Chapter 18, Civil Liberties and Civil Rights. Okay, so what are civil liberties? Well, according to your textbook, civil liberties are constitutional guarantees that protect individual freedom from government power. So civil liberties are basically our rights. What freedoms and rights do we have under the Constitution? And the reason we have civil liberties is to protect us from the power of the government, right? So they protect individual freedom from government power. What kind of government power?  And in other countries, that happens, especially to people who disagree with the government. So many dictatorships around the world often jail their political opponents, people that oppose them, people that they're afraid of. They will just send the police to their homes in the middle of the night, drag them out of bed and put them in jail with no trial, no chance for the person who is accused of whatever crime to defend themselves. That doesn't happen here in the United States because we have civil liberties. Civil liberties protect us from the power of the government and they also protect our right to oppose the government, to speak out against the government, and to have many other types of freedoms that I'm going to talk about over the course of this lecture. Okay, so that's what civil liberties are. That's why we have them to protect us from the power of the government. Now, one of the most important things to note about our civil liberties is that they're not absolute. So just because the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution says that we have freedom of speech, that doesn't mean we have the freedom to say anything we want, the freedom to speak anything we want. One of the most famous examples of a limitation on the freedom of speech is that you cannot yell fire in a crowded movie theater. I can't barge into a crowded movie theater and yell fire if I know there's no fire. If I say that falsely, I cannot then later on say, well, you can't do anything about it because I have freedom of speech. The Constitution says I have freedom of speech.  You cannot put other people's lives in danger. You cannot hurt other people through what you say or do. So that's basically the limitation on our freedoms. You're allowed freedom so long as you're not hurting anyone. So government can legally place reasonable limits on our civil liberties to protect public safety, to protect other people from us, from your bad actions. And so there are many kinds of reasonable limits that the government can place on several of our civil rights and civil liberties and I'm going to go through them through the course of this lecture. So we know the government can place reasonable limits on our civil liberties, but what are reasonable limits? Who defines them? In other words, how do we strike a balance between government power and individual liberty? Because if we allow the government to place too many limits on our freedoms and if we define reasonable limits in such a way that the government can do anything to stop us from having freedom of speech or freedom of religion or freedom of the press or any of the other types of freedoms we have under the constitution, then we're giving the government too much power. But at the same time, we need to protect the rights of people, all people, not just the person engaging in the exercise of their civil liberties but everyone else so that people who do engage in the expression of civil liberties do not go ahead and put other people in danger. And again, we go back to the example of my right to speak freely against the people in movie theater who yet heard if I barged in and yelled fire in a crowd in movie theater. So how do we strike a balance between government power and individual liberty without going too far in either way? Well, that's a tough question and that question takes us back to the power problem that I mentioned and your textbook mentioned right in the beginning of this semester and our very first lecture. The striking of a balance between government power and individual liberty where we as a society decide to put the line between those two things is what we call the power problem and it's a constant challenge to make sure that we define that line carefully so that we're not giving the government too much power but we're also not weakening the government's power so much that it can't do what it's designed to do which is to protect all of us, not just some of us but all of us, all the people who live here in the United States. So that power problem is very difficult and so is the question of what are reasonable limits and how do we strike that balance. Essentially it's up to the courts and throughout American history every time there's been a question about this, every time there's a question about what the government can do to put limits on our individual freedoms and when it comes to questions about is something that someone did protected under the First Amendment or the other Bill of Rights, the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights, the ten amendments total. It's always a question that goes to the courts, not only the federal courts and the Supreme Court that I talked to you about in the last lecture but also state courts sometimes get involved in these discussions and so throughout American history the courts are constantly deciding cases and involve conflicts between individual freedom and government power and I'm going to actually talk about some of those cases in this lecture. So our civil liberties come from the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments in the U.S. Constitution. The most important of those ten amendments is the first one which is why the Founding Fathers put this as the first amendment and the first amendment covers four different freedoms, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly. Okay, so let's take each one of these and delve into it, delve into them in more detail. Okay, so before we do that though I want to point out that the Bill of Rights only protects us from government restrictions, only from government power. So we do not necessarily have these freedoms in private settings and I'll give you one good example. So I have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech. We can express our political opinions almost in any way we want to. I have the right to stand in front of the White House, for example, and yell out that I don't like Donald Trump. I can even call him bad names. And I'm protected by the first amendment. I cannot be arrested. The Washington D.C. police, the Secret Service of the United States cannot come out and arrest me as long as I'm not doing anything illegal. They cannot arrest me just for staying there in front of the White House and yelling that I don't like Donald Trump, that I think is a bad president. And I could say almost anything else I want to, because that's a public setting. That's a setting where I'm on government property. If I have a Facebook account, if you have a Facebook account, does that mean that we can write or say anything we want to on Facebook, express any thoughts we want to on Facebook, totally free from any interference, any restriction by Facebook? No, because Facebook has a terms of service, has a code of conduct, and if you violate that code of conduct, you can have your right to post on Facebook, your right to have an account of Facebook taken away either temporarily, the famous Facebook JLI friends who've been put in Facebook jail for things that they wrote that went against Facebook's policy.  Facebook can do that because Facebook is a private company offering a private service and you have no constitutional right to have a Facebook account. You have no constitutional right to write whatever you want to on a Facebook account. So that's just one of many examples of the difference between how you can exercise your rights in a public setting where it's you and the government or a private setting where it's you and a private corporation. Okay, so now let's get down into the individual parts of the First Amendment. The First Amendment breaks down the freedom of religion in two parts. So we're going to talk about the freedom of religion first. So the freedom of religion is broken down into two parts, two clauses in the First Amendment. You've got the establishment clause first and then the free exercise clause. Okay, so the establishment clause states that the government can pass no law that would lead to the establishment of a national religion in the United States. Now what do I mean by national religion? One religion that is either the only religion that can be practiced in the country or it's a religion that has more freedom and more preferential treatment than other religions. So for example, in England, you have a national religion, the Church of England, which is a Protestant church, the Anglican Church of England. Okay, they have in England, they have freedom of religion. If you're Jewish, you're allowed to practice your religion freely. There are synagogues in England. So if you're Jewish, you can go to synagogue freely. There are many Muslims who live in England and Muslims are allowed to practice their religion freely and they're allowed to go to mosque freely in England. And there are many other religions that practice freely in England. But of all those religions, the Church of England, the Anglican Church, is the most prominent church. And the Church of England is allowed some special treatment that other religions are not because it's the national, the official religion of the nation of England. That cannot happen in the United States. So every religion has to be treated equally. Every religion is allowed to exist freely in the United States and every religion is allowed to exist equally, has to be treated equally by the United States. So for example, the United States cannot say, well, every religion that wants to create schools is allowed to. So if Catholics want to create schools, that's fine. If Protestants want to create schools, that's fine. If Muslims want to create schools, that's fine. If Jews want to create schools, that's fine as well. But only the Catholic Church, only Catholic schools, will be allowed to have certain professional treatment under the law. For example, only Catholic schools will be designated as non-profit institutions, meaning that Jewish schools, Muslim schools, Protestant schools, will have to pay taxes just like any other business. But Catholic schools will be the only ones who don't have to pay taxes. So that would be a very big preferential treatment for Catholic schools. And even if the United States did not designate Catholicism as the official religion of the United States, the Supreme Court would still probably say that by giving the Catholic Church such preferential treatment, the United States government is actually violating the First Amendment, the Establishing Clause, because it's essentially making the Catholic Church the official Church of the United States because it's giving them such a preferential type of treatment that's not giving any other religion in the United States. So that's an example of the Establishing Clause that government cannot pass a law. That means both the federal government and also state governments, no government can pass a law that would lead one church, one type of religion, to being the official religion or official church of the United States. And that also means, as the example I just used says, that you cannot even give them preferential treatment. You have to treat everyone equally. So if the US government decided to make Catholic schools non-profit institutions, it has to allow every other type of religion to school the same benefit to be non-profit. So they all get the same treatment positively or they get the same treatment negatively. You can't play favorites. So that's the Establishing Clause. The second clause in the First Amendment in the freedom of religion is the Free Exercise Clause, which means that government cannot pass a law, any type of law, or take any kind of action that would restrict anyone from being able to freely practice their religion. So if you're Jewish and living in the United States, the government cannot do anything that would prevent you from being able to practice Judaism freely, or if you're Catholic, the government can't do anything that would prevent you from being able to practice Catholicism freely, or if you're Muslim, the US government cannot do anything to prevent you from practicing Islam freely, or any other type of religion. And so I'll give you an example of one instance where a local government actually ran afoul of the Free Exercise Clause, meaning it did something that led the Supreme Court to rule that it was interfering with the particular religion's ability to freely exercise its religion. And so the incident that took place that led to a Supreme Court case took place in Florida in the early 1980s, and this was something that had to do with the Santaria Church, the Santaria religion. Santaria is an Afro-Caribbean religion that also has elements of Catholicism involved in it that originated in the Caribbean during the time of the discovery of the so-called European discovery of the New World that was started by clump. We're talking about the period when Europeans first began to come to the Caribbean first and then to the mainland of North America, Mexico, what is now Mexico and what is now the United States and Canada. So when that happened, when the first Europeans went into the Caribbean and those first Europeans were Spanish, they came into contact of course with the native peoples who were living in the Caribbean, and that was the native Caribbean Indians, mainly the Taino Indians, T-A-I-N-L, the Taino Indians. Not long after the first Spanish came into the Caribbean, they started to bring African slaves into the Caribbean. They forced African slaves to come and work in sugar plantations, work on sugar plantations, because sugar was a very valuable crop and Spanish made tons of money in the Caribbean using African slave labor to produce sugar that was then sold back in Europe and also sugar was made to rum, used to make rum that was then sold in Europe. So shortly after Columbus' first voyage, you had three groups of people living together in the Caribbean. You had European, Spanish-Europeans, African slaves, and native Indians. And as they lived together and communicated with each other, they began to share cultures and they began to produce new cultures that was a mix of European culture, African culture, and Native American, Native Caribbean culture. And one of the things that came out of this, one of the new things that came out of this was a new type of religion. The Santaria religion, which combined elements of Native Caribbean Indian culture, religious rituals, African religious rituals, and then Spanish religious rituals, which is Catholicism, the Spanish were Catholic. And so eventually the Santaria religion migrated to North America, to the North American mainland. And in parts of the United States today, it's still heavily practiced, especially in Florida, which has a lot of immigrants from the Caribbean, especially Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrants. So that's why this incident that I'm talking about took place in Florida, in Hialeah, Florida, which had a very large Cuban population, people who practice Santaria. And there was a Santarian church in Hialeah. And that was something that bothered the leaders of the city council of Hialeah, the local governor of Hialeah, because one of the rituals involved in the practice Santaria is the ritual killing of animals, particularly chickens. And that was part of the old original Native Caribbean culture that got melded into Santaria. It's essentially voodoo, the spiritual offering of sacrifices to the gods, which is a practice in many, many different types of religions. And just in Santaria, the sacrificial offerings is in the form of animal sacrifices, killing animals, killing live animals, killing live chickens. And so because the city council of Hialeah was so upset about this, they passed a law in the early 1980s that prevented the Santarian church from continuing to slaughter live animals, kill live animals during their religious services during church. And so the Santarian church decided to sue and claim that this law that the Hialeah city council passed was a violation of the church's first amendment rights, the free exercise clause. In 1983, the Supreme Court heard the case and found in favor of the Santarian church and ruled that the city council's law, the Hialeah city council law, violated the Santarian church's free exercise rights under the first amendment because the law that the city council passed was targeted toward the church. And it singled out the church from not being able to do what was legally available in other areas of life. So let me explain what I mean by that. So the free exercise clause doesn't say that church can do whatever they want to and claim that it's the right to do that under the religion. So for example, if a church, if a new religion was created, and it said that the practice of our religious, our religion, the free practice of religion requires us to conduct human sacrifices, to kill human beings, live human beings during our church services, could the, would that be legal? Well, no, obviously not, because the killing of any human being, murder, is illegal. And you can't kill a human being for almost any reason except in war or in self-defense. But for the most part, it's illegal to kill another human being. So if a government tried to stop that religion from existing, the religion couldn't say, well, you know, you can't stop us from killing human beings because our free practice, and you're targeting us because the government wouldn't be targeting the religion because killing human beings is never, is never, almost never legal. But here, what the Hylian government was saying was, well, you can't kill animals for the purpose of your religion. But the Hylian City Council did not put a blanket law saying you couldn't kill animals for any reason in the city of Hylia and that would include for eating meat, for food, for testing of cosmetics, or the testing of medicines. If the Hylian government said that, then possibly the Supreme Court might have decided differently, but because the law that the Hylian City Council passed was targeted so specifically against the church that it really was designed to prevent the free exercise of the San Maria's religion. And so the Supreme Court said that because what you're doing is not allowing people of San Maria's religion to practice the religion the way they need to, the way they want to, well then you're violating the free exercise clause. And so that's an example of the free exercise clause. So the Sabant Clause again says that you cannot pass a law that leads anyone religion to becoming the national religion in the United States or that gives one religion preferential treatment above all others. So in essence you have to treat every religion equally. And then the free exercise clause says that government cannot pass a law that prevents people from freely exercising their chosen religion. So that's the freedom of religion. So the First Amendment also covers another very important freedom, the freedom of speech. The First Amendment prohibits government from passing laws that restrict freedom of speech. So the First Amendment basically says that government cannot pass a law that restricts people's ability to speak freely, to express themselves freely. And so freedom of speech doesn't only mean verbal speech. It also involves making a sign, holding a sign up in public during protests or expressing yourself in other ways, artistically for example. Freedom of speech also protects paintings, drawings, other types of examples of expression. Now just, you know, so let's go back to the example I talked about earlier about limitations on all our freedoms and the example of not being able to yell fire in a crowd. A movie theater when you know that there is not actually a fire. So there are several types of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. And these include slander, clear and present dangerous speech, and obscenity. Okay, so these are types of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. So that means if you engage in these, you can be held liable either in civil court meaning you would have to pay money to somebody that you hurt or you can even be subject to criminal prosecution. You could be arrested and put in jail for engaging in one of these types of speech that is not. Okay, again, not protected by the First Amendment. So slander, so what is slander?  So let's say for example, so let me use the example of religious schools. Many religious schools have strict hiring policies that state that the people of work there have to engage in certain moral behavior that is approved of by the religion that's running the school or hospital or any other type of institution that's being run by that church, by that religion. So let's say I'm working in a religious school that has a human resources role, an employment role that says that all employees of the school have to be heterosexual. So gay and lesbian people cannot work at the school because according to the religion that's running the school, homosexuality is a sin. And that's the case in many schools, many religious schools throughout the country today because the Supreme Court has ruled that the ability to have these types of employment rules in place are not a violation of the Constitution because it's covered under the First Amendment, the Free Exercise Clause that religions have a right to exercise their own morality and their own moral rules in their institutions and institutions they run. So a public school could not have that rule. CUNY City Tech could not have that rule because City Tech is a government school whereas a religious school is a private school. So again we have this difference between how the bill of rights, the civil liberties apply to public settings and government settings versus private settings. So back to this example. So I work at one of the schools. I'm a teacher at a religious school and there's another teacher that I don't really like. And I know that teacher may be up for promotion someday.  And what I'm doing is I'm either trying to get him fired or I'm trying to damage his reputation so much that he'll never get promoted if there's suspicion, even the remote suspicion that he's gay. And if that other teacher finds out that I went to the administration and knowingly lied about this with the intention of hurting him, that teacher can sue me for slander. He can sue me for hurting him through my speech. And when we go to court I cannot defend myself by saying well he can't sue me. I don't have to do anything in response to this because I'm protected by the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not protect slander. It does not protect someone from knowingly lying about someone else with the goal of hurting their reputation now. Is this a crime? No, slander is not a crime, but it is the kind of tort that could lead to a lawsuit that I mentioned in the previous lecture when I talked about the judicial branch. So because it's a tort that you can sue somebody for, that other teacher could sue me and if I'm found to have a coincidence slander against that other teacher I might have to pay that teacher a lot of money because I damaged him, I hurt him. So slander is not protected by the First Amendment. So you cannot slander someone and try to claim that what you did was constitutional in the First Amendment because it is not. Another type of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment is what's called clear and present danger speech. And this is something that was established in a very famous Supreme Court case, the case of Schenck v. United States. And it's a court case that's mentioned in your textbook. So you can go back to your textbook and look it up in Chapter 18. So Schenck v. United States was the case of a guy named Charles Schenck who during the First World War was very angry about the United States' entrance to the First World War. He felt for many reasons that the war was an immoral war and that the United States should not be fighting in the war. So in an effort to express his feelings about the war, he and some friends of his distributed leaflets, paper leaflets to young men who were being drafted into the military and told them to ignore their draft notices, meaning don't show up for the draft, don't go into the military. And in response to this, the federal government, the U.S. federal government arrested him, the federal agents arrested him. And he was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which was a law that was passed right after the U.S. entered World War I, the First World War. And the law basically made it illegal to do anything that hurt the American War effort, to do any kind of thing. And so the U.S. government now claimed that what Charles Schenck was doing by trying to influence young men not to go into the military was a violation of the Espionage Act because if American men were not to go into the military, that the U.S. said would hurt the U.S. effort in the war and possibly lead the U.S. to lose the war and that would greatly hurt the United States. So that's why the U.S. government arrested Charles Schenck and accused him of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. So Charles Schenck was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act and he immediately appealed his conviction to the appellate court in the very same manner that I explained in the last lecture about the judiciary. And remember the appellate court deals with matters of law and the issue of law that Schenck was appealing on was the First Amendment. And basically what he said is that the U.S. government's arresting me was a violation of my First Amendment rights because all I was doing was engaging in freedom of speech which was protected by the First Amendment. So the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court and in 1919 the Supreme Court had to answer a basic question. Did was Charles Schenck's actions here protected by the First Amendment? Was Charles Schenck's actions an example of expression of speech that was protected by the First Amendment? The Supreme Court basically said no that it wasn't protected by the First Amendment because the Supreme Court said that the kind of speech, the kind of expression that Charles Schenck engaged in, what he did presented a clear present danger to the U.S. government. Meaning that just as the U.S. government had argued that if people, if he had influenced, if Charles Schenck had influenced lots of men not to go into the military that could really hurt America's worth. And the Supreme Court said that the U.S. government has the right to stop that kind of behavior, that kind of speech, that kind of expression. And so since then the rule is that any type of expression, any type of speech that presents a clear present danger to the U.S. government is not protected by the First Amendment. Now what would clear present danger be exactly? Well, we don't really know. It would have to be defined on a case-by-case basis by the courts. And so that's why the judicial branch and the courts are so very important because they decide very important issues like this. What is clear and present danger? Another thing that courts decide is and define as obscenity, which is another type of speech, another type of expression that is not protected by the First Amendment. So what is obscenity mean? Well, we don't really know exactly, but in a very famous Supreme Court case years and years ago a Supreme Court Justice famously said, You know, I really can't define obscenity, but I'll know it when I see it. And that sort of gets to the modern definition of obscenity, something that shocks reasonable people, something that would shock most people. So what today would be a good example of something that the Supreme Court and other courts and the U.S. government consider obscene? Child pornography. So, pornography is legal, adult pornography is legal, pornographic images, it's legal to say post pornographic images on the Internet. X-rated websites are legal on the Internet, as long as everyone who is depicted in videos or in images are adults, 18 or over. If, however, if someone posts a video, a sexual video or a sexual image on the Internet, and someone in that video or image is under the age of 18, then that is what the law considers child pornography. That is what the law would consider obscene, an obscene video or an obscene image that cannot legally be posted to the Internet, that people cannot legally purchase or even view. So the possession, distribution, creation, and viewing of child pornography on the Internet is a crime. And people go to jail for a very long time for violating child pornography laws, either on the Internet or even through the mail. So if you own a sex shop and you sell child pornography magazines or videos illegally, and you mail that to somebody in the mail, which is a federal crime, to mail something criminally through the mail, not only can you go to jail for being the one to be selling it, but if the FBI, say, catches the person who's ordering it, receiving it in their mail, they could go to jail as well. So that's an example of obscenity. Child pornography is a great example of obscenity, something that's shocking to most people. And I think most people would agree that child pornography is shocking, it's disgusting, and that it should not be legal, that it's wrong. The First Amendment also covers the right to assembly, the right to protest. So the First Amendment states that government cannot prevent people from assembling peaceably. Mass protests are allowed if they're peaceful. So people can protest all sorts of things, lots of different issues that they want, and they're allowed to do that as long as they're peaceful. But for the most part, peaceful protests must be organized under a permit. You have to have a permission from the government to assemble at a certain time, in a certain place, with a certain amount of people. And that is why, for example, even peaceful assemblies, even peaceful Black Lives Matter protests recently have been broken up by the police, sometimes violent. And that's pretty much legal because most of these protests did not have permits. And so even though we might consider it wrong for the police to have done this and bad, and even though lots of people would probably consider that a violation of people's First Amendment rights, because they didn't have a permit, they were able to be legally broken up. So it's legal, maybe not right, but legal doesn't always mean right. So protests also have to be peaceful though. So the moment a protest becomes violent, then the police can move right in, even if the protesters have a permit. The government does not have to give a protest organization a permit. So the government usually only gives a permit out when the protesters have picked a safe spot that will not harm other people, not put other people in harm. So for example, if you want to have a protest in the middle of Central Park, that's different than say wanting to have a protest in the middle of a busy New York City street where you might block traffic, where you might block ambulances and police cars from responding to crime and people in trouble or the fire department from reaching a fire. So if you ask for a protest somewhere to be somewhere where you're not going to prevent other people from living their lives and being safe, then you're likely to get the permit. So the government can prevent an organization from getting a permit based on where they wanted the permit or what time they wanted the permit. What they cannot do is the government cannot not give somebody a permit based on what they want to protest. So the government cannot pick and choose between political issues that it wants to allow people to protest or not. That would be a violation of the First Amendment. So the New York City government can't say, for example, yes, we're going to give a Black Lives Matter group the right to protest somewhere, but we're not going to give a permit to an anti-abortion group to have an anti-abortion protest. If you're going to give one group a right to protest somewhere, a permit to protest somewhere, you've got to give every other group the right to protest that same place in the same manner. As long as it's not harming other people. So that's the right to protest. And one of the things the First Amendment is famously about is protecting even the most disgusting speech, even the kind of speech or expressions or protests that we would find unworthy of being protected. So for example, and a very famous example is many, many years ago a neo-Nazi group wanted to have a parade in a town in Skokie, Illinois that had a very large Jewish population. And so the idea of having neo-Nazis marched down the, have a parade down the main road, Main Street, in a Jewish community is something a lot of people would consider offensive, disgusting, wrong. But in the town of Skokie, Illinois at first did not want to give the neo-Nazi group a permit, claiming that it would be dangerous to the neo-Nazis because Jewish residents would come out and there would probably be fighting and violence. And the neo-Nazi group went to court and got the court to order the town of Skokie, Illinois to give them a permit saying that yes, it could very well lead to violence. But it was up to the town, the city, the police force of the city to protect the neo-Nazis and make sure that there was no violence between the neo-Nazis and the Jews. So in many ways the whole idea of the First Amendment is to protect speech that would find vile, disgusting and outrageous. Because if you start to decide that some speech is not worthy of protection, then you get into this gray area where anything could be considered too offensive by somebody and at that point there's no more First Amendment. So the First Amendment has to protect everyone, every kind of political conscious speech, no matter how offensive you or I might think it is. So that's the First Amendment. The freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly. Oh, wait. So I didn't get to freedom of press. Freedom of press I just remembered is not going to be, I'm not going to discuss that in the chapter. I'm going to talk about the freedom of press later on when we get to the chapter on the press, which is the second to last chapter in the semester. So later on in December we'll get to talk about freedom of press. So that'll be separate. I didn't forget it. Okay, so what we talked about in the First Amendment is freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of religion. Okay, so now let's get to the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is the right to bear arms and what the right to bear arms means is that people are allowed to privately own weapons. So the meaning of the Second Amendment goes back to the colonial times, back before the American Revolution, just before the American Revolution started when the relationship between the colonies and Great Britain got really bad. The British government here in America tried to go and take away the guns of colonists because they were worried that they would use them to start attacking the British. And so when the United States was created, when the Constitution was created, the founding fathers decided to put in the Second Amendment to prevent the government from ever trying to take the weapons away from the people in the United States in case the peopleiness ever needed those weapons, either to fight another enemy like the British or even their own government, the U.S. government, if it became too tyrannical that the American people decided that another revolution is necessary. So the Second Amendment says that the government cannot pass any law that would prevent the American people from owning weapons, owning guns. Now, does that mean that there are no restrictions to this? No, absolutely not, because again all the civil liberties have restrictions. So the government can restrict us from owning certain types of weapons. For example, you cannot own a tank, you cannot own a fighter jet, you cannot own a nuclear missile, and people who do own weapons, guns have to be licensed, have to get a license, and certain people are prohibited from getting a license to own a gun, for example people who, for the most part people who have been to jail, people who are mentally ill for the most part are not allowed to own a possessive weapon. In certain states you have to have a special license to carry a gun around with you. Here in New York, for example, it's very difficult to get a license to carry a weapon around with you when you're walking around all day. It's even hard to get a regular license to own a weapon where you have to leave in your home for protection. You can't go outside with it. So certain states have different limitations on how easy or how hard it is to own a gun, but basically everyone has the right to own a gun within certain limitations that are set by states. The Third Amendment has to do with courting of troops.  And again, this goes back. So the prohibition on courting troops is what the Third Amendment says that the U.S. government cannot pass any law that requires the American people to have to have troops living in their homes goes back to the time before the American Revolution when the British government forced American Collins to allow British troops to live in their homes because it was cheaper to have British troops live in Collins homes than for the British government to build their own housing for them. So many American colonists, as you can imagine, oppose that were upset about that. And so the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that this could not happen here. This should not happen in the United States. Fourth Amendment is about the protection from unlawful search and seizure. And that has to do with the government or any agency of the government, meaning basically the police coming into your home or stopping you on the street and searching you or your property illegally. So I'm going to talk a lot more about this later in the semester when we talk about crime policy. But essentially the Fourth Amendment says that in order for the government to search or seize your property, it has to have a good reason. And that good reason comes in the form of a warrant. So the police cannot just barge in your home and start searching your home for no reason. They have to basically have a warrant. And I'm going to talk more about that more deeply later on. The Fifth Amendment has two things in it. The right to do process and protect from self-accrimination. Right to do process means that the government cannot take away your liberty or your freedom. And that's essential of the words that are used in the Fifth Amendment. That the government cannot take away your freedom or your liberty or your life, meaning take away your liberty and freedom by putting you in jail or your life by executing you without due process of law and due process means telling you what you've been charged with, allowing you to defend yourself by hiring a lawyer, by going to court to try to prove to a jury that you're not guilty and so on and so forth. So that's what due process means. Protecting from self-incrimination means that you have the right not to plead guilty, that you have the right not to give evidence against yourself. So if the police arrest you, you have the right to remain silent, right? Because the whole idea of remaining silent means that you're not answering any questions and giving the police any information that they can use against you to find you guilty, to prove you're guilty. So you don't have to incriminate yourself in a situation where you're accused of a crime or you've been arrested and charged with a crime. And one very famous Supreme Court case that came out about this issue occurred in 1966. United States was Miranda. Miranda was the name of a man who was arrested in Arizona and the police questioned him. And during his questioning Miranda confessed to the crime and that confession and self-incrimination was used against him to prove him guilty in court. And Miranda's lawyers appealed and argued that the police questioning him without telling him about his Fifth Amendment rights was a violation of the Constitution. So when Miranda was arrested and when he was questioned the police did not tell him that he was a right to remain silent. The police now today have to tell you that you have a right to remain silent, they have the right to an attorney and so on and so forth. If you're brought in for questioning or if you're arrested and the reason they have to do that now is because of the court case US versus Miranda. The Supreme Court said that from now on not only is it enough that we have the Fifth Amendment but that the police have an obligation to inform people of their Fifth Amendment rights. The Miranda rights, if you've ever heard that term say on TV or if you've read it in a book, the reason why we call these rights that the police recite to people, the Miranda rights is because it came out of this court case US versus Miranda. The Sixth Amendment says that people have a right to a speeding and public trial.  You have to be put on trial, you have to be given a reasonable speedy and public trial and if you're not then a judge may let you go simply because you were not given the right to a speedy and public trial. The Seventh Amendment says that you're right to a trial by jury. So not only you have a right to a speedy and public trial but you have a right to a trial by jury. So it's not just a judge or the government deciding whether you're guilty but it's a trial of jury of people like you who decide whether you're guilty or not as I explained in the last lecture on the judiciary. So Seventh Amendment is the right to a trial by jury. Seventh Amendment covers two different things, no excessive bail and no cruel and unusual punishment. So when people are arrested they're usually sometimes they're held in jail before their trial. Sometimes they're let out to be able to go back home while they're in trial if they pay bail. And bail is sort of a monetary fee that they have to pay in order to make sure that they don't skip and leave town because let's say somebody's arrested and the bail is $10,000 and somebody's family puts up that money just to take a mortgage on the house. If the person skips bail and doesn't show up for trial then the family doesn't get that $10,000 back. If the person does show up for trial after the trial is over the family gets that money back. But the Seventh Amendment says that bail should not be excessive.  And the Seventh Amendment also says that there's no cruel and unusual punishment. So if somebody is being held in jail they cannot be beaten until they confess. If somebody is held in prison they cannot be held in torturous conditions. If somebody is executed they cannot be executed in a way that causes a lot of pain. And this is an issue with capital punishment because lots of forms of capital punishment are shown to be painful. And so that's an issue as to whether putting somebody to death through the elected chair or by a lethal injection is a violation of the Seventh Amendment and it's prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment by the hands of the government. And then the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, the last two amendments in Bill Rights, says that certain powers are reserved for the people and states. So any power based on it's not expressly given to the federal government, the national government is reserved for the people and states. You might remember I talked a little bit about that when I talked about federalism and the division of power between the national government and on one hand state and local governments on the other. Okay so that's civil liberties. Now let's move on to the second part of this lecture, civil rights. Throughout American history certain groups have not been able to execute their freedoms fully. So even though certain groups of people have always had civil rights under the Constitution that for many reasons having to do with bigotry and racism they have not been afforded the full ability to practice their civil liberties, they have not been afforded their true civil rights. And three groups in particular that throughout American history have not been able to do this have not been equal to other groups, mainly white people are African Americans, women, white women, not just black women but white women and in gay, lesbian, and transgendered men and women are groups of people who have not historically been able to exercise their civil liberties as freely as other groups of people, mainly white men and to some extent Latinos are also figuring into this as well or also an example of a group of people who have not been treated equally in the United States and you could say to some extent Asians but African American women and gay, lesbian, transgender men and women are the three most prominent groups of people who have been exposed to the most racism and bigotry throughout American history. So in an effort to rectify this, in modern US history the US government has passed civil rights laws to help guarantee civil liberties to these groups, so laws that tried to more forcefully help these groups enjoy their civil liberties and guarantee quality to these groups. So the first effort to secure equal rights for African Americans came right after the end of the Civil War which ended slavery and was intended to help African Americans become truly equal citizens of the United States. So to try to do that the US government passed three amendments to the Constitution between the period of 1865 and 1870 the five years after the end of the American Civil War. The 13th amendment, 14th amendment, and 15th amendments were the three amendments. The 13th amendment ended slavery, so because of the 13th amendment slavery is no longer legal in the United States. The 14th amendment did two things. The 14th amendment which passed in 1868 first gave citizenship rights to African Americans by stating that citizenship would now be defined as belonging to anyone who was born in the United States. So today we recognize that anyone who was born in the United States is automatically a citizen of the United States. Well that wasn't the case until the 14th amendment. So the 14th amendment was designed to take this large group of people. African Americans have just been slaves but are now free and because they were slaves were not treated legally as people and automatically made into American citizens simply because they had all been born in the United States. So the period when you still had slaves who came over directly from Africa and long ended by that point so by 1868 all African Americans living in the United States have been born in the United States and because of the 14th amendment they were now citizens. The second thing that the 4th amendment did was state that everyone in the United States had a right to the equal protection of the laws meaning that laws had to apply to everyone equally regardless of the race. So again that was designed to protect African Americans from racism based simply on the color of their skin on the race. So 14th amendment created the idea of equal protection for everyone including African Americans and it gave citizenship to African Americans. And then the 15th amendment in 1870 gave black men the right to vote. Not black women because no woman in the United States was allowed to vote until 1920 but in 1870 black men were given the right to vote under the 15th amendment. So we know though that even though the United States government created these three amendments that even that still throughout most of the 20th century most of the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century African Americans still did not have equal rights because southern states especially but even many northerns simply refused to recognize these equal rights and continued to discriminate against African Americans based on the race. For example even though the 15th amendment gave black men the right to vote southern states passed laws that prevented blacks from voting in many different ways. And southern whites also used intimidation to prevent blacks from being able to vote. Even though the 14th amendment gave equal protection to African Americans southern states and even in some places in the north still practice segregation meaning that blacks had to go to different schools. Blacks had to use separate water fountains separate bathrooms could not eat at the same restaurants could not sleep at the same hotels. That whites did simply because of the race. And so because of that during the civil rights movement era in the 1950s and 1960s the US government and the US Congress and the Supreme Court took further actions in order to try to once again make it so that African Americans would have true equality and true civil liberties under the Constitution. So in 1954 for example in a case that I talked about earlier during the lecture on federalism Supreme Court and Brown versus Board of Education ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. So after Brown's Board of Education schools in the United States began to very slowly desegregate. And so as a result of the Supreme Court and Brown versus Board of Education case black and white children began to slowly go to school together. And blacks began to have more educational opportunities. The civil rights act in 1964 which was passed by Congress did away with segregation made so that segregation laws in the United States were no longer legal. And so again that took time to implement but very slowly segregation began and in the United States. And then in 1965 the next year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act which was designed to stop all the laws and actions that southern states were taking to prevent blacks from voting. So as a result of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 a lot more black people started to be able to vote. So all these things did not end unequal treatment for African Americans did not end racism by any means racism still exists today. Unequal treatment for African Americans still exists today we know that but things are a little bit better in some ways more than a little bit better because of the actions that the government took during the civil rights era. More still needs to be done but things have been done since then. So today the struggle for equal rights and equal treatment for African Americans continues with the black lives matter movement and deals with issues such as the criminal justice system and policing that we know is a big problem just from all the things that we've witnessed have passed for years of unarmed African American men being killed by police. So let's talk about women. The women's rights struggle began in the early 20th century. The struggle for women's civil rights began in the early 20th century with Margaret Sanger and the campaign to legalize birth control. Margaret Sanger was a white woman. She was a nurse who was an activist here in Brooklyn. She lived here in Brooklyn who wanted to legalize birth control for women because in the United States at the time birth control was not legal. It was considered a sin as many religious people still considered to be today a sin. And so because of that the US government did not allow people to legally use birth control. She created the first illegal birth control clinic family planning clinic here in Brooklyn which was ultimately raided and she ended up going to jail because of that. But ultimately Margaret Sanger and her movement led to the creation of Planned Parenthood which today still offers family planning help, birth control and abortion services and many other types of medical treatments for women. So that was a very important thing that Margaret Sanger did. The legalization of birth control what Margaret Sanger was fighting about did not come about until the 1960s. So in the 1960s and 1970s women won a number of big rights, big victories in the area of birth control. In 1965 the Supreme Court in a very famous case Griswold v. Kennedy ruled that women did have a constitutional right to use birth control. So that court case made it illegal for states to have laws that did not allow women to have the right to use birth control. And then in 1973 in another very very famous Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court ruled that states could not ban abortion outright. And that was a logical next extension. So okay women have a right to use birth control but what happens if the birth control doesn't work or women didn't use it. And as a pregnancy that she does not want does a woman have the right to terminate a pregnancy. And in 1973 the Supreme Court said yes under certain conditions. So those conditions are that mainly the pregnancy has to be in the first six months of pregnancy. After six months it's very difficult for women to get an abortion unless carrying the baby to term would put her life in danger. So both cases centered on the right to privacy. In both cases the Supreme Court said that the Constitution's right to privacy protects women and women's right to use birth control. And also women's right to have an abortion. Now where is the right to privacy in the Constitution? Well nowhere exactly. The Constitution does not actually have those three words in it right to privacy. But what the Supreme Court said is that well one of the things that the founding fathers wanted to do was to allow people to live in privacy against the power of the government. So obviously even though the right to privacy is not actually explicitly in the Constitution it's implied. Everything about the Constitution everything about how our government works is centered on the idea that we the people have privacy. Have a right to privacy. And so that right to privacy is what was at the foundation of Griswold versus Connecticut and Roe v Wade. Women's rights issues in the 1980s and 1990s and even today deal with economic issues and sexual harassment and sexual issues. The right of a woman to for example be treated equally in the workplace to be paid equally. And there are many areas of the economy today where men and women doing the same job do not get the same pay. That men get paid more for doing the same job with the same experience simply because they're men.  The right of a woman to be free from certain kinds of behavior like sexual bullying in the workplace. Sexual harassment. Before the 1980s and 1990s there were no such thing as sexual harassment laws. Today we have sexual harassment laws because of the women's rights movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Today the civil rights battlefield is also focused on gay, lesbian and transgendered rights.  In Lawrence v. Texas which was a Supreme Court case decided in 2003 the Supreme Court ruled anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional. Sodomy is defined well at the time was defined by many states as any sexual activity between people of the same sex. And technically some states even had sodomy laws that applied to heterosexual sex between couple that was not married. So technically it was legal for an unmarried couple to have sex. Well what happened in Lawrence v. Texas? Well the police barged into a home thinking that there was a crime going on. They had the wrong house it turned out. But what they did in Texas and what they did was barge in on two men having sex. And Texas at the time had a law that made it illegal for two men to have sex. And so they were arrested for breaking that law. And then the Supreme Court said because of the right to privacy you can't have these laws. So it's pretty amazing to think that all the way up into 2003 that these kinds of laws existed but they did. And the Supreme Court finally ruled them unconstitutional in 2003.  In 2010 President Barack Obama allowed gay and lesbians to serve openly in the military. There was once a time where if you were gay or lesbian and you were in the military and you were found out you were automatically kicked out. Then in the 1990s during Bill Clinton's presidency they came up with a policy called Don't Ask Don't Tell.  So Don't Ask Don't Tell even though it was a big deal did not allow gay and lesbians to actually be able to legally serve in the military, openly serve in the military. Barack Obama did that in 2010 when he allowed gay and lesbians to openly serve in the military. And then more recently in 2015 five years ago the Supreme Court in a case called Obergefell versus Hodges ruled that gay and lesbians have a constitutional right to marriage. And so up to that point some states allowed gay marriage, some states did not. It was a state issue. But the Supreme Court said that the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourth Amendment, the thing that was designed to make sure that African Americans were not discriminated against because of the race, also applied to gays, gay and lesbians who wanted to marry. And so the state could not give marriage licenses only to heterosexual couples, but not to gay couples, had to give marriage license to everyone. So the Supreme Court ruled that gay and lesbians have a constitutional right to marriage. And just this summer in June, in the case called Bostock versus Clayton County, the Supreme Court ruled that civil rights laws protect transgendered men and women from workplace discrimination. So up until this summer there are certain civil rights laws that said that you could not be fired from your job because you're a man.  But the civil rights laws did not apply to transgendered people because of the question of sex. Does sexual orientation apply to transgendered men and women? Up to that point, nobody had said that it does. But in this case, Bostock versus Clayton County, the Supreme Court ruled that civil rights laws protect transgendered men and women from workplace discrimination. So today a transgendered man or woman cannot be fired from a job simply because they are a transgendered man or woman. They cannot be fired just because of that. So that's a big extension of civil rights protection, civil liberties protection, constitutional protection to men and women who are transgendered. So that is it. I will see you next time.


You are the fifth person now, including, let's see here, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Robert Ajemian, Dr. Kirill Piajkiewicz and Jonathan Keats, and now Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. I'm trying to keep a list of these people because you guys are the only people that I know that do not own cell phones. And what you have said, well, I'll say what, you know, Aubrey de Grey has called it the ultimate destroyer of personal solitude. You have said, I do not want to be interrupted all the time. And for example, with me, this device has been off now for quite a long period of time so that I can finish this project and it's going to be off so that I can continue finishing this project. So will you please briefly speak to, especially the millennial and generation Z that is now using the devices nonstop, we use them 150 times a day. We speak to the importance and Cal Newport talks a lot about the idea of deep work. And we've been talking about this for so long, but just the focus and neurobiologists are talking about it now, the importance of that focus for achieving big goals in your life. Will you just briefly mention, talk about that for a moment? Well, yes, I mean, cell phones are obviously highly convenient and they're essential for many people's work life. And so they obviously have their uses. But they can easily become a means of constant distraction and the whole point of deeper work is being able to focus and concentrate and constant distraction of drip feed of news and social trivia on Facebook and other social media and so it is just ultimately distracting. And so I think that one of the things I suggest actually in ways to go beyond I have a chapter there on the importance of holy days and festivals. And it was always a tradition in the in the Judea tradition having the Sabbath, a day when you don't work. The whole point of the Sabbath is that you it's a day.  It's the same word. Yeah, you it's a holy day because you don't work. And then the purpose of it is to give thanks to God to make love, to be with your family, to play music, to have fun. And then for Christians, it's Sunday for Muslims. It's Friday. But this site, this pattern of a Sabbath, a day in the week when you we now have a weekend, two days. But the trouble is these have now got engulfed by 24 seven culture. So shopping malls are open, or at least they were until the covid lockdowns and, you know, constant Amazon deliveries, online shopping 24 seven. And this has completely abolished this necessary time. It's part of human nature to have time off together. And for people who are forced to work on Sundays because they work in a shop, in a shopping mall, for example, then the employer says, oh, you can have Tuesday off instead. That's not the point because everyone else is working on Tuesday. It's it's being together, being alone or together as one wishes to have a time away from all this work life. And the the workaholic culture, which America has spread to the rest of the world with seven procedures.  I think workaholicism is really does need something doing about it for our own sanity. And so I think that the minimum thing I'd suggest is having us a technological Sabbath.  But have a have a day when you don't work, when you when you do just have time to read books, listen, walk in nature, do some gardening, hang out with friends, make love, play music, you know, and and not be distracted the whole time. So I think that for people who need these devices for their work, who become dependent on them, earning a living, I mean, and many people have. Obviously, you can't just give them up. But having a technological Sabbath and actually ideally combining with a real Sabbath, real Holy Day, once a week, and then observing the festivals. I think it's very important to most people observe in America, Thanksgiving and Christmas. But there are other festivals throughout the year, which are important. And for me, an important one is September the 29th, the Feast of St. Michael and all Angels, which is a time to become aware of all those forms of consciousness beyond the human level. And the ancients thought that every star and planet had its own intelligence, which was an angel.  They were the intelligences of the celestial bodies.  And for me, the Feast of St. Michael and all Angels is a way to connect with all those forms of non-human intelligence beyond our own. The Feast of the Day of the Dead, November the 2nd, which is a very big deal in Mexico and in many Catholic countries, is the Feast when we acknowledge and remember the ancestors, those who've gone before. November the 1st, All Saints Day, All Hallows Day, is when we remember the Blessed Dead during the famous dead and November the Saint, everyone else. And for most people, they've just forgotten about these festivals. Instead, children remember the eve of these festivals, Halloween. That's become a sort of orgy of dressing up as witches and eating candies and stuff. But the festival itself has been hollowed out. And for me, again, November the 2nd is a day when I was going to a requiem mass. I remember my dead parents and ancestors, my dead friends and all those I know and who will give thanks for who've gone before. On November the 1st, I give thanks to all those who've been my teachers who are now departed and who've influenced me. So I think having throughout the year, you see, there are these special days, the festivals, each with its own purpose and their holidays traditionally, so that there's time to give attention to these other things. So I think recovering a sense of sacred time is very important. And switching off cell phones when one's doing that is a very important part of it. So I would say that starting with special days, holy days and festivals, and then maybe extending it out further to only having it on certain hours a day, it would be a good way to go. It's not a good way to go to have one's entire life engulfed by 24 seven workaholic culture. So well said, these technological sabbaths, also these rituals that have been passed on for so long to have like you talk about the brief moment before you dig into your dinner and with your family, just hold each other's hands and close your eyes and reflect on the beauty of the fact that you are sharing a meal. There's so many different ways. There's all these days that are celebratory days to just take a sabbath away from technology and workaholism and just tune more inward and music, make love, go play, be in nature, do art. This is so beautiful and I'm really happy that that you listed. It's going to be really important, potentially even moving forward to do things like just have a have date, have more days where we just say, OK, turn down the economic machinery today and turn up the spiritual machinery today. We're going to have to have more days like that in the future. That was beautifully said, Rupert. Thank you so much for coming onto the program and for teaching us everything that you have today. This has been an honor and a pleasure. We're very grateful. Thank you. Well, fun to be with you, Alan. Thank you.


Time now for Hey, bro, you up where I hit you with my favorite sleepers for daily fantasy and season-long leagues How about Jared goff at quarterback? He hasn't put a monster numbers yet. Mr. PFF number one grid at quarterback We see you it's hard to run on these buccaneers though. So I think we see him air it out He's got the Chris Carter Hall of Fame like love on the show this week.  They're allergic to it. They are at least guarding from it. They're getting lit up So tutu thrives there. I like it and a tight end. How about Dalton Schultz? Nice little target here low on all the rankings He's a good value. He's heating up. Okay, he scored him back-to-back games 10 targets this past week Is he the so fetch of tight ends? I don't know, but I'd say you should play him against even a tough Saints defense


My name is Anna. I'm from Poland and I'm 18. I play drums. Sorry. I can remember I wanted to play drums, but my parents didn't let me. That's true. So the first instrument in the honour, which I was playing, was piano. And after one year playing on piano, my parents accepted the drums. So they bought me the first one and I never came back to piano. Actually it wasn't about drums, but we thought that the child who came out here maybe should be more interested in some sports or not music. But it was like mantra, she was repeating this. And when we analysed all the pictures from holidays, she always grabbed like a small drum from holidays. And when my husband said, come on, maybe we should buy her drums, you know? Because drum was all the time, so yeah, so finally she got drums. But it was really strange for me and I think for most of our friends because people do not expect somebody who has hearing problems playing music.  So that's why I can play drums to come myself. But I also like to ride a bike, motorcycle. And I like to hear, after I'm driving, I can hear the noise. It also comes me down, so I like it. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is about other people's attitudes. Because when you get the cochlear, then everything is fine actually. The only difference is that maybe you start doing things a little bit later than other people, other children. But you can catch them very, very fast. And later on, when you can see, observe that your child develops normally and even sometimes in some areas, better than normally. So it is fantastic really. Yes, I'm waiting for the second surgery. And I'm a little bit afraid because it will be kind of new for me. I don't know. Because when I'm sitting with someone and right now I can hear only everything on my right side. But on the left is a little bit worse. So I would like to have a second ear to hear. If I have advice from people in school who do not hear, I would say don't care what about people say, but just be yourself.


Cool. Before I start, can I get a show of hands? Does anyone here work at startups? Does anybody here own startups? Like, are you guys founders? OK, cool. Nice. So I think, so I'm Vish. So I am the co-founder and CTO of Split. We are a travel financing startup, which means we let you pay for your trips in installments. So how we do this is we become a payment platform. We become a place where we get integrated on travel websites at the checkout page. And you can choose to pay in Split and split it in installments. But what I'm here to talk about is a problem that's very personal to me. So I've worked across multiple startups in many countries, in India and the US, Malaysia, and now in Singapore as well. And I worked in small companies and rather large companies as well. Small instance at less than 10 employees. I was one of the first few employees. And then in all the startups, there are 200-plus employees spread across multiple countries. But one problem remains constant, and this is also personal to me, is firefighting. And I'm sure you must have heard this term or faced it yourself. There are more often times where you feel like, why am I doing the same thing? Why am I just not growing? Why am I lagging behind? And you know when you're firefighting, when your product team is asking you to build features at such a fast rate, maybe one release a week. And then you have a huge backlog of bugs that you need to fix. Or if you're always trying to figure out hacky solutions for problems, just fix it really fast. Let's get it out and then do it later. I guess this sort of a mindset in startups has been sort of vicious in a way that things don't get built properly. But on the other hand, we see startups like, I mean, X startups like Airbnb, WhatsApp, they always seem to be way ahead of the curve. They're always building amazing features that works across platform, across communities, across countries as well. How do they do it? So what I'm here to do is actually go through my experience of why firefighting happens and how we can sort of avoid it in the first place. And then again, as me running a startup of my own, I do not want to deal with any of these problems. So firefighting, how do we stop it? I think the first question to ask is, do we firefight at Split? That's your, we don't so far. Yeah, so far. And the way we are able to do it is by two core philosophies that we have. First one is be lean, very unlike the lunch that I had today, but yes, be lean. Be lean in two ways, be lean in your code and be lean in hiring. Let's talk about code.  I wanna engineer things that autopilot's on its own. An example I'd like to share is actually WhatsApp. So just before that acquisition, WhatsApp had 16 employees, that is it. And they were probably in the top 10 of every app store in every country for a long, long time. How is it that they're able to achieve something like this with such a small team, right? So that leads me into hiring, right? It is actually very easy for startups. Like, look, you've got in your seat around the same million dollars or so. Boom, you get an office here in WeWork. You hire 10 engineers who are just onboarded and then, and you're expecting things to grow really fast and really like explosively, right? But that's actually not gonna happen. So as founders, you've done your due diligence and figuring out what the product and what the experience is going to be. You get one person onboard and it probably takes them about a month to kind of get their mindset tuning and work as one single unit. Imagine getting 10 people in one shot. How are you gonna convince them of your vision? Yes, maybe they convince an overall scale, but can you work together as a unit is the question. Something to think about. It's easier said than done, but that's something that we try really hard at split to do, making sure that you're on the same page. We're all thinking as one unit rather than having like confused conversation, meeting after meeting. That's never gonna happen, right? And the second thing is, I know this is gonna be a very cliche topic. Stay true to your vision of your company and never find shortcuts. Now, again, when I said easier said than done, your vision, for example, split vision is no travel will be made impossible because of the upfront cost, right? If $1,000 is a huge upfront cost for you, we wanna stop that for you to be able to travel, right? This is our actual vision. Now, the motivations of a startup could be very different. So let's say you find out that there's a company in the US that's doing something and you feel like, hey, the same product could be applied in Singapore and there's a huge market, right? So your motivations could probably be that, I wanna make that money, I wanna make that exit. Now, if you go with this mindset, you're never gonna be building a very customer-focused product.  Sure, you can do your user research, hire five product managers to do it, but then your measure of success is always gonna be GMV, right? So that's bad. So the key is always stay true to your vision of whatever that might be in your case, right? And second, never find shortcuts.  I don't wanna elaborate more on this, this makes sense, right? So yeah, anyway, speaking of hiring, we are hiring at Split, if you would be interested. You can come talk to me later. But enough of me, I'm gonna pass on Mike to Marsha. He's a full-stack engineer at Split, and he's gonna talk to you about experience of working at Split, working at startups, and how it means to be here. Just a minute. Hi, my name is Marsha. So maybe some self-introduction. So I'm a full-site developer for about three years of working experience. So for my development experience, I've been bouncing between startups, working for a deaf house, projects after projects. Then I got an opportunity to work in a big MNC, German MNC called SAP. So I experienced startups and MNC structured and unstructured, or less structured companies before. So I'm trying to convince you guys why you should join startups, rather than a structured company like the banks, big companies. I know they pay well. Full-site developer, you got now $5,000 a month, no problem. But why you should join a startup? So the main g-source of it is there's costs for everything. So first there's costs on monetary gains. Second is growth and opportunity. Working for big MNC, they are structured, got rules and regulations, very little room for creativity. But working for a startup, you got more room to explore your ideas, to grow, to be creative. And in some sense, for split, there's no office politics in some sense. So yeah, split adopts 80% to 20% room. 80% of the time we do what we are hired to do. 30% of the time we can do whatever you want to do. So for me, my 20% of the time, I choose to do business development. So I was part of developing a pet project for loans for our travel agents, like people's puppet. So ongoing project. It's fun. I'm a full-site developer, but I care to be a mini-PM below BD. That's cool, man. You can't get the kind of opportunity in MNCs. So this is it. So yeah. Yeah, we are. So we need to reiterate split hiring. We are all Node.js days. So I will be at the corner talking about Node.js. If any of you guys are Node.js, you're the first come talk to me. I will be great to learn from you guys. So check with me later. Thank you. Yes. So the question was, what do you guys do in a day-to-day basis that reduces the rush in development, right? So we've been active for about a year. And the one thing that, again, back to core principles is that we follow the general principle of sprints, making sure everything is clean before it goes out. We use a test. The golden rule is number six. Talk to six people for majority likes it. Go adopt these product principles. But at the core, if even one person says that, hey, this is not something that I'd use and not a widespread experience, we'll not use it. For example, a couple of days ago, we needed to push a release out, which does a lot of new things. But it was a little bit slow. It took a two-second delay. And we took a conscious choice. We will not push it until we figure out why there's this delay. So the end consumer matters the most. Like, if you look at companies like Apple, for example, hopefully they have been doing stuff, start-up-y. But then more often than not, when they release a product, it is generally widespread and it works. They do a lot of testing. They do a lot of research. And then they take their time to do it. So that's the thing, right? So our product has evolved over a year. It is not what it is before, but we also don't follow the move fast and break things principle. We don't want to break things. We want to just move fast. Any other questions? So when you say that you don't fire five, right, it's kind of magic. Okay, so in any project, there's always this trifecta or whatever you want to call it like feature, scope, quality and time. And there's a natural tension. So at different points, whether it's your own fault or not, one goes into a crunch mode. And then you wind up by fighting. That's what happens. So how do you bring the balance back? That's the only way, right? Absolutely. I think we are fortunate at this time that most of the things that we want to do already is perfected in some way. For example, right? An API call, making an API call or a queue, your queue stack. Three years ago, like RabbitMQ was not as good, right? Today it's really good. Making an API is super easy. Let's say things like a server crash, for example. It used to be a thing of the past. You have auto scaling, you're easy to go down. But now put everything on Lambda and it works fine. So I think adopting scalable technologies is what I'd recommend. And there is this core reason why this happens because, again, staying lean, we are a three-member team right now. Now, if we do something that could potentially break, I don't want to wake up at 2 a.m. and then fix something, right? So there is a sort of need to make sure we cover our track wherever we go and make sure this doesn't happen. I don't know if I'm expressing this correctly, is that when in your mind you feel like things are gonna break and this is gonna happen, it kind of reinforces your brain to figure out what could possibly go wrong and fix it. But having said that, it is quite possible that things will break and you will have to firefight at certain points. But let's say if you're mostly not firefighting, that's a very good thing. Does that make sense? I think I would add doctor and we don't rise oil for it. So if there's a problem, we say doctor put an image, you're done, you can go to sleep. And automate that process. So you don't even wake up, huh? Yeah. Good. All right. Yeah.


This is Alex again. I have bills from the boxo locks from Bill Brink's lock which I decoded last night. Bill gave a really good demo on that, so I'm not going to waste your time with it. The combination turned out to be 2-0-1-2 and it opens. Please, there we go. So brilliant lock. What I think I'm going to do is, you may have seen my video, I hope you saw my video on the Yale, I'm sorry, the SNG, the Post Office lock and I was just thinking to myself here, I think that'll fit nicely in there. Yeah, so I'm gonna hang on to the key. This is number 56. Okay, Charlie 56. It's in the locked position. You obviously could defeat it by taking the screws out and, you know, messing with it. But whoever can pick it on tape, I'll send you the key. How about that? So I'm gonna close this thing up. I'm gonna recombinate this little safe so you can open the safe and then open this lock and you get the bonus. So real quick video, that's it. So Charlie 56. This is Alex. Thanks to Bill for starting this round of a traveling lock box and it's been fun so far. Looking forward to more videos. Cheers!