Recommends Poison Ivy.

Transcript context

…Yeah. What gives you hope about this whole thing? About this dark state that we’re in as you describe, how can we get out, what gives you hope that we will get out? I think that people are sick of it. I think people are sick of not being able to be authentic. And that’s really what censorship is, it’s basically telling you don’t be yourself, don’t actually say what you think, don’t show your personality, don’t dissent, don’t be weird, don’t be wrong, and that’s not sustainable. I think that people have had enough of it. But one thing I definitely want to say to your audience is it can’t just be up to us arguers to try to fix this. And I think that, and this may sound like it’s an unrelated problem, I think if there were highly respected, let’s say extremely difficult ways to prove that you’re extremely smart and hardworking, that cost little or nothing, that actually can give the Harvards and the Yales of the world a run for their money, I think that might be the most positive thing we could do to deal with a lot of these problems, and why. I think the fact that we have become a weird America with a great anti-elitist tradition has become weirdly elitist in the respect that we not only, again, are our leadership coming from these few fancy schools, we actually have great admiration for them, we look up to them. But I think we’d have a lot healthier of a society if people could prove their excellence in ways that are coming from completely different streams that are highly respected. I sometimes talk about there should be a test that anyone who passes it gets a BA in the humanities, like a super BA. Not a GED, that’s not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about something that one out of only 100 people can pass, some other way of actually, of not going through these massive, bloated, expensive institutions that people can raise their hands and say, I’m smart and hardworking. I think that could be an incredibly healthy way. I think we need additional streams for creative people to be solving problems, whether that’s on X or someplace else. I think that there’s lots of things that technology could do to really help with this. I think some of the stuff that Sal Khan is working on at Khan Academy could really help. So I think there’s a lot of ways, but they exist largely around coming up with new ways of doing things, not just expecting the old things that have, say, 40 billion in the bank, that they’re going to reform themselves. And here’s my, I’ve been picking on Harvard a lot, but I’m going to pick on them a little bit more. I talk a lot about class, again, and there’s a great book called Poison Ivy by Evan Mandery, which I recommend to everybody, it’s outrageous, it sounds like me on a rant at Stanford, which was, and I think the stat is elite higher education has more kids from the top 1% than they have from the bottom 50 or 60% depending on the school. And when you look at how much they actually replicate class privilege, it’s really distressing. So everybody should read Poison Ivy. And above all else, if you’re weird, continue being weird.…

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