Greetings and welcome to this edition of Campus Conversations. I'm Dan Mogulov from the University's Office of Communications and Public Affairs. As many of you know, we regularly use these events as a way to get acquainted with new academic and administrative leaders. And today I'm really pleased to welcome David Wilson, who began his tenure as Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy on July 1st. Prior to joining the Goldman School, Wilson was the senior associate dean for the Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware and a full professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. That's an interesting blend of academic disciplines. We'll be talking more about as we go along today. David's own widely published and cited research examines how individuals formulate their political preferences about race and justice and how social cognition shapes broader survey response behaviors. He's the co-author of the forthcoming book, Racial Resentment in the Political Mind. David is also a military veteran with 19 years of service in the US Army Reserves, including combat tours for Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. As always, we welcome any and all questions you may have for our guests today. Just post them to our Facebook live streaming site as we go along and we'll do our best to answer them. David, welcome to campus conversations. Thank you, Dan. That was pretty impressive. Yeah, you should know. So tell me something I'm always interested. Why Berkeley? Why Goldman? What brought you here? What got you interested when either you got that recruiting call or saw posting wherever it was? The excellent way to start. Grew up on the East Coast.  California is this mysterious place. We had visited on various trips to the national parks, but we had never really engaged the idea of the state and it's kind of history and it's this kind of California spirit that I read about in the strategic plan. And I was impressed by the legacy, the sense of pride that the university has in excellence, the public mission that is beyond just kind of being a public university, but actually trying to do good on behalf of the public and be accountable to the public as well. So I was impressed by how the public mission really emphasizes service and contribution to something bigger than yourself. And the University of Delaware is a private university and some other affiliations I've been with were private entities. And it kind of changed the way I thought about what I wanted to do in my academic career. So I looked at Berkeley very seriously and when I looked at the Goldman school, I saw an interdisciplinary faculty focus on excellence. It's reputation just like the Berkeley reputation preceded it. So I knew it was excellent. I knew it had high standards. I knew it had really smart faculty and really mature and outstanding students. And I wanted to be more connected with an area where we could have impact. And so the value of a professional public policy school was that we can really take our scholarly work, apply it to things in a real way and talk about the real-world implications and bring things closer to change, if you know what I'm saying. I got that. We're gonna get into a lot more about Goldman and policy and your areas of research, but you mentioned we, this is also a chance to get to know you. So do you come with family? What's your setup away from work? Yeah, here's my story. I got in a Subaru with my wife and my cat and drove five days across the United States, the great United States. I mentioned there was a cat involved. And we landed in Berkeley in early June. And we enjoyed the ride together and got really close. We're all still together. Everyone's still happy. But we landed here in July and, I mean, in June and we've been located in Berkeley and we're really happy with the move. Do you have any school-aged kids? What's your children? I have a, I'm sorry. My son is 23 years old. He's six foot five, way smarter than I am. And he works at a startup in San Francisco. And my wife is also way smarter than I am. And she works for the university. And we met in graduate school at Michigan State University and she's, again, the brains behind our operation. Wait, so are you telling us we hired the wrong Wilson? Perhaps. I should play the fifth, I guess. I don't know, you got too good, you got two good smart scholars who know the academic world and know how to understand excellence. Yeah, so I'm always curious. And I tend to ask this question a lot of, you know folks who are new. So you've been at Berkeley since July one, right? Yeah. So what surprised you? And what have you been initial, your initial impressions of the campus? We've got this big, huge reputation that has different shapes and forms depending on people's disciplines and geography and probably politics. So what's it been like? Yeah, it's, I don't wanna say the word shock but it's been a lot of surprises on a daily basis. And it's because when you're on the East Coast if you've ever made the migration you don't really pay attention much to California. And if you're California you don't pay much attention to the East Coast. So you don't think about the day-to-day things that happen in California. You may think about the big things like an earthquake or natural disaster but you don't think about the planning that you have to prepare for for the natural disaster or the politics of it or how there's a culture of, you know here's what we do or here's what we don't do. And that climate environment, the homelessness situation, the housing costs, the cost of everything, the urbanness of the Berkeley area is almost, it's kind of European almost. It's not urban like East Coast urban and having Oakland right here in San Francisco be close but be across the bay. It's just different. The weather is different. It rained last night. It rained yesterday afternoon and I was staring out the window. It's just so wonderful. And so that's the third time I think since I've been here that it's rained. So you're constantly experiencing new things on a regular basis and you're engaging with really smart people who are thinking about the world differently. And I mean from the person that's unsheltered that I meet at the coffee shop to the Nobel Prize winners who are on campus now you're really getting exposed to a new world. And for people who are familiar with Berkeley and have been here for a long time you kind of maybe take it for granted. But to us new folks it's like a whole eye-opening experience about what's possible and the history and everything. It's just so rich. And what's on your agenda for the school? I mean, you're coming in after a dean who served had a long and distinguished tenure. Schools in great shape. One of the believed and seen, perceived to be and is one of the finest schools of its type in the entire country.  Where are you headed? That's a good question. First, Henry Brady is an outstanding scholar and was an outstanding dean for the school. And he's been nothing but kind of a stalwart in really helping us and helping the school to be successful and helping me to be successful as a new and incoming dean. Also, our staff is excellent and really play a role in helping me to understand the school and understand what our priorities are. And then our faculty and students have just been the most welcoming group of university citizens that I've ever encountered. And everyone I think is understanding that this is a period of transformation and an opportunity for change. And the things that I'm thinking about are not changes that are big things, but thinking more about focusing in on how everything we do can be transformational. We're our number one school of public policy analysis and we've been there for a while. We have an outstanding reputation that gives us a little bit of leeway to experiment and try some new things. And so we are enhancing and we are expanding and elevating our horizons more so than changing them, so to speak. So we'll be experimenting with how we do our scholarship, how we organize ourselves, how we create an infrastructure that allows us to be really outstanding. We'll be innovating with our degree programs, making sure that we are trying new things out in the classroom and outside of the classroom to enhance learning so that the experience is transformational, not just in terms of academics, but also in terms of culture. We'll be investing in student life, making sure that students when they leave here, they have a source of pride to go along with the degree that they've earned. And we're also of course, as many people know, we're thinking about our rocket ship, our building and our space where we can actually take all of these new technologies around learning and scholarship and student life investments and go somewhere that really does expand how we think about public policy and how we solve public problems. So we're laser focused on the future and being a school of public policy that realizes what the Goldman difference is that really articulates the values of innovation, diversity, our public mission, being transparent, being transformational and again, embracing that California spirit that nothing is too big of a problem for us to solve. I'm gonna circle back to you for a second, and ask if you can give us just maybe an example or two of some of the things you're thinking about a little more specifically. Before that, just wanna remind folks who may have joined us late, we're talking today with the new Dean of the Goldman School, David Wilson. As always, we welcome your questions. And if you do have questions for David as we go along, just post them to our Facebook live streaming site and we'll do our best to get to them. So let's go back and let me pick up where you were on the broad level, sounds really exciting. Can you give us a without letting too many cats out of the bag, some of the things you're thinking about that would count as new either in an evolutionary or a transitional sense? Yeah, yeah. So as a cat person, I'll let a few cats out of the bag. One thing we've been thinking about is we have nine or 10 research centers and of course we have a lot of ideas that come to the Goldman School. And one way that we can better work together and collaborate across research centers is to organize ourselves in terms of an institute, an institute for public policy research and analysis. One that has a leadership and support structure that allows faculty to be experts at their fields and at the research work, but has a support staff necessary to help do all of the kind of grunt work, so to speak, organizing of HR, helping with pre-award and post-award, dealing with facilities and equipment and spacing needs. Faculty who have to deal with all of the details within the proposal can sometimes detract and create a disincentive for going after more sponsored activities. So organizing ourselves in a way that allows excellence and outstanding research to be conducted in the school, but also transformed into practical solutions to the big problems requires a new kind of structure. A second thing we're thinking about is how to expand our footprint in different areas. Right now Goldman is primarily located in Berkeley. We should be thinking about how to have impact in Sacramento. We should be thinking about how to have impact in DC. We should be thinking about utilizing our international partners so that we can take, again, the Goldman difference in the Berkeley brand and work on behalf of the public sector and on behalf of public solutions in other locations. We have the expertise. We have the alumni. We have the tradition. We could do a little bit more out there to have a bigger impact. You know, it was interesting. You were talking before about Goldman how important its mission that includes public policy analysis is. And I'm looking back on the notes I took when you and I sort of had a preparatory chat before this event and you said you're not a public policy analyst. Help us through that. In other words, if you're not that, what are you and how does that work in terms of your fit as a dean of a school of public policy? Yeah, good question. So I am a person that the public policy is a vocation more so than a scholarly and scientific discipline. Policy analysis is a method for understanding the effectiveness and efficiency of policy. My work in public policy is looking at how the public experiences public policy. So when I do public policy analysis, I'm looking at, all right, if the policy is effective, why don't people like it? If the policy is not effective, why do people support it? If we're talking about a $3.5 trillion piece of legislation, why are we thinking more about the cost than the benefits? So as a policy scholar, my work centers on how the public understands public policy. And so that public voice speaks back to the policy process and helps to define what the problems actually are, what are acceptable or feasible solutions, what are the best mechanisms for implementing public policy and the like. So I'm more on the behavioral side or the policy feedback and in many ways implementation side. There are many traditions in the public policy world. There's public management, there's organization theory, there's public administration, there's public affairs and public policy and policy analysis. And so there are a lot of different methods and my work isn't traditionally in that scope of public policy, but I do look at the impacts of policy and I do try to understand its value. As a dean, where that comes in is it helps me to be a constant student of what our faculty are doing and what our students are interested in. As a senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, we had 26 departments. And when I would have to speak to each of those departments, it required them to explain to me what was important about their discipline, what was consequential about the research they were doing and how to best support them. And as a dean, you want to kind of have an open lens. You don't always wanna come with kind of a set mindset on how discipline should proceed. And that helps you innovate a little bit more. So my eyes are in ears are both wide open as being a dean of public policy. I do have a master's of public administration. So I know the discipline. I've experienced this in the classroom and a little bit in work. But what I really wanna do is find the best ways to ensure our faculty and our school are thinking about policy in a way that's moving as fast as the world is moving. In many ways, higher education tends to kind of follow or lag what's happening in the real world. And we have an opportunity right now to kind of catch up and prepare for the future. We only have an hour. Every answer of yours like makes me think of about 7,000 more questions. And as did this last one, both personal and professional. I'm curious about your background. In other words, was something about the way you came up or your family? Is there a connection there to what your academic interests and pursuits are all about? Yeah, I tell this story quite a bit. So I grew up in a split home. My mother followed divorce at an early age. My father was an immigrant from Panama, family located in Roxbury, Duchess, Boston, Massachusetts. And my mother's family was from Nashville, where we tend to draw out our ours and talk a little bit longer, use y'all quite a bit. And so no matter where we would spend our time, my sister and I, if I was in the Northeast, I talked funny because I still had that Southern draw. When I was in the South, I tended to talk a little fast sometimes and get all twitchy when I talk. That was my Northeast side. And people would pick on us a little bit. People would say we're different and we're odd. And really early in my life, I started thinking about how you treat people, how people treat one another, mal-treatment, good, bad, et cetera. And that colored my research and my interests throughout undergrad, graduate school, professional work, and then academia. And so my work centers on justice. It centers on how we think about people getting what they deserve or not. And that includes a handshake or a greeting or holding back certain benefits that connect with a policy or not allowing people to be members of certain communities. How we treat one another really determines how we think about what government does and the direction in which our country is going. So I've kind of got this lineage of justice and behavior. And my main tool of understanding the world is survey research. So I worked at the Gallup polling organization and helped the country and public agencies understand what the public is thinking about the direction of the country and the policies that are being implemented on a daily basis. So my background is broad. You've mentioned the military before and that has a little bit of how we treat one another thing as well. But those early years shaped my research and my interests. So I mean, I have to ask, I'm curious. It's not you, it's, I don't wanna say usual but it stands out that you spent 19 years in the military and at the same time have this incredible, I've had this incredible academic career. I mean, the list of your publications is page for those who haven't seen it page after page after page and incredible accomplishments landed here as a Dean. How do you sort of connect those two parts of your life? What led you to military service and how did it influence your subsequent choices? Yeah, it's a good question. I joined the military when I was fall of my senior year in high school. I was an athlete and I got an injury and I panicked. And there were these commercials on TV that said, if you join the army, they'll pay for your college. And that was the first time I kind of fell into something I should have been paying more attention to. I didn't read the fine print on a lot of that stuff at the time. But I joined and they said, hey, just go one weekend a month and everything will be fine and you'll do great things and you'll travel the world. That's not how it works, but that's what I did. And three years later, when I was sophomore, I think a sophomore in college, Desert Storm kicks off. And all of a sudden my world has transformed because I'm being mobilized to go to war. And I'm like, oh my, I'd only seen movies about this thing. Even though you go through basic training, you get trained, it's not real until you have to really do it. For most people in the military, it doesn't become real until you're activated. So that shaped one experience. And then later on, I just, I never got out of the military. I enjoyed the process of understanding how the military work, building the camaraderie around fellow soldiers and the training and the learning, all the traveling, all the things I got to do eventually. And then in 2001, 9-11 happens and I'm deployed again. And that really transformed my life. So Operation Iraqi Freedom, I spent 15 months away from my family and really had to reflect on, and of course, a lot of time in the combat zone, understanding with a different lens about how we treat one another and how we regulate that treatment in our own minds and through policy. And when I came back, I had a little bit about enough of Washington DC and wanted to get out. And I had been publishing and doing work at Gallup and got the great fortune to go into academia, landed at the University of Delaware. A few years later, got an opportunity to do administrative work. And so here I am. Wow, what an interesting story. What a great journey. You mentioned when you wanted to get out of DC and I was listening to you before and talk about really a set of inspiring goals and belief in the importance of the mission of the school. But then I'm trying to reconcile this, a lot of what the work that your students are doing and the careers that they're gonna go on to have are gonna find expression and legislation and government action. And at the moment, speaking of Washington, government seems entirely broken in terms of being able to put points on the board, being able to progress with legislation that's important to one party, a complete freeze. How do you keep students sort of with their chin up and feeling that actually it is possible to implement an effect change and reform and make the world a better place through public policy? Because it seems at times so futile when you look at the news coming out of the Capitol. Yeah, you know, this is, so I developed these kind of, I don't know if they're proverbs, but when I was in the military in some of the toughest times where it didn't seem like anything was changing in the world, I said, one, everything happens for a reason. You can't always control what that is. Two, it's all relative. It could always be worse. Three, if you somewhat said your expectations low, you'll likely always make a profit. And then four, always have a backup plan. If A doesn't work, make sure you got B ready to go. And how I talk to students about politics and government is that serving the public is one of the hardest things that one could do. And if you're looking for a challenge, public service is it. No one will, well, I shouldn't say no one, I'll speak in absolutes, but you'll get very little appreciation. You won't make a ton of money, but you'll be able to impact people in a way that you can actually see. And so when we think about public policy, which is how government solves public problems, but government doesn't often do it alone. It does it with the nonprofit sector. It does it with the private sector. It does it with other international actors. It does it with, you know, volunteerism and all kinds of other things, but it has all kinds of mechanisms from, you know, tax and spend, to educating the public, to actually doing research. The reason why universities exist in part is because the government knows we need really smart people to help them understand what's going on in the world. The science, the social science, the humanities, the arts, all the traditions included. So it seems like government is not working, but government is working. It's our democracy. We, the people comprised of government, what we have to do is constantly remind ourselves that there is a process for change. And if we become experts in that process, we can actually realize change. If we move forward thinking that we can disrupt the process in many ways, it sometimes puts more barriers in the middle of change, but it is possible. We don't see as much of it because the story is more salacious if it's negative. You know, if a plane crashes, the story is 50 people die, not 50 people survive because this is where political psychology comes in. We have a negativity bias. It tends to capture our attention more than the status quo does. So we're constantly reminding students that change is possible, that our commitment is to community and the public service, and that we should be thinking about everything we do with the spirit of shared success, that we rise and fall together, and that our democracy is only as meaningful as our commitment to it. So that's how we keep our students and our faculty and hopefully the public engaged. So I want to talk to you about, we're going to circle around to it, just about what's happening in the country in terms of polarization and sort of the aid, the era of the conflicting narratives and all the rest. But on a first step down that path, talk to us a little bit about this blend of your academic interests, that you also had a joint appointment at your last school to the Department of Psychological Psychology and Brain Sciences. How are all of these things connected? What does brain science bring to public policy and politics and all of your interests? How are they all connected? First thing I'll say is higher education and departments come up with these names and sometimes they don't reflect what they really do. So I was in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. I didn't do any international relations and I was in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. I didn't do any brain sciences. I did psychological sciences. So I was a political psychologist. I still am a political psychologist. And what political psychologists do is they study behavior. They use psychological theories and methods to understand how people process political information and make judgments about what that information means and then as a result of that processing behave, whether it's a vote, whether it's where a button or a sticker, whether it's share information, whether it's yell at someone who's walking down the street or whether it's painting something on a building over on the other side of campus. We are motivated by certain things and the job of the political psychologist is to understand those motivations, including supporting policies or practices, many of which exist here at the University of California Berkeley. Our spirit governance approach is all about this idea of democratic input and why that's valuable. It creates something in the minds of those who are acting in the sphere. And so hopefully it creates trust. It creates some level of commitment. It creates some sense of community but the people who are on the outside, it may be intolerant. It may be seen as something that is not welcoming or overly rigorous. And so the political psychologist helps people to understand how the mind is connecting to what's actually happening in society and politics to the political psychologist is not just government. It's literally if there are 12 people in a room, how do they decide what movie they're gonna go watch? Is it the strongest person that gets the pick? Do they vote on it? Is it a majority? Is it super majority? Is it secret ballot? Is it public ballot? Rock, paper, scissors? What is it? The political scientist looks at the rules and organizations. The psychological side looks at how people accept or don't accept what's been decided. And the political psychologist will always have a job. Fascinating. We've got a couple of questions coming in. I'm gonna get to them in just a second. Just remind anybody who may have joined us late that we are as always taking questions from the audience today. If you do have questions for David Wilson, the new Dean of the Golden School of Public Policy just post them to our Facebook live streaming site and we'll do our best to get to them. One more question before I go to those that just came in. I think we're all experiencing, no matter what our politics are, this difficulty of how to engage with people we disagree with in this era of polarization. How do we engage with people who have entirely different narratives, whether it's around climate change or around vaccine? And I'm wondering, given that you're there at that nexus of policy and opinion formation and perspectives, what do you do? What advice do you have in this day and age? Should we just not talk politics with people we disagree with? Or what's happening and how do we continue to work and sort of exist with those we disagree strongly with? Yeah, it's a good question. The thing that doesn't work is trying to change people's minds. Wow. So if you enter into a conversation hoping to change someone, you're already operating at a deficit. What I try and tell people that's useful is to readjust your expectations about what a win is in any kind of policy discussion or policy debate. A win is, in my view, helping someone else, helping their idea get better, right? And sometimes it's dissonance in action. It is very uncomfortable to let somebody else's idea become more prominent than yours. Being the bigger person in any kind of discussion should be our aspiration, even if it doesn't feel very good, right? And so if you wanna have conversations about politics, in other words, it's not agreeable politics, it's mostly the disagreeable stuff, go to the table prepared to let someone else's point have merit. Try and see that merit, try and see the value in how they're thinking about it, and just let that be the end of it. You don't have to change them. You don't have to win. You don't have to walk away with a victory. It's hard to do, but that's what the research suggests you should do. The other piece that's important is that we start thinking about how to design a curriculum. I think we really wanna do some of that at Goldman around active learning, active listening, perspective taking, empathy, communication, persuasion, and among other things, just learning how to breathe. These may seem like very soft skills that have no relevance to any vocational area, but they will help you when you start having conversations about what's important to you when somebody else may not see it. And that's whether it's going to see the movie that you don't wanna see, or whether it's a policy that may actually make your life more difficult. Being able to have those skills that allow you to be an active listener and a change maker in the truest sense, I hope Rich Lyons is somewhere out there. I think that is the way we can really understand what's powerful about Berkeley is that here you get exposed to life.  So instead of taking a position on it, embrace it, continue to learn about it and share it, but don't expect to change people because you're up against a molehill. They'll be thinking the same thing you're thinking and you're not gonna change either. So why set that as your expectation? Fascinating. Let me go to a couple of questions that have come in. The first question is somebody has posed is how big is the impact of public policy? And I guess is what they're getting at here is, is this just sort of an academic endeavor, the whole public policy thing, or are there really, are there real world consequences that you can draw a line from what's happening at graduate schools and public policy to what's going on in the real world? Yeah, our return to what public policy is. It is how the public sector seeks to solve public problems. So these are not private problems.  I mean, they may arbitrate the problem on the back end, but in terms of policy, we're thinking about how do we take a problem that we can exclude everybody from? So if it's small, for example, and deal with it in a way that doesn't, it's not, it's never gonna be perfect, but it doesn't necessarily harm one group just to help another group. That's a hard thing to do. And so public policy is always about finding that middle ground, selecting those alternatives or those choices that have costs and benefits. Nothing is cost-free, nothing is benefit-free or benefit-perfect. And so the public policy schools give you those skills to balance things out to really understand what should be the criteria. What do we expect the policy to do? How do we define the problem itself? What are we trying to accomplish and how do we know it's there on the back end? When is it time to do something different or change course? How do we know that the right citizens or non-citizens are benefiting from the policy in the way that we planned? That's what the policy analyst does. Policy is not designed to be a perfect solution. It's designed to help solve a problem, not perfectly, but solve a problem and give people options, give the public options. And again, we don't seek to try and solve private issues, but the bigger public issues. And for example, who's a citizen? Big public issue. Who should be able to buy housing in certain areas? And if they can't, how do you open that door so that people aren't living in their cars or in campus? If we have a water crisis, how do we communicate the people that we need to kind of tamper down our water usage and make it easy for everyone to have access to good water, low-cost good water or free water in some cases? So public policy schools aren't just going through an academic exercise. They're actually looking at public problems and helping people to understand the market's not solving them. Government's gonna have to step in. Solution is not gonna be perfect, but it's gonna be an evolutionary process of trying to get closer to what really does work. So I'm curious, nearly every public policy issue you raised just now and in previous answers, nearly every single issue was politicized. So how do you keep politics out of the classroom? Or do you? Are professors expected to be blatantly political with in terms of their opinions about what the role of government should be? Are they market-oriented? Everything now is tainted with some sort of political color, one or the other. How do you deal with that in the school and in the curriculum and in your hiring of faculty? That's a good question. Wow, you cannot have policy without politics. Politics in a very basic definition is any decision about who gets what and how. And if someone's getting something, someone else is gonna be judging whether or not they're deserving of what they've got. So this is, again, the political psychologist's piece. And they'll make a judgment about what should happen if they're undeserving, just as they make a judgment about what should happen if they are deserving. And then they have reactions to that. So politics, you can't disentangle politics from thinking about policy. You can do your best to think about policy analysis as apolitical. So just as the scientist seeks to have a scientific methodology for understanding a bigger research question or a bigger issue, and shies away typically from the normative debates, is it good or bad, as opposed to is it doing what it's supposed to do or not? How do we measure the outcomes and measure the inputs and see if they're aligned the right way? So the policy analyst is primarily, in theory, supposed to be focused on the costs and benefits of the policy, the outcomes, the ways in which people experience it, whether or the problem is to define the right way, whether the story is being told in a way that gets the public to support the policy and therefore support the democratic process. And that requires a lot of skill to try and not bring your politics in there. And we do our best to try and say they should be disentangled when you're analyzing the policy. But when you're thinking about it, the politics, you can't help but let them come in. Great answer. I got a lot of food for thought there. I'm gonna turn to another question that came in from the audience, who asks, how do you distinguish being aware of public opinion about a particular policy from pandering to public fads? And I guess this gets to that whole relationship between opinion and politics. Do you follow it? Do you lead it? And how do you distinguish between the two? Years ago, when we decided that people were important in governing, we had to come up with a methodology or a way of getting the people's voice. Direct democracy is messy. So if we've got 300 and we may have 400 million people in the United States, how do we determine, how do we listen to all four million voices? Some of them are underage and may not have a good way. So what we do is we come up with these rules. I say, well, if you're a certain age, we'll listen to you more. Some will listen to you less. We then have to come up with a way to make sure that voice is representative of everyone and do it in a way that's scientific. So public opinion, in a scholarly sense, has a scientific method behind it, a method that's not just about polling, but a method of random sampling and statistical estimation based on data collection and other things. So public opinion is supposed to be information about what the public's will is, and it's always a snapshot in history. It's never predicted of the future, even though many people like to use polls to try and predict who's gonna win an election or how the public will respond to something in the future, that's not what polls and public opinion surveys were designed for. So you use public opinion information to inform how you think about things. You shouldn't always use it as a reason to decide. It should be a part of the equation for decision-making, but it shouldn't be wholly, the only criteria for decision-making. And that's because as we know, once people know they're being studied, they change their behavior. Once you have opinion in an ad comes out, it changes people's perspectives and they may come up with different opinions the next day. Again, the political psychologist's currency is that we understand that random error happens and that people will change their behavior in systematic ways under different informational conditions. And we have tools that help us take that into consideration. So as we're thinking about the public and how it responds to leaders and policies and factions and commercials and controversies, we're always trying to take partition those things out that are meaningful and those things that are just kind of air and random noise. So I'd like to toss you some softballs, but I'm afraid that's not an option because we have some really good questions coming in. Pretty tough ones. There are no good softball questions. No, this is a good hardball question. Here we go from a member of the audience. Incrementalism where we have an inherited status quo and are only able to make changes on the margins has been a dominant school of thought in public policy for the last few decades. How do you think public policy will evolve either past this idea of incrementalism or within this idea of incrementalism? I guess my main question is the person writes, what's the cutting edge of how we think about public policy right now? Yeah, certainly there was a policy faculty member or scholar somewhere that either looked that up or just is in the school. Somebody threw you a fastball under the chin there. Look, I look at the tax code that the Trump administration passed. That didn't seem like incrementalism to me. I sometimes look at War Powers Act and the actions that come about, that doesn't seem like incrementalism to me. I think about some elements of voter ID laws and how we think about citizenship and how we look at our border doesn't look like incrementalism to me. So how we think about policy is kind of, it kind of, it goes to Evan flows, I think, or it should go through Evan flows. How we analyze policy has a set of tools that we use to understand whether it's good or bad. How the public adopts and accepts the value of a policy is something we have very limited control of now.  So I think a good framework for public policy is sticking with the idea of really understanding what the problem is and making sure it's well-defined, thinking about the range of solutions and knowing that no one of them is gonna be 100% effective or liked and thinking about what's feasible to the policy scholar out there. It could be something that's incremental or it could be something that's a radical change and you have an opportunity to adjust and then you have to defend it on the back end and therefore talk about what the story of the policy is, its value, how it will change our democracy of the United States for the better and just stick on that messaging. You can't get rid of the politics, but policy is about solutions and not wholesale solutions, but just parts. And you have to encourage others, private sector, nonprofit sector, others to kind of get involved and it's tough now, certainly. Even at a university, for example, our policies are quite incremental, radical change is not supported. So we should be thinking about 100 policy ideas we have, one or two can be a little bit radical and we should move forward with that. So it's about picking which one or two those are and being okay with that and then slowly migrating the incremental curve a little bit more to the big change curve and seeing how it sits for a while and then maybe going back to incrementalism. Yeah, I wonder how that, I mean, everything you say makes a huge amount of sense, but I wonder how that lands with your classic or maybe your stereotypical or even cliched Berkeley graduate student who wants to change the world tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. I think it's okay to have diversity. I think it's okay to have diverse perspectives and I would be quite open to someone, I've been out in the world, as a graduate student, I wanted to change the world too. It's not as easy as we think and I think you have to pick and choose your impacts and very early on in my professional career and then in academic career, I couldn't make everyone do those things that may be impactful, but I could influence one person and I could help them understand things in a different way and that was enough for me. So sometimes we want change to be something everybody else sees instead of what we accomplish. And so it's important to set realistic expectations around what can be done, but that doesn't mean you have to reduce your energy or your passion for seeing change. It's when you go into a situation, understand what's feasible. We teach that in the public policy schools, what's doable, what's possible and then kind of find the mean, use your variance, your diversity and find what the mean is and then go after it. And slowly you'll build a partnership that builds another one and builds another one with that system. Here's another one, this is almost like a softball. This person asks, how do you plan to strengthen the pipeline at the undergraduate level for undergraduates interested in public policy since this person states or their belief that the pipeline is very weak across the nation. So one, do you buy into the sort of a inherent assumption here, the pipeline is weak and if you do, what plans or thoughts do you have about strengthening it? It's an interesting thing. I don't know that I agree that there's a weak pipeline into public policy and I'm not sure if it was degree programs or the field of public policy in general. They were talking undergraduate here. Undergraduate of the pipeline into our undergraduate mine. It's like, I guess the pipeline, it seems to be at the undergraduate level. In other words that where for undergraduates interested in public policy, person asking questions suggests that that pipeline starting at the undergraduate level is weak and difficult. Yeah, I don't have enough information to confirm or deny that to be true, but I know that there are several pockets in health policy, the law school and high school of business, of course in the social sciences and I'm sure the natural sciences as well, there are areas of public policy. They're not, I guess maybe broad wholesale majors but they're areas where you can engage public policy because again, public policy is what governments do to solve public problems, right? So any public problem that you're trying to solve at some point will require policy. And so the inroad to the field of public policy may be a bit narrow. We're a professional school and so we don't have undergraduate majors, we have an undergraduate minor so it's available. But if you wanna go into a graduate study or go into the work, it's really about having a set of tools to help you to see problems in a certain way and then working with teams whether it's in a public sector, private sector, nonprofit sector to come up with solutions that are feasible, that are effective, that are efficient, that you can rationalize and justify to the public and the like and I think there are a lot of majors that can help the pipeline into public policy work but in terms of the undergrad program I can't speak to. Got it. David, one area, it seems like a major area in your professional life, your academic life that we haven't talked about yet is race. The book that you have coming out is called Racial Resentment in the Political Mind. Tell us a little bit about what that book is about and what drove you to write it. Yeah, wow. So the book is about thinking about race and how race matters in a way beyond simple racism and prejudice. In that if you look at public attitudes about any particular issue and you use an indicator of racism to try and predict those attitudes, racism and prejudice may explain some of the variants but it doesn't explain all of it and it doesn't explain the majority of it and in most cases it doesn't even explain a third of it. So there are other things that are going on that may bring people to the same position as someone that is racist or prejudiced that we may not be thinking about. And so the book is about exploring just world beliefs. Just world beliefs are beliefs that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt. Are you saying just world as a- Just world, belief in a just world. The world is just. So the shortcut of justice is something is just. So belief in a just world is the belief that again, the world doesn't necessarily need the same that need to change the things that we experienced. They work for us. Yeah, there may be bad actors and bad people out there but our world is fine. And it doesn't mean that we all agree on that world. It just means my system is fine. So you think about religion, for example. I believe in what I believe. And if someone tells me that someone is experiencing religion in a negative way I don't seek to change the system the world as I know it that person may need to change. And so the way people process information about change is one of resistance. And some of that stems to our notion that our current ways of doing things are just. They're the right way of doing things. And if someone is impinging on that right way of doing things, I should react with some level of defensiveness because it's unjust that I have to change to accommodate it. So in the area of race relations that means if we're thinking about policies that help bring about racial equality they may involve me having to kind of not get as much benefit out of something as someone else, a racial minority, for example. I don't know that that's fair.  And so it's very, it's very human for people to resist change and therefore if you have inequality and you're seeking to bring about equality people can't just stay high in the world and people stay low and then there'll be equality.  That's the only way to get equality. And so the book is about how that occurs in people's minds, what's acceptable, what they can tolerate, how they think about issues through justice and not just through racism and prejudice. And it gives us a way to look at the political mind is how we are distributing values and benefits and rewards in society. And that's the political mind. And then how we resent when those things are doled out the people who don't deserve them and then how race colors that resentment. So it makes me wonder and wanna ask you from an analytical, not necessarily a political point of view, what your take is on a lot of commentators who've talked about the extent to which racial fears were really behind sort of the, a key factor in President Trump's election, the fear of loss of place and of status and of a changing world and moving towards more diversity. Is that something that rings true for you from your perspective and from your studies? What's your take on all that? Yeah, it sounds like you've read at least half the book so far. That's absolutely right. I mean, it's not something that's so far-fetched, right? That if we looked at any other subject, except for beyond race, it would just make perfect sense to us that if we had to all of a sudden change how we do things at the University of California, Berkeley, people would see that as kind of a threat to our traditions, our statuses, our state of excellence. If we start experimenting with things and we take away, it was pretty tough. Take away the SAT or take away the GRE or stop grading or start allowing people to take courses that allow them that are flipped and don't use the Socratic method. All of those changes create resistance and people start wondering, well, what happens if we do it? What happens if we change? And so if you take it back to race, it's the same exact thing. It's not just that people hate or dislike racial minorities. It's that there is a belief that our culture, our traditions will change if we have to give up our current way of life, our current way of merit, our current way of thinking about what's right and what should be privileged or prioritized. So it's not such a far-fetched idea. It's just not as rarely thought of as a way to think about racial attitudes is that people think that having to accommodate minorities today is unfair because I've done nothing to harm them. It doesn't, if they're unequal, they should work harder or maybe they should do the things I do, but I'm not willing to change the system to make the world a better place. That is a collective action problem. That is a political science and political behavior problem. It's how we filter information about the world and then how we feel about things like change and new policies and equality. I'm wondering if one of the motivations for writing the book was a sense on your part that the salience and urgency of racial issues has never been higher in this country. What really was my motivating factor started way back in graduate school, actually, was that political science had a particular way and social sciences had a particular way of thinking about and measuring racial prejudice. And when I looked at the measure or the indicator, I didn't see much racial prejudice in it and I didn't see much racism in it. And that got me thinking about what is it? What's behind this? In other words, what is the fear that people have that leads to racism? In other words, if you let somebody who's really different have the same status as you, what's the problem? What's behind that? Well, one thing, there's got to be some injustice to it. There's got to be something that creates resistance in anger about it because racists get pretty upset about things like racial equality or racial integration at least. And then there's got to be a moral component to it. And so resentment is an ideal emotion or an ideal sentiment because it's a reaction to some kind of undeserved outcome. And so when I talk about just world beliefs, that is kind of the motivating force, but the reaction that people have to someone getting something they don't deserve, whether it's being able to live in my neighborhood, being able to eat at the same table, being able to ride in the same place as me on a bus, being able to be in the same classroom, being able to just quite frankly, look someone in the eye and be proud. If that happens, the whole slippery slope falls apart, we'll all be in trouble. And so that fear is a moral fear that's grounded in my research. It says it's grounded in justice. It can be grounded in racism and prejudice, but that's not all it's grounded in. A lot of it is grounded in justice. So my motivation started with what's beyond racism and prejudice. We don't need one single additional article on racism and prejudice to know that it exists, to know that it has impacts, to know that people hold it when they think they don't hold it. What's next? How do we think next about race in America? Wow. And does that leave you your studies and your research and everything? Does it leave you optimistic, neutral, pessimistic about the possibility that through public policy and through the sort of awareness you're talking about that we can actually address the structural racism in our country and in our government and our society? It doesn't leave me optimistic, but it doesn't leave me pessimistic as well. It will take a tremendous shock to the system for us, or it'll take a lot of time for us to realize the promise of our democracy. It won't happen through just public policy because again, ameliorative policy, helping policy exist, and then all it takes is one administration to roll it back. And all it takes is one administration to send a signal that all these other things the prior administration did to kind of help us just made us worse. And here are some specific examples of it, even though the overwhelming majority of examples showed the complete opposite. So talking about positives and benefits is good, but negative information always weighs more heavily on individual minds because they have to prepare for negative. They don't have to prepare much for positive and preparing for negative puts you in a fight-or-flight mode and therefore makes you less resistant to new information and change. All right, I'm gonna give you a softball. What color is the sky? Give me that one. That's not that soft. This came in from the audience. It's a good question, but also put the ball in the teeth for you. What do you think makes the Goldman School of Public Policy one of the top schools in the country? Just reading this. As someone who was currently choosing graduate schools to apply to, why should I choose Goldman? And if you can't do well on this question, David. I won't grade myself, but I'll say what I think is the Goldman difference is the commitment of our faculty to making sure that students, in the best way they can, that students have a transformational experience that challenges their thinking on what are right solutions for public problems. Students take those experiences and they build a community of their own. I mean, they really do work together and commit to one another around this idea of altruistic input. This notion that we're gonna be public servants in some way, even if we're not working in a private sector, we're interested in these big problems. We're interested in being a part of teams that try and solve them. And in many ways, they wanna be entrepreneurial. They wanna come up with their own solutions once they're done with graduate school at the Goldman School. And we wanna really be the place where they get trained to be entrepreneurial, to be active listeners, to think in terms of designs and systems and to encounter problems and have confidence that they're gonna address them in a way that leads to change and impact. And so we started Goldman with community. That's what grounds everything we do at Goldman. That community leads us to think about the kinds of scholarly work around public impact and resolving issues like inequality and unfairness in society. That builds on our academic enterprise where we're teaching students about those scholarly learnings. Then we give students an opportunity to put those things into action. Once they put them into action, they gain confidence. They grow, they get better. Then they see the actual impacts and outcomes of their work. And then they're proud of that experience. And then they wanna give back and they then become a part of our extended Goldman community. And they wanna help others learn and have an impact. And so Goldman has a very specific model for training students to be outstanding policy analysts and policy researchers. And we've now just brought on a new master's degree program on master's of development practice that thinks about these things even outside the boundaries of the US, that there are these global challenges in a world that need thinking that is not just US domestic thinking. And that's not to say that that's all we do, but we now have a broader framework for thinking about how to articulate that into a degree program and then blending our hosts of degrees to give students that transformational experience we think is important. So I hope that's enough of a pitch to get the student to think about the Goldman School. If not, we have a lot of fun activities that have food. Oh, my, well, David I really, this has been a fascinating conversation. I wanna thank you for your time and welcome you to the campus community. We hope we can have you back here on campus conversations at some point. Thanks, Dan, it's been great. Go Bears. Yeah, go Bears. And thanks to all of you for joining us and look forward to seeing you next time for the next episode of Campus Conversation. Stay safe and be well.


Welcome to Finding Happiness in Hard Times. I'm Ken Burtness and I'm coming to you from Haleva out at the North Shore. And today we're returning to that special series that we've got on Big Questions. And today I've got three special guests that I'm sure you'll enjoy. We're gonna talk again about what is important. Very difficult and a hard question for us to not only answer for ourselves but answer and share with other people. It gives us direction and that's what we need to find happiness. But it also makes us uncomfortable because when we ask ourselves what is important, we may not be acting in line with what we feel is important. And that makes us feel uncomfortable. It also brings up the uncertainty of what might be in the future because everything changes for us over time including what is important. So what is important to us 10 years ago or 20 years ago may not be important to us today. So we constantly really need to update ourselves. And that's something that we don't tend to do. Like I said, it tends to make us uncomfortable and we like to keep things short and breezy. Sort of like with our social conversations with a lot of people. So with that difficult question that I'm gonna pose, now let me introduce my three good friends Richard McPherson, Stephen Katz and Bob Brown. Welcome to the show guys. Thank you very much. Aloha. All right. And two months ago, I had three guests who were ladies and they were like the three guests I have today very talented and knowledgeable. And so today I wanted to go back to that same question except this time have my three male friends here.  We've made a lot of progress here. And so I think we've, the gender differences have gotten less, but you never know. And so today we're gonna find out and of course there are a lot of other individual things that are working here too. So I think you're gonna enjoy these answers. Today I've started, I asked Steve to start off with everything. So Steve, I'm gonna turn, what is important over to you? Okay, you gave us this topic I don't know a month ago or so and I've procrastinated dealing with it until recently of course. And I've used my job as a therapist selfishly and unselfishly because it's a great question to ask people when they come in for therapy. Like it's another way of asking somebody what their goals are, right? Like if I was successful as a therapist, what would be different? Sort of like can the miracle question, if a miracle happened you didn't have a problem anymore how would you know it? What would be different? And but with a different twist, like what's important? And then of course this past week, what's come up because we live in Hawaii is what happened in Lahaina. And the people there are dealing with that question in a very existential way.  You just have seconds to look around the house. And I think it just sort of confirmed what all the people that I asked and myself because I wrote my own little spiel before I asked them. And pretty much everybody said the same thing as number one and it was their relationships to other people.   Most of the people, I think all of the people that I asked said it's about their relationships to other people. It's about feeling connected to other people. One or two, like some of my people in recovery put that as number one. Like perhaps like one guy I just spoke to today said, it's my sobriety and God and my family. Number one, my wife and children. And that's what's important to them. Although I didn't have an outlier sort of who was very interesting. At first she said something similar to that but then she said, you know, here in Hawaii money is very important to me because it's a very hard place to live.  And she said, now she's in the dating scene again. She feels very crass. But if somebody doesn't make enough money, she's not interested because that's important. You know, and maybe it has something to do with the Maslow hierarchy of needs, right? You need the basic foundations. You need enough a place to live and food, sustenance and a sense of safety. Those come first. But I pretty much agreed once those things are covered it's to me, it's about feeling connected and it's about having a sense of purpose in your life is right up there for me. A reason to get up in the morning. And for me, that's about helping others. Okay, over to Bob.  Hey, well, I like Steve. I had a lot of thoughts about what's important to me and what I came up with. You know, there's three categories of areas that are important to me. One is obviously relationships and learning how to maintain those relationships, which has been a struggle for me over the years. Learning to maintain them, learning how to make friends, especially as time goes by and you're getting up in years and learning, trying to learn how to make friends as an adult and then maintain the ongoing ones. Also, adjusting the circumstances over time, health, maintaining a sense of being grateful for me and also having a purpose, learning. So for me, I'm 76 years old. So as you age, all these, what's important changes. Right now, time is important. You have a lot less time than I did 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And so it's about choosing things and stepping in that kind of right direction. One little, my little cliches that I always talk about with people is I have a learning, I'm learning how to make friends with unstructured time. You know, I grew up in a structured environment, work, that kind of thing, military. And now I retired, but I made a choice that I wasn't going to, I was going to only create what was good for me. So nothing gets created unless I create it. I don't have anything that I have to do. And then there I have these choices to make and that really brings out what's important to you. And I'm learning how what's important to me and some of the things that are important to me I'm getting better at and some I really need to work on. And so I'm going to stop there. This is an endless subject and it's always changing. Absolutely. Great points, Bob. Thank you. Richard, over to you. Learn your lines. Great. Steve knows what I'm talking about. I know what you're talking about. Me too. You know, and I say that because I've come to this realization that I want to feel like I'm a professional, that I'm doing something that when I look at somebody do a job well, I appreciate it. And so I see that when I do theater, I at least have this sense that I am doing everything that I can possibly do to create something. And I feel in complete control of it. And I get tremendous satisfaction out of it. And you know, I'm here in Hollywood pretending to be an actor. And so I got this chance with Steve to come back to Hawaii and we did everything. We created this all on our own. We got a theater. We produced it. And I know we both had this tremendous sense of satisfaction that, you know, one, we still can remember things. And we helped each other. So that to me was extremely important for my well-being. You know, because I thought, no, I'm still capable. And I thought, you know, there's this whole question about being retired and I don't know that I really could get my head around that. But you know, you want to stay in the game. You want to be alive. You want to be a matter. And I really want to talk about literature because I was an English teacher, but there's these key books along the way that just helped shape me and who I am. And the first book I wanted to mention was a book called How to Survive in Your Native Land, which was written by a teacher, a fourth grade teacher. And after I read that book, I realized, well, I could be a teacher because I saw myself in the way he created this world that I didn't really understand. But he made it so interesting that I thought, oh, OK. That's a profession I think I could do. And thank goodness I did it. And then the other book that I want to mention is Slaughterhouse 5 because Vonnegut really gave me the lowdown on war. And so when I was like 18, 19, I had to really go and think about what I was being asked to do. And I thought for him to describe the horror and what he went through and somehow get close to this just unimaginable absurd thing that he was going through. And I thought, oh, I'm going to have to deal with this. But it helped sharpen my mind and think, OK, I can make a choice here. It's my life and whether I want to engage in on this. And I love humor. I think humor is just so important. So I always like to quote Mark Twain because he said, I tried religion, but I didn't take to it. So that really helped me because I was brought up in such a strict way as a Catholic and it was all black and white. And I was always going to confession. And I was just like tired of all of that. So I thought, OK, I'm going to figure this out on my own. And so the other thing I want to talk about is my family because my father, who was an accountant, he would paint nudes inside book covers. And he saw himself, he wanted to be an artist. So you know that blank white page in the books? There's nudes. There were these books and there's new paintings that my father did. And then my brother was in the basement and he took one wall and he painted it completely black and put an eye right in the middle.   And you know, like I had to do it. I had to do it.   But anyway, Steve got a bowling ball for me, by the way. Great stuff. Yeah. So am I out of time? Yeah, pretty much. Okay. Cause I wanted to throw it up into a discussion, but great, great things. And of course I'm sitting here, having done many years as an amateur actor compared to, not quite in the same class as Richard and Steve, but having a great time. I was also thinking of, you know, the fear most people have of all of a sudden being out in public and being naked. Of course, my great fear was being coming out on stage and forgetting my lines. It's the big thing that for, for an actor. Yeah, it's the thing. And of course, of course war, which we're going through right now. And I hope to maybe ask you guys back for maybe some comments on that one time in the future, because those are things that happen and stay with us. Just like slaughterhouse five, the main character in slaughterhouse five was going back and forth out of that war continually. And that's the way it is with people.  So one of the things that what is important to us is again, helping us not only find direction, but helping us find focus. And we don't want to be focusing all the time in our life on things that we don't want to do. And I appreciate Richard telling us that you pursued things that you wanted to do. And that is really, really important. Okay, let me throw it open to you guys and open for any additional comments and elaborations, comments on what the other guys said. And who's ready to start. You know, it's interesting. I was thinking along this subject, obviously, a lot of things come up when you think about what's important to me and let it float. Well, all of a sudden it just popped in my head, you know, it's like I have had a relationship with my children longer as them with as adults than I had when they as them being my kids. You know, my kids were seemed like that would be always be my kids. Well, they are, but now they're 50 and 40. And then they have lives of their own. And it's like adjusting over time to that adult relationship. So that that's relationships change. Life changes. Time changes things. And it's really important. I've been discovering to stay curious. And to be in a position where I can be creative and helpful. Because I need to feel like I'm contributing. Even though I'm not working, which is fine. That's exactly what I don't want to do. Yeah, but I am volunteering. I'm creating art. And I'm doing things in the community that that I feel are important, which reflects what's important to me. Yeah. And maintaining my relationship with my wife. And friends. And then learning to create new ones. And then you see making. Men male friends. Later on in life, because everybody is in there. Stuck in their patterns. And then decide to make adjustments for some people, including myself. And I'm going to stop there. Yeah. Well, I want to jump in and thank you, Richard, for. The first thing you said, learning your lines.  All during the rehearsal process of our play. It felt like some kind of a death. And so I'm also trying to relate the. What that thrill is of being on stage. To the other things like the feeling connected. To other people. And it's true that the feeling that I get when I'm on stage and it's good, like. I know my lines. Is a feeling of being very connected. Not only to other people, but maybe primarily. To myself is like this.  I'm like so. In the moment. Focused feeling. Not worried. You know, feeling like a whole person, like sufficient. Like. In almost the rest of my life. And sometimes I feel like that. In therapy sessions. Cause, and I think that's why I like. Being a therapist is because I have that when it's good. I have this intense feeling of connection. I feel like I'm in the right place at the right time. And I worry about that a lot, like. Outside of that sphere. Like, am I doing enough. For my kids. For my community. You know, now there's the disaster. Am I doing enough in that realm. Am I doing enough for my kids. Even though they're adults. I'm still their father. I'm still their father. I'm still their father. And in my friendships too. Am I doing enough. And like you, Bob, I struggle with that is. Maintaining. One-to-one friendships with other men. Which. I'm pretty lousy at two. Well, I would certainly not agree with that because Steve. Heads up a men's group. And. Which has been going for 12 years. And he has made a big difference in a lot of men's lives by bringing them together and getting them to talk about important things. Rather than just. You know, what kind of beer we're going to drink tonight or what kind of sports we got to watch on the television, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah. Thank you. Yeah, but I mean, I made that group.  But I mean, I made that group. And because I was thinking, oh, that'll fix it. No, it only fixes it every other week on Sunday morning. The rest of the time is I'm still struggling. We all still struggle. That's. That's why it's important to keep asking ourselves what's important. And to keep on track. Because I don't know about you guys, but I tend to procrastinate. So. And I certainly would second Richard is saying about and Steve about the performance. We all have peak experiences in our life where we. Feel connected. And some of my. Well, one of my big peak experiences was opening. A show. Not only a show, but opening a new theater. Back in the 60s and going on stage. Not being able to see the stage. Or talk to anybody because the lights were in my eyes and I couldn't see theirs. But I felt that connection. And that's what all relationships do. If we're really there in the moment. Moment with ourselves so we can be true to ourselves. But also to share truly with other people. And Steve was asking us at the beginning of the show. He says, Well, what would you take with you if everything's burning up? Like, you know, of course, relating to that Maui. Wildfires, which I'll mention at the end of the show. But one of the things that I'm doing as an old person is. Finding ways to get rid of stuff. And I'm organizing stuff. And one of the ways. He thinks I'm organizing as my pictures. My pictures of my life. And I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that.  And my friends and my people. And believe me, If there's a fire in my house. That's going to be one of the first things that I grab. Is a picture of the people that are important to me. Richard talks back to you. Well, you know, I probably saved my Elvis costume. That came down to. I must tell you guys that I feel like this this year I've been in this kind of river of grief, lots of deaths and just you know so I look for this I look for this kind of brightness that that's why I relate to the theater because it's it's taught me a lot about understanding life and so it's almost spiritual to me what what you can go to the theater for and what people write about and so that's why I've sort of seized on it as a way to to understand myself and to you know like you you know you you give your attention to something you think is valuable and and I think that's what Steve and I did you know we just we we decided this was important to us and so it was a beautiful thing so I'm you know really happy that we got to do that you know that's terrific uh guys that we're running uh you know it's getting close to closing time how about some final thoughts from each of you uh last minute things that maybe you can leave uh with the audience who are also finding it difficult to tackle these big questions and to uh to find our way into like the title of my show says during real hard times and uh so final thoughts final ideas final point by something different because um I went to a class uh to at the Honolulu Museum of Art and uh that was like 10 years ago and now I've been painting for all that time and creating and uh I made a big difference I was scared stiff to go well I was gonna look bad way to go way to go um you know Sartre said uh I think it was hell as other people um but truthfully I found that I really do I really do like people I appreciate them I appreciate my neighbors I like the fact that I have contact with them and that you really can offer yourself to them and you know be of assistance and that there's something really beautiful about that you know you can kind of get it brings into focus what what's important is is really helping other people so well my two cents I guess would be sort of an advice to myself and anybody else that wants to do it is if there's something that you've been procrastinating because you're a little afraid it won't go well that's what you need to do um there's a few things like that in my life and I'm giving myself right here a little on screen recorded pep talk let's go for it you got nothing to lose remind me about that next time we're together okay you can ask the same thing okay yeah um yeah I mean some of the best things in my life like my wife happened because of I dared to do something that I wouldn't normally do yeah well said yes you know and because the last three years we've been in that you know really locked down from the coronavirus and it's been hard for a lot of people to get back together to reach out to other people to try new things like Bob is saying and to be helpful you know like you all are saying with other people so now's the time for us to do that and and I hope that for those of you watching the show that it's also encouraged you to sort of step out and reach out and maybe help some person be in the moment do some things that you haven't been doing and been procrastinating on and maybe watching a little less news on television or things that make you unhappy and looking to follow your bliss like I think the people on my panel are doing and have done and I think that's really really important thank you Steve thank you Bob thank you Richard I really appreciate you being on the show thank you especially thanks to Richard who's coming all the way to us from the mainland and that's always a great thing and coming to me from my hometown I was born in Hollywood and raised in the San Fernando Valley so I have a special affinity for that but thanks to all of you who are listening into the show and thanks to the people that think take away Michael and Jay and Haley and Carol and all the people who make this possible I hope you join us in two weeks uh for the next two shows and our my show is always usually on a Wednesday at two o'clock or excuse me we tape on Wednesday at two and we'll show it to everybody on Thursday at two o'clock we're going to be concentrating on what Steve brought out at the beginning of the show and that is the Maui fires that are going on and the tragedy that's unfolding with us in the islands and for people all around because everybody can relate there's been so much disasters worldwide from climate change in various ways not only wildfires but floods and and you name it uh so we hope that you'll uh join us then and thanks to everybody and everybody have a good day aloha


last reading. The writer wrote that if the National Security Agency wanted to come to his home and look at his telephone records, emails and texts, he would welcome them because he has nothing to hide. That brought to mind a statement from an earlier time, quote, I have nothing to hide. I am ready to appear before a public and impartial commission of inquiry with documents, facts and testimonies in my hands and to disclose the truth to the very end. I declare if this commission decides that I am guilty in the slightest degree of the crimes imputed to me, I pledge in advance to place myself voluntarily in the hands of the Executioners. On quote. My God, who said this? This declaration was made by Leon Trotsky in exile where he was later murdered on Stalin's orders. Stalin bumped off a lot of people from 30 million. Almost as much as the Catholic Church throughout history. 50 million. But how come the media and the history books did not demonize this genocide by Stalin like they demonized Hitler? They never talk about the Catholic Church bumping off 50 million Yeah, you don't hear a lot of talk about it. You know, or the genocide of the Native American people and how the Europeans brought smallpox over and all this stuff and stealing, stealing. Actually, I think what they really wanted was the gold. They heard there was gold in Dendar Hills and I think they were after the gold with the representative from the Catholic Church talking about Cortez and Pizarro. Spaniard, Spanish conquistadors, when they stole the gold and the land from Native America, they had a representative of the Catholic Church with them. Interesting. Anyway, they sound disturbingly alike. Then there is the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Guaranteeing the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Sad times these when some so-called Patriots sound like the minions of foreign totalitarianism. Yep. And here's another letter addressing that same letter of the person who said, I'm not gonna hide. Hey, come on over.  You know, I grabbed my junk at the airport. Yeah, they like to say junk nowadays. Junk. The writers. Yeah. I mean, hey, your genitals might be junk, but not mine. The word junk in that context is much like, remember back in the 60s, the word was bad, man. You bang. When it meant you were good. Yeah, bad meant good. Yeah. And these words like groovy. And there's hip hop words now. And they're hip. Dope, man. You're dope.  You're dope, man. You rad. Rad, baby. You's rad. It's almost sound like Wolfman Jack. And the Wolfman Jack. God bless his rest guy, rest his soul. Is he dead? Of course he's dead. Well, how the hell do I know he's dead? You didn't know Wolfman Jack? Hell no. Long time ago. Oh, that was Sam the champ. I was doing Sam the champ. Whatever. The writer's statement that he would welcome NSA agents to come to his home because he has nothing to hide is alarming evidence of the ignorance some US citizens have about the Constitution's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Does he naively think that someone from the NSA would politely knock on the door rather than knock it down and ask for permission to search a home? Who needs privacy? The writer and so many others do not realize that our constitutional freedoms are slowly and in the last decade, not so slowly, being erased in the name of security. We must understand that depending on who is in power in our government, security is easily redefined. We could have another Richard Nixon leading our country and he had no qualms about compelling an enemy's list. And by the way, I believe I was on that list back there in the early 70s. You were a tad bit too risqué for America back then. A tad bit against censorship. A censorship? That sounds like fascism to me. Well it was then. Now it's a little more secretive. You know, you're not so blatant. Human nature has never changed. It's still vile as ever. Don't forget back then. Just as vile. There was no role versus way. And women were having abortions in back alleys. I mean taking advantage of vice unscrupulous doctors and etc. Sixties in the early 70s. Psychic healers.  I saw it on TV. They were hiding. And look at it. I got the tumor. And it was, I swear, it was like a chicken liver. Yeah, I saw it on video. It was, yeah, the psychic faith healers. Yeah, there was one in the Philippines, I believe. Yeah, that was the one. Yeah, this chicken liver. Yeah, the raw chicken liver. Oh, God. And he was taking money. I mean, taking the feed, securing people. We could have another demagogue like U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy and an on American Activities Committee that cruelly and unnecessarily ruins so many lives in the name of security. Let me guess. Senator McCarthy was a Republican? No kidding. Senator Joe McCarthy, I believe, is reincarnated today by Mr. Darrell Issa.  He wanted to go back in time and assassinate Jane Fonda during the Vietnam. Yeah, because he was a, he was a nut. He was a nut.  They always want to bump off some, somebody doing good, like let's say a Democratic Congresswoman, like that poor woman that got shot in Arizona at that time.  Yeah, somebody that's, that wants to do good for the mainstream population. Yeah, a nice person.  But again, Jane Fonda, apologize. Swaggered apologizes, Sanford apologizes, all these, Jimmy Swaggart? Yeah. Oh, how you see him? They apologize. Oh, they're accepted back into the Christians of the fold. Fold right away, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. But if you really know the Bible and you speak the truth and you really want to do good, you are demonized by the, by Satan's world here, Satan, the devil's economics of capitalism.  Speaking out or organizing a protest against what our government is doing, could well be labeled as a threat to our nation's security. Yeah, sure. And that obliterates our right to peaceably dissent. Without that right, we have a dictatorship. The slippery slope begins with the small skin. Don't be lulled into a false belief that it can't happen here. I just want to tell everyone, before I show something positive, this is not part of the chiseless whole of shame. But I just want to tell people that you are watching corporate and FCC free internet talk show that we are very progressive, but it is uncensored and FCC free. That's why you hear everything as it is. You hear occasional cursing, yelling, curse words. They are not planned. This is not like a pre-rehearsed shock, shock media. This is all ad-libbed, spurred a moment or sperm in a moment. Everything, if something happens, it is react to and respond to exactly unexpectedly, at that moment, like real life would be. Like a real life reality show, not a reality show that's like doctored up and faked. You know, to get ratings, to get ratings. You know what show I actually saw the other day and watched for its 22 minutes or whatever it was? Duck Nation. I never seen that. Duck Nation? As in... All the mountain men that make the duck... The hunters? Are they in Alaska? No, they're down south. But they're hunters. No, they make duck calls and stuff. That's what they made a show out of? Yeah, six of them. Duck hunters? As one guy employs them all. Just duck hunting. But they're lazy. They don't want to work. They do whatever and anything else, but doing the work. My God, what else would they make a reality show out of? But I'm gonna tell you something. Duck hunters. Every one of them who's married, that's a good-looking chick. Really? Oh, you know, they got the full bids. Oh, like ZZ Top? Yeah. No, ZZ's a little warm. Like Hillbillies. Yeah, but they have good-looking chicks. Mountain men. Mountain men. They have attractive girlfriends and wives. You know a show I like because I like The Father. I like swamp people. The Louisiana Cajun people that go hunting, alligator in the Bayou swamp. And The Father is so funny. He's got that agarong tea, that Cajun way of talking. But he's funny. He's always busting his son's chops. I like him. I don't like Larry the cable guy because he's a teabagger. He's always saying, ah, America. Everything America's number one. Everything America's the best. No, it's not. It's not. Infant mortality on up. Well, he's a flagger. Let's see America sound at the bottom of the list. Yeah, for many things.  And he just goes on and on and on. Now, before I forget, this gentleman here is a self-portrait of the Reverend Dr. William J. Izaman. It is a watercolor painting done by my cohost and mentor, the Reverend Dr. William J. Izaman. And you can see the William J. Izaman collection by simply going to lowercase all one word, William J. Izaman collection dot tumblr.com. And if you like something, let us know. Let us know. Post it at tumblr or go to newslettercensored.com and send Dr. Bill a message. And if it's still available, you can buy one. It is signed by William J. Izaman himself. Every one of his watercolor paintings. And that's pretty much it. I mean, if you want to, the most important thing is to get your free annual subscription to newsletter censored with your gift to support this work. And just go to newslettercensored.com. But anyway, that's it. Okay, now what I wanted to show Dr. Bill and our viewers is one of my early, one of my early birthday presents. One of, this is an external hard drive that can fit in your pocket. It is 500 gigabytes, 500 gigs. It's thin, as you can see. Okay, it's not very big. And it's very light. And that was a tear. This little thing. No, this is 500 gigs. It's a half a tear. And the another plus is it does not need a power source. It does not have to be plugged in. It only needs to be plugged into the USB. Doesn't have to go into the electrical outlet. So it's very convenient and very portable, 500 gigabytes.  I mean, considering when the thumb drives and the flash drives first came out, they were what, like two gigs? Yeah, and they were not really expensive, but they were not enough. Now, I think I saw an 18 gig at Micro Center. Yeah, small price. Yeah. So this is this actually, this technology might very well make easy doc obsolete. When you think about it, easy doc is large. And you put the old fashioned, big metal clunker hard drives in there. But this is like very portable, very light, fits in a jacket pocket, doesn't need a power source. And the company is Western Digital WD. My passport edge portable hard drive. That's what WD is. Western Digital. Yeah, I'll take you work for it. Anyway, there it is. Pretty cool, huh? Pretty cool. Yeah. And portable. Like a cigarette case. Yeah, yeah, like an old, like the old cigarette cases that the rich movie stars used to keep their poison in. Remember these cigarette holders? Stay thirsty, my friend. Stay thirsty, my friends. All right. He has one bar. Oh, okay. One more for the road. Let me get the horns. Just when you thought it was safe to attend your next barbecue, there's a new scourge in town. Additional one. It's the Asian tiger. Tiger or tiger? Tiger. How the hell did that get over here?  Oh, that the pretty glistening the little jewel like mosquito. New Jerseyans had learned to live with, if not exactly love, several species of plain brown mosquito. But these take the cake. That had collectively earned the title of New Jersey State Bird in late night talk show monologues. Oh, gosh. But there's a new kid in town. The Asian tiger mosquito named for its distinctive black and white striped legs and body markings. Oh, yes. Is now a major nuisance in Bergen and Pacific County. I've seen them. You could see it. You could actually see it. How did they get here, may I ask? On a container ship from China. I was just going to say from China on a container ship loaded with product made by cheap labor for American companies coming back to the U.S. un-tariffed, like they should be. And this is where the stowaway tiger mosquito came aboard. Now, I have a video on, well, they're on YouTube, but I have it on my group Holistic Health Talk on Facebook.  You put a mixture of water, heavy sugar and a little bit of live baker's yeast. And what happens is the baker's yeast feed on the sugar. And as they feed on the sugar, it gives off carbon dioxide, which is what attracts mosquitoes because as we exhale, that's how mosquitoes find us due to the carbon dioxide. So what happens is, for some reason, primitive creatures of all different types have a tendency to be able to go through a funnel one way, but they haven't figured out how to turn around and exit that hole. It's not only primitive beings as Wilhelm Reich showed. Really? The entrance to the trap, which he used the word trap for emotional disorders. Yeah. Which end up in your muscles and fixations and all this other stuff. But the entrance to the trap is also the exit that humans can't find by themselves, obviously. Look at any trap folks, bait traps, crawdad traps, lobster traps, crab traps, they're all, it's all based on a funnel. In this case, it's like chicken wire material, but it's all based on a funnel where the animals can enter, but they cannot figure out how to exit. Meanwhile, the hole is the same diameter going in as it is coming out. But because of the shape of the funnel, they can't exit it. And that's how you make the mosquito trap, and that's how you make the fly trap, except with the fly trap, which is good for your barbecues. In the daytime, instead of putting sugar water with baker's yeast, you put a piece of raw meat in there, which, am I upsetting you? Which attracts the flies. Why not cook the meat and I could eat it? No, a little bait for the flies. Okay, a piece of the fly trap. They go in, they can't exit. Feed me. Feed me, I'm hungry. Help me. As from the fly, we're Vincent Price. Anyway, thank you for joining us for this week's progressive discussions.   Yes, I want to go out. No, I don't want to go out.   But I realize one thing, no matter how nice I feel the show looks, there's always some motherfucker out there that will choose to be petty and criticize us. Wow, when did you come to that decision?  They would repeat a word and they start dancing. You know what I mean? Yeah, they don't say anything about the content, but they'll say, Oh, you guys are not in a state of the art studio, not realizing that sponsors, which are needed to be able to pay for this, will censor us. Isn't it so? Yeah. Yeah. But like I say, why even worry about that? You mean why worry about what people say? Because you got content. So why worry about it? Yeah. Well, the person isn't criticizing content. What does that tell you? He ain't listening. He's not listening. Or he's not reading the newsletter. Correct. Like you're relative there? I have a relative. You have a relative that is a teabagger who does not, who gets the newsletter for many decades, who is teabagging. And obviously, if they were reading the content of the newsletter, they wouldn't be a teabagger. Correct. Because they would see, they would read the real truth. Correct. So yeah, that's the story. We have one more day of the heat wave. No way, Jose. What do you mean? Monday? All week. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You mean? All week long. You mean the 90 degree plus with heat and humidity is going to extend this weekend? You got it. So what happened to this, back to the low 80s that the weatherman... I believe the low 80s tomorrow is 89. That's the high 80s. You know, I've said... Well, what is it today? I think it's 95. I've said it before and I'll say it again. And when I said it, the person who desperately wanted everybody to like him got nervous, that I dared to remotely criticize the career of a meteorologist, a weather person. It really, I couldn't...  I can't stand people that are so such sycophants. They have no backbone that they desperately want. They don't want to offend anybody. They want every person to like them and love them, like an obsession. And they're afraid of what their mommy, this guy was a mama's boy, extraordinaire. They're desperately afraid of what their mommy would say and think and whether or not she would approve of this gentleman, this young man. When I mentioned the fact that the weather person is the perfect job because they could be wrong every day and still get paid a lot of money, he had no comment. When I mentioned about the Catholic Church and all the corruption of their history and genocide, not only he had no comment, he was twitching and shaking, rocking back and forth. Was he a Roman Catholic?


Our time here at Port Wainimi, our technicians have gained a lot of knowledge, our operators have gained a lot of knowledge, and we're going to take that knowledge forward in our deployment later this year and be better prepared to operate the ship systems and defend against any threats we encounter. The engineers and technicians coming on board have a much deeper understanding than most of my sailors on the systems. In Port Wainimi, we get much more specialized technical support comparing to any other base. That's why Port Wainimi is kind of unique in this perspective. They've definitely taught me some things that no one else has been able to show me, some operation capabilities, some capabilities of the gear that I didn't know about before. So while we're out at sea, I've definitely gained a lot of knowledge here that I didn't necessarily know before. The support we've been receiving from Port Wainimi division personnel is material readiness for our underways and preparation for insert. So this is my third time here in Port Wainimi. Every time has been an awesome experience. The ship is just a ship without the weapon system. So it's truly what makes us a warship. It's what enables us to do our job. And we also build a lot of self-sufficiency with our sailors. Again, learning from the technical experts all the way from the ISCA to folks who are just here assisting on the deck plates so we can be more self-sufficient as we would need to be if we were called to go forward and fight. We've got an opportunity to find some discrepancies in our SSTS. We were able to get our 49, our air research radar repaired without having to cash wrap it because the tech is already here. I wish that we had done this before we went to Vineshield because then we would have been better trained. We would have found some of the things that would have had off some of the issues that we ran into while we were underway. Yeah, the arrival was awesome to stand here on the bridge wing and see about 50 to 70 people just come right on the ship right away and say they're going to start work and they did. It's been fantastic. I love coming here to make this visit done in the past. All I want to do is get the ship here and it took us some time but I'm glad we did it. We pulled in day one. We've got 50 guys walking on board standing on the flight deck and it's really a breath of fresh air to have them all coming on board and knowing that they're here to help. One of the biggest benefits that we've encountered here is for my logisticians and being able to identify what parts we can use and what to order for any of these legacy and new systems that we have on board. Being able to pull in here prior to our deployment gives us the advantage of getting technical hands-on training from the subject matter experts who work on these systems every day. That is the biggest value that I think will take forward going on this deployment for my guys and so we're really happy to be here and it just gives us a lot more readiness going into our mission. It's been fantastic. I love coming here to make this visit done in the past and all I wanted to do is get the ship here and it took us some time but I'm glad we did it. Absolutely tremendous job by the team here at Fort Wynamey. Could not have done any of this without this. Thank you for keeping us in the fight. The team has been fantastic and thank you so much for having us. Looking forward to our next visit to Fort Wynamey.