutes, 21 secondsI’d like to see mankind. really make a real serious attempt at evolving.
12:3312 minutes, 33 secondsWe live in a world right now where no one seems to allow the idea that it took all of us to get here to resonate.
12:4512 minutes, 45 secondsWe live in a world where, as a society, we seem to still believe that we, when I say we, I’m just talking the collective we.
12:5512 minutes, 55 secondsthat one race within the we is somehow more powerful than another race within the we.
13:0213 minutes, 2 secondsWhen we now know for a fact, after all the science and research that’s been done, when you look at the human genome,
13:1213 minutes, 12 secondsall of us are 99.5% the exact same.
13:1913 minutes, 19 secondsNot 91, not 92.
13:2513 minutes, 25 seconds99% the same.
13:2913 minutes, 29 secondsGenetically, from a DNA standpoint, though you and I don’t look the same, we’re identical.
13:4113 minutes, 41 secondsIf mankind can finally see itself as human…
13:5313 minutes, 53 secondsThat would be the biggest thing that I would wish for our world. That would be the thing that I think would help this species survive longer than this species is going to survive.
Chapter 8: Human evolution, technology, and the future of mankind
14:0514 minutes, 5 secondsBecause different than most, I don’t believe man has much longer on this planet.
14:1614 minutes, 16 secondsI’m not talking hundreds of years. I don’t think we’re going to survive the next 60 years. 50 years.
14:2514 minutes, 25 secondsIf we’re lucky, 40. There is that concept of the oneness and getting rid of the ego and reaching that point.
14:3614 minutes, 36 secondsIs it like a point of enlightenment similar to that idea where we see that? If we can.
14:4314 minutes, 43 secondsI mean, you know, but I think that unfortunately, you know…
14:5214 minutes, 52 secondsA couple thousand years from now, when the electronic species starts to reevaluate how it took control.
15:0115 minutes, 1 secondhow it took over, how it sustained this planet for its own use, it’ll look back and say,
15:1015 minutes, 10 secondssomething happened within the brain matter of human beings that stopped down their evolution, shut it down.
15:2115 minutes, 21 secondsWhen that evolution shut down, mankind’s future was in jeopardy from that moment on. I want to thank you so much.
15:3115 minutes, 31 secondsIt’s really been special. Well, thank you. I really appreciate you sharing. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
15:3515 minutes, 35 seconds