Welcome to Spotlight. I'm Bruce Gulland. And I'm Liz Wade. Spotlight uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand, no matter where in the world they live. Some people drink it with food in the afternoon. Some people drink it to give themselves energy in the morning. Some people drink it as part of a ceremony. Some people drink it when they are sick. Some people drink it hot. Some people drink it very cold. People have been drinking it for hundreds of years in hundreds of countries. What is it? Tea. Tea comes from the chamelea sinensis plant. People pick the leaves off the plant. They set the leaves to dry. The tea leaves are ready when all the water from the leaves is evaporated. There are many ways to prepare the leaves before making the tea drink. Some tea leaves are left open to the air before they are dried. This makes the leaves darker. They will taste stronger. Some people mix tea leaves with flowers, oils and other plants to give teas different tastes. The people who originally discovered tea developed these methods many years ago. The story of tea begins in China. Chinese history says that over 5,000 years ago, Chinese emperor Shen Neng discovered tea. Stories say that a dry leaf from the tea plant fell into the emperor's cup of hot water. The emperor saw that his water turned dark. He tasted the water and liked it. This was the first cup of tea. However it started, tea became very popular in China. People believed that tea was healthy. People in China also created many different ways to prepare tea. In fact, a man named Lu Yu wrote a book just about tea late in the 8th century. Soon after this, tea travelled to Japan. Japanese Buddhist priests travelled to China. And they brought tea back with them. In Japan, people developed special ceremonies to serve tea. Serving tea became a new form of art. It was most common among wealthy people. Tea was an important part of both Chinese and Japanese culture. It had travelled to other Asian countries too. But tea had not yet travelled anywhere else in the world. Finally, in the late 1500s, Portuguese travellers brought small amounts of tea back to Europe. Portugal was one of the first European countries to trade with China. Portugal worked with the Netherlands to move the tea through Europe. Dutch ships took tea to France and other countries on the Baltic Sea. Only very wealthy people had enough money to drink tea in Europe. It took many months to transport the tea from Asia. And only a limited amount was transported. But more countries started to trade with China. They also brought tea back to Europe. Prices became lower and more people could drink tea. Today, England is the European country most known for tea. British traders started shipping tea to England in the late 1600s. Tea trade had become a very profitable business. England imported about 18,000 kg of tea a year in 1669. Ten years later, the country imported six times that amount of tea. British colonists also brought tea wherever they settled. Tea became very important in India. It is still a very important crop there. And Indian tea is known around the world. Tea played an important part in one British colony you might know. This colony is now known as the United States of America. England sent tea to America. But as time went on, England raised the taxes on the tea and other goods it sent. The people living in the colonies did not like these taxes. To protest the high taxes, a group of colonists took a large shipment of tea and threw it into the ocean. Today, this event is known as the Boston Tea Party. It was one of the most important events in the American Revolution. Tea has also changed over many years. In the past, people drank tea by putting the leaves directly into the water. But around 1908, an American inventor developed a new method, tea bags. Thomas Sullivan put the tea in a small silk bag. This bag of tea could be put directly into the hot water. At first, people in Britain did not like tea bags. But during World War II, people could not get their normal tea. So they had to use tea bags. Today, most tea bags are made of paper. And they are very popular in many parts of the world. Today, people on every continent drink tea. But people in different places drink tea differently. In the United Kingdom, tea became part of the daily meal. Traditionally, two meals involved tea in British homes. These meals became popular in the 1600s. The first was afternoon tea, or low tea. This was popular among wealthy people. They would drink tea and eat small sandwiches of meat and bread. This meal happened around three o'clock in the afternoon. The other meal was called high tea. High tea was a larger meal eaten later in the night. It was popular among poorer people. In Western Asia and the Middle East, a popular way to enjoy tea is as masala chai. Masala chai is a drink made from black tea. But this drink has sugar, spices and milk in it. Around the world, people boil plants and flowers to make drinks similar to tea. These are called tisans. A tisan is any drink made from hot water and any plant material, except from the tea plant. They are also often called herbal teas. In areas of South America, people enjoy a particular tisan. The drink is called mate. People make it from the leaves of the yerba mate plant. A person puts dry yerba mate leaves into a dry gourd. This is a container made from a dried vegetable skin. He then adds water to the gourd. He drinks the liquid through a thin metal tube, a bombilla. People in Southern Africa make a drink called roibos. This hot drink is made similar to tea. But instead of tea leaves, it uses the leaves from the roibos plant. The drink is a red colour and is often called red tea. However you drink tea, the next time you have a cup, think of all the people around the world who are joining you. Enjoy! The writer of this program was Joshua Leo. The producer was Michio Ozaki. The voices you heard were from the United Kingdom and the United States. You can listen to this program again and read it on the internet at www.radioenglish.net. This program is called The Amazing History of Tea. Visit our website to download our free official app for Android and Apple devices. We hope you can join us again for the next Spotlight program. Goodbye!


Be successful online without experience or technical knowledge. Oh my God, I hope you didn't actually believe that. Yeah, people go, wow, the internet's great. I could go in there and make tons of money and not know anything.  So in this video, I'm gonna talk about what you do need to know so you can make real money and you can skip over all the BS. The internet has opened up a lot of opportunities for us, okay, and it's enabled a lot of us to freelance on different projects and be anywhere in the world at home, traveling on a cruise ship or anywhere else in the world we wanna be. But it's also been kind of a scam because a lot of people are saying, hey, you can go online, you can make all kinds of money, you don't have to know anything. Do you really believe that? I mean, really, do you believe that? That you can go online and not know anything and people are gonna pay you for not knowing anything? No, that's not true. You could wipe that thought from your brain. I wanna share with you some of the titles of stuff I saw online. I like this one here. How to make money online without special knowledge or skills. That would have been a good title. Five ways to make money online. No skills, no experience. Here's a good one, and I love the second word. 10 stupidly easy ways to make money with no skills. How to earn money without any knowledge. Here's one of my favorites right here. The best work from home jobs that take little or no experience. Wait, what? I mean, the quick answer to this is yeah, okay, okay, anybody can make money online, okay? That's like saying if you go out into the job market without any skills, you can still get a job. It's just not gonna be a very high paying job. You're gonna be a fast food worker.  Some things that really don't require any skills. I mean, if you could push a lawn mower and I'm not cutting down anybody who does yards, but I'm just saying, you don't have to be trained a lot to do that particular job. So if you do find a way to make money online with zero skills, you're gonna be paid at the very lowest end of the spectrum. Now, I just wanted to say to you, there's no shortcut, okay? There's no shortcut, but that doesn't mean you can't make tremendous money online and not have any skills right now but change that situation. Now, instead of saying how can I make money online without any skills, I would say to myself, what are the most marketable skills online that's gonna pay me the most amount of money?  So here's the formula. There's only four steps. Four steps, okay? First step, develop a valuable skill, okay? And that's pretty easy to do.  So if you pick up the skill and you learn how to apply it to a customer out there that's willing to pay for it, you're gonna make a lot of money. Now, number three, this is the tough part that some of us don't like, learn how to sell that skill to new customers, okay? You constantly wanna get new customers. Now I have some customers that I've had for 10 years, okay, since we started Survival K Food, they're still buying from us, that's very cool but we've also acquired new customers and you need to do that because your customer base will get smaller at some point and the reason it's gonna get smaller is people die, they quit buying your product, for whatever reasons they go to the competitor so if you don't constantly add to your customer base, you can go out of business. So you gotta learn that skill of how to sell to new customers. Now I have some great videos on this channel on sales, just search sales on my channel and you're gonna find those videos. And the next thing you wanna do is trade your service for money, okay?  If you don't do what I'm telling you to do in this video, let's say you say, well, JR, I just don't wanna acquire any skills, I don't really wanna do that, I just wanna make some money online. You can do that, I mean, you could do that but you're always gonna be relegated to the very lowest end of the rung, the very lowest income. And what's life about anyhow? It's about learning new skills and discovering new things, isn't it?  So let's take a moment here and let's talk about how to create really great value. First thing you need to do is prioritize your activities, okay? Everybody has 24 hours a day. Almost everybody who's not successful will tell you that they don't have any time left in the day.  He has an AI company that is working with restoring people who have been paralyzed. He has a rocket company who sends rockets into space, he has a car company that has just taken over the world. He's got a boring company where he's changing transportation because there's 3D transportation and he looks at 3D transportation as the sky, the ground, and the earth. So everybody complains about not having enough time, but the fact is you're probably allocating your time wrong. I know, you don't wanna hear it, you don't wanna hear it, but I'm just saying how about if you allocated your time differently? How about instead of Netflix, instead of HBO, instead of some game show that you were watching, instead of watching a ball game, that you actually spent that time educating yourself? You did some mentorship, you did some entry level stuff so you could learn some things, because if you devoted your time to that, you're essentially gonna become a more valuable person. And this is how our economy works. The most valuable people get paid the most value. Now, I'm not saying valuable as a human being, I'm saying valuable as skills, okay? A guy who actually cleans our office here, who wipes down the tables and all that, he's a very valuable human being. He's very important to his family and his kids and everything, very valuable, but not to the market.  And that's just how it works. Now, ideally we want you to be a great person, but the point is you've gotta improve your skills if you wanna make more money, it's just a fact.  Over the years, I've sold millions of dollars of digital and physical products and I can sell courses based on that now because they go, yeah, he sells all this other stuff, so I'm gonna buy his course on how to do that. I'm gonna listen to his video just like you are right now.  He actually did these things. So when you become an expert in these areas, people will pay you a lot of money. I know I did consulting for a while and I started out at $500 a month and then $1,500 a month and $4,000 a month. One of my last contracts, and I quit doing it because it takes too much of my time, I was making $2,000 an hour, which was not a bad income, right? To coach somebody on a telephone and that was on a telephone. That wasn't even person to person. So the point I'm trying to make with you is you can make more money as long as you become more valuable. Quit thinking I will take the lowest rung of whatever job there is and just pay me something and I won't learn anything. Don't do that. If you become an expert in something, don't settle for it. Let's go back to Elon Musk. He became an expert in the automotive industry. They said he couldn't do it. So he says, really? I think I'll become an expert in rocket ships. He's not a rocket scientist. And in a recent interview on 60 Minutes, when they asked him how he built this rocket company and he didn't know anything about rockets, he answered with, there's books. So you could pretty much learn anything on the internet. Now type in any subject you want and I promise you you're gonna find instruction on how to do it. I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's how to set a broken leg to how to write code. You're gonna find instruction online and a lot of it's free. Now if you wanna organize it in a nice format, you buy somebody's courses. I have courses below on Facebook ads when drop shipping on Shopify stores. You can go down there and look at those. Those are organized. They'll lead you right through the path. Save you a lot of time.  So you can learn these things and if you become an expert in one area, why not become an expert in another area and another area and another area and open up more and more and more and more possibilities for you to make money online. Now I'm gonna tell you to add a business soft skill. What is a business soft skill? Well, a business soft skill is something that really can't be quantified but it's something like this. Lean in for a little bit. It's something like, be nice to people. Yeah. You know, we've all heard the stories about actors that are so difficult to deal with. They make a lot of money but they have all these high demands and stuff. And after a while, the producers say, let's just get another actor. They're too much work, they're too much hassle. So when you're developing these skills, also develop the skill of getting along with people, of being nice to people, of helping them out, of being kind to everybody that you deal with no matter what rung of society they're in. Why would you treat anybody different because they make less money than you than somebody who makes more money than you? Makes no sense. But if you treat everybody equal, you'll be known as that person that's really easy to work with. Maybe you're more expensive but you're easy to work with. People are willing to pay for that. So if you really wanna make money online, get more skills. Get more skills. Did you understand that from this video? Get more skills. Maybe you clicked on this video for other reasons. Maybe you thought, well, I just need to make a few dollars a month. If I could make two or three hundred dollars a month, I'll be good. But what if you could make a thousand? What if you could make 10,000? What if you could make 100,000? I gotta tell you the first time our company sold $100,000 in a day. Yes, I said a day. I was ecstatic. I thought, wow, I didn't used to make that a year. And now I make that in a single day. Now, do we make that every single day from that point forward? No, it doesn't work that way online. I will tell you that. It's not like every single day we make hundreds of thousands of dollars. That'd be great, but we don't do that. We have sold millions of dollars and we sell millions of dollars. And that's nice, but that's a year. That's not daily. Maybe we'll get to that point in one day. Maybe I'll do a million dollar a day. You know, I'm looking forward to it. But why settle for less? Why spend the rest of your life going, I'll think I'll just settle for less. You know, it was funny the other day. I was out with my wife and we were behind a trash truck. And the guy was forking one of those big trash bins and he was dumping it into the truck. And he looked eerily similar to a guy who knew that was online that did digital marketing. They looked alike.  You know, the guy driving that trash truck, I don't know what he made. I have no idea. It wouldn't be a whole, whole lot of money because he's driving a trash truck. Not that there's anything wrong with him or not that he's not valuable, but he's not gonna make a lot of money because a lot of people can do that. The guy that looks like him, physically everything looks like him, online makes millions of dollars a year doing digital marketing. Where did they decide, you know, this is my value? You know, the guy sat in that truck one day and he said, this is my value.  The other guy went online and said, hey, I'm worth millions of dollars and I'm gonna start asking for it. I'm gonna start learning things and doing things to make all this money. Where does that happen?  You know, it doesn't make you a better person. Don't think it does. If you make more money, that doesn't make you a better person or a better dad or a better father, brother, whatever. But it will make you more money, okay? And if that's what you wanna do, you've gotta gain those skills, okay? So I hope this helped you out. If you wanna get more information about making money online and becoming more skillful in these areas, what you wanna do is watch more of my videos on this channel. Don't forget to subscribe if that button down there's red. You need to click it, turn it gray. When you do, ring the bell. The bell's gonna pop up next to it.   Put your comments below. Let me know what you think about this. Have you developed some new skills? Are there skills that you're interested in? Put that below. I wanna hear your questions. Have you developed some skills that made some money? I wanna hear about that too. And if you have any questions about making money online, put that in the comments section below. Thank you so much for listening to this video. Give me a thumbs up if you like it and I appreciate you listening and I'll see you in the next video. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there and keep watching on my channel.


Now, given those examples we saw about attributing random negative events to a curse or something like that and attributing random positive events to a magic pill or something like that, once you've made that false connection, that faulty connection, it would be really hard to sort of unsee it, right? You experienced it. You saw that when you were sick and you took this, you got better. You saw that when you took an exam and then you did this, you did worse, right? That experience is real and I do this myself. Once I see that connection, it's very hard for me to change my opinion if somebody tells me that that is not operating. That's right. That's exactly right. I think with opinion change, as we said before, it's not enough just to say that people like their own opinions or something like that and instead it's really important to figure out why people are so resistant to opinion change. The intellectual reasons, the cognitive reasons, the machinery, the processes that are operating for that resistance to opinion change and we're going to talk about those in a second but I think it's worth making it more concrete. Let's give an example. I've used this before in some of the classes I've taught and we ask people, imagine yourself given the choice between a large class, between taking a class with 500, 1,000 people sitting in this giant lecture hall watching a professor or taking a small class, say 20 people with a lecturer standing in the front giving the same sort of thing. Which would you prefer? Most people in that sort of context would say that they would prefer the small class as opposed to the large class. You'll learn more, you'll get more interaction and all this stuff. That's right. As we talked about in episode five, you'll learn more. You'll retain it for longer if you're in a smaller class than you're in a larger class. Again, going back to episode five, in that conversation with John Dunlowski, I asked him about the difference between a large and a small class. Here's what he had to say. A lot of students think that there's a real benefit to small classes over large classes. We all have experience in sitting in lecture halls, massive 500 people in a lecture hall versus an intimate 20 people in a lecture hall. Is there any evidence that we like to think that small classes are substantially better than large classes? It seems intuitive that they would be right because you get more attention potentially from your teachers and so forth. There's quite a bit of evidence, actually, enough evidence to do meta-analysis after meta-analysis. It turns out that the relationship between class size and student achievement really is really small. In fact, it's almost nonsignificant in many cases, which is startling that it would be that way. In fact, smaller classes aren't necessarily better. As John just said, there's this experiment of the difference between a large and a small class and the learning outcomes that result. That's been done literally hundreds of times. There has been roughly half of the experiments coming out in favor of a small class and roughly half of the experiments that have been done come out in favor of a large class or no difference between them whatsoever. With this as a background, I use this example in my class with my students and I ask them, what do you prefer? As I said, they say I prefer a small class.  Imagine I'm in a position where I have a heap of research funds and I give them as much money as they need. I want them to test the difference between a large class and a small class. Design the experiment. They do. They design this elaborate sort of experiment they say, and so we've learned a fair bit about the experimental method. They say things like, well, we have to control as much as possible.  Maybe record them. Let's video record the person in the two classes and see being an audience member in the large class and being an audience member in the small class, all things being equal, who's going to learn more? And they design this very elaborate experiment. And then I actually give them the punch line and I say, okay, this experiment that you've proposed has been done. It's been done a thousand times and there has been no difference whatsoever. Now then I take another poll and say, okay, students, now how many of you are willing to change your mind?  And there is no change. People who decided, the vast majority of them, if not all of them, say I'd take the small class, are still willing to take the small class despite the fact that I said this experiment has been done hundreds of times, despite the fact that there's no evidence to suggest that there's a difference between them. And why? And this is it. I mean, given this overwhelming evidence against the difference between large and small classes, people just will not waver. And then I ask them, okay, well, why? Why won't you change your mind? Why would you still continue to take a small class as opposed to a large? And they say, well, I don't know. I like them better. Okay, well, or I don't like the experiment that you propose. You designed the experiment, right? You're the one. That's why I have them do it because they're committed. And yet there just doesn't seem to be any difference. And this is the nature of the problem. I mean, we're using a fairly benign example about small classes and large classes, but we're going to see it come out again and again. When we talk about extraordinary claims, ESP and things, when we present evidence to people that doesn't consist with their worldview, what do they do in the face of this new evidence? And when we ask those students to take it to the next level, to reflect on why people are reluctant to change their minds, they tend to give motivational explanations.  But those motivational examples aren't enough. We need to focus on the cognitive, the intellectual explanations for why it's so difficult to change your mind. And I think there's two things going on. The first is it's called source amnesia. We have difficulty remembering why it is we believe something. And think about this. What makes you think you have access that you can instantly recall the exact basis for why you read, why you believe something? Oh, yep, I read this paper that found this effect, or I remember doing really well in a small class and not in a large class. In 1987. Yeah, my memory is that good, I'm just pulling it all and that's why I believe it. So that source amnesia, that difficulty in remembering is one of the factors that makes it hard to change your mind. The second thing that makes it difficult to change minds is it's hard to reconcile what it is you believed previously with this new data. And again, that's cognitively difficult. You've got this new evidence that's come in and you have your former belief. That takes some work to put those two things together. It can't be done in the heat of the moment. You have to do some work. It might take days. It might take weeks for you to reconcile this new information with your previous belief. So those are the two things that I think make it difficult for people, for us, to change our opinions. So it's not enough to say that people are silly to give these motivational explanations. We have to look at why it's difficult to change minds. So evidence alone is not enough to change minds. You need evidence plus a good story. You need to show people what they can change their minds to. That's right. Going back to the large class, small class difference, for example. I would have been extremely surprised if I asked my students after just presenting a couple papers or on my authority to say that, now, there's no difference between a large and a small class. If they just spun on a dime right there and said, OK, I'll take a large class instead of a small class, I would have been astonished if they would have done that. And for exactly the right reasons, I think, as you said, it takes work. It takes an enormous amount of effort to reconcile the information, this new wealth of evidence that they've just been exposed to. How do you integrate that with a lifetime of experience? It's really difficult. And so we're going to help, I think. Next, we're going to talk about six leads of opinion change. Now these are things that students in the course can use when they're encountering new evidence that contradicts a belief that they hold dear. So for themselves or for other people, and I've done this myself, these are really useful tools to be able to say, OK, well, here's something I believe. This is a belief that I hold dear. And I've just been presented with evidence that completely obliterates what I had thought was true. Now, what do I do about that? So what are some of these six leads that we can deal with?


Yard trimmings that you set out on your curb are turned into nutrient-rich mulch so that it doesn't take up precious space in our landfills. Also, Fort Worth residents can get this mulch for free at the Fort Worth drop-off stations. Did you know mulch makes a great addition to your landscape and gardens because it conserves water, prevents weeds, and improves the soil? Recently, a whole lot of trash and debris is being tossed into the green yard carts in the paper yard bags. Now it's contaminated. All that trash in the yard containers ends up in the compost piles, polluting our mulch. Even worse, it makes the mulching process expensive and unsustainable. A glass bottle here or a hose there makes it all unusable. Let's take a look at what we've found in our yard trimming collections lately that should never be included in yard bags, piles, or carts. See if you can spot the offenders before we point them out. Garden hoses. Glass bottles. Plastic bags of any kind, including trash bags, fertilizer bags, and mulch bags. Shoes. Clothing. Plastic plant pots and trays. And plastic drink containers. The bottom line is, when doing yard work, please keep trash and debris in its place, which is not in yard bags or yard carts. Also, remind your lawn service providers to do the same. Remember, all yard trimmings must be placed in brown paper yard bags or yard cart. Leaves and grass and plastic bags will not be collected. To learn more about how to handle yard waste, contact the call center at<PHONE_NUMBER> or email questions to 1234 at Fort Worth Texas dot gov.


Hello and how are you all doing today? My name is Priyanka and I shall be helping you with the following question. Here the question says integrate the following. Now the function which is given to us is sin 3x cos 4x. Here we need to find out the integral of sin 3x cos 4x. Now here we must remember that the formula for sin a cos b is equal to 1 by 2 sin a plus b plus sin a minus b. Now here we will be using the knowledge of this formula to find out the integral of sin 3x cos 4x dx and that is equal to 1 by 2 integral of here sin a plus b where a is 3x and b is 4x will be sin 7x plus sin a minus b will be 3x minus 4x that gives us minus x that is further equal to 1 by 2 into integral of sin 7x plus 1 by 2 into integral of sin minus x dx which is further equal to 1 by 2 integral of sin 7x dx will be equal to minus cos 7x divided by the differentiation of 7x that is 7 plus 1 by 2 sin minus x can be written as minus sin x dx. Now we have 1 by 14 that is minus 1 by 14 cos 7x minus 1 by 2 this minus sin will come out of the integral and we have the integral of sin x as minus cos x plus c and the required answer will be minus 1 by 14 cos 7x plus 1 by 2 cos x plus c. So this is the required answer to the session. Hope you understood and enjoy it to have a nice day.


Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. So the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom just released its list of the 10 most challenged books of the year in the United States. Challenge, meaning someone requested to have the book removed from a school or library. And it turns out the most challenged book of 2015 was Looking for Alaska, which was written by me. The book had been challenged and banned around the country for offensive language and sexually explicit descriptions. I suppose this is a kind of honor. I mean, looking for Alaska contained the very same offensive language and sexually explicit descriptions 10 years ago, but was much less likely to be banned because, you know, not very many people had read it. Also, Looking for Alaska beat out some of my favorite books, like Two Boys Kissing by David Levitan and Fun House by Allison Bechdel, and also The Holy Bible, which came in 6th. To be fair, the Bible does contain its fair share of explicit passages. Anyway, I'm often asked to respond to the banning of Looking for Alaska from schools and libraries, so, okay, here is my response. Text is meaningless without context, and what usually happens with Looking for Alaska is that a parent shows one particular page of the novel to an administrator, and then the book gets banned without anyone who objects to it having read more than that one particular page. The scene in question involves a very awkward and ultimately failed attempt at oral sex, which is described in very cold and clinical language. In fact, the entire passage contains only one adjective, nervous. And then, in the book's next scene, two characters have a much more sensually described and passionate, but much less sexually explicit interaction. That passage ends, We didn't have sex, we never got naked, I never touched her bare breast, and her hands never got lower than my hips. It didn't matter. As she slept, I whispered, I love you, Alaska Young. So, in context, the novel is arguing really in a rather pointed way that emotionally intimate kissing can be a whole lot more fulfilling than emotionally empty oral sex. Teenagers are critically engaged and thoughtful readers. They do not read Looking for Alaska and think, I should go have some aggressively unerotic oral sex. And they also don't read The Outsiders and think, I should join a gang or read Divergent and think, I should jump onto moving trains. So far as I can tell, that kind of narrow prescriptive reading seems only to happen inside the offices of school superintendents. So yeah, I don't think Looking for Alaska is pornographic, and I don't think its readers find it titillating. But that noted, I don't think it should be up to me whether Looking for Alaska or actually any book is in a school or a library because I am not a teacher or a librarian. The highly trained, criminally underpaid professionals we employ to make those decisions. As I've discussed in the past, I don't think publicly funded learning exists primarily for the benefit of parents or even primarily for the benefit of students. It exists for the benefit of the social order. We are all better off with a well-informed, well-educated population because that population is more likely to start successful businesses and develop treatments for cancer and write musicals about treasury secretaries. And that's why everyone pays taxes to fund public schools and libraries regardless of whether you personally use the library or have kids in school. I think teachers and librarians know more about teaching and librarianship than I do. And I believe they must be allowed to do their jobs serving the whole public. But even beyond that, I don't believe that books, even bad books, corrupt us. Instead, I believe books challenge and interrogate. They give us windows into the lives of others and give us mirrors so that we can better see ourselves. And ultimately, if you have a worldview that can be undone by a novel, let me submit that the problem is not with the novel. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.


But today we have shepherd of the argon George are going to be doing what's called an alternative history It's alternative history of naval battles of World War two We were talking earlier about my time with the area and he starts saying well We got this in here and so on so forth so he draws from every warfare community Except CDs. I don't know. He maybe has something on CDs in there. Not yet He's retired Navy captain. He was the chairman of the JMO department late 90s late 90s 94 to 99 Now in 1906 there was a revolution in naval design the dreadnought and All of the countries began building dreadnought battleships. However those previous German laws and the result of requiring Great Britain to have an alliance with France and Russia is What led directly to Great Britain's involvement in World War one? and all of the men that they lost in the trenches In Flanders fields as I called it The stalemate on the Western Front All of that was a result of these German naval laws that required Great Britain to make an alliance with France to defend the Mediterranean Mediterranean was fairly safe the Austrians did not have as many ships And there was never really a threat to that sea line of communication after the war There's a new law that Japan passes requiring eight battleships and eight battle cruisers and It was interpreted to be less than eight years old So this starts another Revolution in terms of alliances in terms of threats the threat is now in the Pacific The United States is directly involved because of our Pacific Coast and Hawaii I'll get to that Great Britain is involved because of all her colonies in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and and we wind up with These very huge authorizations the 1919 U.S. Authorization was for 10 battleships and six battle cruisers all with 16-inch guns the British 1921 estimates were for the G3 battle cruisers four of them with 16-inch guns and M3 battleships with 18-inch guns All of the all but four of these ships are over 40,000 tons in displacement our battleships were 43,000 tons the British were 48,000 tons Now the Japanese are building at the same time They have the Nagato class of 8 16-inch guns the Kaga class of 10 16-inch guns the key class of 18-inch guns and four 16-inch gun battle cruisers of the Amagi class all under construction and the Japanese are really upset at the Americans because of our racist attitude toward Japanese immigration to the United States our Open-door policy in China because Japan felt that China should be their sphere of influence and Japan gets divided in Terms of their hierarchy There's a fleet faction that wants to continue this 8-8 program indefinitely and there's a Faction that says we probably can't afford this it'll bankrupt the country That's called the treaty faction and these two factions politically are opposed to each other Oops, I want to go back. I think John I Think there's a what if slide in there someplace Where there is what if okay? What if this well first of all this treaty happens? and this treaty requires the scrapping of those in America those six battle cruisers and Ten excuse me eight of the battleships All of the British ships are to be scrapped All but two of the Japanese ships are to be scrapped All of the obsolete and obsolescent warships are to be scrapped Millions of tons of scrap steel Will suddenly fall on the scrap metal market? nation worldwide France is going to scrap things Italy's going to scrap things All of the armaments from the First World War all of that steel is being scrapped It's all being dumped on the scrap metal market The shipbuilding industry in the United States Great Britain Japan to a lesser extent France Italy virtually collapses there's a glut of commercial shipping because of all of the ships that were built during the war and those Obsolescent ships which are not as economically viable as the newer ones that were built during the war Also are being scrapped the armament industry collapses There are no there's no demand anymore for big guns The equipment to build those things is very unique And therefore if there is no demand That equipment gets scrapped Armor There is no demand for any of the armor, which is a very specialized steel making process huge hundred ton billets of steel forged to a shape and then Conditioned with carbon to make one face of it extremely hard That all goes away X as I said the excess and obsolescent commercial shipping goes away steel production Goes down because there's not as much demand There's not as much demand for Mind iron ore. There's not as much demand for coal to fuel the steel making process or coke which is vital to steel making and Coke is a Derivative from coal where all of the impurities have been taking out essentially pure carbon As I said the warships are required to be scrapped and the armaments from World War one are required to be scrapped So as I went to go write this book. I said what if What if this fleet faction and Treaty faction had a different outcome Because in Japan many of their political fights were solved by assassination So what I hypothesized was that the head of the Japanese Delegation in Washington and Admiral and I will never pronounce this correctly Thomas Aburo Kato is Assassinated the night before the second plenary session went Secretary of the state Hughes is going to lay out all of these major reductions in the world fleets Clearly the Japanese are upset There is no FBI. It's the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. That's called in to try to solve this problem All the resources of the federal government, but the reality is the treaty faction Members of the Japanese delegation that remain are now in fear of their lives so They go home Without the Japanese Signing on to the treaty and all those battleships being built in the Pacific Pacific the United States has no option but to continue building its 1919 program the British had no option but to continue their 1921 estimates and I hypothesize that this just Continues going on until Hitler Stalin Mussolini and Hirohado decide to commit the world to war again at about the time period of the Second World War 1939 now my novel takes place in April of 1942 The Battle of the Atlantic is at a critical stage There's a German task force They managed to break out through the Denmark Strait But in the process was damaged by the Royal Navy And went to breast in France Hitler conquered France to be repaired and The French Underground has been keeping the intelligence services aware of how The progress is being made towards the repair of these ships And they're getting very close to being ready to sail Breast obviously is a difficult place for the Royal Navy to blockade There is still a huge German fleet in Willem Schaben and the Jade Bay So the home fleet is tied down and scap of flow Norway has been occupied by the Germans So there's there's really not much that the British can do They ask the Americans Can you help us with this and my novel is based on What the Americans are going to do to solve this problem and to prevent this German raiding group from getting out in the Atlantic Destroying the British convoys which will inevitably result in the starvation of Great Britain and Churchill's acquiescence to surrender And without Great Britain you can imagine how bad the Allied or now American position was One of the things that intrigued me when I was a captain of a submarine and went down to Roosevelt roads in Puerto Rico Was a tour that I was given to the base and they pointed out the buildings that were built for the King and Queen of Great Britain to occupy if Britain surrendered so that The Colonies would stay in the war and that Roosevelt roads was being set up as a base for the remainder of the Royal Navy That existed after the surrender now Fictions about characters Which I learned the hard way and I say the hard way because When I first wrote it I wrote it about battles and ships And aircraft and submarines And I sent it off to an editor who I found online By the name of Connie Buchanan Connie Buchanan was the editor for the hunt for red October and Connie sent me back After I paid her a lot of money sent me back my novel with more red ink of Her comments than my black ink, and it was a hundred and twenty thousand words Well, I gave up I Didn't know how to write a novel so After a while I started thinking about it and said okay novels are about really characters So I've got to make a character and I made Captain Shepard McLeod And I gave him an interesting background I he Was an extremely successful leader and naval officer He was exceptional at sea he had command of a destroyer had command of a light cruiser and when the war Started with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was in command of the battle cruiser Shenandoah All right now they had just been outfitted with a mark 3 radar brand-new to the Pacific Vice Admiral Trotter who was the commander of the scouting force decided that They needed to know exactly what this new piece of radar could do At sea rather than just what the tech manual said so after the fleet came back to Pearl Harbor on Friday The Shenandoah and a destroyer went northwest of Hawaii Shepard decided that he would go into the bad weather up there to make sure he could find out Exactly what the radar could do in the rain and the fog and everything else that was happening up there Which was shielding the Japanese coming to attack Pearl Harbor? Now they already were outfitted with what was called a CX AM radar That radar It's basically an air search radar and yes, the Shenandoah saw the Japanese attack waves going to Pearl Harbor Shepard sent a message one of the many messages that were ignored on Sunday morning December 7th and as a result the American fleet is both damaged and The channel to Pearl Harbor which is narrow was blocked And Shepard doesn't know any of that All he knows is that he knows where the Japanese planes came from and His job as a scouting force is to find them and stay with them and radio their positions So that the American fleet can come and destroy the Japanese Well, he finds them And they're not in a battle formation. They're in an anti-submarine formation and They're not heading west back to Japan. They're headed east Towards the west coast of the United States Well Shepard's radio in this positions and whatnot and he's not getting any answers As to what's going to happen. So on his own initiative in this bad weather He decides that he's going to use this new gunner radar that he's just found out the details of and start Lobbying 16-inch shells into the Japanese formation Where he thinks the aircraft carriers are And that's what he does and he starts out doing that and he sees three of those radar blips that he thinks are the carriers slow and fall out of formation and That's when the escorts for the Japanese Find the Shenandoah and they start blasting away and Shepard makes a run for it He's not that successful The Shenandoah is badly damaged. One of the hits they get is on the super structure Where there's a fire that develops? The damage control parties there trying to put it out with their fire hoses and another hit happens Well, and that that damage control party is literally obliterated and That happened right in front of Shepard's eyes as he was looking through one of the command slits in the command tower and The blood and the bone and the flesh from those men pepper his face within seconds, there's another hit on the command tower this time and Shepard is thrown across it his left leg is badly damaged His femur is I don't want to say shattered because there was enough of it left that they Surgeons could put it back together again But many of the men that he had been standing with are now Dead or dying or badly wounded one of Shepard's crew members Petty officer Raimondo to Jesus Cruz Boson's mate who is his gig coxen and At several others Carrie Shepard to the battle dressing station and his ship surgeons Managed to stabilize his leg not amputated Clearly Shepard's not fit to command his exo takes over They find out that the harbor to the channel to Pearl Harbor is closed So they go to San Diego and Shepard spends a month in Balboa Naval Hospital Having his leg operated on one operation after another to try to piece it together and line it up and get it to heal Right and during that time period he starts having nightmares and flashbacks Now To try to make sure I had Shepard McLeod correct. I had The novel reviewed by a clinical psychologist as well as a clinical therapist with great experience with PTSD Because I wanted to make sure that how I presented Shepard Was accurate now in the second world war as John said The men that suffered from PTSD had to hide it It was considered cowardice you may remember a very famous incident where a Soldier suffering from quote shell shock was slapped by General Patton in Sicily and he's lost his command of the Third Army as a result Because he wasn't sensitive enough but For a leader if you had PTSD you had to hide it So my character Shepard McLeod throughout the novel is hiding this thing But when bad things happen he immediately goes back to that command tower and thinking of the men he lost There's a hit on the command tower of the argon during the battle And he thinks his friends have now been obliterated and he goes almost catatonic Until the command tower calls them up For some direction and he can't believe that they're all still alive But they're alive because he had just turned at the last minute and therefore the shell just wrecked the bridge Rather than enter the command tower But you can't just have one Protagonist you have to have a host of characters and that gets me to Corvette and Captain Hans Dieter Meyer Kriegsmarine commander of you 197 part of operation And I'll get it right Beckinslog now. What's Beckinslog mean? It's a symbol crash Why did I do that? Because I didn't want to say Beckinslog, which was drumbeat the actual operation that Dernath put in motion. It's the same operation He has a in command of a type 9 you boat and he's been assigned to the premier Patrol area off the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and this operation is going to start the same day that the American task force sails from Norfolk the drama builds I'm not going to tell you the results that Hans Dieter Meyer suddenly becomes a key element in Whether the task force will be able to accomplish its mission or not Because the Americans only have Two battle cruisers and two carriers the Germans have two carriers and four battle cruisers the odds against the Americans are pretty bad Now the leader of the German raiding group is vice-admiral clogs shoulder now Meyer I'm gonna go back a little bit is already has already been awarded the night's cross Which means he's already sunk a hundred thousand tons of shipping his dream Which he dreams of every night is to have sunk 200,000 tons or Sunk a major warship like Gunter Peane did sinking the Royal Oak So that he'll get the night's cross with swords, which Hitler personally will give him Meyer was In the Hitler youth his idol is I don't know if Hitler so he dreams of this and he dreams of this glory and Maybe it fogs some of his decision-making at a critical moment Schroeder can't stand Hitler. He's a product of the Imperial Navy But he knows that if he can get out in the Atlantic And start sinking German or British convoys like he did when he broke out because he sank one 38 ships Think in terms of the actual event of one Sharn Horst and nyes now broke out into the Atlantic and started sinking merchant ships That's Clause Schroeder's dream because he knows that will win the war and he's going to be the hero Rear Admiral Hamilton is in charge of the American Task Force 88 Good guy has to deal with problems There are Events They're ambiguous. I try to write into the book the fog of war and how Commanders and captains have to deal with the unknown and make decisions based on probability of outcomes Admiral Sir Bruce Hardy is in charge of force H Now he's got renowned repulse and Ark Royal and that's it. He doesn't have the forces Stop the Germans Unless he can make a night torpedo attack, but the timing is wrong But he's going to go out there and he's going to try because that's what the Royal Navy does Squadron leader Rupert wife Jones RAF is commanding 419 squadron of Sunderland flying bloat boats out of Pembroke dock in South Wales and His area of responsibility to search is the Bay of Biscay and some of the Eastern Atlantic now The book starts with them standing down to get a brand new radar fitted into the Sunderlands So that his Sunderlands are now the best search asset that the RAF has Well, the fitting of that ASV 3 is just in time And he sends them out Shepard has some interesting characters working for him Look man a tenant commander Bronco Billy Burtick is in charge of his scout up for observation squadron and Argonne and her Hanger are big enough so that he's actually got eight planes OS to you Kingfisher's Mods sevens Because the Kingfisher never had folding wings during the war But for my novel they've got folding wings and that's why they have a modification beyond where They actually had during the war Bronco Billy Burtick He's a fighter pilot at heart He's also Devastatingly handsome And that and at the end of the novel I'll tell you that the photograph of him with his flying helmet his traditional white scarf flight jacket a little bit of Exhaust fumes on his face Goes into the Philadelphia Inquirer and rumor has it It's posted in all of the dormitories Female dormitories of the University of Pennsylvania John William Hamlin the fourth well as The fourth indicates he's the fourth generation of a long line of naval officers His great-grandfather John William Hamlin the first was a hero in the in the Pacific Civil War think Chris Chris is Chris is my help here His grandfather was a hero of the Spanish-American War His father was The head of the Navy just before Admiral King now The captain of the argon when she was built Uh Got a phone call from Admiral Hamlin and said Please help my son and put him in a position where he can recover his reputation They didn't know anything about him John William Hamlin the fourth. I will say has been badly damaged by his first commanding officer Who will never serve in command again? And one of Shepard's Really great leadership problems is what to do because John William Hamlin the fourth happens to be the director officer of The direct the gun director at the top of our gun There's no way to get to him. There's no way anybody can supervise him. There's no way That he's not going to affect the battle outcome because that Director has the best view and the longest range of any of the ones on board the argon authentic manner Jonathan Becker he in Today's world would be called a geek He's got some problems with Navy etiquette and he doesn't pick up on the Navy social cues and He doesn't necessarily wear his uniform correctly or even the right uniform at times But Jonathan Becker is absolutely brilliant and It takes a while for Shepard to learn What Becker as his CIC officer can do for him and that eventually plays a critical role at the end of the book I've talked about Boson's mate Ramondo Jesus Cruz Who was with Shepard on the Shenandoah and When it was rumored that Shepard would be going to argon many of his shipmates were sent there deliberately so that Shepard would have a group of people he could rely on Without having to learn immediately what people could do or couldn't do Cruz is one of them He's in charge of the gig as well as one of the 40 millimeter gun mounts Commissary Stewart first-class George Washington Carver Jefferson The Navy of 1942 was very segregated Okay, George Washington Carver Jefferson grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama But he is another one People that is absolutely dedicated to Shepard. They have this little funny tradition every morning of It's another fine Navy day as a greeting Jefferson knows everything about him it turns out that Jefferson's also a loader on this 40 millimeter mount that Cruz is commanding Lieutenant Barry Jensen is the second best flyer The Shepard has Arthur Wesley Roberts is the navigator of the argon Interesting leadership challenge Arthur does not want command Shepard has to figure out why and Hopefully by the end of the novel get him enthusiastic about what command is so that Arthur will go on Commander Charles third guard Williamson is a gunnery officer kind of cocky thinks he knows everything Pretty good He was responsible for bringing the 40 millimeter mounts to fruition in the United States Navy and now he is the gunnery officer on the argon Little cocky Maybe he cut some corners that he shouldn't Ted Grubowski's the exo great guy just two junior to command a battle cruiser But he kept that ship going after the first captain died of a heart attack on the bridge coming back to Norfolk Radmle Ray Calhoun Salt of the earth Sailor at heart Great tactician Ray Liberally makes the bellow wood his flagship rather than the argon Because the bellow woods captain is all of the worst things you can think of in terms of a pompous Washington only service escorting admiral's wives to Dancers and he thinks his command of the bellow wood is his justice ward Only long enough to get his quote capital ship command ticket punched so he can leave and go back to Washington He's a micromanager That's a problem now the novel I wrote I tried to make Absolutely Exact in terms of the customs the traditions of the Navy the equipment The cover that you saw I sat down with blueprints for the mark 38 director and Converted them into CAD drawing the same with a mark 34 director the same with a mark 37 director the same with the radars As well as design the ship the procedures to operate those pieces of equipment are laid out in there The procedures for the guns are laid out Very accurately Argonne is equipped with five inch 54s, which we're going to be on the Montana class battleships She's equipped with six inch 55s a gun that was probably a progression of what? The US was doing as well as 18 inch 55s very long-range weapons There's a new concept of battle cruisers to be very high speed and Very long range to such that if an enemy is found Say a carrier task force during the night They can steam at high speed and engage them with gunfire Before the aircraft are launched Safely that's part of the operation and Then there's the operational art something that I taught The operational art is how you accomplish the mission that you're assigned with the assets that you have Well shepherds got this ship Beautiful ship very high speed It's one thousand two hundred and ninety six feet waterline length a hundred and thirty thousand tons Now is there any engineer? Are there any engineers here? Okay, well The limitation on shaft horsepower is the reduction here You can't get with the laws of mechanical engineering beyond about seventy five thousand on one shaft So I had to design a new reduction gear that would allow me to get a hundred and fifty thousand Shaft horsepower on one shaft Using that I now have a ship that's capable of speeds in the high 40s The whole if you go and do something called the hull speed a Fletcher class destroyer is 26 knots And I'll class battleship is 35 knots and the argon is 49 knots Now what hull speed means is the point of transition between What a ship is slicing through the pressure wave that's building in front of it and when it has to start climbing over That pressure wave and if you look at all of the pictures of high-speed destroyers They're kind of pointed up and their sterns are down as they're trying to make this impossible climb over a pressure wave those of you that have small boats You climb over the pressure wave all the time and just plane The novel has been reviewed part of iUniverse which I contracted to Publish this it's a vanity publisher, which means you pay they publish I Contracted with Kirkus blue ink and Clarion to review it They are supposedly very honest. They will tell you whether it's any good or not Kirkus is the hardest one to get a positive review out of and they put me in the top 5% Blue ink gave me a starred review Which put me in the top 6% of all the books that they they looked at and they looked at 3,000 books a year Clarion forward gave me five stars Reader reviews on Amazon So far I have 14 reviews 13 are 5-star. There's one 4-star on iUniverse my publisher there are four reviews. They're all five stars So I have been incredulous at the reception that the book has gotten From the world of publishing and I will never make any money off of it Because I'll tell you that if you're not writing about zombies or Warlocks or What's called chiclet romance novels? You're probably not going to have something with wide distribution or You can be famous and hire a ghostwriter and then Those people will make lots of money like Hillary Clinton with 220,000 books Out out there to be bought so that's my book and If you're looking for a good read and I assume everybody here is kind of interested in the Navy Kind of interested in interesting interactions between characters. I Would ask you to buy it and if you do it today I would be happy to stay and sign it for you and I will tell you that the first place I tried to market my book was on Amazon.com if you send them a Microsoft Word file With a cover illustration They'll put it out there and I did that and it was a mistake. It sold 13 copies I took it down when I went to the publisher one of those 13 sold for $190 on Amazon UK recently because it's the first edition and I deliberately made this the second edition I Didn't keep three copies and I'm hoping that the price keeps going up So I can maybe recover some of the thousands and thousands of dollars that I've put into Trying to get this published and trying to get it to be a good novel now A lot of the reviews on Amazon are when's the sequel coming out? Well, the sequel is right now at a bunch of Agents for their consideration and I'm hopeful because it's been two months since I sent it to them and they haven't said no It's also with a publisher For several months and I sent them an email Because I wanted to try to get it better and I was going to go back to my second editor John Kudrick to have him give me comments on it. He gave me preliminary indication, but I mean a real thorough scrub And They said no Don't spend any money on it We'll do that For you, so I'm hopeful now this novel went down to the United States Naval Institute for their consideration for a year and it got through every single chop Until the last one and then they said no So I wasted a year I'd love to entertain your questions Yes My friend that told me I've got to stay within the view line or John gets mad at me my motivation my friend was actually my therapist because In command of my third submarine. I Almost killed a shipyard worker We were getting ready for sea trial. That was the commander of the pre-commissioning unit of the SSBN Rhode Island and Some little bird in the back of my head said go look at the missile deck again And I looked and just as I looked a paintbrush came up in between the fairings of the missile muzzle hatches Now what we were I was about to order and would have ordered except for the little bird in the back of my head Was what was called a battle readiness test where we flop all the miss all 24 of these missile muzzle hatches As fast as we can 11 second intervals because that's launch interval for tried two missiles Okay, and I would have killed several painters That were it were not to my knowledge in the superstructure trying to get the ship ready for sea trials the next day I Started suffering from hallucinations, and I reported myself as unfit for command and My gold crew CO took the ship out and they continued with their record second setting performance They set the records which will never be broken for initial criticality and power range testing time for Sea trials time And it's a it was a great great crew But the Navy did not like the fact that I Was no longer available to the Navy and they wreaked their havoc on my XO Because they felt that he hadn't taken up enough of the burden that was on me And he had nothing to do with that and to this day. I regret that that happened So that was my motivation Because my friend and therapist said why don't you write and I'll tell you that it has been the best therapy I ever had Putting into shepherd what I personally knew I Had command of three different submarines one of them. I got a 15-second ceremony on two hours notice And it was a turnaround job, which you can imagine And that that was probably the first Thing that started Medicating a major effect on my health The stress compressed the vertebrae in my neck enough That I was in agony from pain in my left arm And I hid that as long as I could just like shepherd Until finally we had to report it to the squadron commander And he almost fired the medical officer on the spot because he knew the medical officer had known about it And hadn't told the Commodore But got a new captain the crew was phenomenal They demanded a full change of command ceremony They gave me to this day my most prized possession, which was the ship's wheel Now it wasn't the actual we was a wooden one And with the ship's plaque and underneath that there's an engraved plaque that says you bought this brought the spirit back Because the ship's motto SSN 676 was the spirit of 76 And that's why they said I brought the spirit back And The Navy looking for a place for me to go sent me here to the war college as the Lockwood share of undersea warfare Which I did for a little while I remember I told you the story about a rick over That turned out to be very important because I was actually assigned to the Department of Energy a joint tour So I became a joint service officer as a result of that and When Admiral Stark was looking around for somebody to take over JMO When the guy that was there suddenly decided to retire and go to Saudi Arabia I was of the right seniority and a joint service officer So I got it until they could find a permanent relief well, the model of the admiral's barge back there is has great significance for me Because shortly after that the admiral decided to take all the senior management out on a night cruise to talk about this that are there the thing which was his want and I was sitting next to him in the stern sheets And he proposed that all of the students Should be ranked based on their class standing at the end of their year in their fitness reports And I've never been one to hold my tongue very well And I said don't mind you under my breath Admiral Stark heard it and I had to defend my position and after I defended it He decided not to have the students Who were the best and the brightest and had come from very stressful jobs To have another stressful job, but rather have a job that they just needed to pass And I got that job and I had held it for five years Because the Navy didn't have any other use for me And we had we had a lot of fun I managed to get a lot of other excess captain sub-rainers to fill a lot of billets around the war college Yes, the submarine force was taking over the war college during that time period Very surreptitiously, but we're doing it And this was probably my number two tour that I enjoyed the most Mostly because I was still suffering from that incident On the Rhode Island at the time And I really couldn't engage the faculty the way I wanted to And my all-time favorite was Winning to get fired and being told to leave the building on five minutes notice Which was Admiral Rickover's typical mode of operation You're fired! Get out of here! And it happened once to a captain on his staff while he was down there It was, you know, get out of here! Captain Severance called Mr. Wagner the deputy from the lobby because he was out of the building Said, yeah, well this fired me But Mr. Wagner was an amazing man and knew how to work with Rickover And after a while Admiral Severance was formally brought back into the Naval Nuclear Power Program And his record restored Did I answer your question? I started in 2006 And as I said, I went chapter by chapter I had a group of people that I'd never met Who did the reviews, who would review the chapter at a time for me One was an aviator from the Second World War Flying from carriers Another was a machinist mate from the Second World War And this group of people would give me comments and say, no, it doesn't work like that There are no valves here I think it's submarines, you know So I got those details from those reviewers I went through about 14 changes for each of those chapters Then I made one major revision And then I sent it off to County Buchanan Another two revisions Sent it to John Kudrick Another revision And what finally went to iUniverse was the sixth revision And iUniverse asked me to change about five of the scenes that are in it Which I did And that's what was published Now, I believe that there's a good book in everyone And for all of you I really hope you will take the time to sit down and write your memoirs Whether it gets published or not It is going to be priceless for your children Your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, etc Just like the oral histories are that are going on now But not everybody gets to do those So my recommendation is to write That's a lot of fun It's a lot of fun building characters And trying to keep them mentally straight In your mind So that their interactions make sense And it's a lot of fun And when I did the battles and what not The first thing I did was take a chart And lay it all out So I got all the times and the bearings correct And my son's telling me I've run out of time Thank you Thank you very much Again, I will say the book is downstairs For those of you interested in sending the bookstore Good read I just want to thank you for your presentation And most of all, thank you for your honesty Thank you It's refreshing I know And that's probably been my great advantage or disadvantage In terms of my career was truth to power Did the battleships of World War II have a command tower? Yes, they did If you go to Fall River and see the battleship Massachusetts You will see many of the pieces of equipment And the layout of the ship that's similar to Argon But remember, this ship is twice as long One and a half times as wide And four times the displacement What did you have for a fire control in your ship? The same thing that's in the Massachusetts A Ford Mark I computer And Ford isn't the Ford Otto Malerith There was another Ford who worked exclusively for the Navy Developing fire control instruments And he developed an analog computer That was onboard Virtually all of the Navy warships From battleships to destroyers For surface gunfire control As well as any aircraft gunfire control That's all mechanical All mechanical analog computer Using gears and very finely made spindles And cams to do the calculations That were necessary I met the Admiral of the Fallen Charger Reactivating battleships Oh, wow He was saying that the electronics people came in And said throw that junk out and we'll put our stuff there And one salvo destroyed all the electronics Yep, yep Now the Ford Mark I was a great piece of equipment And Argon has Let me think, eight Twelve of them She's got eight Mark 37 directors Two Mark 34 directors for six inch mounts And two Mark 38 directors