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access to programs and holding students, of course, accountable for finishing the degrees they do start. only 58% of full-time students who started college in 2004 earned their four year degree within six years. that diploma is getting more and more expensive. although the only family income has increased 16% since whitesnake was on the billboard. people tried to sell their tickets on craig's list. we saw them up there for $250 a pair. fair warning, selling your ticket is illegal and who wants to add a heft at this fine to their student loan anyway. nbc's kristen welker is aboard the don't call it a campaign bus bus heading to the president's speech. kristen, it's great to see you. >> reporter: great to see you too, abby. good afternoon. thanks for having me. we are headed to syracuse, as

you say. president obama's second stop on this bus tour after he unveiled his plan to improve college affordability earlier today in buffalo. and as you mentioned, that plan would involve linking federal financial aid to a college ranking system. that ranking system would be based on a number of factors which would include things like tuition, debts, projected rate of earnings once students graduate. so a number of different factors that would play into that. the president even talking about some of his own experiences, the fact that he and the first lady had some difficulties paying back their student loans when they were younger and getting going, trying to really relate to his younger audience there. and he also talked about a figure that he hoped a lot of people would relate to. the fact that the average college graduate has about $26,000 in debt when they graduate from college. here's a little bit more about what president obama has to say. take a listen. >> at a time when a higher education has never been more important or more expensive, too

many students are facing a choice that they never should have to make. either they say no to college and pay the price for not getting a degree, and that's a price that lasts a lifetime, or you do whatever it takes to go to college but then you run the risk that you won't be able to pay it off because you have so much debt. now that's a choice we shouldn't accept. >> we are getting some reaction from republicansment senator marco rubio is saying this is a slippery slope and saying this entsds with the private sector. this is the chairman of the house education committee. he welcomes the president's proposal and says he also does have some concerns that innovation could be squashed. he says that could lead to federal crisis. there's no guarantee that the president's plan will make its way to congress.

the budget battles are just around the corner. i want to make a sharp left turn and just report some breaking news that we are getting. the white house has confirmed that president obama has directed intelligence officials to try to confirm whether or not chemical weapons were in fact used inside syria. there's video during this recent conversation. more than a year now. so the obama administration is anxious to be able to corroborate those very reports. i've been speaking to some lawmakers on the hill. they say they are anxious to get corroboration. there's a lot of pressure on the obama administration to get answers about what specifically did take place in syria. back to you in the studio. >> reports that the president is squarely focused on the economy. for more on that we bring in josh, politics editor and

insider. josh, it's always good to have you. when you think of the average college students, the borrower is leaving college with $26,000 in debt and the president spoke to us this morning and he talked about improving the cost effectiveness of higher education. josh, i think of you as a pretty sane guy. what is your reaction to what the president is proposing? >> i'm glad to be hearing this. for most of the last year when we talk about college affordability, we've been fighting about how to finance rapidly high cost of higher education. how much will be borne by students and how much will be borne by taxpayers. we need to be focusing on costs. this is a sector where the people are making the spending decisions often aren't the people paying the bills. for that reason costs have gotten wildly out of control at colleges. what the students are doing are identifying schools that produce great outcomes but produce great outcomes at relatively low

costs. as we saw in the health sector we're likely to see resistance from this from people who are benefitting from unrestrained costs. college professors and others who make their living off the higher ed business. this is the right place for the president to focus his attention and i'm hopeful he'll see cooperation from others. >> i want to second what abby said. i think you're sane. one of the things people say is the house doesn't do anything. they do very little. the education packages, the interest rates that we've discussed on the show, children's hospitals and one thing on local accountability. many people are not optimistic that they'll take up president's thoughts on that. >> some of this requires action from congress. we're going to have to work on that. >> you hear that sort of low sad

chuckling. it's not supposed to be a laugh line. is there anything in here that you think congress can and should act on? >> first of all, a little cooperation from republicans controlling health care costs that that was bad for key constituencies. doctors and elderly people receiving medicare. the key part is that you would trick and con strain the growth of cost in medicare. here the people who are losing out are people who are working in the higher ed industry. i don't think you've seen better cooperation on things that involve better federal spending. you'll have this big fight on how much money the federal budget should have, whether or not we should undo the sequester, whether it results in

larger budget deficits. most of the changes won't impact education. it ought to be one of the things that is an opportunity for bipartisan cooperation. >> that relies on an analysis that is sane and what we've seen from republicans in congress so far is that if the president proposes something, even if it is something that should appeal to conservatives, they reflecttivelily have to be against it. we already heard some talk of creeping into federal price controls which doesn't make any sense here but that doesn't matter. let's assume that congress does not act. the transparency piece of this. the more information piece the preds can do on his own providing more information about what schools are good value to students. how much of an impact should that make on our education

system. >> that's an open question. it will make choices about where to go to college. i think there's already information a lot of time about trying to get through to students. i think we saw this in the law school market for years and years all of these people would line up to go to law school and take out enormous debts and 2350i7d out there are very few high paying jobs for lawyers and people were getting law degrees from four tier schools and not able to find work at all. >> tell me about it. >> yeah. finally that's broken through. law school has finally started declining and law schools have figured out the gravy train is over and they're not going to get people to buy this worthless product anymore. that took a long time. i don't know how quickly more information about graduate schools will lead them to have better decisions. it's important to tie the score cards to federal decisions about financial aid so the federal government can put more force behind this. that will require congressional

cooperation. >> you talk about open questions, josh. as krystal pointed out, the sanity of the gop is an open question. they've gone from talking about a government shutdown to talking about breaching the debt ceiling which could lead to a global financial crisis, and i learned that talking about the breaching of the debt ceiling could lead to a global crisis watching the newsroom. >> yeah, well, raising the debt ceiling would be a moral disaster. the barclay's guys say this debate is detached from reality. my goldman source says if the house republicans continue this debate i hope they're willing to mark the end of the dollar as the global reserve currency. >> you didn't say if the house republicans don't race the debt ceiling. he said if the house republicans continue this debate. that's all it takes, just the uncertainty. that's why the dow is going to close down 230 points today, because just the debate.

just the doubt. >> i didn't actually learn it watching "newsroom," krystal taught it to me. they're going to shoot themselves in the chest or shoot the entire country in the chest, what's going on? >> i put very little stock in the republican threats. john boehner is telling his caucus, no, don't pick this fight, we'll pick the next fight. what he's trying to get them to do is he's telling them, don't shut down the government. we have a debt ceiling fight. the last time the debt ceiling came up at the beginning of this year, the republicans folded quickly. they agreed to a debt siege increase in exchange for a meaningless budget resolution that was never going to become law. once we get past september 30th and they've passed some sort of bill that continues to fund the government, then we'll start hearing from john boehner. don't pick the fight over the debt ceiling. it would be terrible for the

economy, and therefore terrible for republicans. this is a threat that they have to make right now. i don't think we'll get anywhere close to the debt ceiling this time just like we avoided having a very serious fight over it this year. >> josh, always great to have you here. thank you for being sane. you cannot say that for very many people. >> i do my best. coming up next, for all the crime time headlines, is the country getting more or less dangerous. what do you think? "the cycle" rolls on for thursday, august 22nd. it's almost the weekend, people. hey linda!

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if it wasn't a general media bias against good news, then would be a huge story. the american homicide rate is now at a 100 year low. despite the headlines you've seen out of chicago recently, the fact is the windy city's homicide rate hasn't been this low since the 1960s. we're in the midst of a national decades long drop in crime, which makes this a ripe moment for the criminologist to study why we still have as much crime as we do. criminologists saying being jobless and having a social network filled with criminal associates have a lot to do with crime. when i discovered the next guest says a person's sense of legitimacy and law has something to do with it. when they view the police as illegitimate, they have tan opinion. professor, can you please explain how the i will legit at

this ma si leads to people not following the law? >> i can. thanks for having me on today. what i like to talk about is not so much i will legit at this ma si but legitimacy. it's a positive concept. the idea is when people have strong connections with legal authorities or with the state in general, they tend to voluntarily comply. it's an internalized impetus, really, for following the law. even people who are long-time offenders basically obey the law most of the time. >> i wanted to ask you a little bit about the projects you've been working on. you right that in chicago the quote, unquote, city's crime problem is, in fact, geographically and socially concentrated in a few highly impoverished and socially isolated neighborhoods and then in terms of project safe neighborhood i'd like you to tell us about you explain that that's part of the drop we've seen in the homicide rate looking at certain communities that use that program. how does that work? >> right. so let's take your first point

about the way people understand violence in cities. many people, especially people who don't live in cities, will say that cities are violent places or dangerous places to be. in fact, it's only small locations, neighborhoods or parts of neighborhoods that exhibit higher rates of crime. the second point you mentioned earlier in the show is that people who live in those places are connected in certain ways and that violence is transmitted among them. so really smart policing and law enforcement policy would take advantage of those things and actually target resources and approaches and strategies at the particular places and at the people who are most vulnerable. >> crime has gone down in chicago. we've seen 79 fewer murders so far this year compared to the same time last year. definitely progress but still a ways to go. i'm curious what you would say to folks, here in new york city murders and shootings have gone down 29% so far this year.

what about stop and frisk in chicago? >> right. there is no strong evidence at all indicating that stop and frisk is effective despite the fact that the mayor and the chief of police have explained it to be so. there's also increasingly strong evidence indicating that that kind of policing that's incredibly intrusive and needs to be carried out in ways that people don't perceive as fair or respectful to them, a lack of legitimacy that separates people from the people that they should trust. overall, over the long haul it's the kind of thing that will actually lead to higher crime rates over time. >> professor, bigger picture though. we have seen the decline in crime across the country. what factors do you attribute that crime to.

>> that's going to increases in crime rates and decreases in crime rates. one, if you get an ambulance out to a crime scene quicker than you used to, the fact that you get to the hospital minutes earlier will turn what was a homicide into merely a shooting. there's other evidence showing that of the prevalence of lead paint is associated with higher crime rates. and the ideas that i've been talking about, you know, the legitimacy of policing matters. the fact that there are lots and lots of police per square foot in manhattan compared to other places could actually lead to lower crime rates. so there's one thing to talk about what the crime rate is at a particular point in time. it's another thing to talk about what it is over time. i heard you say that new york is down 29 homicides this year compared to last.

criminologists don't like using numbers like that. we like to talk in more long-term trends, 5, 10 years. it could be something as simple as the weather, frankly. >> there's something to that, too. in july, the crime rate, homicide rate always goes up. looking more long term, the rise in the number of police over the last 20, 30 years. the waning of the crack epidemic has had a huge impact over the last 20 years. let me get your opinion about steven levity of freak could he no, ma'am mix fame raises that the abortion rates, abortion being legal since the '70s, has made an impact on the crime rate. i'm not sure if i buy it but he's all in behind it. what do you think about that? >> i respect steve's work a lot and he's done that work with one of -- he was my former colleague at the university of chicago and he did that work, i believe, with another of my former colleagues, john donnahue who's now at stanford. i think other people have weighed in to assess the merits

and the demerits of that work, but i do think that the point of that piece, along with the collection of other factors that i mentioned, is that many different things can affect the crime rate potentially. >> absolutely. professor mears, looking forward to having you on the show more. looking forward to a book from you. you should have that out soon. what do you think? >> i am working on a book. it's called "smart, tough and fair, reducing violent crime in "60 minutes" or less." it's about these ideas of legitimacy and how to harness them for good policing. thank you very much. next, we turn to twitter. dr. phil, alec baldwin, geraldo. people getting in trouble for what they say on twitter. does that really happen? ♪ feel my way, feel the darkness ♪ school lunches look at walmart's price. wow! that's great. if you find a lower advertised price they'll match it at the register. really... yeah, in a "jif". that's walmart's everyday low price. seriously?! yeah! now you have everything you need for back to school. that was easy.

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the news cycle begins with aaron hernandez indicted of the first degree murder charge of a semipro football player. his body was found in an

industrial park near hernandez's home. he pleaded not guilty to weapons charges in june but he continues to be held without bail. mayor creepy is about to be former mayor creepy. he's reportedly agreed to resign finally as part of a tentative deal reached with the city. his last day will likely be tomorrow. more than a dozen women have come forward with allegations of sexual harassment and unwanted advances. from one debacle to another, how would you like to find this next to your beach blanket. beach goers in russia scrambled to get out of a 400 person military hover craft that landed on the beach. it was reportedly out for a quote, unquote, training exercise. now to a flash mob video from yale new haven's cancer hospital. it began airing in the northeast. it quickly went viral. once you watch it, you will quickly understand ♪ everybody wants you to be closer to free ♪

♪ ♪ >> pretty amazing. the full version of the flash mob has gotten more than 118 views on youtube. that's your news cycle. we're keeping the online trend for the spinl. it's not youtube that we're talking about, it's twitter. a tweet by dr. phil that has the twitterverse all up in a tizzy. on tuesday night a tweet followed by more than 1 million people, if a girl is drunk, is it okay to have sex with her? reply yes or no. #teensaccused. the tweet was quickly deleted. nothing is ever truly deleted on the internet. that let to a petition on change.org for dr. phil to talk about the reality of sexual assault in america. while he hasn't spoken publicly about the incident, the show did release a statement which reads in part, quote, this tweet was intended to evoke discussion into a very serious show topic. this was not a personal post and dr. phil deleted it the second

he saw it. okay. so dr. phil personally deleted the weet and at the same time that statement suggests he wasn't personally the one who sent it out. but judging by the reactions, those details don't really seem to matter to most people out there. guys, this is not the first time we have seen someone with over a million followers tweet something out that has really caused a stir online. there are countless examples. i think of ashton kutcher. he tweeted something about joe paterno and it really caused people to go crazy. the reality is though, i mean, how often are people not even tweeting this themselves, like intere dr. phil. you have a number of assistants. i'm not one of them. they tweet something that people take the wrong way for whatever reason. >> right. sometimes you don't know. ashton kutcher, he didn't know what was going on with joe pa when he said that. >> they're not well read on what's going on. >> i have a personal story about this. i was traveling with my dad on

the 2012 republican campaign trail, often went with him to speeches. i would have a twitter account on my phone. i would tweet out while he was speaking, tell people to get places. he was so busy. i was happy to do that. i still have his twitter account on my phone and i have to figure out how to delete it. recently i tweeted something out a few months ago. i tweeted something out in my own words as i often do about my opinion about the republican party. it for whatever reason went out in my dad's name. within a few seconds it was retweeted. john thinks such and such about the republican party. not from my dad. he obviously called me later saying what's going on, what happened. >> every campaign's nightmare. >> it made me realize in the world we live in, we talk in 140 characters. we need to think twice about the things we send out. we need to not be so quick to judge. as tori was saying, you don't always know the back story. >> you don't know the back story

the way stories come in. i was thinking of john mayer about a twitter debacle. he called it reputational russian roulette. any time you tweet you can hurt yourself. there are a million tweets that would make your reputation plunge into the toilet. you have to think really carefully every time you press send unless, of course, you are pat oswald, the best tweeter in the whole world who did an amazing set of tweets playing on the potential of being y misunderstood. when it comes to doing laundry i firmly believe in using environment friendly detergent and i also believes whites and darks should be kept separate. sorry if that sounds too tree huggy for my conservative followers. another tweet, our country's worth isn't in how many billion arts we produce or countries we

conquer. history will judge us solely on how we eat the poor disabled and hopeless. it's the only way we could ensure our future. there are many, many more like that that you can read on buzz beat and other places. incredible uses of the twitter. >> i like seeing your spoken word reenactment of patto patton oswalt's show. >> future segment on "the cycle." reputational roulette. >> i found that out the hard way. >> i think beyond dr. phil and the famous people, there's a huge revolution in how we converse. for millennia people have been having casual conversations, not always well thought out or diplomatic speak, and now with 200 million people on twitter you have this conversation being much more visible than ever before. a lot of people are on twitter talking like they would talk to a friend or two. for most people if you only have your friends and a couple of hundred people following you, that is your reality.

i wanted to put up what people are doing on twitter. only about 5% was pure self-promotion. for most people, 40% was pointless babble. that's how researchers looked at it. another 40% was conversational. >> it would be interesting to have other people rate what they put up. >>. >> yeo, man, that's not babble. but life is full of that. life is full of chatter where you say, how are you, fine, what are you doing this weekend, nothing. full of normal conversation. what we have now is a world where so much of that is readily accessible and visible. what i think about dr. phil is this wasn't apparently from him and it wasn't a serious conversation. it's trying to commodotize controversy. they're coming up with something right up to the line to get people to tune in. we all understand that being on tv, but hopefully you find a way to drive people into a conversation without just trying to rile people up. >> yeah.

>> obviously this was past the line. that's what we're talking about. what i'm saying is all of these tweets. they're trying to get up to that line. let me retreat, let me share. they're kind of trolling is the internet term for that. >> retreats. >> let's get people to be reactive. that to me is the shame. we were talking about this earlier. there is a conversation to be hyon line and in our communities not to drive ratings but to involve something that involves stigma for those trying to stand up against these kinds of sexual harassment and these kinds of different lines. the idea that if you're drunk or if you're wearing something somehow -- >> that makes it okay. >> you're not sacrificing your right. >> that's exactly right. in a way i think i speak for myself and probably everybody at this table when i say we've all tweeted things that maybe didn't come out exactly the way that we wanted to. >> tori has never done that. >> why do you look at me when you say that? >> in this particular instance where they were not just at the line but way over the line i was

actually incredibly encouraged by the outrage because i don't think it would have been that long ago that someone could have said something like this and it wouldn't have provoked such a response. people would have thought it is a legitimate question we should ask. in today's context we now know that one in five college women will a tempt be taken advantage of without given their consent. i am encouraged that people recognize that this was totally inappropriate and over the line and expressed that through outrage. >> i think the most important part of this whole conversation is tweets are never actually fully deleted. you have to be careful. those 140 characters, you might delete it but it's still out there. interesting conversation. up next, fresh off the president's speech on education and the economy, we have a billionaire investor who says

the most pro business thing america can do is invest in the middle of class. you heard that right here. he's in our guest spot next. you have to be careful. middle of class. it guides you to a number that will change your

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woman 2: 'i want to go to bora bora.' man: 'i'd always like to go to china.' anncr: download the expedia app and your next trip could be on us. expedia, find yours. we've come a long way together these past four years. we're going to keep moving forward on this issue and on every other issue that's going to help make sure that we continue to have the strongest, most thriving middle class in the world. we're going to keep pushing for a better bargain for everybody in this country that works hard and everybody who is in that middle class. we're going to keep fighting to make sure that this remains a country where if you work hard and study hard and are responsible, you are rewarded. >> president obama reiterated today the main goal of his second term, rebuilding the middle class. our next guest is one of the

original investors for amazon. he's on a mission very similar to the president's. in the guest spot now, nick hannouer. i'm going to start by putting up a spot that i've shown several times on this program, which shows that as the union membership rate has declined, so has the middle class share of national income. so essentially as union membership has gone away, so has the middle class. as we're speaking about rebuilding the middle class, how important a role should we be playing in that conversation? >> well, you know, very important. i think that the most important questions in the country today is where does prosperity come from? because for 30 long years people on the right and the left accept the trickle down thesis. if you pour money into rich people like me in the form of tax breaks and so on and so forth, prosperity will squirt out of us like donuts.

of course, that's not what's happened. >> great image though. >> that's the only thing that's happened is that the rich have gotten richer. the middle out framework that the president is using today isn't a slogan or a list of policies, what it really is is a 21st century explanation for the origins of prosperity because when you yuunderstand the econo in the 21st way as an ecosystem, it's obvious that it's a feedback loop between customers and businesses and, therefore, the true job creators are consumers. the fund dammal of capital -- >> you can't talk about the middle class today without talking about under employment. >> they're over qualified for the american dream work and get

ahead. it's seemingly impossible. fast food workers are striking for that wage. the wages that we are paid aren't the consequence of some magical perfectly efficient economic thing that happens. they reflect power. the truth is that workers have very little power in this country and as a consequence most of the benefits go to capitalists like me. and the problem with that, the problem with rising inequality is it represents a death spiral of falling demand. this is why, you know, we have to reverse this decades old thinking. >> nick, let me ask you briefly.

when you look at democrats winning five of the last presidential elections in their share of the vote and taxes being generally redistributed, why is it so hard for democrats to sell the middle class programs as redistribution for the middle class? >> that's a great question. that's because democrats until president obama have not offered an alternative explanation for the origins of prosperity. the problem is that most people in the country have accepted either intentionally or unconsciously this idea that the richer the rich get the better off we all will be. if you accept that, then rising inequality becomes a feature of prosperity. this is why the middle out framework is so crucial. we have to turn this around. we have to show people that there's a choice to be made about where you think prosperity comes from. if you accept the old explanation, then all of this terrible stuff stays in place.

once you see it's the middle class, not a few rich guys like me, you end up with a policy focus on the middle class that won't just benefit the middle class, to be clear, but will also benefit people like me because the morrow bust the customer base is, the better opportunity there is for all of us. up next, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. we have the amazing story of muhammad ali. ♪ ♪

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most people know about muhammad ali. the greatest boxer of all time. he won the heavy weight championship of the world at age 22 in his battles with joe frazier. in the middle he took a stand and risked his career and changed our notion of who can be an anti-war leader. >> mr. muhammad ali has just refused to be inducted into the united states armed forces. >> it took an all white jury less than a half hour to find muhammadally guilty of all specifications and charges.

>> you my person when i want justice. you won't even stand up for me in america for my religious beliefs and you want me to go somewhere and fight but you won't even stand up for me. >> in 1967 ali was stripped of his title. he lived in exile until 1970 giving up three years in the prime of his career. bill siegel's new documentary, the trials of muhammadal al li' life. it premiers in theaters tomorrow. thanks for being here, bill. >> thanks for having me on. it's great to be here. >> tell me how this went from being a famous athlete and letter and icon to the fight for civil rights. >> cassius clay becomes muhammad ali as far as joining the nation of islam has a complete spiritual political transformation and islam ultimately led him to decide

that he wasn't going to go 10,000 miles away and fight a white man's war or any war for that matter. that cost him dearly in the short term but in the long term i think we the people in this country largely came around to understand and support where he was coming from. at the time he was vilified in many corners. he was always a hero to many, but in, you know, mainstream white america he was a villain. people have forgotten that. >> it's very difficult to think back to that time and how much he was hated in that time and how much he's loved now. i want to dig in deeper to something you talked about. a lot of the the film is about ali's spiritual development talking about a young christian, why is jesus white and then becoming a nation of islam figure. i feel like the cassius clay you're talking about, preparing to fight sunny liston, he became a muslim, nobody knew about it. that had a huge impact on him in the ring, giving him a

confidence, the sense that he was chosen by god and got only knows the sort of genius things that malcolm x did to give him extra confidence. do you think thing helped him i the ring, which was -- listen at that time it was the biggest upset in -- >> odds were 7:1 that he would you say lose, that's huge for a heavyweight fight. i think he had aen to of confidence as cassius clay. no doubt. but certainly, you know, to have the backing of malcolm x and the spiritual wind in your soul and in your sails has to have helped him. initially i wanted to make the film with no boxing at all, but i realized that so many of his fights had an ideological component to it. floyd patterson refusing to call him by his name had to be in there. >> right. right. you talked about how he was really vilified at the time. how did we go from seeing him as -- a very controversial

figure to being sort of universally beloved. the film opens actually with an american journalist calling him a traitor, and then cuts to george w. bush awarding him the presidential medal of freedom. so talk about our transition of a society and how we view him. >> hopefully if the film is doing its job, that's what it's about. once he refuses induction, he doesn't change, so to him being vilified by david suskind to get the medal of freedom from president bush is because we changed. so that's for me is what the film is about, our transformation, and how muhammad ali, being in the cross hairs of the black freedom struggle and the antichef vietnam movement, not because he was a professional activist. he does not insert himself to be an anti-war leader. that role was really thrust upon him, you know, and stuck to his principles, made a moral stand. he assumed he was going to

prison. that's a real hard thing for people to remember now. had he was sentenced to five years in prison, that's what he thought was going to happen. and, you know, it takes -- took i believe tremendous, incredible courage, hopefully on an inspiring level to young people now, discovering themselves not world we live in, faced with many of the same issues ali was confronted with then, to they about, what do i want to stand on? who am i in the world? what responsibility do i have? >> interesting that you've got a lot of mr. farrakhan in the film, key figure in the '60s. quickly how hard was it to get that interview? >> one of the ways i wanted to distinguish this film from all the other ali films that are out there, one was to focus on his life outside the ring, but only to have interviewees that were there, a small number of principal eyewitnesses and minister louis farrakhan is the

most -- the best person to speak now to ali's affiliation to islam. it took me more than a year and a day -- i say that because i was trying -- ultimately khalila, ali's wife at the time, led me to minister farrakhan. >> thank you for being here. stick around. up next we have chris hays biking, mika running, you know hose the nbc hosts get where they need to go. where will abby's road take us? you're find out, next. tiny changes in the brain. little things anyone can do. it steals your memories. your independence. ensures support, a breakthrough. and sooner than you'd like. sooner than you'd think. you die from alzheimer's disease. we cure alzheimer's disease. every little click, call or donation adds up to something big.

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♪ i want to be a part of it

♪ new york ♪ new york the city that never sleeps, times square, broadway, crazy taxi drivers, central park, and even the infamous cronut. even abby's road has taken one out for a spin. there are about 6,000 bikes around the city located at 300 docking stations ready for you to ride anytime anywhere. financially friendly and you don't have to worry about your bike getting stolen. perfect for the quick trip across tone for even though just wanting a bit of exercise. cities like chicago, d.c. and denver have had similar programs, but i was the first to say i was pretty skeptical when the program was first announced almost three months ago, adding thousands of beginning bikers to the already terrible traffic? i definitely wasn't the only skeptic. >> they're taking away from valuable parking spots. >> at least three, four other cars could be here.

>> the bikes take up more room than the hondas. >> i might be a potential accident. as the bike's coming out. >> let's be honest. you're a potential accident no matter what you're doing. >> so far, though, i have been proven wrong. sure there are the occasional crazy people that look like they're about to topple over at any minute and the bikers who insist on riding in the opposite direction of traffic, but overall it's enormously successful. riders have traveled more than 4 millions miles, more than 2 millions trips. to put that in perspective, more than 40,000 trips taken. even crazier, riding that many miles is equal to the calories in 1.6 million hot dogs, what is better than eating a hot dog without feeling any guilt. we are going to go to a place a little more philosophical, because of this youtube video. take a look. >> you've got it. you've got it. great work. at this point your heart rate

should be elevated. >> this is all about core tightness. >> though they can't afford to take the bikes out of the docking station, that is a group of new york homeless taking free cycling classes. it not only makes expensive cycling classes look like a total rip-off. it reminds me of something that none of us speak enough by. each time i jump on one of the bikes i try to imagine the story of the person that rode the bike before me. where did they come from? where were they going? i'll never know, but it certainly acts as a reminder, even though we are the most diverse country in the world, there is a commonalty that binds us all together as americans. meaning regardless of race, religion or political persuasion, we can all identify with the shared values of freedom, personal responsibility, family, unwavering optimist, and of course opportunity. whether it's making a better life for your family, reaching higher to achieve our own version of the american dream or just