Some Quick Advice from Barack Obama!

Hi, what's going on here with mkbhd? As you may have seen, Barack Obama has been on a pretty massive tour to promote his new book, A Promised Land. It's been a pretty good read so far for me, but then YouTube reached out and said, Hey, yeah. You want to ask Obama anything that he talks about in this book and of course I said yes, that would be awe

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, but that's a big moment for me, what do I ask the president? If he could ask you

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thing, anyway, what can I do? I have for you are the two questions that I chose and this is actually part of a larger YouTube originals project called booktube, where he answers a bunch of questions from other creators about that book and what he wants to talk about, including a Well, by Mark Rober about NASA and the origins of the White House science fair, which I thought were really interesting, so I'll link it below so you can see it, but this is kind of an extended version of a small talk and eh, I wanted to. to share enjoy mr president my name is marquez brownlee i have a youtube channel called mkbhd so that's mkb which is my initials plus hd which is high definition that's where i become a big nerd, I basically talk about all kinds of technology products, I review technology, I try to make high quality videos and we like to have fun with it.

You know nowadays technology is in everything, it feels like part of the fabric of the culture we live in, so on my channel there is everything from smartphones to 5G, computers to electric cars. basically anything with a power button to interviews with people with unique perspectives on technology, it's a lot of fun, I'm 26, I've been doing this for about 10 years, over 10 years, so a lot of the time it's just Life and I are too a professional Ultimate Frisbee player, so shout out to the New York empire. We had an undefeated season last year in 2019 and I'm also an avid golfer and a huge NBA basketball fan, so I have to say that I'm very excited to be able to talk about your book, A Promised Land, which is your third book and the first in a two-part presidential memoir, so I started my YouTube channel in 2009, a year after his inauguration, which, by the way, I was at. um, I wish I had some pictures or something, but I didn't have a camera, believe it or not, but I remember it was really cold.

The timing of this is not lost on me, I feel like I owe a lot of my position now to the rise of technology and its accessibility and I feel like maybe to some extent you can say the same thing, like a lot of people called you the first president of social media, but more than that, it's just you know, you look at management before you, they hadn't fully used it, they hadn't fully figured it out, then you came along and all your teams used social media, they adopted technology, they adopted these new things, so can you talk about that level of technology adoption? and how it affects our politics and how it activates new audiences and talks to new people.

Obviously we can see that it has its ups and downs, but I feel like one of its unique challenges was finding a balance that we hadn't seen before. Thanks, Mark has some amazing jumps in that clip of yours on Ultimate Frisbee. You're right, technology had a big impact on my campaign, first of all, the reason we were the first to adapt a lot of technology as a tool to reach voters was because I had a group of people in their 20s working for me, young people coming to me and saying listen, we had this thing called myspace and meetup, what turned out was that those early iterations of social media became a really powerful form.

That we built a base of volunteers and a movement made me enormously optimistic about the possibilities of technology as a force for democratization. During the presidency, what we learned was that that same technology could be used for good or evil. being communicated, as well as love and compassion, that is something that I think we still struggle with and what I write about, in a promised land, how do we harness this technology for good and try to mitigate some of the problems that it creates ? A lot of the worlds that I run in haven't been incredibly diverse, right, I mentioned golf earlier, the latest frisbee technology and what I can say is at the junior level and I think at a lot of beginner levels these spaces are more diverse than ever. it's amazing, but you'll notice: at a high level, ultimate frisbee isn't very diverse, at a high level golf it's not very diverse, and at a high level tech level it's still not a very diverse place and I feel like that makes make the focus of attention a little more intense. a black man moving through these spaces moving through these worlds I talked a little bit about this in a video I made on my channel last year, so from your book and just by watching, it's clear that you've felt that attention over time.

Also, I'm not just talking about being the first black president, of course, but I'm talking about looking at politics as a whole, so that made me very curious. How did that make you feel? How did it affect you mentally? Do you feel like he pushed you? To make it better, do you feel like this made the way you present things a little different? You are very careful in the way you articulate certain things. Yes, what has been your feeling about achievements in less diverse spaces? You're right. I write. about the fact that there were times where I had to deal with expectations or stereotypes or attitudes that maybe if I had been white I wouldn't have had to deal with not only myself but a lot of African Americans or Hispanics, Asian Americans or in some cases women were the first in their positions in my administration they all had to navigate spaces where traditionally there weren't many people who looked like them in those situations and it's an extra burden uh but my attitude was always that it was also a privilege to be in these environments where you can really help, these spaces where you are one of the first and that requires you to speak and have the confidence that you can propose solutions that make the whole team or organization work better