I'd like to welcome everyone. My name is Sherwood Smith. I'm senior executive director for diversity engagement and professional development and we're sponsoring this talk by professor Edward Dunbar from UCLA. By practice he's a clinical psychologist at UCLA and I had the pleasure of meeting him at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication where he also teaches and many years ago he was here for something called psychology challenges bias behavior. He is an author and we'll tell you a little bit about his books but his most recent books is the psychology of hate crimes as domestic terrorism and he was given the 2001 award by the American Psychological Association for professional service contributions to the community. He's worked with the UCLA Police Department, unified school district in UCLA and has done a lot of detailed research which you'll have the benefit of tonight to understand sort of the motivations and also in some extent effective responses so without further ado Ed thank you so much for joining us. Hey there hi can you all hear me? Wonderful okay great so thank you for having me here. We're sure what didn't say is that I used to teach second grade in the White Mountains of New Hampshire years ago though I'm not originally a New Englander so I appreciate this part of the country and love to come back here be here. A little bit about what I like to talk talk with you about and kind of go through is to give you a working definition of really what a hate crime is I know it's a term that we've all heard but to kind of look at it up close and personal spend a little bit of time talking about the people that we see who have perpetrated forms of hate crimes domestic terrorism in this country. Talk about something kind of interesting which is actually a book I've got coming out in about a month now on looking at the interrelationship between hate violence in the United States and the 2016 presidential election and really then talk a little bit about some of the fallout for how our society right now is dealing with the issue of to use an old term intergroup relationships or intergroup conflict in the aftermath of the election and the things that we've seen that have been happening so to kind of put it another way by my background I've worked inside the Los Angeles police department the criminal conspiracy unit where I basically walked through the front door and said I've been doing research and hate crimes for about the last 15 years I like to come in and work in your crime lab and bring my psychology students with me and have access to work with you and interestingly they were open to that and allowed me to spend the better part of five six years working as part of their investigative unit so some of the things I'm going to talk about come right out of the data of our working with the police officers the responding to hate crimes and then analyzing the crime reports and following the criminal histories of these offenders as a clinician I've worked with people who have been hate organizers I've worked with people that are mandated for perpetrating hate crimes in Los Angeles I've had students of mine who have been gay bashed I've had patients I've worked with who I've treated who were the victims of violent forms of hate activity hate offenses hate assaults and I've spent a fair amount of time working in some of the courtroom situations having to do with people that have perpetrated homicides harassed individuals and also the claimants who've brought charges against institutions where they have been the targets of hate crimes and hate incidents so to me this is not some abstract far-removed idea it's not like I'm looking at Department of Justice statistics but rather people that I see maybe sometimes you know on a weekly basis even more than weekly basis maybe of the course of several years so I'll talk a little bit at the sort of more immediate level of what this kind of looks like up close and personal so all that being said and I'll give you two quick illustrations of what we're looking at here this is an example of a statue California State and I would point out to you if you come down through here to about the fourth line the idea about motivation being either in whole or in part italics mine by the hostility to the real or perceived ethnic background national origin religious beliefs sex age disability sexual orientation so you know this is very psychologically laden because we're introducing the idea of motivation as if we can understand the motivation of a person who does hate violence and also enter into the idea of trying to understand how they perceive really us and the conception of the idea of difference is something that then leads people to engage in forms of fear and intimidation with the intention of causing fear and intimidation so some of you probably know this because if you're here at five o'clock the afternoon after a long day you know clearly your motivations are you know special and unique or an important frankly to me this is not a crime in these are not crimes perpetrated against individuals the crimes that are perpetrated against communities and also perpetrated against classes of individuals and the motivation is really not just the individual that is targeted it is to send the message in most of these cases to anyone of that population Vermont's law a little bit truncated here but again bias motivated violence and you know by the way the word hate is something I want to look at a little bit into this with you to say hate is it hate or is it bias and they are really you know in some ways quite different things and again intimidation where there could be a civil action meaning that there is the opportunity for a civil remedy to this problem as well as criminal penalties to this problem and then we again see the kind of typical classes that have been promulgated here race religion ethnicity sexual orientation gender and other other including physical mental disabilities so kind of as a as a as a primer to you is I'd like to current deal with some of the resistance you may find if you walk out of here today and you talk to people about I'm trying to understand what this thing called a hate crime is it's something that occurs in our country it's something which has been identified since about 1992 with the passage of a federal act asking for state law enforcement agencies to report hate violence so what is this thing and what is it we're looking at and what do we see in the way of resistance to this to this class of legislation laws well for one is to say that it is not a crime against a person but it's again as I said it's a crime against a community to that a hate crime I'd like to argue today is not a matter of getting into somebody's internal mental apparatus it's rather what they do in the public arena in the public sphere and as such a hate crime is not identity politics gone amok it's rather that there has to be a primary offense to begin with in other words there's a generic offense in any hate crime put simply targeting a mosque and defacing it is called property crime the question then becomes is there also additionally what we call an enhancement offense which has to do with saying this was also bias motivated robbery is a crime which when there's also the presence that I'm robbing as I've known people I've talked to people who will say I rob gay men because they won't go to the police because the police are just as likely to be a violent as I am so therefore I go pick a victim who's not likely to report the crime so the infraction has to first be found on the penal code we call the enhancement which in Vermont California any state law would then say in addition there is this other offense which we treat as being serious enough that we will then arrest the individual and potentially prosecute them for perpetrating a bias motivated crime so I want to emphasize when people say you know here here we go all crimes are hate crimes now I've worked in a youth prison in New York City in the past I've honestly must have evaluated at least 2000 people who have been released from California state penitentiaries I used to work with kids who belong to the Mexican Mafia and a day program the vast majority of violent offenders that I've evaluated that I've worked with that I've seen would say they have no animus whatsoever towards the victims it's for them a lifestyle and it's a form of self support it's an economic alternative to working if you will in a fast food restaurant so animus or hostility may be really very absent and you know it's kind of intriguing a term I may not use again today the clinical psychopath you know they may be very under aroused right physiologically people are extremely dangerous and violent in some cases right before they do the crime their heart rate drops their pulse drops they become focused talk about that a little bit so all crimes are not crimes of hate in fact the majority again of career criminals are doing this where for them it's like their day in the office so hate crimes are crimes that is I'd also suggest have a cultural meaning to all of us that we we understand the offense because it it resonates to things about the dynamics of our history of our culture of our community of the relationships we hold and hence as such we know that these are crimes that hate makes some sense or bias if you will make some sense and maybe we could do a little quick thought experiment why don't we take the first case so if everybody could be so good as to get a case study here just take a moment silently to read it and then I'll tell you a little bit about the case and just to kind of hammer out some of the issues here about what bias may look like in a specific instance so well this is coming around let me just kind of add about this UCLA schools universities in Texas Hawaii Oregon I've done research on students experience of bias and you know what a lot of these are what we would call a hate incident meaning they are as I use in my title kind of like bad manners or hate speech so consider you could walk across the street onto a public sidewalk and use pretty much any kind of language of hatred and in the United States it's protected under the First Amendment so here we get into culture in the United States we'll say that that's a right of free speech now if you walk into the classroom or if you walk into the workplace you have probably violated an institutional code that is either state institution based and or federal so like for example if there's federal education money we will say you cannot have a hostile learning environment just like you cannot have a hostile work environment and those may be treated not as criminal but rather as infractions that the person will be dealt with hopefully and that the target will be supported hopefully but those are not crimes those are you know bad manners plus plus so in many of the things that may occur at a campus will fall short of being criminal but I would argue from the work I've done over 15 years with the experience of university students they can be just as emotionally harmful as an assault with a deadly weapon and in some ways can actually be worse because as strange as it sounds the assault usually occurs once the students I've seen who have been harassed may have that go on for two or three years of their academic life people in the workplace may experience this as something that occurs over the course of several months and it's not just what is the institution or the victim do but it's also what is the institution to respond to it so the cases out is that correct take about two three minutes and just read this silently then I'll just talk about the case to you and my question for you is is this a hate crime go ahead and just take a look at the case I'll say this as you're reading you know if you work in the behavioral sciences if you work in community if you work in criminal justice maybe even sometimes community relations social policy if you work in student life for your job you get some strange phone calls okay get some strange phone calls this person called me up cross-country the the victim and said you know what what is what is this all about so what do we have here again cuz come back to sort of like you know basic terms we have property crime right it's graffiti imagine if it's your house right so there has been some kind of symbol placed on your property without your permission which also holds a cultural meaning so elements that are present granted minor property damage in other words this would be under like $500 probably to repair but would still qualify as a form of property crime it would also then qualify potentially if we understand the meaning of a swastika right as a symbol so what does individual do number one they contacted their local synagogue the comment with the rabbi was we've heard this from other people not too far from your house so the messaging was kind of both ways one this is not just you to something's going on here and we're not so sure why what the individual said to me was kind of interesting he said you know I've lived in this house for several several years I'm moving out and now this happens you know and while it might seem unimportant it was really also very baffling to the individual and became part of the question so it was investing about police the New Jersey which is where this occurred human relations commission got involved the synagogue was involved with me so far so it sounds like a hate crime it's not a violent hate crime but it's symbolic it sends a message it's relevant to his culture to our traditions and then something interesting happened was they talked to the family that was purchasing the house sure when you were talking about being in I think you said inner Mongolia okay and in inner Mongolia you saw a temple and the temple has the swastika this family similarly came from a religious sect where the swastika was something that was put on the house by one of the kids as a symbol of protection to the house so in other words does sound like a statistician the false positive this was indeed not a hate crime at all was rather something that was done by the family that had already you know gone and asked to go so forth and so on it's buying house but had never communicated that to the current owner so this can get complicated right away and the complexity leads some people to wonder if these hate crime should really exist you know I was saying to some people earlier today I know of two cases where university faculty in the last 20 years have faked a hate crime on their campus and in some cases to kind of try and redirect from things they were doing that got them in trouble ultimately so you know we do have an occasion these false positives either willful or accidental I personally have never worked a case like that and I've probably evaluated something like about 3,500 hate crimes in Los Angeles as well as other things particularly Florida where I work with people who do homicides I have not seen that but I know it's out there now let's come back to first orders of business who does these crimes and if you look up here this was just a sort of a day in a life basically here one year I just pulled out randomly of the several years that I've gathered crime data on Los Angeles and I just said okay let's look at LA we're in one calendar year they had 237,000 roughly 238,000 to round it up total reported in fractions and when you look at this very very small literally about one-third of 1% of the crimes that were identified as hate crimes something kind of interesting to kind of violate some of our stereotypes these are crimes that were substantially more likely to be perpetrated by adult men substantially less likely to be perpetrated by adult women but contrary to a lot of our our stereotypes of hate crime offenders are no more likely to be perpetrated by adolescents and teenagers at all so if you think of this being the 18 year old 17 year old neo-nazi think again in fact the arithmetic average age of the adult suspect we see in Los Angeles runs around 30 so they're not talking 22 we're talking people that have been out and in their life arguably for at least the better part of a decade importantly to when you look at the kind of offenses if you look here in this first crimes against the person being a violent offense is that hate crimes on the average in the long run tend to be substantially more violent than most infractions you say in a community in this case about three and a half fold more so okay so we can talk about symbolic crimes and indeed I would say any real hate crime is symbolic but when you look at really what's happening they are more violent and in Los Angeles I'm not going to say this generalizes to the entire country but Los Angeles I can say with confidence over 20 years who are the most violent crimes targeting are two populations gay and lesbian targets and African-American secondly and this won't show here so say a third thing secondly these are much less likely to have to do with money so now we're getting to the head of the offender where it's half again as likely that these have any material pursuit meaning carjacking robbery burglary the hate offender in many cases interestingly will perpetrate their offense where literally they leave the victim with their money so you know we again you know even when I've talked with a lot of career criminals and you know guess what career criminals also get on the internet so there have been times I've evaluated people they go oh I've read all your research which is a little chilling you know like you got some guy out there as I said to Sherwood you know I've evaluated stock crews now send me Christmas cards you know like hi just checking in with you it's like we know where you are we know what you're doing so these guys read this stuff you know is there only people to read my research are probably people are locked out there a lot of time on your hand if you're in the penitentiary and they got to access the internet you know they say this is a stupid crime you know hey doc why do these people do this they're not even going for the money I say so clearly something else is going on the thing that's not reflected here but you'll see it maybe a little bit elsewhere is these are almost always crimes where you don't know your victim so if we think of hate you think of passion right so a lot of homicide cases that I've been involved in work with people on over the years their crimes of passion where you're acting out against somebody that you have a prior relationship with okay that's exactly the contrary here you are finding people you don't know you do not know and it's a culture that people who were truly the hostile violent bias identified individuals enter into so one of my colleagues with LAPD shared with us with me and this is hard to notice see but here's the thing that's intriguing in California there are about 50 actually more 50 specific tattoo icons that if you are part of the lifestyle you will look at something maybe the image of the woman or of the skull and the centerpiece that will say I'm a member of something like we call the peckerwood gang or Aryan nation or the Sotel gang and they are they're communicating they're communicating then the imagery that will be found that we we won't know what that's about and that when these are darkened in it's a symbol to say one I'm a member of the gang two as they're darkening I have I have done more violent offenses so when you see somebody that only has the symbol but it's darkened in it's to say well I've probably done a homicide so you know they live in their own world of communicating this idea of violence that we on the outside the normies just kind of sort of get now I'll go through this pretty quickly because I want to be sure we have time to kind of look at some of the other questions here it's not getting in someone's head it's not mind-reading articulated hate ideology these offenders will tell you they have an ideological motivation they will associate with other people just like in the the image I just showed you members of gangs members of groups some of these people even work and do crimes repeatedly hate crimes in pairs okay the weakest of these I personally believe is the idea of hate speech during the commission of the offense or was the presence of hate language is often found but in and of itself I think it was kind of weak the use of hate symbols and then you know simply this prior behavior predicting future behavior yeah we have repeat hate crime offenders these are not that hard to see literally and hard to identify and you know kind of gets into the idea of who and what are these people and in the course of just the work I've done and again going through these crime reports year to year and following up and looking at the criminal histories of hate crime offenders it's had me kind of do a little bit more of a breakout of like well what are these things called the motivation and what are the things we should be worried about and I'll talk about these in a second but let me step back and say if I'm at a university I'll tell you what you would be concerned about is one any kind of repeat activity by an individual that shows some bias or prejudice that is activated the student who's been called in again for some kind of taunting of an international student where it has recurred or number two where it diversifies so it was last year I was harassing a woman on a soccer team and this year I'm harassing a Taiwanese student that's where I would say the light should be going off because it's saying to you there is a course of activation that makes that person more problematic okay my argument for being in a school university environment is hate incidents which are not per se crimes are going to predict ultimately the risk of a hate crime occurring okay so I wouldn't want you to think well what if we don't have people carrying weapons and shooting at each other and stabbing each other in campus I'd say well I hope not because that's not what you're here for but additionally think of it this way you are looking at young adults who in some cases are going to act out in disinhibited ways because of the use of alcohol controlled substances on one hand and then on the other hand are at a very ripe age for in if any of you do like mental health work initial psychiatric breaks right so guess what in my clinical work people who are more likely to show hostility towards racial differences often show things such as alcohol abuse hyperactivity bipolar disorder these are people that are impulse disturbed and it's a warning sign now if it escalates you see the things I've talked about including some of the idea of targeting people based upon sexual orientation or gender bending and also interesting idea and again I think this has some play here probably in more rural communities not just urban environments is the idea of protecting your community and Donald Green a poli sci personnel at Columbia has talked about this idea of when you look at racialized gangs you will see that they try to keep their community free of what they see as competing racial groups that could come in now that's an urban phenomena me maybe and many of those kids will say you know we don't hate this family but we're going to arson their house because if they get to stay then the kids will follow and now we're competing for the same drug trade very common theme you'll see with gangs what I could expect here you could see people probably driving from rural parts of the state frankly to Burlington to target non US or non Vermonters as a way of driving folks out in Los Angeles what do we see somebody will drive for maybe 75 to 90 minutes to go find a target of someone that they've never met before and the real point I like to make is really this is it's kind of like your house cat okay there is sort of the differences of kinds of aggression so the cat over here is like eyes are focused ears are back bodies in control looking at its target over here this is the kind of hyper roused out of control aggressive response the hate crime offender usually shows this kind of premeditation planning in to put it another way why you will then drive or go out of your own community and when people are more bias motivated they go further from where they live and they become more violent in the course of committing the crime against somebody that they've never met before so again a lot of our ideas of you're doing this for money this is a crime of passion it's about a relationship that's gone wrong is just not supported when you really look closely at the people who were doing the crimes in our communities now I'll go through this kind of quickly but if I were to really kind of try and think about this more so I'd say we've got people that are hate aroused and then people that have sort of like an expression of some kind of a hate ideology right and if you kind of think of the balance of these two things at least gives me a way to kind of think about some of the motivational differences I'll go through this quickly because we got on to some other issues you know for one we've got some people label us a fancy word the highly emotional bigot the person who is highly arousable and may have a very absent sense of any real ideology or motivation these are just the explosive personalities when we see it large but in this case what they are targeted by is anyone of a group that they feel then is going to disinhibit them I'll jump over these guys for a moment the hate extremist is the person who is both highly ideologically motivated and highly arousable these are the people that you would expect to be like really particularly dangerous but then we also consider these folks to be extremely dangerous which is again like our like our house cat low arousal very low stress response high intention and ideology now you know what interestingly we also have people the biased follower who really aren't particularly anything except that this is their social group that they belong to and as I was saying to Sherwood earlier years ago I had the opportunity if you want to call it that to talk to some people who had participated in lynching activity in this country and it was interesting to hear the commentary of like it was like going to a football rally so that for them they just kind of they went along and you will see people that just kind of got along and went along in doing something that maybe they knew was really kind of a bad idea so hate behavior explosive personality the bigot the extremist ideologically driven will engage in both reactive meaning sort of spontaneous as well as symbolic violence the planful terrorist now if you think of this is domestic terrorism this is kind of like the McPhee characters who blow up the buildings you know they have an ideological plan but they're very systematic and organized and then we have the folks down here okay if you want to read a really compelling book on this sort of issue I would recommend a book called the racist mind by Raphael Ezekiel and Rafe wrote a book and it's it's without statistics and it's not about research it's rather Rafe's accounting of what he over the course of several years found by going to members of the Ku Klux Klan in the south and neo-nazi groups in the Midwest to say hi I'm a Jew psychologist liberal University Michigan Ann Arbor based psychologist and I'm really interested to hear what's going on in your head and he talked about the frequent bias follower the people that just simply went along because they didn't have any other identity to be a part of and when I use this idea you know some things kind of shake out a little bit so when I looked at actually what the crimes that people committed were the bigots the people that kind of were both you know lower high and arousal in ideology indeed did very unplanned hate crimes we're more likely to do the crimes near to their home the followers are more likely to do the graffiti and vandalism crimes the non sort of in-your-face crimes which again make them kind of unusual we're more likely to do basically anti-semitic crimes which in many many cases are simply again graffiti crimes we're also less likely to do actually get into physical aggression against the person by comparison the hate extremists were more likely to do crimes assault with a deadly weapon physical assaults were more likely to threaten using language and were more likely to go further away from their home community in this case like 25 plus miles to commit the hate crime and again against people that they did not know and then our sort of like low aroused highly ideological were more likely to do the anti-semitic crimes and more likely to do clearly goal directed crimes so you know we kind of look at some of these things and say here are some of the patterns that we're dealing with now another thing would you think that if hate activity is found in our society and again hate crimes have been around since 1992 as a legal entity as a construct anybody who's a student of history knows that hate violence intergroup violence goes back millennia so we have a very recent effort to kind of codify and identify what this is wouldn't you kind of think that this has a likelihood to occur throughout different social and cultural regions across time and so forth the question that I put to you kind of if you see that as plausible is shouldn't we see kind of the same kind of phenomena re-reported by law enforcement at least at this country at a state level and the point becomes kind of simple that and I like to think of it in terms of if you've never seen this you should really look at it Ken Burns is documentary from the 1990s on the Civil War and at the almost the very end of hours and hours of discussion of the Civil War Burns turns to Columbia University professor Barbara Fields where she basically looks at the camera and says the Civil War is still ongoing the question is who's gonna win you know I'm paraphrasing I would take that and say when you look at how law enforcement reports hate crimes the Civil War has continued to this day because if you ask a very simple question if you're after year the likelihood of reporting a hate crime is considered in terms of the alignment of the states during the Civil War you'll see a substantial difference almost a three to one ratio difference of the Union versus the Confederate states with the Aniline states falling sort of in the middle range and so let's see here we go here's the ratio for my state here's the ratio for your state here you're looking at the frequency of the states of the Union here you're looking at the ratio for the states of the South and here you're looking at the Aniline states I used to work in the Hawaii State Senate I used to be a legislative analyst okay and we had a heck of a time in fact it never happened I was working there of getting a hate crime statute passed and the prejudice in the state was well you're gonna start picking up all these kids who are robbing truest and it's bad for business and it took us to people in the state government a long time to get a state hate crime statute passed about 2002 somebody in Maine actually introduced a piece of legislation seeing the motorcycle gang members should be a protected class in the hate crime law so this gets kind of crazy sometimes I'll be the first to admit it but we find that the war of the country has continued in how we talk about hate violence and here this is from the Southern Poverty Law Center SPLC of then also looking at the presence of hate groups okay so again as the number goes up you're literally seeing a body count you know it to be fair California may have a larger population than let's say wherever it is here Rhode Island for example but here is the Union here is the Confederacy here's the Union here's the Confederacy here's the end line if you look at just who's reporting these crimes we get into the question of saying one there may be differences just because of the nature of how law enforcement at a state level views the legitimacy of these of these laws now okay let's look at another kind of challenging issue here so when you walk out of here today if you wanted to talk to somebody about what we're just discussing is hate crimes and domestic terrorism are these different things so let's consider two relatively recent and notorious cases so here we have Dylan Ruth Charleston goes into historic black church interestingly spent several hours conversing with this elderly population before he opens fire and murder several of them say it for Rook who got maybe 50 miles from where I live works in a state agency goes to a Christmas party two hours later comes back and uses semi-automatic weapons murders many of his co-workers planned and organized radicalized by his father substantially he hoped his attack would agitate race relations and awaken white Americans to the notion that they are second-class citizens inspired by terrorist organized and planned at least for a year radicalation possible through internet possibly through his wife didn't think Muslims should have to attend a non-muslim event didn't leave any kind of written documentation at least it's been reported this point so again this sort of like premeditated offense now here we go if I we might have heard of named James Comey said that the San Bernardino case was it was one of domestic terrorism perpetrated by homegrown violent extremists but when he was asked about Dylan Ruth he said you know I don't see it as a political act I don't see it as a form of hate violence now roof was tried under the federal hate crime statute thank goodness but are these really really different Loretta Lynch DOJ running DOJ at the time says of course that they are both forms of terrorism so you know sometimes our laws get in the way of common sense and sometimes our laws get in the way in which oh by the way this is just kind of for fun so here is one of these grand wizard guys in the clan he was murdered by his own family must have been a really lovely guy are these different deaths and incidents Al Qaeda right-wing extremists so you can see we're facing a lot of homegrown violence that is absent really any kind of international influence really of any sort whatsoever so point of reference two things that make our country kind of different around this issue to keep in mind for one our use of hate speech in a public arena is protected in the First Amendment at this point if you were to go to many other industrialized countries first world countries that would be treated as a an incitement to violence and you would be potentially prosecuted incarcerated so I've worked with the European Union on these issues around hate crimes and they say it's really interesting because we call these offenses that you call the whites to free speech number two they don't have the term domestic terrorism they say it's terrorism so trying to kind of parse this out as a domestic international they just say we don't even know why you're bothered to do that my comment back is well the thing that makes this all intriguing is if you look at the budgetary allocation to deal with hate crimes versus terrorism in this country it is a dramatic difference of where our money goes so our money is really directed towards terrorism the low frequency infractions whereas the high frequency infractions of hate crimes we spend a lot less now about three days after the election my publisher said hey you want to write a book on hate crimes as they relate to what happened in the presidential election I said gives me something to do I'll take a look at it I called with the cultural cataclysm and a wonderful film documentary and Arthur Dong said you want to talk about the losers so this is basic I'm gonna talk about the experience of people that are supporting diversity supporting a liberal democratic tradition supporting the idea free speech and or advocates largely to things such as this whole notion of dealing with hate violence in our society and I'd say what we're looking at minimally are three kind of challenge points of one that if you look at the election proper we saw the infusion much more explicitly than we had before of hate rhetoric into political discourse for number two something which I don't know if I should say I'm gratified but I'm seeing more and more being utilized as the notion of the cultural wars argument that the election was now a choosing of cultural traditions where there was then thirdly the idea of a winner-loser policy of governance if you lost you not just simply have lost we are now in a place to challenge you now here we get into some interesting things I'm gonna go through this quickly and I'll try not to make this too complicated Trump carried states versus Clinton carried states okay reported hate crimes twice as likely in the Clinton carried states versus the Trump carried states somewhat less likely than the Trump states to have identified hate groups within the state now these are the two interesting pieces for me after the election the likelihood of reported hate activity in the first month this is the first month after the election self-reported was twice as likely in the Clinton carried states as in the Trump carried states now this is a little bit like saying what I talked to you about with respect to the Civil War in some ways the states that appear to be more supportive of a traditional liberal democratic process are states in which the citizenry said I am much more likely to want to tell you that have been the target of some kind of hate activity in the first month meaning up until pretty much the middle of like Christmas time in 2016 so if I'm living in a community where I feel more likely to be listened to I'm more likely to be telling now who do they tell they told the Southern Poverty Law Center that at 24-7 Internet live phone line documenting these incidents and they found this kind of a breakout but I also like to come back to something that is really dramatic and terribly telling about like sort of a deep cultural issue in our country and I kind of now we'll back into this on two different levels and that is the idea of black lynching activity from 1880 to 1968 the Clinton states had on the average six reported over an 80-year period of documented lynchings that had occurred according to the Tuskegee Institute which is the place that has documented researched laboriously for years violent homicidal lynching activity against blacks the Trump states had on the average 110 cases so let me put the idea of something that is going on 80 90 years ago and its relationship to our current idea of democracy and of hate violence this was also the one real predictor when I looked at things such as the presence of whites the percentage of voting for Republican candidates the change in economics over the last 15 years in this country none of those predicted the under-reportage of hate crimes state by state it was rather the frequency of black lynching activity that occurred up until approximately 1970 this was also again a dramatic difference we found between the states that were carried by Trump versus Clinton which to me is kind of chilling and kind of really telling about some of what we hear intriguingly just to kind of give you something else to think about what is happening is also to see economic disparity of changes in family median income and the long and the short of it is what these differences will show is that since about 2000 the Clinton states tended to show a greater level of economic vitality at the median family income level versus this Trump states which showed a greater decline every five years according to the census data vis-a-vis is comparison with the Clinton states the Clinton states were more economically stable the Trump states were showing greater economic decline again the black lynchings the under-reportage of hate crimes the over-reportage of hate groups and the substantially lower number of reported hate incidents so we're kind of seeing this kind of a cleavage in just how then we viewed and approach the idea of the election and if you look at the idea of like hate crimes and how they are related to what happened in the election you can again see this more than twofold more likelihood of hate crimes being reported in the states that Clinton carried and when we look at since the election when we look at reported hate crimes again we see that the union states I would argue here the places people feel more empowered were more likely to report interestingly here this flipped Confederate versus non-aligned and the non-aligned are really kind of a whole mix so again just like I kind of showed you before you're seeing you the representation of reported hate incidents targeting the individual since the election again state-by-state now so I'm gonna shift and just take a few minutes and talk about what I think is one of the bigger dilemmas that again I've been doing a series of surveys on SurveyMonkey and following up with people and also responding to some hate crime cases that was related to the election so where the election now becomes a motivating factor for some people to perpetrate forms of hate aggression against each other this is my own personal example which happened essentially about six o'clock in the morning the next day where it's coming out of a yoga class and a guy who used to work in a missile silo was saying how he couldn't vote for Hillary and I said back how could you as a next Air Force guy support somebody who thinks Vladimir Putin's a great guy and his basic comment to me as well he thinks is a great guy for Russia you know I'm thinking man here we go here we go okay so these are the you know the questions I could put to you if we were doing this war is really taking time on it you know how's it impacted you in the relationships you have in our country personally how's it affecting your work going forward you know these are some of the questions I've been asking folks and here we go within one month what were we seeing we were seeing that people that were supported of Clinton reported a lot more arguments with their co-workers I'm really intriguing you know we're now living in an age where a good way to know about our relationships with people interculturally and our relationships is how many people did you lose through Facebook out of the election you know and I have people coming in saying I'm not going back to Ohio anymore because you know and I'm getting rid of my brother off of my Facebook feed and you know hearing this kind of thing what did people associate and again these are as Arthur Donwood put it the losers how did the losers look at this the most primary reported association people had right afterwards to 9-11 and this is a sample of three so about one-third of people reported their primary association of the loss of Clinton was to the terrorist attack then also some to prior presidential and then interestingly about maybe a tenth of the people to the death of a loved one so what were some of the things that people reported in the surveys that have done you know were things such as economic risk health care issues mental health risk and then after the inauguration numbers that stayed pretty comparable and again here's the Clinton supporters here the Johnson Stein Teddy Roosevelt voters over here you know the people of what everybody else and what do I see is the way that this is being activated because you know for me as a hate crimes researcher you know what I'm looking at is we are seeing the collectivist attribution which is always you tip off to stereotype you know the blue states believe this the Hillary supporters believe this the Bernie supporters believe this amplifying factors be it media be it alcohol be it social permission giving and you know to me this is one of the great risks we're running right now is the kind of very soft response or the coded response that we're hearing to things such as Charlottesville which where I sit is I'm thinking I know folks who are going to hear that I'm going to say see it can't be that bad you know I mean see here's what I would tell you the way I look at it this is an opinion but it's an opinion based upon what I've worked with about 10 years ago I did a homicide case where a young man murdered his peer another young man who was his neighbor for years the young man who was murdered was an Asian man the young man who did the offense was a white man though the the defense for this said well the offender suffered a nervous and mental disorder which he might have where he only thought it was wrong to murder white people so that was their defense strategy really kind of intriguing I know it's morally wrong to kill white people but folks of color it's okay and what this fellow said when he was on the witness stand was killing Asians is something I know my country doesn't really care about it's okay and that was part of his presentation I leave it to you but the challenge I see we're facing is the permission giving of saying well there's some honorable people in violent alt-right groups activate something that maybe 10 years ago we said was psychopathology now we say is maybe a culturally based presumption so you know I think this plays at an extreme level of violence but also plays again at what is happening to us societally is this loss of family again you know people who I know there's a lot of students here we're not from Vermont do I go back to a red state do I relate with my uncle do I relate with my brother who's espousing these kinds of beliefs do I lose the connectivity through social media am I politically shamed and you know literally like the Thomas Wolf novel you know maybe you cannot go home again let me move on now let's say this really in passing as people are more in opposition to human rights laws hate crime laws the rights of women in the workplace the way that they approach this is what we call in French and Raven we call hard tactics you pay you buy you withhold you coerce you shame you may use a legitimate power and if you were an advocate for diversity and this is based upon studies both that I've conducted with my colleagues in Spain in Sacramento California in Los Angeles there's a very different approach and the approach is one of education and information of saying that you have balanced relationships of saying that you're doing the space to punish your relationship of I'm going to try and change your attitude with hate crime laws to support them I do this trying to use knowledge in personal relationships if I'm an opposition I threaten you I force you and I try to get you to agree with me out of that sense of control now the dilemma I think we're facing and we have now these anti-fascist groups which are doing violence to is they're now adopting the strategies of the alt-right linear Nazis and I find it very seductive but I also think of it as inherently really flawed because we are then saying the way to change public opinion and social attitudes is through threat and I don't think that that holds any long-term solution to anything okay so in the last couple minutes and I love this quote I am the one who swims against the current or as a contemporary medieval scholar says I will make no bargains with monstrosity referring to the Trump administration I'd like to leave you really with just one sort of thought piece and this is for you to consider in your own circumstance over the years I've seen individuals who have endured in situations of oppression and really a wonderful psychiatrist who's now emeritus at Harvard Chester Pierce says you know you're being oppressed when people are controlling your space your time your energy and your movement he calls it stem space time energy movement you know you're being oppressed when those are being controlled give you some examples when I was going to school in New Hampshire I had a Russian professor named Benjamin and long story kind of made short Ben was a 13th century Crimean history scholar who was sent to the gulag because his work had no reflection of Soviet principles of social realism and he spent a couple of years in solitary confinement and I was an undergrad and quite you know kind of confused about that and I said Ben and this guy looked like he was at a central casting is actually a classic like you know sort of central European academic you know with the coat and the pipe and the whole drill and I said how do you survive he says I learned to meditate and pray and I was going wow because you would never think he was not like you know he didn't look like the Dalai Lama and he survived that way and ultimately intriguingly was only released from the gulag when they realized he was actually a Polish Jew and the Soviets said you're not even worth our spending our money on you're just kicked out of the country but Ben survived by going internally and finding his own sense of sanity the White Rose movement this is again something we seem almost completely to have forgotten about at the height of the Second World War students in Munich imagine the bravery of this started with their own printing press to produce leaflets they handed out in Munich saying we are in opposition to the Nazis the Nazis do not speak for classic German and they cited literature and culture these are not really Germans good Germans are not these monsters now almost all the White Rose movement were in a matter of a few months apprehended and quickly killed there were one or two that escaped there was one that was alive and living in Portland Oregon is up to about 10 years ago so here we have almost like the idea of like the children's crusade of literally in the belly of the beast 1943-44 advocating publicly against the regime at the same time in the same city actually Carl Hartman one of the great symphonists of the century went into silence and his response was I will no longer have my works published I will no longer have my works performed I will no longer engage in anything about music and he just completely went silent and his response was my way of dealing with monstrosity was simply to no longer be in that role not too far from here there was a man named Father James Whitaker who was one of the first generation born American shakers who prototypical religious hate crime was almost beaten to death in Massachusetts and if you know about the shakers the shakers were these people that like wrote like 10,000 American folk songs not only make those groovy looking rocking chairs and those funny little baskets they just everywhere wrote songs right because that's what you got to do for your shaker so Father James basically starts to have this beautiful song he writes literally as they're picking them up off the sidewalk if you will out of the dirt that is one of the great shaker songs which is a song of just sort of the idea of mourning violence being done because of people's faith there's a man I'll call John the mad dog he had a really interesting observation he was a faculty person and he was teaching maybe history sociology I forget now during the people's revolution in China and I knew him when he was teaching in New York City years later and he said with some with some shame that I survived by becoming a mad dog and I said well what is what does that mean he goes I became more radical than the radicals he says the only way I found to survive was to espouse more extremist ideas and that way they left you alone that maybe Carl Hartman silence would have been seen as suspect so he says how did I survive I said things that sounded so extremist that no one bothered me and again he had his own feeling about this but for him that was part of his how do you get through a time of great challenge now have you ever heard of who's called good soldier schweig isn't my favorites okay good soldier schweig was basically a mythical character that described the resistance of the Czech culture to the Hopsburg Empire and what the idea was if you were a good check who was being oppressed by the Austrians everything you did in your day job you did wrong so if you're supposed to send the parcel to Salzburg you send it to Budapest if you're supposed to be dockies documenting something in triplicate you documented in 30 copies and then you send it the wrong department so good soldier schweig became like a folk hero for the Czechs of saying you know the way we survive this militaristic imperial world is we do everything wrong as a form of passive resistance and became sort of like this heroic image in the period during the first world war I then argue also have what I call the ghost of the machine and you know congressman John Lewis who I once had the opportunity actually talked to about hate crimes is a wonderful example of somebody who comes from the Selma March through to today and was of course the first person who really called into question the legitimacy of the Trump administration so we have these people that are like our survivors and that are advocates that remain around finally one of my former students who is very severely gay-bashed Aaron Aaron McLaughlin and who's written about this and you can find some for writings online thumbnail representation because Aaron could have been you Aaron really could have been you because similarly she was living in a liberal part of Los Angeles and LGBT friendly community she know what she was doing is here so students doing this but she was walking out of a bar of all things she's walking out during probably late afternoon with their girlfriend and she sees a group of young men coming towards her and her first thought was this is dangerous and then her second thought was no no I know about diversity don't stereotype don't think that they're all gonna harm us and of course then these these boys maybe as many as 10 severely beat her and her girlfriend up her girlfriend's concussed Aaron said to me a year or so later when I got to know her she says I started to crawl out in the street so they'd stop kicking me beating me and if car ran me over at least it's all over and actually her experience was somebody slowed down and said what are they doing to you and then they saw and they drove off so Aaron's experience was that she became an advocate and we have trained now 20 years now around these issues of hate violence and intriguingly for her just to give you again the complexity of these things is the law enforcement responded very slowly to the case the offenders stayed around the front of the lesbian bar where she was taken back into literally mocking everyone in the bar and then they finally dispersed the police show up they don't charge it as a crime they charge it as an attempt to rob them of cigarettes of all things her girlfriend was undocumented and concussed which meant that they didn't go to the emergency room because of a concern of being deported and what Aaron did out of this was in part got a job in the bar so that she could overcome her own trauma of wanting to avoid the situation and then from there and this is again I think really important because it talks about our experience here she was born and raised in Southern California came from a college educated family and when I had her in a class with me I said so what's this thing that happened to you that the students keep saying well this thing that happened to Aaron and she described it to me I said well Aaron that's a hate crime you know and she goes why do we don't know what a hate crime is what she did know was she was targeted because of a sexual orientation being out in the gay community and she also knew that she was very afraid for her for her girlfriend who was undocumented that started her journey of now being an advocate and working with not only lgb people but also people with disabilities who were discriminated against and it became for her and has become a long-standing process of change so we're not alone and and the last person and I guess baby rightfully in some ways was a former member of the Mexican mafia who I knew was a teenager who was about 17 years old and I named Mikey and Mikey would describe himself proudly as a cholo as a real classically garbed dressed out gang member the bandana the jeans the white t-shirt he looked like central casting kind of like you know violin offender and I've always remembered Mikey because he did something really interesting which was he would say over and over and over he'd say stop the hate so a term that people have spent a lot of time getting focus group data and advertising to raise money over the last 20 30 years he was saying this just spontaneously his point became this he saw brown and brown violence is self-defeating and he became literally his own advocate and this is before like in my community we even had any kind of gang interdiction at all to speak of us just you you know locked people up and he was mediating between different factions of the Mexican mafia to get them to stop he even befriended it was quite intriguingly the program I worked with him he befriended a young African-American guy and said you know what we're doing to you guys are no better than what we're doing to each other and his whole point was stop the hate and so Mikey took this on himself as sort of an advocacy and became really you know he turned he turned from choosing violence to choosing nonviolence and the sad piece of this of course is that he was murdered when he was still a young man because of his advocacy against violence so I think it's best to leave it with what he was saying is just that thought is we're all left with our own challenge of how to stop the hate and I appreciate your being here because you could easily been someplace else this is not a pleasant thing to talk about it's not a pleasant thing to feel about but for some of us here I know it's our work and as somebody once said you never work alone so these are the people I draw upon all of us have our heroes our heroines all of us have to remember we're part of the tradition the tradition is not going to go away no matter the conditions we're living thank you for being here thank you so thanks for sticking around if you have some questions I think sure would we have a little bit of time to talk yeah okay questions about anything I have or have not said please high up at the back yes hey there I'll try you know it's not a factor I guess but one of the interesting things that you brought up and I wanted is when you did the sort of you know the lay by all right so I would imagine the planful plan full premeditated premeditated that I would imagine that that's significantly lower for people and it's planful and so the likelihood like yeah of course they have guns it's gonna be easier for them to do it but then they're likely to be the people that would probably do it anyway but it sounds like the higher percentage of that violence that would occur hate violence would be from the sort of like highly around like the offender that's not going to be as planful so I wonder if there's a lot of data or statistical data stating that basically the connection between guns and the access to guns and that kind of crime the crime of mostly see the kind of paraphrase that so what's the role of no no good yeah what's the role of the use of a weapon for one thing and really the idea of premeditation and when we look at hate in premeditation okay off of the research I've done the more premeditated you are the more biased you are the more premeditated you are the further you move out of your community but I'll sort of reference something else it's intriguing I've worked with a guy named Harry Cropp in Florida we have profiled bias motivated homicide offenders and we've published a little bit on this we're right now doing sort of some follow-up work intriguingly a lot of the people that do bias motivated homicides are doing hands-on not even weapons not even guns but rather hands-on violence and it is the idea of this immediacy of engaging violently against your victim that we're seeing okay and we've got about 70 cases that we will classify as these are bias motivated homicide offenders all that Harry does is nothing but look at people that do homicides and violent crimes in the state of Florida so we've got this this population really intriguing group the other intriguing thing though about people that do murders where there's hate is they very very high frequency of childhood violent abuse done to them prior to becoming adults and doing bias motivated homicides so and I can add when I had looked at about 200 of the criminal histories of hate crime offenders were arrested in the LAPD when you go back the first thing that shows up in their criminal record and this is you know artifact of the state of California is to show that they were in homes where they were abused themselves so I'm not convinced that bias is the whole story at all with these kinds of dangerous individuals that do these unique and bizarre infractions but I would suggest that one of the things is the idea that bias occurs with the idea that violence is naturally how you solve your problems and when I talk about the bias homicide offenders and their histories they were horrifying childhood experiences I'm not talking I was knocked around by my old man I'm talking about I was ritualistically abused I was the victim of chronic you know incest I was chained and left in you know the basement when my family was just things that would make you just feel awful so we see this in people that then become in their own right as adults engaging in hands-on violence not just carjacking shooting you from across the street but where I am proximal and enjoying that experience of that kind of violence so again these very rare individuals have their own kind of stories behind it other questions comments please hi right here yes yeah how does poverty play a role boy it plays some role I would I would argue in two levels see I've known hate crime offenders and I've worked with hate crime offenders who were highly skilled professionals highly degreeed individuals I'm clearly seeing people who are very successful professionals who engage in hate crime activity that being said as with any criminalized activity when you look at gangs you see poverty the absence of economic resources the absence of internal resources of education of stable families and domestic environments and clearly that factor that both creates the risk and and very importantly here creates the risk of recurring hate crime activity and you know put it this way this is the same with anybody that belongs to a criminal gang what happens if I get the person to leave the criminal gang what are they entering into not just a hate gang any criminal gang if you're gonna say you should really get out of the Mexican mafia you should get out of the Peckerwood gang you get out of the Aryan nation the challenge becomes do I have anything to belong to and if what we're saying societally or institutionally is you're on your own then of course these people come back to these groups now having said that I'll ask answer a question that wasn't per se really asked but which is this do you incarcerate a hate crime offender as a way to fix the problem okay the great dilemma is if you have been convicted of a hate crime and you are incarcerated guess what happens when you're institutionalized everyone's gonna find out what you're there for anyone who's not of your racial group in some cases religious group or ethnic group holds you with greater animus the one group that will support you is the group that you're a part of so if you come in is impoverished and hate-oriented you're protected by that group you were radicalized by that group and if you're released what else do you have except the group to go back to give you a quick story and this is all public records so I can say it I remember looking at a case with the DA's office in Los Angeles there was a young man named Randy Rojas Latino last name who was raised in a multi-ethnic household and he exclusively perpetrated violence against Latinos and when they investigated him the FBI said what are you doing this for he goes I believe in white power I'm down for white power now Randy lived in an extremely poor community had not graduated high school had a meth problem along to a white power gang lived in one of the poorest parts of the Los Angeles County area called the high desert area a lot of meth labs and a lot of poverty and a lot of unemployment and intriguingly here's where we get into the demographics a part of Los Angeles where we call that the white flight idea of the 1960s the whites moved out of the inner city went to the high desert the 1990s Latinos move into the black communities that have been white the blacks move to the high desert the whites who left the blacks are now infuriated that the blacks have now left the Latinos to move outward and then these become the gangs in the forms of aggression we see Randy was incarcerated for beating up Latino kids said I'm down for white power becomes a hero in prison is released after a few years when I saw this case that that this is trouble he's released and now get into the mindset you're going out underneath with your girlfriend on a Saturday night she's a part of the gang too and you see a black homeless man you beat him to death because what else you got to do and now Randy's incarcerated again he's gonna be there for life we hope he's a hero in prison so you know if somebody says to me what's the primary issue I would look at can they get a job can they have a romantic attachment can they finish any kind of an educational trade experience do they have a drug problem and if we address those things maybe their bias becomes something you address down the road apiece but it's I don't start with the bias I would start with the idea of poverty vulnerability impulse disturbance drug problems and again if you take a person out of a gang and the gang is all that they have you know if you were asked to give up everything that you have as your collective in your social support that's the challenge what are we giving us an alternative and that's the hard part that's the hard part is as Rafe Ezekiel put it finding an alternative ideology other comments or questions please way up at the back hi there so what we're seeing across the nation is recruitment of you know outright white supremacist recruitment on college campuses that tend to target specific sometimes specific segment of the white population and very stealth and very sophisticated in terms of recruitment and it it skirts violence at least not yet hasn't met the threshold for violence but but it skirts on the periphery that would escalate anytime and so the challenge is how do you identify on the key kids who are at risk because they become in many respects perpetrators and victim right so how do you identify kids who are at risk of recruitment and intervening ways that close them and rather than leave them prey because they are sometimes kids were isolated kids who are on the spectrum kids who are particular set of kids that are being recruited so I so I wonder what you offer in terms of engaging the point in part just a paraphrase is how do we look at this idea of recruitment into biased ideology groups all right at this point in time they're happening in our campuses and not only how do we understand what the risks are of that process but yes indeed who are the people that are vulnerable to join these groups and this gets to the other side of the idea of poverty but it was rather people that are able to go to a university are still solicited you know quite quite seriously are solicited and it wasn't that long ago we would say well you know these are just people out there doing something in a very unsystematic fashion you know the people opening up a website that has like 10 followers now we're seeing these as very well funded well executed strategies to draw people into these ideological groups again there's a cultural challenge we're facing because if we were right now in France or parts of Europe or parts of Latin America they would say we see those as terrorist groups and what they would say is we're not going to wait for the violence to follow what they're espousing we treat as a threat societally and we say well it's a First Amendment right and to make the point in a different way of this idea of solicitation right now if you look at neo-nazi groups in central Europe Germany Austria the Czech Republic Hungary you see something really intriguing their primary icon for these hate groups is Che Guevara if you look at some of the photographs and there's a criminologist I work with it in Berlin and he says I got photos of these groups you think you were at a reggae or a world music concert because they're dressed out not in neo-nazi garb at all but they look like they are going to Coachella music festival where I live right they look like they are suddenly extremely contemporary they solicit women into the movement with the awareness of then being able to draw more and more young men into these groups so yes these are not people that are randomly showing up and doing these things there's a lot of planning behind this and of course that's one of our challenges now in our culture when we look at this idea First Amendment right and free speech and balanced opinion it's intriguing people of my age are more tolerant of that but according to survey research when you look at university students they are much more ready to say I want you to stop those folks from being on campus students are much more likely than people over the age of 40 of saying I don't want you know an alt-right speaker in my campus I don't want somebody who's going to create that divisiveness and you know this kind of flies in the face of some of our ideas of liberal democratic tradition so you know we're looking at a real kind of generational challenge of beliefs in this country and how do we create a better alternative for these people is very very challenging and you know if I may add this the people I know who have desisted from hate groups I mean people that are really like the organizers it's intriguing they don't have much of an answer for why they got out and I I'd say this amongst us it's a little bit like talking to a dry drunk why did you stop drinking you know why I just stopped drinking do you have any understanding of it no I just stopped drinking why did you stop belonging to a violent hate group I just decided to stop belonging a few of them will say things like I realized it was too close to home there's one guy in Los Angeles says my mom has cerebral palsy and the group was saying after we got rid of the Latinos and the immigrants then we're going to get rid of the people with disabilities and that like turned his lights on but often people desist from these groups with the vaguest of their own knowledge as to why so we're really kind of grappling with how do people come out and I think it is about identity and I think it is about having an alternative place to compel people to belong to and some of the social psychology research says you know you can turn prejudices on and off and stereotypes on and off and I think that's what we've got to look at is how do we turn off beliefs and things that you're extremist and give a person a place at the table where they feel like there's something they can be instead and I'm concerned we're kind of losing that battle to the alt right into these you know well-planned recruitment strategies we see around the globe so it's a very much a real problem and again it's a generational difference younger folks are much more ready to say I don't want that on my campus please than those of us who are teaching and working there so it's a partial answer but you see it's a very big challenge we're looking at many many other comments questions okay sure would thank you and thank you have a good night


Well, we know there was a lot to be desired with the M+. We were really excited to bring that one to the market with all the texturing that it had. Ended up with some different opinions out in the marketplace on it. So kind of came back to the drawing board with it. I think that the M+. Really was kind of that driving factor of like getting kind of artists that kind of throws out a new album that is like so different than anything else they've released. People go, whoa, what the fuck? Tried to bring an M to the market that was what we thought more people were looking for. We hit some things really well and a few others not as well as we would like. This time around taking those concepts we learned quite a bit with that product. A lot in terms of a single hit extraction and the surface texturing that we've got going on with it. We heard you when you guys said, hey, the M+, the heat transfers a little bit too much. All right, there's a few things that we can continue doing and evolve this thing a little bit. Let's see if we can't forget a way to streamline the design of the M to make it actually more simple to manufacture without having to make compromises and ideally so that we can lower the cost of making the M. Become more efficient both with machine time and assembly and all that stuff. This time we wanted to put a huge focus on lowering the cost to the consumer. How many companies are actually lowering their prices? Come together as a big group every single Thursday and talk about what we want, what we don't want and how we can proceed with the actual product. The Thursday product meeting is more of an in-depth meeting directly with our engineers, George, Jason, our test engineers, Troy and Austin as well. So we really get a detailed kind of feedback from them on the technical side. A lot of my involvement is really on the project management side of it this time around, making sure that we're hitting our benchmarks, making sure it's getting out to the testing group that we've got. It really making sure everything is locked in place for the eventual launch. It's 2024 and it's our seventh generation M. Well, a lot of the first things we did was really try to understand what parts of the geometry were things that we weren't necessarily keen on. Everything a little more subtle. People kind of really liked the round shiny things and so we wanted to play off that a little bit more. Overall, there was a hefty amount of simplification going on. So there's a lot of subtlety to finessing the overall flow of the device. From the machining geometry that we're working with, the coverage that the texturing has, the finishing process. I think what we learned from last year from the M+. Was that not everyone is into a really gnarly texture that if I can't see one in my hands before I decide to buy it, then I'm going off pictures and that's tough. We did a pretty aggressive texture on the M+. So we backed way off on that. To start taking things out of the programs that we get and start with kind of an interesting texture that we had on some stock. Had a bunch of different designs for texture in place that kind of fell back into like, okay, well, kind of like this, kind of like that. What if we mesh these two together? Try this, try that. First one to go was actually the mouthpiece portion. This was kind of iteration one. Dr. Jason and Jason, let's get rid of the lip groove. Let's get rid of the machining up here. It just felt right to get rid of the lip groove. Really changes like the look and to me in a positive way. So that just really gave the, I think the whole M7 kind of a fresh, updated, different look than anything else we've done before. As soon as we did it, we actually decided we really preferred the aesthetic look of it. And then that kind of expanded into the M7 XL version that we see, noting that it really looks good on either side of that. So I think that actually brought some cool aesthetic advantages. We started changing up the airport. You know, do we have two airports instead of one, 180 degrees apart from each other? With this iteration, there was an airport on the front and on the back. Seemed like a fun concept, but wasn't that well received.  So then it's like, okay, we need to finish the other end of the stem. Just machine off a little bit of the texture, just give it a little bit of something, right? Not quite so plain and boring. Still similar tip here. You can see a little color because it had heated up. Check see how it worked. And then change the direction of the airport, because some of the feedback we're getting at the time was, well, I want to have a little bit more modulation when we use the rocker and rotate the device on the airport so you can better adjust the airflow, even this. People just didn't like the way that it looked. You know, they liked the ability to kind of partially close the airport, partially leave it open, leave it open completely, you know, invest both worlds. It's kind of how I landed, the offset lightning bolt, if you will. You know, it makes it a little bit easier to change the airflow qualities to the customer's liking. Switched out the button on the back for this style rocker. A near-final design. You can see that we've got the little holographic M there. We've got the airport. We've got this little detail here. Got just the taper on the mouthpiece side. We changed up the rocker a little bit.  Maybe we could do a little bit more. Memory serves me right here, you know, when we really focused on texture. It's probably down to two within a few days. I think the best feature by far is the take that we've had on texturing this time around. The texture and the pattern is actually the same all the way across these, but we changed up the depth of the pattern kind of incrementally. And there was a lot of R&D that went into that texturing, different options that we had. Nobody else is doing anything quite like it out there. You know, it's a process that we've kind of developed internally ourselves to be able to apply a texture. Very light texture. Very heavy texture. Ended up going with the one that you see for a variety of reasons. I think it's a very unique process that we do to apply a texture to the stainless steel. And when people see this for the first time, especially with some bright lights that kind of reflect off it and you look at it. Being able to look at it in light and it has one effects and then you're kind of in a shaded area and it looks completely different. I think that's just cool. Working on the tip started to, again, move more of the mass from the stem side up to the chamber side. We ditched the fins and moved the mass around with the M-plus tip, kind of kept a similar profile. We knew where we wanted that mass. We knew how we wanted it to flow air-wise. If you notice the geometry now, all the way from the serrations on the top, all the way down to where the tip meets the stem, it flows really nice. It was more important to me to kind of keep those aspects of it, of what works, and dress it up in a way that it fits the stem. Whether it's a standard cap or an armored cap, because we've got a little bit more room between the very opening of the chamber here and right here. The cap doesn't grind on the chamber like some of the previous tip designs. It snaps on with a very nice distinctive click. I just like to sit there and fidget with it, click it back and forth. I really like the clicks. And if anything, it's just kind of another further refinement of, it's not just the cap that clicks, the components click together because they've been engineered to fit together and to integrate together in a very, very, I think nice and satisfying way. For the first time, we want to actually offer a mouthpiece with that unit. The mouthpiece end of it is really nice, especially when you flip the stem over. I think it just mates a lot better with it. Aesthetically, folks that like to kind of reverse their units and put the tip on the mouthpiece end, another good reason why we kind of dropped that dished out mouthpiece geometry. I know people are looking for an XL length, so why don't we create a mouthpiece? So we started with a few mouthpiece concepts and that's this one. You want the ability to kind of have it go either way and still look good, not like some kind of Frankenstein or something. When we look at all the various features, they look like they belong together. The design really stems from the woodwinds. Originally, you know, the snap in condenser design. I probably done like a dozen different iterations of that mouthpiece and tie and stainless. This is a stainless steel mouthpiece and condenser, which you can get in the M7 as an M7 XL, but it's not exclusive to the M. And it looks good on any other device that you can just buy just the mouthpiece and the condenser, you know, as a kit. It is a modular component that is compatible with the vast majority of all of the stems that we've made over the years. By and large, a lot of the feedback that I've seen with my testers internally and externally is just overwhelmingly positive remarks. Probably the most noticeable response has been, oh, stainless mouthpiece and an XL version of an M? Oh, that's fantastic. We're always trying to do better. We're always trying to develop the process in-house of to make sure everyone's on the same page and make sure that the customer's expectations are met and sales and all the things that have to go on.  We had the design of the mouthpiece aesthetically done. All right, we've all talked about it. We're going to run with this. Production starts, you know, basically tomorrow. The feedback was coming in, though, that it sure would be nice if we could have a little bit of adjustment on the condenser. Part of the feedback that we were getting was just actually a more restrictive airflow. But the huge note that we got from them was to add additional grooves or some way to regulate airflow control just for the user experience. I said to Jason, you know, Jason, I know we've got the groove that the condenser snaps into. It holds in place really nice. Can we make this adjustable? Maybe we could just put another groove in there so that we can have a couple positions. Here we are, you know, last minute, like literally right before I'm going to start production. Like in 10 minutes, I'm going to start production. We just pump the brakes. About an hour later, he kind of walks in with a big grin on his face and just goes like this. Just dropped it in George's hands and walked out. Now I got to take this over to the other people. I'm like, you got to go take that, talk to the other guys, get their blessing, if you will. Should we do this? Here we are. It's past the 11th hour. But we haven't actually made any yet. And we haven't shared any of the messaging and the information with anyone else. And I hope it's worth it. And I hope that everyone internally and whatnot doesn't get pissed. My initial reaction was, whoa, are we really going to make a change this light in the game? It was really fun because I didn't say anything other than I've got a little problem. I just handed them the condenser in the mouthpiece. And they're looking at me and say, what's the problem?  We had to take a look at it from the consumer's perspective as well that I think adding it added a lot of extra value to the product. Sent me a message a little bit later in the day. I said, yep, we're going to go with that. I think we did the right thing. The feedback you got was a run with that. Awesome. Taking their advice, we went ahead and made those changes right before we went into production, but we're super stoked with the result. People are loving it. If I were at the machine, we started making multi-position M7 mouthpieces. And I'm glad we did. It just changed the entire thing. It changes the entire experience. We've always tried to have very prominent machinery, different Easter eggs kind of contained within it. But I think the simplicity of the device overall, especially with that gemstone style mouthpiece, it's one of my favorite looking M's to date. We've been getting some really great feedback. People are really enjoying the ability to have an Excel version of an M. That's been very well received. From what I can tell and from the feedback that I'm aware of from both people in the company and others that we've shown this to, it's been very, very positive. We kind of gave everybody everything that I think they were looking for. For the people that have tried it and used it, we're really happy with how well this new tip extracts. The tip is designed to actually hold more heat. So the wall thicknesses on the M7 tip are thicker than in past versions of the M. So it does retain that heat a little bit better. It helps with it fully extracting your material. Taking a lot of the aspects of the M+, that people were really keen on, changed the look of it as that they just weren't so happy about, coming out with a product that really hits all the benchmarks. I firmly believe, and I think you will too, that the M7 is our most refined M yet.