So the next day, 0-4-20, get up, train hard. Before that, I think we did a 933 kilometre adventure triathlon, so it was a paddleboard east of the west coast of Scotland, cycle 790 kilometres and then run a marathon. Trapped all my kit in the Solent, the burger in the Solent, swam across the Isle of Wight, got out the other end, dropped down half the weight and then ran 70 miles around the Isle of Wight. That's hardy, how are you brother? I'm good buddy, how are you? I'm absolutely firing mate. I'm in utter awe probably along with the rest of the world at your latest world record. Before we do that Dads, can you just tell our friends, just give our friends at home your military background so they know who we're talking to today? Yeah absolutely, so I spent 15 years in the British Army. I was a soldier and an officer. I was discharged medically in 2017, four years actually to date and four years ago by a shoulder injury and also PTSD. Yes you're in the thick of it, weren't you? Are you able to tell us a quick bit about the helicopter crash, wasn't it? Yeah so 2006, May 2006, Lynx carrying friendly forces was shot down and yeah it was just that we were on the cleanup party of that so it was the picking up of the bodies etc, so on and so forth for 37 hours actually, Wight's taken quite a lot of heavy incoming. So yeah it was a nasty up but that never really bothered me back then, John was a young 20 year old keen sapper you know and it was 2015 when he was an officer at this point and a girl had fallen into a fire in Canada on a training exercise and it was us that saved their life and it was that smell of the burning flesh that triggered the incident in 2006. So 2015 was a bit of a tough year, we diagnosed in 2016 with PTSD and then yeah just sort of downhill from there. And like all veterans have the power to do, we're right back up there mate, aren't we? Get back up there and that's the you know this is why I do these multi-day endurance events was the initial no reason for doing it was sort of I call it my medicine you know and it's I changed my whole life around sort of 2018 I was in a very very dark place and what I just swear like call it a day pull the pin in essence and it was having a family that stopped me from doing that but instantly overnight I changed from sitting in Tesco's car park crying to my uncle on the phone telling him probably what I was wanting the planning to do and to the next day 0420 get up train hard and that's my sort of medicine and then always have a focus of go going forward i.e these these events that I do. Routine mate so important isn't it you know daily routine mate it starts with some contact coffee as well. If that's a plug mate I want half. Never thought I'd chuck it in but you know them I like it they're you're guys anyway so yes is it a wet? Yes everyone's jumping on the coffee thing aren't they sorry sorry contact coffee I shouldn't say that but I've been approached a few times so just again so I'm putting all this on you so I can be lazy but do you want to just give us a quick rundown on on your challenges to date because you've certainly put yourself through the mill. To date the Yukon Arctic Ultra it's minus 53 up in high in the Yukon what we got next what we do next we did the oxygen chamber thing yeah we did the world's highest geathlon I like to say we want to do this because I've always got a good supportive team around me so I like to keep it as we but generally it's solo media and just just for the viewers so yeah so that was the world's highest geathlon 190 kilometers in a 12 and a half thousand feet with a with a mask on and before that it was 10 ultra distance triathlons in 10 days and 10 locations and that was pretty pretty epic before that I think we did a 933 kilometer adventure triathlon so it was a paddleboard east of west coast of Scotland cycle 790 kilometers and then run a marathon for that I think I ran 75 miles on a treadmill with 30 pounds in my back for VE day last year and and that was in complete darkness I had a little red light in front of me that was that was very very hard there was no change of you know on a treadmill you can imagine in a 12 by 12 tent as well there was no change of terrain it was just that constant fast my probably one of my biggest recoveries from that because of my legs and the swelling on that um I did a 54 mile tab with with 52 pounds in my back and chopped all my kit in the solent the burger in the solent swam across the Isle of Wight got out the other end dropped down half a weight and then ran 70 miles around the Isle of Wight it was about 36 hours of constant hell and I've done a few other things so earlier this year I ran five marathons and 50 hours over the South Downs coast and from Sandbanks just past Weymuth and back 4,000 meters of elevation I did it in 43 hours but I had to finish at the 50th hour because there was um the family that was raising the money for were coming my family were coming media was going to be there so I just got my head down for five hours that towards the end of that and then did the last sort of um okay so it was quite quite funny and then the most recent which is so this one I've actually applied for the world records and whereas the previous ones that the world's house draft on that I just couldn't be bothered you know they don't mean anything to me um if someone said to me why don't you apply for this and your your kids and grandkids won't know appreciate it and eventually and because t-shirts hats medals none of that stuff bothers me to know of have a couple of gold medals as well from from sprinting um in Colorado and they're just I don't know where they are they're tucked away somewhere none of that stuff sort of means anything the times of the stuff it's the case they do it complete it forget about it move on is my sort of attitude towards it so yeah and um can you tell us what it involved as yes so my last one um there was a couple of world records set on that one which was the furthest distance dragging a car within 24 hours now loads of people have done this but if you're going by the Guinness World Record and I say loads of people a couple of people have done it um like Ross said he told a marathon and did it so in a marathon with a marathon distance um but you know with a lighter car um he trained a lot for it and yeah I know you know it's just um so the the actual set world record was 33.93 kilometers within 24 hours and uh and you had the tour 1.5 ton car 1500 kilograms and uh some guy in Slovakia I think had that record um so yeah I absolutely um knocked that one out of the park on the first evening uh or the first day I did it in about 19 hours and then I just carried on pulling for another bit just so 37 kilometers just a nice round number um it was getting very very hot the next day and so I just decided then to have a little bit of a rest because they only had about 20 minutes kit in the first 24 hours and then I carried on pulling for another 24 hours um uh so and then bringing that up a total distance which was the second record the furthest vehicle ever pulled for 53 kilometers um again there's people out there that do things like though I know someone's towing a vehicle 100 kilometers but it's 1k per day you know for 100 days whereas yeah 47 hours my my my final timing was because I had to get in because we were not flying afterwards at Blackbush airports for the work within that flight window so yeah so 53 kilometers and um it's to date the hardest thing I have ever done in my life mate you're certainly smashing it out the pot just just imagine what you you could achieve had you been in the Marines I would have um just yeah I think I could have looked me well I'm good I'm saying nothing yeah no exactly mate and this is it you know and it's always a good bit of friendly banter um it's it's just uh I just think um funny quite a lot that quite a lot of the uh good next um have you know supported me a lot of this stuff it's absolutely fantastic you know I think I've fallen into that crowd of um of soldiers that I never wanted to fall in the crowd of you know army wannabes type as I would have called them but yeah falling that crowd but as a physical training instructor we're all sort of we're there together you know all one yes it is great um I've had multi services I think support me on some of my challenges and um it's just wonderful some boot net will turn up in a van out the middle of nowhere and then like literally attach themselves to you for two days and do everything that you ask of them to a tee with no argument um yes yeah absolutely it's um it's good it's good it's uh but yeah it was um a rewarding event I think you know and it's just sets me up for the next and the next and what what can I do next is is whereas where my head's at normally when I'm suffering in these events I'm thinking how can I make this worse what can I do next you know and that's my sort of push through so I've got a couple of things up my sleeve um which will be good um just waiting for a couple of sign-offs because I've got to go bigger you know uh bigger and better and these things um take more coordination more planning I do it all myself you know and it's that's probably the difficult part the coordination and planning of it um before like for the example the Guinness World Record I got the car from BMW so Barnes BMW sponsored the event um and then obviously the car comes with the set weight you know weight the vehicle is then you have to bring it back to the car to an independent weigh bridge you have to video getting weighed and then you have to go in and get the print out get it signed off and then you have to find it when the scales was last the weight bridge was last calibrated and and so on and so forth similar when we did the surveying of the land to do it you have to find it when everything was last calibrated you had the video the survey being done and it's just a lot of admin for for something like yeah I said I'm not really that fussed in to be honest do you find um that these things cost you a you know do you have to put your hand in your own pocket yeah quite a bit actually and um something me and my wife always talk about it but never you know they do you know when we go across the alleyway I generally pay for the support team to come across and the ferry fuel someone and so forth um yeah they do generally um I I do have a really good guy brought on so um Ali from that resilient nutrition and and he's he's extremely helpful and and he tends to like now do a lot of apart from taking the fuel of resilient nutrition the long range fuel the other bits and pieces of that we need he's generally just the generous guy and we'll go out and and pick it up and bring it in so it's not happen to you but yeah generally it does cost me um a couple hundred quid and which which I rather wouldn't be so have a corporate sponsors then I can put that maybe the couple hundred quid into the charity myself you know or something on those lines and I'll mention it because when I ran the length of the country that cop that that if you took into account I wasn't work obviously couldn't work for 36 days yeah it the the the cost to to me my girlfriend was thousands really you know it is it is absolutely and I've I've worked out now that these little two three-day ones are quite good and you know especially because on Friday my work are generally quite generous because I'm doing it for a charity they'll give me the Friday off you know and then I'm straight back into work on the Monday like for example that one started on Thursday at midday I finished Saturday midday and I stayed up that night to have two in the morning we saw the video evidence yeah I know I know I thought I was going to go proper man time but something just kept me carrying on um so yeah that was good and then and then this week to be honest now I've been tired like most most evenings so um yeah and generally I said I get up at 20 past four I've knocked that back to five o'clock this week because I'm but I still Monday morning straight back into routine getting up early and training it's just that that's my setup that's my bit in the morning ready for the day you know yeah it's funny 420 is it it's the 420 is the code for stoners isn't it I heard that yeah actually before and on it but I'm just uh let's say uh as jockel will it would say up before the enemy you know yes he actually picked that time because he gets up at 0 432 every day up before the enemy and I thought we can't have the Americans beating us at this side of the pond so um I just went 420 you know I I heard that he used to put it on his um Instagram like his what in photo of his quite a lot yeah generally and I I generally do that on my story yeah um followed by a by a video of some sort of dance tune from the 90s bang and I um at about quarter to five in the morning the way to the gym let's talk about um the charity angle who who who who are we raising yeah so um this this year has been um dedicated and I'll continue to get dedicate my time to this charity until the money's raised because we're on a timeline this one and is so habc which is um foundation and it's uh basically children with the world's rarest brain disease and there's only a couple of kids in the UK that have it um a couple of hundred in the world and unfortunately because of it's so rare there's zero funding in the UK so it all has to be done um you know via fundraising and that's when I got involved early in this year you know today at night I've raised in the past sort of 12 18 months I've raised 57,000 pounds for for charity but for this and out of that 57 I've done 30 37 has gone to this one so um and that's just been two events this year so it's again it's frustrating because um I know the month there's money out there and you just gotta gotta find it somehow and and with like Instagram you know you constantly asking people I don't want to keep asking people every day for it um I do find that a little bit cringing in myself but I've just have to be a bit bold about it you know we um as I put in my sort of last post you might have seen it with me hugging Aggie over the line a little girl the 12 year old Aggie you know um I'll recover um and I've got time but she won't recover and she doesn't have time and and that's that's just a harsh reality of it so um that's why I always ask people to sort of dig deep on it and and and the the the condition sort of affects the white matter of the brain the stuff that tells us to to eat and sleep and walk and talk and and Aggie used to be able to do that um as as the other kids and they're all different stages of this um of this journey for them and um she I can't do any of that you know um she's completely wheelchair bind she um yeah she she can't talk she communicates literally with a thumb up thumb down um but she she's mentally there she understands that like a normal 12 year old girl she knows what's happening and that's the that's the sort of one of the the sad things about it now so it's um yeah it's just what what can I do and this is where these crazy events come from and now you know it's what can I do that will make people think holy shit um and raise an eyebrow and and get the media on board and then um then they'll see the charity and that that's I'm using these events and putting myself through the mill as a platform to raise raise the awareness yeah so let's just take a moment um to say a massive thank you to everyone that sponsors both me and Daz um it it's just a sad fact you know not a sad it it's an issue that we can't get around to literally thank you all but I see all the names when they come up on the just giving or whatever and I recognize so many of them and and um it's so kind that you support us guys as well because we you know we've come through challenges and we we have to maintain our mental health and the fact that you buy into us and support us is just um it's it's an equal thing to the fact that you're supporting in this case you know a young girl um funny enough Daz my we we talked about this on the phone but I ran a hundred miles of the coastal path last weekend to raise Christina Thomas who was who's recovering from a brain tumor that's the first extreme challenge I've done that hasn't been for a for a veterans charity and when I was running along when it got well it was all hard yeah but I did keep saying this isn't about me this is you know this was about Christina I I don't know how much easier that made the challenge but it certainly made it firm in my mind that I'm I'm gonna get this hundred miles in the bag exactly that you know and on the five and fifty and this one when I was struggling both times I first time the mum that had to speak to Aggie and see her and that was just all I needed and it was just like so I'm gonna put my PTI vest on me just thought the strength and away I went you know it was just um all right let's go you know it's one of those situations and you realize you're saying it is for there's me moaning yes and I'm dragging this big um vehicle heavy piece of metal behind me but I like to see that you know that's the burden these these people live with every single day you know dragging this weight around and there's me moaning about us one step after the next yes it hurt but you know Aggie can't take a step and and I was like basically probably a bit of over-military fashion way get a grip of yourself Darren stop moaning put your foot in from the other and it's amazing what the human body can do it is just in those two days the adaptation of the body to to people to do that was just phenomenal um yes okay I've got a bit of a stress fracture going on and sore legs but that will cover but it's phenomenal what what it does and how it stays awake and you know it's just amazes me I learn every single time I do these things as you saw probably yes when you look at some of the challenges that people have in their lives it makes you you know it we need to be reminded don't we those of us that are kind of say able-bodied and able-minded and and not not not not treading carefully I was speaking obviously but what I mean is those of us that can get out stay happy and just achieve a few things in our life it's it's a massive difference to know when you've got a terminal illness isn't it yeah 100 yeah yes so and again just that there focuses my energy into doing the next and the next and the next so what was your stretch of the coastal path like because the bit that I chose up it was just so ninja yeah it was like the Royal Marine's endurance course run like up and down would be common like that but for a hundred miles yeah yeah exactly that you know it was the from sandbanks across in and then right through to to Weymouth you know it is you hit all the roller coaster you hit the seven sister you hit the lot you know through loveworth cove up and down and the devil steps war barrel hill the worst hill in the world and you know every single time you've got that big the big one you you you come down steps and that the other side to the where the Royal Marines Memorial is and vice versa and I think that the moralizing thing for me I was going that way and I knew it was having to come back it's like oh my god so yeah it's like 4000 meters or whatever that is a feet and of elevation in no in such a short pit 43 hours because the last bit was flat along the along the sandbanks did you sleep sleep at all in that I know you did at the end but did you sleep in the 43 hours and no I had about I had maybe two 10 minute shut my eyes yeah just I just kept going and kept going so the first night luckily I had loads of people like sort of supporting and walking with me and because I was doing it said self-sufficient so it was carrying the stuff and had a few water breaks along the way but I had like the whole like last marathon distance or marathon and a half I had some guy Ryan's up and with me and and he met me up to that point but the first night I didn't have anyone with me and this guy Ali I mentioned was an nutrition he did some walking him back and with me back and forth just it was like probably the first night the weather came in and it was just like oh this is just rubbish you know it's like what am I doing and having to layer up no after putting so much intensity in my body heating up I was still having like no waterproofs on and I was just because my because my body was shutting down it was so cold and I just no energy to heat myself up I was I was layering up the first night so it was mental but yeah Angel as a good and good descriptor does listen I could talk all day about this I'd love to talk more about kit and and and and it sounds funny to people for people listening if you're not familiar with these kind of events you know hypothermia for me is a real big problem yeah I can be hot and running along fine but second a bit of water comes out the sky in a wick there's a bit of a breeze and then the tiredness just takes over you and maybe you're a bit famished and I can just start shivering uncontrollably and then it's then it's like can I get my bivvy out and it really becomes an issue and I'd love to chat chat more but I'm conscious you've got another appointment yes mate yeah no worries and appreciate having me on and saying if if there's anyone listening and and hopefully there's people listening to this and uh if you want to support you know head on over to just giving us angel link mate yeah I've been Darren Hardy and I pop up there first one good if you can um what's that me all your links mate and I'll just put put them below sounds good buddy yes and that's um let's chat soon brother yes mate take it easy mate keep being an absolute inspiration like we all love it mate thank you here's buddy take it easy


Eating the right foods during pregnancy is very important for both a mother and her baby. Even before a baby is born, his body is built from the foods his mother eats. Also, if the mother eats the right foods during pregnancy, it will be easier for her to stay healthy and feel good throughout her pregnancy and birth. Eating the right things during pregnancy even helps the mother to recover more quickly after giving birth. When a mother is breastfeeding, it's also important for her to eat the right foods because the nutrition in her breast milk comes from the foods she eats.  This is often called malnutrition and it can hurt both a mother and her baby.  Eating too much food during pregnancy is also unhealthy for a mother and her growing baby. This is especially true when too many unhealthy foods are eaten, like highly processed and packaged foods, sweets and sugary drinks. It's normal for a pregnant mother to gain weight during pregnancy, but too many unhealthy foods can make a mother gain too much weight. Mothers who are overweight or obese during pregnancy can develop serious health problems like diabetes and high blood pressure. In some cases, obesity makes it more difficult for the mother to deliver her baby naturally and she has a higher risk of needing a caesarean delivery. When a mother is obese during pregnancy, it's also more difficult for her baby to grow into a healthy child. The baby may be born too early or he may be born with health problems that make it more difficult for his mother to care for him. Being a mother is one of the most important jobs in the world. From long before a baby is born, his mother has the power to steer her family towards good health.


Welcome back everyone. Today we're going to talk about how to work with a AD1 disk image. An AD1 disk image is created by access data. It's their own proprietary format. You sometimes see them around, but they're not very well supported on a lot of different tools, so they're not very popular. But whenever you do see them, you need to know how to be able to extract the data from them. You can think of them kind of like a zip file. This is a logical container and you can put different files inside of it. You can put partition information inside of it or whole physical disk information if you want to. But usually we see them filled with files that have been copied directly. So whenever you do a file level acquisition of a disk or maybe cloud storage or something like that, where you don't want all of the data, you only need specific files, you might see them in an AD1 format if they were collected with something like FTK imager. Now the problem is, because it's proprietary to access data, you're going to need something like access data is FTK imager or FTK to be able to open and work with it. So FTK imager is freely available. So let's go ahead and download that first. So first we go to accessdata.com and Xtero has recently bought access data, so they've changed things around a little bit. Go to products and services. You'll find FTK imager link by itself. Click download FTK imager. They'll ask for your email and some other information about you, but once you put that in, then you do get access to FTK imager download. And the download will look like this and it's access data FTK imager download and I have the 64 bit version. At the time of this video, 4.5.0 is the most recent version. Whenever you want to install it, just double click on the installer, click yes to allow permissions and then it just goes through like a normal install in Windows. You can basically just click next, next, next. So now we can open access data's FTK imager and make sure it does have permissions. Click yes. You will need permissions if you want to access any of the disks, but since we're dealing with a disk image, you don't have to give it administrative access. Again, I have version 4.5.0 and the interface looks a lot like it used to since a long time ago. However, the backend has been changed quite a bit and newer version of FTK imager is much faster at imaging. So I do recommend you upgrade. Okay, so to add the AD1 file, we go to file and add evidence item. It's the top selection and then we want to add not a physical drive, not a logical drive. We want to add an image file, click next and then enter the source path. I have mine on the desktop and then I click finish and then you can see the file name that I had was just disk.ad1 and that's what shows up in the evidence tree. If I expand this, then we can see that it's a custom content image, multi AD1 and then we have what looks like a copy of partition 2. Okay, and then we have root and we have a recycle bin. So we do have partition information here and then we have our users, we have John Doe. Let's go to desktop and then just looking at a link, we have the Zinmap link and it is from April 28th, 2021. Okay, so the easiest way to get all of these files out and work with them, then we go up to the where it says custom content image or this might be your partition information. Don't click on the disk file directly, the file name of the file that you added, instead click on one level below that where it has kind of like these black file tree icon. But when we right click on that, then we can go to export files. So we can choose or anywhere we want to export them. I'm just going to say the export folder on my desktop, I would normally be exporting these to an external storage disk specifically for that case. Okay, so I'll click my export, click okay. Now it's going to export every single file because I got the top of that file tree. Now I could have clicked on any of these other files or folders and exported them directly, but instead since I clicked on the top, it's going to get everything. So if we go in and look at that folder, desktop and export. Okay, I have my partition two, I have root, I have users, John Doe, and then I go to desktop and we can see our ZIN map icon again, and it's 429 2020 239 AM. Again, this is going to be my local time because now I've copied this to my local computer. So whatever time zone my computer is in, that's going to be the time that shows up in date modified. Let's look at John Doe again, and we have our desktop. Desktop folder itself was last modified 429 2021 at say 6pm. We can see that the desktop folder that was created underneath John Doe is 929 2021 basically today's date. Okay, so whenever you're creating folders, I'm copying all of this data out to my local disk that is formatted with NTFS. So these file folders are going to be have a created and modified time essentially of whatever today's data is because they're being created locally on my system. Just make sure that you realize that some of this data whenever you copy it out, it's going to get local metadata instead of copying out the metadata directly. So that's kind of the gotcha with especially folders, some of the files we don't have to worry about too much, but just be aware of the difference between the suspects metadata that was captured in the image versus the data that you've exported the metadata and timestamp specifically. If you're only interested in the contents, this won't affect contents in any way, but it will affect your file system metadata like timestamps. So that's how you can get out the files from an AD1 image. And now we can process all of these files with basically any tool that supports just adding bulk files to it. FTK Imager itself gives you a lot of tools for analysis. And then I usually just go through and pick only the files that I'm interested in analyzing further and then export them out and use them in another tool to figure out what's going on. So all of the file metadata information I would be looking at inside FTK Imager. So I'm just going to have to export the files that I want to analyze and then put them into my other tool export folder and then just basically throw this folder into another analysis tool that I'm using. Okay, so I hope that works. There's a little bit of confusion around AD1 images, how to access them and how they work. Basically, if you see AD, just look at access data's FTK Imager. See if you can analyze it with that and most likely access data will be able to open it and then you can extract the data you need and then if you need to throw it into another tool. Okay, so I hope that was helpful. Thank you very much.


Over the past 50 plus years, Charles Koch grew his family business, Koch Industries, into one of the largest privately held companies in America while playing a leading role in creating or supporting the modern libertarian movement and some of its major institutions. Among them, the Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, Mercatus Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation, a non-profit that supports many organizations, including Reason Foundation, the publisher of Reason Magazine. Along with his brother David, who passed away last year at the age of 79, the 85 year old billionaire became not only one of the most successful businessmen in the country, but among the most controversial, with leftists blaming the Koch brothers for many of our contemporary problems. Koch has just published Believe in People, a book that seeks to offer a paradigm shift that calls for all of us to move away from the top down approach to solving the really big problems by instead empowering people from the bottom up to act on their unique gifts and contribute to the lives of others. In a conversation with Koch and his co-author Brian Hooks, who is chairman and CEO of Stand Together and the president of the Charles Koch Foundation, I discussed the 2020 election, the successes and failures of the Libertarian movement, and what they see as the defining challenges and opportunities in the coming decade. Charles Koch, Brian Hooks, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Nick. Good to see you again. It's been a few years. It has indeed. So, as a starting point, Charles, could you kind of give what's the controlling idea of Believe in People? It's the idea that transformed my life and that of so many others and enabled me to accomplish more than I ever dreamed. And so my goal with the book is to use it to help many more people benefit from these ideas. And these are the principles of human progress, which in large part have to do with bottom up empowering of people. And when that happens and people are empowered, many of them become social entrepreneurs. And when there are enough of these social entrepreneurs as we've seen throughout history, they transform society and move it. It's never been perfect and never will be perfect, because human beings aren't perfect. Directionally toward a society more of equal rights and mutual benefit where people succeed by assisting one another and everyone has the opportunity to realize their potential. So that's what this book is about. And it tells the story, my story, which is probably the least interesting, but the story of people through history who have changed society, transformed themselves, transformed society by being social entrepreneurs, and then talks about the work we're doing today and all the thousands of social entrepreneurs we're helping to empower others to change their lives and help everybody rise. Right. And a lot of these issues have to do with things like education, substance abuse, housing, whatever. Brian, who's an exemplary social entrepreneur? And can you explain in the book and can you explain how that fits together with the larger groups stand together? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as as Charles said, we tell a lot of different stories about people and social entrepreneurs that we think exemplify this model of bottom-up solutions. You know, the three big ideas in the book that while there's going to be a ton of different solutions to all of the different challenges that come at our country, what they all have in common is this core belief in people, that it makes more sense to empower people from the bottom up, invest in those that are closest to the problems as the source of the solutions, and then unite with anybody to do right. You look at an organization that we feature in the preface and a group that we've worked with that stand together for, I guess, the better part of four years now, a group called the Family Independence Initiative. I think they exemplify each one of those big ideas. Family Independence Initiative was founded by a guy named Mauricio Miller, run by a guy named Jesus Horena. The thing that both Jesus and Mauricio have in common is that they experienced poverty firsthand growing up, and so they've got the kind of personal knowledge that tends to be key to unlocking really effective solutions to problems, whatever we're talking about. Charles would say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The results that the Family Independence Initiatives gets in terms of empowering families who are in poverty to emerge from poverty, to rise out of poverty, are off the charts, especially when you compare them to some of the top-down alternatives that permeate society. So what do they, can you explain a little bit of what they actually do? Yeah, I mean, it's a great model. So, you know, whereas the top-down approach looks at people in poverty as a problem to be solved, and it brings people from the outside in to try to kind of tell them what to do, Family Independence Initiative takes the opposite approach. They bring families who are in similar situations in poverty together under the idea that the solution to those families' poverty exists within the families, but just like all of us, they need some help in order to really emerge. They need capital, social capital, and financial capital, and through some pretty simple tools. The Family Independence Initiative helps those families to express their goals, and then to work together to help each other achieve those goals in this very topovillian notion of mutual assistance. But 27% of the families that participate in these programs after two years rise out of poverty and stay out of poverty, which is extraordinary, again, relative to the alternative. They double their savings. And again, this is sort of based on this deep belief in people, right? We believe in those families, and then we recognize that, you know, that many of us, including Jesus and Mauricio and the team there, they've got some skills and some things that can help those families to achieve more than they otherwise could. And the starting point to, as we've found, to learn the hard way is to believe in people is to recognize that everyone has a gift, that everyone has something to offer. And we learn that from multiple intelligence theory, from Ricardo's law of comparative advantage, the division of labor by comparative advantage, which is what raised humanity out of eternal dire poverty, that people started to be empowered to try things, to do things, and focus on what they were good at, recognize what they were good at and what they were not in focus, and then exchange with others. And then this brought about this whole change in the culture from everybody in conflict with each other to cooperating, to supporting each other, to assisting each other by trading, each concentrating on what they do best and exchanging. And this also happens to follow the second law of thermodynamics, which you know very well is that... I live the second law of thermodynamics. I've been tending towards entropy since I was born. Yeah, that's it. That use, entropy, uselessness, and waste increases in a closed system. So we all need to be open. And what does that mean? It means open to different ideas, different people, different things, different approaches, and so try to find common ground with others. Charles, one of the things that I think people reading the book will be interested to understand is kind of the two of the major figures who's thought you're following. There's Friedrich Hayek on the one hand. That's not going to be surprising to anybody who knows free market economics and whatnot, but also Abraham Maslow. Can you talk about how these two guys kind of fit together for you and how that energizes a lot of what you're talking? When I think of them in harmony, I think of Hayek's statement of what probably the greatest discovery in the history of mankind was, and that is that people can live together in peace and to their mutual advantage without having to agree on common aims by only being bound by abstract rules of conduct. Now what does that say? That says bottom up is what works. And that's what Maslow said. He said, what you can be, you must be. If you don't develop your capabilities and realize your potential, you may be successful externally, but you will be deeply unhappy because you're not fulfilling your gifts, your nature. And so the way that's done is bottom up. Each person discovering their gift, turning it into valued skills, and then using it to succeed by contributing. So they're both coming from it. And this is what I find, and with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they all fit. And this is what, when I started studying this, I became fascinated and transformed my life studying these principles of human progress. The ones I really gravitated, it was from all the different disciplines and perspectives, they came together. They reinforced each other. And those are the ones that worked in history, that lifted societies up and headed them toward the ability to enable more people to realize their potential and contribute and work in harmony and peace. So Nick, the real opportunity that we see and stand together is how do you translate those big insights into actual action that can empower people to overcome the challenges? So we talked about the Family Independence Initiative as an example of a program that does that. But no program can do it all on its own. There's no single solution to the big problems that we're trying to solve. And so what we put forward in the book is that what's necessary is this comprehensive approach. So you take what Charles just said seriously, how do we really help to put society in a position where they're empowering people to discover their own paths in a way that satisfies themselves, finds fulfillment by helping others. And so programs like Family Independence Initiative are important because communities play a critical role in empowering people. But we know public policy does as well. And so you've got to identify those barriers and policies that are perpetuating poverty, things like occupational licensure, that sort of thing. But for a long time, we've kind of left a lot of the other opportunities in society off the table. Do you think is that coming out of a kind of rigid libertarian idea that the government shouldn't be involved in it, so we're not really going to talk about it? No, the government has a role. But I mean, government is one of what we look at is four types of institutions. One are community institutions, educational institutions, business institutions, and government institutions. And what our goal is is to help each one move toward doing the things that empower people to improve their lives and the lives of others and move toward this society of equal rights and mutual benefit. So the policies, so we work with thousands of social entrepreneurs across all four of these sets of institutions. And what we do is support those who are going in that direction. And we don't ask for perfection if we find they agree with us on one. They may disagree with us on all the others, but we will work with them on that one. And that's the only way we found we can move society forward in that And at various points in the book, Frederick Douglass, the 19th century abolitionist order comes up a lot, particularly in this concept of uniting with anybody to do good. Brian, Frederick Douglass, social entrepreneur, I mean, it's kind of one way of talking about him. But how does he inhabit or personify? Well, I mean, may I take that? Because I'm the, as you say, as you saw in the book, I have my two, I list three categories of people that have influenced me and that my two heroes are Frederick Douglass and Victor Frankel. And Frederick Douglass particularly because of what he overcame to be empowered, what he did with it to not be vengeful or hateful, but to help everybody, to eliminate all kinds of injustices. And then he wrote about the aha moments, the very things we've been talking about. For example, he found or he realized that he wasn't enslaved because he was inferior, but because he was being kept ignorant. So he taught himself to read when he was eight. Then at age 16, he had the opportunity to teach Sunday school. So he taught them to read. And it wears what his comment was. At last, I found a way to contribute. So he was contribution motivated, even as enslaved. And then he escaped. And he got a job and he says, I'm not only a free man, I'm a free working man. And then he went to these abolitionist rallies and finally, they called on him, but won all the top abolitionists were speaking garrison and the rest. And he was the best. So he found his gift. And he dedicated his life to that and became very successful. And then a powerful, one of the top social entrepreneurs in our history. And Brian, I will point out that it was the Irish who beat up Frederick Douglass when he was free in the North. I'll take that as a personal dig based on our history together, Nick. Our common, yes. I think it's important, though, to note, I mean, we learn so much from guys like Douglass and other of these just unbelievable social entrepreneurs who overcame unimaginable barriers. But I think we make a mistake if we say, well, they can do it. And therefore, I can't or other people can't. So what we try to do in the book is also share stories of modern day people who exemplify the same sort of path that Douglass, recognizing that nobody today struggles with what he had to. Right. Who's a good short example of that? We look at a guy like Anton Lucky, for instance, right? Who's just this phenomenal guy we met four or five years ago, part of a group called Urban Specialists. Anton, early on about 14 years old, started the most violent gang in Dallas, the Bloods, went on to, you know, as one does, after you start a gang when you're 14, spend time in prison. But Anton in prison begins this personal transformation, which follows remarkably the path that Charles just described for Douglass. Right. And long story short, he comes out of prison having discovered his leadership gifts and is now applying them to help other kids go down a better path than he did. And you say, well, geez, that's great. Maybe Anton can help thousands of kids during his lifetime, which he will. But it's more than that. By pointing out what Anton is able to accomplish, right, somebody who most of the rest of the country or society wouldn't really believe in, right? When we believe in a guy like Anton and we tell his story and we celebrate what he's done, he inspires thousands of others to look within themselves to figure out how they can contribute. Can we talk, you know, at some point, so right now we're kind of talking about community efforts to help, you know, people at a very kind of fundamental level, family unit, gangs, things like that, even educational institutions. At one point in the book, you write, America needs a better business culture. And it's, you know, it's clear that a lot of people, certainly you guys do, I do, you know, we express ourselves, we express our core values, our desires, our aspirations through the work that we do. Coke Industries makes a lot and a lot of money because it's doing, you know, it's making things that people want at a price that they're willing to pay. Talk about the two things, I guess. Charles, at one point you write that when you took over Coke Industries after your father died in the late 60s, you had to change the company's culture to one of empowerment, not control. Can you explain a little bit what that meant? Right, it was before my father talked me into joining the company by telling me he was very ill and so I wasn't able to really run the company and so I wasn't doing that well and he didn't have long to live, so either I come back to run it or he would have to sell it. And he said, you already own a piece of the company so I was looking for an entrepreneurial opportunity and I didn't think I'd get a better offer than that one. So I, and he was true to his word, I mean, he had been growing up, he had been tough on me, he had me work at tough jobs from the time I was six all my free time because he didn't want me to be a country club bum but I was reluctant to come back because I didn't need more tough stuff. I wanted to be independent but he gave me that offer and he was true to his word. So he said I could run it any way I wanted except I needed his approval to sell it. And so the first thing I saw is there was a protectionist mentality in the company and that is we're not going to do new things, we're not going to take risks, we're just going to do the status quo and I'm coming and I'm a kid. No, I want to do new things, I want to blow it up. And so I, as I was learning these principles of human progress, I created this model of succeeding by creating virtuous cycles of mutual benefit in the company. And what that means is you figure out what capabilities you have that will create value for others starting with customers but also your employees, your suppliers, your communities and society as a whole. And so that's what, so we changed the whole and then you continually transform yourself to do more and more to build additional capabilities and this leads to new opportunities and the new opportunities lead to the need to create new capabilities and so on in never ending cycles of improvement and progress. And that's what we started doing. And this stuff worked. That's why I say it transformed my life. I didn't think I was that capable and I wasn't, the ideas were. And so we focused on creating value for others and empowering our employees from the bottom up. Yeah, what does that mean? Because, you know, one of the things I've read all of your books over the years and I've heard a lot about market-based management and intellectually I understand the idea and it sounds great. But then as a former manager myself, I don't know how to implement it. What does it mean to kind of set your employees free to figure out what to do? The first job of every supervisor is to enable their reports, their employees to self-actualize. And what that means is to work with employees to find what gifts they have, what they'll be passionate about, and then rather than stick them in a role, most of which they aren't good at, design the roles to fit the capabilities of the employees and then give them the tools and with the technology today, we've, for example, we've invested in nearly 30 billion in technology within the last decade and we use this technology not to control our employees but to empower them and give them the tools and the knowledge and the authority to make more decisions and we are getting innovations, improvements from all levels through there and that passion has gone up. So when I look at society and what could be done and how you change the culture, I mean, I like it and how this is working here. So this isn't just a theory, this is something I see every day. And just to set what the stakes are, Nick, I mean 70% of people, almost 70% of people report that they are completely disengaged from their job. They don't find any fulfillment in their job. So you think about the human potential that's just being lost by the way business typically runs. If you can change that and you do things like what Charles just talked about, focus on self-actualization in the workplace. I mean, not only are you going to get personal value out of it, but think about the productivity you can unleash. You know, Charles in the book, you say that your basic dynamic is trial and error and you emphasize that you made a lot of errors during your career. What's one of the biggest kind of signature mistakes that you made as the head of Koch Industries? Well, I look at it as, I follow the Stoic philosophy, that is, I'm grateful for everything and entitled to nothing. And this is consistent with Thomas Edison's philosophy. Remember when he tried all these things to make a new battery, 9,000 things that didn't work. And his friends say, well, God, I'm sorry you had all this failure. He said, I haven't had any failures. I've found 9,000 things that don't work. And I look at our failures and that's what's made us successful. And if you're not, the only way you can never make a mistake or never have a failure if you don't try anything new. And guess what? That means you have total failure because you're going out of business given the process of creative destruction that's going on at light speed pace today. So we're ramping it up. So we're driving more creative destruction than what we tell every employee, whatever you're doing, that you may be best at the world at what you're doing. Our business may be the leader in all that. It's not good enough. If we don't improve faster than others, we're going out of business and get everybody thinks, so everybody comes to work. How do I drive innovation and find new and better ways to create more value for our customers and our other constituencies? One of the more interesting sections of the book I think is when you're talking about kind of building a business, a better business culture, you guys really go after corporate welfare. You talk about a corporate welfare crisis. And I would like you to talk a little bit about Coke Industries was a major producer of ethanol and yet you lobbied to end direct subsidies of ethanol. How did you sell that to your investors? How did you sell that to your employees? Because that seems to be, you know, that sounds like it would be kind of a tough sell because this is what we don't, I mean, we train everybody, educate all our employees in our philosophy. And a good part of their rewards are they helping us build this culture of creating value for others. And it, when people focus in their career on creating value for others rather than gaming the system and trying to be succeed by tricks or playing politics or whatever, it transforms them. It changes their habits.  Now, not only in business, but in working with their children, with their families, in their philanthropy, even some say, I've worked with my church or my synagogue to help them be more effective in helping their parishioners. So this, this stuff is so powerful. You can see at 85 people ask me why you, why you work so hard now? Because I'm, I mean, what am I going to do? I love doing this. And when I see that it really helps people and empowers them, man, that's what makes my day. So a big error that you kind of confess to or discuss in the book is having spent a lot of time trying to elect most of mostly Republicans in political battles. You had infamous notorious coveted seminars a couple times of years for many years where you raise money for particular politicians.  Boy, did we screw up. What a mess talking about partisanship. How did you come to the understanding that trying to kind of work the political system in that way was not working? Well, I, I always had that, that view. I, well, I've been at this for nearly 60 years. And for the, the first 50, I wasn't in politics at all. Because politics, as you, as you see, everything we, we try to do is based on mutual benefit. And politics can't do that, because it isn't win-win, it's win-lose. You're running against somebody, and either you win, it's not going to be mutual benefit. So, and that's, and then, then I've taken to heart what George Washington's insight and his farewell address, beware of political parties, because I'll tell you that there were, to help you, and they're really there to gain and keep power. So we stayed out of politics in that, but then we got in. So why, why did you get into politics? Well, that's what, that's what I was saying. It seemed like you were, you were kind of on the right path, what, what drew you into it. Yeah, but okay, so we, we started getting into policies. Okay, because we realized we can't just do it with education and empowering people. We've got to have policies that allow this. If we have too many policies that are holding people back that aren't based on equal rights and mutual benefit, that aren't, they're keeping people from realizing their potential. So we needed to change those policies. And then as we got into that, okay, it's hard to find politicians that will really work to empower people or have policies. So we need to help elect some. And then Brian can, can tell how we, how we got it, because I, I, I, I don't say the right things when I get into it. Well, you know, this is a libertarian podcast. So you can curse. That's right. That's right. If you're going to curse, it's going to be a, you know, there's a, there's a pretty big misunderstanding, I think, about even the extent to involvement in politics back in the middle 2010s, right, which is really when, when this experiment was going on. And this was coming after the financial crisis was kind of the between 2009, 2010 and 2014 was this experiment with, Hey, if we want to find politicians that are going to be truer to the principles of empowerment, let's get engaged in politics, right? And figure out if we can do it. We, we played the game like, like everybody does, we picked a team in case it was the Republicans, not because we were Republicans or because we had any love for the party necessarily, but because we thought that was going to be the most productive way to find people that would pass policies to empower people. Three cycles later, experiment run, recognize, Hey, this isn't working the way that it ought to. So let's do something different. But even at that heyday of our involvement in the political process, that was never more than 10% of everything that this philanthropic community was doing. And it's never exceeded that today. It's less than that, but we're still engaged in politics. We're just doing it differently. Yeah. Well, let me just point out that politicians like women of easy virtue come pretty cheaply. So you don't have to spend that much, right? You're not going to get us to curse, Nick. You're not going to get us to curse. But so yeah, you talk in the book about, you know, that you picked partisanship or partisanship over kind of policy. And then you're talking about part partnership over partisanship. So we never picked partnership partisanship over policy. We thought for a while partisanship would be the path towards better policy. But again, you know, you live and learn. And what do you think we did? What went wrong with the Republican Party? Well, I don't think so. It's it's what George Washington said. What I mean, what is the what is the politicians profit and loss? It's whether they get reelected. That's profit. And if they lose, they had a big loss. So, so they're going to do whatever will get reelected. So we had all these, we supported these politicians who, who said they were for all this stuff. We vetted them on that. And they were saying all the right things. And then I'd be watching TV and they would be coming up for the opposite. You know, I got to tell you, Charles, it's hard to take you seriously now if you're only now or only a few years ago was realizing that politicians lie when they're moving their lips. No, no, I told you, I stayed out for 50 years, but I got sucked into it. Anyway, so I said to Brian, I said, I said, Brian, we've got to change. Who, who were the big disappointments? Can I, you know, I, I hate to use a trope from the left, but name some names.  You said like these are good bets to pursue limited effective government strategies. And then they just didn't deliver. I think what we're more interested in talking about is what does it look like going forward, right? And this is what we talk about in the book is look, what you learn from that experience is not that politicians lie. Of course, we knew that, right? But what you learn is that the party system is structured not to produce good policy, but to produce perpetual party. And so how do you disrupt that? How do you change those dynamics? Because look, even when you talk to the folks in, in Congress, right, people are frustrated. You know, a lot of those folks didn't come here to do what's going on right now, but they don't see a better way. And it's worth pointing out however unpopular Donald Trump has been during his presidency, Congress is like half as popular. So that's right. Yeah, that's right. They have their own problems to deal with. But, but policy coalitions can be formed not through this notion of sort of bipartisanship, which doesn't tend to lead to much profound outcome, but through a real nonpartisan approach, right? The idea that we'll work with anybody to do right regardless of party. Yeah, it's in the context of, because you guys were heavily involved in this with criminal justice reform and the first step back. And that seems to be a place where an unlikely coalition of people who didn't have a lot in common except for those issues in the criminal justice bucket came together and, you know, it actually got something done. And we see that as a model, you know, so you look at criminal justice reform, what happened is exactly as you said, we looked for common ground rather than focusing on the things that separated us with the groups that we worked with, put together a coalition of well over 30 groups, right? Everybody from the ACLU to the American Conservative Union, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Officers, I mean, you name it, it was a who's who of a coalition, real diverse.  If you were a Republican or a Democrat, if you dared to speak the truth about the criminal justice system, you risked your opponent basically pointing to the one person that did harm. And that would come back to get you out of office. So all these diverse groups came back and said, okay, if you're a Democrat or a Republican, do the right thing, we got your back. And because of the diversity of that coalition, that it was robust, and it allowed both parties to do the right thing. That's a model that we think we can apply to a lot of different issues. Yeah, what are some of those other issues that you're particularly interested in? I mean, the one that is ready to go right now, and we're very hopeful going forward is immigration. In what way? I mean, we have, you know, one of the weird, and maybe obviously, you know, it was going to turn out this way. But under Donald Trump, who was elected being very anti-immigrant, pro-immigrant sentiment in America is historic highs. That's right. But it's also true that George Bush, who won re-election in 2004, made comprehensive immigration reform. And, you know, it was kind of good, good reform. It was more friendly to immigrants. It didn't get a pass. Obama didn't get a pass. So how are you going to affect change in immigration? We think the change maker here is what we just talked about. In all of those past cases, you pursue a partisan strategy. That's the way the policy making has always been done in D.C. But if we can bring the kind of diverse coalition that we brought to criminal justice reform to an issue like improving our immigration system, you change the dynamic, right? We also see it, for instance, on foreign policy, you know, stopping the crazy adventurism that is so counterproductive, you know, foreign wars that have nothing to do with national security. Here again, you've got a dynamic. It's 70% of the country thinks we ought to be out of Afghanistan. Why aren't we? Right? Because neither party wants to give the other a win. But if you can bring that diverse coalition to that, you can make really important changes that help people's lives, that help the national security and help our fiscal situation, by the way. Right. Can I ask, related to this, where is Koch Industries or where is the Charles Koch Foundation on an issue like climate change, which seems to be, it has become a background issue where everybody basically acknowledges that climate change is happening, that human activity contributes to it, and that, you know, we've got to do something about it. Where does that fit into the kind of basket of things that you're pursuing? Yeah. Well, as you've seen, I've commented on this on several interviews. And so for many years, I've been saying that, okay, the temperature's been rising for over a century now, and human activity has contributed to it. But the approach is wrong. This top-down approach, which they're using supposedly around the world, animations keep rising. So it's not accomplishing what has accomplished and will accomplish it, are innovations, bottom-up innovations that, for example, substitute natural gas for coal. And so this is what we're working on at Koch Industries. As I said, we've invested nearly $30 billion in technology. And that's led to us, let's say, our production of fossil fuels a decade ago was maybe around a half of our business. Now it's just a fraction. And our emissions are less across the board in our plants. And we're working on inventing things that will do two things, not just have less emissions, but will be cheaper and more affordable rather than much more expensive and unreliable, which makes people's lives worse. So we go back to our basic, we're committed to making people's lives better and succeed through mutual benefits. So we've developed a system to automate the detection of emissions from plants, of releases. And that greatly reduces the number and magnitude of releases. We've developed a superior 5G connection system, communication system for electric cars. We've invested in a company that has electric vehicles for delivery yards, where the whole thing is automated. And we're now invested and we're using this in our plants. And then we've invested in a new a small scale modular nuclear plant technology that I mean, that's a huge could make a huge difference. And it's safer and cheaper if it once again doesn't get over-regulated. So it makes it impossible and so on. And I could go on and on. These are the things we're doing because we believe that's that's that's the future. And that that's the only way we can deal with whatever these problems are going to be in the future from temperature rising is through bottom up innovations.  And most of the business people I know that I've talked to has said that there was a palpable difference during the Trump years then under the Obama years, for instance, and that regulation seemed to lessen, even if you don't necessarily see it in the number of pages in the federal register and things like that. How do you guys feel and not just about business, but like, was Donald Trump good for the country? And then also, what are you looking forward to? What's good about Biden and what what worries you about as we move into a new political era? My sense is that that's what a lot of people are asking in the country right now. But like we're right in the book, right? There is so much more to life than politics that if we if we ask too much of politicians, whoever they are, whatever party we are as a country likely to be disappointed. And so what we're trying to do is encourage people to look beyond sort of that narrow lens of politics. Look, politics plays an important role, but it's a limited role, then that's by design in our country. We want to find ways that people can come together outside of politics, government policy.  I mean, was was Trump was it, you know, was it was it a good thing that he was president for four years and kind of burned down certain types of institutions. And when we look at somebody like Joe Biden, I'm thinking, you know, from a from a kind of standard libertarian analysis, Joe Biden promised $11 trillion in new spending. He's not going to be able to deliver on that. But like, does that make you look forward to the future? Or does it make it harder to get outside of politics? Did Trump actually make it harder to get outside of politics? Because we all talked about him every minute of every day. I'll put it this way. I think that there are a lot of ideas that are being offered to solve some very real problems in our country, right?  I think it's a reflection of deeper challenges that we talk about in the book, the core institutions not empowering people to keep up with the pace of change. And different flavors of top down can appeal because they seem almost like magic wands. But what we try to do in the book is show as history does, that it's a lot tougher than that, right? That they're really the only way to overcome some of these problems is not to take, you know, whatever it is, the flavor of the top down of the day, but really do the hard work to help to build an inclusive society that empowers everybody. And so that's, I mean, that's what we're focused on. That's what we think the future can hold. And look, politicians are going to play an important role in that because government policy creates the conditions for these other institutions to be productive. But ultimately, the majority of energy needs to be outside of government, outside of government policy in the voluntary sector, right?  This is what we've dedicated our careers to. Well, this is a good way to pivot to the libertarian movement. And Charles, you know, more than any individual, and certainly with you and your brother, you created, envisioned, funded the libertarian movement as we know it. I believe the oldest institution that you are continuously involved with was the Institute for Humane Studies. Most of the operations that you're talking about are in this voluntary sector. Could you talk about what drew you to something like IHS? And, you know, how has that played out? And how does that kind of reflect your vision of what libertarian philanthropy and a libertarian society should look like? Well, what drew me to the Institute was that, as I said, that these ideas transform my life and enabled me to accomplish more than I ever dreamed. And so I wanted to help as many other people as possible be exposed to these ideas so they could help them do the same. And that's what the Institute was working on. And I guess just for people who don't know, the Institute for Humane Studies funds seminars, scholarships, academics for college students as well as professors, young faculty, people who are involved in having a life of the mind. Yeah, and that's the same thing with the Mercatus Center. It does similar things and a somewhat different methodology. And that's what attracted me. And that's where I met Brian when he first came to work out there out of college. So those are the kind of institutions I was interested in. But we were the people who believed in these bottom-up ideas. It was mainly talking about the theory and the history, how it worked through history. And I said, we've got to deal with, show how it can deal with real problems. And so that's why I helped start the Cato Institute to take these abstractions and apply them to real issues. And then I said, well, we've also got to show that these ideas really work to change people's lives. So we've got to go find people, professors, people in communities. I provided the C Capital for the Institute for Justice to start. I started an organization in the seventies called, we initially named it BLAST, Business Leaders Against Subsidies and Terrorists. And I got Milton Friedman to work with me to become the chairman of the advisors. And the idea was to get business people to see that they're better off not going for short-term profits, rigging the system, and really creating value for others. And a typical letter I got back, I mean, no one would have answered me, but because Milton was there, they said, God, I love what you and Milton are doing. I totally agree with, but it doesn't apply to my industry. For example, one made jeans and he said, gosh, because if we're put out of business by foreign competition, who's going to make the boys jeans in times of war? And so, oh my God. So anyway, so we changed it to Citizens First Sound Economy. And because citizens were the ones who were getting screwed by this. And the business people were making money short-term, because long-term they're destroying society with this. But that's just a minor point, I guess. What you did and from things that I've read and, you know, just talking with people, one of the things that you did, Charles, was you kind of envisioned a series of parallel institutions. You know, if libertarian thought was certainly not represented, it wasn't even represented in the Republican Party really in the 60s very much, much less in the media, much less in academia, much less in kind of business roundtables. I mean, do you feel like you succeeded in helping to create a kind of sources of parallel information and kind of community building or mission building? Well, I feel this when, for example, when we were first, I first got involved in the Institute of Remain Studies, we would be lucky to get six professors in the country to come to participate in a seminar. Now, depending on how you count them, there are thousands of professors who are doing it. So, and so that's in that. And then, and then what we've done, my wife and I 30 years ago started an organization called Youth Entrepreneurs in one school in a tough area to help these kids find their gift. And so it's not just classroom, what I call one dimensional schooling, teach the test, top down, everybody treated the same, but tailored for each individual. And it blew me away that these kids who were failing everything started making straight As and they were transformed and then went on to be successful. And now it's in over 20 states. And we have sponsors in all these states that are they're helping it work. So it was so I look at all those things we did in all the institutions and how it's, it's helped. And now, now we, we work with people across the whole ideological spectrum and all the institution. Now, how do we get it so it's critical mass and it reaches everybody. And that's what we're you asked what we're doing in the future. We've got to scale this and we've got to get the message out a lot better. And that's what we hope believe in people will help do. Yeah, Brian, that's, you know, I've been at reason for 27 years, I believe. I know you've been involved in IHS, Mercatus, etc. 20 years, what 20 years. Yeah. And you know, we can certainly say that in that past time, our reach, our visibility, I think our influence has gotten bigger. But it's, you know, it's not where I think anybody in the libertarian movement would like it to be, you know. And so what are the deficiencies in the existing kind of, you know, structures or organizations or mindsets and where do you see it going? Because as the head of CKI, you're going to be in a position where you can real, you're going to be making a lot of bets on what's going to play in the future. So could you talk about that? Yeah, look, I'll, I'll, I'll give you two answers, right? And I think they're complimentary. One, I think is a mechanical answer, right? We need to do a better job of the mechanics of sharing the opportunities for people to get engaged in really empowering people from the bottom up, right? I mean, that's ultimately what we're talking about, helping people to find how they can live their best lives by contributing the lives of others. That's, that's the liberal project. And, and from a mechanical perspective, organizations that have been dedicated to that mission, we've been pretty clunky and we're getting better, I think, you know, I mean, these 27 years, 20 years, we've seen a lot of improvement over time. We've got a ways to go. We can talk about that if you're interested. I think there's some pretty basic stuff that can be done to dramatically improve the effectiveness. What, what, what's one quick example? Practice what we preach, right? This division of labor by comparative advantage. For a long time, you remember this, right? There were these organizations that were kind of silos, right? Each one of our groups, well, we were, we were the one that we're going to save the world, right? We could, we could solve it all on our own. And we'd see each other at events and parties, cocktail parties, that sort of thing. And we'd, we talked to each other, but we wouldn't really work together. And that's changing quite a lot. And I think that's a really positive sign. And it just interjected then back in the early days, there was a lot of divisiveness and people not speaking to each other. I mean, it was unbelievable. I mean, gosh, we got to work together. But, but the more fundamental answer, Nick, I think, and this is the thing that I, I think, you know, what reason is doing right now in some other groups, I think is really, really productive on this front. We got to take up Hayek's challenge, right? We got to once again make the building of a free society an intellectual adventure, or as he says, a deed of courage. And there's ever a time for courage for those of us who believe that, that liberalism and empowering people to find new and better ways to contribute in society. If there was ever a time for us to sort of stand up with courage and advocate for that, I mean, now is the time. And so if we can bring that spirit into our efforts, and as Charles says, put together, put aside some of these petty divisions and welcome more and more people who are out there looking for a better way into this liberal project, right? This, this, this charge that Hayek has given us for generations. I mean, I think we ought to be, we ought to expect to see a whole lot more progress. And you know, look, let's not lament where we are. You know, Don Boudreau is somebody who always reminds me, hey, we got our problems and we do, but time horizon matters. And so if you look, say, from the 60s until today, and you just consider the number of people in the world that are living under more liberal conditions, however you want to measure that. I mean, it's a tremendous success of these ideas. And I think we got to keep that perspective in mind as well. Well, the other, the other insight of Hayek's is, is to make progress. You can't continue to use the language that were decades ago. You've got to find where people are, particularly young people and what language appeals to them and put it in those terms. So you, we have to go where people are and show them these ideas in ways they will relate to. And that's what we're, that's what we're trying to do. And people said, well, that isn't the way we used to talk about it. Well, no, we got to innovate. We've got to do things differently.  Well, I was going to name my, my, my first book, The Epistemology of Praxeology, and it was pointed out that would only appeal to you. You know, Russ, Russ Roberts, another guy that, that, that's familiar to your, your crowd is, I used to work with him at the Mercatus Center for a long time. He would say, you know, he Russ wrote novels, right? That was his idea to try to get more people engaged in ideas. He would say to me, look, Brian, as much as we'd like them to, nobody's sitting around campfires singing songs about praxeology, right? But today, I mean, we've got the opportunity, you know, the examples in the book, people like Scott Strode, people like Antong Lucky, people like, like the other social entrepreneurs, they are literally sitting around singing songs about the work that they're doing. I mean, these are the, the heroes of liberalism going forward. And then we get musicians together. But they're singing songs. And they're, oh my God. And they tell their stories about how they overcame it. And then they have a song about it. Oh, right. Boy, it brings tears to your eyes. I guess this is a good time to invoke Bob Dylan, who shows up very early in the book. And, you know, arguably, one of the most controversial claims in your book is that you say that Bob Dylan absolutely deserved the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature. I heartily agree. Charles, you, you quote from, it's all right, mom only bleeding early on in the book. He not busy being born is busy dying. Expand on that a little bit. How does, how does that summarize a lot of what you're talking about? Well, I mean, Bob Dylan is like me. He's, he's, he's totally committed and obsessed with his gift. And he has a gift for understanding the human condition and putting that in a way that people relate to through his songs. So he's, he has a tremendous gift. I understand that if he's having a party and the song starts to come, he leaves the party and goes down to his studio and writes the song while it's with him. And that's, he reminds me of me. I wish I could write a song. But no, he has, he's constantly reinvented himself as well. Yeah, no, absolutely. That's it. Continual transformation. And, and he is amazing. I have his whole book of songs, which I, I refer to. And I, there's so many that have great, powerful messages and that is just, it's very inspiring. You think of Dylan never picked up an electric guitar, right? Because he kind of, he stayed within the bounds of what was, and look, he was a very successful folk musician at the time. But he broke those barriers. And I mean, imagine the music that we wouldn't have today if he hadn't done that. Right. Brian, do you, you're also a Dylan fan? What is, what's your favorite Dylan song? If you have one. It's an impossible question to answer, right? But I'll give you one and I won't explain why. It's Blood on the Tracks. It's called Idiot Wind. Sure. And I'm going to, I'm going to stop talking about that. Okay. That's, yeah, it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves. You got it. You got it. My mind is just, mine is forever young. Yes. All right. And, and there's two versions of that on the same album. So that's, you can pick as you're being born. As a final question, Charles, you, you and your brother, who was a longtime trustee on Reasons Board of Trustees, you guys were among the most hated people in America, you know, for many years, may still well be, you know, and kind of the way that George Soros had became this icon of hatred and contempt for people on the right. Just what did it, what does it feel like to be, you know, the subject of that kind of attention? Well, I, I, I, I'm a big fan of Carl Popper's scientific method, which is develop a, a testable proposition and then go find what's wrong with it and get other people to criticize it. And why do I do that? And that's the way we run our business because my, my little ego is strong enough to handle the criticism, but it isn't strong enough to handle the massive failures that come by not getting better knowledge. And I don't know why everybody doesn't have that rather than protect their, you know, I don't want, I know all the answers, shut up, do what I say, and then have disasters. And so I, I look at the criticism. I mean, some is constructive and, and then, okay, we need to learn from that. And then I need, then learn, okay, why, why are these people doing it? Or do they want to shut us down? And then, okay, how do we, how do we deal with that? So each of these attacks is, I find very educational. So I want to learn from them and learn where they're coming from, how we deal with that, because I want to be successful. And unless you can deal with criticism and overcome it, you're, you're never going to be successful. Like, like John Stuart Mill says, those who only know their side of the case, no little of that. Well, we're going to leave it there. Thank you very much. Brian Hooks of the Charles Koch Institute and of Stand Together, Charles Koch of Koch Industries. The book is Believe in People, Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World. Gentlemen, thanks so much for talking to Reason today. Thanks, Nick. Thank you, Nick. It was fun. Great interview.


In summary, the results of this study suggest that using recycled fibers such as latex, vinyl, and peepee can significantly enhance the mechanical properties of 3D-printed mortar. Furthermore, the use of graphene oxide nanomaterials, cloizite 15A nanoclay, and micro silica fume can further improve the printability of 3D-printed mortar. Additionally, the presence of internal reinforcements such as plain steel wire mesh can increase the composite behavior of printed layers. Overall, the use of recycled fibers and admixtures can reduce CO2 emissions and make 3D printing more sustainable. This article was offered by Sade Sina Musavi and Mehdi Dehestini.


We will all agree that a personal referral has been and always will be the best way to get new patients My staff thinks doing Facebook is pointless yet. If I ever find them off-task, they're on their personal Facebook. I Know I suck at posting so I hired a company to post for us and the only likes we have are from my family members Okay, I see You'll like it when I get all fired up at a meeting. Hi. It's why you saved this one. Yeah All right, here we go The whole having a company do your social media posts for you is lame and doesn't work There you go, especially for a small business.   Please it's so dumb. The only national holiday that matters. Anyway, it's national donut day. Everybody knows that So let me give you some tips the best thing that you can do for your followers on social media for your optical is Don't sell to them Don't let them learn about you be real. Let them see behind the scenes Let them see pictures of the cute little the cute little guy who got his glasses And he's so happy to be in his first set of glasses or let them see those sexy new frames You just got in or let them see a pic of how Doc coaches little league twice a week Let them hear the stories of how you took a retinal photo of a child that you were concerned about You immediately referred them and then caught a brain tumor in its early stages. That's good stuff Ask your patient to write a review who got, you know, their glasses online How to terrible experience then came to you guys and had an amazing pair and loved it Share that review on your Facebook page. Now. Here's the thing many lack Creativity and know how to tackle social media. You are dealing with patients You barely have time to even enter in all of your orders before the end of the day How could you possibly take the time to come up with fun and cool Concepts for your social media and then be able to post them. So with socially sexy, which is what brought up the topic that got so Fired up in the meeting this morning We give members weekly schedules of posts and inspiration along with caption ideas So we show them an example of the thing to post and all you have to do is take the pic to mimic the Example modify the caption to fit what your office is doing and done We have a beautiful method on creating active followers for your social media That is where your marketing dollars should be going. Yes, run ads. Yes, optimize your SEO. Yes, yes, yes But where you should be investing is incentivizing your patient base to actively follow you on social Because social media is the new way of getting referrals We will all agree that a personal referral has been and always will be the best way to get new patients referral used to happen when you saw friends at the coffee shop and happened to mention that you had an eye exam later and they Say, oh, where are you getting your exam? And they said, oh, I go to dr. Smith. He's great, right? But today in the social world your referral opportunities are so Astronomically huge because now I take a photo of myself in some super cute frames and I post it on social media and tag Dr. Smith's office and all seven hundred of my local friends are gonna see the cute super cute stuff that they can get at dr Smith's office. Yeah referral game changer So your staff being on Facebook, you know, whenever they're off task is the perfect example of exactly why you must make your Optical relevant on social media


Ukraine reaches agreement with Norway for more Nassarms supplies. A Ukrainian government delegation visiting Oslo has agreed with Norway on additional deliveries of units of the national advanced surface-to-air missile system Nassarms, Ukrainian Verkovna Rada, parliament speaker Ruslan Stefanczuk said. In Norway, we reached agreement to obtain more Nassarms systems as well. Ukraine will be given MLRS, ARTHUR, counter-battery radars, and other essential weapons. Stefanczuk told the Ukraine-formed news agency in an interview. He did not elaborate on the time frames or volumes of the agreed-upon supplies. According to the senior Ukrainian parliamentarian, Norway has approved a record assistance package under which 75 billion Norwegian Krona or 6.8 billion US dollars will be granted to Ukraine. The initiative is a five-year program, Stefanczuk added. Last week, the delegation from Kiev led by Stefanczuk visited Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. In early March, the Norwegian government announced that Oslo would provide Kiev with two Nassarms systems. Previously, Oslo delivered equipment for the US-made Nassarms given to Ukraine.


Okay, so this one has been recommended to me a lot and it's been requested a lot and Well, it's it's pretty good. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long you know, I don't have a whole lot to say about the enemy unfortunately because You know, it's just generally yeah, it's a good book like it has a couple of things that I didn't like about it and Plenty of stuff that was decent, but overall, it's just like yeah That was good. You know, I don't have a whole lot to add about it So this is another one of those entries in that weird genre of young adult books where some sort of disease Comes through and kills off all the adults or turns all the adults into some sort of weird zombie knockoff And in this case, it's the second one all the adults turn into I Mean they call them grown-ups or strangers in the books And I think strangers sounds better, but even then it's not a great name But you know, they're basically just diseased humans who try to eat your flesh But you don't need to get them in the heads. They can die normally and Well, it's in London kids are running around and there's a group of them that are hiding out in an old Department store and then this one kid comes there who says he's from Buckingham Palace and he says like hey We have gardens over there.  We got to deal with now plot-wise. I don't think this book is very good I will say that and I know it's part of a series like I think there's six or seven in this series in total I don't think I'm going to read the rest because as much as I enjoyed this one It just didn't pull me in in terms of like oh, what's gonna happen next Because yeah, I kind of just described the whole plot there. It was kids go across the city to this one area and a couple of interesting things happen But they don't really connect together for the most part and then once they get to Buckingham Palace I'm not gonna go into spoilers right yet, but Things just aren't great and it was very predictable what was going to happen. So Yeah, I don't have a whole lot to say on that, but just the plot wasn't Very interesting to me. Also, I should probably come out and say that I did try to read this book many years ago I think I was like 14 or 15 and I don't know what it was I just couldn't get into it and like I said, I liked it now But I just wasn't able to get into it when I was younger I read like a quarter of it and then I just stopped However, all that said There are still parts of this that I really liked I really liked the grown-ups slash strangers weirdly enough because I know that they are just great value Brand zombies like I get that they're they're just zombies by a different name and they altered a couple of things about them But the way that it's set up they make a little bit more sense than most of the other entries in this weird adult apocalypse genre, whatever you want to call it or hell even you can even go outside of Adult all the adults die and there's other series like why the last man which I read not long ago Where just a certain subset of the population dies like in why the last man was all the men die so that there's a weird genre in there, but anyways, um in the enemy the grown-ups are Genuinely pretty intimidating because they aren't as stupid as zombies and they aren't as slow as zombies Like near the beginning one of the kids mentions that some of them are smart some of them are strong and some of them are fast But none of them are all three. So if you're careful and prepared you can still Figure out a way to deal with them, which is you know interesting But it it does make them intimidating because you know, you have trouble outrunning them a lot of the time out fighting them is Often the best course of action, but even then it's no guarantee of success because you know, they're in London they don't have firearms and Occasionally they are clever enough to set traps and stuff. So I did really like that but at the same time you don't have to get them in the head which makes them a little easier to take out and You know at the end of the day they do eat children. So that makes them Well, just a little bit scarier than most other zombie knockoffs But the main thing that really Brought this book into being good to me at least was the character cast because I mean How do I put this there's a few too many? I think I think that some of them could have been left out or combined with other characters But that said they're all good You know that even the characters that at the beginning I thought were kind of annoying or kind of whiny like a column for instance as the story goes on you start to understand them a lot more and by the end of the story Callum in particular is the one that got me because By the end I did feel sorry for him and I understood why he did the things he did even if I didn't agree with him And that goes for all the other characters too like Aaron for example or Mave like and moxie like they all Uh Actually put this like they all just have multiple Aspects to their personality and I always understood them. You know, I I felt like most of them had a back story You know, they didn't just pop into existence one day like they had a life before all this shit went down which sort of Led into the person that they are now and they have you know, their own different unique reactions to The world being destroyed like some people Are able to sort of thrive in it To an extent some people just really hate it and want things to go back to the way they are Some people are much more accepting of things as they are now But they still hate it and they want to try and improve upon it like there's just You know just a lot of little aspects to their personalities Which sets them apart from one another like I pretty much never got them confused and just makes them Well, it just makes them good characters. Yeah, like there's not a whole lot else.  Just yeah, they're good. And uh, also I got this audiobook because You know, I'm quarantined right now and I don't know exactly when this will go up, but It's easier to just buy stuff on audible at this point and listen to it Then it is to try and go out to the library or anything because library and everything is closed. But anyways, um, I The narrator for this one is English and he does a really good job of Getting a bunch of different accents and different voices for the different characters, which probably helped me keep them straight in my head But um, honestly, I'm just glad that it didn't That they went with an English narrator because an american one would not have been able to get all the nuances there But that's everything, you know the enemy It's it's pretty good. You know, I don't have a whole lot else to say like if the idea of Like a young adult novel about kids in the apocalypse where all the adults are gone and they have to rely on themselves Appeals to you Um, I don't know if this would be the first one I would recommend because you know, like I said, there's a surprising amount of these There's also like the young world and quarantine and stuff And but you know, this one's a little bit more lighthearted than those other two with you know, less violence and less rape and stuff So I don't know if you're looking for that same idea, but a little bit less extreme then I guess the enemy would be for you or if you're just looking for more of the same then Hell you might enjoy it, but overall just yeah enjoyable book not award worthy or anything, but I liked it and Thanks for watching if you got this far. That's not a particularly long review But you know, I I appreciate it. Anyways, thanks to all of my patrons It's including my $10 and up guys Oppo Sabalainen, brother Santotis, Christopher Hawkins, Christopher Quinton, Joel, Joseph Pendercraft and tobacco crow you guys You guys are cool and if you want to get like early access to my videos and Voting on future video essay topics, which are like, you know, not not this because this is just a review But you know the longer ones that I actually script if you want to vote on those then become a patron And if you can't do that then like comment subscribe on this video All that other stuff that I'm supposed to say at this point and I will see you later Bye