 According to a new study, poor Asians are more at risk than rich Asians and even middle-class Asians. Welcome everybody to the hot pop boys. David and Andrew here. According to a new article from Boston Globe that uses scientific studies, poor Asians are the invisible targets of hatred and hardship. And this comes on the heels of some tragic stories that came out this past week in just New York City alone. Right, and I would say that these tragic events do fall in line with the Boston Globe article that, you know, obviously there have been some really high-profile cases of all different types of Asians being attacked over the past year and a half, but the primary, you know, most cases have been in the lower income range or people who are in their city or people who are in high-risk situations. So what we're gonna do for you guys today is break down why it's true, why it is important to correctly identify who is mostly getting attacked, even though it's not everybody, and then also what you can do about it and if there even are any solutions. So let's get into it. All right everybody, first off, starting off, why is it so true that just like poor Asians, lower income Asians, if people don't like the word poor, you know, we'll just say lower income Asians, why are they mostly at risk? Right, in the article it doesn't really go into it, but we'll break it down for you guys. Basically, long story short, lower income people of any group usually have to bear the worst of a situation. Right. So for example, poor Latinos may be more subject to immigration issues. Poor African-Americans may be more subject to gentrification issues. Poor Caucasians may be subject to opioid or globalization of manufacturing issues. Yeah, I mean, across the globe, you know, poor people are also more subject to the downfalls or the pitfalls of like natural disasters. Right, any sort of catalytic event, like they're gonna bear the downside. Obviously right now, what does that mean for Asian-Americans? It means that they're bearing the brunt of the attacks and that actually has to go along with the fact that they bear the most risk exposure. They're more likely to work blue collar jobs, more likely to be on the street, be out at night delivering things, you know, for a job. I mean, think about it, if you work a job or you live a life that requires you to be on the street seven hours a day in a dense city like New York City, you're passing by a lot of people, you're passing by so many people, you could have so many interactions with, obviously, and there's a lot of crazy people on the street, so that's just raising your risk exposure. A lot of like white collar people, they work office jobs, they go there and they go home, so you're not really on the street that long. And not only that, I mean, there is a mental health crisis, you know, synthetic drugs, whatever, whatever, I don't wanna get into that, but- Not to mention last point on this, it's like the income disparity of Asians in America is actually the largest of any group. That means that there are a lot of wealthy Asians, of course, and also a lot of poor Asians. Point number two about why this is true is that basically, imagine there's a scenario where everybody's like a bird, right? And in game theory, there's hawks, and then there's doves, and then there's pigeons, and basically, depending on the context, there's always like a dominant and like a beta, like an alpha and a beta in any sort of situation, and I think it really switches depending on the context, but in the streets, and the poor Asians are always gonna be like in the beta position. And not only that, I think the doves and the pigeons are both beta to a hawk and a street type interaction, but basically, when something bad happens to a pigeon, it seems like society like cares less. Well, for example, imagine that you're like just walking on the street, right? And you see like a dead pigeon bird on the street that gets hit by a car, or ran over, or hurt by a cat, or whatever. You're just like, ah, dang, that's a pigeon, like that's so bad, but whatever, pigeons are in the street, so that's what happens. But then, if you see a dove bird, like a white, clean dove on the street- Yeah, dove from the bar stoke, the one that carries the wedding dress in the back, and it's on the ground bleeding, you're like, whoa, what is this beautiful dove doing on the street bleeding? Like there's something wrong with this neighborhood. The hawks might change because the hawk is just the dominant person, but basically like these doves and pigeons are getting attacked by hawks. The context can shift so much who's alpha, who's beta in every situation, who has the power leverage, it would switch even from the backwood's barnyard to the body oil, to wherever. Basically, the hawk would be different depending on what world you're in. Anyway, but the poor Asian would almost never be the hawk. Actually, I cannot even conceive of a single world that a poor Asian is a hawk in. Anyway, point number three, some Asians, Andrew, depending on their history or their background or their coaching, are more conflict ready than others. Yeah, I mean, I think different Asians we know come from different backgrounds and come from different sets of experiences. Some Asians in their home countries had to go through military service. Are you more referring perhaps to Koreans or Southeast Asians? Well, yeah, or even a certain time when these people, they had to go through military mandatory service, right? And also a lot of Southeast Asians, if they didn't go through mandatory military service, oftentimes they come from war-torn countries or those really tough traumatic backgrounds which cause them to be refugees, right? Now, what I mean by this is that sometimes going through that, of course there's a lot of downsides to having to go through that trauma, but one of the things that you kind of take away from it is that you're such a survivor, like you kind of know, you know how to deal with conflict and danger differently. Well, when you say there's certain like conflict ready attitudes or coaching that may circulate more in that community. Possibly. And I would say that, for example, you know, like amongst like poor Chinese in New York City, I don't think there's a lot of like, you know, any sort of paramilitary training circulating in the community. There might be a lack of it, guys. Point number four, listen, in general, these lower income poor Asians, they just seem like easy targets. Like let's just put it as plain and simple as that. Listen, a lot of these people are like shorter. They're not like big, large, gigantic people that are getting attacked. These are like small women, right? So they look like easy targets. They're just walking by themselves, you know, maybe not in a large group for whatever reason. And these crazy people who are getting triggered by something, they just see them and they're just like, oh, this is an easy target. I could get away with this. This is fun. Maybe they think it's a game. Yeah. I mean, it's not that different than games I saw growing up, where people used to, you know, and I don't want to equate everything to everything else. Like, listen, there's such a variety of things just because it happens to an Asian person doesn't mean it belongs in the same bucket. But to your point of the video we all saw earlier, that did almost seem like some redux of something from like childhood. Some type of contest. Like he was like in GTA or something like that. It just seemed like he just wanted to do it for fun. Like punch a Asian day. Yeah, like he wanted to do it for fun. It's crazy. He didn't see the humanity in that old lady and the fact that she could have died from the impact on the concrete and things like that. Yeah, she's a mother. She's a working person. She has a complex identity just like everybody else. And last reason, number five is that, listen, especially in a city like New York City, where there is a lot of poor Asians, it's a numbers game. There's just a lot of poor Asians. So if you think about it, even if there's poor Asians in every city in every state, a place like New York where it's dense and the population is gigantic, that means there's just a lot of these people. So the rate of incidents might be higher. Yeah, and one thing I don't like is people showing like crime stats about like, oh, New York City is actually relatively low to its population. But one thing you don't know is first of all, it varies so much on which sector of the city you're in. Like literally we're talking about like each precinct has a wildly different like crime rate than another precinct that we could be right next to each other. And not only that, you have to multiply a ratio by the number of pings you have every day. Like, yeah, the ratio does matter, but also the volume of interactions matters a ton too. Yeah, like even if the probability is technically low, but you come in- Lower than Alabama. But you come in contact with 10 to 20 to 30 times the amount of people per day than you would in Alabama. Well, then the probability goes up. Yeah. So sometimes I feel like that is politicians trying to explain something away. Who king the stats? Who knows? Getting into it, why is it important to understand all this? I understand that this might be kind of an uncomfortable thought for a lot of people. They don't want to think about, they're like, guys, I just want to like think about living my life and eating food, but why do we have to understand this? Well, number one, if you don't understand this, then you're not going to focus on the fact that this is largely a class issue. Because as we know, a lot of Asians, class-wise or wealth-wise are avoiding some of these situations, but a lot are just stuck in these situations. Yeah. And by the way, guys, we're not saying that, like, I get it, people relate to, like, somebody that they see themselves in, right, more. So let's say, for example, Asians that are more middle class, upper middle class wealthy, they probably were more personally struck and understandably so by the death of Michelle Gower, Christina Unili. But I'm saying that we also have to understand that it's going to be like a collective thing where we have to address the situation that the pigeons are going through as well and not just the doves, even though we should care about both. Right. And also, number two, why you should understand this is that, you know, I think how kind of, like, rich and powerful Asians respond to this and what they end up doing is also going to speak volumes of the Asian community, because I think that there are a lot of, like, rich and powerful Asians, but when they get to a certain point, if they do not care at all about poor Asians, then they've just become, like, any other rich person. I would say sometimes, and by the way, we know over the years gotten to know quite a few different types of rich people, but, like, I think there's a tendency for Asians, once they become upper middle class, they get more concerned with pushing the ceiling of a dove what they can achieve, whether that's, like, representations or, like, Hollywood representation, and they're no longer caring about, like, the floor of the pigeons. You know what I mean? They're like, I want to see a dove, like, on the cover of, like, this magazine or that magazine or at the Oscars. These are, like, hyper-dove events to care about, but then if the risk exposure and the rate of pigeons being killed is way higher than it was and nobody else cares, then it kind of goes to show you that you're just like, well, you know, whatever. I'm just worried about my situation. Yeah, I'm just worried about pushing these stars to be bigger stars. Right, and which is, you know, that hierarchical thinking and maybe Confucian peasants versus royals, I don't know if that's been a traditional part of Asian society, but now that we're here in America, I suggest that we break free from that thinking of, like, kings and queens and dynastic hierarchies if that's what people are still locked into. Yeah, it's actually all connected, guys. So, David, what can people do? It seems like that as a regular person, as a middle-class person or upper-middle-class person, where however you identify, like, what can you even do to help this? I think, one, you have to understand that you should not try to use it to up your position, right? Like, I think most efforts, I'm not saying that there's none that can be used for own self-purpose because sometimes you're helping yourself and everybody at the same time. I don't wanna take that away from everybody completely, but you have to understand who needs the most help right now. And as the three incidents in New York City just showed this past weekend, Andrew, it is primarily the poor Asians. And that was actually the ending thesis of J. Caspian King's book, The Loneliest Americans. So, I do think that you have to go, we're not gonna have, like, group success unless the floor is raised. Yeah, and I think a lot of people always wanna imagine, it's a trickle-down thing, like, we'll just push the Asian stars to be higher and then it'll trickle down and change everybody's mind and then they'll stop attacking Asians on the street. Absolutely not. Absolutely not how it works. I think we've realized that. And it's funny because some people, they might even sell it to themselves, like, well, you know, as a Hollywood actor, the more we were portrayed with humanity in entertainment pieces, it may trickle down to more humanity for the way that, you know, some of the people who are not like me are treated in the streets. Listen. And they might actually feel that, but honestly, when I hear that, and I, you know, we're like, we have such a high, low, like, of experience of who we come across in the Asian community, I pretty much disagree with that. I get it. And it could be very self-serving. In theory, in theory, it makes some sense, but I think in the real world, it just hasn't been shown to be that effective. So anyways, guys, I think one, people who can have to help provide resources, like for us, you know, we make a lot of videos, but I understand that these videos are not necessarily going to reach exactly these people, like these poor immigrants. Well, a lot of people, they don't speak English. They're not tapped into media. They may not be super web savvy, depending on their age and, you know, whatever era they came from or their access to electronics. Yeah, exactly. So there needs to be more resources put towards that, and that sometimes is coming from the government or private organizations. I know a, just met a Chinese girl who reports the news of New York in Mandarin, in language for all of these people to catch up to. Right, right, and tries to make it useful and at value. I mean, for me, one of the most rewarding things, and I know that the security videos we made or the safety videos we made, it doesn't go directly to someone who's likely to get attacked. But I remember there was a girl that was a nurse, and she deals with a lot of lower income or poor immigrants in the community. And she said that one of the safety videos that we made, like clarified and articulated the thoughts that she had, and she was gonna share some of them along to her patients. So there is some like degrees of separation type thing where it's like a video we made goes to a nurse, a nurse directly deals with the elderly in language. Perhaps there is some impact that way, but you have to understand, like you do have to think about what is your degrees of separation to someone who was highly vulnerable. There is no short-term solution. We've said this before in videos, but again, we just wanna keep this conversation going. And hopefully every video that we've made is a step forward in the conversation. Yeah, I think that the more I thought about this, Andrew, and we thought about this for like hours and hours and hours, anybody who is looking for a silver bullet solution, whether it is on an infrastructure level or a micro individual self agency level or a mid-tier community sort of organizational level, there is no silver bullet solution to this happening. I think right now there are a lot of really mentally disturbed people on the streets, maybe possibly motivated by substances, and they are taking it out on the weakest people in large cities like New York and Oakland or Chicago, et cetera. And the weakest person often manifests themselves in an elderly immigrant, possibly a woman or an older man. That's gonna wrap up this video right here. I know that was like a hard discussion. You guys made it this far. Hopefully it's been helpful for you and hopefully you leave maybe inspired or with a better understanding at least. That's all we can do. We will leave links to all the gold fund means from the three things that happened in New York City, the three tragedies. And I just think we're in a situation where for me, I don't wanna be emotional about it. Shout out to everybody. You know what I mean? You can repost everybody. Feel free to leave this emoji, that emoji, but we're really stepping into the phase where in my opinion, this type of incident is happening so frequently we have to step into a very sort of, I don't wanna say calm-minded but stable-minded solutions-based approach. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for watching. Let us know in the comments down below what you think about this. What are some solutions in your mind? Do people, does some rich guy need to fund a patrol squad on scooters around these areas but maybe it can't cover all areas? Or you guys let us know what you think the actual solution is. Probably, you know, that probably will take a few years because there is no short-term solutions but please let us know in the comments down below. We'd love to hear your thoughts and until next time, we out. Peace.