Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to Work in Progress, where I talk to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going. Today's guest is Christopher Smith. He is a clinical professor in the School of Communication at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he also jointly runs the Media Economics and Entrepreneurship Program. Now why am I so excited he's here Because he happens to have been my college professor at USC and my favorite professor of all time. Professor Smith is the reason why I love journalism so much and why I see the value in journalism and social justice working hand in hand. It was so much fun to see him and talk to him for the podcast. He is fascinating, brilliant, and so thought provoking. And I am so excited that you all will get to learn from him today too. It's almost like you get to sit in on one of my classes. He is just the best, and if you're lucky enough to be at USC, take his class. I promise that will change your life. I'm so excited that you're here today. Thanks for having This is a trip and so fun, so I want to take everybody back a little bit. And it's funny that you remember the year, because I realized that I didn't. But I was looking through the notes from your call and you said it was two thousand two when I was in your class, which is crazy to me. I just started at USC, you had that was my first year? Okay? And where were you before? I was at I was getting my PhD University of Wisconsin, man Sin and I wrote my dissertation back in New York City. I've worked as a research analyst at a tech PR firm, and uh, when I finished, when I defended my dissertation, I got the offer to come to USC as a postdoctoral fellow, and uh, I started, and I've been there ever since. So take me back, what does it mean to work in tech PR in two thousand two? Because this is pre iPhone, this is pre Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, just the dawn of the consumer facing Internet. I mean basically, when Mark Andresen bought the Netscape browser company public and fall of to the that started the Internet frenzy, the dot com frenzy, and so Domino's positive Dominoes after that, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, all those first wave Internet companies came to market, and the excitement in the late nineties was just through the roof. It was like the digital gold rush had begun. And so any young person in New York the Bay Area you wanted to be in that game. And so I was writing my dissertation on the way that technology spurs asset price appreciation and spurs the cultural phenomenon around asset price appreciations that we call bubbles. And so the dot com era was a classic bubble and I was already studying that. So as I was writing my dissertation, I said, well, it would be great to be even closer to the action. And so I also got a full time job working as a representative for startups that wanted consulting on their communication strategies and just their market positioning. Yeah, so it was exciting. So when you talk about a bubble asset price appreciate appreciation, can you tell people what that means for for people who don't When new technology is going all the way back to the steam engine and railroad occur, they transform society, they transform business, they transform the economy, and they also transform the way we think, um just in everyday life, about what's possible, how we might behave and what we can aspire to, and those are all natural byproducts of new inventions and and new ways of doing things. That kind of excitement. People place bets on how far the impact of those exciting new things can take us, and they literally place financial bets on that. And when you literally get like an ignition of excitement around a phenomena and a lot of people are placing bets, bystanders see all those people placing bets, and they sense the excitement and they want in as well, and you get positive contagion effect of people being really interested in this area, wanting to be in on it, and wanting to be part of the financial reward that's going to come from it. And when that becomes a mass phenomena, it creates a bubble because what that what's happening is people's expectations of the impact become bigger than the immediate near term impact is actually going to be. And when you get a correction between those expectations and the reality, that's when the market goes down. That's when the bubble bursts. And we saw that, we realized that you see that all the time. That's a byproduct of of of financial capitalism, you know, and innovation. But when the action is good and the music is playing, it's a it's a wonderful time to be dancing because it's really catchy, it's really exciting, it's fun and to be young. And in the midst of that, it felt like the Roaring twenties all over again, you know, like, you know, the the excitement that working hard, working late, playing hard, staying up late, you know, burning the candle at both ends. To be in New York at any time as a young person is exciting. To be in New York at a time of that kind of game change is particularly exciting. So it was really great. But with the benefit of hindsight, we know that a lot of the value that was initially created around those startups at that time didn't matter, didn't didn't come to mean very much in a longstanding way. So you know, we kind of know that those kind of periods are gonna happen, but we also know that when the bubble bursts, reckoning what actually mattered from that time, um is always a little bit difficult. And so were you writing your dissertation on these topics, Absolutely absolutely, And you know, the idea is is how do peep bill come to adjust their everyday thinking to these new realities. What are the mechanisms of representation, of culture, of of of of just you know, everyday life that are just people's thinking to these new possibilities. These new possibilities always have to persuade people a that this is safe, this is okay, this is going to add to your sense of security, and then on top of that that you're gonna have greater degrees of liberty from this. If you can do all those things, lessen people's fear factor of the unknown and the new, and make them feel like they're going to be enhanced, then you can you can really make a lot of headway and bringing new ideas to market without much resistance or less resistance. And so I was really curious about during that dot com era, how we're everyday people coming to make sense of the dawning of the Internet. So every time you have what it's called a wave of creative destruction and new ideas are coming, you know, into the mainstream. Analyzing how are everyday people in different pockets of the population, with different degrees of stakes in the news, in the change, how are they adjusting. That's always eminently fascinating because I think people today forget what the late nineties felt like. The Internet was a great unknown. It was like exploring space totally, and and people thought it was a joke. Not only was it the great unknown, it was something that people like a lot of new things that people don't understand. They try to diminish it by making fun of it. And and and you know, media companies, you know, you know the space that you were. You know, no one took it seriously. If you go back to YouTube and you see these grainy, pre high def videos of newscasters reporting on the dawn of the Internet. For them, it's like this this weird, fattish, marginal thing. And instead it's become the spine of everything, and it isn't isn't it interesting to think about? As you said, that the Internet is the spine of everything. But in a way, the Internet is still in its infancy. It's kind of like a preteen. We have to raise it. We have to teach it how to behave We have to give it rules and parameters because it thinks it knows everything, and it's creating a big mess when it's given you know, unsupervised time and and it's wild to realize that we unleashed this thing into the world, and in a way we have to play catch up and clean up. Absolutely no, You're absolutely right. I mean, we do not have the frameworks culturally or or politically to really capture all of the implications that the Internet has unleashed, and we are playing catch up, and it's a it's a it's a messy process. So I want to get into the Internet with you and talk about usc with you, obviously in our time there, and I want to learn about how you wound up at Wisconsin and chose this path for yourself. But before we go through your story, I always kind of like to rewind because I sit with people and they're doing incredible things in the present day, and you have been for quite some time now. But I'm curious how you became like this. I'm curious about who you were as a kid. Were you so observational and interested in systems? Were you this this sort of strong presence? Do you think when you were ten? You know, who's Chris when he's a kid? And where did you grow up? I want to I want to I want to start there. Oh my gosh, Well, you know I mean, without going to into the weed. I think if I look back on my childhood growing up in northern New Jersey, twenty minutes outside of New York City, I think what really defines my growing up was being at the crossroads, at the intersection of a lot of different cultural streams. Where did you grow up in New Jersey? I grew up in a in a town in Essex County called East Orange, and I went to school my whole life in a town called Montclair. My mom grew up in Oh my gosh, oh no, that whole area from I guess Teaneck. It's where a school called Dwight Englewood is and that they were one of my school's main rivals growing up. I went to a school my whole life called Montclair, Kimberly Academy Private School and Upper Montclair, and yeah, that all the private schools in that region and inclusive of Manhattan and the bronx Um of New York, those were our rivals, and going all the way down to Princeton. So you know, I was I'm a product of that classic tri state area New York, New Jersey, Connecticut kind of kind of seen and what was going on there, then, what was the kind of energy you were growing up in. I mean, I think anyone who's ever not to date myself, but anyone who's ever seen the Ate, the classic HBO show The Sopranos, can get a little taste of the fabric of northern New Jersey and the aspect of northern New Jersey. It's a very unique and specific cultural scene, very you know, old school immigrant based um, very old world and tough. Like people from that area are like, you know, really no nonsense and and and gritty and and and and very proud of kind of no matter whether you're white collar, blue collar, anywhere in between. Everyone has a hard hat mentality. Like everyone like is like not afraid to roll up their sleeves. And so I'm proud of being from that area because although i love living in l A and I'm not going anywhere and I've been here twenty years, when you're from that area, you you feel like you've got that inborn grid. And so, you know, New Jersey kind of gave me that. But for me personally, the intersection um that I'm speaking about is, you know, my parents weren't from that area. They were from rural Virginia, and so I kind of was like a first generation immigrant um kid. Where my parents migrated, they were part of the Great Migration, the African American migration of rural southern dwellers who just knew they were gonna have more opportunities in the north. And when my parents graduated from college in the mid sixties, they were at the you know, the Great Migration started in the early twentieth century, they were at the tail end of the Great Migration, and they moved north. My dad started a business, and New Jersey became our home. So every summer growing up, I would go back to the rural area of Virginia near Charlottesville that they were from and stay with my grandparents. And and I'm actually flying back there this weekend. And that is a very bucolic like seen, like just very idyllic um butterflies in the cornfield and livestock and you know, your own crops and the whole nine yards of rural life. And then I'm growing up in a place where when I look outside my school cafeteria, there's New York City. And also when my parents arrived in East Orange in late sixties early seventies, what greeted them upon arrival were the race riots of nineteen sixty seven in York. So that was their arrival was the beginning of white flight. So East Orange in New York, and many of these communities were communities where you know, European immigrants had lived for generations and Jewish, Italian Irish, and that's where they had planted roots and formed a vibrant community. And sad to say is the historical record shows the arrival of black migrants meant they're moving out. And so they moved to the western suburbs of Livingston, Short Hills, Morristown and they became real enclaves, white enclaves, and Newark, East Orange and those more industrial communities became black. And so my parents come from the rural South, raised me in a place that is going to become defined by white flight, and I go to a majority white, affluent private school my entire life. So those are three domains that I'm connecting during my childhood going south to visit my grandparents, being deeply steeped in the rural life of the South and all the cultural morays there, Northeastern urban living, and also totally privileged, affluent private education and all that that brings with it from a cultural scene, and that kind of so constantly, I mean now they call it code switching, but constantly knowing how to navigate those worlds. I don't know if it gave me a certain kind of charisma, but it definitely gave me a certain kind of cultural fluency and how to get along with people, because I didn't balkanize myself in any given area. I had black friends that were staunchly from the urban domain. I had white friends who summered in Nantucket every summer. I had, you know, all of my relatives and friends and cousins in the South who picked blackberries at harvest time. And I was weaving in and out of all those worlds at a time of real transformational um change, being so steeped in all those different communities as you, as you explain, and also living through a real transformational period of this migration and this white flight and this I imagine really sort of ever moving feeling in the community around you. Did that create any kind of fear for you as a kid, or or did you just know it to be true because you moved through all those worlds and and as you mentioned, you just sort of learned how to behave in every arena that you found yourself in. Well, I don't. I mean, I think as far as I never felt any fear as a child, in that sense, I was very motivated as a child because I knew I could see the the beauty of it is. I felt secure in all of those environments, so I felt changes everything. Yeah, I feel very blessed that I had a very secure, intact household and upbringing my extended family in the rural South where it was just idyllic and beautiful and charmed, and I felt very welcome in the affluent white world where I went to school, and I felt very connected. I think thankfully I started there right out of kindergarten, so in many respect it was all that I knew and I was. I had a wide range of friends and felt deeply connected. So I never felt like I never had a place. I felt blasting that I had many places to call home. But I think I felt very motivated because I knew that there was a really I felt the momentum behind my extended families carving out of security and what could have been and was quite frankly a hostile segregated environment in the South that they had carved out a place of peace and tranquility from which to raise a family that could go out and spread out and be vibrant wherever they chose to move. Against all odds, they carved that out. And then my parents were very entrepreneurial, and my dad was a striving entrepreneur. So here I come, firstborn in my family. I have a five brother who's five years younger. I felt the energetic, motivational momentum of all that my ancestors had done up until my parents time to kind of move our family's destiny down the road. So I didn't view it as like a weight, but I knew I'm at this particular school for a reason. I'm there to kind of advance myself and advance our family's destiny along the way. So I was very, very motivated by that continuum. That's beautiful because I know that sort of when your whole community feels as though it's going through a tumultuous change, it can be scary for kids who don't have language. And it's interesting that you talk not about a feeling of tumultuousness, but rather a feeling forward motion like we were in this in this energetic part of to make it really real. Part of that is survivors instinct, because let's not kid ourselves. I could see that if you didn't keep if you didn't keep up with the current as it were, you could be waylaid along the trajectory of your maturation. Because I could see kids in my neighborhood who just my instinct was telling me that the cap on their aspirations was likely going to be different than mine. Just by dint of my parents decision to be entrepreneurial and to convert their economic resources into a private education. They could have converted those assets into anything else, fancier vacations, a fancier house, whatever, they converted a lot of critical portion of it into me and my brother's education. When I would come home and I play football with my neighborhood friends in the street, or play basketball in one another's backyard, you could just see different phenomena of urban life that your instinct, even as a young person, even maybe pre adolescent, is telling you yellow flag, yellow flag warning, like those are areas that could stop your four trajectory. And so you kind of you kind of learned how to avoid certain pitfalls along the way because they're very organic to where you are and they're very real, to say nothing of the psychic risks of losing your way navigating an affluent white world and where you live knowing that many of those affluent whites fled because you were coming you That could do a psychic number on you if you let it. So, they're the they're the organic risks of attrition of how young black men and women from early ages in certain communities face great at risk odds. And then there's the risk of what happens to you when perhaps you pursue inclusion too dogged lee and give up all kinds of psychic comforts to be included in these other spaces of privilege. Either one can be a tax on your well being and your eventual prosperity. It's a lot to balance for a kid, that balance the two worlds and making sure you feel full in both. Yeah, but I mean at the end of the day, love carries the day. Love and substance pursuing substantive nourishment every place you go like dials you into the proper channels of of just vibrant energy. And I think you know, just by the way I've been raised, That's the way I'm geared is to pursue the light and not the darkness or anywhere else. I'd like to go to people who really inspire and and you know love, you know, like like you you, gravitating into the light keeps you in the in the space of where love is most paramount. And you know, I think that no matter where you are, if you if you have that calibration and orientation, you'll be fine. You'll be fine. But it takes, as they say, takes a village. It kind of takes a kind of steeping in that perspective early on to kind of, you know, coordinate your gears for that journey. And if you don't get coordinated like that, it can be harder to kind of course correct on your own down the road. But I think I was really hardwired, pretty robustly from the outset, So I'm very thankful for that. You you make your classroom feel like that, Your classroom feels really steeped in in a motivated, loving energy, and I don't I'm sure all your students tell you that, but just in case, I wanted to make sure I didn't, you know, I mean I feel blessed. I mean, obviously we all you know, if we're blessed, we have a lot of options. Certainly had options to how I was going to make a career, but I liked teaching and education because there is a church like quality to it. There is a the best part of church, not the theological dogmatic part of church where you're adherent or you're out, but the idea that love is the currency and mingling souls is a moment, and the classroom and just working in research teams and all those kind of things that we do and education. There aren't many things you can do like the work you do acting and creating inspiring. How many careers are there where your job is to inspire people, where your job is to like turn people on as as to what the possibilities for themselves are, not the possibilities of your remuneration, but the possibilities of their enhancement. There aren't that many ways you can do that, and I just chose. I felt like my comparative advantage was in the classroom. That I felt like I was, you know, anointed and sort of that that was the place for me to be. And you know, like I like being in those settings where you feel the love flow and you feel the positive energy flow, and you feel that that ambition to enhance others flow and to the degree I mean obviously, you know the classroom is also very individuated, and everyone's pursuing their own outcome. But when you can levin that with any kind of communal energy, it's all to the better and everyone will benefit from that. And so that's how I roll, you know, That's how I roll. Everyone does it differently. So how do you Because obviously I know you wound you wound up at USC and became my favorite professor. You're at your private school on the East coast, you wind up in Wisconsin. What's what's the sort of what awakens in you as a student that leads you on your collegiate journey that eventually led you to my collegiate journey. What's what's that storyline? Well? Number one, I mean, I think I wanted to go against the grain. So that's another part of my of my makeup is I like to take the road lesser travel, and so I didn't I definitely wanted to go to a different part of the country. So at that time things weren't as national and global as they are now. Um, so pretty much kids who graduated from East Coast prep schools in that day went to East Coast schools, Liberal Arts schools or the Ivy League. So all my friends were either going to Bucknell or you Pen or schools of that ilk Smith, Williams Amherst. And I was like, I wanted to be different, and so when I considered schools, I considered USC and that was very exotic in those days. But I ended up going to University of Chicago, and I was probably a hand one of a handful of people who went further west upon graduation. So that just dialed me into sort of like always wanted to expand and spread my wings. And at that time, the main thing that was happening in the world was that the media ecosystem was just blossoming and burgeoning fourth and in that day and age, the catalyst was cable television and that was the MTV era and the era of ESPN coming on the scene and though in CNN, and so those seeing that ecosystems start to broaden the options of entertainment choice and amplify the ability for a message to spread. As an undergraduate student in Chicago. I started to get really interested in the sociology of culture and understanding how culture moves the public imagination and has economic effects. And so when I came back to the New York area, I worked as an arts and entertainment editor for four years and then I just had a wonderful time in that space. But I wanted to deepen my sort of intellectual appreciation of these phenomena that were happening in the media world. So I went back to Wisconsin to get a PhD. And that's what led me eventually to USC And what did you do for your PhD? I was in a media and cultural study program and the University Wisconsin, Madison, and so we that program was all about studying the cultural impacts of media and how media really becomes the chief way that we make meaning of the world around us. That it's no longer about making It's not as much the old framework of religion being the prism through which we understand the world around us. That was the traditional way in all civilizations. You know that that religious basis was the framework through which you understood the world as you matured. Now it's media for better and for worse. It's it's media. And as media really intensifies and and deepens into the fabric of everyday life, that meaning making process, it's more complex. So there's a never ending range of phenomena to explore. And that was because I was in my program at the dawn of the Internet. You're at that home it where you know, um kind of a three sixty multi platform ecosystem was just beginning. So you know, we we we were just at the cusp of looking into that. Do you think looking back that that was a wild time for your then professors to try to figure out how to teach you as students about what was happening because there was this unknown thing coming. Yes, I think the thing that really radicalized the classroom at that time where the racial dynamics of the late nineties. I arrived at University of Wisconsin. My first semester was the semester of the O. J. Simpson trial and verdict. And so just because things are so much more just on full blast crazy now, people also forget just how highly charged the cultural fabric was around race in the nineties when gangster rat was rising in the West. Uh, you had just had the Rodney King incident in the early nineties UM, and all the insurrectionary energy that came out of that here in l A. And then all of the police and communal brutality that was happening in New York. I mean, there are numerous cases that New Yorkers remember from those years that I mean, now we're remembering the Central Park five. I mean, there you go. So, I mean that was something that people were just beginning to wrap their heads around the whole idea of how media was a mechanism for people to discuss those events, and whether it was pop music via gangster rap or whether it was the seven news cycle of the likes of CNN covering something like the o A trial. Just race and and the growing popularity of of Black American culture in popular culture, the crossover effect of how popular black expressive culture was becoming in those days, and how it was becoming part of the basic cultural expression of all young Americans. All those things were happening UM at that time, and that's for me, that was probably the main dynamic that was like central to kind of shifting the conversation, because that's that's really what made cultural studies UM such a useful tool to unpack insights from all those things, because cultural studies, if nothing else, tells you that media matters, and traditionally the humanities teaches you that that media and pop culture in general is inconsequential, doesn't doesn't matter it all, that the real stuff of life comes from economic factors and comes from more material factors in people's life, and the culture is mean, it is not important. That's so interesting to me because I think of culture is the expression of who we are, and economics and material things there, they're pieces of our lives, but the expression of who people are feels to me like a much bigger deal. People are still fighting to make the narrative aspect of meaning making matter as much as the material dimension. And there's a Nobel winning economist named Robert Schiller who just released a book called Narrative Economics and the whole idea is and his whole research project has been to make heart and fast quantitative economists who gauge their view on how the world works strictly by the numbers metrics to appreciate that the stories people tell about the world around them has economic effects, and that it's not just the numbers tell it all, but the stories people tell about the lived reality, it's just as meaningful. And so whether in the economics discipline, the media studies discipline, gender studies discipline, a lot of people have been doing the work of making the cultural realm appreciate it for what it is, um real. And it's a lot easier now because culture is just so wall to wall that people can ignore it. But it's still still a bit of an uphill slav from time to time. So what did it feel like when you started at USC in two thousand one and what did you come to teach? How do you This is of question that I'm always bouncing around in my head. How do you when you become a teacher figure out what you're going to teach your students? How do you write your first syllabus? I can't imagine the terror sitting at the computer with the cursor on the blank page. Where do you? Where do you start with us? I think a big part of your graduate training is specialization UM and there's benefits to specialization, and you know there's downside, But in order to be marketable, you have to have a visible area of expertise and that becomes what you get hired to teach. So media culture and your specific take on those areas and your specific area of interest in those areas becomes what you get hired to teach. So I kind of knew that that intersection of race, the economy, and culture was my intersection that was going to kind of feed a lot of what I taught. So I came to USC to really broaden their appreciation for that intersection between race and pop culture. Now that being said, you're not taught to teach as a graduate student. No, there's no way you can really teach people to teach. You have to learn by doing it. And so part of every graduate students career in graduate school is being a teaching assistant, where you get just the hands on kind of proximity to running a classroom. But then always there's the different feeling of being thrown into the deep end of the pool and having to guide an entire classroom over a fifteen or ten week period, and you know, but you know, it just comes with the territory. But I mean, I think the thing that that was interesting about coming to USC was USC was just beginning its trajectory of rising in the pecking order and and and having international stature. So I think when I arrived, I felt that surge that President Steve Sample had kind of stirred, and so you really, I really felt like USC was a campus on the move, and my instinct was that l A was a sitting on the move. And I think I've been both of those assumptions have really been born out, because l A and SC have transformed um incredibly. But you know, so when I arrived at SC, there was this this need to pay more attention to media in always and that was part of the reason why I was hired UM. And at that time, the thing that it just happened was the attacks of nine eleven. So I think the thing that was happening broader in a gea political sense, is this dawning awareness that the world order was never going to be the same again, and that there was a age or shift happening in on the axis upon which the world spins, you know. And so I realized that I wanted to challenge myself to kind of open my mind up to the changes that we're happening in a whole new space, and that I had been in New York kind of long enough and it was time to be at a different frontier and being on the West Coast felt like the place to be. So our class communications for a nation? How did you remember that? And and the and the subtitle of the of the course title was and I won't get the words perfect, but it was a something. I don't know if it was an education on or an analysis of the history of black music in America from slave songs to modern day hip hop. And I was like, what it? What is that? And I want to study that class? And I think growing up as a kid in l a who also had a family in Jersey, and spending so much time there in the summer, you know, my summers went from the West coast to to the East coast and being being in this really crazy changing universe of that zone of New Jersey and going into New York. And you know, I like, I went into college having spent the years of my high school career listening to Biggie and Tupac and and loving this sort of there was this energy, there was this vibration of of rebellion. And when I look back now understanding more about culture from an educated and curious adult perspective than I did when I was a teenager, you know, you you look back at the influence of music. You know. I grew up in a house where we listen to Motown and Elvis and the Beatle and the Eagles, and and my parents were so curious when I started listening to rap. And you know, my my dad thought he was cool, like being able to talk to me about run DMC. He's like, well, you know, I know some cool rappers. I was like, relax, mr, sweet Canadian man, you know. And but I didn't know then how much even someone like Elvis, who my dad grew up listening to, was taking inspiration from, if you put it kindly, from black music. And it was just so. There was something about the title of your core of your class on the page that made me say, I feel like answers to so many things I love and so many things I'm curious about culturallyier in that class. Well, thank you for that. I mean, it was I mean, first of all, having you in class was like a blessing and like a miraculous moment, because it's so cool to see where you are now and all the wonderful work you've done, and all the wonderful work you're doing going and what you're shortly destined to keep doing in all the impacts you're going to make, because that was who you were then. You know, you were always leaning in to comp you know, complicated issues and difficult conversations. You were always um had that kind of sensibility of courage and bravery and empathy and really listening to people, like being very convicted in your beliefs. But also listen, you were a leader, and so you were always kind of like at the center, and people always were rallied around you, and you were always in the front row. And so I remember you vividly from those days. So it's it's it's really heartwarming and gratifying to see where you've taken your ambitions from then till now. And it's it's when anyone would want to see to see that that person has really kind of fulfilled what they presented then. So so that being said, yeah, I mean I think that when we were together in that class, like I said before, there was that moment of cultural change that represented crossing over that the maturation of the cable media economy meant and in the maturation of hip hop's sophistication meant that wherever you were in the world, you were receiving these hip hop driven messages and energies, and so just being aware of that was something that people were really dialed into and what the implications of that are. And I think in terms of framing the class between how hip hop was one bookend and the slave spirituals were the other, Black music always has had that aspirational yearning for either salvation and the after life or salvation here on earth. And but that yearning is the central mode of Black music and that blues element to Black music, and it's just morphed and taking different forms as we've moved from jazz to rock and roll to hip hop and R and B and etcetera, but that core is the same. So I think I probably wanted to capture that in the class. And I think at that moment when you were referencing Tupac and Biggie, I think because of all of the racial conflicts and dynamics of that time, there was a certain way that rappers then were making the obstacles to their yearnings visible in their songs and also shifting the direction of their yearnings. So they were shifting their their yearnings to a more American dream, more consumption oriented vision of the American dream, and and and and and that was new too, that the music was part of the radicalism was about accumulating wealth and displaying that wealth, and that that was a whole new phenomena that people were wrapping their heads around and now and so they were pretty much urgently saying, we want to take our culture and cash in on the cultural power that we have, and we want to monetize that. And so that was really a big part of of what was going on, and studying all the implications of what does black politics mean when cashing in becomes the objective? How does that change the political traditions of Black America well, and how does it make people uncomfortable when you talk about it in that way? Cashing in on your culture When you think back to the music we were studying, starting with Slave Spirituals, really means cashing in on everything you're called her has been denied. And I remember we were analyzing how wrapped in that era was was very flashy and I'll never forget we talked about you put up on the board the image of Little Kim on the cover of Interview magazine. It was a big yellow background and she had like one of her amazing wigs on, and she was posed so you couldn't see her body, but she was nude, and they had painted her a makeup artist had painted the Louis Vuitton logo on her entire body, so her body was representative of this luxury leather bag, you know, these luxury leather goods that, to your point, historically had been made unattainable two people who looked like her. And you talked to us about what a statement it was for her to say, no, I am the luxury me and this body I'm I am luxury fashion, and how evolutionary that was, and we forgot We wouldn't think about that now, but that was a real moment for a black woman to set to stamp her body with the logo of a French couture house. And I remember, I've obviously never forgotten it. You know, I was in your class when I was twenty so yeah, later iconic photo, and you know, I think that how in the two decades since then, you know, the kind of self branding ethos has just become the order of the day. That was kind of like the first wave of that. And you know, rappers have a very astute sensibility. All cultural creators do by definition is they're they're at the edge of what is possible to be thought, and they're kind of leading us forward in every arena of creativity. And so in that rap arena, they were kind of leading us into this space of thinking about how yourself is a product and that kind of losing the shame of that, and because of the urgency of needing to be included from ghetto wise communities and needing to rise from those communities like that, that having no shame in your game, as it were, is necessary to make the relentless moves you need to make to change your situation. And we live in at time that everyone feels that kind of baseline insecurity now and and and and now we have the the media tool kit to translate those kind of anxious impulses. We have to express ourselves and be seen and also monetize those expressions. We now all have that capacity, but at that time, just the basic idea, have no shame to do what you need to do to express yourself and to modify that expression and brand it and license it and and and view it as i p that you own and can collaborate with other I p owners over that little Kim photo. That was the beginning of that whole ethos. Now everyone lives at ethos. Everyone lives at ethos. The whole influencing economy is predicated on that ethos for good and for bad and for indifferent And at the baseline, it's about that striving and that modifying your expression. So cool? Are there things you remember from from that second year of class before I start asking you about how how things are moving now? I wonder if, because as you say, it was the second year of teaching, it, what sticks out to you when you think back to the beginning of of your work at SC and and in that class. Um, I think the things I think about when I look back are just how amazing it is to work with young people who are who are coming into their own because you're continually renewed and replenished. And you know, a lot of my friends they they kind of are envious of this space where you get to work with never ending waves of really smart and precocious young people who energize you. And so when I look back, I really think that that's one of the things that remains the same, is that the level of energy at a place like USC. It's just so phenomenal. And USC is such a incredibly optimistic, can do place that you know, from almost moment one, I felt like that was the place I wanted to be. And you know, you know, I think that's what really defines the USC experience is how how deep to the bone marrow that feeling of energy and positive optimism is there. And I'm realizing we're talking about the class, but so many people who are going to be listening to this I haven't taken or or won't have the opportunity to take your class. And for anyone who is at USC who's listening to this, you're welcome. You also have your new favorite professor. Can you give listeners an overview a little bit of what the curriculum covered in the course, because we touched on it a little bit. And I have so many standout moments like the interview cover and and you talking to us about you know, Biggie rapping about a Cherry m three and us talking about the era of how rap music and and people in New York City we're using muzi and graffiti as protest with the subway cars, and and I remember our analysis of slave spirituals starting at the beginning. But I would love for you to offer people kind of an overview of how the course works and what you're weaving together through it, because I'm sure they're curious as we talk about little details. The main place of conceptual inflection is the way that culture is formulated at a time when our socio economic basis is manufacturing, and the way culture is formulated when it's our socio economy is driven by communications and it fundamentally rewires society and the way movements occur and the way goals are set, the targets that people set before themselves. It's like, that's where I want to go. The manufacturing air and the industrial era just kind of a raid aspirations, targets, and conditions completely differently than what they began to do from the mid late nineteen sixties, certainly early nineteen seventies going forward, when it was all about d industrializing and moving to a more computer generated way of creating value. And the real philosophical shift at that inflection point in our system of governance is that we could no longer afford to help the less fortunate with treasury dollars, and that providing government spending for educational programs, public assistance programs of all types needed to be shrunk so that we could spur economic growth in the financial arena, in entrepreneurial arenas. That we had to kind of forgive the expression to kind of cut the dead weight of society loose, because from the mid nineties sixties forward, part of what the Vietnam War signified is that the world was becoming a more competitive place and that the post World War period of the US kind of being the dominant player on the scene wasn't going to be the case anymore. And as the world became more competitive, the whole notion of providing a safety net was being shredded and pulled away, and so it was become a lot more Darwinian and you were gonna have to kind of survive kind of on your own steam. And so what that meant was is that black people, who had always been at the lower end of the pecking order, at least during the manufacturing era, when there was also this presumption of we're kind of all in it together, there was a clear sense, well, all I need to do is be included, and if I'm included, then I could do what everyone else is doing. I can be educated, I can live in neighborhoods where I prefer I could express my preferences. I want to go to this school, I wanna live in this neighborhood. I want to strive in this manner. But when things shift to kind of a more computer driven situation where people are kind of fragmenting the social safety net, then it becomes a lot more complex, and the people who are kind of most at risk already, they become representative of the dead weight to cut away, not to finance by alternative means and and kind of enable with you know, public programs, but to cut away. And so the hip hop artists gave expression to what it felt like to be positioned socially that way, to be at that place where the transformation of society was going to be felt most harshly. And black music of the days of slavery, they expressed what it was like to be sort of utilized or positioned in a certain way in the modalities of that time. Rappers were expressing what it was like at in their time, and what you can capture by taking raps seriously is just the sensuous way of what it feels like on the ground when these post welfare state transformations actually occur, the pain that it elicits. And one of the main ways that that that shift occurred was obviously mass incarceration and you know, really hyper policing, the war on drugs and all of those kind of things. That was kind of like one of the ways that that this kind of neoliberal shift was operationalized. And so RAP is really uh soundtrack of that neoliberal shift, that movement from that liberal order of the welfare state and the manufacturing era to that neoliberal state of affairs where we're moving to a more computerized, digitized, knowledge based framework of creating value, and the way you access that is according to your own entrepreneurial energy. There's not going to be any public pathways provided to give you an on ramp for that. You have to figure it out for yourself. And so RAP kind of really articulates what it felt like for them to have to figure all that out. Well, when you were a community that has this generational impact of having resources withheld and then suddenly you go through this mass cultural shift and you're told that if you want to get for the hump of the shift, you've gotta bet on your own resources, and you terrifying. It's terrifying, but it's also galvanizing because, like book or T. Washington's ethos was cash your buckets where they lay, meaning use what you have at your disposal and pull yourself up, do what you need to do. And so the rappers are like, we have this, we have cards stacked against us, but look at the ingenuity we see all around us, these incredibly brilliant creative artists. Let's let's make something happen with that, and let's tell the stories of what it's like to be rugged entrepreneurs in the underground economy, making things happen where we are. And those are captivating stories, and it created a vibrant commercial market around those stories that continues. It is the ingenuity of saying, you might try to keep me out of that sector, Okay, I'll create my own sector. Exactly. It's a start up mentality. And you know, in this era of you know, valorizing lean startups and founders, classic founder startup entrepreneurial mentality, we're gonna do this lean and mean and literally by any means necessary, and um, we're gonna make it happen and the rest is history. So that's what I think I was really trying to capture is that is that rap is a lens through which you can understand this this this incredibly important transformation and the overall economy. That it's just one key lens through which you can understand it. Um like wrap now is a key way you can understand the continual evolution of our digital economy. You know, people from the margins are always on the front lines of trying new things, and music is always a space where the dispossess us can have a voice, and so you can learn a lot by paying attention to what's going on there about whatever might be happening. What do you include? What are some highlight points that you include? Now when you have this conversation with students, who are you focusing on? Are you are you talking about? You know, obviously it's a tragic outcome, but Nipsey Hustle, for example, and what he chose to do as a rapper, what he was doing for Crenshaw, choosing to live off slaws in really invigorating his community and opening Vector ninety and talking to young kids from Crenshaw about finance. You know that's a that's the next that's a that's the next wave of ingenuity there. No, you're so right, Sophia. I mean, I think development economics and really formulating in twenty nine what does a development agenda constitute today is just finitional to our times and it's definitional to uh major aspect of our political discourse right now is how do we uplift? How do we develop? Like? What are the tools we have? So needless to say, we have some very credible and charismatic politicians with noble intentions who believe that a major aspect of development, community development requires redistribution of resources, different types of levels of taxation, and allocation of resources in different ways. Obviously, that's a political trigger point in the discourse and always has been in the in the time since we've made the shift towards smaller government being the order of the day. But redistribution is a major framework through which people understand a building block towards development. But then there's another camp that says growth is the way to develop a community. And I think that a lot of people on the progressive left are, for legitimate reasons, distrustful of the growth agenda that they see that growth really enables a lot of the worst forms of exploitation and value extraction. I think when you look at Nipsey Hustle, I do think it's a bit of a corrective to that inclination to distrust growth, because I don't think you're gonna be able to read distribute your way into evening the playing field. Leveling the playing field, You're going to have to create grassroots forms of value creation through entrepreneurship. And I think Nipsey Hustle kind of represented that. And I think that before we started our conversation, we were talking about how the pendulum can fling from one, you know, do a one eight. I think that we've you know, we've got to not take the needle too far in the side of redistribution, that we forget that growth is legitimate, and grow is a way in which people have always better their opportunities. And that given like you said that young Black Americans, particularly in the inner city, have been the deck has been stacked against them from even attempting to be entrepreneurial. Why should we withhold that from them any longer or not cheer lead on behalf of that. I think Nipsey hustles um life kind of invites us to valorize what he was trying to do in Crenshaw by by sort of spreading the message that that's a viable way of changing people's opportunities. It's amazing to think about what's changed in these last you know, fifteen plus years in in this really common cultural conversation about startups and entrepreneurship and and how we can invest locally and what kind of change we're going to make and what kind of read attribution we want to have. I mean, it's it's unbelievable. And I do think so much of the access to that information and to these ideas, and to these artists, and to these spaces and to these places around the world that we never really used to think we could go to comes from this Internet economy, comes from this exposure to all things that we have available at our fingertips on our phones. And I'm curious, how, with your background in media and in messaging and all of this, how do you keep up now? Because now your students in college, they've been on social media since they were ten. They they've had access to things that are just different for so many of us. You know, there there wasn't Twitter until I was already out of college and on a TV show. So yeah, do do you feel like they're teaching you as well? Do they know things before you know them? Do you have to be online more to keep up with them? How do you do it? Um? I think they, I mean they're they're the current generation's ability to process information is unrivaled. I mean they have grown up at a with a device in their hands that brings them a tsunami of curated and non curated waves of information. So their ability to quickly sift what they're interested in and what they're not is unrivaled. And they're at a place like USC or a place where you know, you're you're, you're around a lot of people who are who are who are really activated to lean in just it's it's just incredible the speed at which they're able to process things. But wisdom still counts for a lot, and being able to see patterns based on what has come before means a lot. And so I think what what students seek now is stewardship in not getting buried in history, but knowing enough about what's come before that they can be enabled to see new patterns emerge because to properly discern what's coming at them every day exactly and to have judgment. Um. They do appreciate being enable to have judgment, and and and and so I think that is a big part of the educational mission now because if you don't, if you're looking at all this media, and I read a statistic a few years ago, so it's probably more. But if a couple of years ago I read a stad that said that we intake more media in every twenty four hour cycle than had been created in the prior ten thousand years combined. So I think it's why people can quickly identify, to your point, what they're interested in. It's why we can often sniff out when we're being sold something inauthentic. It's it's why we can see patterns in the present exposure. But I'm so glad you bring up the importance of understanding your history and understanding the systems in which we live and how they were created, and who they work for and who they don't work for, because it can get really easy when you're so good at in taking media every day, to assume you know everything because you see everything, just because you know today doesn't mean you have a clue where it comes from if you haven't done your research. Absolutely, And I think you've touched on one of the greatest challenges today is that we are all really cocooned in the present moment. And I know you are well versed in our wellness economy and the power of meditation and yoga, and there's power in the present moment. But the power of the present moment is stillness, not inputs. And so I think that where immediate ecology is concerned, people get stuck in the present moment just absorbing all these inputs. And and that's that's dangerous because, um, let's face it, the vast majority of those inputs are inconsequential, meaningless distractions, their energy drainers, um and and and so. And you know, students aren't always adapted how to put things together. And so, you know, I think teaching and appreciation of history helps people when they come back to the present moment, to kind of zero in on what's really meaningful and not get caught up in all the all the distractions and the noise. Is there advice you offer your students for how to how to manage their online on screen experience not not so much, because I you know, I do think they're they're pretty media savvy. I mean, I do think that having appreciation for the different news outlets that are steeped and standing by the information they present is critical that you know, and supporting those organizations um with your dollars and you know, yeah, you know, you know, I think that those organizations deserve our support, and so part of what I do is just getting students to institute in their media consumptive behavior to make sure that you respect certain outlets above others, and that you commit early on and drawing down information from those outlets and then supporting those organizations um materially but overall, in my classes, I really stress that they will be well served knowing some of the basic economic fundamentals of what makes media function as a business. And if they know those, no matter what the changes are, they're always going to ultimately come down to certain a six of creating a market. I mean, there are only a few ways to really make money for media, um and those ways have certain dynamics attached to them, and so understanding those dynamics can serve you well and you don't get caught up in just chasing the flavor of the month. Um so I at my age, I can't compete in like knowing every person or phenomenon that represents the new thing, But I am pretty well versed in knowing why any new phenomenon might have staying power or might actually be impactful interesting. Do you, over the course of a class follow let's say at the beginning of a semester, some media phenomenon hits. Will you guys touch on it through the course of a semester to see what happens with it. I think one of the things I do more than ever is we try to find a real business case that either a largest ablished media company or startup has in their approach to a given market, and we frame that problem and we tease that the working out of that problem throughout the semester in teams, and different teams will either tackle the same problem or tackle different problems with different tools. But I think that really is that kind of experiential learning model really is in keeping with giving students the skills they need to actually participate in what's going on and not just learn about it in the aftrict, but actually participate in it. And when you talk about media models doing it right. And when you talk about quality sources of well researched, real journalism that also deserves to be financially supported, I'm curious who who do you subscribe to and who do you follow? What are your what are your top outlets that you really, as an expert, believe in and stand by and pay for well. In the intersection of media and technology, I subscribe to a bespoke publication called The Information that a former editor from the Wall Street Journal started, and that's phenomenal like Silicon Valley tech coverage, you know, l a Silicon Valley intersection coverage that's phenomenal resourced information. Traditionally, my daily bread, Financial Times in Wall Street Journal every day in my driveway and online, and New York Times online and physical paper in my driveway on Sunday. Those are my three. And the global perspective you get from the Financial Times is just incredible. I think it's vital for people, young, up and coming people today to have a global perspective, you know, whether it's from the BBC or find Angel Times or you know UM. I also subscribe to, you know, the South China Post to get a you know, China, Chinese perspective on technology and innovation and what China represents in the global economy. So I think wherever you choose it, have some outlet that gives you a global perspective and doesn't view every phenomena through a US centric lens, because you know the world isn't like that, and and um, we're always prone to being too us centrics. I think that's vital is having some bread and butter outlet that gives you a global perspective that's curated and that they're willing to stand behind. Because obviously you can cobble together a global perspective from feeds you get from different people on Twitter, but following those organizations that they give you the platform to dive into a global perspective is key to get people started. And following the reporting, not just the perspectives of people who you admire, but actual are reporting, hard reporting. And I mean when you read the opinions in the Financial Times, or even though a lot of their political beliefs are different than mine the Wall Street Journal, it's sophisticated, nuanced argument. And the more you get accustomed to sophisticated nuanced argument, you get accustomed to realizing argument is not all or nothing. It's about making cases, absorbing other cases, and participating in an ongoing conversation. Is not just putting people on blast and doing takedowns and so forth, but but but really having a dialogue. And so I think that's what you learn from those kind of platforms. And I think to move away from this idea that you have to be right or die or canceled and more into a space where we can see the ramifications of a lack of nuance, you know, if I may, That's what I view the Trump presidency as there is a complete lack of nuance. This is just a person who says my way or the highway. But it's the way of a bully in a sandbox on the playground. It's unsophisticated and thus very dangerous to our policy or foreign policy or national security. And to your point, I don't agree with a lot of the political views and in the Wall Street Journal, but I read it for that reason. And I read, and I pay for the Washington Post, and I read, and I pay for the New York Times, and I read, and I pay for The New Yorker, and I subscribe. It's so important, and I love oh I love getting into the mail, but I subscribe to it. Really does you gotta be you really have to be diligent. It's hard. But I do find that when I travel I'm a little bit better because I read on planes. But you know, and I also follow and read the BBC, and I follow and read Al Jazeera, and it's so important. And now I know I have to start reading the South China Times, and I have to start reading the Financial Times. So thank you for that. Those Financial Times is incredible, I mean, just so well done. But to your point, I mean sad to say for whatever reason, and the reasons are legion. We live in a time where nuance looks weak and people, I mean, one of the main criticisms of President Obama from his opponent political opponents, was that he was too professorial and that his kind of ways of communicating, in his ways of processing information were were like ineffectual because they were too considerate of you know, and and so people want certainty. Now these are anxious times, and they want certainty, and nuance looks weak in those in those settings. And so I was watching some news report. I don't it might even have been Fox News, one of the rare moments when I turned the dial to Fox News, but a commentator was saying that one thing that the that the Democrats have to understand during this this primary season is that they need to find a candidate that projects strength and projects like that commentator's idea of what being presidential was was having a certain bearing in body language, that right or wrong in the belief being expressed was certain. And he said, well, no matter what you think about President Trump, this is him speaking. When you look at him, you see strength. And for a lot of people that is true. They see someone who if someone attacks him, he attacks back. They see someone that whether he's right or wrong, he just says it with force, and that's what they want. They don't really care about the nuance. They just want the strength. Which is so strange to me because I feel like those quality of these you're describing, if we can call them, qualities we all were taught not to become during recess. You know, don't be a bully, don't don't claim that you know everything. Don't. It's so strange to me because I think the idea of being professorial obviously, as I said across from a professor, the idea of being willing to listen and intake all information and really deduce what's right and what's best and what works for the most people. Those are things I so admire. Yeah, I think that people who study populist movements suggest that at times of maximum or times of high rates of change, anxiety creating rates of change, people turned towards figures that represent strength. That's the danger of fascism, is that that populous desire for certainty can trigger a fascist grounds well, and you know, so you know around the world there's risk factors for that right now. But the baseline is that these are the degree of which to which everything is complexifying is stunning. Everything is super complex, and people want people to simplify everything for them, and and it's a it's a huge challenge we face. And I'm curious to what you think the role of the Internet plays, because you know, we talk about trusted journalistic sources, which are always the people who I believe we should go to, but so many people get their news, as you mentioned, from Twitter, they get their news unfortunately, from Facebook. And we looked at the other day that we're recording this. Twitter has just announced that they will no longer be accepting any ad dollars for political ads. Politicians on any side cannot buy ads on Twitter anymore, while Facebook is saying it will not monitor any language used in ads by politicians, effectively allowing them to lie in any way that they choose, which we've seen the dangers of in you know, debunked videos. There was a there was a scandal created and videos shared on Facebook that claimed that you know, Planned Parenthood was selling baby parts, which was actually not true. It was doctored. Video was incredibly damaging to the yeah deep fakes. It was incredibly damaging to millions and millions of women who only have access to their healthcare and their cancer screenings and Planned Parenthood, to men who get their healthcare at Planned Parenthood. And and we see Facebook in this moment where Twitter is saying no more political ads were not doing it. We don't want to risk that people could be persuaded or or that their election, you know that our elections could be affected by Twitter messaging because we can't possibly police it. Facebook is saying we're not going to police it. Do whatever you want. And Facebook has just made much to my horror, bright part one of its trusted sources of news and a journalist who I deeply respect, and I'm sad that I have to say this, but we live in a world where I'm scared that if I name him, he'll get trolled online. The day that was announced, journalist retweeted the News about it and said, Breitbart wrote a hit piece on my daughter when she was thirteen years old. They are a dangerous, incredibly weaponized, vitriolic, essentially hate platform, and Facebook is giving them credence so as to publicly be able to say we're not quote picking sides, but when you don't pick size between truth and lies, you are, in my estimation, paving a very clear runway for fascism. And so I'm curious what you think, what do we do here? And what do corporations that aren't news outlets, what do they have as far as responsibility in this game? Well, I think you know what's happening is we're catching up to the changes at the platform economy has wrought in our lives, and that's going to require a shift in our government, and we're gonna need to create a agency or expand the function of the FCC to have a division that exclusively looks at the digital media economy that we've been trying to kind of have oversight minimally to the digital media economy, and to the extent that we have any oversight or assumed in the oversight of it, it's been according to the rules of the old days of publishing and broadcasting, and it's a mismatch. And so one of the greatest areas of opportunity for students of mine and young people the world over is to carve out meaningful policy making careers at that intersection where content people talk to technologists. Can you talk to me about what you mean by that a meaningful policy making career? Are what are suggestions for that? I mean in Washington, d C. We have an absence of young people who understand technology the people. And this is not agism, but this is just quite simply people of a certain generation don't appreciate how different the landscape is now, so they don't even know how to ask the right questions, look in the right places, think in certain ways, and consider the implications. So there's a right opportunity for a whole new generation of young professionals not to continue going exclusively to work for the platform companies themselves. For their for their various divisions, including their government relations arms, but to work in government to make policy over these areas, and to have enough facility in speaking engineering speak that when people from platform companies come and talk about the way they're out their algorithms work, and the way their philosophies of what their platform is all about come to speak, that you're articulate and fluent in how to speak back to them in a language that they understand, but in a language that other people the mainstream understands as well. And I think for our school, the Annenberg School, were very uniquely student to prepare students for that. But overall, I think that we need to recognize how powerful these platforms are in creating the dynamics where we make meaning of our lives. And number two, that these companies depend on aggregating large audiences for advertising, and that they could care less what aggregates those audiences. And we know that things that are charged get people as attention, and they can stack ads against that, and that's the business model. To shift the business model at Facebook to embrace that we are a media company that informs the way people understand the way the world works, requires them to build out a completely different costly infrastructure, and that reallocation of dollars they're not interested in. So the same kind of obstacles against the reallocation of resources in oil and gas extraction and building out a new infrastructure for a green economy, Recognizing and acknowledging that this change has to happen is the same reason why Facebook is not shifting gears because they don't want to change. They don't want to reallocate resources. It's too expensive. It makes me crazy, though, because the resources exist, both for us in transferring from fossil fuels to a green economy and for Facebook. You know when when the heads of the company have billion dollar salaries, the resources exist. And I guess where I get confounded is that I feel that we, as the American public, deserve better. We deserve those resources to be allocated for the betterment of all of us. I agree, and I think in both areas and in many other areas, this is a moment where the courage of our convictions is required, and specifically in this digital media economy, we must hold our polity. Are elected officials accountable to hold Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook accountable? They can't be left off the hook for political expediency's sake, right, And to your point, we do need young people to know that there will be this job market and that they can create this job market for this sort of new tech policy division department sphere in government. And I'm hoping that anyone who's in college is listening to this, wants to go there, Please go there. And that makes me feel hopeful because I do believe that with with us, the demand is high for societal betterment. And if we do higher education differently, we can also train engineers to have a more humanistic outlook. It's both educating humanists to understand the language of technology and the and the way technology works um and the way business models are layered on those technologies better, but also that the engineers are working with humanists at the earliest stages of how they learn how to build the things they build and take humans into account and take the social spillovers of what they build into account as early as they can. You can never always be in advance of unintended consequences. And Facebook was made in that with the noblest of intentions, and it's changed the world in so many wonderful ways. But it was never made with any humanistic outlook in mind, and that's got to change going forward our motivations thereafter. Absolutely part of that change is In August, the Business Roundtable, collection of the CEOs of the most powerful companies in America, said that instead of thinking purely about shareholder value being the watchword and the metric for judging business success, companies need to be judged and operate according to stakeholder value. So from climate change to platforms, it's about with that change and outlook. Companies are incentivized to reward their top decision makers to think about those humanistic impacts as part of their incentive structure within the company. And so I think we're seeing the and a lot of people are cynical about that Business Roundtable proclamation, but I do think that as it becomes specified and how those stakeholder interests are actually accounted for, we'll will definitely move the needle. And I think we're just at the early days of figuring out how to actually measure what we want to see happen in the platform space. I love that, and we do. We have to consider our impact outside of ourselves. It can't just be any longer a return on investment profit margin. That's your report card. Um that that that can't be anymore because if that is, you're going to continue to invest in the fossil fuel economy because that is what's returning on established investment. You're going to continue investing in Facebook's established business model, Google's established business model because their money, their cash engines. So once you move away from rewarding businesses purely for returning profit, you can you can get somewhere, but it's it's going to be hard, all right. We need a whole new class of leadership in Washington. Clearly something I do want to bring up just because it's something I find inspirational about you as a former student, and obviously as a person who loves Hannenburg and USC when we talk about as we have been in this very macro way, about how we think about how we're affecting those outside of ourselves and our immediate sphere, you, as you know, my former professor and still a current professor, have always been in my memory and in all of my continuing experience with you such a supportive human being. And for me as a young girl, you were you were the first person who ever told me I should have my writing published. I'll never forget it. You said, maybe not while you're in college, but when you're ready, you come talk to me. And you've always in this sort of modern lexicon that we have now that we didn't have then, you've always been such an incredible ally and as a as a man in a position of leadership. You founded the Women's Leadership Society at Annamburg and it's the first professional developmental organization of its kind under the Annaburg umbrella. And I guess, first I want to say thank you, and and second, I'm curious when we think about widening our sphere of impact, what what motivated you to do that for the women at Annaburg. I just I saw in Annenburg that all of these brilliant young women didn't have a space to have difficult conversations about how they viewed the world, and that a lot of times outlooks are just assumed that they're just gonna happen. But people need spaces to talk. They need spaces. And going back to Virginia Wolf, this idea of women need a room of one's own, women need a space two. And Virginia Wolf's point was that a room of one's own required women to be financially independent. That as long as Victorian age women required the man of the house to finance their every aspiration, they were disempowered. And so a room of one's own was a metaphor of saying that, in various ways, women need spaces and vehicles of empowerment that are exclusive to them. So, like I said, I approach my work from a standpoint of love and substance, and I just continually saw that so many of the most substantive people, the woman sitting across from me, we're women, and it will it might surprise you, it might not. But every time I would bring in a C suite level game changing person of a certain age that was male, CEO, CFO, CMO, and they would walk into my classes. And one particular year in particular, when just by happenstance, one of my classes was all women women, and every C suite level person had walked in to speak with us that semester literally did a double take when they saw it was all women. And what that alerted me to is that men don't think they're passing the baton of leadership to women. If you're surprised when you're coming to impart your wisdom of your experience to young people, and you express shock that the people you're speaking to our women, that's meaningful. That means that your assumption is I'm not transmitting this vital in for nation to a constituency of women. I'm not thinking of them in that way. And it that was number one. And then it occurred to me as well that when I asked my students at that time their interest in being leaders and this was right around the time that Chryl Sandberg was publishing Lean In, but it hadn't happened yet, but it was in that space most of my brilliant young women when they raise their hands, very few of them raise their hands when asked, do you see yourself being a catalyst for change in a leadership role? And I was like, why not? And as we talked about why not, I realized because we couldn't continue the conversation like we should and could in that classroom setting. I said, we need an auxiliary space for women to develop belief in their capacity and belief in one another, and an outlook that says leadership is okay. And if we need to bring in in primarily women, game changers to help inspire them, then so be it. But obviously men aren't precluded from coming. But the idea is have a space at Antinburg for women to connect, have a space where they can be inspired, and have a space where they can be informed about the issues that matter to them, either pre professional or just in their lives. And so I love my students, and I love all my students equally, and I realized up constituency among the students I love. My female students had a particular need, as I saw it, for a room of their own and a space to grow their outlooks because we have to unlearn society's messaging that we don't get the baton, and that requires extra effort. It happened each and every time UH senior leader came from any given company um that they were surprised, and I was always kind of like, why are they surprised or why does it even why does it even register? Like humans are humans, like males, mixed groups, you know, females, whomever. If a human being is there, you vibe with them and engage. But something about the gender dynamic of seeing all women just caused these men to be back on their heels, and and and and if I picked up on that, I know that my students picked up on that, and that sends a subtle and not so subtle message about your legitimacy as the next in line. Um and so we I just felt like I needed to bring resources to bear to kind of advance our Annenberg women as best I could. That's so cool, thank you. Yeah. And so I mean I think that you know, they call it being an ally. Now, I don't think to be an ally you need to have a particular interest in any area. You just have to have an interest in helping those that need help. Um. Yeah, But for someone who actually gets in and does the work to create a systemic change, you aren't actually just an ally. A term that I was taught by my friend Lovey, who talks about how women who look like me need to show up for women of color like her. She's like, I'm done with the allies. I want you to be my accomplice. Like, if I'm gonna get arrested, I want you to get arrested to And there's a real thing. So I want to pass the baton from women to you as a as a man, to say, like you're you're fully an accomplished territory and thing. I mean, another word they use is a champion that you know, can you champion the ambitions of others? And I think that that's I mean the whole Professor, it has been about champion the next generation. At the doctoral level, you literally champion in the next generation of professors. You've always been such a champion of us, and I've been championed my whole life, and so I feel like it's just it's just giving back and circulating the blessing. Yeah, I actually forgot about this, but you'll you'll love this. So, speaking of your former students, me and Ali mcguil, who used to be my roommate who took your class together, we were both at can Line this year, you know, big advertising and media summit in France. It's a whole situation and she's there with her company and I'm there to speak and we're just like, isn't this crazy? Like remember when we were in college and we lived in a room that was you know, three d square feet and maybe not even maybe half that. We were laughing about it and she said, do you know what I remember from college? She goes, remember, Professor Smith, and I was like, he's coming on my podcast and uh and she said, yeah, do you remember when there was a day when he said you know? And it was probably after some big like you know, usc weekend we all had papers do and she goes, he told everybody that everybody turned into half as paper, he said, except for one. She was like, do you remember this? And I was like no. And she said, he read a paper to the class and afterwards put it down on your desk. And I was dying loving and all my now coworkers looked at me and said, why is that not surprising? And I was like, I'm so mortified, and also that's really true, and I was like, I wrote really good papers in that class. But yeah, she said, he read your paper to the class. And I was your roommate, and I was like, she can write a paper like that in a day. And I said to her, what occurred to me now is that not on any subject, but I was so invested in your class because of the creative ways that you taught and thought and teach now and think, and the way that the ways that you invested in and championed us, that I would I would sit down to write a paper for class, and I'd wind up writing for eight hours. I would just do it all day. I was so into what we were doing that I didn't want to get up from my work. And I think it's very rare when teachers and professors can make your work feel like play. Yeah, I think that in all of our lives and all that we do, whatever we do, if we can find that element of coaching others, it's powerful. That dynamic of of of of being a coach and being a champion and making people see the power of their own way of viewing things is just a real It just makes me very fulfilled. When you talk about being championed and you talk about learning to coach, I'm curious if that comes from perhaps some best advice you were ever given. And then I wonder what advice you would give to students now who want to study journalism. Well, I would say interestingly enough. I mean, I'm I mean, I've gotten so much good it advice over the years. But I'll go back to USC and say that a kind of way of thinking that got deeply in my bones, and that was a part of the USC climate when I got there. Was when Pete Carroll was coach legendary Pete Carroll, and you know, you were just at the beginning of what was going to become the Pete Carroll era of just USC just dominance in football and just you know what that brings to USC's campus when the football team is clicking on all cylinders is next level. But Pete Carroll this book, he wrote in this phrase he had win Forever. That to me that because Pete Carroll like epitomize that kind of win forever optimism that if you that if you have the right if you find the right frequency of vibration of positivity, it'll just keep going. And until the scandal at USC hit that caused Pete Carroll to move on, we pretty much looked like we were in win forever mode. And Pete Carroll's gone on and taking his philosophy to the Seattle Seahawks and continued his winning ways. And what that dialed me into is that you can you won't always win, but you will always be going in a positive direction if you have a certain attitude. And so that win forever ethos like really stuck with me, you know, as as to like, you know, if you can like kind of generate a kind of way of treating yourself, in a way of treating others, in a way of forming teams when teams are necessary. You can enter any battle with what we at USC called that fight on mentality and that stay in the fight mentality and it's and it's real. So you know, I think it's not so much advice, but I try to inner situations with that spirit of you know, of just positivity. And for me, Pete Carroll really kind of like like steep me in that that's so cool. I like it as a mantra. I like it as a as a choice of how to live because it almost harkens to me that idea that if you make decisions, even when we're talking about policy, shortsighted policy decisions become scary for the future of humanity. If we're thinking about how do we do things that mean we as a collective win forever. We make better choices, we shoot for longevity absolutely and sustaining. And I guess to really spell out the kind of basis of Pete's phrase, it's love, it's trust, it's honesty, it's consistency, and its willingness to compete. That when you put those five things together in a team setting and in the setting of yourself, a willingness to compete. Honesty, truth, accountability, love, You've got the recipe for magic, and that magic can be sustained. And it's a framework that as the players change, and as our individual lives evolve and change, and we become different types of people because our capacities changes, we age or whatever. When you keep that basic framework love, accountability, honesty, trust, you're kind of good no matter what, and and and it's like organizations that build that in are winning organizations. People who build that framework into their lives are winning people. And right now, going back to some of the macro conversation we were having before, our country is struggling to rEFInd that framework as the base is for our national dynamics. Accountability, love, honesty, you know all those things, nuance, nuance. So for young students, how do you offer a version of that advice to them? What? What do you think people who want to go into journalism should keep in mind. I've really believed that people going into media and journalism today can't be risk averse. They have to be willing to take risks, and that's hard for a lot of young people. Because they might be burdened with dead and taking risk is scary in the extreme for them. But if you take risks, you can make change. Um, if this is not a time to play business as usual, we need to shake things out and we need to do things differently, but still have that core framework of a fundamental ways of treating yourself and treating others and including people and bringing people in. But going into journalism and media, now you have to be willing to do things differently, and you know if you're If you're not, you know you're already committing yourself to kind of obsolescence and there's no reason for that. And the other thing is in terms of taking risks, go big, go big like like think big, like and and like get a like don't be afraid of your own dreams. And I think that's what you represent so well is from an from an early age you kind of weren't daunted by your own imagination of what you might be capable of. And other students that I remember from your era, like people you might remember like Alexis Jones and people who got into activism and people who became entrepreneurs. This idea of not being a aid of your own vision and believing that you can be the agent of change. That's for me what this generation has as an opportunity like none other, because they've got tools that no one else has ever had to actually make those dreams realities. And the thing that kind of troubles me a little bit is that, for various reasons, from the debt overhanging to other reasons, even though all these tools exist, a lot of young people are more afraid of taking risks than ever before. And and and I think that's something that speaks to they don't feel like there's a foundation in the culture that gives them that feeling that there's something to fall back on, not a safety net per se, but just a trust factor that everything will be okay if I take this risk. And I think that that should inspire us all to kind of come together as a country and make sure that this generation and the ones that come later have that baseline. We will be okay, We will be okay. And and and and so I think people should take risks, believe in their own dreams, and trust that the things will happen, to make sure that everything will be okay no matter what happens. Okay one more. The title of the podcast is called work in Progress. I wonder when you hear work in progress, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Is a work in progress in your life? Work in progress to me means peace of mind with change because at my stage of life now with two children that are now becoming adolescents, young adults, just making sense of how they've changed is just makes my mind like just world. And I think, you know, work in progress is we're always working to kind of make sense of what's changing. And for me, like like the work in progress is like learning how to kind of like activate that calm in the storm. And so I'm really into meditation and really into yoga, and I love what that teaches you about practicing your own calm because what they teach you in meditation is the art of meditation is not being in that space where your mind is empty and you can look through your third eye and you can kind of feel the kind of spaciousness that you can create by you know, being at one with your breath and so forth. But if the fact that you'll never master that, you know, meditation teaches you that you never master that in that your mind just by definition is always going to move and wander, and as they put it, be the monkey mind that hops from one thing to the next. But the beauty of meditation is knowing you can always come back to that calm, and you can always reactivate your breath and reactivate your awareness of where you are and who you are. Starting with who you are is your breathing, and from your breath comes everything else, your heart rate and everything else, and and so that's a never ending work in progress. And so for me, that really is one of the things that work in progress means is is coming back to yourself and committing to always coming back committing that. That's the work, is always committing to return to that effort to be in sync with who you really are and who you're really intended to be. I love that. Thank you, Thank you. I can just talk to you all day. Thank you for having me. This show is executive produced by Me, Sophia Bush, and sim Sarna. Our supervising producer is Alison Bresnik. Our associate producer is Kate Linley, Our editor is Josh Wendish, and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. This show is brought to you by Killion. Anatomy