A pleasure and honor to be here with you. Thank you for having me.

I think it is something that I acquired over time, perhaps starting early in life. I was the child of parents in the US Foreign Service, so I grew up as an American embassy kid traveling the world beginning at the age of 3. Every 2 years, we were in a different country and then returning home in between assignments. When you take my childhood travels with my parents, and now my adulthood travels as a professional musician, touring and performing around the world, when you combine those two sets of travels, I have been to a total of 62 foreign countries on 6 continents. That has allowed me to be exposed to a multitude of ethnicities, skin colors, religions, cultures, ideologies and all of that has helped shape me. I determined that no matter how far I go from my own country, whether it is right next door to Canada or to Mexico or halfway around the globe, everybody that I have met, everybody that I have encountered, regardless of whether they may not look like me, they may not speak my language or worship as I do, I have always concluded one thing, and that is that we all are human beings.

Being human beings, everybody wants these 5 core values in our lives. They are universal. Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to be respected. We all want to be heard. We all want to be treated fairly and truthfully. We all want the same things for our families as anyone else wants for their family. And I found that if we apply those 5 values or any of them, when we find ourselves in an adversarial situation or a culture or a society in which we are unfamiliar, that our navigation of that situation, that culture, that society will be much smoother, and much more positive.

Mark Twain says, "Travel is fatal and prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness. And many of our people need it solely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime". That is so true. I believe truly that it is the travel and exposure that I was afforded beginning as a young child by my parents that enabled me to see different cultures and be accepting of them.

When I sit down with Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, not that I'm buying into that culture, but I see it as another culture and I treat it with those 5 core values, and that is what has enabled me to be successful. Having done all that travel does not make me a better human being than anybody else by any means. But, what it has given me is a better and broader perspective on humanity than many people who may not have had those experiences. Now, I want to share those experiences either in person or vicariously with those who have not been afforded that kind of travel.

There is absolutely connective tissue there. You described it perfectly. Let me bring them together so you can see they are basically one and the same.

Yes, I am a musician, and yes, I am a race reconciliator, trying to bring people together who think there are racial differences or something. There is only one race. It is the human race. It is man that makes these racial constructs that divide us. But as a band leader, my job, on my stage is to foster harmony between the different voices on my stage, whether they are the vocal voices of people singing, whether they are my instrumental voices, my saxophone player, my piano, my drum, my bass guitar player, the instruments or the vocal voices, I want harmony there. The only time that I want dissonance is when I intentionally inject it into the music for effect. Because if dissonance happens randomly, that is not music, that is noise. That is because somebody hit a bad note or went out of tune. That's not desirable. It is only desirable when you inject it into the music with intent. It is like when you are watching a movie and there is a scary scene, there is some kind of dissonance going on to choke the body. So that is intentional.

Because my job as a bandleader is to foster harmony and only intentional dissonance, I would want the same thing when I come off the stage. When I am vacillating around in society, I want harmony around me. I want to foster that as well. When I see conflict, I want to see what can I do to reconciliate, to resolve this? Because as a musician, I am seeking harmony. So naturally when I am finished playing my gig and I want to be out in society, I want harmony there too.

Well, I have always said that ignorance fosters fear. We fear those things of which we are ignorant. If we don't address that fear and keep that in check and alleviate it, that fear, in turn, will escalate into hatred, because we hate the things that frighten us. If we don't stop the hatred from escalating, that escalates into anger, which then in turn escalates into destruction. We want to destroy the things that we hate. Why? Because they frighten us. But guess what? At the end of the day, they may have been harmless and we are simply ignorant.

My feeling is this, in certain situations, like in a corporation, a company, a department, you can start top down. You want to resolve problems down below on the street, on the floor of the department or whatever, then you start with the administration at the top. If they are tight upstairs, that will trickle down and people down below will also be tight, because they take their cues from the top.

But with situations like this, it has got to be bottom up. I say, forget about the destruction. What has been destroyed is not coming back. Don't accept it as okay. No, it is not okay to destroy things. But don't spend a lot of time trying to address it. It is not going to resolve because it has been destroyed. The destruction is a symptom. It is a byproduct of the nucleus. The root cause. Forget about the hate, it is the same thing. A symptom. The fear, it is the same thing. A symptom. The root cause is the ignorance. If we cure the ignorance, then there is nothing to fear. Because, we fear that of which we are ignorant. With nothing to fear, there is nothing to hate. Because, we hate the things that frighten us. With nothing to hate, there is nothing that makes us angry and we rise to the level of wanting to destroy.

The good thing is, there is a cure for ignorance. That cure is called education and exposure. If we can focus our energy, our efforts, our time and our money on providing that education and exposure, we can alleviate the ignorance. Then those other byproducts don't exist. That is where we should focus. It doesn't matter whether you are a child or an adult, it is the same thing.

I do a lot of lectures, obviously, to adults. But I also speak with children in classrooms. Sometimes I will be talking with them like I am right now, and they are all lined up in their rows of little desks and chairs and they are listening to me. Then all of a sudden, I'll jump up and say, "Hey, hey, there's a snake under your chair", and I'll point to somebody in the front row. I am pointing to the floor under a desk in the front row saying there is a snake there, and everybody 5 rows back starts screaming and throwing their legs up in the air just at my suggestion, there is a snake crawling around the front desk. They are screaming and throwing their legs up and then they realize there is no snake and I'm just making a joke. And they start laughing.

I ask them, "Why were you screaming? Why are you getting all upset?" The response you hear from everybody is, "I hate snakes. I'm afraid of snakes." Well, there is your hate and there is your fear. So I say, "Why do you hate snakes? Why are you afraid of snakes?" "Because they are poisonous. They are slimy." Well, there is your ignorance. If you have ever touched a snake, it is not slimy. It's very dry, and not all snakes are poisonous. There are some good snakes. So, there is your fear, your ignorance and your hatred. And I say to them, "Okay, obviously there was no snake under your desk. I was just joking. However, let's just say there really was a snake under your desk. What would you want me to do about it? Do you know what they say, "Kill it". There is your destruction.

It goes all the way from childhood to adulthood. Ignorance breeds fear, which breeds hatred, which breeds destruction. So let's start at the bottom. Cure the root cause, the nucleus. Then we don't have to worry about those byproducts.

Right. A law will only compel someone's behavior because they don't want to go to jail. It does not change their feelings. The example we had here back in the 50s with Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, where black people were not allowed to ride in the front of the bus. The day that that law changed because of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King's bus boycott, we were allowed to sit wherever we wanted to sit. That did not change the feelings of the other bus riders about us. It just made them accept it because they would be arrested instead of Rosa Parks if they violated the law. Time changed that, exposure to us changed that. We need to accelerate that exposure, accelerate that education, and that will also be very effective.

Yeah, and it is kind of paradoxical. The Silver Dollar Lounge was a lounge, a bar, a nightclub in a town called Frederick, Maryland, which is about an hour and 20 minutes north of Washington, D.C. The Silver Dollar Lounge had a reputation of being an All-White lounge. Black people were not welcome. There were no signs that said whites only. No blacks allowed. Nothing like that. It had no visible signs. But you knew if you went there you would definitely feel uncomfortable and you were not welcome. When you go somewhere where you are not welcome and alcohol is being served, sometimes it is not a good combination. So most black people avoided this place.

Well, I had joined a musical band that was very popular in the area, and it was an all-white band. I was the only black person in the band and they had played at the Silver Dollar Lounge before and now they were having a return engagement there. So, here I am in the Silver Dollar Lounge. My first time and I was the only black person in the whole place. After our first set of music, we were taking a break and I am following the band to go sit down at the band table, take my break when I felt somebody from behind, come up and put their arm across my shoulder. Now I see the whole band in front of me because I'm following them, and I don't know anybody in here. So I'm turning around trying to see who is touching me. It was a white gentleman, about 15, maybe a little bit more years older than me. He had a big smile on his face and he said, "Man, I sure like y'all's music.” I said, "Thank you." I shook his hand and he pointed at the stage and he said, "I've seen this here band before, but I ain't never seen you before. Where did you come from?" And I explained that I just joined the band recently and yes, he has seen them before because they told me they played here before, but this is my first time. And he says, "Man, I sure love your piano playing. This is the very first time I've ever seen a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis". Jerry Lee Lewis was a white rock and roll piano player. He was there at the heyday, at the beginning of rock and roll that was created by black artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley and others. And it was popularized by the white artists, their contemporaries like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley and the Comets, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and many others.

Something I had done while I was playing that set of music reminded him of Jerry Lee, and he made that statement that he'd never seen a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. I was not offended, but I was surprised because given the fact that he was at least a decade and a half older than me, that he did not know the black origin of Jerry Lee Lewis' piano style, which Jerry Lee learned from black blues and boogie woogie piano players. I explained to him that Jerry Lee got it from the same place I did. When I told him of his black origin, he did not believe me. He said, "Oh no, I never seen no black man play like that except you". I said, "Listen, I know Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee is a good friend of mine. He has told me of his influences. He didn't believe that I knew Jerry Lee. He did not believe that Jerry Lee learned it from black people. But he was fascinated with me and wanted me to go back to his table and allow him to buy me a drink.

I don't drink alcohol. But I went back to his table, I let him buy me cranberry juice. He pays the waitress, he takes his glass and he cheers me. He clinks my glass, and then he says, "You know, this is the first time I ever sat down or had a drink with a black man." I'm sitting there like, what? Because given my background of having been all over the place at this point in my life, I had sat down literally with thousands of white people or anybody else to have a meal, a beverage, a conversation and this man had never done that before. It was almost incredulous to me. And so innocently I asked, I said, "Why?" He didn't answer me. He looked down at the table. His buddy elbowed him and said, "Tell him. Tell him". I said, tell me. He looked back at me and he said, "I'm a member of the Ku Klux Klan".

I started laughing at him because I thought he was joking. I know a whole lot about the Ku Klux Klan. I know they don't just come up and embrace a black man and want to buy them a beverage and sit down and hang out and praise their musical talent and have conversations. It is not like that. So this guy must be joking. While I'm laughing at the joke, he goes inside his pocket, looks through his billfold, his wallet, and hands me his Klan membership card. I recognize the Ku Klux Klan insignia. I stop laughing. This card is for real. It's not funny anymore. I give it back to him. But we had a conversation. It is a good conversation. It was a very friendly conversation. And I see how naive this man is. He knew very little about me. He knew even less about music because he didn't know where Jerry Lee's style came from. So we had a good conversation and we talked about the Klans and more. He gave me his phone number. I didn't ask for it. He gave it to me and asked me to call him any time I was to return to this lounge with this band because he wanted to bring his friends, meaning Klansmen and Klanwomen, to see, as he put it, "To see the black man who plays like Jerry Lee."

I would call him every 6 weeks. He would come. He would bring Klansmen and Klanswomen. They didn't come in robes and hoods. They came in regular clothing, and they would gather near the stage and watch me play the piano with the band. They would get out on the dance floor. They danced to our music. And on the break, I would make my way over to his table to thank him for coming. Meet some of them. There were two of them, every time I walked that way, they would get up and move to the other side of the room. When I left, they would come back to the table.

The message was, we don't want to talk to you. We don't want to shake your hand, we just want to look at you. That was okay. The others, they were curious. They wanted to talk to me, meet me, etc. That was a good thing. That went on to the end of that year, at which time I quit that band and I went back to playing rock and roll and some other genres of music, and I lost track of him.

But then it dawned on me, because as a child, I had a racist experience with people throwing things at me at the age of 10, when I was the only black participant in a parade. Not everybody, some people threw things at me and I did not understand that. When that happened, I formed a question in my mind at the age of 10, which was, "How can you hate me when you don't know me?" So I have always been looking for the answer to that question. After I left the band that I played with at the Silver Dollar, a few years later, it dawned on me, Daryl, you missed your opportunity to find the answer to that question, because who is the best person to ask other than someone who would go so far to join an organization that practices hating people who don't look like them, who don't believe as they believe? Get back in contact with that Klansman and ask him to introduce you to the leader of the Klan here in the Maryland area. Sit him down, interview him and write a book, because no book had been written by a black author on the Ku Klux Klan from the perspective of sitting down face to face having an interview.

Absolutely. We start off at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. You spend 5 minutes talking with your worst enemy, your strongest adversary and you will find something in common and that gap narrows. You spend another 5 minutes, you find more in common, and it narrows even more. When you get to that point, you are having a relationship with your adversary. It may not be that you are going to each other's house for dinner at this point, but you're having a cordial relationship. You keep on talking. You even find more in common, and now you are even closer. That is a friendship. You may not agree on everything, but you're having some kind of friendship. When you reach that point, you have found more in common than you have in contrast. The trivial things that you have in contrast, such as skin color, or whether you go to a mosque, a temple, a synagogue, or a church or wherever, begins to matter less and less, and then that person begins to think, why did I hate that person? I didn't even know him. Now I know him. I can't hate this person sitting across from me. Maybe he doesn't go to my religious institution, but he wants the same thing that I want. And so you have a cognitive dissonance. It's very hard to hate somebody when you are sitting across the table speaking the same language and finding all these commonalities. Then you begin to question yourself.

I'm also very fond of saying that we need to do something. We can do it physically or we can do it virtually. Let me explain what I'm talking about. In diverse populations, especially here in our country, whether it is a college or a company or whatever, you find people there who work together on the same project. They may even share the same cubicle. But what happens at 12 noon, they go downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch. Blacks sit with blacks. Hispanics sit with Hispanics. They self-segregate? Does this mean that they are racist? No, not necessarily.

Many people feel comfortable around familiarity. They want to share something in common and that's okay. Now, if you try to go and sit at their table and they say, "Oh, no, no, you go back to your table. You don't belong here". Then, yes, there's a problem and it needs to be addressed. But I would say, once or twice a week, get up from your comfort group at your lunch table and walk across the cafeteria and sit at somebody else's table, because you have a lot to learn from that person or those people, and they have a lot to learn from you. It's a teaching learning exchange. And in the process, I will guarantee you, you will most likely make a new friend and it will broaden your horizons.

I don't have any familiarity. I am familiar with everybody because that is how I grew up. I was changing cultures every 2 years all over the place. I didn't have a familiar group that I grew up with. So, walk across the cafeteria and sit with somebody else's group. You can do it physically if you are going into work or you are going into school, or you can do it virtually over the Internet like you and I are talking right now. Contact somebody from your company who works in another state, in another country. When you are off work, contact them and say, "Let's just have a conversation and get to know one another. What do you do with your family on the weekend?" Get to know one another. It is not going to take any skin off your back and you will learn something and you will teach something.

When my parents wanted me to do high school and college all in the same place because that was important. Because, at my earlier grade school, I was changing schools every 2 years, because I was changing countries every 2 years. They wanted me to be stable in the higher grades. When I came back home to the States, 8th and 9th grades, it was a phenomenon for me that all of my schoolmates had known each other since kindergarten. They knew each other that long. They had been to school that long. I never knew anybody for more than 2 years. To me, that was a phenomenon. At my school, we had little cliques of people. The sports people, the studious people and so on. In these cliques, they all knew each other because they have been to school all their lives, but they did not associate with each other.

I had only been here for a couple of months. We just came back from overseas. So I'm the new kid on the block. The two most popular people in my school, a boy named Albie and a girl named Debbie, were the 2 most popular people in my school. They each belonged to a different clique, and they each were running for student body president of the school. Because they did not associate with other cliques and they saw me, who associated with all the cliques because that is all I knew, each one of them asked me if I would run as their vice president on their ticket, because they're thinking, "Well, Daryl knows all these other cliques. If I have him on my ticket, they'll vote for me". Both Albie and Debbie were good friends of mine. I had only known them 2 months, and I didn't want to pick one over the other because the other would be hurt. So what do you do?

I went home, and I thought about it. It took me a while, but I thought hard about it. I decided, you know what? If both Albie and Debbie think that much of me to ask me to run as their vice president, maybe I should run against both of them and me run as president. So, that is what I did. I ran as president, the 3rd choice against the 2 most popular people in my school. And guess what? I won. Everybody knew them a lot longer than they had known me, but I had made friends with everybody in all these cliques, and I was the newcomer. That's the power of communication.

When two enemies or adversaries are talking, they're not fighting, they're talking. They may be disagreeing, but at least they are talking. It is when the conversation ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. So we always want to keep the conversation going.

Let me just add, that Klansman who is in that club with his tribe literally walked across the cafeteria, because I'm just there doing my job. He got up from his table and came over to the stage where I was coming off and talked to me. I wasn't looking for him. He was curious about me, and he walked across the cafeteria. In this case, he walked across the lounge. And look what happened. A friendship bloomed. This is the power. That is why I say, get up from your comfort group and walk across the cafeteria and sit with somebody else one day. Regardless of how you perceive them, you realize one's perception is one's reality. Even if it's not real, it's their reality. If you want to, you cannot change anybody's reality. If you try to change the reality, "No, you're wrong. You need to listen to me". You are going to get pushback back, because they only know what they know. If you want their reality to change, you must offer them a better perception. If they resonate with your perception, then they will change their own reality, because their perception becomes a reality. So he had a certain reality in his mind about black people not playing this style of music because he only knew Jerry Lee Lewis to play the style of music. He walked across the cafeteria or the lounge. He got to meet me. His perception changed, and thus his reality changed.

So to your point, I got back in contact with him and I wanted him to introduce me to the Klan leader in my area. He did not want to do that. He was fearful for his safety and for my safety. He genuinely liked me, he said, "Daryl, I cannot bring a black man to this leader". And I begged and pleaded with them. The leader's name was Roger Kelly. I said give me Mr. Kelly's phone number and address. He did not want to do that. I finally convinced him to give it to me. He gave it to me on the condition that I not tell Mr. Kelly where I got his personal information. I said okay. And he warned me. I told him, I want to write a book on the Klan. I want to sit down with Mr. Kelly and interview him. He said, "Daryl, do not fool with Roger Kelly. Roger Kelly will kill you". He was genuinely concerned for my safety. I said, "That's the whole reason I need to see him. Why would he kill me? Is it just because I'm black? This is what I need to understand. This is what I want him to explain to me". He gave me the number, and he warned me again. Don't fool with him, but don't tell him where you got the number. That is how it started.

I interviewed Roger Kelly. I traveled up north, down south to the Midwest of the country, the West Coast, and interviewed many different Klan leaders and members, and thus, wrote that first book on the Ku Klux Klan, written by a black author from in person interviews. There were many who would talk to me. There were some who would not talk to me at all once they saw me. Today, everybody associated with those kinds of groups knows who I am. But, they don't know me personally, they know of me, and they know I'm black. But back then when I first started, they didn't know I was black and I would have my white secretary phone them and say, she is working for somebody who is writing a book on the Klan, would you consent to sitting down and giving my boss an interview. I expressly told her, "Do not tell them that I'm black." If they ask, don't lie to them, but don't give them reason to ask. That way, if they agree to do the interview, obviously they can see I'm black when they meet me. That is how it initially began to work.

Yeah, absolutely. Let me preface this by saying a Klansman or neo-Nazi or white supremacists or black supremacists, these people are not stamped from a standard cookie cutter. They come from all different walks of life, all different education, socioeconomic backgrounds, and different reasons for joining these racist groups or whatever. They are individuals. But, what allows me to deal with them and to receive return visits. Not everybody. There were those who would not talk to me. There were those who wanted to get violent with me. I have had some violent encounters, fortunately few and far between, and even some of those have come back and apologized and then talked to me. Not everybody, though. There will be those who will die being racist and violent.

Anyway, the application of those five core values, the most important asset that we have as human beings is our credibility. That is our most valuable asset, not how much money you have in the bank or what kind of car you drive, it is your credibility. Because, you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression. If you are lucky, you may have a 2nd or 3rd opportunity to make an impression, but only one opportunity to make a good first impression. Most people will judge you by their first impression of you. Even though they may not like me, I want to see them again. I don't just want to have one meeting. Nothing changes in one meeting. I want to see them again. So even though they may not like me, they give me the time and give me this interview and they cut me out. I sit there and I listen to them. I give them that respect. I am not respecting what they are saying. I am simply respecting their right to say it. And I sit back and listen. That is something that they are not accustomed to. Because, when you attack somebody, their integrity, their dignity, people get emotional and they want to fight and then the whole thing goes downhill and nothing gets accomplished.

I just sit there and listen to them insult me and whatever else. People say to me, "Well, don't you find that offensive?" Sure, I find it offensive. But, am I offended? No, I am not offended. Why? Because I know who I am. They don't know who I am. So why would I let somebody who walks into my room to be interviewed and they have only seen me for 5 minutes define who I am and tell me that I am inferior, I am lazy, I am a criminal because of the color of my skin? They don't know me. So why should I be offended by a lie? If my mother or father were to say those things about me, maybe they would have some credibility because they brought me into the world, they raised me, but not somebody who doesn't know me. I am not going to get emotional over somebody who is trying to define me when I have known myself my whole life and they have only seen me for 5 minutes. So people get carried away with emotions and they want to fight and defend themselves. You don't have to defend yourself. Know who you are before you go into that room, because if you don't know who you are, they will tell you who you are and you might walk out believing them. I know who I am going in.

When I allow them to express themselves, because, when they first walk into the room, their wall is up and they see me and they are in defense mode. This is the enemy. They are ready to push my buttons and attack and defend, etc.. Their wall is up. When that wall is up, their ears are plugged. They don't want to hear anything I have to say. I am the inferior one. They are the superior one. They have the knowledge. I have nothing. No matter what you say, when somebody has their wall up, nothing goes in. It is like talking to a brick wall. But when you apply those 5 core values; you have good demeanor, you show that respect, you allow them to be heard, and all that, the wall begins coming down. As the wall comes down, the ears begin to open. When the ears are open, that is when you can impart your point of view and they will hear it. They are not going to change immediately.

I have seen it many times in the past 40 years. They go home and they think, "Man, I just had a three hour conversation with a black man and we didn't come to blows. Yeah, maybe we got a little loud. Maybe we argued about this, but we didn't fight. What he said about this, it makes sense. Oh, but he's black. But what he said was true. Oh, but he's black". So they are having that cognitive dissonance. They realize what I said was true. It made more sense than what they thought, but they do not want to accept it right now because it goes against everything that they have learned. So they struggle. Nobody likes struggle, it is stressful. That cognitive dissonance has to be resolved. It is a dilemma. Then it reaches a point where they have to decide, "Do I disregard Daryl's skin color and believe the truth because it is true? And now I have to change my ideological direction? Or do I consider his skin color and continue believing a lie?" That is their dilemma. Most people, not all most people will follow the path of the truth because they want to alleviate that stress.

Now, here's something else. If you are just a member of these organizations, it is a lot easier for them to accept that change and make that change. But as you rise in leadership and you become a leader in those organizations that means you have followers and your followers accept you and accept what you teach them. Now you are a leader and you realize you are wrong. How do you go to your followers and tell all your followers, "Hey folks, I was wrong". That is a very hard thing to do. It is also hard to give up power, because when you have sat on the throne of power for so long, you don't want to give it up. How do you tell these people that look up to you, they worship you. You are their leader. They obey you. How do you go and tell them, "Hey, I was wrong? You need to change your direction". That is a very hard thing to do. But many of these people have done that through that friendship because they want to alleviate that pressure and stress on themselves.

Absolutely. As I put it, I am not a psychologist. I am not a sociologist. I am just a rock and roll piano player. If I can go and do these things, anybody can do them. Walk across the cafeteria, whether you do it physically or virtually.

We are a very impatient society. We want things yesterday. Things take time. You have to plant the seed. You must come back and nourish the seed so it grows and blooms. It is not going to grow out of the dirt and form a beautiful flower overnight. It takes time. You used a good word, marinate. Plant that seed, let it marinate, come back and water it. Give more nourishment to it, and over time it will grow.

I have had this happen to me 5 times in the 40 years, where I have spoken at an elementary school. I give a talk to maybe some 7th or 8th graders. Then years later, I am speaking in a whole different state somewhere at a college. This sophomore boy, he is in his second year of college. I come onto the campus to give a lecture, he comes running up to me and says, "Mr. Davis, you know, you spoke at my elementary school in Maryland, in Montgomery County. I remembered what you said and I told the Student Activities Board about you, and they brought you here". So all those years later, whatever I said, when he was in 8th grade, he retained. Now he is in college years later telling the people about me and they bring me there.

You never know what effect you might have on somebody. The idea is you want that return visit. Always be credible. You only have that one opportunity. If you impress somebody, even though they may not like you and you say, "Oh, listen, I appreciate the time you spent with me. I appreciate the information you've given me. Give me a couple of weeks to process it. Maybe I'll have some questions in 2 weeks. Is it okay if we get together and just do a follow up?" Even though they don't like you, they'll say, "Yeah, okay." Because you have been credible. But, if they catch you in a lie or you prove yourself not credible, they say, "No, we're done. Don't call me anymore. We're finished".

Your credibility is your most valuable asset, and you want that return visit with those people. That is what has happened. I did not go see Roger Kelley one time or any of the others one time. I see them time and time again. Even though they didn't like me for a while, I am the enemy, they are the supremacists, I am the inferior one, but I am credible. That is why they were willing to see me again.

Absolutely. I think you are spot on. Amidst all the negativity, there is some light somewhere because all this negativity is a learned behavior. And what can be learned can be unlearned. As children, we are taught that a tiger does not change its stripes. A leopard does not change its spots. So why would I think that a Klansman would change his robe and hood? Or a Nazi would change his swastika? But, that is who they are. Well, I'm wrong, because a leopard and tiger cannot change their spots or stripes because that is who they are. They're born with those spots and stripes. A Klansman or a Nazi is not born with that robe and hood or that swastika. That is something that is acquired. I see all this negativity, but I also see them being very kind to their children. They are working hard at their job. They are nice to their wives. They want good for their family. These are the same things that I would want for mine. I see that and I need to open up a little bit and show them, "Hey, you know, we have more in common than you realize". So I take that time to find those commonalities and build upon those. The more you build upon the commonalities, the less and less the things you have in contrast begin to matter to them.

Absolutely. And loving comes a lot more natural because we all seek that nourishment, that hug. We want to be nourished. We don't want to be hated. So why are we learning to hate?

The name Matthew Stevenson rings a bell. I'm not sure where I know it from, but I have heard that name. The first one is Antoinette who?

I am not familiar. I will look them up.

Oh, you are talking about Derek.

I know Derek very well.

Got it. That's why I know the name.

Why not begin teaching these values in kindergarten, in 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade? You can tone them down, of course, for little kids and then increase the intensity of them as you get older in older grades. But let's start now. It is always better to start with a good habit than it is to break a bad habit.

Absolutely. We call certain countries, 3rd world countries, but yet look at us. Maybe, perhaps we are 1st world technologically, but ideologically we are 3rd World. Because, you look back to when Obama was first running for president. There was Mitt Romney, there was Hillary Clinton, and there was Obama. People were saying, "Oh, I don't know if I can vote for a black man. I don't know if I can vote for a woman. I don't know if I can vote for a Mormon". What difference does that make? Vote for somebody who can run the country. Back in the early 1960s, people were saying, "Oh, I don't know if I can vote for that Kennedy fellow. He's a Catholic". But yet some of these countries that we refer to as 3rd world countries have female presidents, have female prime ministers or whatever. So they are more concerned with the person who runs the country than they are with the gender or the skin color. Maybe we need to learn something from that.

Honestly, I enjoy being on a stage performing music and seeing people smile and dance to my music and have a good time. I would much rather be doing that than going to some KKK rally and watch people marching around in robes and hoods screaming white power and are burning cross in the background. But, that work is also necessary.

My biggest hope is that people will see the power in conversation. Our greatest weapon to combat controversy is also the least expensive weapon. It is free. Yet, it is the most underused. It is called dialogue. A missed opportunity for dialogue is a missed opportunity for conflict resolution. A missed opportunity for conversation is a missed opportunity for reconciliation. We need more of that. We spend too much time talking about the other person, talking at the other person and talking past the other person. We can solve a lot more just by spending a few minutes talking with the other person, and I just hope that people would be inspired by some of the things that I have done. Like I said, I don't have a formal education in this type of work. My formal education is in music. I am not a psychologist or a sociologist, but I have an education through exposure and experience that I can share with people. If more people can be inspired by this, hopefully they can take it a lot further than I have taken it and start doing these things, because one person can make a difference in a lot of people. I have proven that.

Well, I have a lot of influences, including Martin Luther King, Gandhi and many others. If I had to choose a couple of people, I would say Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. Why do I choose those people? They were the ones who influenced me to get into music. I didn't decide to become a musician until I was around 17 years old. I was kind of late to the game. But up until then, I wanted to be either a computer programmer or a spy, an espionage agent. My hero was James Bond as a kid.

At the time, both vocations, computer programming and spying were pulling at me with equal force in opposite directions. So I was immobilized and I kept trying to figure out how I combine these two careers. At that time, there was no way back in the 1970s. Today, of course, you can do it. It is called cyber espionage. But that word did not even exist back then.

So I thought about people that I admired a great deal. I always liked music. I never played, but I always liked it. Almost instantly, 2 names came to my mind, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. What I admired about these 2 gentlemen was the fact that they had made millions upon millions of people all over the world happy with their music. They had touched people that they would never meet, that they would never even see. Most people may have not seen Elvis or Chuck perform. Maybe they have, in concert or seen them on TV, but they have heard them on the radio. They have their records, they have danced to their music, and they have sung their songs. They are happy. That is really cool. How many of those people ever met Elvis Presley or met Chuck Berry? I have, but I'm the exception because I pursued that. But those 2 people have touched millions of people. And I thought, that is really cool. That is what I want to do. I want to make people happy. I want to touch people whether I meet them or not. If I can make them happy, that makes me happy.

Wow! So the more you talk, the more commonality you find.

Thank you very much. I look forward to doing it again one day.