[Part 1] Hey what's up, mkbhd here

so as you may have seen

barack obama's been on a pretty massive book tour for his new book a promised land

uh it's been a pretty great read so far for me but

then youtube reached out, and they were like, hey

do you want to ask obama anything about what he talks about in this book

and so of course i said yes that would be awesome

but that's that's a big moment for me like

what do i ask the president if i could ask him anything

[Part 2] so anyway what i have for you are the two questions that i chose

and this is actually part of a larger uh youtube originals project called booktube

where he answers a bunch of questions from a bunch of other creators about that book and what he wants to talk about

including a really good one from mark rober about nasa and the origins of the white house science fair which i thought were really interesting

so i'll link that below for you to check it out

but this is sort of extended cut of a little chat and uh i wanted to share

enjoy [Music]

[Part 3] mr president my name is marquez brownlee

i run a youtube channel called mkbhd

so that's mkb which is my initials plus hd that's high definition

that's where i get to be a huge nerd basically

i talk all kinds of tech products review tech try to make high quality videos and we like to have fun with it

you know these days tech is in everything it feels like it's a part of the fabric of the culture we live in

so on my channel it's everything from smartphones to 5g to computers to electric cars

basically anything with an on button all the way to interviews with people with unique perspectives on tech

it's a lot of fun

i'm 26 years old i've been doing this for about 10 years now over 10 years

so a long time in my own life

and i also happen to be 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 pretty big nba basketball fan

so i gotta say i'm pretty excited to be able to talk about your book a promised land

which is your third book and uh first in a two-part presidential memoir

so i started my youtube channel in 2009 so a year after your inauguration which i was at by the way

um i wish i had some some pictures or something from that but i didn't have a camera then believe it or not but i do remember it was very cold

the timing of this isn't lost on me i feel like 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 an extent you can say a lot of the same like a lot of people have called you the first social media president

but more than that it's just you know you look at the administration before you they hadn't quite used it hadn't quite cracked it

then you came along and all of your teams using social media embracing technology embracing this new stuff

so can you speak to that level of embracing technology and and how it affects our politics and activating new audiences and speaking to new people

you know obviously we can see it has its ups and downs but i feel like a unique challenge of yours was finding a balance there that we hadn't really seen before you

thanks mark has unbelievable hops uh on that clip of you in uh ultimate frisbee

you're right technology had a big impact on my campaign

first of all the reason we were really early adapters of a lot of technology as a tool for reaching out to voters was because i had a bunch of folks in their 20s working for me

young people who would come to me and say listen we had this thing called myspace and meetup

what it turned out was that those early iterations of social media became a really powerful way for us to build a volunteer base and a movement

it made me hugely 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 ill or for good

you know hatred could be communicated as well as love and compassion

that's something that i think we still struggle with and i write about in a promised land how do we harness this technology for good and try to mitigate uh some of the problems that uh that it creates

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