Interview with Dr. Catherine Liu

[00:00:00]Welcome to another episode of Ask a Brother podcast. I'm your host, Jeff St. James, and we're going to have a whole host of different people from [music] different backgrounds coming in because that really is about building a community of like-minded people that's just open to listening and hearing from other perspectives. The revolution is going to [music] be because of us.

[00:00:22]What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of Ask a Brother podcast. I'm your host Jeff St. James.

[00:00:27]And listen y'all, I just checked and we cleared 90,000 subscribers in no time.

[00:00:32]So, we are very, very much um hitting a goal that I didn't know we were going to hit so soon. Um it looks like we're potentially going to hit 100,000 subscribers before the end of the year.

[00:00:43]And once we hit that 100,000 subscribers, I absolutely have a couple surprises in mind for all of you in terms of a project I've been working on for quite some time, as well as an event that's going to be coming. So, stay tuned for that. But without further ado, when it comes to interviews, I, you know, I'm very particular about the people I try to bring on. I always love their perspectives. I think that they're interesting, and this person is absolutely um near the top of the list when it comes to uh important people. Uh so, our next distinguished guest has stated that we need a left-wing project 2025. She is an intellectual force that is holding up an introspective mirror in all the societal and cultural places where the left has lost its effectiveness. She is an author, cultural theorist, and professor of film and media studies. Please help me welcome to the show for the very first time, Dr. Katherine Lou.

[00:01:30]What's going on, man?

[00:01:30]>> Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:34][applause] >> Appreciate you. So, real quick, uh you're a big deal coming on this platform. Uh I've seen you everywhere.

[00:01:41]You you you've spoken in such large crowds and it's it's an honor to have you.

[00:01:45]>> Thank you. Thank you. I think um I was really committed. I really wanted to come on to this um to your podcast. I think you and I can have a unique conversation given your um background in counseling, your perspective on African-American identity and things like that. So, I'm really looking forward to it.

[00:02:04]>> That's an honor to hear and and I don't take that uh lightly. So, real quick, why don't we start with you letting people know just a little bit about your background and what made you interested in just cultural analysis and film and media? Um, you know, I was always really interested in theory and I grew up, you know, in the 70s when it was the dying days of, you know, kind of the social democratic compact in America in a very very racially diverse, you know, public school through high school. And I was always incredibly intellectually curious and I wanted to be around people who were interested in asking hard questions, curious about culture, literature, all these things, you know, unlike sort of the um immigrant family that I came out of. But as I've spent 30 years in academia, I've seen a decline in curiosity and open-mindedness, in appreciation of aesthetic experience even. But you know it was part of my journey into the professional managerial class that made me see how the class has failed. And I'm also really interested in what we can do with a sense of like political agency for people who are um who have been sorted and identified by liberalism as you know these distinct categories. And part of that I think has to do with my early experiences of China during when we'd go back every other summer. My dad was at the UN and you know even though I was just a kid and I didn't really know what was going on I felt like there was something really important politically that was happening in the country that Americans didn't understand and wouldn't understand because it was really like the cold war.

[00:03:56]So that's a little bit of background about me. Um I loved psychoanalysis in my first encounter with it and then you know um the leftism Marxism sort of came naturally to me and I loved having the synthesis of both >> in the Frankfurt school which is what um I discovered on my kind of on my own because people weren't really teaching it when I was in graduate school.

[00:04:23]>> No, I I appreciate that. You know, I do invite people both both uh political ends of the spectrum just to hear their perspectives of the strengths and weaknesses of those viewpoints and I and I absolutely thought you would be a perfect person for bringing in in terms of just seeing what your actual analysis is especially of the left today for sure. So the initial question I wanted to ask is in the west and absolutely in the US many of the left that are on the left are big on treating people with the minority status in organizations meetings and even in academia as the voice of entire racial ethnic groups.

[00:04:55]I've been there quite a few times. Um as an Asian-American what are your thoughts about this and how have you process why this happens? Um, so you know, I think it was Cedric Johnson who wrote about how and Adolf Reed wrote about how African-American leaders after the civil rights movement in these liberal institutions became the unelected unelected representatives of their alleged communities. And the and the Asian-American um model for this really followed the AfricanAmerican model in liberal white spaces. And um part of the pressure of performing your identity for the white liberal elites is that they already have an idea of who you are and what you're supposed to do.

[00:05:42]>> So, you know, in recent years, like well, even when I was growing up, like Asian-American women were supposed to represent intergenerational trauma, and you labor for liberal inclusivity by presenting yourself in this way. One of the things that I always objected to in this and I resisted this kind of like I'm I'm Chinese American. I'm going to work on Chinese American issues.

[00:06:07]Although I do have an experience that isn't really visible to these lips was that oftentimes the struggle for like sovereignty for autonomy was actually happening within my family like or within the alleged community, right?

[00:06:23]there's these expectations of um who and what I should be as a woman and also a lot of that happens in ways that I didn't feel like fit into this narrative of authenticity that white liberal institutions wanted like oh it's community you've got the community the what [clears throat] does your community think and there's just a lot of there there are a lot of conflicts in the community the you know you and I know that minority communities are very conservative and you have to respect them. Like in the end, you know, I would go home from undergraduate and go to my parents and like give them lectures on feminism two years ago. She did not need liberal feminism.

[00:07:11]>> No, she her relationship with my father was one thing. He was abusive to her and to us as kids. Um feminism I thought would be like a key that unlocked them.

[00:07:21]It took like years, decades for me to understand that this agenda of progress, healing, wholeness was really about a kind of theater for liberalism and its inclusive um inclusive agendas that excluded conflict within, you know, um within the family, conflict within classes, within between classes. And another thing that I think really like kind of distinguished me from other Chinese-American or Asian-American people, professionals, was that um my mother never finished high school. And my father came from a very poor peasant background, tested his way into college, you know, was kind of like, you know, lived the American dream in some ways in the 20th century. But um I didn't feel like I had so much in common with some of these, you know, Asian ladies who are like whose families, you know, came out with gold ingots from the PRC and [laughter] and um were very bourgeois and then came and um had, you know, higher education and they were just part of this aristocratic elite. So I mean that in itself was another that that was a big conflict. But within the liberal institutions, um, identity politics plays out as an opportunity for young, ambitious people of color to sort of take up, um, to climb the ladder really. And if I resisted like, you know, chi embodying Chinese Americanism, Americanism for white lips, because I felt like these this Asian-American identity actually didn't have anything to do with um chi the Chinese family where you don't speak English at all.

[00:09:06]So, I didn't feel like I was a hyphen. I felt like I was a slash. Like, if I spoke Chinese and I was my family, I was one person and then I would be another person. But this like Chinese slash hyphen American like my parents, their friends, my family in China be like who the who are you? You know I [clears throat] um so I often felt like AsianAmericans and Chinese Americans they they played this role um because you know in modern times we don't the especially the professional classes we don't really have any roots. So the profession gives us this identity like unlike the African-American community which has been or African-Americans have been in America as long as they've been Americans. It's like hundreds of years, right? And when I would often see African-Americans, you know, in workplaces or things like that, I'd be like, you guys are so American and you're talking about anti-racism this and blackness that. And it's like this does not translate >> outside of America. And when it does, it's oftentimes part of American imperialism and hijgemony. Anyway, so I I I think it was, you know, there there are many ways of like putting it in a nerdy academic way like, you know, you switch codes or whatever, whatever it was was like living in a very divided way, but then feeling like to succeed you had to perform this identity for people that I in the end like felt was not as important to me as that of a scholar and an intellectual. And you can see that that is not important in academia now. people are it's you know I wrote a book about this like people are more anti-intellectual in academia than there are than they are in the outside community. I'll give you an actual example from my 21 2011 book called um academic anti- elitism as cultural critique. So, you know, like progressive education and left liberal spaces are like very critical of the cannon, right? You you don't want to read stuff by dead white men. It's all like great great literature is somehow inherently oppressive and we should like only teach contemporary literature or things that are useful. Well, around the time of, you know, um, in the early 20th century when there were all of these different curricular fights and there was, um, requirement for all American children to go to high school, like before that hadn't even been an issue yet. Um, people were already having these kinds of culture wars and these curricular wars. and um the African-American community, well the African-American population in the United States, especially among sort of the more urbanized ones or the um the ones who had come out of the south during the great migration, stuff like that. They rejected vocational education because that was what Booker T.

[00:12:01]Washington was saying like African-Americans are only good for learning how to farm, learning agriculture, we can just be better farmers. They wanted their kids to learn Latin, the Greek, the Greeks, the classics, and everything else. And so they didn't have this anti- elitist attitude towards the canon. No, >> it was a an invention within, you know, left liberal ideas about like popular culture being really cool that they decided like the people love popular culture. And if you look historically at um what happened Oh, yeah. This was definitely like some on my mind during um Obama's administration when he was like, "Yeah, I'm going to open up all these community colleges. We're going to have vocational education for, you know, working-class people." And I was like, "Why is there vocational education for minority kids who have to go to community college or, you know, for kids who um have to get a job and then at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, whatever, the IBS, everyone can have liberal arts education." And so I started looking at the history of American education and testing and all these other things and um you know everyone in the liberal spaces be like oh it's naturally oppressive to demand more African-Americans and workingclass kids and the African-American um sort of polity at the time was asking for higher standards for like a universal general education that was going to provide the best the best for their children. Obviously, this doesn't happen in the south because of racism and funding and sec and Jim Crow and segregation. But the aspiration was there that we would all have the freedom to learn this um cannon because it belongs to all of us. We can reject it later if we want to, but it's not going to be this condescending thing like um oh yeah, you can study hiphop studies and you know and uh you know whatever I'm talking about. [clears throat] You're tell you're absolutely telling the truth and I love the part that you said at the beginning of that about how as identity politics really started to take root educationally that became the new opportunity for minorities. And and the wild thing was those of us who were kind of felt like we were split in between between what life is actually like in our respective families and our social circles versus the version of what they're expecting us to be in these spaces. and knowing that if you didn't told the line that may be how you don't get promoted, that's how you don't get in the class. That's how you don't get certain opportunities. So, it's a very very unfortunate dance where it's not that it wasn't about intellectual curiosity. It was like, "No, we have a certain script for black people. We have a certain script for Asian-Americans.

[00:14:44]Just follow that and then you can be the mouthpiece for the whole community."

[00:14:48]Well, you have a lot of integrity by even being able to articulate that because I don't feel like I see a lot of people with your level of integrity in the professions and you know a lot of this got escalated after you know George Floyd right so we you know had to do all these diversity initiatives and there were you know we had to admit more African-American graduate students and um hire more African-Americans. I just have a question like did this increase family assets for African-American um families of middle class working-class African did it improve the condition of African-American men which we know is very different from African-American women especially in the white collar world right >> hold on doc you getting into dangerous territory you bringing up the caring about species you know you're not supposed to talk about that in academia now you >> I know I I know. I know. Okay. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know.

[00:15:47]>> You're telling the truth. You're telling the truth. And And I that's why I wanted you here because someone with your background who has been able to to see it from that level up and down. Um it's it's tough for people who are new to the platforms or, you know, just even with my background, people like, well, he's not an academic. He doesn't have a doctor. He's never published anything.

[00:16:06]I'm like, leave. I saw it. I I saw it in the trainings. I saw it all. I saw it take root and take over the psychology and mental health field. And everything that you're pointing out where you're noticing these these contradictions, these these internal conflicts with with ideological viewpoints um you you get demonized, you you get targeted even and um it's so helpful that I I'm I'm actually really grateful from 2020 till now to find and hear more and more people who are acknowledging like there is such a thing as liberalism going too far. Um, I ask you this second question.

[00:16:41]Is >> liberalism Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I think >> No, I don't think it's gone too far. I think it's actually just betrayed its own values because if its values are equality, it actually doesn't treat people equally.

[00:16:54]>> You know, it condescends to um African-Americans, but it doesn't include workingass or make provision for workingclass people. Or when it looks at, you know, inclusion, it's always through the um special provision. And I think that people of integrity, people of color, we don't want special provisions. We want to be treated as equals.

[00:17:15]>> Yeah.

[00:17:15]>> And liberalism has betrayed its own value. Its value of everyone being born equal. And that is something that really was invented that of that idea really came forth in you know the work of the French enlightenment Jean Jacqu Rouso then transferred to the American Revolution. Yes, there were slaves, but the idea was that we would be able to overcome um social political conditions that left people less than human, which at that point were African-American slaves, but like hundreds of millions of surfs, um lowass people, peasants, and people who lived under feudalism and feudal arrangements in the 18th century. That was a lot of the world. So you you have this like goal, right? You have this goal of equality and then suddenly you have this like micromanaged, you know, technocratic engineering of proportional representation that who does that satisfy? Well, as my friend Jen Pan wrote, like why the rich love anti-racism, selling social justice, it satisfies the capitalists, the really really rich people who don't have to redistribute any of their wealth, but who can just like play these sort of purely um um sort of cosmetic games. And this is here's the other thing I wanted to say. One of the other reasons I wanted to come on this podcast was mostly when I talk with my um leftist friends, we don't have this issue, but when I talk with a lot of liberal white people, >> their [clears throat] fear of appearing racism is just exhausting.

[00:18:54]>> Oh gosh.

[00:18:56]>> I can't I I I can't.

[00:19:00]>> Sorry for my horns, but you're absolutely telling the truth about that and and it it makes you extremely uncomfortable to just be authentically yourself. like >> it's very hard. There's like a there's like a screen and I and um one of the things that I often wanted in academia is for us to have more explicit disagreements. Yeah.

[00:19:22]>> And now when the question of race comes up or you know whatever they just shut down like everyone just shuts down >> because you're afraid of saying the wrong thing. you don't want or the other really bad thing is I have to say like people's when there's a question of race or you know inclusion and then there's some like you know explicitly unfair thing that's happening people will look to me to be like oh Katherine will say something it's like come on now >> yes I have been there imagine being in my role in my field as a black man during uh co and especially during um George Floyd >> like you know I'm talking like there were rooms where it's it's I'm the only guy, not black guy.

[00:20:05]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:20:06]>> Right.

[00:20:06]>> Oh, right. And another question I wanted to ask you is uh you frequently argue that lived experience has been turned into almost like a weaponized moral authority to silence intellectual debate. Why is it deeply anti-intellectual and even anti-Marxist to claim someone has no right to speak on a crisis unless they have personally suffered through it?

[00:20:25]Um because Marxism is actually based on objectivity and objective reality and it is objectively bad when one 0001% of the population you know owns 40% of a society's wealth and those are numbers that we can all recognize. We can have find our way to a shared reality. I think you know I'm not ready to say like Bill Gates is going to be like oh this is wrong. he does try to cover up, you know, the abuses that his wealth produces, but I do think the only way to build um real mass solidarity is to say most of us aren't Bill Gates. Like the great majority of people working who have to work for a living will see that and say this is what we have in common.

[00:21:11]We live in this very up society and we need to do something about it.

[00:21:16]But if everyone can only speak about their lived experience, there is no shared reality. I'm just listening to you to mirror you. Then you talk and I mirror you. We're like in a hall of mirrors. And so all we can do is not say is not say like let's let's have Medicare for all or let's have um universal child care like mom Donnie is trying to say or let's make sure that every mother who goes out of a hospital has provision for her child for the first year. And no, we we start to talk only about these like very narrow ideal ideas of what I've lived through and that authorizes me to say something and silences you because you've never lived through it. as if we didn't have a shared reality.

[00:22:06]>> And in the end, it's like this micromanaged technocratic pluralism where everyone is different and you don't have any basis for solidarity and collectivity. And yes, we are very different. But even in that hall of mirrors kind of thing, I don't think people really are able to recognize each other in their particularity because as I've written about now in traumatized people talk about their suffering in a very scripted way like this happened to me, this happened to me, this happened to me, then I you know met guru or you know I I had PTSD, I was an addict, I blah blah blah. Then I like had my come to Jesus moment. Now I'm recovery. Now I'm like doing this, this, and this. Now I'm taking care of myself. Now I'm a wellness influencer. You know, just [laughter] it's always like the same story.

[00:23:00]And they they can't actually reach into their >> experiences anymore because they're following the script of lived experience.

[00:23:10]>> You are so right. It's not just identity politics. People have now taken the identity of being traumatized to >> that's become an identity. Oh my goodness. You're so And again, like the whole I don't want to get into the mental health field because I feel like so many people have hijacked words and are now bringing it into all these different places to a weaponize it, shield themselves from scrutiny, and then to get certain perks, privileges, or advantages as a result of claiming that identity. It's it's disgusting. And and I'm happy that more people in your position are like actually pointing it out. Um >> some people Yeah, most people are not.

[00:23:43]But you know what? when I talk about my ideas like a lot of my colleagues like they try to ignore me but if I make an argument they're like nodding to me but then at a meeting or in like anything at a high stakes it's like all systems shut down. So, but what I wanted to say also was um >> during COVID we got all of these slides. I actually have them somewhere um about how we were supposed to teach differently from our teaching our office of teaching excellence and um there was something called traumainformed pedagogy that we were supposed to study and on one of the slides it literally said you know listen to your students trauma um don't if you care too much about teaching this could be bad for the classroom. Oh my god.

[00:24:35]>> It was literally there was some weird formulation like let's care for each other not so much for knowledge. I'm like what am I doing? I'm not a therapist.

[00:24:45]>> I'm not their mom. I'm not trained to be a therapist and I don't want to be their moms.

[00:24:51]>> I'm a professor. I know stuff and I'm trying to teach it desperately on this Zoom format and then I get this stuff coming out. And you know, there's only so much BS you can ignore before it like penetrates your soul and just rots your trust in institutions. So everyone's like, "Oh, no one trusts higher education. No one trusts the government.

[00:25:11]No one trusts the press." There only so many distortions of reality and go forward before like you feel like our entire public sphere is just like eaten away.

[00:25:21]>> Wow. Wow. And me being a a trauma certified therapist, this is horror stories hearing this stuff. My job is one of my jobs and roles was literally to help people reduce their PTSD symptoms from their actual trauma. And hearing these scripts that they're giving people in all these HR departments in academic settings and telling them like it's it's it's infantalizing. It's cod coddling the entire student bodies that are are engaging in this stuff. It's ridiculous.

[00:25:51]It's cognitively fantalizing, emotionally infantilizing. But one of the things I have as a question for therapists, but also I I have a intuition that one of the reasons why um my book is already resonating with so with the therapeutic community is that I feel like more and more people go into therapy with the script in mind already.

[00:26:14]>> And what you have to deal with is actually the resistance to change because they expect you to mirror them.

[00:26:21]Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:22]>> Is that happening that >> Yeah. Well, yeah. So that that they there's a starting point that I've noticed that people are carrying from society or social standard or even if them being socialized in the mental health space where >> the victim identity like you said is kind of who they are. And when you take people like that, let's talk about relationships for instance as an example. When you carry that identity with you, your companion, your partner is always going to be the blame for why the relationship is failing or fell apart. So, this is where you'll hear you'll hear examples of this of like when women will list the last 10 exes all being narcissist. What? Like, how is that even a thing? She she's been socialized to not see herself at fault.

[00:27:06]You're the prize. Any man will be lucky to have you. Um, you don't need to change any you don't need to change or improve for a man. and they need to do all the x y and z for you. you're you know so when you are having that buffering lens that strokes your ego and society is kind of conditioning you to always view it in this way and academia is reinforcing it your therapist or psychologist is reinforcing it by the time you actually like are in an actual relationship the level of narcissism is so high that it it it takes them 10 15 20 plus years of actually going through it sometimes to truly realize oh maybe I am the common denominator maybe I am the issue Um, and then when you take >> or something about you, you know, the the the thing that really worries me about this for women, for feminists, for women of color, for a lot of the scripts that are given to black women too is that if you are constantly expecting the world to treat you a certain way, that actually makes you very passive and creates a kind of anxiety because it actually is about you trying to control the outside world, which is fundamentally beyond our control, Right.

[00:28:15]And so I'm not saying that it's all your fault or whatever, but there really is a way in which like I've gone through this myself where you understand after a certain point like a lot of hard work too how you are actually an agent of your own life and that is extremely painful to >> because you you you've obvious you have been hurt like there actually has been hurt but your coping ing with that hurt has actually reproduced situations in which you are the agent >> and it it is actually very liberating to understand your responsibility because then you can do something about it but but it's always like I'm the victim people are doing this this and this to me >> what can you do except like play house in a in a dollhouse and arrange things so that everything can be perfect there's no room or comedy ation for uncertainty, unpredictability and you know the real otherness of others like >> people are in a way like fundamentally different from us incomprehensible.

[00:29:27]Um there's a mystery to them and that script about like he's a narcissist, she's a narcissist that reduces like the mystery of the other. I'm not really I'm not a spiritual person necessarily, but I do think that in our relationships with each other in order to find that authentic connection and um the possibility of love, you kind of have to let go of every single expectation you have in order to let that other person be in your life and let yourself be close to them. And I feel like a lot of this trauma narrative and the um the handholds that are given to women um actually prevent us from like giving grace to other people.

[00:30:15]>> Wow. Wow. I let me let me stick to these questions.

[00:30:19]I don't want to get off. [laughter] >> Okay. Okay.

[00:30:21]>> I love this so so much. Um you've been critical of of how Oprah Winfrey actually historically turned pain into profit. How did Oprah's brand of individual self-help lay the cultural groundwork for this post uh Keynesian like uh winner take all capitalism?

[00:30:37]>> Um Oprah Winfrey can be a model for trauma and recovery because she is one of the wealthiest women in America if not the wealthiest woman in America.

[00:30:47]Right. And she's self-made. And I tr you know she during the 1980s when um she was one daytime talk show host among many though Phil Donahghue was her biggest competitor but there were other like um um sort of more trashy people coming up like we just filin and people like that competing for audience share.

[00:31:11]She on her show came out, she literally says, of the closet um as a childhood sex abuse survivor.

[00:31:23]>> And this was considered, you know, a real moment of, you know, revelation because it was under Reagan. I think there was the the culture was shifting, right? Reagan wouldn't say the word AIDS, but Americans were actually becoming much more tolerant of homosexuality. And in outside of the closet was a term that was used for h for gay people, right? Coming in out of the closet, but Oprah used it for coming out of the closet as a sexual abuse survivor. And I, you know, don't doubt it. She doesn't give any details. It's was within the family. And um she then presents herself as a survivor.

[00:32:09]And from then on her show intensifies in its ability to speak to or to to allegedly speak to women and their pain and suffering.

[00:32:20]>> Her audience is still middleclass white women. Yeah.

[00:32:23]>> And that I I think that's also a really important point too. But she uses the cadence of the African-American preacher and she's able to speak in this very very articulate way about her past. Like you don't see her go through the process. A lot of it is externalized like she'll she struggles with her weight. You know, maybe this is about her um past. She she has bad relationships, but everything is extremely wellont controlled and well packaged. And she has women on her show with various kinds of problems. Some of them very sensationalized like she had Trudy's Chase on her show who allegedly had 93 personalities. It was because of childhood sexual abuse. But [clears throat] um in the end all of her solutions to personal suffering, all of her solutions to um all of her paths of recovery are individual and often go through you know in those days like Maryanne Williamson was a big new age guru often go through the path of guru self-help books you know sort of payment um pay to pay to heal kind of things. So she was a great marketer of these things. Now that said, like in history, in American media, um people didn't talk about their um past like this. Like this was really a new thing.

[00:33:49]Like even >> um I think it was Eugene McCarthy or I got the name wrong. Like um it was Tom Eagleton was like Eugene McCarthy's vice president when he was running for president. And it turned out he had had electroshock therapy. And this was like in the late 60s, early '7s. And when this came out, it was like game over for his candidacy, game over for McCarthy.

[00:34:13]It was like he was like any sign of mental illness, mental distress, having to, you know, have that kind of very extreme therapy was considered, you know, just taboo. Like you couldn't be a public figure anymore. And so Win Winfrey represents like the culmination of a lot of like civil rights, women's rights movements, but she is not someone who's like politically progressive, although she, you know, annoyance Obama and anoints Kamala. All her solutions are like you got to like learn to self-control or you buy this diet. You know, it's, [laughter] you know, it's all about her um her own like ability to be very ordinary and normal and find consumerrist solutions to, you know, real really serious problems. And her her elevation of the daytime talk show host status had a lot to do with her embodiment of her having survived childhood sexual abuse. Now, for someone who survived childhood sexual abuse like someone in her audience, does she really provide therapy? Does she really provide like a mirroring? I don't know. But what I do know is that her media empire really expands at that point. If you look at her her um you know value, her present value, she just really expands her um wealth at that point. and she makes some really really smart moves because she's really good capitalist.

[00:35:47]She buys the rights to her own show, buys the rights to her own syndication.

[00:35:52]She starts her own, you know, u publishing company. Oh, but before that she has Harpo Media, which is the conglomerate that owns all of these different channels. So, each of her channels stays very much within this like um healing trauma, women's relationships, women's problems. Um, but if you're on her show or if you want to go on in her publish in her magazine, you want to talk about like what happened to welfare under Clinton, she'd be like, "No, no, I'm I'm not like Janice Peek does show how she actually shuts down some people on her show."

[00:36:28]But, you know, Clinton was cutting welfare, right? But then she has these shows called like runaway moms where moms like so many [clears throat] of them workingass just like ran away from their families. Like the stressors on workingclass families made you know being a mother trying to work um really really difficult. You you have very few supports. Social supports are um uh dissolving. But her thing is like look at these women. They couldn't stand being at home anymore. you know, there was like really good television. Um, >> wow. Wow. Even blaming the the the the household for for capitalist failures.

[00:37:07]Oh, man. This is Wow.

[00:37:10]>> And if you wanted to talk like, well, maybe these women needed more social support. She she'd just be like she she was very good at shutting that kind of things down, those kind of things down. And her latest venture was with Prince Harry which was a she did an online streaming series that came out during co called the me you cannot see and it was it streamed on Apple because of the streaming platforms. You'd never know like how many views it actually got but it was like the a prince of the one of the oldest monarchies in America and a billionaire talking about their childhood trauma. Yeah.

[00:37:52]>> And the end of every segment would be like um click on apple.com the me you can't see to find therapy um um sources like I don't know where that went like it it showed you like apps that you could take you could >> it was like more it was just about you giving more data to Apple. Mhm.

[00:38:16]Mhm. Now, I do want to ask you this. Um, you know, you often critique cinematic liberalism uh and political art when the media and the art focuses entirely on triggering empathy or teaching a moral lesson. Uh, the results have often become lackluster performances in the back box office. I know right now uh Supergirl is set to lose a hundred to $125 million loss and even um I think a lot of times when they're trying this, they're even losing the audience. What are directors, writers, and artists missing here that gets lost in translation?

[00:38:46]>> Um, I think that a lot of producers uh and uh Hollywood mogul types like thought the translation of trauma into content was a was a money maker.

[00:38:58]>> Yep.

[00:38:59]>> And it they love formula. They don't like anything new. So, it worked for, you know, different it might have worked for Jordan Peele. So, they're like, "Okay, it's got to work for um the next African-American filmmaker." Um the I didn't know that Supergirl was about trauma, but almost every popular media thing is about trauma right now. So, I can see how that oh, you know what um was the great formula for Asian-American um work was um everywhere, everything everywhere all at once. It was like they were like, "Oh, yeah, it's actually about trauma. It's actually about this f this young girl who's gay who needs you know she's so evil but she needs to find her mother's love and so that became um Disneyi and I think there were a lot of Disney like Coco a lot of animated Disney shorts Disney films for kids also became like these were the traumatic experiences of immigrants crossing the river and then it becomes you know this fantastic world where you overcome your trauma and Hollywood just loves a formula and it's become a formula especially and this is, you know, terrible for women of color. You know, if you want to break through, if you have a trauma narrative that you think you can sell, then, you know, Khloe Da is, you know, was the director of Hamnit, which is all based on like Hamlet being, you know, it's part of this like women's non fiction world.

[00:40:32]Hamlet is actually related to Anna and Williams loss of their son Hamnet, right? And I mean that's [laughter] whatever. But um >> what that's very but what it does is it invites you to produce yourself as this [clears throat] figure as um the trauma guide for the culture industry. And you know what's funny is that people are tired of it. You know, it's like the formula is exhausted, but they don't know what else to do. And Hollywood wanted to be liberal and progressive and inclusive, right? But if the only way that it can be this way with minority figures, then it's it's infantilizing.

[00:41:16]It's, you know, it's a cliche. I was thinking a lot about this before I came on today and I was thinking about toughness.

[00:41:22]>> I was thinking about sports and how important mental toughness is. then used to play um soccer, you play tennis, and all these things about being mentally tough, right? And that just doesn't seem to be a value in the liberal um world when it comes to people of color, women of color. It's like what mental toughness seems if you tell someone like you should be more tough, then it seems like you're discounting their their story. But you know what? We really need we need to be tough. like women, people of color, we need to be tough to face all of these different challenges and demands on us. Like to actually not play the game when a white lib says like wants you to play this role, you've got to be pretty tough.

[00:42:05]>> Yeah.

[00:42:05]>> To be able to refuse that, to do that politely, but say like, I'm not going to play that role. you know, I'm um so there's no they use this world word resilience to um cover over for toughness, but you never hear that with regard to like um anyone outside of the working class, I think, because that's their way of saying like you need to be a ladder climber like you know for African-American men like resilience about being but you know actually toughness might be more u more more important here and I don't I don't want it to become another kind of cliche but within um like film genre film um which I love like there used to be this figure of like a tough woman >> in film noir especially the bomb fatal like the values of a and this was like actually pre-feminist and they you know we we thought like they were too beautiful they were too tough they were to um you know, objects of desire, but they they represented for me a really powerful model of how to survive in a male-dominated world. Not these like neurotic Gen Z millennial types, right? Full of like um neurosis because the implication there, and I still think it's a class-based thing, is that you think the world will accommodate you. Yes.

[00:43:32]>> And when you're tough, you just decide like I know who I am. the world will not accommodate me, but I'm going to make it meet me on my terms. Not necessarily by mirroring me, but but like playing this, but like struggling for some kind of truth or dignity.

[00:43:48]>> I'll say this, it's a shock that they keep doing it over and over in these mediums and platforms when it's not doing well, when the audience, like you said, is turning on it. They're rejecting it. They're they're putting it in kid shows. they're they're doing. And I was like, you know, if you just told the story and didn't make the story about the person's trauma, their race, or their sexuality the entire time, most people wouldn't care. But like, you replace great narrative storytelling to just sell us these moral messages >> or these and the was full of psychological cliches. So, like one of these things that one of the things that um I've always really liked our studies of fairy tales and you know fairy tales are actually really really scary and they're all you know um related to like real human hardship like you know the Hunzel and Gretle story about how the stepmother makes the father leave them in the forest that's related to actual like famine in Europe like when your family can't feed you anymore and you got a really mean stepmother. There's no food in the house. She sends your father out to leave you in the forest, right?

[00:44:59]>> And then you have to survive by not like saying, "I'm so traumatized, but by being smart, by being cunning, like, you know, they fooled the old woman." The the whole house of candy, all of all of this is about human experiences of starvation, right? And there there are lessons that the um fairy tales teach us, but they don't like bunk us over the head with them, you know, like the popular culture trauma narratives are.

[00:45:29]And they're very fright and it is very frightening, right? Because that the old witch in the forest is actually feeding the brother so that she can eat him.

[00:45:38]there all these problems of cannibalism and um survival and um in these ancient folk stories and I feel like another thing that liberalism has done is that it said like the past is really racist really we colonial we need to discard it and we're going to reinvent these stories that are um easily consumable and that you know discard the stupidities and the um backwardness of the past, but they are just recycled cliches that seem to infantilize children to the point where they never really grow out of these stories. Like so many adults still, >> you know, people call themselves adults, right? They're still playing with toys.

[00:46:27]They're still doing this like actual fairy tales and the le and folk cultures that were very alienated from all of those stories that children were told were stories about how to grow up.

[00:46:39]>> Wow.

[00:46:40]>> How to survive.

[00:46:42]>> Yeah.

[00:46:42]>> And none of these stories that the that are being produced by YA and all and like the new children's literature, none of them are about how to grow up.

[00:46:50]They're about how to stay a child.

[00:46:52]>> Wow. Wow. Just a few more questions because I know I don't want to hold you too long. And these are the good question. These are the These are the ones I really been wanting to ask you.

[00:46:58]Um, >> sorry, I went on for too long.

[00:47:00]>> No, you're good. You're good. Listen, the reason why you are who you are and why people ask you to speak is because you be bringing bars. You be you be bringing that fire. Okay.

[00:47:10]>> Um, how did the PMC and for those in the audience that's not aware, the professional managerial class change and evolve from the 1970s to the day to to today in your opinion?

[00:47:20]Um well, you know, their power grew within the Democratic Party >> and they wanted to define the very image of progress without economic redistribution. like the Democratic Party was an unruly party with a with a you know um sort of uncontrollable workingass um constituency that became less and less important as the Democratic party became more and more yellow dog more and more neol and James Carville his campaign director would say like we just need to get the so we just need to create a wedge issue and get suburban women to vote for us a little more and that's how we win elections we win elections by 2 to 3% everything was like technocratically adjusted and they and um the PMC really dominated the Democratic party so it became more and more empowered also higher education became more and more um expensive and it becomes a luxury item prestige institutions become more and more um expensive to attend and as America de-industrializes the white collar worker um has privileges because they're not going to be laid up. Now they're going to be laid up by AI, but they their jobs are protected. They're the symbolic analysts. They're cosmopolitan. And you have they construe the working class as somehow um backward and um provincial and we don't really care about them. The the really bad thing about what happened with the configuration of Democratic Party though is also they just felt like they had African-Americans and minorities held hostage. Like they'll never vote for anyone else because we supported the civil rights movement and we you know do these cosmetic things. We empower these very like old school southern machine type you know um African-American politicians to be powerful. We um we h we consolidated our base like that and >> they like electorate. Yeah.

[00:49:31]>> Yeah. And we're just going to you know they're just hostages to us. So um we'll promote some of them into the PMC. I the black PMC becomes more and more powerful as they become less and less part of like uh a workingclass movement within the African-American communities or you know um constituencies like and you can see that actually with the more distant the PMC is from material interest the more they love like radical ideize like a African-American radicalism. So, there's nothing a lib loves more than to talk about the Black Panthers. And you're like, "Okay, what did the Panthers actually do? Did they actually have like, you know, um mass following?"

[00:50:19]They're always like, "Oh, we have a breakfast program in Oakland." Um, did they actually have a mass following? Did they, you know, did their violence produce good outcomes? No, >> actually not. And um and I feel like a lot of the PMC's ideas about racial equity and everything else have to do about creating diversity within exclusive spaces and they're not even very good at that. They, you know, if you look at the corporate boards or if you look at actual like ownership of capital, it's skewed still so much to white men. you know, after the whole racial recognitioning and everything in Hollywood, this is another thing that I think is really um incred There were a lot of films green lit but to be made by, you know, um African-American directors and everything else, but if you look at the ownership of all the studios, it's exactly the same. 2019, 2026, there's one woman in the top 10.

[00:51:15]It's Sher Lancing and all the rest of them are white men.

[00:51:18]>> Wow.

[00:51:19]>> Nothing changed.

[00:51:20]>> Wow. So the PMC is like, you know, moving chairs around, playing musical chairs. Its idea of social justice um masks its actual resistance to progress.

[00:51:33]And you know that the thing that makes me really um so it's just become more and more powerful but less and less popular more and more powerful within liberal institutions less and less popular within the actual electorate because we know that when you know with the last election I I don't know why they can't like actually deal with this fact that African-American men voted for Trump at a much larger they broke for Trump Latino men broke for Trump and it's like okay >> doc >> can't you have a moment of self-reflection here why is this happening >> they can't their conclusion remember the way in which they've been socialized they are they are intellectually incapable of imagining a worldview where it's not strictly because people are just racist or sexist or just because they don't know any better they're illinformed they cannot imagine you've been ignoring these electorates for years decades and that's why >> not only ignoring them. But I mean, I think they actually demonized African-American men like at the end of that campaign. You know, it was like why aren't they coming over to us? You know, this is like >> you're attacking them while you're saying >> constantly attacking >> during during like some of the key key moments um that I I I vividly remember even in recent history. Uh a couple two to three that kind of stood out to me.

[00:52:54]The first was when uh Kla Harris was running. There was the there was the rumblings that were starting to make it to the PMC and the and the uh bgeoisi class and the celebrity class and all the commentators that were behind microphones in the political class and they were saying what are black men complaining about like why are they you know what do you mean she has to have an agenda specific for black men like like like first of all they're just assuming our votes indefinitely and the idea of us having the audacity this is why shout out to uh Dr. Tommy Curry and uh Dr. Tasan Johnson, they have given the language for us to be able to articulate better what it's like to be ignored by an entire political um apparatus still expects your vote anyway. And just the audacity of bringing it up, they were going off and they're trying to shame men. They're criticizing men. Michelle Obama Michelle Obama gets up and says, you know, vote against your men. Uh what's it? Barack Obama goes into barber shops and starts trying to shame black men. the infantalization, the demonization. I I forget which year it was where they were using uh political commentator Roland Martin where he was wearing a t-shirt and it went viral of vote like a black woman. They did not see any of this as an issue at all. And and the worst part was years ago, I think when Trump ran the first time, >> I believe it was the first time rap um retired rapper Ice Cube, he had he was producing the black agenda. And for him, he was like, "Listen, I'm willing to sit down with either party of whoever it is that's going to at least listen to us, give us a map of how to improve some of the actual things that's happening. We don't need lip service. We need an actual outline of what we're going to hold them accountable to."

[00:54:34]>> And he did, you know, meet, you know, I think he called it the platinum plan.

[00:54:39]And and Trump's people did sit down with him and, you know, he he appreciated it.

[00:54:43]He didn't say he believed they were going to do anything.

[00:54:45]>> Right. Right. Right. But they met with him. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. the Democrat side. You can imagine how that went because and the worst part was when he then tried to raise awareness about what he was building. He sat down with a group of black women, all famous, all you know, uh, celebrities, very well-known figures, and they went off on him because he didn't specify specifically when he said the black community that they needed he needed to specify what specifically are black women getting. And he said, 'Well, you know, like when I this this is this is something that's going to target the entire community. And he says, >> when I say remember this level of individuation, this level of constantly splintering and making the the group smaller and smaller to where when somebody says the black community, black women don't hear themselves anymore. So for them, they see themselves as a separate political group. uh even apart from so in their world view if they're doing well with college degrees if they're getting home ownership in their world view the black community is doing fine.

[00:55:47]>> So so anything else pertaining to children to men the concept of marriage relationships etc if individual black women are doing okay or if they feel represented politically that's sufficient to satisfy the needs of the entire community. So that's how far this stuff goes.

[00:56:04]>> Wow. when you're constantly um you know leaning so far into uh constantly dividing us strictly on the l and reducing us to such such lengths that >> you know this is what fe this is like what fe liberal feminism has produced for me it's like you can't have any solidarity with men >> no >> um or else you have like only solidarity with men who completely capitulate to you >> yeah mean male feminist that's what she's saying That's what you're basically saying. And the and that's the men that are actually cap still captured right now where the >> ally ally. You have to be an ally.

[00:56:44]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so it it's a let me let me ask my two my two last questions. Uh, what does a healthy materialist uh what does a healthy materialist and genuinely unify workingclass politically look like to you?

[00:56:59]>> Um, you know, we're so far from it. So, this is a really hard question, but I would love to see a world where we could work together towards common goals and disagree with each other at the same time. like we could have a fundamental disagreement about um I I don't want to say these words but you know really controversial issues but say we want to get to universal healthcare we want to make college free we want to promote human dignity at work we want to make Amazon Walmart pay all of their employees many of whom are African-American and people of color enough money so that they don't have to be on welfare so they don't have to be on food stamps and SNAP. I would like to see community care as part of um housing developments or even neighborhoods like mine where you don't have to like be negotiating with an insurance company to try to get the health care that you need or go to some like weird tower where some white person is going to tell you about your problems. It's like embedded well-trained therapists within community centers that can provide you know health care that can provide a meal if you want child care. You know people say like China is not a communist party communist country anymore. It has still has social some socialist remnants. They have community centers in you know even the fanciest neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods as well or poor villages as well where you can go and get some of your basic needs met.

[00:58:34]>> You know they [clears throat] don't have like social welfare that we have because the communist party says we want everyone to work and there isn't enough for work. But if you have a need like there are these place like even the police station you could go to and get some help. You know there's there's a way in which people are they really believe like in serving people's needs but where meeting them where they are.

[00:58:58]And if we could get some notion of public provision of mental health care that's decommodified. You know really good therapy now in New York is like $500 an hour $350 an hour. Who can afford that? Right? make it available to people and actually, you know, have um publicly funded news so that we're not like all, you know, um driven by these profit making news companies. And I I see like there are some really really clear goals that we work towards as a social, but they're all of these forces, many of them coming from the liberal side. They're about fragmenting us, destroying any ability to um of us to work together. And um and there are a lot of like I don't know if you encounter these types of people, but you know these left liberal types who use race instrument weaponize race to create more division. And I would hope that we don't do that in a real materialist um unified movement. we'd be like, "No, we're we're we're we've got your back. You have our backs. We're in the same boat." And um nobody can play the race card to silence other people or to sty them styia movement. I I do feel like it's so hopeful. It's so helpful for me to talk to you about this because I feel like the conversations I have about or I don't have about race at work just I think make everything worse and divides us more because we're not having the right conversations.

[01:00:37]>> Yeah. Yeah. And it's so it was so extremely difficult for me to do it even in my field um prior to me finally transitioning out. It was extremely difficult because I didn't know when you're first realizing it, and you're first seeing it, you actually aren't truly aware of how deep the propaganda is and why people are clinging to it. It takes you a while to realize why people are so resistant to even >> will being willing to re-evaluate it.

[01:01:01]Like uh what was it? Um Orwell's book, was it 19 >> 1984?

[01:01:06]>> 1984.

[01:01:08]Because there were social consequences if they did.

[01:01:11]>> Oh yeah.

[01:01:11]>> Right. And you're you're punished if you if you question this racial regime right now. You are punished.

[01:01:17]>> You know, I lost my black card a while ago.

[01:01:20][laughter] >> You know, and I'll even argue this stuff is so conflated that I've actually asked people when I'm trying to do a proper critical analysis on just say liberalism, progressivism, and and just the Democrat party. I got to ask them like, "Were you born black or were you born a Democrat?" I'm interested. and and it takes them a while to realize like you're reacting as if those things are equated. And that's the first time for many of them they I was like you're using a lot of propaganda and and and language that sounds very uh white supremacy, very um plantation-y type language where every time someone tries to say this is a contradiction, they're lying to us. They're manipulating and using us. They don't even care about the men. They're they're manipulating the women. they're they're conditioning them to not see the value or need for men or fathers. Like you don't see that like and I realize it now. So it took me a while as well to go through the same process. Thank god I wasn't in academia trying to do this because I'm like that's probably where it's at its worst.

[01:02:18]>> Yeah. Um but but honestly the psychology and mental health field has got to be probably top three in terms of >> because this is where this is where you indoctrinate you know this is where we indoctrinate people on race relations and you know the African-American studies people don't want to read Adolf Reed Barbara Fields these are African-American scholars who are critical of these kind of race politics I mean Barbara Field's whole book which is very very difficult to get through but so rigorous is about the fact that the more we do anti-racism practice, the more we make race a real thing. Whereas biologically speaking, there are no differences between the races. Yeah.

[01:02:59]>> So if we start from there, then she calls it racecraft. It's like >> and you know who loves talking about race? White >> white liberals.

[01:03:10]>> They can't let go of it. and um and they've they are indoctrinating people into thinking that the question of just racial social justice is one of um proportional representation.

[01:03:26]>> Listen, yeah. Anyway, that's >> final final question that I've been wanting to ask you. If you were to radically transform the modern progressive movement and the individual PMC's that we talked about earlier, activists to a materialist cadre, what would you do? Oh my god.

[01:03:44]You mean before before we do re-education, um I would ask people demand of people a higher level of integrity in their social relations and I would try to provide for people more robust structures of socializing so that we're not like ready to stab each other in the back all the time.

[01:04:07]>> Boom. And that to me is like the cellular level. Then you can move up from there. Before we can get to that, >> we can't build a mass movement if we're all just like trying to leverage our differences and distinguish ourselves to the marketplace. I think that um we need structures for that to happen in. And so I'm talking about very cellular level thing. But one of the things that I would really like for people to have the capacity to see is that many of our problems right now have to do with financialization, have to do with private prisons, private detention centers, and private equity taking over all of the social services and literally sucking um the polity dry. So why can't we focus on this as a unified term like Republicans, tr whatever, get private equity, get private prisons out of public services, out of public institutions.

[01:05:06]Goal number one. Let's all work on that together.

[01:05:10]>> It seems really simple, right? But we can't focus on that.

[01:05:14]>> No, you know, you know what it is?

[01:05:16]because there symbolic representation of of mo of movements is seen as making a difference where holding up a sign, changing a hashtag, wearing a t-shirt, and standing in solidarity now counts as doing work.

[01:05:31]>> Yeah.

[01:05:32]>> And that's what I've unfortunately and I think that was one of the big switches for me between 2018 to 2020. I started to realize that we're going to be doing this next summer. We're going to be doing we're going to be complaining about the same things, saying the same things, using the same talking points, and we're reshuffling the people at the top that's, you know, telling us what we're supposed to do, where we can be hired, and it's we're not we're not breaking the glass ceiling. So, I absolutely absolutely agree with you.

[01:06:01]And considering myself, now I'm officially referring to myself as a as an independent that depending on the topic has conservative or liberal perspectives or values on things. Um, I've I it took me starting this platform last year to finally find my tribe >> because I I felt so isolated and alone from a friendship standpoint, from a family standpoint, and feeling like I know I'm not the only one. And it took quite a while for me to realize like, oh, there's other people that's turning a mirror even to their own ideological camps. And I'm like, that's a level of of boldness that I honestly didn't know as many people were willing to do. And people like you, I I I can't tell you enough. like please continue doing what you're doing and and listen when you're ready to form that that international cadre let me know your boy >> I'm trying to I will I will let you know you stay in touch with me and uh we'll let well you have to be a part of it I've just started the Palm Springs school for social research which is an independent um think tank research group um which is just which is >> criticizing the left from the left as one of my board members said so I hope you'll stay in touch with us about what we're doing and be a part of it. You're in LA, right?

[01:07:12]>> No, I'm actually in I'm actually on the east coast on Philly side. Philly.

[01:07:16]>> Oh, you're in Philly. I'm hoping to get to Philly for Traumatized. So, I hope to see you there. But it gives me hope to meet a young person like you and just like that my work spoke to you is so important to me. So, >> absolutely. Now, I'm writing a book as we speak on on modern dating and relationships. I have so many of the things that you And listen, I'm going to let you know now, your boy is quoting you. I'm gonna be quoting you in that book because I think your level of analysis, your your your willingness to just be there and go there and not do the whole I'm I'm trying to be a good good liberal thing. I I I we need that.

[01:07:48]We need courage to say, "Listen, y'all are screwing us over." And again, you're losing people. You're losing demographics when authoritarians or other group people can come in and take votes because you're not willing to actually give the substantive changes especially when it comes to the economic base of people's reality. You actually have to address that. That's what's changing everybody's world.

[01:08:11]>> I raised a son during the height of me too >> and I you know and I saw everything that he went through and I it's very hard to become a young woman. It's very hard to grow up as a young man right now. We don't have the social handholds that we did. And in fact, I'm there'll be released this next year a Doha debate which I did with Alazer about um male female relations and I think you'll really enjoy that.

[01:08:38]>> Okay.

[01:08:39]>> I want to um recommend someone to you who's written a book on it. I don't know if she's she's amazing. She's um Nigerian American Christine Emba. She wrote a book about um male female relations and I think you'll really enjoy it.

[01:08:55]>> You should have her on.

[01:08:56]>> I will look her up.

[01:08:57]>> She's at the Washington Post and now she's at American a American Enterprise Institute DC. She's not far from you.

[01:09:03]>> Listen, when I start name dropping you, I might end up at the White House.

[01:09:08][laughter] >> Well, I don't know about Trump, but okay. Yeah. In the new regime. You should run. I'll run your campaign for you.

[01:09:16]>> Listen, you know what it is? I've probably caused so many, you know, and I'll say this, I wouldn't even know what to run as because I think the problem when you're when you've grown up your entire life as a Democrat and then you're criticizing the party, everybody that's a part of the boogeoisi class, >> they see me as a threat.

[01:09:33]>> Yeah.

[01:09:34]>> From from pastors to the liberal elite, they see me absolutely as a threat. So, I'm like, I don't even know how to run with all the money in politics. I wouldn't even know what people have told me that but but I'm like I my sense is it's very very difficult for people to make it at the top of a swamp while maintaining their integrity >> and I think >> I also think on the other side of this people are hungry for voices of integrity. People are hungry for something new.

[01:10:02]>> Well, you know what, Doc? I'm not going to disbelieve you. You probably know a lot more people than I could even imagine. So, I'm going to make sure I send you my you all my contact information.

[01:10:11]>> Okay, great.

[01:10:12]>> And listen, if there's rooms you want me to be in, all y'all got to do is let me know and and I will make it happen because I work and and as a person like you who's who's taking intellectual risk that years from now, generations from now, people are going to be so grateful people like you spoke up. Um it's an honor for you to come on this platform. So, why don't you let everybody know where they can find and support you?

[01:10:36]>> Okay. Um, you can follow me at cluanon.substack.com.

[01:10:42]Um, I've also, um, on the screen here, you can find out more about the Palm Springs School for Research, Social Research. We have a Substack, plesr.org.

[01:10:53]And, um, I'm on Instagram as Katherine Lou anan, and you can find me there as well. Um there are a lot of new and exciting things happening and I hope that Jeff will be part of some of those initiatives.

[01:11:09]>> So thanks again and everybody if you when you whenever you get the chance to see this everyone please make sure that you follow her, support her, show up to her speaking engagements if you can and absolutely absolutely absolutely make sure that you like this. Make sure that you share this and make sure y'all send it to at least two, three, four, or even five people. So thanks again and everybody take care and we will see you on the other side. Peace.

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