Another edition of Thinking Things Through, Critical Thinking for Critical Times. I'm your host, Michael Sukhoff. We are pleased to have with us today, Douglas Kellner, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Today, we're going to be discussing Herbert Markuza and his relevance for today. War, climate and democracy a way forward. Professor Kellner recently retired after teaching philosophy for 25 years at University of Texas at Austin and philosophy of education and cultural studies for 25 years at UCLA. He probably is the foremost expert in my opinion on the work of Markuza in the English-speaking world. And on a personal note, I know Doug through our participation in the International Herbert Markuza Society. Welcome to the show, Doug. Well, thank you, Michael. Pleasure to be here. That's great. So we have a lot to cover here. And I'm gonna try and keep the conversation moving forward, but I wanna start out with what is critical theory. We've talked a lot about critical theory on this show. I've had two or three guests talk about it, but what is critical theory for you? And then I wanna segue into Herbert Markuza and his critical theory. Well, I identify myself with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. So when I use the term critical theory as Herbert Markuza, D.W. Adorno, Eric Frome and their colleagues use, it refers to a critical theory of contemporary society. And what's distinctive about critical theory, it's a critique of society as a totality. So it sees capitalism, for instance, as being the organizing principle in the capitalist world, but it also sees our being on earth, that our everyday lives are grounded in an environment. And in this totality that critical theory is analyzing, they focus on the principles or the institutions of domination and liberation. So they show how individuals are dominated, controlled, repressed, but they point out pathways to liberation and particularly Markuza as a dialectic of theory and practice. So he critiques the problems with contemporary society, but then he addresses solution and practice that will try to create progressive social change. Now, let me stop you right there for our listeners who may not know anything about any of these concepts. Could you give an example of what Markuza meant by domination? Well, domination would be labor. For instance, we have to go to work, most of us, eight hours a day, that survival requires getting a job and that requires a 40 hour week of employment. And this was my middle-class family and all my relatives basically worked this all life. I spent two summers working in a factory in Chicago and I was in college to earn money. So I got sort of a sense of what Markuza called the alienation of labor, that you're not doing a job you have any control over, you're sort of a cog in the machine. And so you're dominated by the labor system and by your boss and the technology at the workplace, et cetera. This is one of the reasons guys like you and me become college professors and writers and researchers because we can choose more of how we wanna spend our life and hopefully we like teaching and interacting with students and young people. Absolutely. And for the vast majority of people on this planet, I would assert that they are doing forms of labor or work that is not satisfying to them that may be pretty meaningless. I mean, of course there are different levels of this. Right. Yeah, I think that's a great example of domination. Now you mentioned, well, you mentioned I think the dialectic. Maybe we can get into that later rather than get sidetracked by that now. Okay, so let's move into, who was Herbert Marcuzzo? You know, tell us a little bit about him and then we'll get into his ideas and why you think they're important. Okay, Herbert Marcuzzo was a German Jewish-American member of the Frankfurt School, which was a group of scholars that immigrated from Germany under fascism because they were Jewish, they were radical and they were affluent and privileged enough to be able to get out. And they ended up at Columbia University, which was my alma mater. And then Adorno and Horkheimer, as you know, came to retire in Los Angeles close to where I live. And Marcuzzo taught for many years in University of California at La Jolla, where he had Angela Davis and many others as his students. So Marcuzzo and the Frankfurt School came to the U.S. and Marcuzzo went and worked for the U.S. government in the fight against fascism with the U.S.S. that was the intelligence service of the day, the predecessor- Office of Secret Services, I think. Office of Secret Service. It was the predecessor to the CIA. And of course they focused on Nazi Germany. It was World War II. And Marcuzzo stayed after the war for about five or six years, working for the State Department, focusing on communism and Soviet Marxism. It was the Cold War. But then he chose to have an academic life. Yes. Went to teach at Brandeis University and spent his next year's teaching and fighting and being father of the New Left and a political activist. Okay, well, I wanna stop you right there. Maybe we'll get to that, but this moniker of father of the New Left, at some point I'd like to unpack that a little bit because it's kind of like, it's a gloss of what he actually did. Right, right. First I want to say that I was a member of the New Left. I was a graduate student at Columbia University. And I heard Marcuzzo lecture at Columbia in 1969 and he was talking about the New Left and revolution and the next day we had a reception for him in the philosophy department. And so I went to that reception and then Marcuzzo wanted to go to the West End Bar where Jack Kerouac and Helen Gidsburg and the Beatniks went. So I actually got to drink beer with Marcuzzo. Oh my goodness. Marxism, that was the day that I met him. Wow, that's wonderful to hear about that. Okay, so yeah, there's so much we could say about him and his life, we've both written about him. But maybe we should talk a little bit more about his ideas. What of his ideas do you think are most important for us to understand today? Okay, I would say it's both his critical theory of capitalist society and his theory of radical social change and particularly human emancipation. I might say just the word about the New Left versus the Old Left. The Old Left was the Communist Party in the United States. It was the Soviet Union as the model of really existing socialism. That the Old Left saw as its idea. Right, and this is, yeah, maybe between around the early 1920s up until World War II? The Soviet Union actually lasted until 1989. Yeah, right. It collapsed with the collapse of communism. Right, yeah. But unfortunately, Russia has now Vladimir Putin who was sort of old KGB, old sort of Stalinist, but that's a whole nother story. Yeah, that's another show. But Markuza, we should say, while he was at Columbia, I think, wrote a book called Soviet Marxist. Markuza was for a form of democratic socialism, which we identified today with Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialism. And Markuza also, though, was a theorist of liberation, ranging from sexual emancipation to democratic control of society and learning, studying philosophy and developing your critical faculties, et cetera. So this is a whole different project than Orthodox Marxism was. Right, and Orthodox Marxism meaning? Meaning the Soviet Union's ideology of a dogmatic kind of scientific socialism that took a very ideological interpretation of Marx and Engels, who actually are great historians and great critical theorists. They were analyzing their contemporary society and the changes in contemporary society that were brought about by developments of capitalism, new technologies, new crises of the environment like fascism, war. The critical theorists were always developing their theory as did Karl Marx. So that's what a critical theorist is. It is anti-dogmaticist. And that's what Markuza opposed. Right, and I just wanna ask you, you use the term ideology. That's a term that's in common language today. It's thrown about as if everybody knows what it is. But Markuza and the Frankfurt School theorists had a particular notion which goes back to Karl Marx of what ideology was. Did you just say a sentence or two about ideology? Sure, ideology is our, ideologies are the ideas of the ruling class. So during Markuza's growing up in Germany, this was first the ideas of the Weimar Republic of liberal democratic capitalism. And then when fascism took over, the dominant ideology was fascism. Just as Russia had a czarist regime where the ideology was bought in the czar or the fathers of Russia, whereas Lenin and the communists had a Marxist ideology. So the dominant ideas of a society are the dominant ideologies. This is what Markuza focused on, keeping American ideology of the consumer society of bureaucracy in this state, of domination. I think it's important to also note that for Markuza and the Frankfurt School theorists, ideology did not just refer to the ruling ideas. It did do that. But there was something about ideology that was false or distorted or didn't give people the real picture of what was actually going on. I don't know if you wanna respond to that or not. Absolutely, I mean, that's I think the key insight of the Frankfurt School of Obesity Ideology, which basically is the theory of the culture industry. That ideology in contemporary capitalist societies is conveyed by the capital, the culture industry, which brings... Newspapers, magazines, the internet. Right, the movies, radios, television. So it's not just ideas that you get on news or documentaries, but it's entertainment. So individualism is the dominant ideology of capitalist society. Of course, Hollywood films and television, individualism. Yeah, go ahead. Everywhere in the culture. That's a great segue to my next series of questions is, okay, individualism, that's an ideology. I assume you'd agree with that. It's a set of ideas about how we should be in the world, generally speaking. But anyway, so I wanna talk about... Marcuse also talked, especially, not well throughout his work, but particularly in his earlier work about the individual and what he later called the whole individual. So I was wondering if you could say a little bit about why was Marcuse so interested in the individual? What did he mean by that? And what did he mean by the whole individual? Well, I'm glad you brought that question up because the critique of the American ideology of individualism might be taken that they were against the individual. In fact, Marcuse and all the members of the Frankfurt School were for individual emancipation and freedom. This is not something you find in Karl Marx. And they also have a theory, and this is particularly Marcuse, of the full development of the individual. So education is very important. The development of thought, of knowledge, of critical faculties, of freedom of choice, but making choices that are governed by positive values. And for instance, they saw the individual as having a body and being part of nature. So they have to conserve nature. We have to love and cooperate, like Marcuse wrote with other people and not be in competition. One of Marcuse's big books in the 1950s was Eros and Civilization. He brought Freud and subjectivity of the individual, of developing your ability, again, consciousness, raising in the 60s, developing your full subjectivity. Right. Now, I was wondering if we could just say what we mean by subjectivity here. Is it the same as consciousness? Is it different? How does it apply to real people in the real world? Well, this is, again, a Frankfurt School innovation because they root the individual, the body, but also in society. So we're all functioning as individuals in a given society. Right, right. So what is radical? What is subjectivity? What is radical about radical subjectivity? What does that mean? Well, I got this term from Marcuse. One point that we should revert to in terms of Marcuse's key ideas is the notion of the great refusal. Marcuse developed this in terms of an analysis of the civil rights movement that Martin Luther King and the people of color of his civil rights movement refused to take racism anymore, refused to take their inequality and oppression, their situation, and organized and struggled to try to realize American democracy. Right, right. So radical subjectivity is the sense, the awareness of the forms of oppression and the forms of struggle you can take in order to liberate yourself from these forms of repression. Right, and I just want to add that we've talked on this show about the term radical, and I gave the example of, well, the term radical comes from the Latin radicalis, which means going to the root of something. Right, and this idea, this sense of radical was very much a part of Karl Marx's understanding, as well as Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, so I just want to add that in. Right, and in fact, Karl Marx, in an 1843 essay wrote that exactly what you said, to be radical is to go to the root, and thus we want to go to the roots of human beings and their forms of repression and the possibilities of liberation, and that was Marcuse's life project, was update Marx, but also to analyze things like subjectivity and eros and liberation and individual ecological issues and issues of love and sexuality that Marx didn't analyze, which Marcuse thought was an important part of human beings and our subjectivities and our existence. Well, I'd love to have you back because we're only scratching the surface here. We got about five minutes left, so I want to segue by reading this quote from Marcuse, it's his book, The Aesthetic Dimension Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, and a lot could be said about this book, it's one of Marcuse's last books, and but here's what I want to read to you. In this passage, he's talking about ideology and the rational subject, the subjectivity of individuals and how that tends to be dissolved under advanced capitalism, and then here's the quote Marcuse is saying, a major prerequisite of revolution is minimized, namely the fact that the need for radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves. So, Doug, why for Marcuse is this the case? Why is he saying that radical change needs to be rooted in the individual themselves? Let me connect that with the aesthetic dimension and what Marcuse's vision of art was and the role of art in human liberation and in the development of individuality. Marcuse was a great German in the Bildungs tradition, a great theorist of- Culture, right, Bildungs? Culture and of aesthetics and art, and he believed that art could be an important form of human liberation and development of the individual. So Marcuse wrote the aesthetic dimension that he thought was a dimension of liberation where individuals can liberate themselves through aesthetic education. Now this goes back to German, Marcuse's doctoral dissertation, German artist novel, which about Goethe and Schiller up to Thomas Mann and these novels that wrote about individual liberation of fighting yourself, becoming an individual, et cetera. So Marcuse found this tradition of radical individualism of revolt against society, against society, development of full individuality. He found in German culture and literature, might have loved classical music, you know, Beethoven and Mozart, all of these forms of culture develop the sensibility of individuality, not just the rationality, the intellect, which is important. I mean, Marcuse is obviously in some ways very much of a rationalist as a German idealist. He wanted to integrate mind and body. Mind and body integration, which is why he thought ecology was so important. Okay, great. And one thing I want to point out about the importance of Marcuse, he was, he popularized and struggled in the major political movements of the day. The Civil Rights Movement, that he ends One Dimensional Man was citing. Then the Anti-War Movement, that was the lecture that I heard during the Vietnam War. He was the first to talk about ecology and to affirm the ecological movement that we're in a situation of ecological crisis, which we're exploding today. Yeah, and I want to get back to that very quickly. I just want to mention the women's movement. Thank you. And that was the other important part of Marcuse's analysis of individuals and liberation were gendered individuals. Absolutely. We're in male dominated patriarchal capitalist societies. So, Marcuse was one of the first Marxists to do a critique of patriarchy and to affirm women's liberation at the same time he affirmed ecological liberation, sexual liberation, et cetera. So, gender politics was a very important part of Marcuse. So, Doug, we're almost out of time, but I got to ask you, so what does all of this mean for us in practical terms?  How can, in a word, a sentence to do, how can Marcuse help us to both understand the crises we're in, and there's more than one, but let's focus on the environmental crisis to both understand it and how can it empower his ideas, empower us as citizens of Hawaii or the US to make a difference on these issues? I know that's a huge question, but... Well, this is why Marcuse is so important. Not only did he affirm the new left and all these liberation struggles from women's liberation to gay liberation, but also he affirmed the importance of the ecology movement and ecological crisis as one of our biggest problems, which I'm just coming out of the greatest heatwave of years in Los Angeles. And of course, we had in Florida the most destructive hurricane in over 100 years. So we're obviously in a situation of ecological crisis, but Marcuse not only does an analysis of the problem, but he gives you a answer to what the solution is and its movement, its political struggle, its activism. And this also is relevant for gender, race, class, all of the forms of oppression today. Marcuse, so I saw Marcuse as very important when the Occupy movement, the Arab uprising, Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, all of these new movements that have appeared in the last decades are in some ways very Marcusean, that they were ones that Marcuse would have affirmed, joined, supported. So that's what our lesson is from Marcuse. We have to support all of these important movements, the ecology movement, the Black, Brown power movement, youth movement, all of the political issues and crises we're facing today. Marcuse told us we have to focus on the most important ones and we have to be activists in the movements that are addressing these problems. So that for me is Marcuse's legacy. Well, what a wonderful note to end on. Thanks so much, Doug. Thanks for joining us today and we'd love to have you back sometime soon. Sure, my pleasure, Michael. This has been Thinking Thanks Through, critical thinking for critical times on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Michael Sukhoff. Please join us again, two weeks from today at the same time, wherever you may be. Mahalo. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


Well, I think it gave us a reality check of where we are. That was a really good team. That's the best team we played, or the second bad. We played Vassar, too, who beat Stevens this year. So we have some things to work on. I'd say the third set, we finally started to compete and believe that we could take a game from them. But it wasn't to be. So I told the guys, you know, we just have to keep working, practice and focus on our conference play. Yeah, I'd say when we play well, you know, we're acing the other team more than they're acing us. And I haven't really looked at the stats that much. I'd say that they pretty much outplayed us in all phases of the game. They serve better than we serve. They pass better. They definitely hit better. They side it out like at an incredible rate. So I have to find a way to coach better. Anyway, yeah, the passing, we've been working on the shorter float passes. It just, you know, we ran into some trouble tonight. Well, our next match is our alumni game. Everybody should come out for that Thursday. And so we're practicing next week, Monday through Wednesday. And then we have the big spring break. So it might be good for them to take a break. Their legs looked a little tired. And so, yeah, we're going to go at it. After spring break, we all have a week of practice before we play three important conference matches. Got Alvernia. And we haven't played them yet. But them and Rutgers and Karn.


You know, one inning, two inning, three innings, and then finally in there in that last a bat, it kind of started cramping up on me.  Did you have an MRI, Aaron? No, I get an MRI tomorrow. So that's what we got planned for tomorrow. What are your thoughts based on how it feels right now? I mean, I feel good right now. I mean, so we'll see how it goes today. And, you know, see what the results say tomorrow. Is it similar, Aaron, to the level of pain that you felt last week with the other handspring? No, no, not that much pain at all.  Was there any debate about you staying in the game when Steve and Aaron came out?  Will you change your play tomorrow? I mean, I'm going to try to do everything I can to be able to take it, be ready for tomorrow's game. I mean, that's my plan. Do you think that the H might be a more realistic goal for you? I mean, I don't know. That's not my decision.


Good morning cyber traders happy September 18th, and thank you all for wishing me a happy birthday. I'd like to thank you all I was almost uh, there's so many of you that Try to say as much as I can but thanks everyone It's a beautiful day. I gotta tell you guys a funny story What happened to me this morning and some of you were in this morning, so you know, I open up the room um Around 8 a.m. I was in this morning around 7 30 of zooms from shopping looking for some stocks So, you know how we play the music? so um all of a sudden, you know, I Thought somebody's playing a joke on me. It started playing happy birthday So like I never heard I've been doing this to 25 years I've never heard on the audio player on these on on the live radio stations played happy birthday and You know, I would have to say I Probably think it's an angel of my mom You know, obviously, you know my mom just passed a couple of just two months ago And I says, you know what I bet that was I bet that was my mom wished me a happy birthday It was the weirdest thing I've ever heard in it, you know, if you guys believe in leaving angels You know guardian angels. I would have to say it just want to kind of share that with you I thought it was pretty cool pretty interesting. I showed my wife I thought it was I thought it was pretty funny too, but anyway, anyway, thanks guys for happy birthday At least you believe in angels. I think we all do, you know Especially when you lose somebody so close to you and such a So recently too, it's kind of hard But but anyway guys, thanks a lot and we're gonna get right into and talking about what's going on on September 18th Because today not only it is the greatest day of the year because my birthday, but it is a couple things that are going on That are happening in the market. First of all today is sundown of Yom Kippur It is the most religious holiday of the Jewish community tomorrow So I'm not expecting it to be a very exciting day a lot of Jewish people do are not here on Wall Street and You know just in general when markets slow, you know, we don't want to trade We don't want to get crazy. There are a couple of stocks that are moving and we'll definitely look at some of the stuff but But overall to be very careful today because I'm not really You know feeling it there's a couple of stocks that are moving this morning and honestly a lot of them are expensive Now the big thing a lot of people are talking about is the UV XY One of you just mentioned me earlier. What is a reverse stock split? Well, this is a double short. It's the biggest ETF short, I believe in the industry and I told you I actually bought this ETF as an insurance policy You know just in case it was really cheap yesterday. I think I paid seven bucks for it. Well, I didn't know they would do a reverse stock split So what it means is that? Stocks have to be at a certain price. They'll reverse stock split to make it make it very attractive in the market You know, so when they get so cheap especially anything on the five bucks Stocks obviously can't be traded by mutual funds, whatever So they keep doing reverse stock splits have to reverse stock split to reverse stock split So if you look at the UV XY, you're like, well, I don't remember UV XY trading at 150 because it did so many reverse stock splits and and I showed you this yesterday if you go back on the if you go back and look at my yesterday's yesterday's Recording you could see right here this stock with all the reverse stock splits It's about what five million dollars So this thing has been reversed over verse over verse over verse over verse over verse over but it does move it does move You could see you know the stock they go from like 10,000 to 45,000 because that because you're implementing all the reverse stock splits But the stock can move very very volatile and if you're a little concerned about the market, you know, listen Yeah, it was cheap yesterday move reverse stock split, you know by whatever it is It's another way of trading an option. So there's some way you kind of protect your longs You know if you don't want to do an option play of a leap or something you could do an ETF like this And that's what they're really good for but that's what's going on regarding about that stock Because some of you are asking me now, let's get into the exciting part and see what's going on In the daily markets because there are a couple of interesting stocks that are moving First of all, so we got the UV XY out of the way the the v KTX, okay, so this stock Just had a huge gap up right now Obviously, you could see it's probably a pharmaceutical drug probably came out with some pretty good something pretty good And you can see the stock is doing really really well Pop, but it's kind of flatlined right now. It also has warrants on it And the v k tx w but you don't want to trade warrants from spreads are really big people always ask me What's the difference between the stock and a warrant? Um before there were options there were warrants So stocks are like it's just the kind of rules that allow you that you can't do Voting shares and stuff like that. It's just another way of people making money with warrants not owning the stock But uh, Ben already did pretty well a cholesterol. Is that what they came out with Ken? All right, well cholesterol is big And uh, Ken already made money with us again remember round of applause 35 cents good for you Ben, all right, so let's go look what else it's moving in the morning. Um, I know You know what? I got pretty close on buying it But from watching the stock, um, you know, we've been doing really well with that stock I saw testing some major resistance levels yesterday if it broke that resistance level I was considering buying it But you start to make a little bit of a move this morning. So I don't know something's going on with the stock I want to keep an eye on it. That's gonna be on our watch list The t l r y what's going on? How you doing? Look at this though killing it on this one You know, I mean I sold a cheap What is what it is at least that I could say I was in it But I know some other people are still Riding the wave and this thing is just non-stop and you know, I said this yesterday if you remember When a stock trades like this for a long time with this amount of shares Um, that is a that's a very bullish sign When you trade something like the n i o that we traded and to trade that many shares went up Went up so much faster in t l r y but came back down and never held That is what you know as what's called a short squeeze, you know with all these algorithms going on But this t l r y, you know, obviously people do like it, you know, and it's holding pretty strong It's not like the elephant that we talked about That we traded with all the block trading stuff and all those crypto currencies r d c m Is that coming out? No, I'm sorry m d gl that's the one So here's a stock taking another huge hit, you know, listen, you know, I'm not a fan It's very expensive You know the stock gapped up from 100 went to two to three 20 now it's coming back down It's filling in the gap, you know, it's a level five stock So but you know what the trend is down the stock looks like a probably a nice little short You know, we had a lot of good shorts yesterday, you know and shorting looks like where it's at right now I mean listen the gov was a great short yesterday. Look at that 16 only down to 13 We killed it, you know, it's not something we found In the pre mark of it did show up afterwards n t nx Another great short, you know, that one went from 53 down to 47 now it's just coming back a little bit. I'll throw that one on the watch list the n t Nx maybe you'll get a little bit of a dead cat bounce. I mean, that's not the end of the world But uh, oh that it was the Tndm that was what it was And that one also took a got Destroyed I mean I said that one I probably liked that one got killed So anyway, that stock you could see has been having such a great rally from 10 to 50 and you know, listen Quick winner right there 30 minutes great short 48 to 40 and guys that is what we train for That is what we do and why you got to be aggressive early in the morning Because we only some people always ask me, you know, how many hours you have to do this? Well, I don't know you telling me how long it took you to make, you know Forget about the eight points could have made at least a buck on that trade, you know So you got to be aggressive early make your money and run and that's what it's all about and uh, you're on the middle of the day Did something there to there but overall if you make your money, I would just take money and run All right, anything I'm missing guys that did not call out Charles uh, Charles rose now he said he traded the good on that short Rosalind, I'm sorry rolling. He traded ETSY did a good short. He said he made a day's pay just on that one stock Let's give him a round of applause All right So anyway guys, uh once again be very very careful today it is you know, we're going into a Uh, a holiday which is tomorrow the market is open But um, I expected to be kind of slow going into this afternoon. I think it's gonna be really really slow All right, and uh, so I'll be really really careful what's going on But the couple of good things that are going on also remember we have Uh traders talk that's going on today and then also the new cycles of all the phase one two and three are starting So guys take the time don't worry about it the stock market. I guarantee you is not going out of business So don't worry about it being class. That's what you spend most of your time That's where we learn what's going on. That's where we focused on how to get prepared Remember if you guys like football where they do most of their work It's not on sunday on tv It's monday through saturday and that and that monday through saturday starts today. So make sure you're in class All right, you got to learn Before you could earn all right everybody And uh, just one let and and yes, and and dana also be very careful I've got to mention the china tariffs are also going to be kicking in So that I want to see how that's going to be affected In the market too and that's one of the reasons why I'm a little skeptical on what's going to have marks You might find a couple little Volat with some volatility going to this market classes are going to start at 10 30 and now before the market opens up james. All right All right guys, let's get to let's get to work. Let's get right open Remember, whatever we find this morning doesn't mean it's not going to dictate. We're going to find something Going when the market opens up. There's always new ones that do pop up So let's see how it goes and if you see something say something and hopefully your new members are enjoying yourself and having fun Just look listen to learn happy trading everybody and enjoy class today


Welcome to the Endless Knot. We just got back from Educon and VidCon in LA and Anaheim. And because we'll be travelling more for the next little while, we won't be able to get out another main video very soon. So we took the opportunity while we were at VidCon and Educon to do some interviews with a few of our friends who are also educational YouTube creators. So you can check out their channels and have lots of great videos to watch while you wait for our next video to come out. We had a little fun and I asked each of them to nominate a particular word that was meaningful to them so that I could etymologize it for them. So there are lots of great etymologies in this video as well. Now be aware, these were filmed in a variety of different filming locations with different background noises and so forth. There's a little bit of unevenness here but I think you'll find the interviews quite fun. We put together a playlist of all the videos of theirs that they mention and we'll also put links to individual videos in the comments. So do check those out. Enjoy. Hi, thank you for being here. Hello, thank you for letting me be here. So why don't you introduce your channel and tell us about it. Sure, my channel is called Articulations and I do videos on art, architecture and design. In the art part, a lot of it is about art history or art theory and architecture and design. A lot of it is about architecture and design theory. And I would say a video to start with if you're not familiar with the channel is look for the video, Why Do People Hate Modern Architecture? And I will tell you why. That's probably a good video to start with. So yeah, should head over to that. So, have any interesting little stories or things about your educon so far? We're just beginning but... Yeah, I would say, so I just did a collaboration with my friend Cheryl from the Roving Naturalist and we got to use the space and we... I also did a lighting class and we had a lot of YouTube staff just help us out in setting up cameras and lighting equipment and I managed to get one of their teleprompters so that I could use it and it's just been a really good experience of them just letting us utilize their space. Do you have a word that you'd like to know the history of? I do and actually regarding my collaboration, so it's going to be a video about birds flying into windows. So my word is defenestrate. Defenestrate. This is an odd word because it was invented for one particular occasion, the famous defenestration of Prague in 1621 when three Catholics were thrown at a window by some Protestant radicals and it comes from Latin, made up of Latin elements, day which means from or down from and finestra which means window so it's literally the window and finestra we don't know exactly where it comes from but it might come from the Etruscan language, a sort of extinct language in Italy. Awesome, so if I was throwing someone out of a window I can say I defenestrated this person. Exactly. Perfect. Exactly. So again the channel is Articulations and thank you Betty. Thank you so much. So welcome, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us about your channel. Hi, my name is Willie and I run a channel called Canubis. It's like a social studies channel that's just about how the world works in simple short videos. And is there a particular video you think our viewers might like to start with? Well I think just for a typical video of mine like my latest video as of the filming of this my latest video is a video on how the Schengen area works. Recently the video I've made that I've been the most proud of is a little departure from my normal format but it's my video everything you need to know about Hong Kong. Right. Cool. And do you have any interesting stories or things that have happened so far here at VidCon? Well I mean today's the first day but as I was walking into a panel to get ready to see the panel I did get someone come up to me and ask like hey are you Canubis and I said yes and so he asked me to sign his badge so I basically just got to sign my first real autograph today. Cool. That is really cool. So do you have a word you'd like to know more about? I think you know since alliterative is a channel in etymology I think I'd like to know more about the etymology of the word etymology itself. Yeah well it comes from a Greek root that etymos that means truth. And so you know the original sense of etymology was the sort of study of the truth behind words but of course now we use it to mean not the truth necessarily but the origin of words and words of course change meaning over time so it's not necessarily the truth per se but that is the original meaning behind it. So remember that channel is called Canubis check it out. So welcome why don't you tell us a bit about your channel. My channel is called Knowing Better I do history, government and psychology. I typically do topics that people know a little bit about but I kind of deep dive into them so that you can know the backstory or maybe some of the more difficult terms that we've probably run across stuff like that. Cool and is there a particular video you'd recommend our viewers maybe start with on your channel? Yeah I recently did a pair of videos on Dante's Divine Comedy and John Milton's Paradise Lost and how a lot of Christian beliefs actually come from that fan fiction rather than from the Bible and that series took like two months and it was a big deal so that one. So is there anything interesting about your VidCon experience so far that you'd like to mention? Just being able to put faces to names of people that I've been in contact with forever or are an animated channel like finally being able to meet the person. Cool so again Knowing Better is the channel go check it out. Okay welcome Cypher, why don't you introduce your channel to us? So I'm the cynical historian and I focus on like analytical history sometimes doing movie reviews and kind of just whatever I'm feeling like doing scholastic scholarship wise. Cool and do you think there's a particular video you'd recommend our viewers to start on your channel? Well especially for this channel it has to be something etymologically oriented so and I haven't done one of those in a while. Maybe the Philippines one that was a long time ago though which is basically talking about how like we get the word boondocks and there's a lot of violence in that word. Cool so do you have any interesting stories or things that have happened so far at VidCon? Well we were in a hall just like about an hour ago that had lost air conditioning. Not a good thing to happen at VidCon. Yeah there were like 500 people around just like, it's not 500 it's like 100 but you know still. So what word do you want to know about? Nation. Nation okay well the word nation goes back to a root that means it's the basic way to be born to give birth. So it is also the root of words like pregnant, renaissance and native. Renaissance. Yeah rebirth renaissance. Fascinating because especially considering the way it's continuing to morph. Especially like native has become a politically charged word. Exactly yeah. Yeah cool. Cool so again the channel is the Semical Historian so check that out. So welcome Cheryl why don't you introduce yourself in your channel and tell us a bit about it. Sure thanks. So hi I'm Cheryl the roving naturalist and on my channel I want to answer all the questions you never knew you had about how humans and the environment interact. So it's a lot of biology and environmental science content but seen through the lens of human culture, art, psychology, things like that. And is there a particular video you would recommend our viewers start with? Yeah actually the one that I just published what is an ecosystem is sort of the first video in what will hopefully be a very long playlist where I'm going to be exploring all of the ecosystem. All of the ecosystems on earth and what characteristics sort of define them. Cool. Yeah. So do you have an interesting story or thing that's happened to you at VidCon or at VidCon so far? Oh boy. I don't know that's like an interesting story per se but I just really like being here in the same physical location as all of my internet friends and getting a chance to like hang out and work with people and you know nerd out and brainstorm about things. Like we can have good conversations online but being in person is so much more valuable I think. Yeah I agree. So do you have a word that you would like to know more about? I do. I have always felt a lot of like personal resonance with the word quirky and I'd love to know what the background of that word is. Well the really interesting thing about the word quirky is that it used to have a different meaning. It used to mean shifty. Oh. That's not so good. Not so good. And its etymology is uncertain but it might be connected to the word queer in which case it would go back to a Proto-Indo-European root turquoise which meant to turn. Interesting.  That's really cool. So again the channel is called Rubin Naturalist and you should check it out. So welcome. Why don't you introduce yourself and your channel? Yeah. So my name is Corey. I run a channel called 12 Tone. I'm a music theorist so I make videos about music theory and sort of in a hand-drawn animation style. And we look at popular music and also sort of the deeper structures of a lot of different musical models. Cool. And is there a particular video that you think our viewers should start with? So a lot of our most popular videos are the song analyses, the stuff we do where we look at often rock songs sometimes pop songs. One that I might recommend would be our one on Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd or Money by Pink Floyd. Or I don't know whatever song series we've done a lot. But yeah. Cool. And do you have any interesting tidbit from your time so far? Either EdgyCon or VidCon? I mean probably the most interesting thing that's happened. I got to sit down for a while with Sarah Erest Green from the art assignment. And just like during dinner at EdgyCon just like happened to sit next to each other and just had like a long conversation about like art and the art world. And how the art world is different from the music world and how it's the same. And just about like the difference in reception between like different types of theory. And it was like a really deep and interesting conversation with a very, very smart person who works in a related field and knows a lot of this stuff too. So it was a really fun time. Cool. So did you have a word you'd like me to tell you a little more about? Yeah. So there's one thing that I've been interested or curious about for a while is just in music or when we talk about scales, especially the major scale is like different names for each different note in the scale. And there's sort of three primary important ones. There's the tonic which is the root that it's built on top of. And the third note is the mediant and then the fifth is the dominant. And the first two of those, the etymology is fairly obvious. Like tonic is the tonal center, tonal tone tonic. And then mediant is the midpoint between the other two. But I never understood dominant. I don't know why that happened. So dominant goes back to Latin, domus, which means house. And it goes even further back to Proto-Indo-European with that house sense. But it also then gets expanded to word like dominus, which means lord and dominare to command, to rule over or whatever. So it's that sense that dominant came into English first, just in a general sort of, you know, to be dominant, to rule over, to command. It doesn't get used in the musical sense until as late as 1816, which is in some ways, I suppose, a bit surprising. But on the other hand, if you think about how music theory is being developed. A lot of stuff developed around that later. But what I find really interesting is that unsurprisingly, tonic in the musical sense goes back to the earlier, to the 18th century, but subdominant is recorded in English anyways before dominant in 1803 and a lot before, but a little bit before. Now, both words are probably being used in other languages than English in the musical sense before that. So I'm guessing it actually probably comes from French, from French theorists first, but it could be Italian. I'm not thinking French. A lot of it is Italian. A lot of it is Italian. So it's going to be one or the other. Cool. Interesting. So again, the channel is 12 tone. You should check it out. So welcome. Why don't you introduce yourself and your channel? My channel is Mr. Beat and my name is Mr. Beat. Social Studies channel. Cool. And is there a particular video you would recommend our viewers to start with on your channel? Well, my latest video that is educational is South Dakota, North Dakota Compaired.  Which is better. Cool. And do you have any interesting thing about VidCon or EduCon that's happened so far? Anything to comment on you'd like to mention? I think just when I didn't think it was possible to meet more educational YouTubers, I met like twice as many as I expected. Like I thought I knew what this world, you know, we all kind of know each other, but today there's at least probably 25, 30 new educational YouTubers that I met. I was like, holy crap, where have you been? So yeah, the world is bigger than we initially realized. Cool. So you have a word or really a phrase you'd like to hear more about. What's that? Yeah, I've always been fascinated by Pull One Self Up by their bootstraps because I know it originally had a different kind of meaning. But now it's like people seem to think that, yeah, like if you want to make it in the United States, especially always gets associated with this, but you know, you got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and go get it. Yeah. Yeah, that sort of self-made man kind of thing. Exactly. Yeah. Well, that's right. It did have a different meaning. Originally it referred to doing the sort of seemingly impossible. And it seems to possibly come from, or at least the inspiration for the phrase might have come from, one of the adventure stories of Baron von Munchausen, in which he doesn't pull himself up by his bootstraps, but he pulls himself and his horse out of a mire by pulling on his own ponytail. So to do the sort of seemingly impossible thing. Yeah. And it was used in sort of kind of physics questions as a thing. Why doesn't this work sort of thing originally? And then it moved into the sort of self-made man.  That's right. Okay, so that's kind of the opposite today. Yeah. Yeah. All right, I'm glad I chose that one. Cool. So remember the channel is Mr. Beat. Check it out. Thanks. So welcome, Tristan. Why don't you introduce yourself in your channel? Sure. I'm Tristan from Step Back History, found at stepbackhistory.com. I do video videos about history, specifically trying to get away from stories of kings, generals, conquerors, and rulers and such like that. Do you have a particular video you suggest our viewers start with on your channel? I think a literary fans would probably get a kick out of one I did a very long time ago, which was about a delve through an old medical textbook called Bald's Leech Book, which resulted in a sty remedy for eye infections, which then, when tested, turned out to actually be an effective antibiotic against bacteria that we don't have antibiotics for. That's very cool. So do you have any interesting thing to tell us about your VidCon experience? I've had a lot of fun times here at VidCon. I think the best thing I've seen so far is the kid who dressed up like they were in an apology video, putting their head through this thing with lots and lots of ad breaks at the bottom with a bunch of tissues. I think that's probably been the highlight of the visual sights of this place. Cool. So you have a word you want to know more about? Yes. I am much to the chagrin of many of my subscribers a pacifist, and I would like to know more about the roots of such a word. Certainly. Well, the word pacifist comes from Latin Pax, meaning peace, and ultimately that goes back to Proto-Indo-European root, Pag, that means to fasten. So it's the idea of fixing a truce in a sort of pact. In fact, the word pact comes from that same root. It's also related to the word pagan because of the idea of boundary markers, because pagan originally referred to people in the countryside. Okay. So it's about making a pact with the outsiders. Yeah. And I guess you just add, it's to the end, where you take it to its logical extreme. Yes. Okay. It makes sense. There you go. So again, check out the channel. It's called Step Back, and you'll find all the links. Also, like and subscribe to more of these. So check all those videos out. Check out the playlist, and the links to individual videos are in the description. And we'll be back with a new video in a little while.