Good morning everyone. Let me just introduce the speakers of this morning. You already noticed our strong feminist orientation yesterday. And this feminist orientation is continued today. First speaker will be my dear old friend, Diana Vorbush. Who's a lawyer specializing in labor law. She's also the wife of Doug French. And I should mention that Doug and Diana got married here in Bodrum during one of our conventions. The second speaker will be Enrico Colombato, who's professor of economics at the University of Torino in Italy. And the third speaker is Andrew Schuwen, who's a co-founder of the Lyon Rock Institute, the Free Market Institute in Hong Kong. He's a financial analyst and he's the commander of the Silver Legion volunteers, which is a place that buys and stores silver in Hong Kong, I assume. So, Diana, please. Thank you, Hans, and thank you Hans and Guchin for inviting me to speak today. As I think I mentioned yesterday, my husband and I were here at the very first Property and Freedom Conference back in 2006. And it's an absolute honor to be asked to come back here all these years later. I don't know where the time's gone by, but to celebrate the 10th anniversary. As Hans mentioned, if any of you were here during the 6th conference in 2011, you'll know that I got married here and Douglas French got married here. Of course, while I was immersing myself in the spiritual ceremonies, my husband was being entertained by what he calls the local talent. But the next night we had a proper, elegant European wedding and it was a year I'll never forget. And in fact, it's the year that I think Lodi proposed to Donna. Of course, they got married in Las Vegas as did the Doctor's Hapa. But don't let all this discussion about marriage or all these marriages concern you because as Hans told Doug back in the day, marriage existed long before the state did. So I think that's the only way you got Doug to marry me. Nevertheless, I'm here today to talk about violence in American unions and because I'm going to primarily speak about American unions, I think I should distinguish a little bit between American unions and European ones. In the States, labor unions are considered to be third-party entities that interfere between an employer and their employees, that impede their ability to have good conversation and good communication that create work stoppages that impose all kinds of crushing work rules and expensive benefits and prevent employers from terminating out will. But moreover, in the United States, labor unions will, in my opinion, stop at nothing to get a foothold in a company's front door. And I guess I should tell you that anything I tell you today is based on either my own experience or my own well-informed opinion. So, but in my opinion, the labor unions in the United States are impede business and that's the way they're viewed by most employers. In Europe, on the other hand, and particularly in the Germanic and Scandinavian companies, unions are more like works councils. They form more of an alliance with the company and they actually act as a liaise between the employers and the employees. They can't strike, but they usually don't. They do. They try to find the least disruptive way to do it. Some labor unions in Europe have been known to strike on lunch and then to go back dutifully to their jobs. Even when the tube in London goes on strike, it's two or three days of a work stoppage and that's it, nothing like you see in the States. So, any kind of work disruption is very minimal in the European Labor Work Councils and in general, the European Work Councils are very careful not to put the company or the employees' jobs in jeopardy. That's why when Volkswagen started or decided to build a factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the first thing they did was invite the UAW to come and form a union and hold an election. They did that because they believe that their culture of worker code determination is actually a competitive advantage. They believe that having a work council in the factory promotes productivity and management flexibility and why? Because in Europe, work councils are at least as worried about the well-being of the company and the stability of jobs as are the companies themselves. But that's not always the case in the United States. In the United States, labor unions are not always so worried about the rank and file employees. They're tremendously politically powerful organizations. And at times, in my view, they're more interested in wielding that power than in worrying about the financial well-being of corporate America. You might have noticed that we're not producing many cars. This is the European labor unions. You can hardly notice they're striking. But you might have noticed that we're not producing too many automobiles in Detroit these days. And the New York textile industry has been off-shored. They're not making any textiles in New York City anymore. We're not many. And the Pittsburgh idle still mills have been turned into now-failing casinos all because most of the world's still production is being done in China or India or Russia. Even Turkey's crude still production has gone up by 23 percent, not so in the United States. And the primary reason for the demise of these formerly robust American industries are labor unions. In my own town I watched labor unions put unreasonable pressure on companies and like the Hacienda, the El Rancho, I don't know if any of you got old-timers remember these from Vegas' old days, but the landmark and the frontier. All these properties are closed. They've closed their doors due in part at least to the union's unreasonable demands and absolute refusal to grant concessions. When the Culinary Workers Union started their organizational effort at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, they said that Las Vegas is the new Detroit. They've already destroyed Detroit. We're not making cars there anymore. So now they say Las Vegas is the new Detroit. And by that they mean Las Vegas is a union town that the union controls the gaming and hospitality industry. And if anybody wants to operate there, they'll do so based on the union's terms or they can leave town. That's their attitude. The unions are particularly powerful in Las Vegas and that's because you can't offshore the hospitality industry. As you know, we actually need people to make beds and prepare food and serve the occasional cocktail.  So when they went to Sheldon Adelson, the owner and developer of the Venetian, they told him he could sign the neutrality agreement or he could take his billions of dollars and thousands of jobs that he intended to create and leave town. There was no compromise. Either take their terms or leave. You know, they could care less about the money that would be spent on the community. So of course, Mr. Adelson declined and he instead put together a pretty powerful team and he gave them one marching order and that was, if the Culinary Workers Union is going to represent my employees, please make sure that they get a secret ballot election before they do. So I was very happy to join that team but before I could I had to pay my own form of dues, not union dues but the kind that leave bruises. But I began my career as a union attorney in Philadelphia. So that's a big transformation but I came from a blue collar family and at the time I felt that there was a place for organized labor. After all, thanks to Jimmy Hoffa over the road, truckers were no longer burning themselves with cigarettes, going down the road, trying to stay awake for the 18 hour haul. Children were no longer being trapped in hot factories because organized labor had helped pass OSHA regulations and child labor laws. The Fair Labor Standard Act has been passed in part by union efforts making sure that hourly employees now have a 40 hour work week or get paid over time. And in any event, my overall philosophy at that time was that the working man needed this kind of representation to get a fair shake. Of course it didn't take me very long. I was very young, didn't take me very long to learn the errors of my way and I never, it all started when I lost my first labor arbitration case. I was a young lawyer in Philadelphia, had won every case I'd ever tried. Every employee I ever advocated for got put back to work. But one day after putting on a very, what I thought was a very vigorous defense, I was told on the way back to the office by the union rep that I was going to lose the case. I said, how am I going to lose? I think, you know, this is a winner. He said, no, it was predetermined. The arbitrator wrote the decision before you ever put the case on. And we just owed one to the company and his attitude was the employee was expendable because they, you know, they had made a deal with the company and the employee could just be, you know, the collateral lost. I think more than furious I was absolutely crushed to part of my, you know, belief in America had been crushed because I learned that union representation all it's cracked up to be. It's, unions are far more interested in representing their own interest in the United States than they are interests of their employees. So it was about this time that I met Tom Alardi whose family owns casinos in Las Vegas and particularly they owned the Frontier Hotel and Gambling Hall. They were looking for an attorney to help them survive what was then a four year strike.  No, I think I do want you because given your background you'll help me protect my employees. So if I'd only known that by taking his offer that I would be magically transformed from this ardent union attorney to a now a zealous management lawyer I don't know what I would have done. I think, I guess I'm happy that I took that job and I've explained the transformation by really adapting one of Winston Churchill's quotes and I say, well if you're not progressive when you're young you probably don't have a heart but if you're not a libertarian when you get older you probably don't have a brain. So I finally grew a brain thankfully and I think my philosophy completely changed when I learned that the Frontier strike was caused because the Lardies wanted to actually provide their employees more benefits, better benefits than the union contract allowed. Margaret Alardi the matriarch of the family made her fortune the old fashion way by churning real estate in California and Nevada and she was a friend of Benny Benions who started the famous Benion horseshoe downtown Las Vegas and he said you know Margaret you should buy the Pioneer Club Pioneer Clubs are the one where the cowboy is saying howdy as you come to town so she bought that club downtown and the one in Laughlin and you know she's a very stupid business woman and didn't take her long to learn that you know the gambling business was a pretty slick way to make a lot of money and she did that she made a lot of money and she sold the Pioneer Clubs and moved to the Las Vegas Strip so when I say Las Vegas Strip today and I might say Las Vegas Boulevard those are synonyms the same main road down the fancy part of where all the big new modern casinos are Las Vegas Strip or Boulevard so she bought the Frontier right on the Las Vegas Strip with 35 acres of frontage strip frontage property from the Howard Hughes Corporation for 22 million dollars so rough math there is about 600 thousand dollars an acre this is in 1988 now the Frontier had a union contract when she bought it and she was correctly advised that when the contract expires she would be able to renegotiate the terms so she had the collective bargaining agreement analyzed and found that she was extraordinarily overpaying for subpar benefits and so she went to an advisor and learned that she could provide a better benefit package plus put aside a Christmas fund for each and every employee that they could cash out at the end of the year for less money than she was paying the union for these inferior benefits so when the time came she went to the union and she said this is what I want to do if you allow me to do it then I'm going to renew the collective bargaining agreement so after they pulled themselves up off the floor from laughter they then told her well that's a very nice try but that's not going to happen and she quickly learned that in culinary union land the right to renegotiate exists only in legal textbooks they told her if she wanted the privilege of operating on the Las Vegas Strip and apparently they were the only ones that could grant the privilege that she would have to sign the Strip contract which is their uniform contract or sell to someone that would so she also declined and she did with the law permits which is bargained to impasse and then implemented her last best and final offer the employees got better benefits and a Christmas fund but the union was furious they were furious by the Ilarity's audacity they convinced the employees that they should walk out they said if you walk out in solidarity it has to be done so that we can maintain the status quo their benefit funds and we'll have you back to work in two or three days but they were wrong the frontier strike and the picketers stayed out there for six and a half years while Bill Bennett who is the owner of the circus circus was giving them three square meals a day and the union was trying to convince the Ilarity's or I say coerce them into signing the Strip contract for example they followed the 70 year old Mrs. Ilarity around in her car and terrorized her until she completely stopped driving they picketed the bank that she helped found until she resigned her position on the board they scaled the walls of her children's homes and terrorized their families and children and but moreover they vilified this respectable family in the media and made them really our communities pariah and that's really the saddest part for example when I moved to town there was no law school in Las Vegas which is what or in Nevada which made it such a great place for her lawyer to practice no competition right or little competition but UNLV where Professor Hoppe has emeritus status. UNLV wanted a law school so they went out looking for the money and of course Mrs. Ilarity said she would contribute the million dollars which back when a million dollars meant something or more than it does today she would donate the money but she wanted the school name for her family the culinary union told UNLV and they have this much political clout they told UNLV you can take the money but you cannot grant the naming rights and of course the deal fell through and now that law school is named after Bill Boyd this is Ilarity's competitor so the message to the Ilarity was clear this is a posting from the union's website and the message was clear shut down or sell but you're not operating without a union contract so there was a lot of physical violence on the frontier picket line for example they formed the picketers formed human chains and blocked traffic for hours there were all kinds of fights and vistikovs and general hoodlumism while the police stood by and virtually ignored all this that is at least until Sean and Gail White made the mistake of trying to come to the frontier and said to a picketer as they passed by why don't you get a job so of course that picketer had a huge glass beer shind in his hand just smashed him over the side of the head with it and then chased his wife across the street tackled her and beat her so that day there was exactly one person arrested and of course the whites filed a lawsuit against the culinary workers union for assault and battery but the culinary union went to the whites and said listen why don't you just put this litigation on hold and sue the frontier for negligence and the theory was that if the frontier had only signed a union contract the picketers would not be out on the street and the whites would not have been harmed and this argument actually survived summary judgment so we learned later that the union had gone to the whites and unethically and I think illegally offered to pay them a fixed amount of money if their litigation against the frontier failed which it did in 1997 we prevailed in that lawsuit and the union presumably paid their damages but I'm not privy to that information but that was a very bittersweet day because that's the day that we learned that Mrs. Ellardi had sold the frontier so see a labor strike is supposed to be the ultimate industrial hammer it's supposed to bring a company to its knees it's supposed to close the doors and basically coerce the company to come back to the bargaining table if after six months a company has not capitulated to a union's demands the strike has essentially failed and that's just generally understood this strike went on for six and a half years this is how strong the culinary workers union is they knew they had failed but they weren't going away and they didn't know what to do and the only thing they could do is find somebody that would pay this family so much money that they would have to take it and that's exactly what they did they found Phil Ruffin who was the owner of Greyhound dog tracks in Kansas and casinos in Bahamas not the likely guy to get licensed in Las Vegas but he was willing to pay 167 million dollars for the frontier in their 35 acres which I think pencils out to be about 4.7 million dollars an acre substantially more than Mrs. Alardi paid so of course I said she's a savvy business woman and she recognized that 145 million dollar profit in nine fun-filled years was an offer that no reasonable person could pass up and she wasn't going to in the union new but she wouldn't so the hotel closed Phil Ruffin bought it and he was flinked by Jesse Jackson and every single politician in town when he opened the property as the new frontier so the unions got what they wanted they paid dearly but the Alardes were out and the union was in just as an aside in 2007 Phil Ruffin sold the frontier to Elad which is an Israeli company for 1.2 billion which is just shy of 25 million dollars an acre but that was of course before the Las Vegas real estate bubble burst and just in fact I think that was at the brink of it my husband would know but Elad's bankers now that the bubble has burst and has not really recovered I don't think Elad's bankers recently sold the property to James Packard the Australian billionaire 53% of the property anyway for 260 million dollars the bank oak tree financial kept the other 47% of the deal so it was essentially a 315 million dollar deal or 9 million dollars an acre so you see the fluctuation over this period of course Phil Ruffin was the big winner but the Alardes aren't going to miss any mail so they're just fine when the frontier closed the front page news and Sheldon Adelson called me and said what does that mean for you I said I'm going back to Philadelphia he said no come across the street and help me build the only non-union mega resort in the new Detroit so everyone from the governor to the county commissioner to all the politicians and other operators and of course the union said this could not be done but I really I had been surreptitiously meeting with Mr. Adelson over the years and really liked his style thought he was going to be successful he was an extremely he is an extremely principled man and just wants right to be done and he didn't want a union representing his employees without a secret ballot election so I have lots of stories to tell you about him I think I'm just going to be able to tell you one I learned a little bit about his character when he told me how he developed his position on organized labor he said that when he first bought the sans hotel in Las Vegas he's a lover of frozen yogurt so he went downstairs to stand in a long line of people queued up to get frozen yogurt and he couldn't understand why the line was moving so slowly so by the time he got to the front of the line he could see why because there was one employee serving the yogurt meanwhile there were three employees just lean back against the counter doing nothing so he had to go to the hotel they didn't know who he was so he said to the first employee why aren't you serving these customers and the employee said well sir I only stock the shelves that's all I'm allowed to do I'm not allowed to do any other type of work he looked at the next one she said I'm the cashier I can only ring up the cell once somebody else serves the yogurt next one was the supervisor and she could only stand by and watch the work not being done because the union contract that came with the sans hotel had these very strict jurisdictional rules that required that no person in a certain job classification can work in any other job classification and no supervisor can do any bargaining unit work so here he had this long line of people all these employees that are on the clock and nobody can do the work no one can service the customers because of the union jurisdictional work rules so he knew then and there that he could not run a five star hotel the way he wanted to with restrictive work rules and told the union that he would not sign a neutrality agreement if if they were going to represent his employees they'd have to do it through a secret ballot election and they'd have to offer them more than he was going to and that was unlikely to happen so maybe during Q&A I'll tell you more about some of the crazy stories that went on at the Venetian after he refused to sign the neutrality agreement but the that's when the battle royale broke out and the mother of the battles took place on the sidewalks in front of the Venetian that run parallel to the Las Vegas strip every time the Venetian needed a permit the union would object this was their coercive corporate part of their corporate campaign so what they would do is pack the county commission meetings with hundreds of union members wearing union t-shirts that had the big red check union yes so they would all be sitting in the audience as a not so subtle reminder to the county commissioners who got them elected their 60,000 members could also get them unelected and so in true fashion the union opposed the Venetian's petition or application to get a construction permit they said the anticipated traffic that would come with the new project could not be born by the Las Vegas strip it would be too much for it to handle so the commissioners forced the Venetian to conduct a traffic impact study and of course the impact study found that the anticipated traffic would be much better accommodated if there was a new lane added to the Las Vegas strip so the union thought this was a big victory they felt like they had one that they had the project was dead because how do you add a lane to the Las Vegas strip but then the engineers that the Venetian hired said well we can put another lane here if we use the land that is currently housing the existing sidewalk so the Venetian said okay well if you'll widen the boulevard we'll build a sidewalk on our private property and that's what they did so they said we'll grant a public easement so that the people the public can traverse the frontage of the property but it'll be our private sidewalk on our private property so the easement contained very specific language that we worked on forever I know quite a bit about this language and in the easement the Venetian retained full rights inherent to the ownership of private property to the full extent permitted by the fifth and fourteenth amendment of the United States amendments to the United States Constitution the Venetian also posted no trespassing signs and private property signs all the way up and down the sidewalk if you go there today you'll see them they're still there beautiful brass plaques nevertheless as soon as the sidewalks were built Clark County issued a rallying permit to the union so that they could hold the demonstration on the Venetian's private sidewalks so of course we object the Venetian objected and said if this rally takes place we expect you police department Metro police department to arrest these people for trespass so the DA issued a statement and he said well the police will attend the rally but there will be no arrest because in his view the picketers had a cognizable first amendment defense to any trespassing charge I don't know how you do that on private property but that was his view so on the day of the protest these are the guys that they couldn't do their job because of the work rules on the day of the protest this is what it looked like the Venetian took several measures to protect it's private property we put up these barricades to mark the property line we issued trespassing warnings I remember these guys they were doing nothing this is me in the fashionable fanny pack issuing trespassing warnings this guy wasn't having any of it and when the police refused to arrest the trespassers we effected citizens arrests this is my friend detailer in this shot and arrested them for trespassing so of course after the rally the venetian sued the district attorney the police department clark county and the unions and alleged that the government took their property without due process or just compensation they also alleged that the government impermissibly deprived them of their property rights the defendants argued that the property had because of use the property had become a public forum and the venetian had lost its right to exclude so shockingly u.s. district judge philip proe agreed with the defendants and while acknowledging the general rule that the constitution does not apply to private conduct generally he said that this case fell into a very narrow exception that's applied when a private actor performs a function generally performed by the state based on this finding he held that the property looked and functioned like public property that the area traditionally had been public property to traditionally had functioned as a public sidewalk and based on that the land had become quasi public and first amendment now attached to the land and the venetian had lost the right to exclude so of course we appealed to the ninth circuit court of appeals who affirmed the decision and so we convinced Mr. Adelson this is such an important case the supreme court of the united states the highest court of the land will understand that without property rights there are no rights please you know finance this appeal and we filed a writ of sorcery to the united states supreme court and they denied sorcery so judge pro's decision is now the law of the land and it's all very sad it's a sad day but on the whole I think this case demonstrates the violence perpetuated by American unions against private property and it's done with impunity in the united states and I think the case further demonstrates the problem with granting the state the right to protect private property because that creates a dual edged sword if they can protect the private property they can also take it away and they can also take it away without due process or just compensation so I don't know what else to tell you except caveat emptor and to my American friends happy labor day.


I think one of the things that most folks don't really understand is how diverse this microbial labor force is. There's 15 trillion or so microbes in that shovel, but they're not all the same. There's not one microbe and let's get 15 trillion more of the same one and we'll do 15 trillion times as much.  They're the ones decomposing cellulose, decomposing corn residues. Then there's the skilled labor and the skilled labor are the ones that are transforming the soil organic carbon. The little, it's a lot tougher molecules to break down and by breaking down the soil organic matter they're actually creating new forms of soil organic matter at the same time. This is your skilled labor. You need to have some different functional capabilities to degrade soil organic matter like humic substances and so I'll call them skilled labor. Then you have the teenagers, you got to get them a summer job and they're working at Burger King or something and for the bacteria the youngsters are working on plant exodus. They're hanging out by the plants. Plants are leaking all these sugars and organic acids. It's a free for all and these youngsters, they don't have a lot of skills yet but they sure know how to gobble up this sugar so you've got the youngsters taken care of, you've got the skilled workers, the unskilled laborers but then you have some professional specialists and these are microbes like our muscular mycorrhizal fungi that form close associations with the plants and the plants provide everything that the mycorrhizae needs so that they can reproduce so it's a very special relationship. Another example would be nitrogen fixing bacteria. Nitrogen fixing bacteria and blue-green algae or cyanobacteria are the only organisms on earth that can fix atmospheric nitrogen and bring it into the land. These organisms have very special capabilities that none other have and so I consider them as professional specialists. They have a very specialized function. They're communicating. They are communicating chemically that the soil microorganisms and the plants are sending chemical signals back and forth to each other in the soil that stimulates certain activities.


Welcome to Alden Library. I am Scott Seaman, Dean of Libraries, and this is a very special evening tonight. We are celebrating the release of President Charles Ping's new book jointly published by Alden Library in the Ohio University Press. The book is titled A Conversation About Ohio University and the Presidency, 1975 to 1994. Now, some of you may not be aware, but the library has a tradition of publishing the memoirs of Ohio University's presidents. That tradition, interestingly enough, was begun by President Ping. It was later supported by President Glidden. It was called the Oral History Program. The first history published was that of John Baker, followed by Vernon Alden, Harry Crewson, Claude Sol, and now Ohio University's 18th president, Charlie Ping. Now, the title of the new book comes from its format. It's a conversation. It's a transcribed conversation between Dr. Ping and Professor Sam Crow. Sam Crow is trustee professor of English here at Ohio University and he's author of numerous works, including Shakespeare Observed, Studies in Performance on Screen, as well as many other publications. So, we're fortunate to have both Dr. Ping and Professor Crow here tonight to give a flavor of what's inside this book. So, please join me in welcoming them. Welcome. We did this before. Do you want me to just lower my voice? We okay on the sound now? We're each going to make a little prefatory remark or statement and then we're going to try to give you some of the flavor of the book by my re-asking and perhaps not the identical form, but in the general form. Some of the questions that propelled the conversation that President Ping and I had in one of the studios up on the third or fourth floor of WUB TV in May of 1911. I want to add that there, while the main body of interviews in the book were conducted between the two of us, that after I had worn out asking Charlie questions, Doug McCabe, who is the very fine curator of manuscripts in the library, did the last interview in the book and to my way of thinking, it's the best because he was not quite as close to the action as I was and so he stands back a bit from the lived experience of the Ping administration and asks I think some wonderful broader questions and elicits from Charlie some I think particularly potent answers that I hadn't gotten to. I make this plug because I think he does did wonderful work but it's also Doug is a former student back from the early 1970s when I was just a young puppy here and then he went off in the world, married, started to raise a family, came back for alumni college and said I should never have left and so he came back to school and got a master's in history with a specialty in archival work, got a job at the library and has been here ever since so I'm delighted that he's a part of this family. Okay Charlie, go ahead and tell us about the troubles with memoirs. Well this is an author's night so I want to make a confession at the start. I published a number of books and many articles, this was the easiest book I ever did. Sam just got me talking and anyone my age wants to talk about the past and that's what I did. The past has far more reality than the future at this point in life. I expressed to Sam as we were starting a certain reservation and frankly Scott I forgot that I had started the whole process. My reservation is about memoirs and the sense that they are frequently self-serving because you remember the past through the prism of the present and that tends to distort and change and what you may well have thought you had planned carefully was actually a product of the whole variety of other circumstances. Having said that, much to my surprise I thoroughly enjoyed this. Sam had been after me to do it and I kept saying no and finally I had a serious accident and I think everybody got concerned about mortality and so it had an urgency and I agreed to do it and much to my surprise the nine taping sessions we had nine two-hour sessions proved to be fun and I think Sam you made it that way but it was an easy book in part because of the exceptional work of the library staff Scott and all who work with him and Doug's work as producer and Sam your questioning and commenting is always provocative. I have sat through one of your Shakespeare classes and watched you do it with your students and it was fun to have it in person. All right I think I've finished my introductory statement. Where do you want to go? Okay I want to ask you the first question but before that one of the things that the book doesn't tell you that you should all know which is one of the remarkable things about Charlie is that after he didn't retire after he stepped down as president and went on to run a number of other programs and national institutions he came back and took my Shakespeare class with his grandson and they took Shakespeare's tragedies from me sometime in the mid 1990s and the thing I remember best is Sam his grandson it was a wonderful student a very bright lad but he never said much in class until the one day his grandfather cut and he talked a lot that day and I was happy that had he had a chance to open up when grandfather wasn't there. Charlie in 1975 Ohio University was in crisis we'd lost something like 6,000 students in three or four years the 1960s hadn't really ended here the students were still up in arms the faculty were threatening to unionize in fact had taken a boat quasi unofficial straw pole that indicated a strong preference for unionizing a great number of the classified staff had been laid off most of the untenured professors had been laid off and there were even plans to maybe get rid of some tenured professors the university just sort of just stumbled from one bad moment to another and because we had this wonderful school of journalism here anything bad that happened on campus was immediately known all around the country because they were all stringers for somebody and it was all topped off for me by in the summer of 75 one of the two great summers of the big red machine over in Cincinnati one of our students took off his clothes and streaked across the outfield at riverfront stadium and when he was arrested by the cops was asked why did you do that he said it was on an assignment from his art class at Ohio University I know who the professor was Charlie why in the world were you interested in Ohio University in 1975 some of you have heard me tell a couple of the stories but they're worth repeating when I my first contact was the sort of informal letter you've been nominated are you interested and I wrote back no some time passed and Alan Booth who was a history professor at the time and chair of the faculty senate called me I was now on leave in the uh advanced management program of the business school at Harvard at Harvard yeah it's a three month cloistered program and uh very high powered in anyway this call from Alan came and he said if some of the committee flew up to Boston would you meet with them and I said well that's very flattering of course I would and a number of the members of the committee flew up to Boston and we met in Bern Alden's office he was then CEO chairman of the first Boston company I think and we had two hours of very warm and cordial conversation and I enjoyed the conversation and they seemed to respond and the time came when they had to leave and go back to the airport and Vern said to me please stay for a minute and I did and he said I want to show you something he took me into his dressing room and there on the wall was a large plaque and mounted on the plaque were portions of bricks and rock and pipe and two by fours and uh I'm looking at I think what the world is this and he said those are all the things that were thrown through my window that during my years as president and then there was a pause it said Marion and I regard those years as the best years of our lives anyway I went back to the business school and decided that the intense commitment of this group had caught my interest interest enough I went around talking and I talked to some of the corporate officials from Ohio and without exception I got a response from them the response was don't touch it I sure wouldn't send my daughter there and then I went around the faculty who were friends and I got just the opposite response oh this is a gem do look at it well that's an intriguing kind of contrast and uh little time went by Alan called and said would you be willing to come out and meet with the full committee and perhaps visit the campus and I said yes but one condition it's to be understood that I am not a candidate until I have been out there and talk to people and then I'll decide whether I'm going to be a candidate I don't want anything coming back to the campus that had given me this leave and well Alan Booth collected all the chits he had with the post and though they knew about it it didn't get published until later and and we came into town and were taken directly to the home of a faculty member who had children our age of our children and the whole thing was planned so beautifully because we were concerned about the public schools we had two children in high school at the time and anyway to make a long story shorter I met enough faculty that I really had a sense of the kind of people that I'd be working with and their intense commitment to the institution and I've been on lots of campuses is unusual and very important so I agreed to become a candidate and from that things progressed now Sam I understood the problems I had read all the financial reports and they were alarming but we had a couple of things going for us the legislature had appropriated three million in special funding to bail us out we were tottering on the edge of default of millions of dollars in bonded indebtedness and they had also passed legislation establishing a college of osteopathic medicine I thought both were indications of promise for the future we'll see however it was the place and the people like so many my first visit here just to walk a campus in the Midwest that has a sense of history is a wonderful thing what were some of the early challenges you've already mentioned the the legislature approving the creation of a college of osteopathic medicine here but they had a timetable that is rather astounding you want to talk about that those faculty senate hadn't approved it yet and to my surprise there was some opposition within that group anyway John Baker has a wonderful line in his oral history said he arrived on the scene in 1945 and he got a number of surprises he found out the college of business was not accredited the engineering college was not accredited there were no phd programs and there was no arm for raising private funding all of which he thought well I got some surprises too one of which was reading the bill establishing the medical school and finding the provision there that said if we failed to admit our first class of at least 16 students within one year there would be no further funding now that's unheard of you don't open a medical school in one year you have to recruit a faculty you have to put in place an admissions process you have to develop a curriculum but somehow we did it then on the bonded indebtedness I read the instruments with some care and discovered to my surprise an alarm that there was a provision in there that the bond holders had first claim on any income other than appropriations you see what that meant if we had in fact been unable to pay him then tuition would have gone to bond payments and I discovered the convocation center was still on a construction loan which means this is 1975 76 means it turns over each year at the current interest rate and we were right on the cusp of the period when interest rate went out of sight there were that's enough many challenges for the students in the audience that the bonded indebtedness was a major issue because we had built dorms that had a capacity for holding about 9,000 students and those dorms have been built on bonds when we lost the great decline in undergraduate enrollment we suddenly had 3,000 less students filling those beds but they still had to be paid for so that was why the system was teetering on financial disaster but interestingly enough you were able to turn that to an advantage well we took many of the buildings and turned them to all the purposes the first building in the medical school was grovener hall and it was the funds were appropriated uh bill drum doski he was in the audience will appreciate the funds were appropriated we went out to bid and contracts were awarded in 30 days now that's really quite usually it takes seven years from the time the buildings are appropriated and when the first class came in that fall they were still nailing and working in the grovener and then we took another complex off for the engineering college and we did that for a number of the units and went to the legislature and said all right we're turning these to academic purposes but we still have the bonded indebtedness you buy out the buildings that we're converting and they agreed uh including one that stood on the college on the across from the college green uh the corner of college street and union somebody just called it Howard Hall Howard Hall was built originally as a hotel and the university took it on it had wooden struts and you couldn't buy code use it as a residence hall so we tore it down now it was still part of the pool of places whose income was supposed to retire the death so the legislature bought Howard Hall and it was not uncommon when I testified a budget hearing have a legislator look at me quizzically and say aren't you the fellow that sold us a building you'd already torn torn down and I was but we lowered the annual debt service by more than a half million dollars that then we did a lot of other things to address the problem by inclination by training by I think all a sense of who you are as a man you're a philosopher and you were most struck in your studies by Plato and Hegel who were too idealist idealists tend not to be people who sell buildings to the legislature that they've torn down but somehow you took what you had learned in graduate school and as a professor from Plato and Hegel and merged it with some ideas that you picked up at the Harvard School for management to create a sort of unique management system and style here and I'd like you to talk a bit about putting in place the planning process which you did in those early years well it took a few years mostly because people were sick and tired of planning they'd planned and planned and planned and all they got were problems and we went through a series of steps trying to identify the basic understanding of what the university was here to do and how was it to do it now that's idealism you first start with the ideal model then you try to speak to the ways the actual relates to the ideal uh so the first part of it was to begin to get the campus really thinking coherently rather than defensively about basic goals then we needed a process where the people involved could take ownership so we divided all the campus into a series of planning units so the library was a planning unit each of the colleges were a planning unit physical plant was a planning unit and so on and uh we had this group describe what changes that they would bring over time and we organized a what we call UPAC university planning advisory committee it was basically advisory to me and through me to the trustees and the committee was made up largely of faculty deans and students and a handful of administrators and each of the units would submit and it would be reviewed so that we were weighing the issue of the need for the bulldozer to move cold as opposed to increasing the library budget for books everything was in a real sense intention with everything else and to my delight and surprise it worked there was a sense of ownership and UPAC did in fact put on their university hat rather than their particular college or department or organization within the university one of the things oh sorry didn't mean to interrupt you one of the uh elements that came out of that early um planning uh was something that you were vitally interested in which was the core curriculum liberal studies general education those um sets of courses or academic experiences that the faculty determines is unique and important to define what an Ohio university education is or a Ohio Wesleyan education on that campus etc and it's often difficult to do because faculty we are all trained in our disciplines and often our first loyalty is not often always almost our first loyalties uh intellectually are to our disciplines and it's hard to get us out of thinking just in those terms to think in broader terms about the the shape of the curriculum that all the students are going to take some of we um and many universities across the country part of the student revolt in the 60s had been to get away from common requirements because in large part they'd probably been in place for 30 or 40 years and that's about the life cycle of these things and the faculty were happy to give them up it was one less thing that they had to worry about community I think the faculty here discovered after three or four years but maybe that had been a mistake whether they were ready to really um get down to the hard work of imagining something new rather than just re-establishing what had been old um I'm not sure but you took an active role as the president in that discussion and I I think that's um unique in many ways and I want you to talk about it a bit well first of all it was one of the things that attracted me here I found a underlying faculty interest in the concept that there ought to be a common core and I found the a genuine commitment to international education and I found a genuine commitment to undergraduate experience well uh one of the things I keep on my bookshelf and cherish is the university bulletin for the 1975-76 academic year it's uh it's fun to go back and read it it's very empty of any sense of common learning or common core and I understand the resistance that you talked about and so we put together a committee we are we're able to win a grant and we went out to Colorado Springs and this faculty group spent weeks talking to each other and they came back with a report to the faculty uh Professor Nick Dinas of the engineering college uh was the first to speak to the report in the fall convocation uh and there was a balance in the committee that helped win uh two years later the faculty senate had adopted it now that was a surprising and painful process uh and the concept of tears was put in the concept was put in place as a core for all undergraduate education that there were certain basic fundamental skills that there were certain basic areas of study and that there needed to be uh at the end of their experience some conscious effort to tie things together crossing disciplines and I think this core curriculum was the only undergraduate program to be awarded a program excellence award during the brief period that the state of Ohio funded excellence award and it was in that response you mentioned two things that were also important to you and were important to the campus as you said that was one of the things that attracted you here was the already the international posture of Ohio University is remarkable fact that this school and the the sort of out of the way 13 little counties in southwest southeastern Ohio had this international connection you want to talk a bit about that and how you then went about to work to build on it well it really goes back to john baker's day or even much earlier uh it was partially a product of projects so that we worked in Nigeria to help them establish what is essentially a land grant college we worked in Malaysia to try to bring the daily malaise into the business life of the country and so on uh we had a long history of involvement in Botswana and Swaziland and a lesser involvement in Lesotho and Namibia all part of the Saabic countries of uh that is we had faculty who were spending portions of their career working on the campuses in these countries uh we really assisted the government of Botswana to implement the national policy of universal primary education and I think the people involved in it took great pride in it and I think the leadership of Botswana recognized their contribution anyway then when we did this it was a conscious effort to get our faculty not the higher people uh to do the jobs which is frequently what is done in project but to send our faculty so they would come back to campus and teach with new understanding we built links to the library so we have a marvelous Malay collection uh and this is a direct product of the involvement and most of all we had a large pool of international students interestingly when I came in 75 the largest number were from Nigeria why because we'd had a faculty group there for many years and after Nigeria's economy went on in the doldrums uh our largest student group was Malaysian and at one time we had some 350 Malaysian students on campus and when the ambassador came to visit I said I think this is a mistake because they're creating their own village uh and we want them interacting with the students from Cleveland or the students from Cincinnati or the students from Gloucester uh and I think it was two things summed up in 1978 when China made an opening to the west the first real contact between Chinese higher education and the U.S. was a delegation that came to a number of campuses in the U.S. and we were the only campus in the Midwest that they visited uh and we were among the first campuses of next year to receive students under this opening to the west now they weren't students at all they were faculty who have been displaced by the cultural revolution and needed to get back in touch with their discipline uh and only later did the Chinese population turn out to be students and China succeeded Malaysia as the largest source of students uh and I think there are people like John Katie a name that will mean something to the old timers in the group and his work with the Southeast Asia program which was uh very very early for this sort of effort I once um spent an evening uh with a new faculty member here who would actually come from being on the faculty at Penn State and talking about the two schools I asked him what he thought the major difference was between Ohio University and Penn State and he said well in many ways they're very similar they're located in rural beautiful areas and they're bustling universities on the go and on the move he said what struck him was that there were about the same number of international students on both campuses but at Penn State you'd never know the international students were there while here we celebrated them and we had international week and that wonderful Saturday on court street when all the international students put out their booze of local cuisine and and local dancing and whatever the I should never have done this when we did something similar to this a month ago or three weeks ago I talked about the flags in the convo those wonderful flags from all the countries of the students that attend school here and it makes me proud every time I'm in there because it's that visible sign in an athletic arena uh of our international presence when I walked in a week later they were gone they're down and I was told oh something so much better is going to take their place I'm too old for something better at this point but anyway I always I like that that was a signal and not you know you and your administration and you later gave Joel Roody the credit for that idea and rightly so but I like the the way in which we tried to to make the presence of the international students on campus in southeastern Ohio a part of this university and a part of what it meant to go to school here and indeed and it worked um one of the things that a president has to do that most of us is a part of his or her life that most of us don't see is having to deal with the external communities and we've talked a little bit about your having to deal with the legislature I know that in Ohio it isn't quite as onerous as in other states where there's a a pecking order and every university has to go and lobby every year for its budget that in Ohio there's a formula that drives the that basic need but nevertheless you have to deal with legislators and with governors in particular and you get to know them and you get to know their flavor and I wish that you'd tell us a tale or two about some of the governors of Ohio that you had to deal with and what that was like well uh when I came Governor Rhodes was the governor and then he came back after a term out of office and Governor Rhodes had about a five second attention span and we went we needed to replace the old auditorium it was the most energy inefficient building on campus it would be uh sweating hot upstairs and there'd be ice on the floor in the dressing room it really had a lot of problems and so we were given a grant by nationwide and we launched a architectural competition which is how in the best of all possible worlds all buildings off the review bill and uh we didn't have any funding for it it did not make the capital bill that emerged from the board of regents now the operating budget is not very political in Ohio it's very formalized as you said the capital budget is a political free for all so uh a couple of trustees uh Kenner Bush who was the third generation of his family to be a trustee editor and publisher of the messenger local paper and uh had been state president of the chamber commerce uh Kenner was a trustee and Dean Jeffers who was the president and CEO of nationwide a very large and important insurance company Kenner and Dean Jeffers went with me to meet with Governor Rhodes and I had been in his office three or four times and the whole time you're trying to talk to him he's taking phone calls he's talking to three assistants and he's doing about a half dozen things simultaneously and this is not multitasking this is and uh we find the we let our case we got up to leave and Kenner turned turned to Dean and said Dean I don't think the governor heard us at all and Rhodes heard the comment as we were going out the door and he said Dean I I'll get your old swimming hole in and sure enough it was in the capital budget uh Rhodes did not like to come on college campuses I guess the the the pain of Kent State was still with him and uh one of the things I cherish about Dick Saless as governor one he was a very bright and able person and he loved college campuses and he made it a practice while he was a sitting governor to come to each public university campus in the state and he would spend two days and he would teach some classes and he would spend the night in the residence hall and uh generally get some flavor of the campus he'd been a Rhodes scholar and uh ended up uh interesting enough as the president of a liberal arts college Colorado college anyway uh Dick Saless came to campus and uh we had planned a reception at the end of his visit and someone was to bring him to my office and we were to go over to the old Baker Center for the reception and he came into my office and said Charlie may I close the door for a moment I said of course close the door and he sat down and he said now what I want to know is how you can deceive all these students and I was sort of taken back and I said what do you mean deceive he said they think they're on a small liberal arts campus and they're not a hundred universities the size of this one in the country now that's the nicest compliment you could possibly pay us uh Dick Saless was good to work with because he could take an idea accept it uh take her with it and then run with it and the program excellence was a good illustration of his running with an idea uh and George Vonovich of course is one of our graduates very loyal and quite ready to acknowledge his debt to Ohio University and to John C Baker uh but George is his own man and he would listen to you as he did uh but in the end he made up his own mind it was influenced only by what he thought he ought to do and that's a good definition of a public service they have three very different people uh each of them in turn I enjoyed I remember traveling one of the things that came with the medical school is that we had a series of regional teaching centers for the clinical experience and we got one that we really hadn't asked for because of some political maneuvering of the president of the senate and when the building was done uh the governor went over with me to dedicate the building and I had just gotten back from a trip to china and uh we were talking on the plane and I said well the students coming to campus now are in fact faculty who've been sent off to work in the coal mines and the rice fields during their re-education and I thought to myself that was a dumb thing to say I could see the wheels turning in his mind ah what a good idea well I cherish many memories of the group well we're into storytelling one of my favorite stories that you tell in the book it's completely non-related to governors and politicians but back home and back to the convo is that uh for the once again for the youngsters in the audience the students in the mid 80s we had as we have had uh now again for the last five or six years a very fine basketball team and there were several players in that generation who went on to at least brief careers in the pros and uh charlie tells a wonderful story about the two of them dave jamerson and snoopy ram because he'd be over working out in the in the weight room and over and overheard this following exchange uh tell him about jamerson and snoopy dave jamerson was uh set an ncda record for three-point shots uh he played I don't remember who but he only missed two shots the whole night and in both cases it was because the defensive player was so frustrated he knocked him on his rear now he could shoot uh just with a grace and a beauty uh I'm wondering but I'll go ahead with we had Malaysian guests and we decided to take them to a basketball game and it happened to be the night when he sent dave jamerson a ncda record 16 three points three pointers it's no longer the record it's a bit about 16 not bad huh anyway the Malaysian guests had never seen a basketball game so we took them after dinner to the game and after the game making conversation I said did you enjoy the game and the wife said well they really didn't seem very much to it so you just throw the ball up and it goes to the anyway to get back to the jamerson dave uh severely injured his knee and I've had chronic knee problems since my college days and I had had some surgery and was rehabbing in the convo room that the team used and dave was rehabbing his knee and so we fell into conversation and uh sometime later when his knee had improved dave is out shooting baskets uh trying to get his form back snoopy graham his teammate probably had more natural athletic ability than anyone I've seen play basketball here he was a wonder uh and snoopy says dave jamerson oh I wish I could shoot like you and jamerson says to snoopy snoopy you start about a million shots behind one of the things I felt badly about or you know it bothered me um when we did this before was that I didn't ask you to talk about the person that you shared the presidency with and without uh whose um help and um and guidance and getting you out of town and and uh entertaining a zillion people and that's clear I mean these jobs are at least um a job for a team and you had a good one and um and I wish that you'd talk a bit about that and also you know the the burden that comes with the job to the family to the to that part of your life we have been married 62 years now and it is terribly important to have someone in your life who will always accept you so if you spend a day as presidents do from time to time getting meet up the post rights and editorial and there's a student demonstration at a faculty group comes in to raise cane about something and you sit at the end of the day and you go home and somebody says oh you're not so bad and she was always uh my sanity base and had a regular practice of periodically she would call Marie White and say all right next weekend the calendar is to be clear and we would go off on a trip uh dictated by the book backroads and country ends now she liked country ends I thought they were a pill because the beds were all too short but and uh without her help I don't think we would have built the core of friends for the university over the course of our 19 years she entertained over 50 000 people in that home entertained them with style and grace and that made a big difference in the the efforts of the university to build private support Charlie I think I'm getting signs from Scott that uh the evening is coming to a close and so we'll let Scott into the Charlie I'm wondering in the last few minutes of the program if you might be willing to take some questions from the audience I would be overjoyed to take questions well I'll do all the answering so I'll start since I'm dean of the library um and get to do these things occasionally so I was in I was in Japan at Chubu University about three years ago and heard an extraordinary story that I found hard to believe and it was about squirrels oh I'm wondering if you could tell a bit of that well we were actively being courted by a Japanese city to open a campus and this is sometime in the 80s they had set aside 25 acres of land they had raised 25 million dollars to build the first buildings and all they wanted was us to say yes and so I visited the campus and talked with the city council and we entertained the city council in our home and the marching band came up and serenaded to them and oh they thought that was wonderful and they went home and after working with the numbers I came to the painful conclusion it just wouldn't work so I had to write a note saying no uh they accepted this with grace and some time went by and the mayor of Kabaki City wrote me and said we are opening a new subway line in in the fall and we have a park at the terminus for it and we were all so impressed with those squirrels that ran all over your campus would you please send us a dozen squirrels six males six female and maybe they'll people the park with squirrels well you can't believe how complicated it is to send uh critters like that overseas Jim Bryant the vice president for regional higher education was a man who could do the impossible and so I said okay figure out how to do it and sure enough he did and I have no idea what the squirrels are running wild in that park or not but I've always wanted to go back and see any other questions yeah whoa whoa thank you very much as just a little addendum our daughter was in the Peace Corps in Botswana and reported that uh you could mention Harvard Yale Stanford and you got blank stares mentioned Ohio University oh yes we know Ohio University actually the largest alumni dinner I ever went to was in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia no thank you you're very kind well I thought surely somebody would have had a grudge coming out of the past some decision that we made that they found troubling and puzzling something that we did or failed to do or yes please what was I do I'm not sure what you're talking about is this did our summer programs Clayton Pell is who you're thinking of these were summer Ohio program in the humanities just it did did Lois was stalwart part of it well thank you Scott thank you very much for coming out on a damn we thank our presenters I want to put a plug in for this book it is a wonderful read it really gives a glimpse into Ohio University's history there were so many things that I found out that I just didn't know and what's special for you tonight is that this book is on sale right over there from the Ohio University Press normally it's 49.95 but for you it's on sale at 30 discount for $34.96 now for those on our web audience you can go to your local bookseller and buy a copy of that you'll have to pay full price though similarly you can also buy this from Amazon and you can even check it out of a library if you so choose so please join me in thanking President Ping and Professor Kraus


all the way sparked up trying to stop us, baby. I think Walmart stopped by all the way sparked up. They got a whole Walmart delivery van now, baby. So comment below and let me know if this is going on in your area. But it's time for us to get to busy. I hope you guys are with me. We about to move kind of shifty. If you just now choose in the channel, just so you know, I move fast, talk fast and get cash. Let's have a blast. Walmart 2 orders 9.1 miles for 2607. Thank God for his blessings. Let's go. All the numbers you already sparked that did you. It ain't, baby. It's the car. One order. Jewel Osco 51 items 2.8 miles for 4704. It's time for us to get this dough. Let's go.  Order number one. We about to have some fun, baby. Just so you guys know, I dropped my business partner off at the Jewel Osco.   Then we're going to drop that Jewel Osco order off, baby. We're going to keep on moving. We're going to keep on moving. We're going to get this money and hopefully it's losing. Come on. Now we've got a few items all off. What's going on here? Bop. Let's bring that door down first. Twig. Knock, knock, knock, knock. Step back and open the phone. Smack. Let's go. Drop off order number two, baby.  Come on.  Turn that drone off right quick. Ah. Let's get busy, baby. Let's get busy. They got a decent amount of room on this porch, baby. So we can get busy real soon. Bring that doorbell so they can come out here. Mm. Put it up, put it up. What's wrong with my mouth? It's a little bit of a mouthful. Is that my money? Don't know about that.  Let me know if it's all about that. Step back and open the phone. Smack. Let's go. This is the cool order to get an order. This joint is huge. Boy, they got wood and everything in it, John. That's how you put up the dolly. Put that wood right there. What about that? Turn that fireplace on. Get it on. This is our first time hunting. Look at this seat.  Oh, dang it. Oh, that's not going to work, guys. We're going to have to take these joints, man. Two by two. Let's get this door. Let's go. All my niggas falling.  Free my- I'm staying on the mess of my pants. Look at what that wood. I said that you put my hoodie on there, but it is what it is, baby. I'm going to grab this one, man. I'm going to try to grab this right here. So I don't want to do it. I'm messing my shirt. How you doing, sir? Of course you couldn't control that. Kids just being kids.   You have a great day, sir. You're welcome. Order number three. It's time to get this cheese. One by one order, 2.2 miles for 1060. Oh, I'll pee nips. You see, I got a nifty blue hat on today, baby. Let's go. Up and all the way. Turned up 10 to the maximum, baby. They only got 10 items. This ain't no tip. This is no tip order. And it's for the lowest. We've been seeing a lot of orders that are pretty low. The eyes, I don't know what's going on. The water is parked up. They probably lowered the base pair. So that's what I'm thinking, because these orders have been terrible. It's hot when that door goes. I think the mosquito just bit me. I don't know what to do with you now. What you doing? It's hot, man. Step back a little. The photo here, you know what I'm saying? Man, let's go. Order number four. We're back for some more. The 3.5 miles for 2185. Let's stay alive. Look, I don't know if we're going to stay alive. This joint. We want to get no other orders, so we decide to take this one. This one, the XC, is the extra large order, 79 Ives, baby. So comment below and let me know if you'll do this order to get an order. Let's go. Here, I want this order to get an order, baby. This is nothing. I'm talking about this joint. It's huge. I'm going to try to carry these two bags. We still have two things of water. They got the alkaline water. Gatorade. I'm going to put this down first. Let me get both of them out of the car first, because I'm taking my time. They can't get stuck. Oh, snap. Drop stuff. Drop and they can't do this. Drop and they can't be sued. Put that in the bag. Right right there. Put this on the right arm. Carry this on the left arm. Let's go. I don't even know how all this stuff going to fit right here. It's way too much stuff. Not going to do it all. In case he's going to come over and get busy. I'm going to put this down here. Hello. You're welcome. Let's see if she give us anything. All right, you have a good one. That's everything. You're welcome. You too. So we just got done delivering that order and guess what? The lady was talking about some. You guys don't know how much you're helping me. No, help me. Give me some tips, man. Give me some money. Give me some tips. That joint was low key critical. I ain't going to lie to y'all, man. It was critical. It was a lot of stuff. I don't understand how people justify or think it's okay for you to get all these groceries and all this stuff or even one thing of groceries. No matter what, I'm going to tip the person. That's just me. But everybody was raised different.  But you out of pocket. I was going to tell you that. And I know that we helped you. Why you don't help us? But either way, go over to begin another order so we can go. Let's go. Order five and six. We paid him for no money, Mitch. Oh, order one more to 1.7 miles for 2,181. You know he about to get it done and hopefully we have some fun. Order number six is all. One more to order 6.8 miles for 4,173. It's time to get this cheese. Let's go. We're here in the back of Walmart, right? Look what they got, baby. They trying to stop our money. Look, wow. This is their new delivery truck. And one of the guys, come look. Grocery. They trying to take us up top, God. And it's 100% electric. They really trying to get busy. Dang. And they trying to hate on us, guys. Shoo. This one guy told me that they're going to start doing it in like a week or two. This joint clean. Look at the inside of this, John. That joint clean. Brand new. Talisha Mason. I'll see you with the all white loaves, all. All these drones. These are just one-throughs right here. They still picking up. Are they still picking it? Yeah. So you're going to be driving and you're going to be driving. Damn, Freddie. So it's going to be two people in the truck at a time or one? Two. Two in the truck at a time. They trying to steal our money. I don't really need the schools, though. Yeah, because they raise order. Because there's a lot of orders I need to be out. So you're going to be right along with them. So because I've seen what does one do with Juan. You know Juan, he told me that he started one of these in Roundlake. Yeah, they got one. It's operating. So they got one in Roundlake here in Wales. Walkiegan. Walkiegan. They got one designed, too? Yep. Anyaq. Everybody getting one. That's the new department they had on. Well, did y'all get more money and all that stuff? Yeah. Yeah, get that money. As long as somebody get it. Sure. Yeah, but we go in the house with the groceries, too. So we got to wear body cams and stuff. Yeah, it's wherever they want. See this? That's what they do. It makes you like one door at a time, though. Yeah, I take them in some people's houses. I ain't supposed to, but I do. Like older people and stuff, I don't be wanting to have to carry all that stuff. I'll take it in there sometime. Yeah, but you don't know if they have serial killers. No, I keep a gun with me now, but, you know. Yeah, I keep a gun. I'm keeping a gun with me at all times. Hey, I seen that dog, man. Yeah, you saw that? You know, that was crazy. That lady came out with that broom on them. We are here to come up with this order to get an order, baby. I'm not even going to pull off this dolly, man. I'm going to take three trips, man. I'm going to take two. What am I going to do? I'm going to grab these, put these on the arms. Arms ski. Put them on our arms, ski, ski. Put these chips on top of the water, take the water, and then come and get the other water. Now, I could grab one in each hand, but this plastic is not the strongest on these waters, these axemons waters, for some reason, baby. Either way, we're about to get this shimony. Like this, huh? No, no. Just in case you want to come out here and get busy.  You got to go back to pick up this other order to get an order. It still was saying, get ready. So we're going to keep it steady. Get this money. Right there. That's from the water. That's from the Aguario. I know I know how to speak Spanish a little bit, but did you? You ain't know that, did you? It's not like it's hot. Step back and have a photo. Let's go. It's order to get an order. They got nothing but drink, guys. I'm talking about nothing but drinks. All this stuff. Well, not everything, but like 98% of it. They have a few like ice creams and stuff like that. I don't think they have a party or something probably. We're about to have a party. I'm going to load that up first. Let me try to see if I can get these two out here. I don't want to do too much dying, trying to, oh, snap. Yeah, I heard that, and it sounds a bit weird. I don't want to try to break this down. But I think that comes to us with the viola. How are you doing, sir? If you want me to, I can bring them right in, right by the door right here, you guys. All right. Whatever. I don't know if he can help me or just whatever works. OK, you're welcome. You guys having a party? Yeah. I knew it. I know.  Round two, fight. I don't know what the dolly going to say. Oh, the dolly couldn't do this. The thumb is going to be too small. I should have put that pop on the top, but I didn't. This is the last thing. I called the screen for you. You guys have a great one. Oh, thank you, sir. I appreciate it. You have a lovely one. Guess what, guys? We got an extra $10 scheme, baby. They gave us an extra $10. We are high. That's $51, baby. We getting this money. I hope you are too. Make sure you subscribe, but make sure you give me a thumbs up, and do not skip those ads. We're going to continue to get to this bag. Let's go. We are here to drop this order. Huh? Oh, OK. We're here to drop off this order. I think it's going to take us like two trips, baby. Oh, snap. Drop it like a bop, bop, bop. We got some contractors or somebody else out, I think, to get them righteous. Drop those eggs right there, right there. They got a decent amount of drinks, too. They got some ice teas and all that stuff. We got to go back to the car and get it. And we just got our new bag, guys. We got the new truck bag, like the square ones, the big square ones. We got a new bag, so we got two of them. Let's go get this last bag when we're gone to get it all. And we have another order to pick up. So close that. I don't got to bring out this new bag to get this bag. They got some more iced tea.  I never tasted that kind of like, oh, it's a zero. I don't know if I'll be drinking that.  I have a vitamin water. Drop it like it's high. Drop it like it's high.  Step back in with the photos. Mac, let's go. Order number seven. Thank God for us, but we getting this money. We stressing. War by war to two miles for $13.96. We back in the mix. Let's go. Now put that top on the side. So y'all starting them deliveries, you said in July? Yeah, I'm missing them in July. Y'all get the whip, the truck and all that? Yeah. Y'all, I think you're going to like it. I don't need to put that. Oh, I hope so. Yeah, it's going to be sweet. It ain't really, you're going to have some good days and bad days just like anything else. Yeah, it's like everything. Yeah. It's going to be, it's going to be cool. Y'all going to be to be out.  It's going to be you and whoever you with. Y'all going to cheer, relax and just do your thing. Yeah. We are here, baby. It's all up to this order to get in order. They got the doggy doggy doggy. Look at the little doggy. It ain't barking this way. It's just chillin. Let me down now. This is because we're going to come over here and get busy. That little doggy is chillin. See, that's how my dog is. Chill. Put this on, oh man. Just, just what watermelon juice is got in the bag. I just saw it. I'm going to wipe this down now. Luckily, we got some wipes this, huh? Step back and I'm going to follow you. I don't want to be a fool, baby. Step back and I'm going to follow you. Let's go. That's what I'm saying. This this is from Yeah, they ordered the other day when it was pouring down rain of the day What for 45 Wait, we don't get 38 90 baby for this order guess what Both of the orders might be at the same time right one of my phone one of my business for the phone We thought it was the same order, but it was the same order. It was two separate orders going to the same place Both orders were 15 bags of ice ice ice, baby Uh, uh, uh, uh, we going back to that when we went to the other day start with this ice ice, baby And we about to get 38 90 to do this baby. I hope you guys are with me. I hope you guys move your shifty I hope you smash subscribe button gave me a thumbs up and did not skip those and We're about to pull up to one needs to get this bag. Let's go and just like that. It is the end of the video I hope you guys enjoyed the content today. We made 23185 enough for us to survive a time as a baby Hold on wait one second It is now one or nine leaves on the grass at any time y'all so much shine Look, I want to pause out to you guys that I messed up with the gopro I thought I was recording when we jumped on the ice, but I wasn't baby Lead the way go we came and got that dough and y'all so us go I see you guys on next also if you want to buy some of the merch Read it for the brand the best friend on the brand if you ask me all you have to do is to email me at Wrongs house user gmail.com and let me know what you're trying to do. What colors what kinds like what you want to do, baby I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I'll see you guys on next one We go we go before you already know this dk and I'm on my way


It's that time again! This is Katni with your weekly Python on hardware news. Every week, we put together the Python for Microcontrollers newsletter. It is available through AdafruitDaily.com. Head over to sign up and see all of the past and current newsletters, or tune in each week to hear what's going on. Adafruit is working with the team to open safely as we continue to navigate COVID-19. We are following the same safety protocols we have been since the beginning and will continue to do so. At this time, regular non-COVID-related orders are shipping, but expect delays as we ramp up. We are working hard to get more items in stock, so if there is an out-of-stock item you're looking to purchase, sign up to be notified when it's back in stock. For more information, visit adafruit.com slash open safely. The SEEDS Studio We-O Terminal is now officially supported by Circuit Python. The SEEDS We-O Terminal is an at-mail SAMD 51-base microcontroller with wireless connectivity supported by a Realtek RTL8720DN, which supports both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, providing a backbone for IoT projects. The RTL8720DN isn't currently supported, and therefore Bluetooth and Wi-Fi functionality are not currently available in Circuit Python. The We-O Terminal itself is equipped with a 2.4-inch LCD screen, onboard IMU, microphone, buzzer, microSD card slot, light sensor, and infrared emitter. Details available on hackster.io and circuitpython.org. The first alpha release of Circuit Python 6.0 is out now. It is a renumbered version of 5.4.0, because iSquared C Slave Module and the class have been renamed to iSquared C Peripheral. This is a breaking change. It's an alpha because the developers may rename or remove additional APIs. It is relatively stable. Feature-wise, this release adds basic lower-power support when in time.sleep and initial ESP32-S2 support. The lower-power work changed timekeeping and may have introduced bugs. Please use 5.3.0 if you need a stable version of Circuit Python. New features and improvements since 5.4.0 beta-1 include SDIO and SD card IO for native SD card support available on SAMD51 in presence, improved performance and bus IO support for ESP32-S2, support for the SAME54, a number of bug fixes and improved Dutch, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish translations. Thank you to everyone who was involved in this release. Check out this watch, Running Circuit Python, based on the Open Hardware Summit 2020 badge. For more information, check out Sedatius on Twitter. SciPy 2020, the 19th annual Scientific Computing with Python conference, is a virtual conference being held July 6th through 12th 2020. The annual SciPy conference brings together over 900 participants from industry, academia and government to showcase their latest projects, learn from skilled users and developers and collaborate on code development. The full program consists of five days of tutorials and talks July 6th through 10th and two days of developer sprints July 11th and 12th. Visit SciPy 2020.SciPy.org to learn about the event. Humble Bundle is offering a pay what you want offer for Python learning text with $1,400 worth of materials. A portion of each sale goes to the Python Software Foundation, details available at HumbleBundle.com. In this week's Circuit Python deep dive livestream, Scott streamed his work with the ESP32-S2 SPI bug and discussed networking. Check out the latest video and past videos at adafru.it slash deep dive. Liz ported the Blinka Jump game from using an Adafruit Pi badge to using an LED matrix display. Check it out at BlitzCityDIY on Twitter. Development on the Open Book E-Incrator continues with a new revision out in the last week. Joey writes, I've assembled and tested one, written a system test script and a sketch to burn the bootloader using a Feather M0, completed a first draft of the documentation, and I'm almost done with a kitspace bomb. The goal for these is to sell the bare PCBs on Tindy for folks who want to build at home. I had hoped to have that done by the end of June, but pandemic drama has slowed me down. Still, they should be available by next week. Watch the Tindy store for updates. Details on hackaday.io. Thea wrote up a blog post about designing Winterbloom's big honking button, a URAC module running Circuit Python. Check it out at blog.thea.codes. Anthony posts to Twitter, Aquarium Automation consisting of an Adafruit Feather NRF 52-840 Express dev board plus four Feather Wings running Circuit Python. For more details, check out vacant3rdman on Twitter. This project is an expressive system's ESP32-S2 Saola running Circuit Python 6.0 with .0 alpha with the ESP32-SPI library to also use an Adafruit Airlift Feather Wing for Wi-Fi. Python vs. Code posts to Twitter using the new PyLane language server in Visual Studio Code to get auto imports. Davy posts to YouTube and Twitter a review of the Pew Pew M4 game development platform. In this week's episode of Microcontrollers with King or North, learn about using ultrasonic sensors with Circuit Python on Arduino, available on YouTube. FreeCodeCamp has added four new Python certifications, details available at freecodecamp.org. After less is post about using requests in JSON and Python, all about code posted to Twitter testing out a new requests block in edu blocks to create a simple COVID-19 tracker. Linux Market Share climbed to an all-time high in June, details on omgubuntu.co.uk. PowerStamp is a USB-C power management module that provides power source management and charge control for IoT devices programmable in MicroPython, available on Kickstarter. For details, check out MyronWW on Twitter. MakerFabs posts to GitHub, a guide to building a MicroPython TTS weather broadcast based on ESP32 and audio. PDBPerks posts to Twitter, porting an Altair simulator to ESP8266 using MicroPython, an OLED display, and IR for GPIO, capable of octal data entry. Learn about web scraping crypto prices with Python using beautiful soup on TowardsDataScience.com. KoanLPy is a Python package for natural language processing of the Korean language. Details on koanLPy.org. Learn how to create and modify PDF files in Python in this tutorial on realpython.com. Radu posts to Medium how to get free historical and live stock prices and FX rates using Python. Learn Python in 10 minutes a day in this series on TowardsDataScience.com. Make your code great with Python style. Learn some tricks to write better Python code in this post on livecodestream.dev. The number of CircuitPython supported microcontrollers and single board computers continues to grow. There was one new board added this week, the SEEDS Studio WIO terminal. Are you interested in adding a new board to CircuitPython? Check out the Adafruit Learn system for a series of guides about getting your board added to CircuitPython and CircuitPython.org. There are three new Python on hardware-related guides in the Adafruit Learn system this week, including in the latest translated guide Circuit Playground Express Piano de Limones. Learn in Spanish how to build a light-up capacitive touch-tone piano complete with fruit in this guide from Álvaro Figueroa. Learn how to write a side-scrolling video game based on the Chrome browser's jumping dinosaur game Easter Egg designed for the Adafruit Pi badge. Use CircuitPython's DisplayIO module to create sprites, text, and other game features to build your own game in this guide from Liz Clark. The current number of CircuitPython libraries is 262. This includes both the Adafruit CircuitPython libraries and the CircuitPython community libraries. There was one new library this week, Adafruit CircuitPython BH1750, as well as a number of updated libraries. As always, visit CircuitPython.org slash libraries to download the latest version of the Adafruit CircuitPython bundle. Included in this week's updates from the CircuitPython team, Dan's continuing to work on an implementation of underscore BLEIO that supports the HCI Bluetooth protocol available on the ESP32 used in our airlift boards. He has first light. He can talk to the ESP32 and ask it simple commands. He's also fixed a number of small bugs in various BLE libraries, and there are still more to fix. Lucien worked on creating a timer management system for STM32, which allows various different modules in the port to share a pool of timer peripherals. The system allows modules to prioritize certain kinds of timers based on whether they have pins exposed, aiming for the minimum number of conflicts possible between the internal timer use, such as modules like PulseOut and RGB Matrix, and external use, such as PWM Out. He also worked on some miscellaneous bug fixes to modules and peripherals affected by this new timer mediator and fixed a crash related to Simflex SPI on the STM32. Melissa ported the PyPortal library over to Blinka so that many of the PyPortal examples work with little modification. As she's ported over examples, she's also found small bugs in the PyPortal library and display IO for Blinka that she's slowly been fixing, which is leading to a more stable display IO for Raspberry Pi and other single board computers. Scott started to work on network related libraries and brainstorming what the API should be for Circuit Python on the ESP32 S2. He's also hoping to reduce the memory overhead and making JSON requests because they are very common. He may also add memory debugging and monitoring APIs to better track how many allocations occur and what size for a section of code. EuroPython 2020 this year will be an online conference from July 23rd to 26th. Attending the conference days will require a ticket and participating in the sprints will be free. Check out ep2020.europython.eu for details. PyCon AU has announced that they are holding PyCon line AU in August. Check out 2020.pycon.org.au for more information. Py Gotham is a New York City based eclectic pie centric conference covering many topics. Py Gotham TV is taking place October 2nd and 3rd 2020 with a single track of talks presented online. The call for proposals is now open at cfp.pygotham.tv. Visit 2020.pygotham.tv for more information. PyCon India will be held online from October 3rd through 5th 2020. A call for proposals is now open through the 14th of August. Visit in.pycon.org slash 2020 for details regarding the CFP and the conference. Translating Circuit Python is now easier than ever. Translations make the project more accessible to a broader range of folks. Adding or improving translations is a great way to get started contributing to the project. With the help of fellow open source project Weblate, we're making it even easier. You can create a new account just for Weblate or sign in using other sites like Google or GitHub. If you write another language, visit adafru.it slash translatecp sign in and start translating. Looking for more Python on hardware all week? Join the Adafruit community on Discord and check out the help with Circuit Python and Circuit Python channels. We're over 21,000 strong and continuing to grow. You'll find a supportive, positive community filled with like-minded folks. Join at adafru.it slash Discord. And that is your Python on hardware news for this week. Visit adafruitdaily.com to subscribe to the newsletter or tune in again next week.