In this episode, we catch up with Thaddeus and talk about his life as a professor in Los Angeles and what he's up to now that he's getting a new job at Willamette University in Oregon. We also talk about the weather and what it's like living in Southern California in the dead of winter. Do you like the weather in LA? Do you miss the rain? Have you ever wanted to move to a new place but don't know where to go because it's too far from home? Or do you just hate the idea of leaving your job and moving across the country to find a new one that's a little closer to your current location? Well, don't worry, we've got you covered. We're coming to you live from Los Angeles, California on this week's episode of Do Do Do Dope! Enjoy, Dope People! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Thank you so much for all your support and support of the podcast! If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! We'll be looking out for more episodes in the future! Subscribe, review, and spread the word to your friends and family about the podcast on all of the awesome things we're doing! Do Doodle Do Doo Do Do. Do Do! Do, Do Do, do, Do, Dwee Do. Do, DO, Do... Do Do...do, Do ... Do...Dwee. Do...Do...do! Do...dwee...do...do. Do ...do...doo...do? Do... do...do ...dweeeeeeeeeee do...deee...dooooooeee.... Do ...dooeeeeeedeee do...eeeeeeeeeee...... and we're live, do do, do... do, dweeeeee...dah...do-do, doooooooo...deeeee...eee, do-doo-dah-eee-eeee-dee-ee-eee-do-ee, doeee? Do, dheee-ha-tee-a-e-eay, do ...dah, dah-do...ee, nay?
00:01:36.000It's like an hour and a half, and then it's about the same as what I'm doing now between the east side of L.A. and the west side of L.A., where his mother lives.
00:01:44.000So actually, it's not that much of a different commute for me.
00:03:47.000Well, since you've been here, the social justice warrior crusade has ramped up considerably, including what happened in Yale with that woman who, I guess she sent out a letter saying that you should allow people a certain amount of leeway to be offensive.
00:05:59.000And many of their demands are essentially totalitarian, you know, demanding diversity training, mandatory diversity training for all faculty and staff, which, you know, I'm assuming would be teaching me how to think about race and gender and sexuality,
00:06:15.000Telling me what I should say in my classrooms and not say in my classrooms.
00:06:20.000That Occidental, the faculty themselves, some of the faculty actually took it upon themselves to propose a mechanism in which students can report microaggressions committed against them by faculty.
00:06:35.000The faculty, the students didn't even demand this.
00:06:41.000I will say, I will say, just to be clear here, it hasn't been voted, the faculty hasn't voted for that yet, but it was a significant minority of faculty proposed that.
00:06:55.000A mechanism to report microaggressions.
00:06:59.000Microaggressions meaning like a nice shirt?
00:07:02.000I could look at you and go, Nice shirt.
00:07:05.000We can be specific, because they've actually listed microaggressions in many places, and one of them is asking the question, where are you from?
00:09:02.000There's this incredible conflation that goes on, which drives me insane, because certainly there is some racism on campuses, you know, there is some racial insensitivity, no doubt, but they conflate that stuff that goes on at Yale.
00:09:18.000With Ferguson and Baltimore and Birmingham, Alabama in 1956 and South Africa under apartheid.
00:11:07.000Which has been said to you on campuses, you know, and often they'll say things like to a black guy in particular, oh, you must be an athlete.
00:11:43.000If it was like the insinuation that the only reason why you got into the college was because of your athletic prowess, not your intelligence.
00:11:55.000There is a lot that's legitimate, that's real, that I understand, that I have compassion for.
00:12:00.000I've never been a black person, I've never been a black college student, but I've always been sure that it must be at least uncomfortable for black people on these campuses that are mostly white.
00:12:08.000Yeah, in some circumstances, for sure.
00:12:11.000Well, that makes sense, but, I mean, it seems like socially that stuff all weeds itself out.
00:12:15.000Like, people realize who the dicks are, and you avoid those people.
00:12:19.000We're talking about, like, the word microaggression is suitable for that, and that is a microaggression.
00:12:27.000It's all, like, it's just kind of slightly dicky.
00:12:30.000Right, and so the question is, do you have a macro response to a microaggression, right, in the form of policy, which...
00:12:37.000It limits freedom of speech, which limits academic freedom, which erects the surveillance system, which is essentially what they're asking for with microaggressions.
00:14:10.000So what's happening now is kids on campuses...
00:14:15.000Either have been trained or have trained themselves to feel damaged, devastated is the word actually that's often used, by things like microaggressions.
00:14:26.000Well, so what you're doing is you are stating and claiming status as a weak person, right?
00:14:35.000Someone who can be damaged by the slightest slight.
00:14:39.000So then what happens when you're in the real world where there really are racists, where there really are people who will pull you over for being black, who will throw you in prison for being black, who will shoot you for being black, who will not give you a job for being black?
00:14:52.000You know, real racism, real structural racism, what do you do then?
00:14:55.000Well, I think the idea is that they're going to eliminate that by raising people through their system that never have these thoughts.
00:15:27.000And I always assume that the reason why people do that is because there's not enough real problems.
00:15:32.000Like, the real problems have become so minute.
00:15:35.000Like, this is the safest time to live ever.
00:15:37.000And on campus, I mean, outside of the normal things that you're going to deal with when you have a bunch of young people together and, you know, social interactions and alcohol and all the other crap that happens between human beings when you get them together and they're young and they don't have...
00:15:54.000Even when they're older, you know, you get a group of people together, you're likely to have some disputes.
00:15:59.000But outside of that, what's the fucking worst thing that's happening to these kids?
00:16:03.000I actually looked up the statistics, because, you know, people, during when the Missouri thing was happening, at the University of Missouri, right?
00:18:56.000We talked about it the last time we were here, but a man and a woman, because they're both over 18, that were going to college there, they got liquored up and decided to hook up, and they exchanged some text messages where she said, do you have condoms?
00:19:39.000But for whatever reason, These social justice warriors have taken upon themselves to, again, impart victim status only on women that are in these scenarios.
00:19:50.000So that the man is always the ugly oppressor, the ugly pursuer, the penetrator of the vagina, this evil man.
00:19:58.000And so this kid got kicked out of college for having sex while drunk.
00:20:11.000He should fucking close that place down and then light it on fire and turn it to Disneyland 2. Yeah, I mean, I think a revolution is coming, or it's maybe already begun in higher education.
00:20:24.000Well, I think what we're doing right now, I think what you've been doing, I think stuff like this, I think podcasting, I think it started with blogs 20 years ago.
00:20:32.000Now there's all sorts of online courses.
00:20:35.000I think there's a tremendous demand for learning, and I think there are a lot of curious people out there who can't afford to go to college or don't want to go to these nut houses that are colleges.
00:20:44.000But what is it that's causing these nut houses to flourish this way, where it's so common?
00:20:54.000Where they stormed into the library or the study hall and started screaming Black Lives Matter while fucking white and black people were going over their work.
00:21:03.000They're sitting there trying to do their homework and all these fucking white dorks are running through the hallway screaming Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.
00:21:11.000And I'm watching that and I'm going...
00:22:02.000So silence in the case of these kids in the Dartmouth library, right, was violence.
00:22:06.000If you carry that argument to its logical extreme, which is what obviously is happening here.
00:22:12.000It's a perversion of French post-structuralism, which made this intervention about 40 years ago about discourse being power and also being violence.
00:22:20.000So they're kind of running with that idea.
00:22:22.000And if you run with it all the way, it becomes totalitarian, right?
00:22:27.000And then you're back in like Maoist China.
00:22:29.000Because everyone who says the wrong thing or doesn't say the right thing Yeah, no, it's bad.
00:23:06.000One would hope, and that's probably true to some extent.
00:23:09.000However, I don't know if you know about this, but there's been some recent polling done of millennials by the Pew Research Organization, and they found that millennials are much more hostile to the principle of free speech than previous generations.
00:23:23.000Yeah, I saw that the students in Yale, actually, there's a significant majority, voted to rescind the First Amendment.
00:25:25.000I think it's even worse than this, right?
00:25:26.000Because as I said the last time I was here, you know, it is inherently conservative what they're calling for, even though it's sort of a left-wing movement.
00:25:34.000They're asking for Big Brother, either the college president or the United States government, to protect us from ideas and speech and words, right?
00:25:57.000And even these ideas, I mean, to stray slightly from this, when people are talking about socialism ideas, about taxing the rich more, well, where the fuck do you think that money's going?
00:26:30.000If you want to encourage charitable donations on a wide scale and encourage some sort of, like, broad-range philanthropism amongst people and figure out some way to institute that voluntarily, that's great.
00:26:43.000But, Joe, we all know that when you give the government lots of money, it uses it wisely.
00:27:20.000Would it be amazing, too, if we could link it up online, where everybody could take your itemized tax sheets and say, okay, let's just make sure that they used all of our money.
00:28:12.000The problem with that is, like, even if you do that, like, his ideas, as they've been explained to me by people who understand the economy, like, you would have to charge...
00:29:21.000I mean, as long as the ads aren't offensive or as long as the ads aren't, you know, some ridiculous propaganda.
00:29:27.000Well, that's exactly the question that should be raised with Bernie Sanders and his supporters, right?
00:29:30.000Why do we need a government-run education system?
00:29:34.000Or, put it a different way, why do you want that?
00:29:37.000Because I think there's something else going on here with them.
00:29:39.000I don't think it's just they want free education for everyone.
00:29:42.000I do think they're interested in social control, and that's a great way to control the populace, is to control their education, for the government to control their education.
00:29:51.000So when you say they're interested in social control, to what extent?
00:30:14.000When I looked at my parents' tax returns and saw that they made $11,000 a year in the 1970s, I said, oh, this seems like not much fun to me.
00:30:23.000So, yeah, there's a long-standing tradition of a desire for social control on the left.
00:30:46.000They didn't want the government interfering with your life.
00:30:50.000But then it sort of got confused, and then there became a lot of religious issues involved in the Reagan administration once they started incorporating the religious right into their plans.
00:31:04.000When they started using the religious right in order to get into power and to vote, Things started getting really weird, because then conservatism wasn't necessarily leave people alone.
00:31:15.000Then it became about gay rights, it became about gay marriage, and all this other weird stuff started getting in there.
00:34:11.000But for a long time, they'll have some control, and they'll kill a lot of people in the process.
00:34:17.000So we started this whole rant of trying to figure out where this all started from.
00:34:24.000Where this social justice movement on campus, this ridiculous exaggeration of microaggressions and things along those lines, How much of it has to do with social media, though?
00:34:35.000Because it seems like social media, they support each other, and then they find like-minded groups, they get confirmation bias, they all join together in these little message boards and what have you, and little Twitter hashtag groups, and then they feed off of each other and then explain to each other various things.
00:34:52.000I would say that just makes it louder, but it's always been around.
00:34:55.000I mean, the stuff I'm seeing on campus now is what I saw in the 1980s.
00:34:58.000It's just that in the 1980s, it didn't get off campus because there was no Twitter.
00:36:42.000They pepper sprayed those kids that were sitting there peacefully on their knees and they were protesting the raising of tuition and they wouldn't leave.
00:36:52.000So these cops, this cop pepper sprays them in the face and then after all the commotion had settled, Was it the dean?
00:40:47.000I mean, if you look at sort of police brutality, right?
00:40:49.000Most riots in this country have been in response to police brutality.
00:40:52.000And you look at the cities in which riots have happened since the 1930s, you'll see a decline in police brutality in those cities almost across the board, almost in every case, right?
00:42:40.000You're supposed to do stuff like that when people are dangerous and violent.
00:42:44.000You're not supposed to do stuff to kids that are just sitting down.
00:42:47.000But in Los Angeles, it is much safer, even though it's not safe, but it's much safer for black people in dealing with the cops now than it was in the 1980s because of the 1992 riot.
00:44:34.000Like, what is an effective tactic, right?
00:44:36.000And there's just no doubt that disruptive protest and in many cases violent protest in the form of riots has been very effective.
00:44:44.000Do you think that the future involves These kind of institutions, these long-standing institutions like Stanford and Harvard and Yale, or do you think that the future is going to be something where people get their education online more likely than not?
00:45:01.000Well, I think the future is the university I'm going to start next year.
00:45:07.000I'm going to Willamette only part-time, but what I'm really doing this coming year is launching what I'm calling a renegade university, which will be an online education A set of courses, lectures, and interactive seminars for anyone who's interested in learning about history and political philosophy, current events,
00:45:27.000I think most people wouldn't be interested in that.
00:45:30.000I think this is just for people who are just like you, or just curious about the world.
00:45:34.000There's a huge demand for this in the world, and it's so expensive at colleges now.
00:45:39.000It's unaffordable for most people now, or many people now.
00:45:43.000And also you have to sort of enter this loony bin, as we know, to learn these things now.
00:45:48.000So, I mean, I think people are kind of bypassing colleges and universities more and more through online education, through podcasting, through all these other media forums.
00:45:59.000I'm going to offer sort of what I've been teaching in my classes in colleges for 20 years to anyone online for a tiny fraction of the cost, right?
00:46:08.000It's much cheaper to do this for them than to pay tuition at a Yale or Occidental College.
00:46:15.000Well, that sounds excellent, and I think we're in a unique time now where something like that is very appealing to people because a lot of people are getting...
00:46:24.000I mean, at the end of the day, education is information, right?
00:46:29.000You're taking in things, and we're educating ourselves constantly.
00:46:32.000You're constantly educating yourself with articles and books and things, documentaries that you watch.
00:46:37.000There's always information that's coming in.
00:46:39.000It's just the idea is that to get an education, in air quotes, you have to go to a place and you have to follow their rules.
00:46:47.000And you have to sit in the class with all these other people that are trying to do the same, and you have to somehow or another do it together.
00:47:06.000I think that it's kind of confining and archaic to have these institutions where you have to go there.
00:47:17.000And then the whole tenure process and the politics of the staff and the teaching and what can and can't be in the curriculum and who it does and doesn't offend or appeal to.
00:48:20.000I mean, it's nice to have this space where you can talk about ideas.
00:48:23.000The problem is that's happening less and less in colleges.
00:48:26.000Isn't it good, though, for a lot of people to get away from their parents, to go someplace, to be around other young kids that are experiencing this sort of new freedom for themselves, and then to be thrust into this sort of pressure cooker of ideas?
00:48:40.000Yeah, but do you have to go to college to get that?
00:48:42.000Well, otherwise you're stuck with your parents, and then what are you going to do?
00:48:45.000You're going to get a job to pay your rent.
00:48:46.000This way, you're in a dorm, you know, you show up, bell rings, go to class.
00:48:52.000Well, like in the 1960s, people just went to San Francisco instead, right?
00:49:58.000Either formal online courses, or just listening to podcasts, or reading blogs, or going on Twitter.
00:50:04.000I've said there's more, and I really mean this, there is more intellectual debate in one hour of Twitter than there is of four years of college.
00:50:14.000I mean, there's far more conflict of ideas on social media now than there is in a college classroom.
00:50:21.000Because college classrooms are dominated and have been for decades by left liberals.
00:50:26.000That's the discourse that goes on in there.
00:51:30.000I mean, so what happened was conservatives basically dominated colleges until the 1960s.
00:51:36.000And then the 1960s generation of radicals had nowhere to go when they went into their 20s and 30s.
00:51:44.000So they decided to move into the academy.
00:51:46.000So they all got PhDs and they became professors and they've dominated ever since.
00:51:52.000There's also this system of tenure in universities, which is supposed to protect academic freedom, and what it actually does is it enforces intellectual conformity, right?
00:52:01.000Because you have a lifetime appointment and you control hiring, right?
00:53:03.000I've had him on the podcast before, and it was probably the most hate I ever got from...
00:53:08.000He's got this radical idea that AIDS is not a...
00:53:13.000It's not a disease that's caused by HIV and that HIV is a weak virus and HIV exists in these people because they already have a compromised immune system and that what's really going on is they're taking recreational drugs and partying and depleting their immune system to the point where HIV can actually show up.
00:53:32.000That HIV is not the cause of AIDS, but it's just the symptom of a depleted immune system.
00:53:38.000He's a fucking professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
00:53:42.000And he's widely hated by AIDS researchers, like people who understand HIV at a deeper level, and they think he's a fucking moron.
00:53:51.000And what he's doing is dangerous, but meanwhile he has tenure.
00:54:49.000So what the market does is the market learns, right?
00:54:53.000So at Occidental, they would kick out, if they had their way, they would kick out the president and he would be replaced by someone who was just as bad.
00:57:44.000But it's this detachment from objective reasoning, this complete detachment and this insistence on staying within this idea that they're enforcing of safe spaces, of intolerance to anyone with opinions other than what they're trying to conform and what they're trying to enforce on these kids.
00:58:09.000I mean, I would imagine That Melissa Click believed that those students protesting in the tents on that quad were being harmed, had been harmed, and were being harmed, were actively being oppressed by racism on that campus.
00:58:23.000And they needed to be protected from that harm.
00:58:26.000Now, what actually happened on the University of Missouri campus?
00:58:30.000Allegedly, two people used the word nigger in a six-month period.
01:00:02.000They created a safe space that had like coloring books, I think, for students to go to because if the ideas they heard were too troubling for them.
01:00:14.000But yeah, I believe it to some extent.
01:00:16.000Yeah, and that was because of a woman who's a feminist coming on to talk about the problems with using incorrect data and biased studies to reinforce ideas that may or may not be true, which she believes damage actual feminism.
01:00:54.000In fact, it's a fairly small minority.
01:00:57.000Most of my students, as far as I know, have not been like this at all.
01:01:00.000In fact, most of them are pretty disdainful of this kind of stuff and just want to learn.
01:01:05.000Well, I think a lot of kids today also, because of social media, because they get to watch videos of all this nonsense going on at Yale and all this craziness going on in Missouri, and they get to read blogs about it, and they get to participate in conversations on social media,
01:01:21.000they're understanding how stupid it all is.
01:01:23.000They're understanding that you're dealing with a bunch of fucking babies.
01:01:25.000And so there's probably some pushback in that regard.
01:02:30.000That intervention is not being made by faculty, though.
01:02:32.000I'm not hearing that being said, not publicly, not on campuses.
01:02:36.000But that's where it gets confusing, because if the faculty does have tenure, wouldn't they want to express themselves?
01:02:41.000Like, you don't have to worry about getting fired.
01:02:43.000Like, don't you see the problems with this kind of thinking and this kind of enforcing this very rigid idea of what you can and can't say or who you are and how you behave?
01:02:54.000But the worst thing that can happen to a white liberal And I know this, is to be called a racist.
01:03:00.000That's the worst thing that can happen to you.
01:04:48.000So now what you see a lot, but not entirely, but a lot among trans people is, you know, they're really concerned about what you and I think about them.
01:04:57.000That seems to be their primary concern is what we think about them.
01:05:02.000Again, it's like it's asking for more paternalism.
01:05:44.000Wouldn't it be better if we just didn't care?
01:05:46.000Yeah, I mean, I think this idea that a man has a woman inside of him and he really is a woman trapped in a man's body or a man trapped in a woman's body and you would like to transfer...
01:06:01.000Like this idea that now it's a she or now it's a he.
01:06:05.000I think that you should be able to do whatever you want to do.
01:06:07.000And I think that even if you're not a woman trapped in a man's body, but if you wake up one day and go, I think it'd be cool to just get an operation and become a woman and start taking female hormones and see if I like it.
01:06:18.000You should totally be able to do that.
01:08:02.000So my point being, like, when you decide what's normal, what's not normal, what we have to accept and not accept, and what we're allowed to comment on, that's when things get weird.
01:08:10.000Like, when you're not allowed to comment on certain things because you become insensitive, but you're putting out this thing in the public.
01:08:17.000You're making it this big social issue.
01:08:19.000And you only have one way you're allowed to communicate and look at it.
01:08:23.000Yeah, I mean, what I really dislike is, as I said, the concern for what I think about you.
01:08:58.000Now it's about wanting to be treated properly by parents, by making us into their parents.
01:09:05.000Well, it's also sort of reinforcing this new society standards of acceptance, which I'm 100% in favor of.
01:09:12.000The idea that, you know, it is okay if your dad just decides to become a woman at 60 years old and starts wearing dresses if it makes him feel better, which I'm 100% for.
01:10:26.000But if you're really in favor of making people feel free to make whatever choices they want, then using terms like insane and crazy is not helpful.
01:10:37.000Well, I could see that point, but also there's a very real possibility that people with all sorts of dysmorphia issues, whether it is anorexia, whether it's bodybuilder dysmorphia, where they never can be big enough, that all of these are These are conditions that are psychological,
01:10:55.000mental conditions that you could say this person's crazy.
01:10:58.000Like when you see a bodybuilder and they can't stop getting bigger because they're out of their mind, they look at themselves in the mirror and they think they're tiny, and so they're 350 fucking pounds and they're doing steroids and lifting weights 24 hours a day.
01:11:24.000We're talking about a man who's a bodybuilder who lifts so much weight that his body is like virtually exploding and they have a dysmorphia where they cover themselves up because they always look tiny.
01:11:37.000You don't think that there's a psychological condition there?
01:15:36.000See, it's very dangerous because people have been locked up for behaviors that were called crazy that you would never consider to be crazy now.
01:15:49.000All kinds of behaviors have been punished harshly because they were deemed to be crazy or insane or pathological.
01:15:59.000So I, you can do whatever you want, but I don't want to be in the business of labeling things, behaviors, choices, other people's choices as those things, because I know where it can lead them.
01:16:11.000Well, I think we're dealing with a broad definition of the word crazy, and some of them are pejorative, and some of them that are actually positive.
01:16:18.000There's a lot of people that I find to be crazy that I enjoy very much, and there's some of my favorite people.
01:16:49.000You got on this road because of the possibility that someone who is transgender might be crazy.
01:16:57.000Like, this should be taken into consideration.
01:17:00.000Or the possibility that someone who gets their face tattooed...
01:17:03.000You're, by definition, pathologizing something by calling it crazy.
01:17:06.000You're saying that it's not normal, and basically you're suggesting, at least suggesting, or just straight out saying, that it should not be done.
01:18:31.000What you're saying is you don't want to shame people or in any way affect their choices and you want to give them the freedom to do whatever they want and by saying someone might be crazy, you're possibly limiting that.
01:21:43.000Because boxing's not illegal and kickboxing is not illegal.
01:21:46.000Neither one of those things are illegal.
01:21:47.000Those things are brutal and violent and they are combat sports.
01:21:51.000So it's not that combat sports are illegal.
01:21:53.000It is that mixed martial arts is illegal because of the culinary union and their influence, particularly on one politician who is now going to jail most likely for the rest of his life because of corruption and we're hoping to be getting into Madison Square Garden in April.
01:22:29.000Well, no, but you do grant that much of the population thinks it's barbaric.
01:22:33.000There's a large percentage of people that don't like any violent sports, whether it's football, whether it's boxing, whether it's MMA. They think it's animalistic, barbaric.
01:25:13.000Well, I certainly think that the boxy confines of ideas that you seem to be forced into when you're a professor at a college definitely reinforces this sort of self-censorship.
01:26:32.000But the word renegade, like, you know, you're going to have a bunch of dudes who are Sons of Anarchy fans with shitty t-shirts going to show up.
01:27:15.000I mean, the ideas I'm going to be teaching in the university will be influenced, come out of the book.
01:27:20.000Do you feel like, though, that it's possible to limit the people that are willing to enroll at Renegade University because of just the name, the moniker?
01:28:11.000When you're formulating this university, do you have a plan for launching it and for how you're going to roll out courses?
01:28:21.000Are you going to create all the courses?
01:28:25.000Yeah, I mean, it's going to start with sort of stand-alone lectures that you can download and listen to, like podcasts, or you can watch the videos of them.
01:28:33.000And then if there's sufficient interest, I'll have interactive seminars.
01:28:37.000There's lots of great platforms for that.
01:29:32.000Yeah, I mean, there will be some production, there will be some PowerPoint stuff, graphics, you know, I might actually use an old-school whiteboard in the background, depending on what I'm presenting.
01:29:49.000I mean, I started becoming disaffected with colleges and universities probably ten years ago after getting fired from Barnard College at Columbia.
01:30:09.000Yeah, people just, well, I mean, I say things you're not supposed to say, and the renegade history stuff didn't go over well with a lot of the professoriate And they wanted a black woman also for that job.
01:30:22.000And then this happened to me again at Occidental.
01:30:24.000I was disqualified from a tenure-track job about two years ago because of my race.
01:30:47.000I don't know if it's equally depressing that they wouldn't hire a black woman.
01:30:52.000I think it's probably more depressing they wouldn't hire a black woman for whatever reason, because there's so many more white men doing your job.
01:31:53.000Okay, that's racism in its classical sense, right?
01:31:56.000Then there's, like, prejudice and cultural dislike, and, you know, but that's...
01:32:01.000So anyone can be racist against anyone else, right?
01:32:04.000There is a point to be made there that some groups have power and some don't.
01:32:10.000So some who are racist can do things about it, and some can't.
01:32:15.000But of course black people can be racist if they think that there are biologically distinct and hierarchical races of human beings, which some do.
01:32:22.000I watched some white rapper They just can't put anybody in prison about it.
01:32:26.000And people were, this was so frustrating.
01:32:29.000These young kids were saying, he's woke as fuck.
01:33:03.000If you're a black guy and you have a business and you don't want to hire Chinese people because you don't like Chinese people, you're a racist.
01:33:07.000But as a group, they can't do much unless they're in South Africa, where they control the government.
01:33:34.000Well, I just don't understand that there's no benefit in redefining the words.
01:33:39.000Of course, people can do wrong things, whether they're based on racial prejudices or sociological prejudices or economic or class, whatever the fuck it is.
01:35:16.000I mean, as a human race, we're going to have to get over the origins of your ancestors and languages that you speak and just be able to appreciate each other for what the fuck we are.
01:35:35.000I'm saying appreciate each other for what we are, and this idea that people can generalize or be racist, that seems to be a counterproductive idea that I don't understand.
01:35:50.000Which is sort of dissipating and nationalism which is also sort of dissipating over time as we integrate with all these other cultures all throughout the world and you have Google Translate and you can understand what people are saying in other places.
01:36:04.000But because of the separations of languages and cultures and things like that, you're always going to have people that are wary of people that they don't know or understand.
01:36:14.000Yeah, I mean, classical racism has declined dramatically in the last hundred years.
01:36:19.000I mean, until World War II, it was dominant and respectable.
01:36:22.000I mean, it was taught at Harvard and all the Ivy League schools.
01:36:33.000And so that was all replaced after World War II, basically, in respectable discourse.
01:36:38.000Not that racists went away, but in respectable discourse, you couldn't use the N-word anymore, right?
01:36:44.000And what it was replaced by is what we call racial liberalism, which is this paternalist stuff we've been talking about that goes on in campuses, which was assimilationist as well.
01:36:54.000The idea was we need to get these black people into our institutions to train them to become like us, right?
01:40:42.000Yeah, my book is full of examples going back 250 years of whites appropriating, in a celebratory way, black culture, loving it, wanting to be black.
01:40:52.000Many of them have claimed to be black.
01:40:55.000A musician named Mez Mesrau in the 20th century who he said, he never said he was actually black, but he said, I'm renouncing my whiteness.
01:41:13.000I just think that when you make stories up about your past and we find out that's not true, you've created some sort of a fantasy narrative.
01:44:12.000That Mark Twain used to give these readings, and in these readings, they would be very humorous, and he would essentially be doing a monologue, and it was like a stand-up monologue.
01:44:22.000And Mark Twain has some still brilliant, insightful, and resonating quotes that he wrote hundreds of years ago, right?
01:45:09.000Because vaudeville is happening when Mark Twain's going on, and there's lots of comedy going on in vaudeville, and that was Jewish and black.
01:45:14.000I wonder what kind of speeches they would do or what kind of jokes they would tell or if they would do it.
01:45:36.000Variety shows were a big deal back then and the MC would often be a stand-up comedian and you'd be armed with jokes and it was like the Catskills era was one of the weird things is that they had sort of street jokes and like you would have jokes and I would you know use kind of the same jokes that you would do so you would be in one place and I would be in another place and we might be doing the same jokes you know and then Lenny Bruce was like the guy that started talking about life Whereas instead of having these jokes,
01:46:05.000he was trying to explain why some of the parts of our culture didn't make any sense, why some of the things that we do are preposterous, why there's these hypocritical aspects of our society that should be addressed, and maybe we could live in a better, more happy world if we kind of looked at these more clearly.
01:46:25.000So what we think of as stand-up comedy, It's so broad because there's like Stephen Wright stand-up comedy which is like joke joke joke you know non sequiturs not not connected and then there's George Carlin which is like he would create sort of a new monologue every year and then he would do that new hour on HBO throw it away and start all over again the next year Observational humor is what you're talking about,
01:46:49.000In some ways, but like Jerry Seinfeld's observational, but he doesn't have any like deep political insight or social insight or sexual insight, whereas Lenny Bruce would.
01:47:35.000He wasn't talking about race the way that Lenny Bruce did.
01:47:38.000Lenny was doing some stuff that wasn't even funny.
01:47:41.000One of the things that he did was he was talking about how they lied when Jackie Onassis was jumping out of the limousine after JFK got shot, or Jackie Kennedy.
01:47:53.000When and they were they were saying that she was trying to help him and that she was trying to go for help But she was hitting he was like she was saving her ass She was trying to get out of that fucking limousine because they shot the president in the head his head exploded and she jumped out of that limo and You're lying to people if you say any differently,
01:48:11.000and it was like this weird moment When he was on stage, I've heard the recordings where he's explaining this.
01:48:16.000Like, he's explaining, like, you're trying to sell a false narrative about an important historical event and it's going to fuck with people's heads.
01:48:24.000Like, of course she's trying to get away.
01:48:26.000She's trying to get away because they just shot and killed her husband.
01:48:29.000You know, but that wasn't funny at all.
01:48:31.000So there's, like, some stuff that he was doing that, like, he sort of, like, he had, like, crossed this boundary, this weird, strange divide into commentary that wasn't even necessarily funny.
01:48:42.000Yeah, but he's flipping the script, though.
01:48:44.000I mean, he's turning things upside down, even when he's not being funny.
01:49:32.000Well, if it wasn't for those guys exposing how ridiculous...
01:49:36.000I mean, our culture went through this radical shift, right?
01:49:39.000From the 50s to the 60s, 60s to the 70s, and they tried to put a cork on it in the 70s.
01:49:44.000And then the sweeping, psychedelic legislation that was passed in the 1970s, where they fucking made everything Schedule I, and they started locking down What you can and can't do.
01:50:35.000You know, one of the big heroes in this, he never gets talked about in this way, is Larry Flint.
01:50:39.000He waged many successful court cases on obscenity issues, and he went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he won many of them.
01:50:49.000And he really opened up a lot of space.
01:50:52.000For speech in the media in the 70s 80s and 90s.
01:50:55.000That's a very interesting point is no one would even if they did believe that was true They would leave that out because he's a pornographer, right?
01:53:15.000I don't think they kind of knew totally how counterculture Hunter was.
01:53:19.000It's one of the things in the Gonzo, Fear and Loathing, the Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, the documentary sort of talked about how when he decided to write that book, And he went to the campaign trail.
01:54:22.000I said, what would George Carlin say about a stand-up comedian giving a platform, an uncritical platform, to a politician or head of state?
01:56:09.000To be a part of a program that has 80 plus percent, depending on who you ask, innocent casualty rates.
01:56:18.000Like, what is it like to make these decisions knowing that people are going to die?
01:56:22.000What is it like when you see someone like Edward Snowden come out against the NSA's Spying platform and then you realize that on your own campaign when the hope and change website You had all these provisions in there to protect and and help whistleblowers Whistleblowers who are exposing actual laws that are being broken like what is?
01:56:45.000How did you make this change like what is your thought process behind that look?
01:56:49.000What do you think about a guy like Julian Assange?
01:56:51.000What do you think about someone like Chelsea Manning?
01:56:53.000What do you think about someone who delivers?
01:56:55.000Information to a news source, and that news source exposes things that are absolutely crimes that the United States public hates, that people don't ever want to think of when they think of the American people, when they think of this good, just leader of democracy in the world.
01:57:12.000You don't want to think about those things.
01:57:14.000And this is why Obama will never be in this chair that I'm sitting in right now.
01:58:51.000I think certainly that there are animals in this world that are beautiful and should be protected.
01:58:57.000And I don't think you should really kill things that you're not going to eat.
01:59:00.000And I don't necessarily understand why anybody would want to go to a place like Africa and kill a lion.
01:59:06.000But it's incredibly complicated when you look at the reality of what These hunting camps are in Africa because they have taken these animals that were on the brink of extinction and they've made them plentiful.
01:59:18.000And the way they've done that is by fencing in these enormous, like, you know, 100,000, 200,000 acre areas and turn them into these hunting preserves.
01:59:28.000And they've bred these animals in there.
01:59:32.000And they have areas where these lions are free-roaming, like in Zimbabwe, where this Cecil lion was killed, where there's part areas where they're preserved, where they're not allowed to hunt, and then areas where they are allowed to hunt.
01:59:45.000And the money that goes to these hunts is what pays for conservation.
02:00:15.000They have to shoot a certain amount of coyotes.
02:00:17.000If cattle ranchers have calves, they have to be very careful because the coyotes will literally pull the calves out of the females as they're giving birth and kill the calves.
02:00:27.000They have to keep them away if they want to keep a healthy population of cows and sheep and a lot of other animals.
02:02:54.000His brother Jericho, they were worried, was killed too.
02:02:57.000Because people had created this narrative that Jericho was now going to take care of Cecil's babies for him, which is so fucking hilarious.
02:03:02.000Because first of all, if you don't know anything about lions and how a male becomes the head of a pride, they murder all the cubs.
02:03:20.000All of the heads of prides, those are all baby murders.
02:03:24.000So if Jericho came along, not only would he not protect Cecil's babies, he would fucking kill them with his face.
02:03:30.000Okay, so they were worried that Jericho had been killed too, and there was a story saying that they believed Jericho had been poached.
02:03:36.000And then they said there was a relief because it turned out that the lion that was killed was not Jericho, but was some other no-name, bitch-ass lion that nobody cared about because nobody had made a noise that you associate with this fucking lion.
02:05:10.000He probably thinks he's a great president.
02:05:13.000If you look at what Obama has done, if you look at the numbers, what he's done economically as far as job creation, as far as the rebound of the economy, I don't understand all that stuff.
02:05:23.000But if you look at it, it all looks really positive.
02:05:25.000If you look at the raw numbers, the raw data.
02:05:27.000Yeah, but he had very little to do with that, with unemployment going down to 5%.
02:05:31.000I mean, his policies or the Congress's policies had very little effect on that.
02:05:37.000What do you think that- That was the economy churning itself.
02:05:40.000So the economy rebounding like the- Yeah.
02:05:42.000I mean, most economists I think would agree with that, that fiscal policies by the government had negligible effect on that.
02:06:45.000Yeah, but they're worried about all these people losing all their money ahead in the banks, just like the savings and loan crisis in the 80s.
02:07:19.000Your past experience as a student activist at Occidental College, by the way, with now being the head of the biggest killing machine in world history.
02:07:30.000How do you reconcile your feelings as Barry Obama, who was protesting against apartheid in South Africa, with being the president who murders brown people in Africa?
02:07:46.000So I want to know sort of personally...
02:07:49.000What in Africa, and what are you referring to?
02:07:52.000Well, there are troops on the ground in Africa doing, you know, murdering people, and there's drones in North Africa murdering people in the Middle East, right?
02:08:26.000One of the main claims that's made about him is that he's actually a peacenik who's forced to do these things by the military industrial establishment, right?
02:08:42.000When a drone strike is made, is it really you and your advisors making that decision, or are you forced to by this thing called a military-industrial complex?
02:09:13.000Wouldn't it be amazing if Bernie Sanders got into office and just started fucking full-scale drone attacks and cutting down on whistleblowers and ramped up the NSA spying program?
02:09:45.000Now, when you talk to someone like Sam Harris, what he believes is that Obama gets into office and is then presented with the reality of the ongoing situation in the Middle East with Islamic terrorism, with radical fundamentalists and all across the globe that mean to do America harm.
02:10:02.000And he's presented with this overwhelming evidence that the world is way more fucked than we're being led to believe.
02:10:09.000I mean, Sam Harris thinks the world is far more dangerous than I do.
02:10:12.000I mean, he thinks that Islam is inherently violent, that jihad is a necessary outgrowth of Islam, that if we don't take action, lethal action against them, that they will come and kill us.
02:10:35.000I think he believes that there is a fundamental flaw in the ideology that wants all people who leave the religion killed and that a religion that believes...
02:10:47.000Well, a religion was founded by a warlord.
02:10:49.000It's a different style of religion than, say, like Jesus, who is a peacenik.
02:10:55.000I don't think he necessarily thinks that we need to take lethal action against them.
02:10:59.000I think that he is more concerned about what they are capable of doing than the average person.
02:11:06.000So there's no doubt that there are Muslims who do believe that stuff, right?
02:11:10.000The question is, why are they targeting the French and the United States specifically, right?
02:11:17.000And I think that is because, not because of their I think it's largely because France and the United States has intervened in the Middle East against Arabs and in France against their own Arab and Muslim people in discriminatory,
02:12:08.000If they continue to fly planes into our buildings after we've withdrawn from the Middle East, then we can talk about their religion and we can talk about them as criminal psychopaths.
02:12:24.000Yeah, removing troops from the Middle East is a hot subject, and I would love to hear what the President would say about the consequences of doing that, the vacuum it created and what's going on right now with ISIS. This vacuum that has been created is now filled up with the most dangerous radical fundamentalist group in recent memory.
02:12:56.000And what you were saying, like, they created this vacuum, this power vacuum in that area, right, in which these nut bags just easily and quickly filled.
02:13:04.000Well, we're seeing that in Libya as well.
02:13:06.000We're seeing that everywhere you get rid of a dictator.
02:13:35.000I can't imagine they could sustain a society for very long.
02:13:39.000Well, it should also be pointed out that I think something around the neighborhood of 80 plus percent of the people that are fighting against ISIS are Muslims.
02:14:19.000First of all, I think anyone is far more effective outside the establishment, right?
02:14:25.000I think I can actually get more done and change minds and change the culture, which ultimately changes policies simply by talking, by doing this, right?
02:14:50.000I'm not going to give you all the credit for it, but clearly you had something to do with that.
02:14:53.000I mean, you participated in this massive cultural shift, right?
02:14:57.000I mean, there were many people doing it, but I would say that your voice was one of the loudest, and I'd give you quite a bit of credit for moving it as fast as it has moved.
02:15:20.000So it's got a lot more people that go, oh, I didn't think about it that way.
02:15:26.000People that wanted those two groups to be much more clearly defined, and I'm letting them know, it's not.
02:15:32.000And there's a lot of benefits, especially martial arts.
02:15:36.000One thing that I definitely have probably done is turned a lot of people that would have never been involved in martial arts onto martial arts.
02:15:49.000I'm not here to kiss your ass, but I have seen evidence of your influence in the drug policy debate.
02:16:53.000Well, that's one of the things that concerns me the most about the trends that are going on in the schools today, because I think that if you really do want to change the culture, what you have to change is young people.
02:17:03.000You have to open the eyes and the minds of young people to all the possibilities, and to the fact that what our culture really is is just this established pattern that we're all following that doesn't necessarily suit you, help you, or even make sense.
02:17:18.000But it's got momentum behind it, and it's a habit.
02:19:25.000Certainly not in the official curriculum, because those guys said bad words and they said naughty things.
02:19:30.000So the official curriculum, what is the goal behind it?
02:19:33.000To be the most efficient at educating kids, or you think they're trying to program children?
02:19:38.000So the American public school system was modeled after the Prussian system of the 19th century, and early American educators who founded this thing, public schools, Horace Mann and others, said explicitly, this should be a means to train children to be workers.
02:20:44.000The government has to have citizens who are law-abiding and who don't question the fundamentals of the society.
02:20:52.000So do you specifically believe that they set the students up and they set the classes up in that manner, or do you think they do it because they feel like that's the most efficient way to produce the goals that they want to achieve, which is higher GPA, higher SAT scores?
02:21:09.000And we have to compete with China and India.
02:21:18.000It's just like, well, of course they've got to be good in math and engineering because that's how you get a good job and that's how you're a good American.
02:21:25.000You can talk about Rosa Parks now, because she's now safe, because we now live in an integrated society, right?
02:21:32.000But 60 years ago, you didn't talk about her.
02:22:09.000When you talk about the government itself, isn't the idea of a representative government kind of an archaic thing in terms of it was all created back when communication was incredibly difficult?
02:22:19.000When you wanted a state representative, one of the reasons for it is because no one could get a hold of everyone in the state.
02:22:28.000You couldn't all get together and speak your mind about something, but now, Because of social media and the internet as we know it now, forget about what the internet is going to be like 10-15 years from now, which is going to be even more intense, but you could express yourself in a way now that just wasn't available before.
02:22:45.000You don't necessarily need a representative government.
02:22:48.000And the reason why they have to go to these fucking places like Iowa and campaign there, and it's a big part of the campaign trail, is just because of this weird fucking setup that they have.
02:23:00.000Yeah, well, the electoral college system, the primaries, the two-party duopoly.
02:23:12.000The most exciting thing that happened in 2008 was not Barack Obama to me.
02:23:15.000It was Ron Paul and Ralph Nader joined forces with some other third-party candidates to break down the rules that bar third-party candidates, make it much more difficult for third-party candidates to have a viable, I haven't seen that renewed really in any serious way since then.
02:23:49.000And I think that's why we have such low voter turnout.
02:23:52.000If there was actual choice, if you could actually see yourself represented among the politicians running, I think many more people would vote.
02:24:00.000Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of futility that people feel when they look at the two-party system and then they see where a guy like Barack Obama arguably at least returns to military policy as conservative as GW. Foreign policy.
02:25:39.000Well, there's also an issue, and a huge one, in the way that teachers are financially Compensated for work.
02:25:50.000The amount of money that teachers make is so small.
02:25:54.000And the way we look at teachers, we don't look at teachers like, if you thought about someone who is educating your child about the ways of the world, influencing them, we all have ideas in our head about really positive and really negative teacher experiences that we had as a child.
02:26:13.000You know, I have a few really positive ones that to this day, I think back about this guy like, I had a science teacher in seventh grade that, for the first time ever, introduced in my mind the idea of infinity.
02:26:29.000He would grow his own vegetables and bring them in and talk In these really passionate ways about what it's like to grow the food that you actually eat.
02:26:39.000And this is, you know, I was, you know, I was 12 or something.
02:26:51.000What it's like to have food, to understand the actual process of a seed becoming your food, and then to eat it and bring it into lunch.
02:27:00.000And he was talking about these radishes that he had grown in his garden that he's eating right now.
02:27:06.000And then he was trying to explain to us that everything in the entire world, including human beings, is essentially made out of materials that came from a star that exploded.
02:27:47.000How much time it would take light, just light, to get to the nearest solar system outside of ours, and then think about that in terms of how big the galaxy is, with hundreds of billions of stars, each one with their own little planets, And then hundreds of billions of galaxies and I remember leaving that class just mind fucked at 12 or 13 years old and it stuck like it stuck with me like for years for decades that one teacher but that wasn't that was him it
02:28:17.000was his ideas this wasn't this isn't a part of some state sponsored curriculum that he had to follow no and it was public school right yeah yeah yeah so he's the exception right yeah yeah and there's no reason he should exist in that system right The system has no reason to encourage creativity,
02:28:34.000to encourage thinking outside one's world like that, right?
02:28:37.000It must reinforce itself, reinvigorate itself, right?
02:28:42.000The system must sustain itself and it does that by training.
02:28:46.000New workers, new participants, new citizens, new soldiers.
02:29:32.000So training kids to be better in STEM is a huge part of the Common Core.
02:29:38.000Explain STEM to people who don't know what that means.
02:29:39.000Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
02:29:42.000So if you want to build shit, if you want to make superconductors and computers and technology and all that stuff that the Chinese and Indians are doing, and some people in the United States are doing...
02:30:13.000Well, I have a friend who's got kids in public school in Manhattan, and he was going crazy about it, like the changes that it's made to what they have to study.
02:30:22.000Louis C.K. has been railing about it, too, yeah.
02:31:06.000Standardization of thinking is the idea of conformity on a mass scale like that without leaving in any room for creativity or any room for exploring the possibilities of the wonders of the unknown of your future.
02:31:21.000Instead, just trying to create a robot that can compete with China.
02:31:32.000See, I think one of the coolest trends in this country right now is not people that are trying to do that, but rather people that are trying to do their own thing.
02:31:42.000And what we're getting out of the Internet is we're getting a lot more small, independent businesses where people leave their job and say, hey, I'm going to sell blank.
02:32:09.000And we're seeing this in, like, there's this trend in restaurants where they want, like, raw wood tables and, like, old-style lighting and everything's sort of rustic with metal and wood.
02:32:21.000It's almost like there's this longing for something that's not homogenized and pasteurized and mass-produced.
02:32:27.000Like, we have this longing for things that are crafted.
02:32:31.000We keep seeing these fucking handcrafted sandwiches.
02:33:37.000So that's, it's kind of unique in the sense that I don't know a lot of other professors that have decided to try to separate from the system and create their own courses.
02:34:06.000I've been researching, and I haven't been able to find anyone who's done it.
02:34:10.000So there is edX, there's Coursera, there's Udacity, there's these big MOOCs, massive online courses, that are basically, they're just in partnership with universities, right?
02:34:21.000And so they get professors in those universities to teach these MOOCs, right?
02:34:25.000But these people already have jobs, they have tenure usually, right?
02:34:28.000So they don't need to go independent entirely.
02:34:31.000Yeah, I haven't seen anyone who's gone independent entirely.
02:34:33.000I mean, I am unusual in that I have a PhD and I've been a professor and I have a book that's given me a fairly big public platform, right?
02:34:44.000So there aren't a lot of people like that.
02:34:47.000There are a lot of people with PhDs and there are a lot of people with big books, but there's very few people with both those things.
02:36:14.000I remember when Fox came around and everybody was like, what is this?
02:36:17.000Rupert Murdoch, as evil as he may be in some ways, he is primarily responsible for breaking that monopoly and allowing all this stuff to happen now.
02:36:27.000He's the one who came in and challenged the FCC. And got that other band and established Fox.
02:36:32.000And Fox, people forget, was very, very edgy when it started.
02:38:43.000What I don't like about Amazon is what I hear about the way their employees are treated.
02:38:47.000What I don't like about it is I hear about the pressure that they're under and they have to run from one spot to the other and deliver these things and they're yelled at and, you know.
02:38:54.000Yeah, it's a big, high-pressure factory.
02:38:57.000I mean, those are terrible places to work and always have been.
02:39:16.000I mean, they have a choice between working in a sweatshop and being in abject poverty.
02:39:20.000You know, I'm not saying it's a good thing to work in a sweatshop or in an Amazon factory, but I am saying, undoubtedly, it's better than what else there is.
02:39:39.000They called themselves a Fairphone, but they fucked up and they only had like 3G. And everybody's like, you know, you can have no slave labor and everyone gets paid a fine wage, but you only get 3G. Fuck you!
02:39:50.000I want 4G! You can feel really good about yourself, but you won't be able to make a call.
02:39:54.000Yeah, you won't get any pictures quick.
02:42:06.000And they have to put fucking nets around the building to keep them from jumping off?
02:42:09.000Like, that seems unfair that they have to live in these dormitories and that they're so concerned with suicide they put nets all around the...
02:42:46.000Do you think those people want to lose their jobs?
02:42:48.000But how did they get employed in the first place?
02:42:50.000Did Americans create this problem by going over there to these slave labor factories and having their phones built there instead of having them built in Ohio?
02:42:56.000They wouldn't work in those factories if it wasn't better than the alternative.
02:43:00.000They're making more in those factories, undoubtedly, otherwise they wouldn't be in there.
02:43:05.000Than they would outside those factories.
02:43:07.000But the only reason why they're making those phones in those factories is because they make substantially less than someone who works in America.
02:43:14.000And if you look at the conditions that they live and work under, they're horrific.
02:43:18.000Capitalist development sucks in a lot of ways, right?
02:43:21.000But it's also necessary to get to something much better, right?
02:43:24.000So our ancestors worked in factories worse than those, right?
02:43:27.000But thank God they did, because as a society, we advance tremendously because of it.
02:43:32.000So, in quotes, Thaddeus Russell says, slave labor is awesome for the future.
02:44:03.000It was like a segmented sort of a phone, and the idea being that what we're doing is incredibly wasteful.
02:44:09.000We have this whole unit as a phone, and then we get a new one every year and a half, two years, whatever the fuck it is, and you throw the old one out and you get the new one.
02:44:17.000What they're saying is, no, instead, when they come up with new improvements, like a new and improved camera, you should be able to put that camera section and take the old one out and put a new one in.
02:45:16.000Yeah, because, look, if you're in a place where T-Mobile doesn't work, but you can get AT&T or Verizon or what have you, you have a Google phone that'll work if you have one of those Nexus phones.
02:45:26.000Has any institution or organization changed human life more dramatically than Google?
02:48:09.000Because pretty much all they're doing is great things.
02:48:11.000Yeah, tech is the bright side of prosperity in my eyes.
02:48:15.000What's going on in San Francisco, although all these people are being pushed out of their neighborhood, what you're getting is insane innovation.
02:48:22.000I mean, unbelievably staggering improvements to the quality of life for people that are- And here's what's missed all the time, because people talk about inequality all the time, economic inequality.
02:48:31.000It's true that there's greater inequality now, but what no one talks about is that the poor live way better Than the poor did 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago.
02:48:41.000And that's largely because of technology, right?
02:48:43.000There is not a person, basically, in the United States who doesn't own a cell phone.
02:49:25.000There's this huge advance for everyone.
02:49:27.000Yes, it's true that the very poor are farther from the very rich now, but if the very poor are living better, and also, by the way, have much more access to power through social media, through the internet, through technology, right, than ever before.
02:49:43.000You can be poor and have a public voice now, right?
02:49:47.000You can certainly be middle class and have a large public voice.
02:49:50.000That wasn't possible before when there was three networks.
02:49:53.000And this kind of balanced perspective will be available to you at Renegade University, launching in the spring of 2017. 16. 16. You think so?