Youtube daily Or Dec 2 2017

Thank you everyone very much for coming out tonight.

Um, my name's Sam Adkison and I'm the president of the Yale Federalist Society.

To those of you watching with us here in the auditorium, welcome.

We're glad to have you here for this important conversation.

Tonight, we're here to discuss one of the important political touchstones of our time,

income inequality.

The purpose of tonight's event is to look at any income inequality and ask a simple

question, but important one.

Is it fair or is it unfair?

Joining us tonight are two of the best people we could have to talk about that question.

Uh, immediately to my right is Professor Markovits and to his right is Dr. Yaron Brooks.

The only time I'll be to your right.

I'm not- (laughs) that is, that is true.

That is true.

(laughs) Give it up.

Dr. Yaron Brooks is an entrepreneur, author, and a former academic who currently serves

as executive chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Uh, he was born in Israel, immigrated to the United States, and became a citizen in 2003.

He attended, uh, Texas where he received his MBA and his PhD in finance.

And after that, he went on to teach at Santa Clara University before becoming a founding

partner at a private equity firm and hedge fund.

He's a co-author of several books, including "Equal is Unfair," "The Free Market Revolution,"

and In "Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance."

And Professor Daniel Markovits, who many of you know here, is the Guido Calabresi professor

of law at Yale Law School.

He works in the philosophical foundation of private law, moral and political philosophy,

and behavioral economics.

Professor Markovits has written articles on contract, legal ethics, distributive justice,

democratic theory, and other-regarding preferences.

He earned his BA here at Yale in mathematics, summa cum laude.

Uh, and then he also, he received a Marshall Scholarship where he was awarded an MSc in

econo-, econometrics and mathematical economics from LSE, and then a BPhil and DPhil from

the University of Oxford before coming back to Yale Law School, where he received his

law degree.

Tonight's discussion, just so folks know what the logistics look like, we'll proceed in

the following way.

Each speaker will be given 15 minutes, uh, to express their general views on the topics.

They'll then be given five more minutes, uh, to share anything else they like.

And then at that point, we'll open this up to audience question and answer.

And we'd love to have your questions.

There'll be microphones on both sides of the room, uh, put in the middle of the aisle.

And so, once we get to the Q&A portion, we'd love to have you line up and ask any questions

you'd like.

With that, please join me in welcoming Yaron Brooks and Daniel Markovits to the stage.

Thank you.

Dr. Brooks.

Thank you.

(laughs) Thank you all for being here.

Thank you to the Federalist Society for putting on this, uh, this event.

And thank you for all you people in the livestream.

Um, and, uh, the sushi was good, right?

So, inequality, is, is it, is it fair?

Uh, obviously, over the last, uh, you know, five, six, seven years, this is becoming a

massive issue.

Uh, inequality today is blamed for almost every political social ill that exists in

the world.

From, uh, the, the stagnation of the poor, the inability of, of poor people to rise up,

from the, uh, from an eco-, uh, economic, uh, growth being stagnant and, and, uh, economic

growth, uh, uh, you know, the middle class not growing very fast to cronyism, uh, at

the top, all the way to terrorism.

Almost everything today, if you read the New York Times or almost every publication, is

being blamed somehow on inequality.

So, let's be clear about what we mean by inequality.

What we mean by inequality is the gap, is the difference between how much people earn.

And some way in the bottom, it could be in the low middle class, it could be in, in the,

in the lower regions, uh, to what people are earning on, at the 1%, you know, somewhere

at the top.

That gap, that is income inequality, and that we are told is a problem, and that we are

told is unfair.

So, let's start by asking the question, what do we mean by fair?

What is fairness when it comes to income, when it comes to wealth?

What do we mean when we say something is fair or unfair?

Well, I think what we mean is, is it deserved or isn't it deserved?

Do the 1% deserve to make as much as they make?

Do the people who make minimum wage deserve to make minimum wage?

Is it right for them to make that level?

And then, of course, the question is, well, how do you determine desert?

How do you determine what people deserve in terms of income?

And I would say that you deserve your income based on the value that you create in a marketplace.

So, to the extent that the 1%, to the extent that, that, uh, you know, CEOs in Silicon

Valley or the Steve Jobs' and the Bill Gates' of the world, the really, really wealthy individuals

at the very top.

To the extent that they create massive amount of value, I would argue that they deserve

to keep that value.

They created it.

That's the point.

They create value.

People who work at McDonald's, indeed, don't create a lot of value.

To take a couple of buns and to put a piece of meat in, in it and some, some lettuce and

tomatoes is, is value, it's not zero, but it's certainly not the same as inventing an

iPhone or building a company like Microsoft, which literally changed the world.

Because it's, it's interesting to ask the question, because most of the, most the claims

are towards the people at the very top.

How do you become a billionaire?

What's the secret to success?

What makes it possible to be a billionaire?

Well, the only way to become a billionaire in a free market ... We'll get to cases where

you don't have freedom.

In a free market, the only way to become a billionaire is to create something that people

are willing to pay more for than it costs you to produce.

But not just some people are willing to pay, millions and millions and millions, maybe

even billions of people are willing to pay.

And why are they willing to pay, I don't know, the $500 for an iPhone?

Why, why is anybody willing to give up $500 to get an iPhone?

Because they believe that their life will be better off by giving up $500 and getting

an iPhone.

So, the only way to become a billionaire is by creating values that other people care

about, that other pe-, that improve the lives of billions of people.

Microsoft changed the world in profound deep ways.

Apple did the same.

And almost every billionaire out there has changed the world in profound ways, has created

value for millions of people, have made their lives, those millions of people, better off.

But if you look at the inequality literature, every time I buy an iPhone, I get $500 poorer

and Apple gets $500 richer, and our inequality has just expanded.

I'll give you an example that's, uh, less material that I, I, I find a fun example.

How many of you read Harry Potter?

I assume all of you.

Hmm, this is the generation.

So, my kids, uh, loved Harry Potter.

I enjoyed Harry Potter.

Um, so, every time a Harry Potter book would come out, I would have to buy two copies,

one for each one of my sons.

And then, I'd have to buy a third copy in audio for me because I wanted to listen to

it.

And, and so, I, I spent three.

And then, I had to buy, I had to go to the movies for the whole family would go to every

single one of the moves.

I figured out that I've spent about $3,000 on Harry Potter.

According to Thomas Piketty and most economists of inequality, I got poorer by $3,000.

And guess what?

J.K.

Rowlings became a billionaire.

How dare she?

At my expense.

But, of course, I didn't become poorer by $3,000.

I became richer by much more than $3,000.

You just can't measure the way I became richer.

I got richer in spiritual value.

My life is more fun for having read Harry Potter.

My children's life is better for having read Harry Potter.

And J.K.

Rowlings made over a billion dollars.

Good for her for making all of our lives better and reaping rewards as a consequence of that.

So, in my view, when people earn money by creating value, who are we to then come and

say, "We need to take your money away in the name of what" to give it to somebody else

who hasn't created that value?

We often hear this analogy of a pie.

You know, you, you, you, a bunch of friends get together and somebody brings a pizza and

there's a discussion about how you're gonna divide the pie.

And the assumption is always you should divide it up around equally because, you know, we're

all a bunch of friends and we're all gonna eat about the same, and that seems right.

And we assume that wealth is a pie.

And that we're gonna divvy up, therefore, it should be divvied up about the same.

But why?

First of all, the pie, it's such a bad analogy.

I hate the pie analogy.

Because the pie is fixed.

Wealth is created.

Wealth is constantly growing through trade, through creation, through production, through

the provision of services.

The pie is constantly growing.

So, to assume that it's fixed, and therefore we should, we haven't, we, we know exactly

how to divvy it up is bizarre.

But there's even a more insidious problem with the pie analogy, which everybody loves

to use.

And that is that there's such a thing as a pie, but there isn't.

There's the pie you make and the pie I make and the pie they make, that person makes over

there.

We each make our own pie.

You don't get to squish all the pies together and create some kinda social pie and then

decide how to divide it up.

You don't have a right to take my pie and squish it into your pie and then split it

equally.

It's my pie because I built it.

I created it.

And you created your pie and you have every right to do what you will with your pie.

I deserve the pie that I bake.

You deserve the pie that you bake.

Nobody has a right to take my pie away and give it away to somebody else.

So, the whole idea of, of this pie is, is a, is a, is a ridiculous analogy.

It's the collectivization of wealth, but wealth is not collective.

There is no social wealth.

There is no wealth of America.

Yes, economists can add up all these numbers and, and, and put them all together into an

equation.

But that doesn't make it society's wealth.

Wealth is individual.

Wealth is individual.

It's each one of us.

We are responsible for our own lives.

We are responsible for our own creation, for our own work, for the energy, the effort,

the intensity we put, the focus we place in our work and what we do.

So, you deserve the pie that you make.

Now, let me say that there are other problems that are attributed to inequality.

Let me admit that they all really do exist.

It's just none of them has anything to do with inequality.

It is true that there is a real problem today in America of the poor not being able to rise

up as fast as we would like them to, as fast as maybe in previous generations they could.

It is true that the middle class is not growing as fast as, as, as ... It would be nice if

it grew, if the economy was growing much faster.

And it's true that some people at the top don't actually create their wealth, but have

found ways to rig the system through abuse of government in order to accumulate wealth.

All those are true and all those are problems.

But the attempts to solve them by reducing inequality make them worse.

It is attempt to improve a lot of the poor through redistribution of wealth and through

all kind of protection mechanisms which keeps people poor.

The best example of this is the minimum wage.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour makes middle-class Americans feel good.

But it destroys the ability of young inner city youth to get their first job and, therefore,

advance in life.

It destroys their ability to ever have a job and to ever find work.

And it's true the economy is not going as fast as I believe it could be growing.

And that is because we suck so much capital out of the economy in the way of, in the name

of redistribution, and regulate and control businesses to the extent that we do.

And finally, it's true that there's cronyism, and cronyism is a very bad thing.

But cronyism is a phenomena of big government.

It is a phenomena of a government that is trying to manage and run our lives.

It's a phenomena of statism, of placing the state above the individual and allowing government

to take on more and more and more responsibilities.

It is a phenomena of unlimited government.

So, if you care about any of these issues, the solution is the exact opposite solution

of what those claiming that inequality is a problem offer.

The solution is more freedom.

The solution is more limited government.

The solution is getting government out of our lives and letting a free market reign,

a true free market, where your value is determined by the real economic value, your value from

an economic perspective, where your real economic value ... The economic value again is based

on the economic value you produce.

Let me make one final point.

Uh, I think I got two minutes.

There is only one sense in which equality is a legitimate concept, because the fact

is that in terms of outcome, which is what we're talking about, income is an outcome.

In terms of outcome, inequality, your equality is an impossibility.

Equality is metaphysically impossible and equality is a disaster when it's attempted

in terms of outcome.

There is no such thing as equality of outcome.

You just look around the room, it's hard because it's dark, but I can still tell that all of

you are different.

You have different skills, different abilities, different characters, different interests,

different motivations.

You're different.

And if I leave you free, if I don't try to manage and run your lives, if I don't use

force on you, if I don't force you to be a particular way, it is not shocking that if

you're left free, you're all gonna produce different amounts, different things.

You're gonna be, have different outcomes.

And because life is not just about money, we, it doesn't really matter that those outcomes

are different.

We've chosen to be teachers knowing that we're gonna make less money than if we'd gone to

Wall Street.

We're both pretty smart.

I think we both would've done okay on Wall Street.

But we chosen to take less money because we love teaching.

We are gonna make different choices.

That's great.

That's wonderful.

That's what life ... You know, life is so rich because of the kind of division of labor

that results when people are free and people are different.

There's only one sense in which equality means something politically.

That is equality of rights, equality of freedom, equality before the law, political equality.

That is the kind of equality we should fight for.

We should fight for the idea that the government does not have a right to discriminate between

people.

We should fight for the idea that we all have the right to life, liberty, property, and

the pursuit of happiness.

Each one of us as an individual, no matter what the economic circumstances of our birth,

no matter our skin color, no matter our gender, no matter anything like that, that kind of

equality is what I think this country should be about.

And that's the kind of equality I think we should be fighting for.

But you have to realize that that kind of equality necessarily results in income and

wealth inequality, because when you leave people free, they produce different amounts,

they produce different things.

So, I think we should celebrate inequality when it's in a free market, because we should

celebrate freedom.

And inequality is just a feature, it's not a bug, it's a feature of freedom.

So, given that inequality is a feature of freedom, I'm all for freedom.

Thank you.

Prof. Markovits: Well, I'm gonna start by talking about something that is not at the

center of our conversation today just to acknowledge it because it's important.

And then, I'm gonna move on to the central arguments that we've just heard.

The first thought is that there's a difference between inequality and poverty.

And how one thinks about poverty is a separate issue.

There's a lot of poverty, including in a rich country like this one.

And there's good reason to think, and we could have another discussion about it, that the

appropriate moral response to poverty in a decent person, in a decent society is to relieve

it, that human need states its own unanswerable claim.

At the same time, inequality is different from poverty in the following sense.

One can have a large gap between the rich and the middle without there being very many

poor.

And in fact, historically in the United States over the past 50 years, poverty has diminished,

nevertheless remaining at unacceptably high levels even as the gap between the rich and

the middle has exploded.

And we are called together today to discuss that gap, whether that gap is warranted.

Now, the argument in favor of the gap that we've just heard has a very simple structure.

People deserve what they create.

And when people capture the economic value of what they create, it's better in general,

because more of value is made.

Both of those claims are mistaken.

They're not just morally mistaken, they're mistaken as a matter of the description of

the world that we live in and of the relations in which people act.

Now, let me talk about desert a little bit and then I'll talk about the others.

Desert can mean a couple different things.

One thing that it can mean is that I am, in some way, possible for being in the position

in which I now am.

We all recognize that there's all the difference in the world between finding the pot of gold

yourself and being led to the pot of gold and bending down and picking it up.

The second person is not someone who deserves what she gets.

So, it's important to try to understand what makes people get ahead in this society here,

now.

And if you introspect, people in this room have mostly gotten ahead.

One thing you'll see is that there are lots of little instances in which you had an advantage

by dumb luck, or maybe even by something like smart luck, but the smart wasn't a fair smart.

So, we began here, some people said about my degrees.

A story about when I was a sophomore in college, I was falling in love for the first time.

My head was not in my books.

I did not study for my mathematical economics final exam.

I failed it abysmally.

Professor called me into her office, said, "What happened?"

I said, "I didn't understand the material and couldn't answer the questions correctly."

She looked at me and said, "You're a pretty smart guy, right?"

I said, "Well, maybe."

"So you get an A." I walked out of the class with an A, which was essential to my having

a record that enabled me to get subsequent advantages.

Now, at the University of Connecticut, I do not get an A, if that happens.

The University of Connecticut, I get an F.

There is no question about it.

Now, ask, who ends up at a place like this university?

Well, there are more children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution

than in the entire bottom half.

There are six times as many children whose parents are in the top quarter of the income

distribution than in the next quarter, not in the bottom half, in the next quarter.

A university like this one, overwhelmingly, is filled with children of immense privilege

who undoubtedly work and work intelligently when they're here, but are sitting atop a

mountain of privilege that's unimaginably high.

Moreover, when they get here, an amount of money is spent on their education and then

on promoting their careers, which is incomparably greater to anything that is spent not just

on children from poor households, but on middle class children.

Furthermore, the rich children don't actually pay for what they are getting spent on them.

At the richest universities in the United States, the average student pays only 20 cents

out of every dollar that's devoted to her education.

At the poorest universities, the average student pays 80 cents out of every dollar that's devoted

to her education.

And the kids who don't go to university pay 100% of every dollar that's not devoted to

their education.

Moreover, those arrangements are facilitated by collective decisions which favor the rich

over everyone else in society.

If I ask people in this room who are students at Yale to raise their hand if their parents

went to college, 85% to 95% of you would raise your hand.

And if I asked you how many went to a pretty fancy college, 60% to 70% of you would raise

your hand.

Now, a university like Yale manages to make ends meet because it has a business model

which relies on its not-for-profit status.

Its endowment grows without sub-, being subject to taxation, and alumni can donate out of

tax-deductible monies.

At Princeton University in a recent year, 81% of its total budget came from those sources.

And the endowment alone generated over $400,000 a year per student.

All of that is tax subsidized.

In a world in which the children who are at those universities, the students are the children

of graduates of those universities, the tax subsidy doesn't represent a public good.

It represents a club in which the elite has managed to get everybody else to pay for the

goodies that allow each children to continue to advance in the world.

This is not a world in which anybody who runs through these institutions is entitled to

the results of their education.

None of that is to impugn an individual person's morality.

None of that is to impugn their effort or their diligence.

It's just to say they are entering into a system that is rigged in their favor.

If you want a sense of the extent of the rightness, if you took the difference between what an

average family in the top 1% of the US distribution spends on his children's education and, and

a middle-class family, the median household in America, spends on its education.

Just money, don't pay attention to time, or expertise, or connections, or all the other

things that we know also advantage those who are born lucky.

Just money.

And you took those sums, and you put them in an investment account and invest them in

the S&P 500, and gave them to the children on the death of the parents, that would be

$10 million per child.

Now, I picked that experiment because the way in which the old elite perpetuated itself

dynastically was by giving bequests of money to children who just happened to be lucky

to inherit.

The way in which this elite perpetuates itself dynastically is by giving equivalently enormous

lifetime training grants that enable the children to get ahead.

And there is no conceivable world in which that is fair.

Now, there's a second part of this argument that we've heard that simply is mistaken,

which is that people deserve what they produce because the market values it.

There is no morally neutral sense of the market.

Let me give you a, an example or a series of examples and we can talk them through.

I have a friend who was an extremely successful woman, a one percenter, uniformly thought

to be brilliant, capable, effective in the world.

I was once in the woods with her and an anthropologist.

And we were throwing a boomerang, and he saw her throw a boomerang.

And he said to her, "Mira, in a society of hunter-gatherers, you would be a gatherer."

The point is, what skills you have and what is valuable isn't a natural relation.

It depends on what everybody else is doing on how the society is organized.

In a society which values certain forms of work effort and intellectual and analytic

ability, certain people do well.

In a hunter-gathering society, other people do well.

Now, add that we live in a society in which who does well is conditioned by inequality.

We live in a society in which the fact that some people are very, very rich determines

whose skills are valuable

Let me give you an example along those lines.

At the moment, if you look at the 20 richest people in the world, 14 of them owe their

fortunes either to dealing with the super rich or to dealing with the struggling poor.

These are people who are in types of businesses where they sell luxury goods or they sell

goods on terms that only people who are economically struggling would buy.

14 of the 20 greatest fortunes in the world are dependent on inequality.

If there were more equality, if there were just a middle class, those people would not

be rich, because the things that they specialize in would not be valuable.

That's the difference with J.K.

Rowling.

J.K.

Rowling is rich because she serves the middle class, but most rich people do not.

Take a look at the professions and the jobs that make people in the United States members

of the 1% today.

If you look at finance, management, including management consulting, law and elite medicine,

you account for half to two-thirds of the 1%.

Just numerically, counting jobs.

Those are all businesses which have at their financial core and their business model that

they serve antecedent wealth.

Finance is a nice example of this.

Finance at mid-century until about 1975 was neither more highly paid nor more educated

or more skilled than the rest of the economy.

What happened?

Well, what happened was the United States won the space race, and they talked with the

Russians occurred, and we had a surplus of physicists produced by our universities.

They went in to finance.

The first people in finance who started developing derivatives and marketing them were called

rocket scientists.

The reason is they were rocket scientists.

They restructured the way in which finance operates.

Since that time, fewer and fewer people worked in finance.

They are more and more skilled.

And each of them makes a much, much higher income.

At the same time, the efficiency of the financial system has gone down.

If you ask the question, how much fundamental risk stays with the individual?

It is more today than it was in 1975.

If you ask, what are the costs of raising money?

They are as high today as they were in 1975.

This is what economists who are no enemies of finance say.

So, what you have is a financial sector which has been restructured around enormous wealth

and now makes people rich.

But if we had a more equal economy, those people with those skills wouldn't get paid

as much.

Other people would get paid.

That's the story that we are living right now.

Let me close with a parable.

Imagine a society in which there are warriors and there are traders.

And the society lives at peace with its neighbors.

And both the warriors and the traders do pretty well.

Then, one day, one of the warriors starts a skirmish with a neighboring society.

The skirmish is reciprocated.

There's a war.

The warriors choose a path of aggression.

Soon, there are more and more border wars.

Eventually, the society is in a constant state of war.

Now that the society is in a constant state of war, the warriors claim all the wealth,

all the power, and all the privilege.

And when asked why they deserve it, they say, "It's because we are essential to our society's

protection.

There's nothing for you, traders, to trade.

And our cunning and strength are necessary for everyone to do well."

To which the traders can answer, "If you hadn't started the war, we wouldn't be in this position."

And that's the position that the middle class is in in the United States today.

Elites have, by concentrating training in their children and producing a class of workers

who have a very particular set of skills, and then, in gross and in fine, restructuring

the economy in the way in which things are made and the way in which people are paid

so that precisely those skills are valuable, created a class of workers who make enormous

sums of money and can then do the same to their children, and the cycle continues.

So, who deserves what?

That's not a well-formed question.

The question is, what is a kind of society that we can have in which we all live freely,

respectfully, and flourish with dignity?

And that's a society in which education is more equally distributed in which the forms

of work that require enormous training are reduced, and there are lots more jobs for

mid-skilled people, and in which people engage one another on equal terms.

Not identical.

Of course, not.

That's an absurd thought.

Rather, on terms of rough equality so they can each imagine the other's lives, and so

they can treat each other with respect as equals.

Now, in the conversation, I hope people ask how we get there.

I have thoughts about that, including concrete ones, but I've said enough for now.

Dr. Yaron Brook: Five minutes?

Good.

So, we disagree on pretty much everything.

Um, let me, let me try to take some of the arguments, uh, sequentially.

Um, yeah, uh, if I work hard and if I dedicate a lot of energy to trying to create some wealth

for myself, I want my children to get a good education.

Absolutely.

One of the reasons some of us work hard and some of us try to make a lot of money is to

be able to maximize the opportunities for our children.

It's one of the things that motivates me and I think motivates many parents in trying to

achieve more.

Now, I agree that the system, to some extent, is rigged.

I, the whole tax structure and the whole way in which we finance education in the United

States today is rigged in all kinds of directions that benefit all kinds of ways and all kinds

of people.

And I would love to see, uh, you know, the government get out of the business of, of

financing and rigging the educational system so that education can be a free market, wherein

education, you have real competition and real innovation and where prices can actually come

down in education rather than accelerating upwards like in any field that the government

enters.

Prices accelerate upwards.

And, and, and this is what's happening in education.

So, uh, yeah, the system is rigged by too much government intervention and, and I fear

that the solution is always more government intervention.

But, yes.

Uh, there are going to be differences in education, always.

It's part of what motivates you in life to, to, to strive and succeed.

But it's also true that just because you get a Yale education doesn't mean you're going

to succeed.

Uh, some of the richest people in the world and, and by the way, the 14 out of the 20

richest people in the world, that is true, because many of them live in countries that

are not free where they are complete cronies and where they indeed are exploiting the poor

and exploiting other people in order to do that.

[crosstalk 00:36:47] Not true.

Then, then, then, I challenge your statistic, it's just not true.

If you look at the top 20, uh, American billionaires, that is simply not true.

All, almost all of them are, are dealing with the middle class.

And, indeed, what the doctors, lawyers, and everybody else do and, and, well, we'll get

to the finance in a minute 'cause I actually happen to know something about that.

Um, people of all, from, from every, uh, realm of, of the income distribution and for every

university, as somebody who never went to a Yale and to an Oxford, uh, you know, I,

I don't feel as privileged, I guess.

But, uh, the whole notion of, of, of privilege, privilege in a sense that somebody gave you

a favor, privilege assumes kind of aristocracy, kind of a government favor that you got.

Yes, your parents worked hard, so you could get a good education.

And you know what?

If you screw up your life, if you take that education and don't do something with it,

you're not gonna be as successful in life.

It's your life and then you still have to do something with it.

There are plenty of billionaires out there, many of the billionaires in the top 20 who

never went to school or who dropped out, and they made the money.

So, the fact that you're at Yale doesn't guarantee you entry into a successful life, into a flourishing,

prosperous life.

Uh, people at the end of the day are responsible for what they do with their own life.

And, yes, some people have more advantages than others.

That's, that's obvious.

That's kind of obvious.

Uh, some parents are more loving, some parents are less loving.

All of that is part of reality.

The question is wh-, at that point, what do we do with it?

Are we free then to pursue our own values?

Are we free then to make the most of our own life?

Or are we gonna have force used on us to tell us what profession's acceptable and what profession's

unacceptable?

Are we gonna force not to be able to go to Yale even if we can afford to go to Yale and

be forced into a different school because somebody else believes that that's what's

good for society?

I don't believe in force.

I, I don't believe in coercion.

I don't believe in forcing people.

Uh, I believe in leaving people free.

And boy, as I said, we're gonna be different.

We're gonna have different opportunities.

We're gonna have, uh, different starting points.

We're gonna have different ending points.

But the idea that some central planner has a better knowledge of what values we should

pursue as individuals is, is, uh, insulting, uh, to us as individuals.

Uh, I, I'll just say the story about finance is, in my view, science fiction.

Uh, uh, finance today primarily serves the wealth that exists in pension plans and, and,

uh, is primarily serving, uh, the middle class.

Most investors in hedge funds and private equity funds are so-called, you know, uh,

uh, uh, is, is middle-class wealth.

It's, it's, it's, it's pension plans.

Uh, so, it's not, it's not as if, uh, these, these are little clubs only, uh, you're only

allowed in if you're, if you're some gazillionaire.

Uh, financial markets today, uh, given a globalization, given the amount of risk that, that exists

in the world today, the financial markets today are far more efficient, far more productive,

far more capable.

Uh, the amount of production, the amount of innovation, the amount of creativity today

in the financial industry at least before, um, uh, you know, the, what's his name?

Dodd-Frank.

Before Dodd-Frank is just mind-boggling.

Those, uh, physicists who created derivatives did amazing work for the, for, for all of

us.

We benefit enormously from the fact, for what they did.

It's no accident that Silicon Valley and the progress made in Silicon Valley came when

it did in the 1980s, uh, when finance was robust and, uh, and effective, and productive

and managed to reallocate massive quantities of, of capital from industries that were failing

to industries that were rising.

Let me make one last point.

300 years ago, and certainly in the hunter-gatherer societies, we were all poor, all of us were

poor.

I mean, there was a little bit of aristocrit-, aristocrats up here who, relative to us, were

still poor, but relative to their own societies were, were rich.

95% of humanity, 95% of humanity lived on $3 a day or less.

We were subsistence farmers, we had nothing.

It is the division of labor society that's just been criticized that made it possible

for us to rise up from there poverty.

It is the freedom and the capitalism that started with the Industrial Revolution that

made it possible for us, even half the middle class.

There would be no middle-class if not for capitalism, if not for robust financial markets,

if not for entrepreneurs, if not for the non-existence of massive redistribution of wealth schemes.

It is economic freedom that allowed us to rise out of poverty, so that today only 8%

of the population in the world lives under $3 a day, 8% from 95% in 200 years.

Capitalism, the, the, the, the, the kind of system that creates these professions is what

has allowed humanity to rise up from the ashes, is what has allowed humanity to rise up from

subsistence farming.

It's what's more than doubled life expectancy.

It's what made life so amazing, even for the poor in America relative to what poverty looks

like anywhere else in the world.

So, to be critical of the kind of division of labor society we have today and, and to,

to compare it to, to boomerangs, yeah, you could, you could, you know, different people

succeed in a boomerang society than succeed today.

Thank goodness we live in a society today, because all of us, including the best boomerang

throwers in the world during hunter-gatherers, live a gazillion times better today on minimum

wage than they did back then under hunter-gatherer societies.

So, hurray for the capitalism to the extent that we've had it over the last 200 years.

Thank you.

The, the bo-, the boomerang, uh, is a joke not an argument.

(laughing)

Okay.

And as a general matter, to reject one extreme isn't to affirm the opposite extreme.

Nobody is talking about central planning, collective ownership of key industries.

Rather, and I'll say a little bit about what I am talking about, it's talking about a thoughtfully

managed, mixed economy that serves the common good.

Now, there are a couple things that I just wanna correct.

For example, the richest 1% in United States today own, depending on how one counts, between

26% and 42% of all the wealth in the country.

They own over half of the equities in the country.

So, it is not true that finance principally serves the middle class.

In a literal sense, it principally serves the very rich.

Second, it is, of course, true that one can have every advantage showered on you, and

you can still screw it up.

That's not the question.

The question is, what are your odds of success if you don't have the advantages showered

on you?

And at this moment, for example, 86% of the partners at the most profitable law firm in

America went to five law schools.

The elite investment banks, five to eight of them, recruit only at Harvard, Yale, Princeton,

Stanford, and Williams.

You don't go to those places, you're not getting in.

That's not a question of, "Oh, it's a little harder or ..." no, that's the equivalent of

a no.

It's an unfreedom.

It's a constraint. if one adds up those kinds of advantages all throughout the system, one

produces massive, not just economic difficulty, but unfreedom for most people in the society.

Here's an example.

At the moment, the gap in SAT scores between children whose parents earn over $200,000

a year, that's the top 4% of the distribution, and the median child, is over twice as big

as the gap in SAT scores, between the median child and a child in poverty.

That's because the rich get their kids private teaching.

And you can't get ahead in a competitive academic system without the private teaching.

Finally, this is not a system that serves even the rich.

And that's important to say, too.

It is true that you can get every advantage and still screw it up.

It's not only true, it's a constant fear among the rich, because the competition has become

so stiff, because the inequality has gotten such a spiky fine point.

That in a world in which 86% of the partners at the most profitable law firm in the country

go to five law schools, and that law firm has 5 to 10 times the profits per partner

of the 25th most po-, profitable law firm.

The difference between going to the seventh best law school and the first best law school

over the course of your life is literally $100 million.

And so, you're a privileged kid, and you're in second grade, and you're wondering what

to do, and your parents, maybe you're in one of these, and they know this.

And so, you're made unfree, too, because the inequality has become so extreme that everybody

at every level can fall off of what seems to them a cliff.

Now, there's an honest response and there's an ideological response to this.

The honest response is to say, "Hey, wait a minute, something has gone wrong."

And what's gone wrong is that we are differentiating people in damaging ways, and we're worshiping

something that's not actually valuable because all it does is make a few lucky people rich

rather than make everybody flourish.

And the ideological response is to double down on the idea of meritocracy, to insist

that because it's so hard to get something, it must be valuable.

That's the ideological response.

And then, to pursue it, all get out and blame those who don't have it.

And that doesn't serve anybody's interests.

Thank you very much, Professor Markovits.

And, and thank you both for the spirited discussion.

And so, at this point, we're gonna move into the Q&A portion of the event.

And so, if I could have a couple of people move the microphones into the middle of the

aisles and turn them on, and if you have a question, uh, please line up behind them.

But, uh, I did wanna start off with a question for both of you.

And with most of these questions, we'll try and give both of you an opportunity to answer

so long as you have something you'd like to say.

Uh, but the question I would pose to each of you is, is you both have theories of, of

inequality and you think that things in America right now could be better in things in countries

around the world.

If you are going to implement two or three policy suggestions, ways that society could

change in ways that, that you think would make lives better, what would those be?

Thank you.

Please.

Two or three, huh?

Um-

Two or three.

So, I would, I would go back to education 'cause I, I agree.

I think one of the ways in which American society today is, um, has turned its back

on, on, on poor people in this country.

One, one of the things that I think is a disgrace is the quality of education that, uh, many

people in, in our poorer neighborhoods, uh, get.

I mean, if you look at the kind of education you get in the inner city of New York, it

is, and, and it's not an issue of money because they spent a huge amount of money.

$15,000 a year per child in the inner city of Chicago, uh, on, on education and yet the

quality of education is abysmal.

It is beneath, uh, anything that, that should be acceptable in a civilized society.

So, I think the most important thing that needs to be addressed is education.

Now, uh, I think that on that point, we'll agree, and then from here, we won't.

And I believe the solution to that is to completely and utterly privatize education, particularly

at the lower grades and, and, and throughout the K through 12.

Uh, I would love to see entrepreneurship, innovation, competition.

I'd like to see the next entrepreneur, instead of thinking about how to make the next stupid

little andi-, Angry Birds app for the Apple, think about how to start an educational institution,

where at a, we at a cheap cost can provide a great educational product.

I'd like to see real competition and real innovation in the field of, of education.

I think education is way, way, way too important to leave to politicians, to student, to, uh,

teacher unions, uh, to government.

Uh, I would love to see the market, uh, do what it does in technology so well do in the

space of education.

And I think when you do that, all these, uh, uh, advantages that the, and, and rich kids

do get advantages 'cause they can go to private schools.

I'd like everybody to go to private schools.

And, uh, therefore, I think we need to privatize education completely and create the kind of

financial incentives that make that feasible.

I, I think the, uh, uh, uh, what do you call it?

Tax credit's a, a good way to do it.

There's a, there's tax saving accounts, uh, that are being proposed, that's an excellent

way to do that so that everybody can be able to afford to do that, um, as long as we still

live in a mixed economy.

Uh, there are a lot of different ways.

But if there's one industry that needs to be taken from, uh, away from government, it

is education and would have a profound impact on that, on the, on the issue of poverty and

the issue of the ability of poor kids to rise up and, and, and to improve their lives, and

in middle class case 'cause everybody would get a better education.

So, I'll, I'll just give one in the name of, of time.

Um, so, I agree about education as important, but I disagree with Yaron.

Of course.

Yeah.

Um, education is really hard.

That's the first thing to say.

The reason it's expensive to do it well is not that people don't innovate and don't know

how to do it.

It's that it's intensive.

If you look at, for example, the charter schools that succeed, the KIPP schools, for example,

they succeed by lengthening the school days, shortening vacations, reducing teacher-to-student

ratios, intensifying training, and effectively reproducing the kind of hyper-intensive training

that rich people give to their parents privately in the school.

So, it's not easy to fix education, particularly at the bottom or even at the middle, first

point.

Second point, I believe government has a very powerful role in education, for two reasons.

One is ideological, and I'll own up to it.

I believe that education is training for citizenship, not just for private life, and government

provides that.

The second is non-ideological.

If you look at the societies that are most effective in education, Finland and Singapore,

now a lot of free market and education in those societies.

Those are government's that are producing these educations.

Now, you can't, and the Finnish Minister of Education, when he travels around the US says

this all the time.

He says, "Don't think you can just follow our education policy and get our results.

You have to follow our social structure if you wanna get our results."

And I'll say something about that in just a moment.

With respect to education, it's also important to emphasize the top end, and massively to

democratize the elite.

So, if there's one educational reform that I could embrace, it would be requiring, and

I can talk about how to require it, all private educational institutions to double their class

sizes and to take all the new students from the bottom half of the distribution.

How would you do that?

You would say, if you don't have two-thirds of your students from the bottom half of the

distribution, or if you wanna be a little bit more relaxed, half your students from

the bottom two-thirds of the distribution, you lose your tax exemption.

'Cause after all, the tax exemption is meant to be there because you provide a public good.

But if all your kids are from rich families, you're providing a club good.

You don't deserve the tax exemption.

So, if you want it, you have to economically diversify.

And you bet, these institutions would take more students, especially if there were state

subsidy for they're taking more, and don't let them say, "This is impossible."

Expenditure per student in the Ivy League today is twice what it was in 2000.

So, if the Ivy League doubled its student bodies, it would be spending the same thing

it spent per student in 2000, which was a pretty good education.

Now, the other reform that I would make is to change the labor market to favor middle-class

jobs.

At the moment, in fact, the labor market disfavors middle-class jobs, and it does so on account

of regulation.

Middle-class labor is the highest taxed factor of production in the economy.

Capital is barely taxed because of delay in capital gains.

Elite labor pays a slightly higher income tax than middle-class labor.

But because of the cap on the social security wage tax, on the payroll tax, elite labor

over $127,200 a year pays 10% less than the first $127,000.

So, get rid of the cap.

That would produce an immediate incentive to shift out super-skilled workers in favor

of mid-skilled workers.

Right here now, you hire one person at $2 million a year, you pay roughly speaking $80,000

in payroll tax.

You hire 20 people at $100,000 a year, you pay roughly speaking $280,000 in payroll tax.

So, there's a $200,000 penalty on the middle-class jobs compared to the elite jobs.

So, get rid of that.

That raises immediately $200 billion in revenue.

In steady state, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it raises 1.1% of GDP in revenue.

Spend half of that revenue on subsidizing education for the middle class and spend the

other half on a wage subsidy for employers to hire middle-class workers.

And you will, at a stroke, rebalance the economy to favor mid-skilled work, not by creating

distortions but by eliminating existing distortions, and rebalance education to give literally

millions of middle-class people an opportunity to have the same kind of education that rich

people now have.

And I see a question on the right side of the room.

And just so folks know, the Q&A will end at eight o'clock, and that's when the event will

wrap up.

So, go ahead on the right and then we'll go on the left after that.

Thank you so much for your arguments.

You know, in both your arguments, you've focused on individuals as individuals, may be rich,

may be poor.

But just diving deeper into that, what about group identities?

If I'm a single mother, uh, let's talk about historic groups do have dis-, different historical

experiences.

I'm a single mother.

I'm a Christian.

I'm an atheist.

I'm a black family with 100th the wealth of a white family, for example.

How would your arguments change, if at all, uh, if accounting, would you account for historical

differences, which it persists to this day between different social groups?

Because we only talk about people, but people don't exist as islands and they exist in groups.

So, how would you account for that?

Why don't you start this time?

Sure.

Um, I, I think I have, uh, two things to say.

One at the high end of the distribution and one at the lower end of the distribution,

although, uh, these are not the only things that could be said.

The first is that the existing regime with enormously skewed income places enormous social

and economic pressure on elites, and especially elite women, not to work outside the house.

Because the way in which elites get these massive salaries is they work, they work all

the time.

They work as a group of the top 1% of the income distribution, works 20% harder now

than they did in 1950.

At law firms, average hours have doubled.

It is simply impossible for a couple to have a family and have both people work those hours.

And given prevailing gender norms and discrimination, it is undoubtedly the women who more often

get pushed out of the workplace.

And that's something important.

And notice, if you reduce income inequality, you reduce gender inequality.

And that's true actually across civilizations.

It turns out, if you look at countries, the best reforms to produce an equal division

of domestic labor to pro-, to embolden and empower women and women's rights is to diminish

economic inequality.

You see that in places like India and you see it in places like Sweden.

So, very different societies.

So, that's one important thing.

The other important thing to say is that the interaction between race and class is enormous

right now.

For reasons that nobody really understands, African-Americans are getting relatively less

wealthy compared to white Americans over time in dismaying and shocking ways.

And if you, uh, if you intersect that with the size of economic inequality, you get absolutely

atrocious outcomes.

The rich-poor gap in education right now, in educational achievement in the United States,

is greater than the white-black gap was in 1955.

That's the year Brown against Board of Education was decided.

So, economic inequality is reconstructing apartheid.

And that's an essential thing to combat.

Redistribution will help, but it has to be redistribution done with the separate axis

of racial discrimination and racial hegemony in mind.

And that requires precise, detailed policies, which we can talk about if we have more time.

So, I think part of the problem in the world today and part of the problem in our society

today is that there's way too much, that there's any really discussion of group and group identity.

Uh, I, I think group identity is, is a road, um, is a road to primitivism and it's, it's

a disaster.

I think it's a, it's a backward way of thinking.

Uh, we spend way too much time talking about race and what group you belong to, what subgroup

you belong to, and who's in a power structure relative to whom, and intersectionality today

and all this nonsense.

Um, uh, I think this is, this is destructive, uh, to, to what, what freedom really means.

And, and to me, freedom is freedom from coercion, not freedom of limited, not, not the issue

of how many opportunities you have but, but whether those opportunities are limited to

coercion or not.

And the idea was to maximize freedom.

It's to limit coercion.

It's to eliminate coercion, to get, get government coercion out of the way, so that we can flourish

ahead as an individuals.

And I don't think it's an accident to, to take, uh, uh, one group, if you will.

I don't think it's an accident that, uh, the rise in, uh, black middle class has, haw slowed

down significantly since the War on Poverty has begun and since, uh, affirmative action

and since all of the, uh, the, the welfare programs that we instituted in the 1960s.

I think, I think welfare is destructive to the ability of people to rise out of poverty.

I think it is, it is a way of institutionalizing people into poverty.

I think it is, it is a horrible way to treat people.

Going back to education, I think, of course, education is part of the reason why people

don't rise up.

But this, in general, I think is, is, is the way we treat poor people in this country.

We treat poor people in this country horribly and we treat rich people horribly as well.

In many respects, we treat poor people horribly.

We treat the ambitious poor.

The, the, the, the, the, poor person who is ambitious wants to rise up, wants to be successful,

we create roadblocks upon roadblocks upon roadblocks.

Um, education is not about money, uh, you know.

We'll disagree again.

In the same city of Chicago where they spent $15,000 per child, the, the archdiocese spends

in exactly the same neighborhood $7,500 per child and gets better results.

You could shut down all of the public schools in Chicago and hire the archdiocese to educate

all the kids and save half the money and get a better educational product.

Uh, this is not purely about funding and about money.

Uh, this is about, uh, this is about the way education was provided in a top-down kind

of, kind of manner that does not place the child at, at the center as we would if it

was the, if it was a, if it was privately run.

But I think the whole group identity stuff is, is, is, uh, is, is bad for this country.

This is a, this, I, I, I believe in individualism.

I believe in treating people as individuals based on their character, not paying attention

to the color of their skin or to their, or to their gender, unless it's relevant, right?

Um, not paying attention to those factors and, and treating people based on character.

And in economic terms, treating people based on their level of productivity and that people

should get compensated based on the level of productivity.

Oh, thank you.

Um, before I ask my question, which is directed primarily to Dr. Brook, I wanna make sure

that I'm understanding sort of two parts, two presumptions that you're making.

The first is that, um, you presented Steve Jobs and J.K.

Rowling as two examples of individuals who produced and earned wealth.

And because they produced it themselves, and they, the market, a free market has valued

it, they're entitled to reap all of that.

And the second, the argument that I've heard you're making is that the government should

stay out of production of wealth because they inherently would mess it up, and they make

it more difficult.

So, I guess I'm wondering, how do you square those two things when both J.K.

Rowling and Steve Jobs owe a significant percentage of their wealth to the fact that the state

guarantees intellectual property rights, and that the state is actually taking a very active

role in ensuring that those two individuals', um, intellectual creations are given value

in the marketplace rather than able to be appropriated by other manufacturers, other

authors, other publishing services?

And so, how do you square intellectual property rights, which is a collectivist state decision

about what we wanna value in the market and this idea that these individuals have generated

all that wealth by themselves?

Dr. Yaron Brook: So, I don't buy the basic premise of your argument.

I don't buy that intellectual pro-, in-, intellectual property rights are any different than any

other form of property rights.

Indeed, uh, most property rights are fundamentally intellectual.

It is, it, what intellectual property rights are protecting is the right of the producer,

the rights of the creator, or the rights of the innovator.

Um, and it, it, it is a property just like any other property.

And, and I, and the, the role of the government, indeed, in my view, the only role of the government

in the realm of economics is the protection of property rights.

And intellectual property rights are a right just like that the government should be there

to protect, uh, your land from, uh, somebody squatting on it or somebody, uh, stealing

your purse.

Uh, intellectual property rights are just like your purse and just like your land.

Indeed, they are more property in some senses than your land or your purse, because intellectual

property rights, you can actually show that you have produced them.

Now, intellectual property rights are, are, are, you know, uh, because reason is the source

of all our creativity, all, anything that we produce, intellectual property rights are

the purest form, a manifestation of that, of that reasoning capability.

So, three things, briefly.

Sure.

Um, two, I just don't wanna let go 'cause this is really serious and one, one has to

get things right.

First, it is simply not true, it is simply not true that the poor have gotten worse off

since the War on Poverty.

The poverty rate fell by between half and three quarters between the inauguration of

the War on Poverty in 1975.

It has been roughly flat since then, as after the Reagan administration, the War on Poverty

was pulled back.

That's a fact, first of all.

Second of all, on the intellectual property point, you know, the reason J.K.

Rowling is so rich isn't just that she has intellectual property rights.

It's also that there's a middle class which can read her books.

The middle class was created intentionally by government policy, starting in the United

States in particular with the schools movement in the 1890s through the 1920s, which were

government-run.

In fact, public schools from the Puritan area earlier.

But it is a striking feature of the United States that as recently as 1920, the Europeans

thought that US American public schools were wasteful because they gave an education also

to dumb and lower class kids.

And that was a commitment in the United States.

And that's what produced the middle class that buys the books.

And that's government.

A final thought on intellectual property rights.

When you say intellectual property is a kind of property, what you mean among other things

is that the government will use its power to prevent people from taking it.

Now, notice, that's true for money also.

Money is not a thing, it's a relation of constraint and freedom.

If you had a series of sheets of paper, and on the slips of paper, it said a $5 sweater,

and if you went and you had the slip of paper and you got the sweater, you could have the

sweater.

And if you tried to get the sweater without the sheet of paper, a man with the gun would

come and put you in jail.

Nobody would say that the slip of paper is a thing.

They'd say it's an accounting mechanism for telling how the government uses force against

the citizens.

Now, money is just a sophisticated accounting mechanism for telling how the government uses

force against its citizens.

Moreover, because money is fiat money and central banks make it, and when they set interest

rates, they set the price of money.

Money is an overtly discretionary and political form of coercion.

And in the last 30 years, if we had more time, I could go through chapter and verse to illustrate

how that form of coercion has been intentionally and self-consciously deployed by the government

in ways that are known to enrich the elite and to make the middle class less well off.

This is not a question of trying to get the government out of our lives.

It's a question of acknowledging that the situation we're in is the con-, is the consequence

of government policy, and that free markets are the technique of coercion that the government

is using.

Thank you both very much.

Um, so, my question is about the relationship between ambition and drive and human flourishing.

Um, so, Professor Markovits, uh, please correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understand

your model is that there would be sort of less of a premium on ambition and drive.

Um, do you think that's sort of a longer-term issue as far as, um, cementing the divisions

that exist under your system, because then people will be less likely to move?

Um, and, you know, I, I do, I take the point that a lot of us at Yale Law School come from

elite backgrounds, but many of us, you know, myself included, are children of immigrants

or come from poor families.

So, um, I think that's, that's something that would be good to hear more about.

Um, and from Dr. Brook, um, do you think that, uh, capitalism and this sort of endless drive

to create the next, you know, big thing can actually reduce human flourishing?

Uh, maybe if we weren't all trying to be elite lawyers, we could be artists or poets, um,

or, you know, statesmen, things like this.

So, so, sort of thinking about, uh, what drives people to be their best human beings.

Uh, how do you both think about that?

You wanna-

Sure.

I'm happy to.

Uh, it is me-, I mean, it, that's an interesting question.

But it's capitalism that creates the wealth that makes it possible for us to become consumers

of poetry and art and music.

It is no accident that the 19th century saw a huge flourishing of art.

Beethoven was the first composer ever to be able to actually make money off of his music

and wasn't dependent on some aristocrat or some church leader because he could put on

a concert and sell tickets.

That is what capitalism made possible.

My, my children both went into entertainment, right?

Um, because I told them to follow their passion.

And, and part of the reason is, is we live in such a rich culture that many, many, many,

many people are going to go into entertainment because we have so much money and so much

leisure time to be able to consume that entertainment and those arts and those things.

So, if anything, capitalism and the arts go hand in hand.

It is the wealth creation of capitalism makes possible, that makes possible the flourishing

in the arts.

And, and I do have to comment on the three points that you made earlier, quickly.

If you look at poverty rates, fact, if you look at poverty rates in the United States,

they were declining way before the beginning of, of the War on Poverty.

They had started declining decades before and continue to decline through the '60s.

The momentum sustained itself to '75.

'75 is when the, the, the welfare state, the War on Poverty really kicked in its negative

incentives, and since then, it's been flat.

But if you'd, if you hadn't had a War on Poverty, poverty rates would have declined and continued

to decline post-1970, uh, post-1975.

Fiat money, fiat money is not a feature of capitalism.

Fiat money is government intervention.

Fiat money is the mixed economy.

I'm against fiat money.

I would like to see money privatized so that money isn't just an accounting, it isn't just

a piece of paper, but actually reflects the real value creation like it was when we had

a gold standard or some other kind of real wealth standard.

So, I agree that fiat money over the last 30 years has dramatically distorted the economy,

distorted distribution of wealth, and benefited, to some extent, the people at the top because

they own so much stock and the money has flowed into the stock market and driven stock prices

up.

But that is a feature of the state, that is a feature of mixed economies.

So, it, capitalism does not produce fiat money, capitalism produces bank-based, uh, gold or

some, some kind of a standard-based money that is not just an accounting entry and is

not based on government coercion.

Prof. Markovits: Let me say something about the ambition point, um, which is a very, very

hard point and, and one wants to be thoughtful about it.

And the reason it's hard is one has to distinguish between being ambitious for something that

is actually worthwhile and being ambitious in light of the system of economic reward

that exists.

And it's cheap to say those are simply totally different.

That's not right either because it's worthwhile to serve ends and interests that other people

care about.

And when you do that, you sometimes get rich.

But at the moment, if you look at where our in-, our system of inequality channels people's

ambitions, people who have a very good sense for very short-term risk can get extremely

wealthy.

People who can design derivatives can get extremely wealthy.

People who interestingly have the capacities of the individual cardiovascular surgeon or

brain surgeon can get extremely wealthy.

But notice this about medicine.

We can transplant a heart or make an artificial heart.

Here's something we don't know the answer to.

What's better for your heart health in the long run?

An hour of exercise twice a week, two hours of exercise once a week, or 10 hours of, 10

minutes of exercise daily?

We don't know the answer to that question.

The reason we don't know the answer to that question is that if you are a cardiovascular

surgeon, because of the way in which you produce your good, you get your marginal product,

which is your average product.

You get a very high share of the social good you produce.

If I figured out the answer to this other question, I wouldn't be rich.

I can't get intellectual property, in fact, about how much you should exercise.

It's not legally possible and it wouldn't be practicable.

Now, inequality is the cause of some of these differences.

And so, it's partly something that drives us to be ambitious, and that's not to be neglected.

But it also channels our ambitions in ways that produce great private return and take

away from the public good.

And if we had less inequality, we would reduce the incentive on the one hand but increase

the accuracy of what the incentive is leading us to on the other.

And on balance, I think we'd all be better off.

Okay.

One more question.

Do you have time for one more question?

I think.

Okay.

So, we have one, time for one quick question and then we'll end with just, uh, a couple

of minutes for each of you to sum up your remarks.

Oh, okay.

So, um, go ahead.

Sure.

So, I've got a question kind of aimed at both of you.

Uh, Dr. Brook, um, I'm curious, under your system, I think one of the concerns would

be that those are the very lowest levels of society would have to work so many hours for

their own subsistence that they wouldn't have any opportunities to advance.

And you'd talked about how in modern society, there is an issue with the poor being able

to rise up.

So, I guess I'm curious how you think that these issues around, uh, poor people being

able to rise through social strata could be resolved, uh, in your system.

Uh, Professor Markovits, I, I guess my question for you is, I, I, I agree with a lot of what

you said about, um, problems in society, but it seems to me that the issue here isn't actually

income inequality.

The issue is cultural.

Uh, the issue is that we put so much value on making, uh, $500,000 versus $60,000 in

living, uh, in a middle-class neighborhood, in a home with the, you know, the white picket

fence.

Um, so, is the issue that our country facing, actually this cultural misappropriation of

what we value, uh, rather than someone being happy pursuing their own goals, and who cares

what Bill Gates is buying, whether it be a yacht or a mansion, uh, do you think it's

a cultural issue or is there something inherent about income inequality?

Thank you.

Sure.

Um, I need a question.

Um, oh, what would happen to poor people in my system 'cause they would have to work all

the time?

Um, I mean, the, the fact is that the only system in human history, uh, to bring people

out of poverty is, uh, uh, the free market to the extent that it is, uh, practiced.

Uh, over the last 30 years, one of the most under-reported stories in the world is the

fact that somewhere between one to two billion people have come out of poverty not because

of redistribution of wealth, not because of charity, but because some countries have,

have, have made it possible for free people to actually go and work.

And, and, and in a division of labor society, whether it's China, whether it's India, whether

it's Thai-, Thailand, whether it's the whole area of Asia and even a few pockets in Africa.

And, and what happens is that the productivity of labor rises.

As it rises, they get compensated more and more.

The ones who are the more, more ambitious and, and, and who learn faster, uh, get to

management jobs and, and can, and there's no limit to how far they can rise wi-, within

the, their economic sphere.

The only way in which to allow poor people to rise up and, and to, you know, the, the

ones who want to and to become middle class and to become rich, uh, is through capitalism.

And, you know, we, we talked about this, uh, you know, the advantages you have if your

family has wealth.

But a lot of the entrepreneurs I talked about and a lot of entrepreneurs, if you look at

that list, take out the Walton family, if you look at the list of the 400 richest people

in America, many of those people did not come from wealthy families, including Steve Jobs

whose father was an immigrant from Syria who would probably be banned by Donald Trump from

entering.

But, you know, uh, an immigrant from Syria and, and, and didn't try, didn't grow up in

a particularly wealth-, didn't go to Yale and, and so on.

So, and, and indeed, uh, if you look at the people who go to Silicon Valley, if you look

at the people succeed in Silicon Valley, where, which is an industry that is still relatively

unregulated, still where the government has, has, has stayed out of, uh, you see people

succeeding from all walks of life.

And you, you, you don't have a limitation in terms of, you know, where your pa-, parents

went to school or where you went to school.

The standard is not whether you got a house, not like the law firms in New York.

Standard is not whether you go to Stanford or not.

The standard's whether you can program or not.

Even if you didn't go to school, you can, you can get a job.

So, uh, I think the only way to allow, uh, uh, poor people to rise up in a way that not

just gives them money, because I don't think life is just about money, uh, but we also

grants them the ability to create self, have self-esteem and have pride and have the kind

of human flourishing that I think all of us are capable of producing, is by them working

in a free market, increasing their productivity, increasing their economic value, and, and

making therefore more and more and more money.

And that is the history of capitalism every way you look.

And, and it's the history of capitalism in the 19th century in America, which is what

really created the middle class.

Uh, I mean, uh, uh, after all, Karl Marx who's writing about the middle class in 1850s.

There had to be a middle class in 1850 before public education.

Uh, there was a middle class from the beginning of the capitalism.

There were, there were people rising up into a bourgeoisie, into a middle-class environment.

Karl Marx writes about this in Das Kapital.

So, you know from the Marxists even that, that it is capitalism that produced the middle

class.

I mean, Karl Marx bemoans exactly that fact.

Um, the question of ideals and ambitions and culture is a hard one.

One way to think about it is this.

About 100 years ago, maybe 115 years ago now, Thorstein Veblen wrote a book called "The

Theory of the Leisure Class," in which he observed that in that social order, leisure

made somebody high status.

And what the rich sought were conspicuous forms of useless activity, right?

Falconry, jousting, knowledge of ancient languages.

Veblen who wan an immigrant thought English spelling, English is so hard to spell, he

thought, because that way you could credibly show by knowing how to spell that you didn't

have to work for a living.

The whole idea was to show you didn't have to work for a little.

Now, in that regime, an economic transformation starts happening.

And at that moment, what a bunch of idealists think is that machines and technological innovation

are gonna come, and they're gonna relieve the middle class and the working class of

the need to work industriously and to work hard.

And then, the middle class and working-class can get leisure and they're gonna get dignified,

status-conferring, useless activity.

Karl Marx's son-in-law writes a pamphlet called "The Right to be Lazy" about exactly this

idea, and Keynes makes a similar argument.

What, in fact, happened is that as the technology came, and as elites started training their

children, and as the cycle that I described earlier got going in which rich parents give

super educations to their rich children who then work even harder and become even richer

based on their elite labor, leisure ceased to be a sign of status.

And business, industry became the badge of honor.

So, as everyone in this room knows, a typical answer when you're asked, "How are you?" in

an elite office or hallway is "Oh, so busy."

That would have been a sign of self-disgrace 120 years ago.

But now, it's what you show off to show how busy you are, how important you are, how much

industry you have, how much your time is desired.

And what's happened is that the middle class, because how we make things has been transformed,

doesn't have jobs.

Machines and rich people are doing all the work.

I'm exaggerating, but that's the structure.

And the lack of jobs means that instead of getting leisure, middle and working class

people are condemned to enforced idleness, which is a form of degradation.

And what the middle of the country wants is not a handout or just money.

What they want is meaningful work, which is like the same thing everybody in this room

wants.

But we've set up a kind of inequality which makes there be no meaningful work for people

in that position, because the people in this room are taking up all the work.

And that's why something that expands education and shifts the labor market away from super-skilled

labor to mid-skilled labor is what one needs to get the jobs to come back, so that then

people can do the work and get the industry and get the status and become once again the

charismatic center of the American economy in the American society, which is exactly

what a just order requires.

Thank you both.

And thank, thank you both very much.

And so, as we wrap this event up, we'd like to give each of you a chance in, in just a

couple of minutes to sum up any final thoughts you have or share any final ideas that you

have at this point.

And so, uh, Dr. Brooks, you went first.

We'll let you go first now.

And Dr. Markovits, we'll let you finish things off for us.

Dr. Yaron Brook: So, uh, just to, uh, feed off the last, uh, few comments.

There was no shortage of work in the world today.

Uh, indeed, there are more people working today than ever in human history.

What many people unfortunately in the middle of this country want is to have work which

requires them not to move and have no competition from people working very hard in China and

other places.

What they want is for the work to be provided to them on a silver platter, at their convenience,

where they are.

If you go to Northwest Arkansas, there's plenty of work in Northwest Arkansas.

There's plenty of work for welders in California.

There's plenty of work in lots of places, not in Southeast Ohio.

So, get in your car and drive to where there is work.

They used to be what Americans did.

But it is this claim that, uh, you should resent the rich and you deserve and you're

entitled and you need, justify that we provide you stuff.

It is the entitled mentality of much of Middle America, unfortunately, which is driving them

to sit on their butts and to wait for the work to show up for them on their doorstep

instead of doing what Americans always did, which is get up and create the work or go

to where the work was.

And this is, I think, what has happened in this country.

Since the War on Poverty and even really since before that, we have generated, because of

the welfare state, because of massive redistribution of wealth, and because of the expectation

that the government will, will meet every need and that it is morally obligated to meet

every need of the people, we have created a mentality that is today driven more by envy

of success than by ambition for success, more driven by resentment than by love of work

and ambition.

And as a consequence, we're getting the kind of politics that we're getting, and we're

getting the kind of mentality, I think, that is a real problematic, a, a, a static mentality

that never existed before in America.

Uh, let me just say, what concerns me at, at the end of the day is individual freedom,

is individual liberty, is the ability of the individual to live his life as he see fits,

as he sees fit.

Without a coercive government, a, a government that tells him what he can and cannot do when

he needs a license to practice, uh, to open a nail salon, you have to pay $20,000 to open

a nail salon, or to get a license from the government of shampoo here in California.

You wanna help the poor, you want to help ambitious people everywhere, the solution

is to get the government out of our lives and to really change our moral code.

Instead of waiting around for our needs to be fulfilled by others, instead of expensive

ex-, expec-, instead of morally expecting, uh, uh, demanding that our needs to be fulfilled

by others, we need to return to that individualism that was, I think, much made up kind of the

American character which was, you know, to take care of one's selves, to have personal

responsibility over one's own life.

Personal responsibility in the deepest sense to make your own life your own moral responsibility,

to live your life, to flourish as an individual human being no matter what your background

is through your own effort, your own energy, your own skill, your own ambition.

To live as a human being, to live as an individual.

Prof. Markovits: Let me say something about work.

And then, something about, uh, imagination.

So, it's bread and roses.

Um, with respect to work, you know, I, I went to an urban public high school.

A couple years after I graduated, the police station was put in the high school.

Um, a lot of friends in high school, still friends with them now, who, you know, got

married or joined the military right after graduation, did not get a college degree.

Um, many of them are struggling.

None of them is lazy.

They want work.

On the other hand, they reasonably want jobs that will allow them to live the kind of life

that, in a free and equal democracy, a respectable stable family lives.

That's not an $8 an hour job.

Just isn't.

An $8 an hour job leaves you below the poverty line even though you're working.

If you look at what the economy has been providing over the past 30 years, employment and wages

are going up in the bottom tenth of the distribution of the skill and wage distribution.

And they're going way up in the top part.

And they're going down in the middle because those jobs are jobs that are being replaced

by machines and computer algorithms that are being designed by the people at the top of

the distribution.

And so, the jobs that people want are not there.

That's the first point.

And when they're not there, the lives that people, not selfishly or childishly or lazily,

but reasonably would like to have, in the same way in which all of us would like to

have lives like this, are not available.

And then, the question is "What to do?"

Now, my diagnosis is that the reason those jobs are not available is that elites are

changing the way we work and make things to their own advantage, and that those jobs could

be available.

It should be said.

They're available in a country like Germany where, for example, capital deepening in an

industrial sector, including in finance, is associated with wage compression.

So, when German companies invest in more machines and computers, what they do is they invest

in technologies of production that hire mid-skilled workers.

And there are more middle-class people.

We don't do that.

We hire super-skilled workers, and there's a reason this is a choice that we make.

And it's a choice that we can unmake by changing the way in which we educate people and by

changing the way in which we regulate and organize in tax production and labor.

That takes me to the last point, which is about imagination.

The system that we have now has a dangerously seductive character.

In an old form of inequality, in which rich people were born into rich families who had

been rich forever and owned lots of land and inherited the land and led lives of dissolution

and idiocy, it was easy to see what had gone wrong.

But in the society we have now, in which rich people are trained to within an inch of their

lives from birth and work all the time and are drilled and are constantly insecure of

not getting the grade and not getting admitted to the next place and then work all the time

as adults and are not made happy by all the material wealth they have because after all

at some point the money doesn't get you anything, but the freedom would get you a lot, it's

very easy for the elite to say, "Well, I must deserve this because I've sacrificed so much

for it.

And so, I must be entitled to it and those who don't have it must be resentful or lazy

or trying to usurp me."

And this is a system that makes nobody well and produces massive inequality.

And so, the first imaginative leap is for both sides to see, for the elite to see, "No,

you don't deserve it.

It's true you work for it, but you don't deserve it because you work for it under circumstances

that were not of your own doing and because you get it in a system that harms other people."

And then, for middle-class people to see that rich people aren't individually evil or venal.

They're in this system, too, and they're as much being ground up by this mill as we are.

It's just, you know, they're exploiting themselves as they, they're ground up and then sleep

an eiderdown, which is a much better thing to do, but still doesn't mean you're well.

And that's the point at which a political movement can arise that can change the way

we make these decisions and the way in which we structure education and labor and produce

the kind of society that, in fact, people on both sides of the divide want and were

thriving.

Thanks very much for coming, guys.

On behalf of the Yale Law School Federalist Society, Dr. Brooks, Professor Markovits,

thank you very much for joining us for what was a thoughtful, engaging conversation.

For those of you here in the audience tonight, thank you very much as well.

And for those of you watching at home, thanks for joining us.

Have a great night.

Thanks again.

For more infomation >> Income Inequality: Is It Fair or Unfair? - Duration: 1:30:06.

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Is the Star Wars Battlefront 2 DLC Leak Real or Fake? | LEAKED SCREENSHOTS INCLUDED! - Duration: 7:39.

all right everybody so what you are seeing here is apparently the brand new

DLC coming out sometime in December for the launch of probably the best movie of

2008 2017 excuse me and I'm hoping which will be the last Jedi so this is gonna

be the DLC pack for the last Jedi and apparently you're going to be able to

pick between Finn or phasma as the new downloadable heroes and this is

apparently the way they're doing it so as you can see here they're saying you

can pick either the resistance or the first order and then it looks like

they're gonna have some challenges it kind of reminds me of like what they did

in splatoon how they had like these weekly kind of challenges and stuff like

that but here's the thing all right here's where I'm coming from

this this does not look real I'm sorry but I'm not a Photoshop guru or anything

but okay so I'm gonna point these things out and please please leave comments

down below because I want to hear your thoughts because everybody's posting

about this I actually first saw this on the Quinn Knight channel and if you have

a check out the Quinn Knight channel go check it out I will put a link in the

info card go check out his channel he has a lot of hero guides he does live

streams he's pretty pretty dope at aha Star Wars Battlefront 2 he's a cool dude

anyways I first saw it on there and a lot of other channels have been showing

this and it just it doesn't look real to me so let's break it down real quick

okay so just like looking at the artwork of it like fin like the style of fin

looks completely different than Captain phasma Captain phasma looks a lot more

2d especially the helmet and this is what kind of makes me think that it

might be fake but also look up in the top left where it says collection

assault primary weapon like it doesn't say that anywhere in the Star Wars

Battlefront screens like nowhere in the UI

does it show this so that's another reason why I'm thinking it's a face like

if they're doing this like that's kind of cool it's something different and it

might you know keep people interested but now

let's go down and look at where it says the Finn epic star card and the captain

phasma at the epic start card if you look at the little icons for those those

look even more fake if you look at Finn's face right there you can kind of

see a white outline it looks like they cropped it out so like I don't know if

this is going to be real or not like I said it would be cool if it was like if

you get to pick a side but like we all know we all know that EA is

money-grubbing and they want a lot of money and even though they've turned off

the ability to buy loot crate's right now like why would they only give you

the choice of being able to purchase one of these two heroes they want to keep

people in the game they want people playing so why would they give you an

either-or situation I don't really see that being a thing but apparently like

as you go forward it says like are you sure you want to choose this faction and

I don't know it would be cool but I I just I just don't think it's real so

anyways so just so you all know like usually when you see the gameplay like

that's usually Dillon but I come in here on my computer and I record all this

stuff but I happen to have Dilli right next to me so let's have some questions

so Dilli what do you think is this real or fake I think it's fake because if you

look it's really realistic realistic and you can kind of see that white outline

like you were saying and how where would they find this actually like yeah no

that's a good point to like so before I made this video I was like going on

Google and I was going through YouTube and stuff I was looking all over the

place to see where they would get this from and here's the thing so those of

you who haven't been following that the community and the leaks and stuff like

that like in the reddit community there's people who are posting stuff and

some of them are credible some of them are not and

this we don't even know where this came from so this could be something where

somebody was just trying to get a bunch of views and you know trying to like

make money off of youtube and like hey like if they want to put the effort in

to doing this but like if you go around and if you actually look on Google right

now as I'm recording this on December 1st at about 9:30 p.m. Pacific Standard

Time you're not gonna find anything and I did like 50 million Google searches

typing in all sorts of keywords and I could not find this anywhere the only

reason I found this video that I'm showing you right now is that I just so

happened to stumble across it but you know like I said there are some people

on reddit who have talked about things that were coming in Battlefront 2 and

they did show up but those were credible sources and you know I kind of look at

it is like when movies when the scripts get leaked in some small ways somebody

who either works for the company or its somebody who is a friend of somebody who

works at the company or something like that but let's let's happen to a place

Dylan where where this is actually a real thing so Dylan if this thing is

real who who are we gonna pick are we gonna pick the resistance with Finn or

are we going to pick the first order with Captain phasma because that looks

like a pretty safe weapon yeah yeah and like you know would be cool you know be

cool Dylan like in the movie like if you've seen the trailer for the last

Jedi where Finn like it's about they're about to make you go down you know what

I mean and Finn pops out that like this big ol like bunk like taser type baton

it's like a electrical baton so they'll be kind of cool like if one of them had

it in there yeah yeah and all hopefully my editing game is okay and you guys are

seeing a clip of what we're talking about but yeah Finn uh yeah Finn

father's old buddy that one actually had the lightsaber for a second anyways like

I just want to show you this in case you haven't seen this yet but yeah please

like leave a comment down below like I might be dumb and some of you might

no more about Photoshop than I do and maybe you can tell me that this is not

fake but yeah I would love to hear what you guys think and also like make sure

that you're checking out all the other videos on this channel and let us know

if you like even like this video give it a thumbs up that's how we're gonna know

because right now we're just doing a bunch of how to's to help you get

credits how to farm how to do stuff in the game that's like not very well

explained so if you like us kind of talking about Star Wars Battlefront 2

make sure you give this video a thumbs up and we'll make more videos like this

to kind of to kind of switch things up but yeah that's all we got and yeah

thanks so much for watching don't forget to like this video and please subscribe

and if you do subscribe but don't forget to hit the notification about thanks for

watching everybody we'll see you next time

For more infomation >> Is the Star Wars Battlefront 2 DLC Leak Real or Fake? | LEAKED SCREENSHOTS INCLUDED! - Duration: 7:39.

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How To Play 8 Ball Pool In computer or laptop - Duration: 3:52.

Install and Run Android App Game on Computer ( Video Link in Description below)

Install and Run Android App Game on Computer ( Video Link in Description below)

Install and Run Android App Game on Computer ( Video Link in Description below)

LIKE & SUBSCRIBE

For more infomation >> How To Play 8 Ball Pool In computer or laptop - Duration: 3:52.

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How to connect Github With Android Studio on Linux Mint or Ubuntu - Duration: 5:29.

hello guys I'm Piash sarker from ptlearnpoint.com today we gonna see an

interesting things how to connect github with Android studio in Linux Mint so

basically in Linux mint environment you need the github repository to be

installed fast in Linux environment for that go to terminal

and here sudo apt-get install git hit your password ok check for git version here okay now we

can see that the git is installed in our Linux environment so git version is

2.10.1 so okay go to in Android studio you okay I'm currently on my Android Studio with a

simple project so this I want to share this project on github for this

Android Studio has an option VCS it's called VCS here I'm going to VCS here

goto vcs control here you can see that share project on github okay open

it hit your master password you will probably need a master password for

Android studio if you want to share something or exporting or importing something

although in server or others internet medium okay for this my master password

okay as we can see that we don't setup

github in our environment Android studio environment for this we cannot share

projects in github right now for enabling version control integration we

need to fast enable it we're going to choose git here hit ok now

goto files settings here version control as you can see go here

and hit github you need to specify github host and login and password

credential so for this go to your browser as I think you're all are currently

signed up with github just copy this link okay here paste it now

credential username and password on github and that we use properly

okay in my case

okay now here is an option that is saying test you can test here if you're

okay connection is successful so we can go for that okay hit apply hit okay okay

now go to VCS and here input into version control share project on github

okay yeah here you can see that you can

insert new repository name, name here or you can insert remote name here okay

our repository name will be Android Spinner that will be good you can add a

description here test project share okay there are files you want to choose to

store in github okay write some message here commit message if you want to

or write something about the committed a description or something okay hit I'm

just typing it test hit okay

okay there you can see that you can still add VCS properties in your

desktop files that in your project file so hit OK

yes it doesn't matter here you can see that successfully shared project on github

Android Spinner open it if you are logged in you can see that properly okay now that

is under Android Spinner and it's just committed 25 seconds ago that's our

project okay here you can see your all code or anything okay that's it

collaborate contribute and build something awesome thank you very much

For more infomation >> How to connect Github With Android Studio on Linux Mint or Ubuntu - Duration: 5:29.

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When you have a little brother or sister - FUNNY VIDEO - Duration: 2:19.

For more infomation >> When you have a little brother or sister - FUNNY VIDEO - Duration: 2:19.

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The Talk - Marriage Equality - Risk of losing identity or culture - Duration: 9:33.

(cymbal crash)

(upbeat music)

- Hi there, welcome to The Talk on Bent TV.

I'm Matthew Wade, Editor of Star Observer.

- I'm Lucy, I'm a high school teacher.

- I'm David, I'm a nine to five working homosexual.

(laughter)

- And I'm Saj, and I'm a film critic

at sajlovesfilm.com.

- So here on The Talk, we obviously cover a range of issues

that affect primarily younger LGBTI people,

and today I thought we'd talk obviously about

marriage equality, but more specifically

post-marriage equality,

because I imagine that's an inevitability.

And I thought I'd talk about specifically,

after marriage equality is a reality,

I wonder will the members of the LGBTI community

become more normalised in society?

Like, be seen as more the same as everybody else,

and in that instance, will we kind of lose some

of our unique or different cultural or our experiences?

So yeah, I thought I'd throw it to you guys today.

Lucy, I mean, what are your thoughts?

Do you think in the event of marriage equality,

if the community becomes more normalised

or seen as the same as straight people,

do you think that we might lose some of our

individuality or uniqueness, like gay culture?

- No, I don't think so.

Partly because I think a lot of gay culture,

or LGBTIQ culture comes from

standing up and fighting,

and demanding freedom, and the right to express

yourself as you want to be.

And that kind of sense of rebellious,

freedom-demanding,

is something that even with marriage equality,

we're still going to have to do.

That's still gonna be there,

and also I think

to the extent that we do win rights,

and we have won rights,

that's space for freedom of expression

and freedom to be ourselves.

So, I think there's just more room to flourish,

rather than less.

- And marriage itself, I mean it's something that's

obviously historically been quite

a heterosexual institution.

I mean, something that's very heteronormative.

Saj, do you think, if more same-sex couples,

in the event of marriage equality,

are getting married, that the more queerer elements

of our community,

so maybe people that are not seen as heteronormative,

or maybe aren't getting married,

that they might get pushed aside,

and people would just be seen as,

yeah, it kind of loses some of that,

or that maybe gonna lose visibility?

- Yes, I think there is a part of me

that does believe that.

So, I guess back to the first bit of your question,

where you were talking about us being normalised.

I think this is a step towards that.

But I agree with what you said, Lucy,

I think it's, we've got a long, long way to go.

Especially with what you just said about

the freedom of expression and stuff.

There's a lot that needs to happen for

normalisation to happen, but I feel like

this is probably a step towards it.

But, long way to go.

- Yeah, I think obviously one of the benefits

of marriage equality, even in its small, little way,

is that it obvious grants us that kind of recognition

and validation amongst our heterosexual peers.

I mean, how do you feel about it, David?

Do you think us having that kind of same recognition

will, be a positive, and obviously

it'll be a positive step, but in terms of

still allowing us to express our individuality

and our queerness, do you think

there will still be space for that?

- Yeah, I mean a few articles like, researchers

all say that the queer culture's all built

on the fact that we can't, we haven't been

able to express ourselves, we've been repressed

the whole time, that's why we're sort of very good

at having the protest for being aware of other issues

such as immigrant issues, religious

issues, all those sort of things where

people are punched down.

That's why we're good at being very open to those things.

And then when we finally get those rights, I don't

believe necessarily that it's gonna pull away.

Although, that is slightly concerning

for the younger people who've never had to fight for it.

That they have not been as aware,

and they see the Queer culture and the pop culture stuff

like, when Katy Perry was on VMAs.

- Great reference.

(laughter)

- Definitely, there's a lot of things.

And I remember seeing like, a lot of memes

on that, where people were like

"oh, Katy Perry, gay culture."

And the Queers saying "keep away."

- Yeah.

- And I'm like "hmm, I don't think it's bad

for them to be representing that."

And I think it's great that everyone's gonna

keep having that coming through.

I don't, ooh, I'm very grey area if it's

gonna be changing our culture.

- Where do you draw the line with,

so when you say "gay culture", what's the boundary of it?

Is it, I don't know, 'cause I'm thinking,

my head initially went to pop culture.

So does that mean that we're no longer

gonna have RuPaul's Drag Race?

No, ya know?

But, so there's, where do you draw the line with that?

- I guess in my mind, we've obviously had

a really long and colourful history in terms

of the gay liberation movement.

And we've fought for really hard-won rights.

And I wonder if, I mean, marriage has been such

a large one in that sphere.

Once that has been won, and we're kind of

seen by many of our straights peers as equal on that level,

I just wonder if a lot of that other stuff might

get, not lost but will lose visibility.

And I guess, as you were saying, sorry David,

in terms of younger people, who maybe haven't had to

fight for a lot of the stuff that has

already been won previously.

Yeah, do you think, if marriage equality becomes

a reality, that younger people may not venture too,

actually learn our history and find out about

our culture and stuff because they've kind of,

younger people have been born into that equality already.

You know, quote, unquote.

Do you think that for younger people,

they might not be aware of it?

Some of that history and culture?

- The way media depicts that,

I feel as if it might be happening now.

- Mm Hmm

- I don't know if you guys watch Will and Grace,

but there was an episode recently

where they covered that.

Will, who was dating a guy who was in his

early 20s, and he was so

disengaged with

the gay history.

I don't know if that was based off real life,

but it seems as if the media is telling us

that might be happening right now.

- I don't think we're at risk of

being overwhelmed with gayness.

(laughter)

- You know, I don't think that's kind of on the cards

now that we've had 60% of the population

vote "yes".

I mean, I think there's still so much space for

demanding more rights, pushing

not just for marriage equality,

but for recognition and representation,

but also freedom for not just to get married, but

to be yourself.

And I think if you're talking about young people,

it's still really hard to be LGBTIQ

as a young person in schools, and so

many studies say that.

So, I think the idea that

we still need to fight for rights,

and we need to be with young people in that fight,

supporting them.

That's still, more than ever, true.

More than ever.

- And then I guess just finally, in terms of that,

as we move towards a more progressive world

and society when it comes to LGBTI inclusion and rights,

how do you think we can best ensure

that younger generations of LGBTI people

are aware of that culture and that history?

Because obviously it shifts.

It's shifting now.

A lot of the stuff people were fighting for back then,

they don't need to fight for anymore.

How are we gonna ensure that kind of remains

alive and younger people are aware of it?

- Ooh, that's a hard one.

(laughter)

Because, I know this sounds ridiculous, but

it would be nice if it was taught in schools,

but I don't know, I think that's a silly

thing to ask for.

But I think even being exposed to

people from different generations will help.

I know I have friends in their 50s and,

different age groups.

And you hear their stories, you hear what

their struggle was.

But I don't know how much that conversation's

gonna keep flowing as time goes on.

- Hmm.

- [Matthew] Yeah.

- That's true.

I feel like it's not like I've got a

great depth of gay history or knowledge.

I feel like I've missed out on so much.

- Yes.

- When I started working with

somebody who had lived through the AIDS crisis.

- [Saj] Yes.

- Just learning about that and understanding

what impact that has had.

That's not distant history, that's really recent history.

- Yeah, of course.

- Exactly.

- And for me to learn that was really important.

But that isn't in history books,

it's not in the school curriculum,

it's in, if you wanna call it the community,

or the movement.

And I think the most important thing

is to keep the movement going, because

those stories of struggle and resistance,

and standing up together are,

you learn them from each other when you have to.

When you're reaching for something to be like,

"yeah, we did it then, we can do it again.

We'll keep doing it again."

- It's a matter of just keeping those stories

alive, an ensuring the people sharing their

experiences and diverse experiences,

so we're always kind of aware of

what came before us, what's happening now,

and where we may head in the future.

Right?

- Yeah, I mean it's probably a bit too

idealistic to say that won't come up.

'Cause it was gonna be a level of struggles.

It won't be as high as it used to be,

but there's always gonna be people focusing

on differences.

So, people having their differences, and

their groups in their communities definitely helps.

- Well, it's an important issue, and I think

we'll see if and when marriage equality becomes

an inevitability, I guess where we go from there.

But thanks for joining me today.

And thank you for tuning into The Talk on Bent TV.

(cymbal crash)

(upbeat music)

For more infomation >> The Talk - Marriage Equality - Risk of losing identity or culture - Duration: 9:33.

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Emma Discovers A Magical Fairy....Or Two!!! - Duration: 5:38.

For more infomation >> Emma Discovers A Magical Fairy....Or Two!!! - Duration: 5:38.

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Skylanders Academy My Way or the Sky Way - Ben Kerr - Duration: 18:14.

PLEASE LIKE, SHARE, COMMENT & SUBCRIBE video! Thanks you very much!

I've gathered you for a mission of utmost importance so vital that the future of the Academy relies on nothing short of

Absolute success. I this time your foe is different, but no less formidable. It is the basement pipes

They are being attacked by a vicious clog of beard you heard the man up on your feet people

We've got plumbing to do hmm plumb Bing is that right I know this being there anyway go

Bad guys every second of every day we provide many essential services to Skylands great and small and sometimes that means

money-saving plumping missions, and that still sounds weird

Huh also do you have a mouse for breakfast?

Do you have any idea how pungent those things are they didn't they smell worse on the way out by the way move?

Okay what we have here is a category eight o'clock

Haven't seen one of these since the great back hair crisis of all six if this thing blows all the academy's up awesome

So what is it jet back?

I'll tell you as soon as I think of it cheapy all due respect

But I don't have much time to think this through as opposed to what each fans will act fast when I have a proper plan

In place which I have already if you weren't interrupting guys. This is about to get a go

Oh, you ain't kiddin that pipes ready to blow I do

show

No creepiness it has swords the tips of which is so good at disappearing

When I thought of what you were considering your plans, which I'm sure would have worked too, so

crisis averted before 11:00 brunch anyone

Earplugs to me

But you never come to my lair to what do I you?

I don't want to spend any more time down here that I have to so let me just say what I have to and

Actually mother you are the reason I'm putting together this little presentation

I want to show the core of light that I found locked away at Skylanders Academy, but now it won't project out

Why isn't my head working question? I've asked myself since you were a small boy

What get a real job and start paying rent like today, or I'm kicking you out yeah?

That's what I came down here to tell you have a great day

With me bidding piling up and you're the troll to do it, don't worry Lemmy

I'll fix this as soon as I can so I can get back to destroying the

Skylanders and harassing on his way of doing that the important thing is I see the world today

Uh you unclog the pipe, dude you say potato I say you're welcome brogue. I'm not pipe today

You're rebellious impulsive nature needs to be tamed, and I'm just the bird to do sure yeah great good

Here's the bathroom obviously Oh

And over there aspires room Spyros will hey well, let's get a good like right now, and what a dump?

Please thank you

Would you say dump? I call him like I see em Spyro no wonder. You don't play by the rules

You're equals poor spinal alignment poor alignment equals a poor attitude a poor attitude equals poor Skylander Inge and this

Video games these things make you lazy no

Experience on your application 300 years for

And since then I've stayed plenty busy trying to annihilate all Skylanders mmm, man. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Supreme overlord of darkness and destroying anyone who gets in my way you're legally required 10-minute break

Hello I'm hey gizzard eat me

Really well

then

Don't we dessert or something I would like a gizzard. I would like a whole bucket of good job. It's horrible

Be strong just try and go to the happy place in your mind

You know your memories of all the fun we have together like when you click my toenails

And I'll be back as soon as I can

Looks like we have a few more hours to catch up man

Don't fall so tell me more about your days in the thief claw machines couldn't recognize me in this getup

that means no one else will either and that gives me a

brilliantly evil idea

Space so the plan is we're gonna live in a sewer

Forever well I was just gonna hide in the sewer until jet-vac retired, but I think I like your idea better

Seriously, how old do you go?

All right we need to act fast

What's the point last thing we have to do the charges mm-hmm page one well now the owner of a supercharger

Yes my favorite stations are priests. Oh right yes cooks in the forest

Spiral why you stop it do the job for you, but well someone had to our team for the win

So how'd you get held up fight with chaos on the way here

so jet-vac

What happened at the falling forest today turns out nothing per your request it was safe from burning to the ground

By kaboom and snapshot, man. You did it huh didn't feel that long was a real page-turner

Alrighty, then now back to the task at hand

Lunch do I start with the business come to me? I didn't see that coming

Did you and now I have your food you know why because I didn't plan it. I just did it

What are you getting at sir I was?

Your righty honor yes

I've been riding Spyros tail pretty high at roost Islander trusts their instincts as much as their training jet-vac

Spyro does this very well me Hugo

Hello, master eons assistant. Enjoying your gizzard. Well. I was just about to dig in

Right that sounds like a swell idea. Let's go there now

after you

Nervous now I've seen that kind of behavior burn way too many Skylanders whoa. What do you mean? Oh?

I was just like you one son talented cocky those in an epic moment of heroism

There was a widow an orphanage a huge fire. They even wrote a song about it

Look. I just want you to know a track record of doing things the right way

But I I think you'll find that my way can be effective too. You oughtta, try it sometime. Maybe I will

Put some coupons huh cuz he didn't realize there were Skylanders here honest mistake well not that honest since okay fine

But before we leave you totally alone with hypnotized Hugo

So you can go into the relics room and do whatever you want to the lizard gizzard dance? Huh, yeah?

My turn kids are dance, and I want the map to the car

Yes

Would you believe now? Oh what without planning it? I I think I did that felt good, right?

How should we handle this trespassing swerve, don't yep?

We made real progress today, and I even followed every order jet vet gave during the fight

And I made a few impulsive moves of my own

Remember when I kicked lizard guts weaponized lizard guts pal

Gizzards the face some in the eyes a little gutter mouth. I may never get that smell out of my nostrils. Well. That would we

This whole time

I got a real job

I worked all day and I got pummeled in skylanders be a productive member of society

Instead of a guy who basically still lives at home in his mom's basement well mother when you put it like that

It's way more fun to take on Richard the third man up so she was mocking your theater days again

Huh huh me never never gets old for her sir you poor troll, I know

Hello I'm that narrator you hear in every movie

I like my dragon

You are specially little dragon

Our story begins here at

Skylander Academy the training grounds where cadets learn how to defend the sky lat

Literally folks like me four years ago exactly like me. There's only one spiral

Umeo my button apology I got this

Though I am NOT grumpy

That's grumpy

You become a Skylander you can't just get by on raw talent

You have to work hard and be an equal part of your team and in my own team I call it

This is all your thoughts biro. Hey hey not always about me

Alright so one last pop quiz hey question go easy on the lad. You know it's not easy growing up an orphan

We are the closest thing he has to family you know

Won't be a good explanation what I passed you passed

Barely, yeah, but I passed you didn't need that other word bigger than just yourself

Eight master of course so you mean I should get someone to run my fan club for me, so I'm gonna need head shots

Right, and oh, I should start practicing my autograph

Can I touch it

I've been looking forward to inscribing you since I found you as a hatchling you came into the world

fending for yourself a born fighter I

Had a reason despite your cockiness immaturity and brazen disregard for fire safety. Oh and other kinds of safety

Yeah, you see this is what I'm talking about her hands and talons all these years well

I am a dragon, so I'm talking about your unbridled ego

Now you must stop put for the skylander games tomorrow. It is your final test spiral and this time

Barely passing will not be good enough

And I suggest you get ready to by defending it against foes that hunger for Anarchy lost and eternal darkness

Threats that seem to be growing in number and power with each passing day I fear

Well TAS sir are you seeing a particularly evil mood today? Oh, thank you for noticing how did you know?

Santé dirt well my latest scheme is so stupendously evil that it would be the end of every today

Every Skylander ever is inscribed in the book which finds their powers to it for all the eternity

So whoever controls the book controls the Skylanders, right?

Isn't the book hidden deep in the bowels of the Academy yes

except for one day a year

skylander graduation day a

New personal record

You know a ruptor. It's been a lot of hard work getting here, but I finally feel ready for the gate

I just spent more important to do

All these people here at our house no

One gets in and left out on the list

Names names. You know us we live here with spiral. I don't

Just be ready for tomorrow, that's born ready relax guys

You checked his bedroom the kitchen

Skylands and to each other a

Dedication clearly not everyone is capable of those of you who pass will chip erupt or

Why are we here I'm getting a lay of the land for my attack plus

I need to know who to draft for my skyline of fantasy week. I guess every supervillain needs a pointless hobby patience sir

On to stage two states to choose a supercharger to navigate through an obstacle course on the brakes

This end well

Look like me I am much taller

That sucked and finally candidate five

Absent very well right now let me just stretch the old wings and then we can

Candidates, I will now call out all of the names of those who have passed and will join me tomorrow

as the newest members of the Skylanders here up top

Sorry

Feelings make me gassy hex

fails

We lost out to a guy whose superpower

I warned you that you're barely passing would not be good enough to become a Skylander and it isn't so

You fail

I'll tell universe I get the point

Couple of months might do some good

I'm just saying maybe this is what it takes for him to finally learn his lesson never ending pity party isn't going to help

I'm gonna go check in to see

This is why we cannot have nice things

Spyro

For more infomation >> Skylanders Academy My Way or the Sky Way - Ben Kerr - Duration: 18:14.

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CHRISTMAS TREES | REAL OR FAKE - Duration: 2:53.

hello friends so today I am here in Salisbury Massachusetts and it's a

really exciting scene as you see behind me these beautiful trees I come from a

Muslim family never celebrated Christmas I don't celebrate Christmas but you've

got to be lying to yourself if you don't believe that you live in America the

time from Thanksgiving all the way through New Year's Eve is easily the

best time to be in this country people are the happiest it's the most festive

is the holidays the music all of it the whole nine is the best so I came here to

a true festival and I'm going to ask you simple questions number one baked

artificial that's just a science question I need to know the answer to a

fake tree or an artificial tree I mean a fake tree for a real trick which one you

want better number two best gift you've ever received I think it was a fairy

emboss as the holidays come around those are the questions we need the answers to

and I am the guy that's going let's find some friends

fake or real artificial or real which tree is more important which looks

better which lasts longer what are you thoughts definitely a real tree

the smell grocery absolutely real every time every time

the real ones the real one yeah real real Mostafa real

real sorry I have to ask because you seem very confident in that answer have

you always had real trees when it comes to Christmas time yes good for you

congratulate there you go that's me that's all that's all I've managed a

real tree no really Richard to smell the feel just just going to get it picking

it up I have to ask because you are here at the festival yes and most of these

shoots are fake do you plan on getting a real tree this yet no wait out oh I'm

gonna save a tree and win one Oh at least you're honest - I'm trying you

gotta you gotta clean up but you do like the real

oh really that means that it means something to you very real you want to

smell you want to send you what the whole Oh

oh well that's a really good reason that's a really good reason allergies

mean a lot to me I'm a nurse I'm a nurse so that means a lot so I might good for

you ladies and gentlemen we found the start

of the race congratulation for t five years in those forty five

For more infomation >> CHRISTMAS TREES | REAL OR FAKE - Duration: 2:53.

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Black Girl Magic or Black Girl Tragic? - Duration: 43:05.

For more infomation >> Black Girl Magic or Black Girl Tragic? - Duration: 43:05.

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Small or Far Away ? - Duration: 0:32.

A pint and a half of beer.

One glass is small, the other is far away.

But which is which ? You've got five seconds.

For more infomation >> Small or Far Away ? - Duration: 0:32.

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12/1/17 4:15 PM (1760 Wallace Rd NW, Salem, OR 97304, USA) - Duration: 10:25.

For more infomation >> 12/1/17 4:15 PM (1760 Wallace Rd NW, Salem, OR 97304, USA) - Duration: 10:25.

-------------------------------------------

12/1/17 6:41 AM (10504 SE Lafayette Hwy, Dayton, OR 97114, USA) - Duration: 10:00.

For more infomation >> 12/1/17 6:41 AM (10504 SE Lafayette Hwy, Dayton, OR 97114, USA) - Duration: 10:00.

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12/1/17 4:25 PM (22001-22101 OR-153, Dayton, OR 97114, USA) - Duration: 10:20.

For more infomation >> 12/1/17 4:25 PM (22001-22101 OR-153, Dayton, OR 97114, USA) - Duration: 10:20.

-------------------------------------------

Glow Big or Go Home - Duration: 43:06.

For more infomation >> Glow Big or Go Home - Duration: 43:06.

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Fingerlings Real or Fake | Ebay Fingerling - real or really good fake? You decide | By Kids Toy Zone - Duration: 4:15.

Does the name match?

For more infomation >> Fingerlings Real or Fake | Ebay Fingerling - real or really good fake? You decide | By Kids Toy Zone - Duration: 4:15.

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REFRESHING OR REVOLTING: 2018 JEEP WRANGLER - Duration: 5:29.

REFRESHING OR REVOLTING: 2018 JEEP WRANGLER

After releasing the first official photos of the Wrangler at SEMA this year, Jeep chose to officially reveal the JL Wrangler at this year's Los Angeles Auto Show.

It's supposed to be lighter and more efficient, offer more features and technology, and still maintain its position as one of the most capable street-legal off-roaders you can buy new.

Alongside the 3.6-liter V-6, you'll also be able to get your JL with a turbocharged four-cylinder or a turbodiesel V-6.

Plus, Jeep says it plans to offer a plug-in hybrid option, as well.

It's definitely still got that classic Wrangler look, but how does the new design compare to the previous one?.

Up front, there are a few things Jeep definitely couldn't mess with.

As a result, the seven-slot grille and round headlights are still there, just like they should be.

But there have been plenty of more subtle changes, like taking the Jeep badge off the grille, adding LED headlights and "halo" running lights, and using narrower fenders and bumpers.

If you spring for the Wrangler Rubicon, the fenders are also mounted higher.

Like the front end, the side view is also still classic Wrangler, with only minor tweaks here and there.

One of the most important additions is the vent on the side that Jeep says will eliminate the hood flutter that Wranglers are known for.

Out back, Jeep gave the redesigned Wrangler new LED taillights to go with its LED headlights.

A backup camera comes standard now, too, and it's mounted to the center of the spare tire.

But even with new taillights, the JL is still instantly recognizable as a Wrangler from the rear.

If you ask us, we think it's a tasteful update to a classic design that will age well.

Inside, Jeep now offers three different infotainment screens, including one touchscreen that measures a massive 8.4 inches.

Regardless of which one you choose, though, the cabin is still completely waterproof.

And when the terrain gets rough, there are still plenty of grab-handles to help passengers hang on for dear life.

The Wrangler might offer more modern features like USB ports and push-button start, but it's still far from civilized.

Jeep has yet to confirm when the Wrangler will land on dealer lots or what it will cost when it does, but expect to hear more in the near future.

When deliveries do begin, the V-6 is expected to go on sale first, followed by the four-cylinder a little later.

Assuming it passes emissions testing, the 30-mpg diesel version will arrive third, with the plug-in hybrid option getting here in 2020.

For more infomation >> REFRESHING OR REVOLTING: 2018 JEEP WRANGLER - Duration: 5:29.

-------------------------------------------

FACT or FICTION - "BACK FROM THE DEAD" [Season 1, Episode 2] (YouTube Series) - Duration: 16:53.

We know death to be the end of this bumpy ride we call life.

It's the one guarantee and one of few things that links everybody in the world to one another.

We're all facing the inevitability of an eternal vast darkness or a higher plane of

existence, but what if some of us could beat death?

We all face our mortality in our own ways, but the following three stories show that

some aren't willing to let go..

Is there a way to come back from the beyond… or are we spinning fantastical fallacies?

Put your perception to the test as you determine whether these stories are a product of fact…

or fiction.

The line that divides the factual from the unreal has long since blurred, the tales we

once thought fantastical now implanted as truth.

To decipher verity from the imagined, you must break from the ordinary and consider

a universe where the outlandish prevails.

Can you expand your mind to see beyond our perceived reality?

Can you decide what's fact or fiction?

Whether we want it to or not, death is coming for us all, and sometimes it even has its

eye out for those newly introduced to the world.

Bethany and Danial Hardener were overjoyed to welcome their son and third child, Devin,

into the world, but the small boy was met with something much colder than the warm embrace

of his parents.

Story # 1: The Miracle Light It wasn't what he expected his wife, Bethany,

to surprise him with on a random Monday evening after work, but when Danial saw the pregnancy

test sitting on the bathroom counter, he was elated.

Fast forward nine months and it seemed like that joy was falling apart right in front

of him, lost to a reality that neither he nor Bethany had prepared for.

All of the shopping for baby clothes, the preparation of a nursery, reading every "How

to…" book on being a father – none of that mattered anymore, not as the doctor regretfully

explained their baby was stillborn.

Danial held the death certificate in his hand in disbelief, questioning what they had done

wrong.

Devin would have been their third child, they knew how to handle the pregnancy and were

still so careful.

But it wasn't enough.

Devin was born at 1lb 1oz, his tiny frame not taking in any air.

Danial could see how motionless his small body was and knew, before the doctor confirmed

it, that his son had died.

By the sound of Bethany's sobs, she knew, too.

While Danial did his best to accept what happened to his family, Bethany couldn't let go of

Devin so easily.

She struggled with the concept that he was dead, that maybe she did something wrong that

caused his premature birth.

She insisted on seeing his body one last time, her heart needing one moment with him before

letting go.

Later that evening, after a day of feeling sorrow and anger and confusion, Danial and

Bethany were escorted down to the morgue for a final visit with the son they never got

to know.

The tiny coffin that awaited them in the morgue was shocking, almost surreal, but Bethany

persisted.

As Danial pried open the wooden top, there he was, tiny Devin, frost forming on his body.

Bethany reached in to touch her baby one last time and as her finger brushed his small cheek,

she was met not just with the shock of how cold he felt but also a small whimper.

Devin's body didn't move, but she definitely heard it, and judging by the look on Danial's

face, so, too, did he.

After 12 hours in the cold of the morgue, the underdeveloped boy had somehow overcome

death and, brought back by the warming and loving touch of his mother.

The medical staff, the very same doctors that declared him dead, attended to the miracle

child, baffled by what many considered a "miracle baby."

Is what sounds like a fictitious and uplifting tale actually rooted in our reality?

Frozen for 12 hours, could Devin be a case for cryogenics?

Is it possible that the timeline is completely off and, in the chaos, the truth was muddied?

Can you tell if we're tangling you in our web of deception?

Tell us your thoughts in the comments and stick around to find out.

Next, we're going to look at the story of Matteo Guzman and how a simple drive on a

familiar highway thrust him into what could serve as a PSA for wearing seatbelts.

Story # 2: The Accident "Be careful, I hate when you're on the

road so late."

It was the last thing Carla Guzman said to her husband before receiving the phone call

that all wives dread.

It was a deadly crash, a freak highway accident that demolished her husband's car.

Within the crumpled wreckage the fire department found the motionless body of Matteo Guzman,

blood soaking his face.

They called out to him but received no response.

When they pulled him from the destroyed heap of metal, there was no question that he had

died in the crash.

Matteo had been returning home from a night with his friends when his car was struck,

the catalyst of a very quick series of events that wound up taking his life.

When Carla received the phone call, she was left in shock but still bore the responsibility

of ensuring the body pulled from the wreckage did belong to her husband.

Through tears, disbelief, and grief, she made her way to the hospital, expecting and fearing

the absolute worst.

As she made the drive, Matteo was being placed on the morgue table and prepared for the autopsy.

A large gash on his face was the site of much of his blood loss and needed stitching, especially

if his wife was going to be seeing his body.

As the needle pierced his flesh, a trickle of blood appeared and dripped down his face.

According to the report received by the morgue, he had been dead long enough for the flow

of blood to have stopped.

That he bled from a simple prick of a needle was a little surprising, but not nearly as

much as when his eyes shot open.

Matteo reacted as anyone who wakes up to being prodded with needles would – terrified.

According to the newly revived Matteo, the pain had snapped him from what was thought

to be death.

As he came to terms with having been declared dead and the tragedy he lived through, Carla

arrived at the hospital.

Though she expects to be escorted to the morgue, she's brought to a hallway where she finds

Matteo, miraculously alive.

Matteo says the unbearable pain is what woke him, but wouldn't being moved and handled

had the same effect?

Could this just be a tall tale passed down through the ages?

Or is the terrifying ordeal that Matteo and Carla went through based on truth?

Before we reveal tonight's answers, we have a question to pose: Could the victim of a

murder also wind up being their best witness?

While you consider an answer, hear the tale of Jennifer Allenbrook, who may leave you

thinking differently.

Story # 3: An Act of Passion It was a case that had been seen way too often.

Jennifer Allenbrook, 35, bullet wound from a .44 Remington Magnum to the temple.

A scornful lover unwilling to let her end what was likely an abusive and volatile relationship.

Anyone could visualize their final moments together, a distressed Allenbrook telling

her beau that they needed to end their fling that led to fits of rage as the two argued

over their past and future.

Those that knew them knew they weren't strangers to dialing "911," but Jennifer stayed

with him because she knew he loved her and would someday change.

Then one night, she reached her breaking point.

As he threatened to raise a hand to her, she reached for something to defend herself with

and struck him.

It was the first time she fought back.

It would also be the last.

By the time Allenbrook was wheeled into the morgue, her boyfriend, John, had already been

picked up for questioning and was, expectedly so, cracking under the pressure.

As he tried to spin his version of the story, the lifeless body of Jennifer was placed in

a room of other frigid corpses.

Her body started to turn cold as John continued spewing his lies, this time claiming she had

turned the gun on herself.

The officers that picked him up listened to his woeful version of the past five years

with Jennifer, and though they knew it'd be an easy arrest and conviction, they were

unaware of how easy it would get.

In the silence of the morgue, there was a scream.

Jerry, who had worked in the sublevel for years, recalled it as the most frightening

sound he had ever heard and feared it was a cry for help from another dimension.

When the coughing and soft sobs followed, his curiosity and concerned trumped his fear.

"He shot me," a hoarse female voice choked through coughs.

Jerry followed the sounds and found the once-deceased Jessica just barely moving.

Her skin was freezing, but she was clinging onto a life everyone thought she had lost.

As confused as the medical staff in the hospital was, it was difficult not to feel elation

over the following days as Jennifer very slowly recovered.

That she survived the gunshot wasn't an impossibility, especially as the bullet hadn't

hit her brain, but how she had come back from death became a hot topic within the hospital.

Though many claimed she was simply misdiagnosed as deceased, those that had attended to her

stood their ground, even as they fell under heavy scrutiny.

Jennifer eventually recovered, though she was left with permanent damage to her vision

and PTSD from the nightmare of being shot, declared dead, and left in a room with the

recently deceased.

Is it possible for someone to survive being shot point-blank in the temple with such a

powerful gun?

And why did so many medical staff misdiagnose Jennifer as being dead?

Perhaps the bullet struck Jennifer just right and the medical technology used to diagnose

her was malfunctioning that day?

What do you think?

Let us know in the comments now.

The Reveal: So, you think you're a bona fide sleuth

that knew which of our tales were true and which were a complete lie?

Let's see if you're as good as you say you are at separating fact, from fiction.

Let's recall the story of baby Devin, a premature baby born at 1lb 1oz.

Did his parents really open a small coffin to find him cold, but breathing after being

declared dead 12 hours earlier?

If you think it's nonsense, then let us introduce you to Analia Bouge and Fabian Veron,

the parents in the real-life story of Luz Milagros.

After being born more than 10 weeks premature, Luz was declared dead within 20 minutes of

birth.

It's also true that Analia wanted to see her daughter one last time, leading to their miraculous

discovery.

Sadly, however, little Luz passed away over a year later.

Do you believe that Matteo Guzman simply "woke up" from death after being poked with a

needle?

If you do, you'd be right.

Thirty-three-year-old Carlos Camejor was involved in a deadly car accident that left him on

a metal slab in a morgue.

As a large gash on his chin was being repaired, he actually did wake up, claiming the "pain

was unbearable.

To verify his story, Carlos posed with the autopsy order and obvious scarring on his

face.

Finally, we have Jennifer Allenbrook and her brush with death after being shot in the temple.

Was this one of our tall tales - or was Jennifer based on a real person?

If you're itching to hear the backstory on this one, well, we're sorry to say, there

isn't one.

Allenbrook and the bullet to her temple are creations of our very own vivid imaginations.

How well did you in

tonight's video?

Did you look past the deception of our world and define the oft-blurred line that struggles

to separate lies from the truth?

Let us all know in the comment section below and should you find the urge to test your

perceptions again, be sure to subscribe and join us next time when we ask you to decide

what's fact... or fiction.