And I believe that's what art can do, is affect that kind of change, create bonds of empathy between us and people on the other side of the world, because frankly before I worked on this, before I went there, I did not care about labor. Because I did not think about labor in any kind of way, any kind of deep way. I didn't have a background in activism. I felt politically aware, more politically aware each year, each monologue, but I had never really been a person who was active in that way. And now, I see them as being so inseparable now: I am in some sense an actor, and it makes sense that I am also an activist. I mean, the central verb is to do, to actually act upon the world, to actually make things happen. I feel like, I don't know how I never thought that we should change things. But sometimes, in the arts*, we feel that way. We feel like the job of the arts* is instead to be this pristine place, pulled back, maybe that is partially the story of our world, because it's been a long time since The Jungle, and when The Jungle existed, it got into trouble, like you heard, but even then, when you called something fiction, it meant something very different than it does now. When you say something is fiction now, what you really sort of mean is that it is fictional, that it will not touch you, so do not worry. There's this sense of toothlessness, I think. I don't know. I don't know what this means. But I do know that there is power in labels. There's power in what we call things. There's power in the shapes of things. And the job of art often* is to blur the lines between things.

I'm going to be talking about all the things I did. I want to be clear, that's not an excuse. I'm just telling you and warning you that that is actually what art does. When you see art wandering into new spaces and making things dissolve, that does not mean that is ... bad. It means that it is on the precepts of what it essentially is. The people who employ it are responsible for what it has done, but it does not mean that it is flawed. It does not mean it was supposed to stay in its (inaudible).

So I began doing the show. It got born. I started taking it from city to city to city. And I think this is one of the things people don't really understand about the situation, is that I performed it for 18 or 19 months before it broke into any kind of national sense here in 2012. I performed it everywhere. Large, good theaters. I have a good reputation in the American theater. Which a lot of you, I'm sure, are like, "I've never heard of you before", and it's like, "well, there you go." This is the fate of the American theater. You'll have to take my word for it. I was doing all right. (Laughter)

I had all these theaters, and I would bring the show there and I brought a number of shows and so, it did well. But honestly, of course, it didn't do well because it was about Chinese labor. It did well because it was about Steve Jobs, this person I was obsessed with. And so, not only was it something that people could connect with, but something that actually I could connect with, in talking about this person. And then the circumstances or devices became this sort of, what we call it in the show, a virus, that weaves its way so that it slowly seduces you as you watch it, it gets inside of you, and makes you begin to think about the fact that so many things you own and possess are made by hand. Fundamentally, that is all it does. It's actually a very simple show. It just tries very, very hard to make you care about where your shit came from. It's actually far more simple than most of the work I've ever made.