By leading the Americans in his audience at TEDxPSU step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand — not approve of, but understand — the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?

Sam Richards is a sociologist and award-winning teacher who has been inspiring undergraduate students at Penn State since 1990. Every semester, 725 students register for his Race and Ethnic Relations course, one of the most popular classes at Penn State and the largest of its kind in the country. Through his natural ability of seeing a subject from many angles, Richards encourages students to engage more fully with the world and to think for themselves — something he did not do until his third year in college. Because of his passion for challenging students to open their minds, an interviewer recently referred to him as “an alarm clock for eighteen-year-olds.”

His career began at the age of 24 when he was hired to teach a cybernetics course — just 15 minutes before the first class meeting. He remembers walking into the room without having had a moment to create a lesson plan and greeting his students, “Welcome to the course. I’m your instructor. And if you have no idea what cybernetics is, you’re not alone — because I don’t either.” This characteristic willingness to be playfully transparent in the classroom, along with a talent for making complex ideas understandable and relevant, is the foundation of his success as a teacher.

Richards is also the co-director of the World in Conversation Project at Penn State (www.worldinconversation.org), whose mission is to create a kind of dialogue about social and cultural issues that invites the unexamined, politically incorrect thoughts of participants to the surface so that those thoughts can be submitted to conscious exploration and inquiry. The conversation topics span a range of cultural issues — from U.S. race relations to gender to faith to international racism. This year, nearly 7,000 University Park students will participate in one of more than 1,300 of these unscripted conversations. Furthermore, the project also sponsors video dialogues between Penn State students and students at other universities around the world.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ”indoctrination,” we might say – exercised through the mass media. ~ Noam Chomsky

The Free Person’s Roundtable is a virtual community forum and podcast available on iTunes that aims to affect real-world change through dialogue and discussion.  The FPR podcast is a platform for public opinion that features free-thinking and progressive-minded people defining and commenting on the issues that they see as relevant in their lives and their very own visions for a better future. The topics discussed will include anything that has impact on our daily lives from education, religion, environment, technology, to health care, media, society, or art — the basic “A to Z’s” of life. We will also throw in some entertainment and fun because in the end we need to laugh along the way.

By discussing issues close to our hearts and daily lives, we hope to uncover the real sources that are negatively impacting our lives and discover alternatives.  When we try to come to solutions through unfiltered and uncensored dialogues, we open the door for new ideas.  By featuring the free persons of our podcast thinking freely for themselves, we hope to get people engaged, first in dialogue, and ultimately in actively improving their communities.

Media for the Rest of Us – Joining the New Paradigm

The media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There’s really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It’s not healthy. ~ Ted Turner

Recently, major media news has become increasingly political, corporate, destructive, and divisive.  Too often, big media censors our radical ideas labeling them as too outrageous for the mainstream.  Yet, some of those very same radical ideas, the truly original and innovative ones, can vastly change and help heal society.  In the current media system, we are reduced to being taxpayers, voters, viewers, workers, or just commodities. Rarely are we ever considered to be an intelligent, independent, and free thinking people with solutions.

FPR believes, we are all very able individuals capable of examining problems in our communities and acting independently to solve those issues at a grass roots level.  The FPR podcast is designed to create that forum for: we, the creative, self-aware, and independent people to partake in constructive, informative, and enlightening discourse.

Correspondents

We promise to always work completely independent of any mainstream major media market, without the help of any politicians, or be controlled by any big corporate investments. Come and join the new paradigm of democratized media. ~ The FPR Hosts

Dru: Describes himself as an Anarcho-Syndicalist with Georgistic tendencies. Dru is a resident of the Midwest by way of an upbringing on the East coast. He was taught at a young age that having a stand is better than having your opinion made for you, and that it is your responsibility to hold the powers that be to the light.

TBA: Looking for a new host… if you are interested, contact Dru.