As a parent, I don't know how old your daughters are, but as a parent, what do you do with phones? Do you say no phone until this age or what? And I'm sure this is a difficult one. But what is that like for you? What decisions have you and your wife made? Yeah, we've been, I mean, when you have a four and a six year old, really you're only just, you're making really decisions about whether you let them watch shows or not. I suppose there's some families that are doing, letting them do interactive things like that. But we're basically at that stage where like, do you let them watch Mr. Roger replays? Or do you let them do that? And we do it very sparingly, mainly because we've done trial and error.  And when they don't, they're really pleasant. And they're more creative and they have longer attention spans. So that's just, that's just been our experience. When they get older, you know, there's a model called wait till eight. That basically is a framework that parents at the same where their kids are in school can say, hey, first grade parents, do you all want to sign this pledge that says, we're going to wait till eighth grade or when the kid is 13 or 14 to give him a smart phone and let them sign up for social media. Because if we can all band together and agree to that, we're probably going to be making a pretty amazing choice on their behalf. And so I would like to try to do that with each of my daughter's classes. And then I think the final thing that I think parents get wrong on this issue is that whenever they complain to me about how much their kids use their phones, they don't want to talk about how much they use their phones. They don't want to look at their own usage. And modeling is everything in my view. I have this funny stat that, you know, if you ask parents, 80% of parents think wearing a helmet when you ride a bike is critical. But only 25% actually do it themselves. And so only 40% of kids wear helmets on bikes. Conversely, you look at seatbelts. You know, almost 100% of people think seatbelts are important adults wear them and kids wear them. We're sort of all in alignment on that. Right. I think with smartphone usage, if your family wants to change, you've got to change as a unit. And you know, I've talked to doctors who treat families where the kids are diabetic. And the only way that you can sustainably really get your kid in that circumstance to stop eating, to change their lifestyle in terms of how they eat is the whole family has to change. Right. It just does not work when they don't. So I think parents who are really serious about this have to have a reckoning with their own usage. And a lot don't want to do that. Yeah. Which to me underscores how serious the problem is. Yeah, it's super valid. Addiction. Guess what's one of the fundamental issues is an addiction, denial. Hey, everyone, thanks for checking out that clip. If you enjoyed it, be sure to hit the like button down below. And if you're interested in hearing the full episode, it's out right now on our YouTube channel. We've had a lot of great guests come on this show before and we've got a lot of great guests coming up in the future. So hit subscribe so that you don't miss a single episode. And one final note, we're always looking for new ideas and new companies feature on the show. So if you know of someone or know of a company, write us a comment down below letting us know who they are and what they do. We'd be happy to have them on the show. Until then, I'll just be here waiting for your comments. So, see you later.


Live from San Francisco, it's The Q. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with The Q. We're on the ground at Pure 48 in San Francisco, California at the top coder. Open. Open. 14. The 14th event. And we're here because really it's about the girls in STEM in high school. I'm really happy to be joined by the managing director, the brain child, the girl that put it together. Awesome. Mary Naruse, whose real job is VP of outreach to your coders who are here coding, but really took it upon yourself to introduce this new program. So talk a little bit about how you got the idea, how it came about, how you're able to execute it. Absolutely. I am a mom of two daughters. I have a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old. And in addition to that, I'm a woman in technology. I have been in the field for the past 20 years. I have been a programmer. I've done it all. You name it, I've done it. And when I had this opportunity to go ahead and really speak about what it takes, why do we need girls in STEM, much like that passion about what I want to tell my girls to do and be, I am the role model for them. I was looking for a way to go ahead and bring their own models in and bring these high school girls who may not have their own models to feel as passionate and see that technology is an option for them. And it's a lucrative business. We need them and they need this kind of a career path to be able to be successful. So all of that combined together is really what I saw. This was a perfect venue for me to go ahead and have our first inaugural girls in STEM program. Right. So a little bit about the numbers. How many high schools do you have? How many girls? I noticed you have like a Girl Scout troop. You have a really good variety. Yes. As a matter of fact, we have 11 high schools and a Girl Scout troop that has been part of this. 200 girls. And we actually had a waiting list. So we had to ask folks to accept no more people coming in primarily because we didn't know whether we had enough staff to support the girls. But there was a lot of interest. We've had folks driving from far away distances. So we're really excited to see this level of enthusiasm on the venue today. Yeah. And you've got Palo Alto High School. So that's good. I have $2 to Palo Alto. So that's good. The girls from Lincoln seem to be the most vocal. I think we have more questions from the girls from Lincoln. Amazing questions. We're amazed by the questions that these girls are asking. To me, it's incredible to see that you normally think high school girls. Oh, they're still figuring it out. They've already figured out. I could have closed my eyes and imagined having professional women sitting in and asking the same kind of questions. Yeah. Well, as I comment on the last week, to me, the best part of the questions was the comfort and kind of the funniness of the question. Like, what do you wear to work question to me really shows that they're comfortable and they're curious. So that's a real question. That's not a complete BS question that somebody told them to ask. Yeah. One of the things that we really wanted to do with this panel was I was looking for women who are relatable. We have a lot of famous, very successful women in technology and they are great. But I was looking for more relatable females who could strike that balance with the audience so that the audience sitting in there could imagine, oh, she's really cool. She's funny, but yet smart. I want to be her. Right, right. And as we were talking all fair from Grace Hopper's celebration of computing, Maria Clave was very adamant in that the fact that men, boys, Mark Zuckerberg is not a great role model for girls. He's not a great guy and he hasn't built a great company, but girls are looking for women.  Exactly. That's exactly the case. I think there's only very few women who get to be like a show Sandberg and that's amazing. I mean, one more of them. But at the same time, you can be a software engineer and be highly successful and passionate in what we do. I mean, we want to make it as, in a way, we want to let the students feel that it could be them. They don't have to be a Cheryl Sandberg to be successful. You could be a software engineer, just like Jefferina. Right, right. And equally feel that passion. And this is just the beginning of what you can, in fact, achieve. Right. And I think the other one that came up at the end was the car question, right? Yes. The fact that that gal had never really equated cars with technology when, in fact, you know, we do a lot of tech shows. Cars are basically rolling tech platforms with more software than there is anything else in a car. So the opportunity to tell them that, yes, you can get involved in cars. In fact, one of the panelists, I think, said she interned at GM, so a terrific opportunity. So where do you take it from here? Great inaugural thing, over-subscribed, huge demand.  There aren't enough engineers to fill the jobs. So it seems like a no-brainer to get the girls going this way. Absolutely. Much like our CIO, Glenn Weinstein, spoke, I am responsible for a lot of the hirings at Iperio. And to me, this is just the beginning of what we at Iperio will continue to do. Not only we need more women in our own workforce, I think this is an area that we can certainly give back to the community. Iperio does a lot of community work. Girls in STEM is one of those initiatives that we've taken on. Given the response that we've had and given the passion that's there across, you see a lot of Iperians here, I feel that the next event, the next top quarter open, expect to see more people, more tracks, and I hope we can even do more than one event throughout the year. That's awesome. So if people want to get involved, they want to contribute, they want to help, what should they do? Well, join the local organizations that are out there. There are many of them. As a matter of fact, I belong to a women in technology group in a DC area. I mentor girls in technology groups. There's code.org, girls can code, black girl code. It's amazing. Just all you need to do is just go ahead and Google girls and coding. And all these groups are locally situated. They have hackathons, they have meetups. Put your name out there.  And you will find that everyone that you meet are as cool and interesting, as passionate as you are, and hopefully that will lead to a technology career. Well, Marion, thank you very much for having us. Congratulations on your first event. Huge success. Really supporting girls who code, high school girls in STEM, trying to keep them on track, showing there's a lot of great opportunities for a career path going forward. So I'm Jeff Frick. We're on the ground. Pier 48 at the top Coder Open 2014. You're watching theCUBE.


roll call. Commissioner Hart, Jones, Clayunas, Samet, here. Let's read here. We'll call the meeting to order and pledge allegiance. Pledge allegiance to the pride of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. I would need approval of the minutes for November 16th meeting. Is there any discussion? All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. Go into items for discussion of possible action. 3.1 fire department letter of retirement. Assistant Chief Butler. Yep. Okay. So this will be effective January 4th provided everything goes as planned. So he put in his notice and really that's the letters attached. It was a very nice letter. He sent out an email to the departments as well and to some of the city members. So very nice. Any questions or discussion? I just want to thank Assistant Chief Butler for all his service in many ways to the past years.  And I think we need to acknowledge his special role there. So thanks to him and all the best in his future. Thank you, Gene. I just wanted to echo what Gene said and also ask Chief, how long has he been with the department? So I believe he said about 28 years. And yeah, thank you. I'll make sure I pass that on to him as well because he has done a phenomenal job in his role as EMS and emergency management. So I will make sure I pass that on. So thank you. Thank you. Say nothing else. We'll move on. Sheboygan fire department update for the lieutenant promotional list. We're just asking. I think actually it has been approved, but we had not formally came come to you earlier this spring. We had run a promotional test had only one person passed the test and they were promoted and we had two vacancies. We waited several months. We ran another test. Again, we had a single candidate. We came to you for approval, which was approved. And at that point we were trying to get everything moving along quickly. I had not had an opportunity, which is normal practice for us to review the exams with each candidate, whether they passed or failed. After I went through the exams with the remaining candidates, we had found a couple questions that were that we just felt instead of arguing over them, we would toss them out, remove them from the process. And when we recalculated the scores based on that smaller number of questions and points that ended up bringing one candidate up into the pass range. So his name is Alex Ebert and we asked for your approval for him to be placed on the list. He's our single remaining candidate or person on the promotional list for lieutenant. I would need a motion to approve that. I moved to approve Alex Ebert to a lieutenant position. Candidate list for lieutenant. Any discussion? Everybody understand what happened? It was just some mathematical thing that he didn't have the scores, but then when they redid it, he did have it. So to be fair, they called me and they said, hey, we want to have the scores. And I said, go ahead, but bring it to the commission for approval. So understanding is just math? Once we review it, the questions change each time. And in this case, we went through the questions and they were questioning what the potential answers were. And as we went back and forth, while we didn't think we were wrong, it wasn't worth, we could see the confusion or the question that they had. So you know what, let's just remove the question from the process. So all the candidates, we recalculated their scores based on that new number, which ends up changing, affected everybody's score a little bit. That one individual that actually bought him past the line necessary to pass. So it wasn't special consideration? No, that number, those questions were thrown out. We applied that same thing to everybody. I'm fine. I'm ready for the vote. If nothing else, no more discussion. All in favor signify with saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. Review and approve updated job description for the position of police chief. Now that's what you just gave us, right Chris? It is. So we're being requested to update all the job descriptions in the city. These chiefs hasn't been updated since 2014. Primarily what they're doing is moving it to a different format. So I provided the last one that was run by you in probably late 2013. I've moved it into the new format, updated it a little bit and brought it to you so that you would have a chance to review it and approve it before I send it to HR. And they finalize it. I didn't change much in it, some wording in some of the different areas under some of the areas that you would have concerns in the past under education and experience. I kept it the way that it was with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree preferred. In the past it said at least six years experience. And it suggested a sergeant's position. So I took that out because it said management command level position and then it said sergeant in parentheses. In my view a sergeant is not a command level position in the police department. And I don't see any times when you as a board would be considering somebody in the city of 20,000 who's a sergeant as being prepared to do this job. It really needs to be command level experience at a similar size city. So somebody who's a sergeant in this department in my opinion would struggle if you tried to put them in that position. And I'm not telling you that there's not some person that might be able to do it. Pretty rare though. And a lot of that really just comes down. They might have the talent to be able to do it, but just that lack of experience and having to make those jumps in those middle management positions. You really have that opportunity to experience things and start to see things from a broader perspective. And so without that experience, the learning curve would be pretty significant, I believe. So I just updated that a little bit. I also added advanced training in advanced training school in there. Obviously that's not something that's necessary, but many of the candidates might bring some of that experience with them. And if they have that, that would be a plus. And so I put some of the programs in there. There's a variety of other programs. We send all our middle managers to either the Southern Police Institute, which is run through the University of Louisville. And that's a 12 week program. If they go down there with a bachelor's degree, it's right through the university. And it's a graduate, can be a graduate level program. So they can earn half of a master's degree by going through that program. And then they have the opportunity to complete that master's degree on their own online. So Steve Cobb has gone to the Southern Police Institute. Kurt Brasser, Scott Middlestatt before he left. Kurt Semple and Joel Kozinski, all of them have gone to that. The FBI National Academy is another one. It's a 12 week program run at the FBI Academy in Quantico. It's for middle managers of large departments or chiefs of very small departments. I went there in 2005. Jim Visor has been there and Doug Tennison has been there. It's also affiliated with the University of Virginia, so the same kind of thing can happen. I got a graduate certificate for the classes that I took through the University of Virginia while I was there. So you can get credit that way. There's a couple other shorter programs that are significant programs. But sometimes different qualifications. So the FBI offers another program. But you have to be a chief in a mid-sized city to be able to go to that program. It's a two week program. PERF is the police executive research forum. They offer the senior management institute for police. And they run a three week program through Boston University and Harvard. I went to that in like 2009. It's a case study program. So they have professors from Harvard that teach in the graduate and undergraduate programs there. And they do case studies on modern policing and management. It's really fascinating and it's a great experience to learn from. So there are those programs and they will again help broaden a candidate's perspective. And maybe even just as important is the networking that's built up through those. So when I went through SMIP, there was about 50 other either chiefs or senior leaders throughout the country that attended that with me. And so I got to know the future chief of Atlanta, the future chief of our superintendent of Chicago. Just really a lot of good connections at the FBI. There's 250 people from both the United States and around the world. So you're developing really a worldwide network through that and through Southern Police Institute. It's the same thing somewhere between 30 and 50 students from around the country. So having those chances to network and when you run into problems to reach out to people in other cities across the country and share that what's going on and how they're responding to things is really a key to leadership. So I think that's important. And so that's pretty much the major things that I've updated to it. I just wanted to make sure I brought it to you and gave you guys a chance to look it over and provide any input that you want before I send it on to HR because of some of the issues in the past that have happened between the commission and the council with developing it. What's the timeline? That's really up to you. You could approve it tonight if you want to look at it and put it back on the agenda for the next meeting or if however you want to do it.  I see nothing changed as far as the city with the position requirements and the schooling and stuff, right? Everything stayed the same. Right. The only other thing that I updated now that you mentioned that is where it talks about certifiability in there. I changed that from six months to a year. So it says current certification for a Wisconsin police officer or the ability to obtain certification within one year of employment. And the reason I did that is because the law enforcement standards board is the board that certifies officers in the state and what their requirement is a year. So if Eric was the police chief coming here, he would have a year to take that reciprocity exam and pass it. So I changed that from six months to a year just so it's consistent. Okay. What's the board's pleasure? Do you want to spend time to look at it or I think he's addressed everything he's touched? Are you comfortable acting on it today or do you want to wait? I'm fine with it. I trust the chief knows his job. And I just want to make a comment on the experience and training and things. I think that is so important right now looking at police work and how we have to really look at how our police forces are trained and what's the attitude of the leadership in the police department and what has to be enlightened and not regressive. I appreciate those specific mentions of certain institutes that we can't just say, you know, I did this or I did that, but we want certain kinds of training so that people are on the right page in terms of leadership for our force. And I think for the most part the issues between the council and the commission have come back in those educational requirements in the past where the council wanted to push to mandate a graduate degree where the commission is in favor or prefers to have a graduate degree but wants to have the leeway that if they get the right candidate who doesn't have a graduate degree but has significant experience and can demonstrate that they have the qualities that they're looking for that you want to be able to exercise your right to hire that person. And so I left that and I agree with that. I think there are going to be some people that don't have that graduate degree although it's starting to become pretty rare I think. So if you look at the candidates that you interviewed in spring, at least one of the three captains in our department has a graduate degree and I think every lieutenant does. So it's really up to you though. You're in charge. Andy? Chief, I think you just answered my question. My question was within the current department and your top command staff, do they all meet these minimum requirements? So we could consider almost all of them for internal candidates? Yep. And then secondly, one of the minimums is possession of a valid Wisconsin motor vehicle driver's license? Correct. Would an out of state candidate have that? They would have the opportunity to obtain one. So I wonder do we need to add like you did or the ability to obtain to the end of that? You could but I think that you can ask Eric. I think the timeline is to be able to switch is so fast that once they establish residency here. But I could do that. I could put it or equivalent if you want it. I think what you're really looking for though is once they move here that they have the ability to drive to get a Wisconsin driver's license. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I was going to go. Sorry, go ahead Larry. No, Jerry, I'll go in after you. Thank you. Please continue. Okay. Yeah, I was just going to put forth the motion to improvements presented. Well, Larry, let us hear what you got to say prior to Jerry's motion. Certainly, I'm going to abstain obviously because I can't vote on something I don't have in front of me, although I certainly respect and trust the chief and my other four peers on the commission. So I don't think that'll be a problem, but I do have a question for the chief and it's more just of informational chief do national politics influence the training that occurs in these many fines educational opportunities you talked about. In other words, there's an administration in the White House dictate how how officers might be trained based on the philosophy of the department, ongoing Department of Justice under that administration or is it pretty consistent. And particularly, I'm using an example of de escalation techniques, for example. First, any thoughts on that please. For the most part, I would say no it doesn't and the reason that I would say that is because the only programs that that really would be influenced by the Department of Justice for for the most part would be the FBI programs. But but just by the very nature of the type of agency that the FBI is. Most of the classes that that they're going to be presenting in their programs are more leadership classes and then investigate investigation type of classes. And then if you go to the to the other programs. The University of Louisville is going to is just going to be a progressive eight university that does a lot of research in in the area of policing so they're helping to develop some of the the research base that forms policy. Purse programs Purse is is again the police executive research forum so it's led by and made up of police chiefs. So some of the things we've implemented I can't as part of our our training program and so that stands for integrated. Now I won't be able to think of it integrated communication and tactics. And so that's a de escalation course that that we've integrated into our defense and arrest tactics. And that was developed by the police executive research forum. And then once they developed it we sent three of our people to a train a trainer session to learn the curriculum and then bring that curriculum back and integrate it in into our programs. So I think most of those programs especially SMIP and the Southern Police Institute would really be some of the progressive things that are that are sharing much of what's being learned through research. So that's where some of these best practices are really coming out of so be able to be connected to them. Really I think gives agencies kind of a like up. All right. Thank you very much for answering my question. Otherwise, as I said, I'll abstain from the vote. Thank you. Jerry. Sorry, and I was unaware and Larry did not have a copy of this. So if we wanted to hold that I'd be in favor of withdraw the motion. But at this point I'd still say we should move forward and I'd like to make a motion to approve as presented. We have a motion to approve it. We have a second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor signify with saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. All right, we'll move on to 3.4. The approval for promotions of the Sheboygan Police Department to the rank of Sergeant. Okay, so I provided you with two letters that pretty much just lay everything out. What I'm doing is nominating two people today for your approval to promote to the rank of sergeant. And so I'm asking you to approve those promotions, but I don't anticipate them taking place until February. And so what we have going on is we have one sergeant's vacancy that was created in June when Ryan Schmidt resigned to go work for Acuity. And because of our current state of manpower with the number of people that we had in training, I decided not to fill that position at that point, because I believed essentially what we would be doing is taking somebody from the police officer position and moving them up to sergeant, which would be good for our supervisory ranks. But when we're already short of bodies on the street, it still is my belief that we're best just holding the vacancy at the sergeant position until we got those people through some training so we would have less impact on our response to calls for service. So there's already that one vacancy. The second vacancy I'm anticipating, and we've talked about it a little bit in the past as part of our succession planning, but Kurt Brasser has announced that he's retiring in the effect of January 29th. And so he's a captain, so by him retiring, it's going to cascade and open up all kinds of positions. We've tried to get ahead of the curve and run these tests to identify who to promote and seek approval for promotion before we get there so that we can put it all together and promote everybody at one time. So for the vacant position, well, I'll tell you, so we ran a process like we always do. The process occurred between October 6th and November 1st, and it consisted of an internal staff evaluation and assessment exercise consisting of an outside oral board, a written paper, and an in-basket exercise. There were three police officers that participated in that process, and the two that I'm nominating to you are Officer John Ropnick and Officer Joel Hendricks. So the second vacancy would come when Kurt retires, and my plan at this point would be in the first two weeks of February to promote them both. Larry, since you're not here, John Ropnick was hired in April of 1993. He works in the patrol division. In the past, he was a leader for the Shoeigen County Dive Team for over 10 years. During that time, he was responsible for the safety of dive team members, and he developed and maintained the training program and performance standards for the team. More recently, he has assisted in tracts training. So tracts is the software that we use to write traffic citations and move all the data through to the state. So John has stepped up and helped lead and train the use of the tracts system. He's also one of our key leaders of our Spillman software, which is our records management. So there's always updates and things going on with that software. So John's one of the subject matter experts and trainers that really models the way and coaches some of our people that are struggling with it to be successful. He, in the past couple of years, he's also assisted with our dementia awareness training for the entire department. And most recently, he volunteered to be a member of the field force, the county regional field force team. So they're the ones who went to training for crowd management. And then last year, we had John and two other of the officers actually train the whole department to get them back up to speed as part of our insurface. John also assumed leadership for the Coffee with a Cop program and helped plan that the last two years. And then most recently, he served for the last two years as a police training officer. So he's one of the guys that are taking our new officers and spending time with them and helping to develop them into being successful officers. And then Joel Hendricks has been with the department for 17 years. He has a bachelor's degree from Marion University. Again, he's a police training officer prior to that. He was a field training officer, so he's been training officers since 2012 for us. For the last 10 years, he's been an evidence technician. He's on our emergency response team. And he's a firearms instructor, I believe. So both of them have a background in training our officers and both really have significant experience to become supervisors, one 19 years and one 17 years. So I would say it warms my heart, but there's better words to say it. To see two guys that have spent significant time working day shift, being willing to go back to third shift and take on the responsibility of being leaders in the department. And so that's exciting, might be a better word. I'd like to make a motion to approve the promotion of Officer John Rupnik and Officer Joel Hendricks to the rank of police sergeant. We got a motion and a second. Is there any discussion? I'm just impressed with the training listing that both of these men have. It's very encouraging when people do this stuff. You know, they do it on their own time with the expense of maybe, you know, putting other things aside for the sake of it for us. So very impressive. Any more discussion? If seeing none, Larry. I'm waiting for the vote. Thank you. All right. Seeing there's no more discussion, all in favor signify with saying aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion carried. We'll move on to 3.4. Approval for promotions in the civilian police department on the rank. No, I'm sorry, 3.5. Promotions to the rank of lieutenant. So again, you have a letter from me nominating Joel Kaczynski. Sergeant Joel Kaczynski to be promoted to the rank of police lieutenant in February of 2021. The position was posted between October 28th and November 10th. There were nine potential candidates and Joel's the only one that applied. I did not run a process because we had recently run a process in November of 2019 when we promoted Mike Stelter to lieutenant. And at that time I talked to you about how close I thought they were and really how well both of them did. I think the reason that only Joel applied is because everybody else understands that or maybe that's the wrong word. I think a lot of people believe they can't compete with him at this particular time would probably be the best way to say it. And that's saying a lot because we have some, I think some really outstanding people that have potential to do this. And they're being encouraged to step up in the future. But just off the top of my head, Sarah Blodgett is an outstanding sergeant that really has a lot of talent and has a bright future ahead of her. Andy Cunninghur really has a bright future in front of him. I think I'll say too, I don't want to just say that they're afraid to compete with Joel because that's not what I'm saying. But part of it I think is because of the path that we've taken in the last 10 years to try to move people around and broaden their experience and give them experience in all different areas of the department. They're doing that and they're seeing the benefits of it and enjoying their time in the different places. And so I know Sarah's in the MAG unit and has been really growing while she's there. I think she understands that and values it and figures the time she's putting in there is really going to help her in the future. So there's some of those things going on. Hey, Chief, I have one question. Maybe you can't answer that, but like you said, of the nine eligible candidates, only one, why is that? You see that so much in the city and departments. People don't want to get promoted. For us, I think it's really rare. We always get multiple candidates, but I think it is we ran a process in November of 2019 for a lieutenant. And we had two really good candidates. Mike and Joel really had stepped up and had leadership roles in a lot of different areas of the department. And so if you look at Joel's resume, so I talked about it. Joel went to SPI and so part of that is a sacrifice. So Joel went to school for 12 weeks in Louisville. He left his family and went down there and earned 15 graduate credits. So he's not out party and he's writing 20 and 30 page papers doing research and all of that. So that's a big sacrifice. And Steve could talk to you about the program because Steve's the first one that I sent to the program in 2011 or 2012. And I think kind of blown away about all of the things that they learn in the program. And then what, yeah, I could talk about this forever, but watching them bring that back and teach it to our department and seeing how it affects our department in comparison to other departments. And then even when we send people back. So every one of the candidates that we have sent there has been a dean scholar, which means they've graduated in the top like 3% of the class. Kurt Sembo was a class president. I don't know what Joel was like the secretary or something, why he was down there. So they all come back with accolades. I didn't bring all Joel's letters of reference, but Joel has about seven letters of reference in his package. One of them is from the head of the program at SBI that talked about the impact that he had on the class, why he was there and the influence that he had in really selling some of these best practices to the other students and helping the professors. Really teach and kind of cement some of these things based on the stories that he had from some of the things that we did. And so mirroring that up. So Joel has been continuing to work on his master's degree while he's come back. And so I think in the summer is when he's supposed to graduate. Like Kurt Sembo, he'll put things together. So this past in service that we just did in October, he put together a two hour class on procedural justice and talked about procedural justice to everybody in the department and got them to understand that letting people have a voice and say their piece and following the process really makes a difference in how we're viewed and how people accept the actions that we take. So just really important things that they do that way. Joel has been in charge of the drug court program. So he's represented the department in the drug court program and has really helped me sell it to the officers. And so he's recognized for that. Yeah, just so many things. They're seen really as leaders in the department. And because of that, people don't want to do all kinds of work and then go through a process that they believe that they're not going to come out on the top of is what I would say. Okay. Anybody else? Any questions? Larry? Move to approve. I'm good. Thank you. Yeah. I moved to approve the promotion. Second. Sergeant Kosinski to the lieutenant. All right. We got a second to the motion. Any discussion? Say none. All in favor signify with saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion carried. Now I need a motion to go into closed session. Andy? I move that we go into closed session. We have a second. Second. Roll call. Hot. Aye. Jones. Aye. Clayunas. Aye. Salmon. Aye. Retrie. Aye. We are now in open, going in closed session. All right. We're almost done here. Yeah. All right. We're back in open session. First action. We need action to the fire department eligibility list. I would like to make a motion to extend the current fire department eligibility list until February 28th. Any discussion? All in favor signify with saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion carried. And as far as the action related to police department candidate interview, we are going to delay making any recommendations until the meeting on the 21st. I believe it was there. Anybody got any comments? I make a motion to adjourn. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Opposed? Motion carried. We are adjourned. Thank you.


This is New Jersey tonight and the gift of life is what a 15-year-old boy from wall township has been able to give to dozens in need of organ donation. And to say thank you, Luke Bautista will be honored at the Rose Bowl Parade in California in a very special manner. News 12 New Jersey's Chris Keating is here to tell us how. Chris? Roxanne, Luke Bautista was able to donate five organs and help 100 other people in his death through tissue donation. To say thank you, his likeness will be included in a very special float in the Rose Parade on New Year's Day. Luke Bautista is among 44 organ donors who will be honored with a floor graph on a float at the Rose Parade. It's his likeness made up of flowers and other natural materials and it was unveiled to family tonight by two of Bautista's organ recipients. The floor graph will be placed on a float that promotes organ donation. One of his recipients is Andre Thomas. It was six years I was waiting for this kidney transplant. 31-year-old father of three Thomas has Bautista's kidney. Before receiving it he was on dialysis three times a week and had already been alive thanks to a liver transplant. My liver transplant was saving my life and my rebirth was Luke's kidney so I feel like I'm gonna know myself again. There were some 200 people on hand for this ceremony inside Jersey Shore Medical Center to honor Bautista's gift. Among them his parents and brother. It helps to know that Luke has such a greater purpose in his life. I really believe that he was you know meant to fly high and he's doing exactly that. Chris Bautista is proud to say his son was able to donate a heart, kidneys, liver and pancreas following his untimely death. It's been amazing to see how many people that my son influenced during his life and then you know 15 short years but now to see that he's still able to do that now is just amazing. Now this year's float at the parade is called the gift of time. Meanwhile the New Jersey sharing network says that in 2016 people who agreed to donate saved 613 lives. Chris Keating, News 12, New Jersey.


Things you need to know before using your non-stick pan. A new study found that thousands to millions of tiny plastic particles come off your teflon coated pans while you cook, going straight to your food and causing major concern for your health. While these pans do make life easier in the kitchen, one small crack can release about 9,000 plastic particles. Stay away from metal utensils that will scratch your pan. Avoid high heat. It can actually peel the coating off. Don't use acidic ingredients like tomatoes and limes. It can cause the coating to break down. And avoid the dishwasher. Even if it's dishwasher is safe, the high heat and water pressure can cause the coating to flake or go the stainless steel and cast iron route and save yourself the trouble.


The U.S. Army Research Laboratory is looking for summer interns on the West Coast. I'm Cindy Bedell and I'm the regional lead at the Army Research Lab West in Playa Vista, California. The 2017 Institute for Creative Technology Summer Research Program offers a lot of benefits. A one year in West LA, which is a great place to spend the summer. But there are tremendous resources between USC, UCLA, ARL West and the Institute for Creative Technologies to try different experimental techniques, to work with people in other disciplines and to do so in a very dynamic intellectual environment. So who can apply? So we want to attract students from the universities in California, but it is open to any student throughout the country. We had students from the East Coast. We had students from Texas. We had students from California. So last summer, even though the program was very short notice, we had students from all over the country. We had three third grade Marshall students last summer, as well as our other interns that were hired through the ICT. It's open to anyone who qualifies our screening. What's ARL West? So ARL West is focused on human information interaction. That is a target area that crosses human sciences, information sciences, computational sciences, and analysis and assessment. As well as maneuver sciences, because this is how we can communicate with autonomous agents, whether they're embodied like a robot or disembodied like a smart algorithm within a network. So the students do need to be in one of the fundamental research areas we're looking at. So that's cognitive science, computational science, computational linguistics, robotics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or information sciences. So it's fairly broad area that will qualify for one of the programs that we're working in. But they have to be ready to work both independently on their piece of the project and collaboratively with other students and their mentors. And they have to be willing to work on an interdisciplinary problem, because these are problems at the cross sections of multiple disciplines. Sounds good. What do I have to do? The Institute for Creative Technology will hire our summer interns for us. So you have to go to their website and go to the intern link to find the projects. And you'll need a resume and you'll need to be able to say why you are qualified under each of the criterion that's advertised under each position. If you're interested in more than one position, you should apply for each of the positions so you answer the questions under each of the position descriptions. There can be more than one person hired under each position, so don't hesitate to apply to as many as you feel qualified for. The short timeline, the applications have to be in by Sunday, February 5th. And the packets will be evaluated throughout the rest of February and March and offers will be made in late March or during April. February 5th is the deadline for applying. So last year was a pioneering adventure, because I officially became the regional lead on 29 May and our first interns arrived on 2 June. We had only four permanent party researchers on 2 June, but we received 17 interns. What we did instead of having on-site researchers, we had mentors come from ARL East and actually also from White Sands Missile Range to ARL West to meet the students to organize the collective research and mentor them for a couple of weeks and then go back to their normal duty stations and then keep up in touch with the students via Skype or FaceTime. The 2017 ICT Summer Research Program application deadline is February 5th. Apply now!


South Africa is from the industry point of view. Same as in 1993, there's just more of it. The great economist Nobel Prize winning economist, Bob Solo, once said, economists use the word structure to indicate they're talking about something deep, but they're not quite sure what it is. We want to be a bit more precise about this, and we focus much more on structure as the technical relations between industries and how those have developed, rather than simply the shares of industries in production, which is the way it's normally looked at. There are two key things in economic development. One is shifting resources from less productive into more productive activities, and I think that's crucial and everyone recognizes that. But the second thing is you want those more productive activities to be well linked to the economy, so that any benefits they have spill over into the rest of the economy. So a large part of the structure we were looking at was that those linkages have those changed in ways that make the spillover stronger, and we find that they didn't really change as much as that. I'm a firm believer that we can't explore things until we've described them. It's perhaps an iterative process. We describe a bit and then we try to explore them and we realize we need a deeper description or some other aspects. When we change a policy or when there's a commodity boom, how does that feed into the economy? We know it has some beneficial effect, but which sectors is benefiting, the linkages between those sectors, how do they spread? We spend a lot of time building a consistent dataset so that we know when we're comparing the past with the present, we're comparing like with like. We spend a lot of time in that. So now we've got a dataset which allows us to describe what the changes have been. Now, the next step is not for us. There's a public dataset. It's available through WIDA. We can encourage other people to say, can we find out why these changes have happened? How can we change them? What can policy makers do to get the kinds of changes they want in the economy? And data is not something which falls out of the sky. Data is something that's constructed and it takes hard work to do. And that's what we've been doing.


Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. And joining us today is Matt Ridley. He's a journalist, businessman, and author of the best-selling book, The Rational Optimist, How Prosperity Evolves, which I should point out has a proud place on Libertarianism.org's short list of books you should read to understand libertarianism. He's also the author of the new book, The Evolution of Everything, How New Ideas Emerge. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Thank you for having me on the show. So let's maybe start by talking about the connection between Rational Optimist and this new book. Rational Optimist was a book in which I surprised myself by writing a book about progress and deciding that actually it had been far better than I ever even dreamed, that in my lifetime the average income of the average person on the planet had trebled in real terms. Their lifespan was up by 30% and the amount of child mortality was down by two-thirds. And then on the whole, despite what we all thought and how gloomy we all were about the world, we were healthier, wealthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, more peaceful and more equal than we thought, sorry, than we had been 50 years before. So I cataloged these extraordinary improvements, but I didn't just stop there. I also tried to explain where they'd come from and how they arose. And of course in a word, they came from innovation. They came from innovation in technology, but also innovation in habits, so tools and rules, if you like. And trying to understand why innovation happens to human beings and not to rabbits or to rocks was part of the motivation of that book. And it's one that I carry on in the current book, as it were. And particularly the idea that came out of Rational Optimist was that basically it's about recombining ideas, that you take two ideas, meld them together and make a third idea or rather they meet and mate and have a baby idea, perhaps. And that's where most ideas come from, is the cross-fertilization of thoughts between different people. And that's a sort of equivalent to a biological process called sexual reproduction, which is a key ingredient of evolution. So I then got interested in how evolution is actually a very good description of how society changes, as well as how biology changes. Now for you personally, because I had been familiar with your work with Red Queen and things like this beforehand, when you're doing straight up evolution stuff, when you started doing Rational Optimist, was this, did you surprise what you found surprise you and where you went on this journey to like how big evolution can be from where you started originally? Yes I did. I certainly, you know, a long while ago wouldn't have thought that evolution was an apt way of describing how human society changes because I thought human society changed because clever people told it how to change. It was commanded and controlled, it was top down, it was ordered, it was planned, etc. As I grew up I became less sure of that, shall we say, and I began to notice that actually an awful lot of change in society consisted of emergent, gradual, incremental, unnoticed, unplanned change and that actually all the good things were like that and all the important things were like that too. And sure it was possible to plan something, to command something in the way of change but actually the really interesting things like the change in the birth rate or the change in living standards were not the results of deliberate policy. And then I realised that the Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek view of the human world, that is to say that spontaneous order emerges from the interactions of individuals, is exactly the same point as the Charles Darwin view of the biological world that sophisticated fit between form and function and complex design emerges from an interaction among individual creatures and individual genes without a designer. Now you described the Darwin theory then if we broaden our view of evolution as the special theory of evolution, sort of paralleling relativity and so that there's a general really theory of relative or evolution, sorry. So how does that break down? Yeah, this was an idea that a friend of mine suggested to me when I was preparing the book, Richard Webb, that was I proposing a general theory of evolution as opposed to a special theory of evolution and I like the concept so I've used it in the book. And what I mean by that is that we used to think that evolution, in fact a lot of people still do think that evolution is confined to genetic systems, that you have to have genes in order to be an evolutionary system, that that's the characteristic feature of things with genes and it's also the characteristic feature of evolutionary systems that they have genes. I don't think that's true. I think any information system, because genes are particles of information, any information system is capable of evolutionary change if there is an element of randomness in the way it changes, an element of trial and error if you like, and if there's an element of selection. And clearly both are true of human society, that we try things. We don't come up with a single solution. Different people come up with different solutions and we get the opportunity to pick through the market or through choice or even through democracy. We get the opportunity to pick the ones we like and reject the ones we don't like. And so in that sense, evolution by natural selection is going on among ideas, among thoughts, among habits, among technologies, among morals, among gods, among businesses. Businesses exactly. So there's a lot of unconscious incremental change driven by evolution in human society. Is it fair though to think of like a spectrum of from outright creationism to outright like algorithmic evolution where on the one end, on the biological, we've got, you know, this is random choice, random selection, there's random mutations and they're checked against things in the world as the organism died, as it lived long enough to breed and so on. But cultural evolution seems like a weird halfway point perhaps because it's not entirely random. It does have agency. Like there are intelligent designers making design choices like I am going to try doing this thing instead of what we were doing yesterday. And then there's a selection process but the selection process is also being done by intelligent selectors who are themselves intelligent designers. So does this, does it look just like biological evolution because I can imagine it being weirder? It's certainly true that we are trying to improve the world in a way that Darwinism isn't, I mean biological Darwinism isn't trying. And you know that we can plan something and our plan might be a good plan and it gets selected. So in that sense, there is consciousness, there is purpose, there is aim in the human world. It would be foolish to deny that. What I'm saying is that to a surprising extent, that's a bad description of how we do change the world because yes, people come up with ideas for how to improve it but what really matters is having competition between those ideas and some of them surviving and some of them failing. Let me give you a very nice example that was given to me by Dan Dennett, the evolutionary philosopher and it's a quote from an early 20th century French philosopher by the name of Allah, he went by one name. And he, looking at the designs of boats in the Pacific Islands, he says, he thinks about it and he says, the badly designed one sank and disappeared, the well designed ones were copied. It was the sea that fashioned the boats. Yeah, sure, each person, when he built a new design of boat, was trying to make it a better one but it was the sea that decided whether it was a better design or not. And then some of them come along and say, isn't it amazing that we all only have good boats? There must be some principle of design by this. It's like, no, they're just not here anymore, like an anthropic principle kind of thing. That's right. As Douglas Adams said, the puddle says, isn't it amazing that this whole fits me so well? We see that in, I mean that would seem to explain to some extent the constant culture and arts decline attitude of art and music and whatever else used to be good, so much better way back when and that's largely because right now we're watching that process in action. We're watching the bad novels and the bad novels being written but in the past all we have left from that are the ones that were pretty good. That's a very interesting point and I think that's spot on. In other words, the second rate Victorian novels don't get read so we think, my goodness they were at good novels in Victorian times whereas today we have to labor through some dross in order to find the good ones and the filter of history is one of the reasons I like classical music is because it's been well filtered for me if you like and of course that's partly why we have rose tinted nostalgia about the past is because we've only bothered to remember the good stuff and to preserve the good stuff and we compare it with the present and we think, things went much better in those days. We've left out the bad bits and what I rather like about golden age nostalgia is that if you go back to the golden age what the Greeks described as the golden age because they were already nostalgic for time and you go back to the time of Hesiod, eight centuries before Christ you find that Hesiod was grumbling about how things aren't like what they used to be. Maybe that is something that ties in in some way to something you talk about in the book the sort of bias to purpose and the bias to design which I think that we have when it comes to say creationism and biological evolution especially here in America where creationism is still pretty popular but just in terms of human institutions in general. It's certainly I think true that we have a tendency to look for to think things are more top down than they are. It's a common mistake as it were a reflex we have and it manifests itself in the way we think inanimate objects are vindictive and think thunderstorms are revenge of the gods and that sort of thing. What dandenic calls the intentional stance is a big part of the way we view the world. I wouldn't see it necessarily so much as coming out of that golden age nostalgia thing that we were talking about as coming out of an evolutionary psychology would likely build in a hair trigger for intentionality because if your friend bumps you and you're walking along a narrow path next to a big cliff drop and you almost go over and he says oh sorry that was an accident it probably makes sense to say oh well it was an accident I mean not to say it was an accident but to say hang on a minute you were trying to kill me weren't you? Or to preserve on to err on that side. Or the noise in the bushes is someone coming to get you rather than the wind you had to err on the. That's an even better example. It's actually more plausible. I suppose your friends killing you but perhaps another question that strikes me before we get into some of the details of your chapters is they're called the evolution of education the evolution of money a bunch of these things but does it also maybe require something I think about in libertarianism in general that you have to have some sort of faith in the quality and goodness of people which which in your prior work on evolution you've written about virtue and things like this that you know you might not be full or bottom up explanations if you think that people are just bad because bad people would create evolutionary things too they would create the thunder dome and mad maxed or something like this so you have to actually believe that people are fundamentally good kind of the walkie inverse the Hobbesian paradigm that people are actually pretty good so that was maybe an important part of this that some people who don't believe in bottom up solutions maybe the one reason they don't endorse them. That's a very interesting point and the way in which this argument intersects with the slightly older or parallel argument about the perfect ability of man etc. is I think is in it which is kind of I wrestled with in my book the origins virtue is a really interesting question and you're quite right. The view that people only behave morally because they've been told to by priests or teachers is not really compatible with the view that people should be free to live their lives as they want if you genuinely think that we would all kill each other were it not for government being told as children that that's bad then of course you think that we must have benevolent dictators in charge of the world because the opposite is very dangerous anarchy and I think most people go around with a view that anarchy that lack of rules leads to top down rules like lack of top down rules exactly as opposed to bottom up emergent ones leads to really bad outcomes in which horrible things happen and on the whole the evidence doesn't bear that out I mean the one of the things I like to do is ask people can you name a country which you think has too little government and some people say Haiti Somalia maybe yeah well Haiti is not a good example because actually if you go to Haiti you find it's extremely difficult to start a business because the regulations are so tight even in a sort of badly governed country like that Somalia well actually it's got rather too much government it's just that it's not a monopolistic government it's several different warlords I asked you to me I asked students when I teach these kind of emergent rule things if whether or not before Hammurabi's code if they think that ancient Somalia was just complete chaos with everyone just running around kicking everyone and until he came down and carved this in that's what everyone okay well let's stop well no no one actually believes that exactly we're pretty good at behaving themselves let's talk let's talk about some of these actually Aaron did you have I was wanted to start I mean there's the the paradigmatic case of what we think of as a totally planned going back to the Hobbes and Locke totally planned institution is government you know we we got together and we created this thing in some distant past in order to protect our rights or do whatever and then we kept planning it and kept planning it until we got to today and but you say no like even government is often the product of an evolutionary process how does that work yes government is the emergence of monopoly on violence that that's pretty clear from both myth and history and and also what we see around the world is that the characteristic of a government is that it's managed to monopolize violence and so and therefore doesn't need to use it keeps it in the background and what I think is rather interesting is that you can see this arrangement emerging ab initio from nothing in certain institutions today and the example I give in the book is prison gangs prisons prisoners operate on a sort of you know the various kind of rules emerge among prisoners about what's good and what's bad behavior and it turns out that at a certain level a certain size of prisoners certain turnover of prisoners these rules start to break down and so what happens is that instead you see you see gangs emerging within the prison and the gang says you know we're in charge we decide what happens we punish transgressors and often this is very welcome to the prison authorities because they they find that what's happening is that order is being brought in but some quite powerful gang masters are emerging within the prison who are able to bribe the prison authorities etc so it's very parallel I think to and and but the point is it's not planned you know it it it appeared spontaneously David scarbeck has a very interesting book about this but doesn't that cut against the the general idea that what's unplanned is good and what is planned is bad if I mean if you're example of like look here's an unplanned thing prison gangs that doesn't sound all that encouraging well prison gangs are better than complete anarchy I mean you know complete chaos in prison which is the point there are a response to a much more dangerous and chaotic situation that they are a form of order emerging within within a prison sure these are bad guys we're talking about because they're in prison so you know we're talking about a problem of violence that is being solved now another one of your chapters you talk about the evolution of education which which is one of my favorite subjects it wasn't the case that the before the state came along and said we're going to have schools that there that there were no schools I mean as I would seem people might think but the story the real story is different indeed and and the literacy rates shot up in the 19th century in America but also in Britain and other parts of Europe and indeed in India in places like that long before there was any education public education policy or compulsory education or anything like that why because there's an out there was an once people you know ordinary working people got sufficiently well off that they could afford to worry about these kind of things there was an appetite to to come to arrangements whereby their kids got in got educated and so you see a huge progress evolutionary progress you know emergence of education systems and then government comes along and says look it's disgraceful that we haven't got enough education we're going to impose a system from top down and it's it's not always clear that that was an improvement in fact it seems in many cases to have slowed down the evolution of education sure it's improved education in the 20th century and so on but it's bound to because the resources were much more available the wealth of the society was much greater it would also have improved under a much more free system so you're also seeing that now coming back to haunt the the public sector education because of the ways in which people can can use new technology to develop new forms of education and I think self-organized learning is an example of that so go to Mitra's experiments showing that kids with computers attached to the internet as long as they're working in groups and as long as they're given certain well-posed questions by teachers will teach themselves surprisingly well and I think that's you know that some reminder that that that there are new forms of education that are much more bottom up that are going to emerge and of course the Kahn Academy and things like that in terms of using the internet to teach people you know the idea that that you should have a medieval structure well actually it's not a medieval it's an 18th century Prussian structure where you have one guy standing at the front of the class and we're all sitting at desks you know that's not the only way to learn it's just I hope not there has to be something different out there exactly that seems to raise it another way of arguing that the other side of coming at the problem with the planned systems is so we can you know one hand say like look if we begin with emergent processes then we've got this selection process going on and it's going to weed out the things that don't work and the things that will work and that was better than hoping that one guy or one group of experts can get us to the right thing but then on the flip side and we can see this with public education is even if the planners let's say get it right at the time like they come up with sitting in you know early 20th century we're going to come up with a system of education that will work for all Americans the world changes a lot and the problem with these planned things is the planners like to keep them the way they are and we tend to be stuck with them well I think what that's teaching you is that monopoly is very bad at change and that's because change comes from trial and error in an evolutionary system and so letting a thousand flowers bloom and seeing which one is best adapted to the new technology the new situation the new background is the best way of making sure that you don't get stuck in a rut and do the same thing over and over again or maybe the way of talking about it could be that or another way of talking about it could be that the government if you think about it as an ecosystem and you and you saw something in the ecosystem an animal with an adaptation that seemed to be counterproductive or made no sense you'd wonder what would like a peacocks tail for example you'd wonder what was the thing that allowed it to exist and the government has this unique adaptation called the ability to use force which is the ability that which is why it can have things continue to exist that no one even wants perhaps or a prussian model of education 150 years after it's out of date because it has its own adaptation to thrive in this world which is the ability to use force in this in this specific way well back to the point about what government is it's a it's a monopoly on force as as we said and the the keyword there is monopoly I think you know that that it only government only pacifies a country because it's a monopoly I mean if you had two rival monopolies on force within a country by definition you've got a civil war so so in it has to solve that problem government has to be on monopoly but that produces another problem which is that it can't evolve it can't change fast enough it it's not responsive enough to new environments and it doesn't experiment enough it it doesn't try new things and so for example political systems tend to be surprisingly long-lived they they change with revolutions but they don't change much in between and political reform is notoriously difficult to achieve I make the point in the book that if you brought Daniel Defoe who you know wrote about riding around England describing it in the early 18th century if you brought him back today 300 years later he would find everything completely changed except government which would be horribly familiar there's there's a constitutional monarch there's a bicameral parliament there's an unelected house of laws you know etc etc there's nothing depressing about that is there a way though to introduce evolutionary pressures into government because I mean we have a system right now where we you know at the global level there is not a monopoly there's no state that controls all of it and they are competing but the history of humanity is filled with destructive competition among states it tends not to go well when two states compete with each other is there a way to get them more into an evolutionary process without it just being a series of wars well David Hume made the point and a lot of people have continued to make this point since that the reason Europe stole a march on China in the from the sort of 18th century on well from the 17th century onwards was because it was fragmented politically and that meant that during the reformation and the renaissance and the enlightenment an individual inventor or or talent of some kind could get up and leave if he didn't like the regime he was living in and this happens all the time I mean if you go and look you know Gutenberg or the man who invented mice and china or whatever you know they often move from one country to another to find a regime that's more congenial for them to live under so it's very favorable to innovation to having a fragmented continent and the reason Europe is always fragmented is because of its peninsulas and its mountain ranges it's very hard to unify a lot of people tried Julius Caesar Hitler Napoleon Charles V none of them pulled it off for very long whereas China which is a much more sort of concentric country with great big rivers running through it and and without very much in the way of peninsulas was very easy to unify and although it's occasionally fragmented and it's its golden age was when it was a bit more fragmented nonetheless when it it usually ends up being turned into an empire and very clearly when it gets turned into an empire it tends to stand still and be actually anti-innovative because it gets a regime that's that's too monopolistic so war is the price that Europe pre paid for being fragmented but innovation was the reward it got for being fragmented on that on that point dovetailing off that is there a top-down bias in or what would be the purpose oh sorry can I come back on one post script to that because it's it's an interesting thought so where does America fit into that in many ways it looks like China it's easy to to to unify as as a North America I'm talking about and but of course the answer is the federal structure gives you just about the best of both worlds a single monolithic country but with an ability to have experimental governments within it theoretically at least there is right and at its best yeah with of course the risk that that turns into a civil war over states rights which it does at one point but you know the the the states as laboratories is a huge advantage of your system that most countries don't have so yeah the the question I was asking was about about history in terms because we were bringing up history and you write in the book about sort of the bot the same sort of bias that we have when we think of history the top-down view of history as opposed to thinking about it as more organic it kind of reminds you of some of the wig view of history that this mesis and to discuss the history is directed by people and has a purpose and it's going towards something usually you know centralization and nice classy buildings but but yeah how is there a bias infecting our view of history well I think we believe in the great man theory of history too much we tend to to say you know brilliant George Washington he won he won the war he created the nation yeah and of course he deserves some credit but if you go back and look at the surrender Yorktown of the British forces and this isn't a Brit complaining I was just gonna come back on that yeah you got sour grapes here it's way to pass and I'm very glad you won that one it was inevitable you were gonna win that war but that's kind of the point but if you go back and look at what actually happened the malaria parasite played a huge role in the surrender of the that particular British army because the Cornwallis had been ordered to to to stay in the low ground around the Chesapeake Bay and all these three-quarters of his army was debilitated when the battle happened and that's true of wars historically so yeah often death in the camps and it's either economical biological or parasitic or something the reason why a war gets won but nonetheless we say I mean Napoleonic Wars you know Wellington wins not because he was a better tactician than Napoleon but because Britain had the most money and you know the allies did as it were and you know in the end they were able to throttle Napoleon for that reason so the the the the great man theory of history is that great men take history and turn it in one direction or another and obviously that can happen I don't think anyone would deny that Hitler was a great man in the wrong sense of the word obviously you know effecting a lot of things do not mean to imply that he was a good man of course but on the whole we overemphasize that we don't take into account the inexorable inevitable emergent forces and the degree to which your ordinary people are what's deciding the outcome in the way they're behaving and trading and and and so on so I think you know we give too much credit to the people on top of history rather than the people at the bottom of history what about the role of innovators that we have I mean so much of the the really wonderful stuff that's improved our lives today came from smart individuals making discoveries whether that was Newton and I guess Leibniz for calculus or you know the invention of whatever these things happen to be all are from a single vaccine's vaccine food the iPhone I have in front of me well there again I think we overemphasize the great man and by the way and you know I'm not I'm not dissing these wonderful inventors and I am a huge fan of science I'm a huge fan of technological invention but look at you know do you really think that if if Google hadn't invented the search engine we'd have no search engines if Thomas Edison had invented the light bulb we'd have no light bulbs if if Newton hadn't discovered gravity we would never discover gravity if Darwin hadn't discovered natural selection you know it's inevitable I mean the the double helix of DNA was bound to be discovered in the 1950s the technology had reached the point where it was inevitable so in that sense every single scientist and inventor is dispensable you can do without them you can even run over Einstein and before he discovers special relativity and you still get special relativity because Hendrik Lorenz was on the trail and would have got that do you see what I mean so I mean this sounds like I'm being very rude about these guys and and but I'm not really meaning to I'm just saying that that let's hear it for the ordinary technologists and and grunts who are sort of putting together the pieces that mean that actually this thing is ripe and someone's gonna find it and you know let's celebrate the chap who find it but let's not overdo it the Nobel Prize tends to be in that sense very unfair because it selects the person who happened to be in the place to put the keystone in the arch or whatever it is but can we can we advocate for say government funding of these institutions understanding that there's a lot of does an evolutionary bottom up stuff so say the Manhattan project we had to get a bunch of people in there to share ideas but have the funding for them so they can share ideas that they come up with this and so many different false starts and we need to figure out how to do this but the end of it we have nuclear weapons which bad thing but probably going to come anyway but nuclear power and all these things so so maybe government has a role in trying to direct this towards some sort of path well certainly whoever's in charge of society or whoever's taking the decisions should do their best to create an ecosystem in which innovation happens absolutely and what does that require it requires you know plentiful movement of people movement of ideas trade so that things are coming into contact with each other it requires resources it requires stable infrastructure etc now does it require government pump priming yes obviously in some cases it does but would it get other kinds of pump priming yes that's true too you know in the first half of the 20th century Britain and America were conspicuous by not spending any public money on science whereas France and Germany did spend money on science which would were more successful arguably Britain and America were more successful in discoveries in that period so I think the where the money comes from doesn't necessarily matter so much as how you make sure that the money and the people and the and the opportunities and the resources and the infrastructure are in place and that usually these days is a role for government but it doesn't sort of have to be well that that they sort of the fall question I had on here was was kind of based on that if you kind of think so we wouldn't advocate for emergent evolutionary stuff if say an asteroid is going to hit the earth I mean we'd want people to come in and plan and organize people and say let's get the asteroid I assume or build the laser or whatever well it depends are you suggesting that we we know which technology we're going to use to head off the asteroid we want to make a Manhattan project we just need to well yeah but exactly but what are you going to do you need some experimentation to find out what technology to use to head off the asteroid and that I think you know this climate change is the thing here should we be spending our money on r and d to come up with cheap and abundant low carbon energy or should we be spending it on top down targets and plans well I think we should spend it on r and d you know I think that's more likely to to produce the results so so yes if we know it's just a matter of putting together a 10 billion pounds to to solve the problem then obviously we've got to club together and do that but if we don't know what's going to solve the problem then we should let a thousand flowers bloom so one of the objections that I get when I make the thousand flowers bloom sort of argument whether it's you know let's not centrally plan this but leave it up to the market or let emergent processes handle it is the sense that evolution seems to work pretty well and we can see that with biological evolution but a tremendous cost you know all of those mutations that failed along the way all of those organisms that died out and when you're talking about people's lives in the real world you know so we say like a free market and healthcare will lead to all of these terrific innovations and lower costs and provide access to more people and it will be better but we can't tell you the specifics because you can't tell the specifics about a market process and the response is well okay but what do I say to the person who needs the healthcare right now you know and the process hasn't provided something for him yet but if we centrally plan it maybe it won't be as good in the long run but we can help this guy right now it seems a lot to ask these people to be the cost for a evolutionary process yeah but I think that's a false dichotomy because I don't think we're saying to the person with polio in 1950 we won't give you an iron lung because we're going to spend all our money on a vaccine but we are we are saying let's see if there's a better way out there than simply designing a better iron lung and it turned out there was it was a vaccine so I think you can run both horses at once as it were and yes evolution is wasteful and a lot of bad ideas fall by the wayside but better bad ideas fall by the wayside than people fall by the wayside which is often the results if you if you try and do it by planning you know it's hard to argue that centrally planned systems have not been wasteful I mean look at often they're very wasteful of human lives whereas at least the the experimentation is wasteful of ideas if you like you know look at the economy of South Korea you know sorry North Korea well let's look at them both South Korea is an experimental place that tries lots of different things and no doubt wastes a lot of electricity on advertising hoardings or something futile which North Korea doesn't but North Korea certainly wastes human lives and human potential and human happiness and so I don't think that that's a that's a fair argument because you can solve a problem pretty quickly with evolution often and get a better result and the fact that it's disruptive often means that the people who are suffering the people who feel this pain and this waste are the inefficient ones who should be got out of the way anyway not not the people but the organizations I mean in in that sense should be got out of the way anyway so you know the vested interests are the ones who who are on the whole making that argument well that that that something Aaron I have talked about for a very long time is that maybe at the end the best argument for freedom and also the evolution that comes with freedom is that it minimizes the damage of being wrong and this is opposed to governments will maximize the damage of being wrong because we're all wrong often I mean if we're all humans in government or markets we have a bad idea and we we run with it it doesn't work but that and that would be a dead end in the evolutionary change if you if you let the evolution go but if you have government with this unique ability wrongness can go on for a very long time at very high cost yeah let me let me tell you a story about a really rather inspirational guy who's just left the UK government but has been there for five years it was brought in from the IT industry called Mike Bracken and he was given the problem five years ago of these gigantic IT projects that where hundreds of billions of dollars are spent that and then you end up trashing the whole thing at the end because it doesn't work government projects exactly yeah exactly the same sort of thing and and and he has basically kind of stopped that in the UK and we haven't had any of those in recent years and and I've asked him how did he achieve this and it's all about saying instead of designing the whole system you've got to fail fast get it get a little bit about there test it in the real world get another little bit out there try keep trying it on a small scale not just piloting you know that's piloting the whole thing he's saying do it in stages and test it at every stage evolve it essentially but I was very struck by his use of the word failure you know I want you to fail you know I want you to discover what's wrong with this you know don't say it's not ready to be used yet go out there and test it and fail fast fail fail cheaply and fail fast was his motto and I think he's had pretty big impact on it I mean he may be one of many examples but you know his his his model is now of interest to other countries around the world I know that you know etc so so I think there are ways of of doing it even within monolithic structures do you fear that the more the government grows with this this unique power of force that it will constrain the evolutionary growth of society when there are a lot of more there are more entities out there that have this granted power and therefore are not going to be easy to get rid of and so maybe we won't be evolving as fast as we might as we could have there's certainly an arms ranks between monopolistic and bureaucratic and anti-innovation tendencies and the opposite as it were I think the good guys will stay one step out of the bad guys because as you've seen with the internet you know it was it was out of the blocks and three quarters of the way down the track before government even realized it existed thank god thank god and couldn't catch up and and regulate it but then you take examples like genetically modified crops in Europe or electronic cigarettes and you see how vested interests working through monopolistic governments are managing to stifle innovation almost completely and keep keep new products out of certain markets almost completely and and and yes I do worry that the the power of the the political power that not necessarily government but you know corporations can achieve through lobbying government often is sometimes sufficient to stop this process happening and when you then look at the history of innovation and the history of progress it's a pretty rare flower it's it's you know it's in America in the 20th century it's in Renaissance Italy in the 15th century it's in Arabia it's in China it's not everywhere you know it's in Holland in the 17th century etc but you know you can imagine an asteroid landing on the wrong part of the world and and and suddenly there's no word doing this thing and everybody is is is run by very neophobic governments as well free thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel to learn more about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org