-How are you, Malcolm? -I'm doing well, Seth.
How you doing? -I'm doing well.
Thank you for being here. And congratulations.
You opened the season with a win.
I know you've been at this for a while.
How sore are you on a Monday after a game day?
-Uh, I'm pretty sore right now.
But, you know, you get in the cold tub,
you ice up a little bit
and you're back at it tomorrow, so --
but nothing out of the norm.
-So last time we spoke, you were here,
you were a newly crowned Super Bowl champion.
And now we're speaking after a game in which you played
in front of no fans.
How was that as an experience for you?
I mean, again, you've been playing football
for a long time, but I'm sure you've never played
in an empty stadium like that.
-Yeah, it's weird.
The first couple drives felt very much like a practice
or a scrimmage.
They talk about having, like, crowd noise
pumped in that's about 70 decibels.
That's like about as loud as -- it sounds like somebody's,
like, vacuum -- vacuuming the stadium.
That's how loud it was.
But you know, at the end of the day, it was a game
and you start to get into the competitiveness of it
and you get used to it.
But it definitely was a weird feeling
not having your fan base there.
-I know this summer, you had expressed some doubt,
some hesitation about playing this season.
Now that you're a week into it
after a very obviously weird training camp and no preseason,
how comfortable do you feel with the protocols
and safety measures that are in place?
-Yeah. I think there's been a lot of ground
that's been made up since the spring,
when we really didn't know much about
what our protocols were going to be.
A lot of it was negotiated
between our player union and the league.
And I think we've gotten to a point where, you know,
guys feel comfortable, we're getting tested every day.
The positive tests have been really, really low.
So I think guys are comfortable,
but that came about through a lot of negotiating,
a lot of pushing and pulling.
And you know, I'm glad we created an environment
that at least allows some guys to feel as safe as possible
as we try to play this game.
-So, we also spoke before about your foundation.
And this is basically an organization
that's trying to serve underserved communities.
And in a time like this, you know, we always find out
when something along the lines of a pandemic happens,
it of course affects underserved communities
disproportionately.
I assume you have to shift your focus
and the way you approach helping people out.
Have you found that to be the case
during these incredibly difficult last six,
seven months? -Yeah.
I think to what you alluded, you know,
whenever you have these national crisises,
you know, often times the communities that are already
disadvantaged are -- get it the worst.
And also, so does those nonprofits that, you know,
help those communities.
And so, for us, we've had to pivot
not -- you know, as with social distancing
and a lot of the restrictions.
We have a lot of in-person programs.
And what we did was say, "Okay, how do we make this virtual
and turn all of this into the needs of today?"
And so, we are creating an online curriculum,
an e-curriculum that kids can go and experience for free
and get job training and job readiness,
not only for kids who are going to go off
to four-year universities
but also those who are going to take those nontraditional paths
and go directly into the workforce.
And so, we're doing that and trying to not preach to kids
at what they should be, but really give them
opportunities to see other people
who have taken these paths and have been successful,
so they can see themselves as creatives,
see themselves as entrepreneurs,
and really pursue those types of paths.
-You're also a producer now,
and one of the things you've produced
is this really eye-opening documentary that I think
allows voices that you're not used to hearing
tell their stories.
You were originally supposed to be just one of the subjects
in this documentary.
And can you talk about the path from that
to ending up on the producing side of it?
-Yeah. I mean, the film --
I was supposed to just be interviewed,
and it was about kind of this spectrum of black boys
and their humanity.
And I was intrigued because it was directed by a white woman.
And she wanted to tell the story because at some point,
she realized she had a fear of black men
that she couldn't really explain.
It wasn't taught to her, but that she'd just kind of
been conditioned by the things that she'd seen and been --
you know, how black men are portrayed.
And I think -- I've had a good friend tell me recently
when you look at situations like George Floyd
and how somebody can put their knee on a man's neck
for eight minutes -- almost nine minutes --
it's because you have to either see him --
you have to see him either as superhuman or subhuman.
And often times, when we look at how we depict black men
and black boys, it's in those two buckets.
And so there is a wide range of who we are.
We're not monolithic.
You know, we have creativity, we are --
we have minds that are brilliant.
We are creative.
We have fears, we have joys, we have pain.
And so really just being able to explore that,
and what does it look like as early as grade school?
What do our educators look like?
What are the messages that we're sending our kids?
And really just celebrating who we are as black boys.
And now, I'm really excited to do the same
kind of project with black girls,
because I think they are subject to a unique experience
that's even, you know,
further kind of in the depths than black boys.
-Well, congratulations on the documentary.
You are definitely as adept a producer
as you are a football player and an activist.
There's got to be something you're not good at, Malcolm.
Maybe we can get to it next time you're here.
-[ Laughs ] Golf. That's one of them.
-Golf. All right. Thank you.
You and I, finally we have something in common.