The Exchanges

Q Is that like part of your brain at least?

A No, it's kind of like, it's a little bit of an alert system that happens in your brain, right? And as you get older in the league, and you start to feel these certain experiences, you start to know where they come from, and those are, those are some of the angles That you have to be able to pick up on much more quickly or else you're not going to make the play at all. Right? So I think that's one. I think two is being able to understand what everybody else is doing. Right? So there's one, the angles. Two is understand where your competitors are, where they're going. And have a, have a sense of what the future looks like, but also at the same time recognize the past. I think that has to do with the people as well that are around you, right? So as middle linebacker, you're dependent upon your outside linebackers. You're dependent upon your defensive line and your cornerbacks. You got to know what everybody's doing.

AI assessment note: “No, it's kind of like, it's a little bit of an alert system”

Q So talking a bit about family and legacy, what are, what are the big challenges you see in our society? What do you, what do you want your legacy to be in terms of what you're, what you're trying to confront?

A Uh, so there's probably three things that I, that I'm always keeping top of mind when it comes to, so legacy. I think one is, well, one is I, I, I have come, I came from a middle class family. My mother African-American, my father African-American. My father was in the United States Navy. My mother United States Navy. My father went on to continue to be a military contract to my mother, a physician. And I saw my mom at her Retirement party. Okay, so my mom is an anesthesiologist. She helped open Kaiser Permanente on the East Coast, and she was in private practice, and I don't think I ever understood the impact that she made on so many other African-American and diverse medical professionals until I was at her retirement party. There were thousands of people.

AI assessment note: “there's probably three things that I, that I'm always keeping top of mind”

Q That's awesome. That's awesome. And so you, you, people also know you from shows, you've been on TV shows like Adventure Capitalists and Tahani Tackles the Globe. You see you doing some media these days still?

A Yeah, I, I had a great mentor when I was playing on the Giants, Michael Strahan. And if he hasn't been on the show, I'd recommend you interviewing him because I think that Uh, he is one of the most optimistic and, um, positive and uplifting people. If anything, he just wants to show off that gap in his, in his teeth. Right? So, but I remember when I walked into the, to the Giants stadium when I was just a rookie, and my parents always taught me, when you walk into the room, you want to identify really, not necessarily who's the boss, but the one that's setting the standard, or the one that you'd like to live up to, and I think Strahan was that guy, and He told me, much like so many other people said, you know, you, you play football for a certain amount of time, but it's not going to last forever.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I, I had a great mentor when I was playing on the Giants”

Q so tell us more, what other kind of, I mean, originally in business, you did something called bow tie cause, which I guess is kind of one of your earlier adventures. It was both kind of philanthropic, but also evolved into, into a business. Like how do you, it's clear you think about business in terms of causes, like, like what else are you looking at cause wise right now?

A I think it's, I think it's the notion of causes, but I think it's a certain notion of consciousness. And by the way, you know, Ken Rosenthal wears our bow ties on Fox as he's covering the MLB. And you know, that story germinated out of, out of one of my good friends, Kunta Littlejohn, who I didn't know that he had cancer. And when I did, I remember when he told me he, if you want to be somebody, you got to rock a bow tie. And then I was like, I'm not wearing a bow tie. And he's like, you got to wear a bow tie. I'm like, no, I don't. He's like, if you want to be somebody, you got to rock a bow tie. I was like, no, I'm just fine. That's why I'm Dhani. It's fine. I'm, I'm great. And then I found out he had cancer and then I went to go put on a bow tie. But I, what I realized Was that in the same way that Lloyd Carr told me at the university of Michigan, it's not about you, it's about something greater than yourself, right? It's, it's not just you standing up for yourself. It's standing up for others. It's about representing the things that you believe in, but it's also representing the collective of those that truly believe and have a certain level of consciousness. And that's where Bowtie Cause originated from. And so we worked with, you know, a lot of companies, companies and corporations to help them tell the story, but more importantly, it's about you telling your story. And s…

AI assessment note: “And that's where Bowtie Cause originated from.”

Q How do we, how do we re-inject this? So, so, so, so some people think maybe there's certain types of masculine energy In certain communities where there's not enough fathers doing their duty and standing up in that kind of positive way. Like, like how, how, how do we solve these problems? And is that something, is that something you think about?

A I think about it all the time, and I don't have the exact answer, but I think that being able to be open and honest and have a conversation where you're not ridiculed by virtue of even bringing up the topic is the first place to start. And it's about pushing, to your point, the boundaries of the yeses on both sides, because there's truth and allowing them to kind of sit down and then start to rewrite it. But then I also kind of think that some people are disappearing into the, the netherworld, and they don't even care about it because they've got other things to worry about. So there's an element of narcissism that plays in where it's not about what the greater good is thinking about in the world of femininity and masculinity. It's more about me.

AI assessment note: “I think about it all the time, and I don't have the exact answer”

Q Is this like a whole thing where the whole society's getting a little softer, is this what you're saying?

A And I, I have some strong opinions about that, right? It's like people aren't wearing helmets, they're wearing, you know, they're just wearing, You know, sock hats in order to kind of protect everything. Nobody's, there's nothing physical anymore. And so it's, and maybe, just maybe, those that played in the seventies and eighties would say the same thing about those that played when I played in 2000 and said that we were softer. But I think there's a fundamental shift when you take the pads completely off and you don't hit at all. The physicality of the game starts to go a different direction. But when I was playing, and Strahan was playing, and Strahan had played with LT, and so I'm kind of dating myself, as I have a little bit of gray hair now, but when, when we were playing, we were, we were physical, and we hit, and so, yeah, the time was only three years, and I got to play for 11, but the transition was always going to be something that happened at some point, right? For me, football, I felt like it was a springboard, and Strahan, he kind of gave me this suspension to kind of say, look, You can play this game for a long time, get to know people, spend time with people, but there might be an opportunity in the world of TV. If you kind of show your personality and don't allow yourself to kind of be caged into the world of this locker room, express to people who you are, what…

AI assessment note: “For me, football, I felt like it was a springboard, and Strahan”