After the Vietnam War, when the United States Army had less to do, then they had all this equipment. And of course, the Army would like to have new equipment, so they wanted to get rid of the old equipment. And so they offered it free to police departments. And the police department said, oh sure, we're happy to have that. And so on. Now, what neither of them seemed to be aware of was that having all of this military equipment would require policemen to be trained in the use of this equipment. And that in turn would change their attitudes that instead of being on the side of the people on the street, they were like military invaders coming in on an enemy. This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today on Juneteenth with Dr. Peter Timmons, someone I was lucky enough to become familiar with as an undergraduate at MIT. He's a professor emeritus at MIT in economic history. His forthcoming book, Never Together, an Economic History of a Segregated America is just extraordinary. This is the second podcast we've made. There was a working paper that he made, which was a segment or chapter that foreshadowed what would be in the book last year on this podcast series. But he's got a new working paper that just came out on the Inet website. And it is called Mass Incorporation, Mass Incarceration, Retards Racial Integration. I think this is a painful but very, very important topic. Peter, thanks for joining us and thanks for continuing to illuminate the challenges that America must face. Okay, thank you, Rob. It's a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to participate in an Inet podcast again. And so I'd like to make a focus on the Inet working paper. And people can look at that for more details of what I'm going to say right at the beginning here. But there are two points that I'm making in this paper. And one is the point that Mass Incarceration, which affects Black Americans much more than White Americans, because Blacks are only 13% of our population, but they are 40% of our prisoners. That one is that it ruins the lives of a lot of young, poor Blacks who never finish school. They are restricted in what they can earn as an adult, taken back into their families. But really, and often don't have any families there for that. So that's the effect on the Blacks. The effect on the Whites is to confirm their view of Blacks as unruly, illegal. Otherwise, whatever negative thoughts you want to have on the Blacks, but they are not members of society. And so a point that I make in the paper and in the book more forcibly is that this affects poor Blacks and uneducated Blacks. And as a result of President Lyndon Johnson's great society, we have what Richard Freeman of Harvard called a Black elite. That is to say, Black people who have gone through school, often quite good schools, have done well and then have professional jobs of one sport or another who are accepted into this kind of dominant life and can earn money and so on. And so that there is this kind of ambiguity that if you are a prominent educated Black, you are accepted. But if you are an uneducated Black male in prison or having been released from prison, you are dirt and so not accepted into society. So it's both a raised issue and it's also a class issue that this affects not the entire Black population, but it affects the uneducated Black population. So I think it's fine that the Koch brother, it's not the Koch brothers anymore, it's Charles Koch, are supporting education, but I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. I mean I've seen, you know, in the first step act, but the court just restricted the act as the first step act. And there has not been a second step either in an act or in state organizations or things. You would think that would be a perfect thing to start on because that was passed in the Trump administration. And so the people who want bipartisan work could then introduce this in a democratic administration and get bipartisan support for it. But I don't see Charles Koch making that statement. And if he should, I would welcome him. Now there are a number of things that I would say are quite mysterious in reading your working paper. I remember a quote where Glenn Lowry said, well, the intensity of this prison industrial system and so forth is going up even and incarceration rates are going up even as crime rates are going down. What, tell us a little bit about the history.  But when did this frontier, the mass incarceration, come to the forefront as part of what you might call the repressive toolkit? Well, this started, had its start in the Nixon administration when Nixon replaced Johnson's war on poverty with a war on crime and so on. And this was greatly expanded in the Reagan administration and then became known as a war on drugs. Now the war on drugs then was amplified in the 1980s by, there was a drug epidemic there which got everybody excited. And the penalties were a hundred times as high for the kind of of coke, of narcotics, for the form that blacks like, then for the form that whites like. It's the difference between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. And so that led to this, well that and policing and so on led to the progress of mass incarceration. And what several people have found in research studies is that at the same time that the mass incarceration was involving more prisoners, the drug crimes were decreasing. In other words, these things were going in opposite directions. Now you can see this, the drug things were supported more by Republican administrations than by Democratic. But while you can see the difference, the difference is not large. And so let me take an example from President Clinton's administration because he was trying to take advantage of the hysteria about blacks by having both more police to deal with the crimes and having more social services to provide alternate activities to help the blacks and the incriminated blacks, the people who had been freed from prison, do some healthy activities and kind of motivate themselves in a way. He didn't talk about education particularly, but to get them on a different track where they might go back to school then for that. And the Republican legislature stripped out all this, all the social services and people watching this podcast may recall the controversy over midnight basketball, which became the symbol of all of these social services and the source for Republicans to strip all this out of the bill. Nonetheless, in the mid-80s, President Clinton signed the bill, put 100,000 more policemen out on the streets. He has subsequently said that he regrets signing the bill, but of course that's a couple of decades after the act that he did and he no longer has any political office. So it's kind of comforting that he comes to that realization, but it's a little late for public policy. It's better than denial, but it's because so much time has passed, the damage has been done, but it is how would I say? Exactly. The damage, but it's not just that the damage has been done, it's that the damage continues. That's right, but his acknowledgment may help or may contribute like your work to trying to change this course. So it may not be enough, but it's in the plus column, however small. So there are a lot of different dimensions to this. Now there are a lot of dimensions. Let me mention one dimension before you go, which is that one of the federal aims in the expansion of mass incarceration was to take the recommended sentences that had been promoted by the government to try to standardize courts around the country became mandatory signed, mandatory punishments for various crime. Now at the same time, in local jurisdictions, the funds for public defenders were restricted and were limited and kind of disappeared. And so the prosecutors were seeing these people in their offices rather than in a courtroom. And in the courtroom they would say, look, if you're here under a drug thing, the minimum is five years. But if you'll plead guilty to, say, stealing a car or stealing something or hitting somebody, some aggression kind of thing, then we have more freedom and I can give you a shorter term, one or two years. And so in our prisons, when you look at state prisons, state drug offenses are a minority of the convictions of the crimes that they're in for. But this is the result of the minimum sentences and the prosecutors getting more influence than the courts. That's fierce. One of the things that is mentioned in your working paper is the, which you might call militarization of law enforcement and the discipline in the prisons. As people return from Vietnam or is this more a loop later in time, but tell us a little bit about what that change in the nature of both law enforcement and prison administration implies. Yes, this has been going on for a long time and I think in the book, the timing is explained in more detail that after the Vietnam War, when the United States Army had less to do, then they had all this equipment. And of course, the Army would like to have new equipment, so they wanted to get rid of the old equipment. And so they offered it free to police departments. And the police department said, oh, sure, we're happy to have that and so on. Now, what neither of them seemed to be aware of was that having all of this military equipment would require policemen to be trained in the use of this equipment. And that in turn would change their attitudes that instead of being on the side of the people on the street, they were like military invaders coming in on an enemy.  And so if you recall the original, or not the original one, but prominent black who was about to go to college on blocking on his name at the moment in a suburb of St. Louis for that. And he was shot by the police and laid on the in the street for six hours before anybody picked up the dead body. But there were riots that night. And the police showed up in military equipment in fortified troop carriers, having all of this equipment come in. And it really did look like a wartime invasion of the of this suburb of society, except that all the weapons were on the police side. And there were peaceful demonstrations on the other side. And so you can get other examples for them. That's one that stands up in mind. But I was growing up in Detroit in the late sixties. Mayor Roman Griggs created something called the stress force. Stop the rioting in joy state streets. Yeah. And it was essentially, from what I understood, people were hired, who were former Green Berets that came home from Vietnam.  Though I it was how they say etched into my mind very powerfully, because my father was a urologist and a Caucasian urologist, who was a good friend of his lived in our community, was driving home one night when plain closed people stopped him in downtown Detroit. In those days, that was scary. They didn't identify themselves as police. And they pulled them out of the car and they beat beat the tire out of him. And he later said, well, I was quite inflamed because I was quite scared. But he had no idea what was happening to it. And eventually, the mayor Coleman young, the black mayor who took over in large part, mobilized his campaign around ending the stress force. And so this was a very, very tangible experience. I got pulled over by the stress force a couple of times in when I was in high school. And how would I put it? I wasn't under their zoom lens. It was the black population that was. But they were pretty, pretty forceful, pretty, I mean, I'll tell you one example. It's a little bit graphic. I was driving my car, my mother's car, Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser Stacia wagon, taking some guys downtown to see a music show. And a guy in a Volkswagen said pull over. And he put a, he's a plain close guy in a Volkswagen. He put a badge out the window. His partner did out the passenger front window. And one of my friends in the back was a smart aleck. And he said, where'd you get that? The cracker jack box? He pulled out a big pistol and pointed it at me. I have not had a gun pointed at me again in my life. But so this was the kind of things you're talking about. I guess a lot of the urban black population, those who rose up in the 67 riots and others had experienced a great deal of even at that time. But it seems like it's only accelerated since the late 1960s. And I thought it was a very haunting experience. Yes. And I think that's right. And that's a good example. Because that doesn't make the news, but it affects very much the way people's lives are lived, to be harassed one way or another by the police. And there is a lot of research on this. And people say, you know, that it's not so bad. But it is clearly racially done. And racially determined that they're much more likely to hit people with dark skins, people with light skins. Although your last example suggests if you have teenagers in your car, you may be liable to be pulled over and terrorized, independent of the car. So that it affects there. And one that must remember that in mass incarceration, the majority of prisoners are white.  And that's important for the United States, because by taking all these people out of the educational system, then what happens to these people is that if they're very bright, or very inventive, they have no way of capitalizing on that and getting there. And so it affects the progress that the United States will make. But disproportionately, almost half of the prisoners are black, even though blacks are less than one sixth of the population. And so it's much more proportionally set for blacks. But mass incarceration is affecting the future of America by taking all these people out of the labor force. And it does so by another mechanism entirely. Don't think of the individuals, think about the financing of prisons. Because if we were to take, let's say we were to reduce the mass incarceration by half, still maintaining the proportions, that would send out whites as well as blacks into other sorts. And it would free up the funds that are now given to prisons to have more education. So I describe that in the paper as a win-win situation. The problem is here is political, because the prisons are typically located in the country, out of the cities, where the real estate is cheaper. So it provides jobs for rural people. And those people tend to be supported by, tend to support Republicans and be a part of their base, the rural base. And so the Republicans have been very resistant to decreasing the presence of these rural prisons in the rural areas. And partly because they don't know what would replace them. Now, President Biden has suggested that getting the internet to be a national phenomenon, rather than an urban phenomenon. And getting high-fi and fast high-fi available in the rural areas would provide an avenue for other activities to go on. And one of the lessons of the pandemic is that people can work from afar over the internet if they have access to it. And so if they were to do this to allow Biden's infrastructure plan to get through, it might decrease the importance of all of these prisons in these rural areas. And so they are opposed to the infrastructure plan as well. That seems far removed from mass incarceration. But you see, if you take the finance... But there are a number of thoughts that came to mind as I was reading your working paper based on... You joined me in 2016 at the Detroit conference that I did. And as I was researching for that, I met a woman from University of Michigan who unfortunately couldn't attend the conference, but she helped me with lots of issues. Her name is Heather Ann Thompson. She's recently written a book about Attica Prison that's quite prominent. But Heather Ann Thompson showed me some of her work. And you were talking about the win-win situation of more money liberated for education people out of the prison. But there's a third dimension that I heard from her. She studied what happened to the performance of children in Detroit public schools when the acceleration of their fathers being put in jail took place. And the performance dropped markedly in the schools where the fathers had been in some substantial amount taken off to prison. She also spoke a great deal about the state politics that you referred to. She taught me that when there was a census in Michigan, the men from Detroit, both men and women who had committed or been convicted of felonies, I don't know whether they committed them, they had been convicted of felonies, they are not allowed to vote. But for the census, they weren't counted at where their home and residence was. They were counted as population where they were in prison outstate which strengthened the out-of-city, out-state Republican party relative to the Democratic party in the state legislature. And there was a lot of outrage about that in and around the time of the Detroit bankruptcy where the out-of-city state legislature was trying to play a very aggressive role in the restructuring of the city of Detroit. And so you're correct. And that's exactly what's going on. And so the census is also involved in this by that ruling, which is now quite an old rule of where these people are given as living. And so that accentuates the political problem. Any of the working paper at the end after the references are a number of graphical exhibits of various different facets. And I think this is important to give a sense of proportion about the scale of the change in America because you talk about cumulative risk of imprisonment in 1945 to 1949. And then again in 65 to 69. And you just see an explosion of the risk of going to prison for black people who are high school dropouts. It goes from 4 to 11 among white people who were in college, who had some college, at least some college. It went from one to one. It didn't change. And the only, how do I say, it's hard to find good news in here. But the only good news was among blacks who had gone to college or at least had some college. It went from six down to five. But the idea that it's still five times, for college educated people, it was five times what it was for white people. And I'm not saying college education makes you honest. I'm saying it probably takes, it gives you greater probability of employment, alleviating despair. But looking at those numbers, and then you have another graph right after that, it's called figure one, the incarceration rate as an aggregate. Now you've said 40% are black while only 14% of the population. But you watch the United States on this graph from 1925 to 1975, it's essentially 100 people per 100,000. By 2010, it's 500 per 100,000. It's gone up by a factor of five. Yes. Well, you see, and in other post-industrial countries in Western Europe, and so on, the people we identify with, it's remained the incarceration rate. It's remained at 100,000. And one per 100,000. And so we are unusual. This is an American phenomenon. This mass incarceration, and racial mass incarceration is very much, this is Jim Crow 2.0, as various people have said, to keep the black population down. It's an amazing thing to see because through, how would I say, the history of my own work on Capitol Hill, I worked in the United States Senate for six years. Some of the people I knew who were down there were telling me stories that both what I'll call moderate Republicans and Democrats have been starting to rise up against this. Many of the Republicans, not on humane grounds, but on the ridiculous cost of this, that this is making society worse off at a tremendous cost to a society that has to marshal its resources productively. And I do remember a very prominent bipartisan op-ed in the New York Times, Jason Furman, who had spent time at the Council of Economic Advisers under Obama. And on the other side was Doug Holtzak, who was a student of Allen Blinders, but very involved in the Republican Congressional Budget Office and so on. They coauthored an op-ed complaining about this. I've heard more recently that some of the Koch Brothers Foundation and others have been very involved in trying to change this course because, first of all, the waste of money. And the secondly, what you call the lose-lose situation needs to be reversed. What is creating the persistence of clinging to this past policy? Are there vested interests who are making a lot of money, like owners of prisons who get cheap laborers? Or I know there's a young man who was a postdoc who, I remember, was interviewed by Joseph Stiglitz and by Inet for a postdoc, and he did a dissertation that showed that the wages in the communities around where the prisons were located were going down and business failures were going up because they couldn't compete with that approximately zero wage of labor inside the prison. So there's all kinds of negative side effects, but my question to you is where is the resistance to the constructive change that you make, what you might call, obvious in this working paper? Okay. Well, the resistance comes from several different directions. And one direction is just if you've been doing it for a while, it's hard to change. We all know that. We get into habits. And so the police, as we've talked before, are in the habit that public defenders, the prosecutorial lawyers are in this and so on. And the budgets are in this. Okay. Second thing is there is a growth of private prisons. Private prisons are more, they only have about 10% of the American prisoners. But of course, we have so many prisoners that's still substantial. And they're more in housing immigrants than housing native-born black people. But they're there and they send lobbyists to Congress saying, you know, give us more resources, 10 more people there and so on. So just as lobbyists for other things go along. A third thing is this geography. And as you say, there are a lot of problems with rural America and the prisons have ambiguous effects. Nonetheless, they do provide a lot of support for people to stay in those rural areas. And so that proposes political support that tends to go toward a Republican Congress for that. And they are reluctant to give that up for that. And then of course, finally, the things that we've said, this has been going on for half the century. So it's in regulations that come from the military giving military equipment to the police, to the census classifying residents as their prison home, rather than their actual family home, that you have the state laws set up with minimum sentences for some effects. And that gives rise to this out-of-court settlement process and so on. So there are just lots and lots and lots of ways in which the given structure, and this leads us back to the first thing I said, which is, as you've done this for half a century, it's very hard to get you out of this for that. Now in the paper, I argue you don't have to go back to the whole web. There's a model underneath the paper, and it suggests strongly that if you go back to a middle course that is in there where the laws are less severe, that then the progress of the legal system would get you eventually back to our original level. That will take time, and that's a legal effort, so that I think at the moment the most promising change would be to have the follow the first step act, or the act under President Obama to try to equalize the penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine, and then the first step act under Trump to try to alleviate some of this is the way to go. And so I think if they could just say, we're not trying to solve the problem at once, what we're trying to do is to reduce the resources that are needed for it by increasing it over time, that then we might be able to support legal changes that would reduce the penalties that come in various ways to the less educated members of our society, both white and black. I think there's another dimension in what you talk the win-win of coming out of funding prisons and redirecting the money to education. With the advent of the so-called technological or internet age, you refer to it a little bit in the how we're learning from the pandemic, more and more work is knowledge-intensive. It used to be you could use some muscles to get a pretty good job. Bill Lozadek just wrote a working paper that I made a podcast on this week about the undoing of the black middle class as globalization and automation technology took people out of that workforce. But at this time, with what's been revealed through the pandemic with the technology that's present, it seems to me for social sustainability the need to step up knowledge-intensive funding. Going back to your earlier book, The Vanishing Middle Class, the rungs in the ladder from low-margin services to high-margin services have been devastating. And there's a call to action now that I think is extremely important. And given the imperatives of climate, given the funding or the pandemic we've just been through, finding healthy uses for money related to knowledge-intensive education has got to be one of our highest priorities. And you've identified a sack of gold that can be redirected to that purpose. Yes. Well, I've been focused very much on mass incarceration on this podcast. But you're right, the economy has changed greatly. And that has been accelerated in the pandemic that we're now coming out of this June 19th, 2021. And so that the factory life that was the main stay and the main attraction for blacks in the Great Migration that ended in 1970 have disappeared. They started disappearing, starting in the 1970s, as automation came in. And that has continued for a half a century, very much the same half century that mass incarceration has grown. That the ideal has been to that what you need to get a decent job in the new economy is more education. And so that gives an urgency to increasing the educational system in our country. But I wrote a paper a long time ago now about the fact that teachers pay was not increasing. They were stagnant wages and that the women who gained access to the pill and then control over their family life could then go for higher paying and more demanding jobs and jobs that were worthy of their intellect. Like my own daughter who is an emergency department physician at Mass General Hospital or that so that you go there and you get out of the teachers, I'm sure very hard working, very good. But it's hard to attract the best teachers if you only pay low wages because the other jobs are out there and they will attract the potential teachers better. So that you not only have to educate people more but you got to change the educational system so that you could pay teachers more. They could make the classes more attractive and then that's the other side of the coin, one is the supply, the other is the demand and so on so that you could get more there. But you are exactly right that the change in the economy makes all of these issues more stuff. I mentioned Heather Ann Thompson's work in Detroit when the fathers were put in jail the children's performance dropped. I forgot one dimension which resonates with what you just said because you get to a place where the teachers are being judged on the kids performance on standardized tests and when the fathers go to jail and the traumas come from things beyond their control, the high quality teachers vacate the areas that are traumatized. So you have a supply shock that's induced by the incarceration of mothers or fathers and so there's a whole lot of damage going on in this realm that you explore and I find it very important and very illuminating. I wanted to conclude by saying that in almost every realm I've always learned a great deal from you starting as an undergraduate knowing you through Tom Ferguson, looking at your work on the 1930s. One of the things that makes a great scholar is knowing what questions to choose and I don't know what it is that's inside your heart but I recently have been monitoring of oh I've been taking a course an adult education course at the Union Theological Seminary. It's taught by a brilliant man named Obery Hendricks and who is a professor there and formerly worked on Wall Street and it's called The Kingdom of God and Political Economy and the person who keeps coming back to what to do is Martin Luther King Jr. and they describe the essential ingredients in how Martin Luther King found his courage. They talk about he cultivated a certain love and a certain righteousness and a certain courage and what he called from the Hebrew Bible Hesed, a deep love and he meaning Dr. Hendricks shared with us pieces that he'd written that Dr. King obviously was subject to an awful lot of danger, physical danger and was ultimately murdered but he went inside and he found with that pursuit of truth and pursuit of righteousness and that loving notion called Hesed which he was very conscious of the stamina to continue to do good work for society and when I see you while I'm taking that course in these weeks I can see that you have a lot of that inside of you and I want to applaud that and I want to thank you for that and I want to ask you where you get it from. Well, thank you. I think I get it and I think my mother was very invested. I grew up in Philadelphia in Germantown and my mother established a group called Public Education in PEP in Public Education in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and which my brother ran some years and so after her death and so education has been a center of my life through that going through and the importance of education has been proclaimed and that's of course we can do all these things and say we're great doing them but it comes basically from my family coming in and then what I chose was to be a college professor to be an economic historian which I've enjoyed very much.


All right, let's start by establishing my program of credentials. Hello, world. How come I used to say hello? All right, so I kind of enjoy reading about all sorts of random stuff, which basically means I spend a lot of time just clicking on hyperlinks in the web. And I'm interested in publishing, and I came across an interesting article about one of the leaders in international publishing. Which is the Jehovah's Witnesses. They actually publish in, I think it's 47 different languages. And back when they started doing it, there was no software that let them do that. So they actually wrote their own software to be able to publish in these 47 languages, and they actually created their own fonts in order to let them do that, because this was before Unicode and everything else. And that led me to like a whole stream of memories from my childhood. Because back when I was growing up, my parents subscribed to The Reader's Digest. And the link between The Reader's Digest and The Jehovah's Witnesses is they actually used the same publishing system. Well, the rumor is they actually used the Jehovah's Witness publishing system to be able to publish in all the languages they published in. So The Reader's Digest started about 100 years ago, and it was designed to bring the word to the masses. It was interesting reading. They would take articles from other magazines and other sources, sometimes abbreviate them, and then publish them. They were there for kind of educational purpose. There was always the thing about it pays to increase your word power. And this kind of thing, how to speak better, was one of the articles they used to have. They always had exactly 30 feature articles in each issue. Because the idea was you're supposed to read one a day. And that was your assignment for the month. And then in the next month, you get a fresh 30 to read. So The Reader's Digest was pretty cool. And as a kid, I always used to like reading. Down the bottom of the pages, they had little anecdotes and jokes and stuff. And I always remember just that was kind of like my reading. It was just like these little small snippets. Now, that then led me to Lord Twinsmuir, who is actually the son of a guy called John Buckham. Now, how many people have heard of John Buckham? Cool, excellent. Nobody. If you had grown up in England, my father's generation, that would be, that's trivial. Because he's like the Tom Clancy in England of that kind of period. He's actually a lord, but he wrote, John Buckham wrote all these kind of spyish fiction things, quite popular. The one you may have heard of is 39 Steps, which Hitchcock turned into a movie. His son, this is I think his second or third son, John Buckham was like bigger than a life character, like a Hemingway kind of character.  He wrote all these popular books. He was the governor general of Canada. So obviously, he used to walk around the house naked, pontificating about stuff. So clearly, his son grew up with a number of problems. One of which was that he wanted to be a writer as well, but he was eclipsed the whole time by his father. So he ended up editing the Reader's Digest in the United Kingdom for three years, and clearly he resented this greatly. So his big claim to fame is that he actually wrote a story. How my dog taught me to pray and got the Reader's Digest to publish it. And it was a joke. So I thought that was really, really cool. And given that I'm not invited to this conference, but Moose is, I thought I would follow suit. And my talk is on how my dog taught me to code. And I'm gonna do it in Reader's Digest style. I have 30 articles to cover, which means I got about 80 slides, 70, 80 slides. I only discovered when I got down here that I've only got 30 minutes to do it in. And I am really lousy when it comes to being scripted. So, what I wanna talk about are the things that I think are important when you're programming. And they go from the ridiculously low level to the ridiculously high level. Let me start with just one, okay? So there's 30 of these things. The first one I wanna talk about is forget the rules. Everybody out there is an expert on how you should do things. They keep telling you how to do things. So people come up with all of these schemes for how to design code. And they're quite often like five points and they'll make an acronym out of it solid or whatever it might be, yeah? Doesn't matter. What I want you to do is to forget them all. Because you can drive yourself crazy trying to follow all of these different rules. Here is the only thing you have to know. Good design is easier to change than bad design. That's all there is to it. There is no other metric for what makes a good design. So when you're coding and you come to a decision point and you say I could do it this way, I could do it this way. All you have to do is ask a year from now, which of these will be easier to change and do it that way, right? That's all there is to it. Layout, see I said there'd be some at low, low, low level. This kind of thing drives me insane. Don't do it. This code actually compiles perfectly cleanly. It's nice, but a ruby code. It contains a totally insidious bug that means that it actually corrupts the output one time in 50. I bet you can't see the bug. Why?  It looks like some on vomited letters on the keyboard, right? It's disgusting. So let's tidy it up a bit. Here we go. That's probably how most of you would write this. Can you see the bug yet? No. All right, let's tidy it up just a little bit more. Can you see the bug yet? Let's tidy it up one more time. Can you see the bug yet? Yeah, Florida. Thank you. Perfectly valid ruby. It concatenates the two strings, but it just means the Florida entry only has three rather than four columns, right? This bites people all the time. Lay out your code nicely and you can see it. You say nobody does that, Dave. So this is actually a bit of code from our online store that looks up towns in North Carolina that will work out sales tax. We'll actually work out what county they're in. And yeah, I do lay it out that way because it's easier to do. Here's some real life code, right?  Everybody knows that God created 80 column terminals, right? Code like that, right? You will not go to heaven if you write code like that. So at the very least, do something like this, make it look like that, okay? But you could do better than that because does that express intent? No, that lays out nicely, it does not express intent. How about laying it out like that? Then you can read it. You can see what it's doing. Lay out is communication and what we do is communication. Here's another one. And yeah, it wraps and it's ugly and it's hard to see what's going on. So the same kind of thing. If you don't have an editor that will do that for you automatically change your editor. Cough, Emacs, cough, all right? But even that's kind of a little bit, the punctuation looks a bit strange. So how about thinking about doing it like this instead and using the little ruby percent I thing.  Select those lines, alt X, sort lines and put them in order. So it makes it easy for people to see what's going on. Yeah, small things, big wins. This is an actual line of code from Rails. It is 490 characters long. The reason it's there is because everybody is afraid to change it. We write it like that. It's code. You're supposed to make it readable, okay? Layout matters. I'm way behind time already. Okay, inline comments. Inline comments are screaming at you to say get rid of me because what you've got is a function. So if you have code that looks something like that and you have this beautiful comment, you're really proud because you wrote these comments.  Yeah, you probably should have extracted out the complexity, given it a name and made it into a function because that's what the comments are telling you to do. And of course what you probably should be doing is using elixir because that lets you write it like that. But while we're talking about names, use your names as a design tool. If you go back to here, you could have written the thing like that but you probably wouldn't because you probably say I'm gonna help communicate so that people are reading what my code does. So you'd probably use decent names like that. But let's take that a step further. Let's think about how names help us do design. No class ever starts out like this. But most classes end up like this. They end up being this big bag of stuff. So you look at that and you think, okay, how could naming help me with this? Well, the first thing I could do is I could say, well, these things are in common, like name details, date of birth, address employer. So maybe I could be really good and extract them out into little separate modules. Yeah, and that way I have names that say what they do and they're independent and that is a really big win. But then what you should do is look at that and say, what am I actually doing here? Is there any difference between that and that? Well, yeah, it's a bit better to read but it's still ugly in terms of the design side. So I would say once you've gone there, take it a step further and turn it from a big class into a container class. Names help you see that kind of thing. Honor names. And it's related to honoring names. Rule, no more class base. Class person's less than an active record, colon, colon, base. That means there's a class base lying around there. In fact, there's many class bases lying around there. Here's an example from SNMP. SNMP called manager. Why is it called manager? Because whoever wrote it thought, well, manager sounds pretty important and this is pretty important so therefore, I'll call it manager. It's nothing to do with managing. It's actually a host connection. Whenever you see class names like factory, processor, implementation, holder, in fact, any class name that's named after a pattern. Delete it. No more names like that. Okay, personal pet peeve time. Name gems and libraries consistently. Please, here's the first 20 or so lines of our gem file. Gem file, oh yeah, it's our dot lock, I think. All right, look at this. Does anybody spot a pattern? The answer is no because there isn't one. Okay. Please, please, please name gems in some kind of sensible way. And although cute names are very cute, they really don't help when I've got 100,000 gems out there and I'm trying to find the one that I really want. So just do me a favor and keep them simple. Moving on, don't code the abstraction, refactor it. There is a wonderful tendency and I appreciate it and I do it myself all the time of you're looking at code and you think, hey, you know what, I could make this into some kind of like library, some kind of abstraction and then I could build on that and I could reuse it, right? And all of these are good words in the industry. So, what people tend to do is they look at a problem. Okay, I gotta strip the comments out of the, oh, I gotta strip the blank lines out of this file. How am I gonna do that? Oh, maybe I could write a state machine. Yeah, a state machine would be a good way to do that because that's an abstraction. Let's do a state machine. Hey, you know what, if I'm gonna do a state machine, I could probably do a DSL that would allow me to define the states. That's really, really cool. So let me do a DSL for the state machine. I could probably do a DSL that would allow me to define the states. That's really, really cool. So let me do a DSL for the states but they might get into this problem writing that DSL because it's not quite working. So I am gonna write a DSL, Metaprogramming Debugger Logging thing that will let me log the changes that my DSL is making to the data structures to find out why it's not working. Four days later, I have still not stripped the blank lines out of the file. Renan Stimpe gave us a name for this. It is yak shaving, do not do it. Next rule, do not use patterns. Okay, we are being handed down as if they were commandments. As if they were handed on tablets of stone, we've been handed down this idea of design patterns. And we use them all the time, observer, singleton, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Do not, do not code a pattern because it's just the devil tempting you. Right? The devil is saying to you here, take your code and make it work my way. Patterns are not recipes. All patterns are therefore is so that you can communicate an idea to somebody else. They are idioms, right? They are nothing more than naming conventions for ways of doing things. So code first, and if you happen to have created an observer, cool, then you can say to your friend, hey, look, I've created an observer. But please don't start off saying, oh, let's go see how I do observer pattern. That's not the way to do it. Next point, avoid inheritance. Inheritance is probably the most misused feature of all object-oriented programming languages. In object-oriented programming, you have the concept of a class.  So you can use a class to create an object, and the object has its own state, and it has the methods that come from that class. And then people say, okay, well, I need to use those methods in somewhere else, right? I need to share those methods into somewhere else. How do I do that? Oh, I subclass. And so you end up with these class trees that have nothing to do with each other, that are there simply because people needed to get the methods from A to B, right? The only time you wanna use inheritance is when you have a true is a relationship, and A is A, B. Here's the problem. In the real world, there are almost no is a relationships. It's really hard to find is a relationships, which is a clue to say you should never use that little less than sign on your class line. If you need to share methods, that's what modules and includes are for. Next point, Postal's Law. Anyone can tell me what Postal's Law is? John Postal was big in the original, isn't it? He devised a lot of the original RFC type protocols. And you can actually, speak to me, kind of like there's many interpretations or many ways of expressing it, but be liberal in what you accept from others, be conservative in what you do with it. What this is saying is that if you are to participate in a big world, then you have to be capable of accepting things that that big world throws at you. But you can't trust it. You have to be conservative with what you're given. And when you look at the success of these incredibly simple protocols, like SMTP for mail, or HTTP for the web, which are basically just lines of plain text. When you look at the success of those, you can see that there's something to this law. I say that we're gonna need to honor this law going forward. And the reason I say that is because we are gonna move very rapidly into a world of federated random systems. And our systems are gonna have to be able to talk to each other. And that's gonna be tough, because you're not even gonna know what these systems are that you're talking to. So we're gonna need to be like this. We're gonna need to find ways of being open to what people give us and then be very careful with what they give us. I learned something from Chris McCord yesterday when he was talking about how he designs his services in Elixir. And he does something like this. He will accept a hash that contains the various parameters and he will create a new hash containing the parameters that he actually wants and pass that on to the next person. Now, what I would tend to have done is just take that parameter hash, say, hey, look, the keys are the same. I can just pass that parameter hash straight down to my authenticator. But that means that anything anybody passes in also gets passed down to the authenticator. So if they discover I'm doing this, they could put role equals manager in that incoming hash. Yeah? So hashes, JSON, whatever, is a great way of plugging these together. It's open. You can add to it. So it's a really good first part of Postal's Law and then this kind of technique is a really great part of the second part of Postal's Law. Next, listen to the code. When you're programming, I am sure you have all experienced this.   I'm gonna code harder, right? And you push back on the keyboard and it pushes back even more. You end up swearing at the code and the code ends up swearing back at you and eventually you may wrestle it into submission but no one's ever happy, right? When the code pushes back, it's trying to tell you that you're doing it wrong, right? I guarantee you every time it pushes back, what that really is is a little voice in the back of your head saying, Dave, this isn't the right way to do it. Listen to that voice. I don't know how to explain this in a minute. What we work with programmers is data. What we do to that data is transform it. So we need to think of the two things separately. When I design, not when I design, when we design, what we're really doing is we're looking at the data, the structure of the data and how that data relates to other bits of data. But when we code, what we're doing is we're making those transformations. The problem is that we tend to wrap that all together into the concept of classes and we do both at the same time. So is this my subtle way of introducing you to the idea that you should be doing functional programming? Of course it is, but it's actually, I have found that by switching to this, it's made my life infinitely easier and it's made my programs a lot easier to design and write. If you are gonna stick with OO programming, then my next rule is simple. Stop designing with classes, start designing with objects. It's OO programming, not CO programming, yeah? But what do we do? No, the first thing we type when we're writing code is class something or other. The first thing we do when we're drawing pictures is we draw class diagrams and we produce these little hierarchies just like Victorian scientists doing butterflies, right? It's not true, that's not the real world. The real world is not hierarchical and you cannot design the real world to be hierarchical. So please, stop designing using classes. If you use that data-oriented approach I'm talking about, then naturally you'll find yourself using objects and not classes. One of my favorites, delete the tests. I didn't get booze, hey. We all have been brainwashed into the idea that if we don't write tests, we are subhuman. That's not the reason we're subhuman. That's to do with bathing and other hygiene issues. Right, tests are there to help us. And fundamentally tests are there to help us with design because by writing tests, we get to be the first users of the code we've just written and therefore we get to see if our interfaces are good and we get basically to get some feedback before we move on, yeah? So I tend to, and also to make something testable, you have to make it decoupled and therefore you're gonna tend to lead to better design. So I view tests as being fundamentally a design technique. Now, you get to a point, your system's been live for three years and your tests are taking away a very long time to run, but every time you make some fundamental change, you've got to go and change 50 tests. They're just getting away. So my rule is delete them and see what happens, right? I, our online store had, I can't remember, it was like 4,000 or 5,000 tests, unit tests, and I recently had been rewriting it just a little bit to make it more mobile friendly, but in the course of doing that, I changed quite a lot of the low level stuff and yeah, all the tests start working and I had the most liberating morning of my life when I deleted all of the tests except the ones that are to do with money. Everything else just went. And suddenly I was about 10 times more productive. Having said that, consistency is key, do nothing without feedback. So don't start doing something until you know how to know that you're done. Yeah, and that's not always easy, particularly if you've got a big job. So what does that mean? Don't do big jobs. Break them down into smaller things where you can tell whether you're being done, whether it's done. And that, yeah, tests are useful for that. New tests, a test that you write and maybe throw away. Who knows? Divide and conquer. This is again, back down to the low level. If you're faced with code, okay, let's start at two levels. First of all, let's look at code, okay? Some code, the time it takes to do something increases non-linearly. It goes up faster than the complexity you would indicate. So as the complexity increases, the effort goes up faster. And that's bad because it means at a certain level of complexity, you're basically up in the lifetime of the universe kind of complexity of time. You can't do that. And over the years, many people have worked on ways of fixing that. And the most obvious one is this thing called divide and conquer. Because down at the bottom of this curve, it looks kind of linear. It's only when you get further up that it gets out of control. So break the problem into smaller chunks. Each one is fairly small. If you add up the times for each one of those, it's a lot less than the time if you did the whole thing at once. Divide and conquer. It's the basis of just about every sorting algorithm out there, right? A divide and conquer will take n squared and turn it into n log n, right? Which is way, way better. So divide and conquer. I bump into a situation maybe once a year where I discover something that works great if I'm just playing with it on my laptop, put it into production, dies of death because of volume, and you fix it by doing something like this. It's not the same as MapReduce, but you can solve it using MapReduce. But divide and conquer applies everywhere. Because as you know, the complexity of writing a large system is way more than the complexity of writing a small system. And yet, we insist on writing these big balls of mud. In fact, this is actually a better representation because what it really is is a whole bunch of sticks tied together with bits of string, right? Which is pretty much the way our systems look. I think this comes from Australian survivor. Yeah? It's a good reason not to go to Australia, if you ask me. I mean, the fact that people will actually do this, I mean. All right, anyway. So how do you do that? Well, you basically don't write monolithic systems. Which sounds really trite, and it's really hard to do. I know that because I happen to own three very large monolithic systems that I'm desperately trying to split into small systems. But try to write things in small chunks, self-contained chunks. One thing you might want to do, it's always easier if you have a rule. You maybe have a one-day rule. If it takes longer than a day, don't do it. Throw it away. Or a half-day rule. But choose some period of time. Chad Fowler says that they write most of the services from Wunderlist in a couple of hours. And that's great, because if you screw up, you throw it away and start again. Who notices? You may have just been a coffee. You know, just choose a rule you can follow and use that as the boundary. And one of the tricks for doing that is if you use message-based APIs, then you'll find you've got greater isolation. It's easier to write these small self-contained chunks. Related to that, every library couples you to a tree of arbitrary whims. This is a representation of the gem file dependencies in our online store. We have 124 gems in our gem file. We have 511, I think it is, in our gem file.lock. And frankly, I don't know what about a third of them do. Honestly, I have no idea what a third of them do. What I do know, though, is if I leave my code for more than a couple of months and then do a bundle install, it stops working. And that's because we have these crazy dependencies. I'm getting rid of them. I'm going through and I'm having great fun deleting out the gems. And sometimes it means I have to get, you know, a gem will be there because you needed three lines of code in that gem, yeah? I just replaced the three lines of code, I write it in line. Or even better, I go to that gem and copy and paste it out into my code. Why? Because copying and pasting it actually makes it more maintainable, right? They line to you. What is the most powerful to... If you use an IDE, God help you. What is the most powerful icon in your IDE? It's that one. Be joyful whenever you throw something away. Clearly, if you're doing something and it's not quite right, right? Don't fight it, throw it away. But sometimes, even if you're doing something that is right, throw it away. All right, quite often I'll be doing coding and I'll be kind of like battling with something. I'm not sure how to do this, whatever else. And I'm coding and coding and coding and I'll finally come up with something that just works and I'm kind of happy with. The next day, maybe about a third of the time, I'll throw it away and start again. It may have taken me two days to get to that point. It will take me the morning to get back to where I was and what I get back to it well with is infinitely better. Why? When you did math at school and people were showing you proofs for things, right? And there would be some like the quadratic equation. How do you get to that minus, plus or minus, whatever, yeah, that one, right? How do you get to that? And they'll show you some magic proof that involves steps that no human mind could ever possibly use it. Oh, I know, I'll go from here to here, right? Because that gets me to the solution. Well, no, no one did go from here to here. They groped around in the dark for six months. They found the solution and then they worked backwards having explored this space to come up with a really elegant solution. They threw it away and started again. Next one, never call when you can send. What this means basically is try to write every system as if it was a distributed system, right? Decouple, force yourself to write decoupled systems. You will thank yourself and people that follow you will thank you greatly. It all comes down to this idea of divide and conquer.  It's a way better writing code. If you've been writing webby design-y stuff, then you'll know that the common mantra now is design mobile first. Okay, now that's so much last month, right? This month is accessible first because I've been doing that with our new website and I've discovered that if you write accessible first then you get to learn what's important and what's not. And then you get to throw away the stuff that's not because you know what? If it's good enough for your accessibility, for your reasons that have disabilities, it's good enough for all of your users, right?  So I strongly recommend writing accessible first. Please know your history, please. We are an industry that spends its entire time looking forward. Do a little, spend a little time looking backward. Little test, when was the first language with classes, dates, roughly? Similar, back in the mid-60s. When was the first pure OO language? Small talk was in the 70s. You could argue maybe it wasn't small talk but I think it's small talk. When was the first language with proper declarative platen matching? No, that would be prologue also in the 70s. Statically typed full functional language. That would be ML still in the 70s. When did we have a language that featured proper tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, full conditional logic, higher order functions, recursion, and a full self-hosting compiler? What year would you say for that? Actually, 58. Yeah, it goes back a lot further than you think. These people were doing this on systems where you were coding an assembler if you were lucky. Respect them and learn from what they knew. Don't reinvent the wheel. All of the people that I respect are language designers. There's more than that but this is a ruby crowd. They all study the past. You can talk to any of these people and they can go on at great length about languages in the past because they learn from them. Please do the same. Similarly, learn a handful of useful data structures. I have no idea which ones are useful to you but there are some examples up there. Just some stuff that you can go down and pick up because every now and then you're gonna have to solve some problem that needs a data structure like this. And you may say, oh, I don't need to know the data structures because I'm gonna use a library. No, because the library is not gonna let you understand the behavior of that data structure. You need to understand the trade-offs that are involved because every data structure has a trade-off. Learn data structures. Similarly, learn a handful of useful algorithms. This is kind of like eat your vegetables, right? So I don't know what they may be to you but stuff that's cool to understand, quicksort. Not necessarily because you wanna write a sort from scratch but because you wanna understand how dividing conquer works. Radix sorts because they are just so cool. Boy or more, Robin Cart, there's how you do pattern matching in strings, transitive closure because it's how you work out what's related to what.  No, right? Shortest path algorithms. There's a whole bunch of interesting stuff to do with shortest path. Topological sorting. Again, what are my dependencies? Topological sort, we'll tell you. State machines. Oh, I love state machines. Please, we should all be using state machines. Get familiar with them. You don't need a library or a gem to use state machines. You need a hash, right? That's all there is to it. There's cool books. There's a whole bunch of good books out there, right? Sedgwick is my favorite. I've had each edition of this come out, I think this is the fourth edition, but stick to it. How am I doing for time, Jim? Wake up, Jim. How long have I got? In it, easy. I'm gonna actually finish. Plus a change, which for the non-French speakers is the more things change, the more things stay the same. I, this is not accurate, but it feels to me like software has 14 year life cycles. During the first 14 years, we come up with some technology that is gonna change our lives. And slowly over those seven years, it moves from being like the earlier Dr. AlphaGeek types into the mainstream. And suddenly everybody is doing it. And after about seven years, the AlphaGeek start saying, well, wait a minute, this isn't Alpha anymore because all these commoners are doing it. So I need to go find something else. And to do that, I have to justify it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, all that stuff I was telling you seven years ago, that's crap, all right? I've changed my mind. I'm gonna do it this way instead. And they basically react against what they used to do and end up doing it this different way. And they sort of like push and they push and they push and gradually people start coming along and following them. And at the end of the next seven years, everybody's followed them to that point. And they look around and they suddenly go, whoa, it's crowded in here, what am I gonna do? Oh, I know, I'm gonna go back to what I said 14 years ago and now that's the best way of doing it, right? And keep pushing. And you watch, there are cycles. There are cycles of popularity that go on for, I don't know, maybe it's about 14, I can't tell exactly, right? But there are cycles. And it's a bit like that old dialectic material thing, right? Where you have to have two opposites that come together and create something different, right? It goes on the whole time. But because we don't know our history, the saddest part of this is that each cycle repeats exactly the mistakes of the previous cycle. Except it's more complicated. So please, please just be aware of this. And I'm guilty of it as much as anything else. I mean, I pushed Ruby because I thought Ruby was fantastic, right? I evangelized Ruby. And now I'm out there evangelizing functional programming because I honestly do believe it's better. But at the same time, I'm causing all of this kind of, discontent, oh, maybe we should be doing this instead and this kind of stuff, right? Don't just listen to people like me that say, hey, functional programming's the future.  Cobol's great. Instead, you need to be, yeah, looking at what these people are saying, but through the lens of a knowledge of history, through a lens of, yeah, but what they're doing is exactly the same as Nooth was doing back in 1976. And that didn't work because of this, this, and this, right? Look at all of these great ideas critically. And the only way you can do that is by knowing history. Who knows what miss one means? You know what? It's a typo. It's a typo on the slide. It's mince one. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Mince one. Max is nice. So we are nice. Gotcha. Good. I was wondering about that. Sorry. I started going in that second, that's like. Yeah, yeah. It's a silent N. It's a silent N. Yeah. Why is this significant when we're talking about programming? It's because being nice is about thinking about other people. It's about being considerate. And when you're coding, you're communicating.   This is kind of like feedback thing that goes on. So as a community, I don't like the word community because that implies there's something, we just all like the same thing. I don't know what the word is for a group of people that like the same thing, but we tend to be nice, right? Apply that as you code as well. Think about future generations and it'll help yourself. Oh, I like this one because it always end up with an argument. People talk about flow, right? Flow is the state you get into where you start doing something and you look up and it's three hours later and you had no idea that all that time passed, yeah? Flow is the state you get into when you delegate to the kind of unconscious, subconscious part of your brain. So for example, if you drive from here down to San Antonio, ignoring the construction bits, you probably will be in a flow state when it comes to driving. You can quite often get 10 miles down the road and not actually remember doing the driving because you'll have been thinking about the music on the radio or whatever else you've been doing. You'll be in a flow state, okay? In learning theory, this is really important because it's the state, in order to get to that state, you have to practice and practice and practice like with driving, right? A brand new driver sure as hell is not in flow state as a driving I-35, right? Because they have to be thinking consciously about all that they're doing. But the more you do it, the more you learn not to have to think. But you are thinking, it's just become a reflex.  It's become internalized. A baby can't catch a ball. They have to think about it. So what that's called is tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that you have without knowing that you have it. And you can do that when you're programming. And for a long time, people thought flow state was really good because if you're in flow state, the idea is you are productive as hell, right?  But you know what? If you look at a racing driver, I mean a real racing driver, Formula One, not this NASCAR crap, right? But if you look at a racing driver, you can pretty much guarantee that they're concentrating on the driving. They're not thinking about the music on the stereo because they don't have a stereo. But they are not in a flow state. They're concentrating because they have to. They have to think about every single thing they do. When you're coding, if you're in a flow state, you know what? All you're gonna do is do what you've done before.   Yeah, flow stage dangerous. Change your course. Contribute to open source. Do not be a vampire. I don't know about you, but my entire life is possible because of open source. I mean, if I look at the stuff that I'm writing, the stuff that I'm using, in the old days, in the 80s, I had to pay for software. I would pay for compilers. I would pay for databases, right? And as a result, once I'd committed to paying $800 for a seat compiler, that's what I would write in. The whole time I had no choice. I couldn't afford another one. Same with databases. But now we have the choice. We live in this incredibly rich time. And not paying back is just criminal. So please pay back. Pay back by contributing projects back. A lot of what we do, even in our commercial work, we can take bits of it out and make it public and not hurt our companies. Let's do that. Add functionality, if you're using some library, some open source, and you have to add functionality to it, contribute it back, all right? But this is kind of going down in order of increasing the decreasing difficulty. Bug fixes, we all find bugs and stuff. If we fix them, contribute it back. Documentation, it's really important and is often forgotten. Contribute it back. And bug reports, if you don't actually write the bug fix, even contributing a bug report, adding a GitHub issue is still really important and it still adds to the overall value of the system. So please contribute back. This is actually aimed at me. Because I come to conferences and I say things like, I love Ruby, yeah? And, you know, in a way I do love Ruby. But the more I think about it, the more I think, actually no, what I love is what Ruby lets me do. All right? It's the facilitation that I like, not the language. And it doesn't take anything away from Ruby. Ruby is a spectacular language. But fundamentally, loving the language is relatively sterile. Think about what you do with it and that's what you love. And that allows you to be unfaithful to a language without being unfaithful to yourself. It allows you to experiment with different languages and try to say, does this let me do this better? Or in a different way, or do I learn something? Try not to befall into love with the tools because when it comes to things like languages, well, actually with everything, familiarity breeds complacency. And complacency is stagnation and stagnation in our industry is death. Almost last, I think that, and this is not a religious thing, God knows, but we are living at a time which is staggering. We are living in that kind of science fiction future. Yeah, we don't have flying cars. We've got cars that drive themselves. We don't have, we have drones that we can program in Ruby and have them fly around and do wild things and kill people. But we live in this time, we have open source software. We have access, each of us now sitting there can download stuff that would be unthinkable 10 years ago. And then we can use that to create wild new applications. Expert systems, image processing software, large scale databases. If we want to, we can run up a thousand instances on EC2 to process some big, big data set, run it for an hour or two and then shut it down and it costs us like 30 bucks. It is an unbelievable time to be living in. But sitting there day after day doing the job, it's kind of hard, it's easy to forget that. So personally, I've started like every day just thinking a little bit about what an amazing time. This is, to be a programmer. And I think we should all be really grateful for that. And my last rule is because of that, don't forget to have fun. Thank you.


what did you make a target you know look target in the end would be up probably two three if it weren't such a bad day i like the earnings i didn't like the traffic was down i like the fact that electronics was doing well it was doing poorly but that's the nintendo switch i like the fact that apparel is doing well most people did not have good apparel swims doing well that's victoria secret pulling out a swim but what ultimately i really do think is the determinant here is that they had guided down and they beat the guy down macy's a guy that down and they equaled the guy down so it is a better story than the broad deportant schools


That's one of the things that I realized early on, that Western world did not really appreciate the extremism that exists in other parts of the world. Like in the West, people get into fights, and it ends there. In certain other parts of the world, when two people get a fight, clans get involved. There has to be retribution. A price must be paid. A mens must be made. And that's one of the problems with geopolitics. Politicians and puppets that are ruling over us in the Western world do not have the capacity to understand what the game is at play and how far things will go, because they were, as children, pampered and protected, fed with a silver spoon or a golden spoon, so they don't appreciate the magnitude of what it is that they are doing.


The 3 wrong things your parents taught you about money I left school on the 30th of June 2008. When I left, I announced to my parents that I was never going to need a degree or a job in my life. I told my brother that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. He told me a million reasons why I can't succeed but I had a single reason to succeed and that is I love freedom and I want freedom by any legitimate way possible. Next last month, 11 years after I left school, my father called me to persuade me to go and collect my certificate from the school. Even though I already run a successful company with many university graduates on my payroll, my father still believes that somehow, something is lacking in my life. The degree Even though I make more money than almost every PhD holder in my country, my father still thinks that I'm a failure because I don't have a university degree.  In this video, I'll be sharing with you the 3 wrong things that your parents taught you about money. If you are new here, consider subscribing so you won't miss other interesting videos like this. The love of school, not education When I dropped out of school in the year 2008, what I did next was to focus on building a business and reading hundreds of books about entrepreneurship, psychology, marketing, negotiation, and others. The problem I have with my family members is that even though they always saw me reading books, they believed that I wasn't getting an education. My father once challenged me for reading too much. He believed that I ought to be at university instead of studying at home. The first wrong thing your parents taught you about money is that school is the source of education. I don't know about your culture but in the culture where I grew up, the school has become a God. Going to school to get a degree is the thing. The more degrees you get, the more education you are believed to have. If you have no degree, then you are believed to be an illiterate, even if you have read a thousand books in the last year. The problem with this program is that you are made to believe that the certificates will solve your life's and money problem. The real truth is that school and education are not the same things, in fact, indoctrination center than an educational institution. In school, you are programmed to love the job.  Instead, you are taught that if you can work hard and get good grades, then you will get a good job. And if you can get a good job, all your money problems will disappear. By now, you know that is not true. So what is the truth? The truth is that you don't need school to be rich. You need financial education. That is not to say that if you have a degree, you can't be rich. But to say that school taught you nothing about money. If you care about having money, you have to read books about money.  You need connections or luck to be rich. Some of the reasons why my father joined politics was because he wanted to be able to connect with the political powers so that it could help his children get jobs, contracts and others. The other day, I read the comment of someone on our video. He said that money comes with DNA, meaning that if you don't have the gift for making money in your DNA, you just have to be poor. Somehow in our world today, we believe that to be rich, you need luck, connections or some special gift. Our parents taught us how to think this way because many of them complain about the economy, the rich or the government. When parents complain in front of children, what they are teaching them is that they don't have the power to change their situation, either because they are not connected with the powers that rule their country or because they are not lucky or talented. That's the reason why you see that today, everyone expects everything to come from the top, the luck, the government's favor or the help from the employer. If we believe that getting rich requires some luck, then we should also believe that becoming a lawyer, a doctor or a soldier requires some luck. Well, it doesn't. Instead, becoming rich requires being intentional, knowing what you want, getting education from the people who have what you want and be willing to make sacrifices for what you want. Being rich is about skills and every skill is learnable. You can learn how to save money, that's a skill. You can learn how to delay gratification, it's a skill. You can learn how to multiply your money by investing or by building a business. You can learn how to be persistent when you fail. You can learn how to learn so that you know what nobody knows about money. It's all skills. Hard work leads to riches My father is the strongest man I ever knew. He worked harder than anyone I know. But guess what? He's a poor old man. While growing up, I usually hear people saying, if you want to be rich, you have to be hard working. At a point in my life, I started thinking about it. You see, I know so many hard working people who are broke and in fact, almost every hard working person I know is broke. If hard work is the reason why people are rich, why are so many hard working people poor? After studying for a while, I discovered the truth. Now here is the truth. It doesn't matter how fast your car runs, if you are on the wrong road. If the road you follow doesn't lead to where you are going, running very fast will only make you look smart to other drivers on the road. It won't take you to your destination. Don't forget this, if the road you follow doesn't lead to where you are going, running fast will only make you look smart to other drivers on the road. It won't take you to your destination. If you work hard on the wrong thing, you will only impress other people who see that you are working 18 hours every day. But think about a man who is on the right track, on the right road that leads to where he is going but he cannot run fast. Yes, it will take time for him to arrive at his destination but he will get there. What are you working hard on? Working hard earning minimum wage in McDonald will never make you rich.  What about leverage? Nobody tells you about leverage but I will tell you, you see I'm the laziest person among my siblings but I'm richer than any one of them. The reason for this is because almost everyone out of my ninth siblings is working with his two hands. They work hard in a job or work hard in a one-man business that is two hands. I do the opposite, I learned and master how to work with 100 hands. Today as you watch this video, I have many people working for me on my businesses. Not just humans, I learned and use technologies to make money even while I'm sleeping. How can we give so much glory to hard work when people can use leverage? Why should we teach people to work three jobs or work 18 hours per day when we can teach them how to use 100 hands instead of two? The truth is that when your parents taught you to work hard if you want to be rich, what they wanted you to do is to work hard with your two hands. Don't do that. Learn how to work with the hands you don't have. The truth about money is that you can't work hard enough to have enough of it. Nobody becomes a millionaire because he works 23 hours per day. People become rich because they use leverage. How many hands do you have working for you? How many brains do you have making your money? How many technologies do you use to make money? Learn how to create a solution to human problems. Learn how to employ humans and technologies to work for you so that you have 100 hands instead of two. Let me remind you of everything I've shared in this video. The school doesn't teach you anything about money so when your parents talk as if degrees will solve your money problem, that's a BS. The only thing that will solve your money problem is your financial education so pay attention to that regardless of whether or not you have a degree. Your lack of connections or perceived lack of luck isn't the reason why you're poor. Money making is not magical, it's a skill. If people can learn how to be a good lawyer, doctor or policeman, you can learn how to make money. Hard work isn't a sin, but it doesn't guarantee financial success. I raise leverage above hard work, though I may be wrong, that's how I think. I rather think about how I can employ someone to do a part of what I'm currently doing than to think about how to work 5 hours more. I'd rather learn how to use technology to do something for me than to think about how to work 3 hours more. I don't think in terms of hard work, I think in terms of leverage. If you think I'm lazy, thank you. Thank you so much for watching our videos. Are you between the ages of 15 and 40? Then we invite you to join our new channel which was specially created to share with you inspiration and life's lessons to succeed in life. We call it Under 40 TV. Kindly look at the description box to join the Under 40 TV. We love you.