Uploaded October 2016 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
President Obama humiliated Alex Jones, an extreme right-wing talk show host, during a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in North Carolina. Jones frequently makes insane comments, like calling President Obama and Hillary Clinton devil worshipers.
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President Obama humiliated Alex Jones, an extreme right-wing talk show host, during a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in North Carolina. Jones frequently makes insane comments, like calling President Obama and Hillary Clinton devil worshipers.
Subscribe to TDC for more videos like this: youtube.com/TheDailyConversation
Like our page on Facebook
facebook.com/thedailyconversation
Join us on Google+
plus.google.com/100134925804523235350/posts
Follow us on Twitter
twitter.com/thedailyconvo


![Africas Mega-City: Future MEGAPROJECTS
LAGOS, NIGERIA — population 22 million — is Africas largest city. This mini-documentary examines the multiple mega-projects under construction, the leadership of state Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, and — briefly — the history of Nigeria.
Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/TheDailyConversation/
Video by Bryce Plank and Robin West
Music:
The Search by Matt Stewart-Evans:
https://soundcloud.com/mattstewartevans
https://www.facebook.com/Matthew.Stewart.Evans
Decisions and Heavy Interlude by Kevin MacLeod are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/
The Stranger by Glimpse (TDC Remix)
https://soundcloud.com/glimpse_official
Script:
This is Lagos, Nigeria the largest city in Africa.
Home to more than 22 million people, it’s facing a perfect storm of challenges.
So let’s look at how this megacity is trying to modernize.
The biggest challenge Nigeria faces is a population pyramid that’s overwhelmingly bottom heavy. 61% are younger than 25—that’s a lot of jobs to create and houses to build in the coming years.
This problem is made worse by the extremely poor condition of the city’s infrastructure. Badly designed and maintained motorways cause people to endure agonizing commute times, and interrupted access to electricity causes regular blackouts.
Add in the threat of a rising ocean that’s steadily eroding the coastline, and the future of this place looks bleak.
But perspective is relative, so let’s gain some.
165 years ago Lagos was an island fortress and one of the principal roots of the slave trade, until the British navy bombarded it into submission and abolished the practice. But slavery wasn’t outlawed in Northern Nigeria until 1936. That means any Nigerian older than 85 can probably still remember slavery, or was a slave themselves.
In 1960, Nigeria gained independence from the British. But, the country quickly became engulfed in a civil war that killed as many as 3 million people. In the dark aftermath of this bloody conflict the country had one thing going for it: oil, which provided a consistent source of income. But the temptation of controlling all that black gold attracted deeply corrupt men, and Nigeria endured decades of violent struggles between power-mad dictators and military officers.
With just two legitimate presidential elections under its belt, in 2011 and 2015, Nigeria has only had six years of truly peaceful, independent — not completely corrupt — democratic rule in its entire history.
All this upheaval was amplified by strong ethnic and religious divisions throughout the country. So for the federal government to appear legitimate, the capital had to move away from Lagos to a more centralized, neutral part of the country. Following in the footsteps of Brazil’s master-planned capital, Brasilia, the Nigerians built an entire city from scratch during the 1980’s. The relocation of thousands of government workers drove migration to this new capital, Abuja, the fastest growing city in the world from 2000 to 2010.
Unfortunately, while Abuja thrived, Lagos languished. With the city far away now it became even easier for deeply corrupt federal officials to neglect the megacity’s needs.
But the its downward spiral is quickly changing direction thanks — largely — to one man, the current governor of the state of Lagos, Akinwunmi Ambode.
Ambode earned his Master’s in accounting from the University of Lagos and studied abroad in England, Switzerland, Singapore, and at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Boston.
[Osoba]: “Everything about this man is outstanding, everything about him… He is someone who does not leave a place without changing it for the better.”
Now 53 — with a long career serving the people of Lagos under his belt — Ambode hit the ground running upon his election in 2015. He immediately began holding regular town hall meetings. This helped him tailor his plans to best affect positive change for citizens that they could see and feel.
He installed a team of competent deputies who’ve helped him implement his mega-master plan of targeted micro projects to drastically improve conditions throughout the city. Lagosians are already feeling the benefits of his less than two years in office.
[Citizen of Lagos]: “Today we are happy because the government have done a perfect job here. Now we can have a good access roads to get to our homes. And you can see business around this area, they are doing very well.”
By making road fixes his first major task, Ambode wisely accomplished several important things that any new leader should immediately set out to do.
The other half of this modernization equation rests largely on the success of two key mega-projects under construction in Lagos and Abuja: Eko Atlantic, a financial hub that’s being built on reclaimed land along the coast; and Centenary City. Africas Mega-City: Future MEGAPROJECTS](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/n8TKlpIyHn4/mqdefault.jpg)





![Chicago: Boomtown to Modern Marvel
Chicago is the crown jewel of the post-industrial United States with a metropolitan population of 9.5 million. It triumphed over nature to become a boomtown and railroad hub. Now, its economy is considered the most balanced and resilient on earth. This is the building of Chicago, a modern marvel at the crossroads of America.
Part 2 https://youtu.be/V9LQ2oWZlZI
Subscribe to TDC https://www.youtube.com/TheDailyConversation/
Thanks to Paul Durica and the Chicago History Museum https://www.chicagohistory.org/
Main clip sources: WTTW Chicagos local PBS station https://www.youtube.com/@wttw
This futuristic urban river canyon reflects a staggering amount of resources, capital, and innovation. It’s also America’s railroad hub and the central node in America’s extensive system of navigable freshwater ways. Its roads lead to most corners of the continent, and its runways send direct flights to over 200 destinations–all of this supports one of the planet’s most productive regions for growing crops and extracting raw materials. The opportunities available in and around this prairie boomtown have attracted hungry young workers for nearly two centuries. In fact, so many arrived daily that it sustained the highest population growth rate on earth for several consecutive decades in the late 1800s.
Its story began when a Haitian-born fur trader [Jean Baptiste DeSalle] and his wife [Kitihawa], a member of the local indigenous Potawatomi tribe, established an outpost here in 1779.
It remained a sleepy frontier village for decades until Chicago’s first locomotive, the Pioneer, made its inaugural trip out to nearby Des Plaines in 1848.
I learned about this pivotal moment firsthand when I visited the Chicago History Museum for a trip back in time with Paul Durica.
These products were listed in mail-order catalogs, an industry invented and based in Chicago. The conveniences of online shopping can be traced directly back to Montgomery Ward and Sears–businesses that were only possible because the railroad reliably delivered.
By the beginning of the 20th century. Chicago had close to 40 different railroad lines running through it. Most cities today will have like maybe one Union Station or a central terminal–but by the early 1900s, Chicago had six different ones.
Chicago was also responsible for the rapid growth of the vast prairies that stretched westward to the Rocky Mountains. A Chicagoan had invented the mechanical reaper, freeing wheat farmers from the backbreaking, inefficient work of harvesting their crops by hand. And when they shipped their wheat into the city, 12 massive grain elevators stored it before it was sent across the lake to Buffalo, or downriver and onto oceanliners waiting in New Orleans.
But even with this bounty, prairie farmers couldn’t build much of anything, because their lands had few trees to harvest. Good thing there were expansive forests in Wisconsin and Michigan north of Chicago, and soon it became the world’s largest lumber market.
“The Union Stockyard in many ways is the kind of natural culmination of how the citys been growing and developing because its all about centralization and expanding markets.
Hundreds of millions of calories were passing through the processing plants and storage facilities of Chicago every single day, feeding the ravenous Union Army in its hard-fought victory in the Civil War.
“Chicago is situated magnificently for trade, but it’s a pestilential swamp–it’s a horrible place for a city. It’s an absolute hellhole… Children were playing with maggots as if they were little pets.”
Before long, Cholera had crept up the Mississippi to extinguish 60 Chicagoans a day during the warm summer months.
To find a solution, Chicago brought in Ellis Chesbrough, one of America’s brightest sanitation engineers. He designed gravity-fed sewers to flush the waste into the river, and then deepened the river by dredging it and using the fill to raise Chicago’s ground level 10 feet. Lifting all the existing buildings safely required widespread adoption of a new system: George Pullman’s jack.
“So, how could you reverse the flow? Well, you must realize that the land form drops off. You get down to the city of Joliet and you’re 40 feet below Lake Michigan. The idea was to link up the south branch of the Chicago River with the Des Plaines river and to break through that subcontinental divide.
When they had finally finished the Chicago Shipping and Sanitation Canal, and were ready to let the water in, they still weren’t positive it would even work. After a few tense moments, amazingly, the water began to flow slowly downhill.
0:00 Welcome to Chicago
1:20 A Sleepy Frontier Town
2:04 Railroads Help Industry Takes Off
3:10 Prarie Boomtown
5:00 Union Stockyards
6:24 The Battle Against Cholera
7:10 Chicagos Innovative Water System
9:02 Reversing the River
11:12 Outro: Part 1 of 4 Chicago: Boomtown to Modern Marvel](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pNdX0Dm-J8Y/mqdefault.jpg)

