If you thought of aircraft carrier, ocean liner, rowboat, destroyer, you're an incredibly well-educated adult. Give yourself an F. If you thought of submarine, give yourself a D. Apologies to the Navy personnel here for calling a submarine a ship. But I did not ask you to name things that float on water. I ask you to name different types of ships. If you thought of airship, give yourself a C. It has nothing to do with water. If you thought of spaceship, give yourself a B. And if you thought of friendship, ownership, or relationship, something like that, give yourself an A. Now, one of the keys to breakthroughs is not adding boundaries that are not there. We do it every single day to ourselves. And it's one of the greatest limiters that we have. I don't care whether it's in the technical world or whether it's in the leadership world. Removing those boundaries is a key to seeing things differently.  To look at things differently, to look in the background, to not assume a ship is something that floats on water. And as I go through today's talk, I want you to look for where things are different.  Because I believe that what I'm going to talk about is going to set the stage for many of the other elements that you're going to hear through the course of the next two days. And that's based on talking with a lot of the speakers last night and in the room this morning. So let's start this way. I have been eating up with airplanes since I was a little kid. My dad introduced me to airplanes. His job during World War II was to man a Quad 40 Bofors gun to shoot down pesky airplanes. But his gun mount was on the flight deck level, and he watched aircraft operations. And he imprinted a love of aviation and aircraft and flying on me as well as patriotism. Airplanes ate me up since I was a little kid. And you can see here from drawings that my mom saved that I wanted to design airplanes ever since I was a little kid. And I fortunately got to do that. I got to do it for the company that developed the world's first Mach 2 fighter. This is the first plans for this aircraft were drawn up when we had barely broken the sound barrier. And now you're talking about designing an airplane that went twice the speed of sound. And it even looks like it's doing Mach 1 just sitting on the ground. The world's highest, one of the highest flying aircraft made out there, and is still in service today, the U-2 spy plane. Every time it flew, its test flight, it was breaking world records, and was often reported as a UFO to airline captains because they would look up in the sky above them twice as high as they were flying and see a shape flying up there and had no idea what it was. And then the magnificent Blackbird. Airplane where the outer skin was heated up so much from the skin friction of the air flowing over it at Mach 3 that it was hotter than your oven could get at home. And force a new mindset in how materials and aerodynamics and aerotherbodynamics were handled. Not only that, but it was the world's first stealth aircraft. And all of that came from the mind of this man and his team, Kelly Johnson. But not only was he brilliant technically, he was also a visionary leader. He set up an organizational construct that lives to this very day. And that's what I want to talk to you about for just a few minutes. But I want to set the stage for where the skunkworks came from. So now you need to flash yourself back to 1942, 1943, and the clouds of war are over Europe. This is a photograph taken on a particular mission of a B-17s of the 8th Air Force over Europe. And the story I'll share with you about this came from a B-17 pilot that lived at the facility my dad did in the later years of his life. His name was Mr. Barney. And he was a B-17 pilot, as I said. On his 18th mission to Germany, he was shot down. And he related this story to me firsthand. And so his hand, while he's telling the story, went up onto the wheel of the B-17's control column. His fingers were up on the bailout bell. And he's describing to me what it was like feeling the cannon shells hit his airplane as the yellow-nosed ME109's raked his airplane as he fell out of formation. So he's holding the bailout bell for his crew to get out. The deal he had with his top turret gunner was that when he heard that the 250 calibers over his head stopped firing, he knew that everybody else was out and that top turret gunner was on his way out. They would be the last two out of the aircraft. Finally, as the airplane is falling out of formation and he's holding tight to the control column because the aircraft wants to go out of control because the controls are so badly damaged, he hears the top 50 cows stop firing. And so he heads for the hatch that's in the lower side of the fuselage. The airplane diverges wildly from its flight path because of the damaged controls. He's thrown around inside the aircraft, desperately trying to find his way to the hatch, finds his way to the hatch, jumps out of the airplane. The airplane is gyrating wildly around him and he falls clean, he falls from, he stays in a free fall for just a few seconds to get away from the aircraft, pulls his parachute and then hangs limp in it so that he would not be the subject of strafing runs by the German aircraft. But he looks up and he sees something that I've never read in a book. And he said, I saw, this is him talking, I saw columns of smoke coming up from the ground and marking the trail back to England and that was all the aircraft that had been shot down. That was the smoke columns coming up with the contrails coming overhead of all the aircraft headed towards Berlin. He escaped twice from a Luft-Stallag and hid out in a farmhouse until Patton rolled through. Now, I mean, to me, that story was incredibly powerful and I look at this photo and I think of some of the missions that had a thousand aircraft associated with it, most of that being bombers. Each bomber had 10 crewmen on board and if you lost in a thousand airplane raids, let's say 800 of those were bombers and 20% of those is shot down. 160 aircraft, that's 1600 men that went down on one mission. The level of sacrifice and you guys have studied this, I'm sure, is just beyond comprehension for today. And that is the environment that the United States Army Air Corps was dealing with when Allied intelligence spotted a new aircraft being tested, the ME-262. The scary thing about this aircraft to them was that it was about 20 or 25% faster than our fastest fighters, the P-51. The jets that we had going on at the time were no faster than those propeller-powered aircraft. And so the Army Air Corps sitting here going, okay, if we get an aircraft that flies that fast coming through our formation, as it turns out, the ME-262 would come through the air formation so quickly that the electric-powered turrets could not pull lead to shoot it down. The cannons in the nose of the ME-262, a three-second burst put out 90 pounds of lead that would literally rip the wing off of a B-17, sorry, B-50, B-17. And there were also aerial rockets that put out a swarm of rockets that filled the basket the size of a B-17. I mean, these were devastating, and you're talking about losses where the possibilities of crewmen making 25 missions was virtually zero. And now you had a new technology being introduced. A gentleman that I met at the Skunk Works was a tail gunner in a B-17. His squadron was stood down after 20 missions because his was the only aircraft left. And now you have a technology leap happening and you're on the wrong side of it. What do you do? Kelly Johnson was speaking to a lot of people in the Army Air Corps. He was a project engineer at the Lockheed Corporation at the time, and he goes, I can do that. I can give you a jet very quickly. The Army Air Corps was looking for a jet, and they said, can you do it in 180 days, six months? Can you give us a jet, a prototype? Followed very quickly by production. He said, I can do that. Kelly comes back to Hall-Hibbard that you see pictured here, who was the chief engineer of the Lockheed aircraft company. And Hall goes, that's really great, Kelly.  We're building aircraft here for a war effort. We have so much going on inside the plant right now that we're building aircraft outside. This is a photo of P-38s in an outside assembly area down in Burbank. We were building as many as 28 aircraft a day. During this time period, Lockheed was hiring as many as 3,500 people a month. I want you to think about the human resources challenge of hiring 3,500 people a month, okay? And how do you train them and get them into jobs? You can see they were building all types of aircraft, including B-17s under license from Boeing. And Hall's admonition to Kelly was, you cannot screw this up. You cannot impact war production. And Kelly said, I have an idea. I've had it for a while, and that is, I wanna get a small group of people together, and I wanna empower them, I wanna put them together. I want, in all disciplines, not just the engineers, but the buyers, the planners, the tooling people, the manufacturing people, and I wanna put them right next to the airplane. I don't want them disconnected from it at all. And Hall said, great Kelly, I'll tell you what. You can have a tent. And this is the only known photo that we have of the original Skunk Works tent in the background. Made out of canvas, the walls were made out of torn down engine crates from the right cyclone engines that were brought in for the B-17 that they were building. Okay, pretty rudimentary facilities. There was no machine shop available on site, so Kelly bought a local machine shop in the Burbank area and it became the Skunk Works machine shop, and those employees that were in the machine shop became Lockheed employees. So it is own dedicated machine and tooling shop. Now, the idea was to get this jet built, this prototype built, in 180 days. So let's look at what the tempo looks like for 180 days. This is where they started the design of the aircraft. Okay, you can see that date up there, 17 May. When we go to, now they have the design requirements from the customer, you guys? Just a few days later. So the design was started ahead of the actual set of requirements, but there was a lot of verbal requirements given to Kelly. They approved, on this particular date, 17 June, they approved the L140, which became the XP80 as a program. Shortly after, the contract letter was submitted for it. You can see here, let's go to the next one here. This was the contract was released here. Now, for those of you that may be in the, floating around the acquisition chain, I want you to think about how long it takes to buy a bolt nowadays, okay? To ride a spec for a bolt and get it. But this is where you saw partnership on the part of the guys in what became the Skunk Works and on the Army Air Force side, trying to make something happen. Here you have the assembly complete of the aircraft and here is first flight. It was 143 days, okay? From contract award. From design start, it was 237 days. About nine months, okay? Breathtaking performance out there. And not only that, but the performance continued. Here's first flight. So you see the first flight in the top left corner here. You can see by 12 months later, and by the way, the prototype or see the production airplane was two months behind the prototype airplane to allow some lessons learned to be garnered. Two months of lessons learned. So that means that we're doing the production airplane as tooling and stuff was being assembled for the prototype airplane itself. The prototype had not even flown. So this is just maximum amount of concurrency. But you can also see down there six months later, so excuse me, 12 months after first flight of the prototype to YP80s, the pre-production aircraft were deployed to Europe. That's actually, there were four deployed. This is two of them flying, I believe it's near Sicily. And six months after that, 83 aircraft had been delivered. And if you look very closely in this photo, you will see that it's the production line for the P80 is right next to the production line for the P38s, okay? It's put together in a place called the Cotton Shed. The thing that was amazing to me as I look through the records of the P80 production, it was kitted. So there were a lot of modern things we consider modern manufacturing techniques that were applied to this in order to speed up the process. As a matter of fact, for each sub-assembly process as I look through the process documents, there was a clock for how long it should take to do each of these assemblies, sub-assemblies that went onto the aircraft. And each of those built up in timed processes that led to the completion of the aircraft. Kelly, as a result of the lessons earned, there was a set of rules actually put together by one of his chief engineers for the experimental shop, as it was called at the time. From the lessons of the P80, Kelly assembled some lessons for the skunkworks itself. And I've highlighted a few on here as one knowledgeable, empowered leader. And I'll show you an example of that in just a moment. It was also never surprised the customer. It was one of these situations where Kelly believed that the only way that you could get the kind of speed that was absolutely necessary was to have open communication and trust so that everybody knew what was going on. And as it turns out, there were Army Air Corps people that were at the Lockheed facility helping make decisions about how you make things move forward and getting parts delivered on time, parts were delivered in the middle of the night, decisions were made in the middle of the night. Anything that could be done to move the progress forward. There was manager team. Kelly set very clear expectations for his team. Very clear expectations for his team and very clear expectations for the leaders on his team out there so that there was no mistaking what was necessary to happen. Know what you're going to provide. And as I was reading some of Kelly's notes one time, he said the objective is to get a good airplane built on time. Not the perfect airplane, a good airplane. That's one that meets requirements. And how often do you see people trying to unnecessarily exceed requirements that brings in extra complexities and introduces failures that result in setbacks? So this is a really interesting mentality. Establish trust with your customer. This was one of the paramount things that was embedded in me as a leader at the Skunk Works. The amount of open communication I had with my customers was absolutely unbelievable and I valued it. And I was told by many of my customers how much they valued. Exactly knowing what was going on without any filters. And the last was reward performance. And rewarding performance was not necessarily monetary. In the case of the XP80, Kelly said meet the schedule. You get to come out and watch it fly. And so on the very first flight of the XP80, you see the team lined up on the hillside to watch America's first, what's gonna be their production jet fighter fly for the first time. Regarding Kelly's rule number one, I'm gonna give you an example of that. So this is pages out of his archangel log, which became ultimately the A-12 oxcart and SR-71 Blackbird. And on these pages, I want you to see on the left-hand side, where he goes through and does the sizing and performance buildup for a Mach 3 aircraft. And if you note up there, I believe the date is 1956. There's no computers to do this with. There's a slide rule. There's no understanding of the aerothermodynamics or the stability and control or the performance of the engines or anything. And yet this guy is up there sizing an aircraft. And I will tell you, his pencil sizings came very close to what the final product was. He had no simulations at all to work with. He had a fundamental understanding of the physics that went on, not only that, but he understood what it took to make a program out there. So on the right-hand side, you will see a buildup of pages from the log where he does the program planning. You'll see a staffing chart inside of here, as well as how he built up costs when supplies would be delivered. Basic program plans. You'll see here unit cost for each bird to be delivered. And then as you get to the very end, one of those all important things for test pilot bonuses being included in the cost buildups, okay? This is a man that's understood every aspect of what it took to make a program run. And it allowed him to strike the balance between what was necessary technically and what was necessary programmatically in order to achieve success. This is what he expected from his leaders. He said, make sure that the mission is clear, create the environment that you're gonna have for your people out there. Assemble those with the proper mindset, build the proper team, get the right people into the right jobs. How often have you seen the wrong person in the wrong job?  Number two, you shouldn't do it that way. Number three, that's not how it's done. And a myriad of other reasons why you shouldn't do that. It's not according to the rules, pick something. So have the iron underwear ready. And lastly, inspire your team. I will tell you that as I talked to the people that worked for Kelly directly, and I only got to meet him once, they had violent loyalty to the man. He did not demand loyalty. It was through his actions that they were loyal to him. And the products that they achieved as a result of what Kelly instilled in them to this day for me are inspiring. And I'll leave you with just one note.  Oops, back up. Fortunately, you need to know when not to listen. Enjoy the workshop, listen to it in a very different way. Listen for key points that go with these elements here. Take them with you because I guarantee you it will change how you look at problems and it will change how you lead people. Thank you so much.


I don't believe that that many people voted for Joe Biden, and I will never believe that. I don't believe that. No matter how many lawsuits or court cases there are. No matter how many lawsuits or court cases. So it's an election year, obviously, and unfortunately. And during election years, I like to try to gauge where voters who I generally don't agree with are at, just to kind of get a sense of why they're voting for who they're voting for. And of particular interest to me is Donald Trump supporters because I am curious where they stand. And I think it's obvious where they stand. I can make a lot of assumptions about where they stand. But I've seen a couple of viral videos of Trump supporters lately that has led me to believe that they are somehow more insulated than ever, more delusional than ever. And I just feel like a lot of these folks, there's no saving them. There's no bringing them to reality. We have a president, former president now, who could very well win and he's threatening to end democracy and they're just OK with it. So rather than trying to show you clip by clip, I want to just react to some of these viral videos that I've seen and share my thoughts. So the first one is this ABC News interview. They're going to talk to three Trump supporters, small sample size, right? But I think that these anecdotes are important. But let's just listen to what they say. Not only do these voters dismiss Trump's many legal challenges. My opinion is that the justice system is being weaponized against certain individuals. They stand by Trump's false claim that Joe Biden lost the 2020 election, even if it takes a minute. Do you think the election of 2020 was stolen? I don't think that it was, yeah, I do. I think it was stolen. I don't believe that that many people voted for Joe Biden and I will never believe that.  They can't fathom that that many people voted for Biden because they themselves couldn't fathom voting for Biden. OK, well, I couldn't fathom voting for Donald Trump or a lot of candidates that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't happen. It's just so bizarre that that's the logic that they use. You know, in the absence of evidence, which they have none that the election was stolen, they just resort to, well, I just I can't believe it because I would never vote for Biden. So I don't believe that that many people did as well. It's just mind boggling to me. I don't believe no matter how many lawsuits or court cases, no matter how many lawsuits or court cases, when when something is proven, I think you have to investigate the other side of it. I take it you believe the. She uses the word proven. I don't think she knows what that means. Election was stolen. Yes.  I think there might be. Why aren't we looking at it? How do you bridge the bitch? We did look at it. Okay. She just said, if you were listening all these court cases, it doesn't matter. Because one thing that we have to acknowledge is that facts are not going to be a contributing factor to their opinion, right? This was supposed to be the side about facts don't care about your feelings. Well, facts are something that it doesn't matter to them. Like they're they have this opinion based on nothing and their brains are impenetrable. You can't you can't get through to them with facts. And that's something that I think is hard to accept, but it's true. Facts don't matter to these people divide in this country. You guys have very strong opinions. You have certainly heard people who do not like Donald Trump. I think if we really start to look at how we really have a lot more in common and we all really want the same goal, we want safety and security for our country.  We want, you know, to be able to pay our bills. I think we have to get control of the media. I think we really have to get... Okay. Okay. Before we get into the media stuff. So I'm sorry. I'm not buying it. There's this idea that, oh, okay, well, we can come together if we see our similarities, right? We all have, you know, a lot of policy agreements, right? We want the same thing. We want our kids to prosper economically speaking. But you don't. You're lying. I don't believe you when you say that because you keep voting for politicians who don't support the same thing, right? I mean, leftists such as myself have been screaming at the top of our lungs for years now about the benefits of Medicare for all, right? It would save us money every single month. Yes, our taxes would go up, but we would no longer have to pay what is effectively a private tax to a corporation to get shitty healthcare coverage, right? If you end up going to the hospital for some reason and in the ambulance, they take you to a hospital that's out of network, you're going to have to pay out of pocket. Our healthcare system is a mess and we say Medicare for all. How do you respond? That's socialism.  You keep voting for politicians who openly say they want to cut Social Security, who are open about wanting to punish poor people for being poor, cut SNAT benefits who don't want the child tax credit. So I'm sorry. I just, I don't believe you when you say you support these policies. I don't think you have a core political ideology.  And so long as I'm doing okay, that's fine. You don't actually believe that the United States is a real community. You don't believe in helping your fellow Americans.  To be clear, I think that liberals are also part of the problem because in public opinion polls, they'll say that they support policies like Medicare for all, but then they never vote for the most progressive candidate in primaries. They end up voting for the centrist Democrat like Joe Biden. We had the chance to get Bernie Sanders and they went with Joe Biden. So everybody needs to stop complaining about the country not changing. If you vote for politicians who want to uphold the status quo or in the case of these individuals, make matters worse, but she says, we need to get controlled the media. What does that even mean? Because I have my issues with mainstream media as well. I think that we need to decommodify media. I think that it's bad for news to be a business, right? I think that you need to remove that profit incentive so that way the actual dissemination of news is goal number one. But in capitalism, it's really hard to do that, right? And that's why you hear these corporate talking points.  It's just, oh, we have to control the media. Well, what does that mean? Get them to be nice to Trump?   I've tried to. I have them in my family. You can't reason with them. I promise you that. To get control of the media if you want to unify people. Because I think that they have a way of really controlling the narrative. Well, I asked Angelica about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press. She said that should stand, but she wants just factual information. Oh, does she now?  I just, you see what I mean? There's no hope for these people. I think that they're just too far gone. And that's not to say that every single Trump supporter is too far gone.  If you're still supporting him, I think you're too far gone. I'm sorry. I think you are. That doesn't mean that you have to be thrilled about Joe Biden. You can hate Joe Biden. But if you actively support and encourage people to support Donald Trump, I just feel like there's no hope. You don't actually care about anything.  And I don't even know what that is. I don't think you know what that is. It's just frustrating. But there's another video here that I want to get to. So this video here is from Luke Beasley. And I think that this is an older video, but he just posted it on Twitter recently. And this video really triggered me a lot because I basically had a version of this conversation last week with one of my family members, and it's so frustrating. And you're going to see why it's so frustrating when we watch it. So let's see what she has to say. He said when he was running that he wouldn't defund the police. And he's talking about Biden, by the way. So obviously a Trump supporter, but a CPAC shirt. So let's let's let's hear from that. And I think that's a huge reason why we so see so much crime today. I think that Biden has defunded the police. Well, I mean, he hasn't defunded them, but he's defunded a lot of the police. Notice how like him just asking her a question gets her to back down from her position. Well, he hasn't defunded them, but he's defunded some and because that is done on a citywide level, not the national level. That's true. That's true. That's true. But I mean, overall, I think that this is the scariest times that we have lived in. He said, OK, this person's mind would explode if she learned that Biden actually supports increased funding for police. Just guess what? Biden loves the cops. He wrote the crime bill, baby. He's that author. It's just it's frustrating. And I was talking to somebody. I'll kind of get to my conversation with my family without naming them in case they see this because they might all of a sudden they have a really strong opinion about Joe Biden. And it's like, do you even know what political party he's in? Because this person is very apolitical, but all of a sudden they heard something that had them against Biden. My question was, well, why? Because I have criticisms of Joe Biden as well. There are legitimate reasons to oppose Joe Biden. So why do you dislike Joe Biden? And the answer was, well, it's because Obama is controlling him. Excuse me. OK, first of all, that's not happening. Second of all, if it were happening, why would that make you so vehemently opposed to Joe Biden? I just it doesn't it doesn't make any sense to me. Like what policy reasons? Is it his foreign policy? Anything that he's done domestically? Because there's a lot to be critical there. But this person was not saying, well, listen, I I support unions and Joe Biden. He broke up the railroad strike. I can't forgive him for that. There's no policy reasons. Everyone is just pulling stuff out of their assholes. And they're having really strong opinions about this made up thing. And it's so frustrating to me because we have to have informed opinions if we're going to be that passionate. But these motherfuckers are the most passionate people on the planet.  It's just shocking. Now, this video is of TYT. This one went really viral. And I actually admittedly have not seen it yet. I wanted to react on camera. But so this is a Trump supporter here interviewed by Michael Shore. And apparently he's going to, based on the title, call for Democrats to be hanged. So let's let's see what he has to say. I'm giving you 20 seconds to say something to President Biden. If you had him right here and the camera was present. But I can't say what I want to say. I'm sorry. We'll say something that could bring public hangings back. Simple as that. I think they should bring public hangings back and hang people like Joe Biden. I really think you think that a pedophile, you think somebody would be a pedophile. OK, he's getting into it.  But it seems like he's going to call Biden a pedophile. Seeing somebody that was a pedophile hanging up in the street. Dude, no, I don't think so. I think they should give every American an assault rifle and a handgun inside of their home, just in case a home vader or a child predator. So just universal guns for everyone. I mean, look, I support universal programs as a socialist. The top of my mind is like, OK, we've got to start with health care. Then we've got to go to housing. I just. How do you? How do you win these people over? You can't, you can't. And, you know, these are anecdotes, guess, but you've got to admit, this is a sizable portion of the American population who thinks this way, who believes this stuff. I have a member of my family who would also probably say something like this as well. I think revelations is happening before. Yeah, I think revelations is happening right before our lives. And he's referring to the end type is passage in the Bible. For those who don't know, Christians have been saying this forever since I was a kid. You know, my religious family members were saying, well, this is revelations. We're in the end time. We've been in the end time for a really long time. So how can it be wrong? How can they be wrong if it's just happening in perpetuity? Right? I think revelations is happening right now. I never used to believe in God until I overdosed on heroin. And then I truly believed in God, man. And let me tell you, the world is about to be a sea soon. I think that sounds like a loving God. He's going to drown everyone, I'm assuming. And it's like, look, I understand that you have like a really huge scary moment and your life changes and you feel like there was divine intervention. But if that leads you to believe in God, you have to also question, like, well, why is so much bad things happening? Despite the existence of God, why does he seemingly care more about me than other people who are suffering around the world?  It just if you go one step further in your thinking, it kind of all falls apart, but let's let's continue. The border problem is a serious problem, dude. I think that soon it's going to be the Hunger Games type issue. You know what I mean? But what would you like to see happen down there? I would like to see Trump get into office and eliminate the presidency. Simple as that. There shouldn't even be a president. Our company shouldn't be a corporation. Our country, my bad, shouldn't be a corporation. Simple as that. And there's a lot of evil people ruling this. But he's running for the presidency doubtful. He'll eliminate the presidency. I hope he does. I hope he does because our four founders didn't. They wanted this little government as possible for a reason. It's because the government's bad, man. And so the very first day, if Trump were to win again, would you? What's the first thing you'd like to see him do? I think because of everything that's going on, there's even if Trump wins, things are going to be bad no matter what. There's a certain family and there's a certain higher ups that control our country. And which families are I the Rothschilds?  Brown, here we go. Here we go. Banking. Once, however, the vision and what we are leaving right now is and it's not that vision. Once, however, I'm a constitutionalist. This is a constitutional republic. We're not a democracy.  Wait, let me just let him finish.   OK. Democracy is an umbrella term. OK, it's a very broad category. And within that umbrella is constitutional republic. There are various types of democracy.  There are different types of democracy.   I mean, they're completely. They don't know their history. They don't they don't read into and they hide half of it from us. You know what I mean? They are history books. Don't teach us what really happened. Who's hiding history right now? Oh, my God, this is so frustrating. You see what I mean? Who's hiding history right now? Oh, my God. In this country, I mean, come on. What's being omitted from history books that you'd like to see? Jesus, he's going to say Jesus. Our actual history instead of a corporated. Our actual history. What does that even mean?  It's really difficult to. To try to find a way to win people back who are operating on a different plane of reality than you. Right. There's not just like the Trump delusional component, but there's also this fundamentalist Christianity that's involved as well that, you know, makes them kind of not have much of a regard for the country and the world because, well, everyone's going to go to a better place soon. Jesus is going to come back soon. So if everything goes to shit here, it doesn't matter because it's only a matter of time before he swoops down on the white horse and rescues us and takes us all to heaven. So when you're when you're operating on that plane, it's hard to get them to care about this life, right? It's hard to get them to care about the country and other people assuming they're correct.  What if we had universal health care and free public education? It just there's no substance here. There's no concern at all for policy. It's just like these weird amorphous grievances swirling around in their head based on things that they've heard, based on memes, based on conspiracy theories, based on anti-Semitism. And they somehow try to mold some political views out of that. And then how that takes shape is just like grievance stupidity politics. And how do you win these people over? I think the answer is you can't. They are too far gone. So what do you do with this knowledge? I've asked this question before and I still don't have an answer for it. How do you go forward as a country, you know, when you have a section of the population that is completely detached from reality? And I don't know. I don't think there's a good answer. I don't think anyone can really answer that question. One of the Trump supporters said, oh, the way we go forward is with policy. But these people have proven they actually don't care about policy.  OK, you can poll Americans every single day and they will signal support for the best, most progressive policies. But when push comes to shove, they vote against their own self-interest. And I get that options are limited in the United States because we have a two-party system with a first pass the post.  But still out of every single politician, you can't say that there hasn't been options that have been given to you. And every single time they opt for the fuckheads over the ones who are progressive. So you don't support policy. So if you can't win with policy, you can't win them over with facts. How do you win them over? Maybe you can't. So the question is, how do we go forward as a country? And that is the million dollar question because I genuinely do not know. And I don't think that anyone is going to know ever because. You saw pretty detached from reality living in their own universe. I mean, goddamn.


I want to just take a look at where we are in this cycle and potentially where we're going. Now, obviously, when we take a look at the four-year cycles, I talk to this all the time. And not to say that this will hold up perfectly. Who knows? All models are wrong, and some are useful, right? But we can see that it seems to go in four-year cycles. There's all having all-time high adip in a reset. Then we'll have having all-time high adip in a reset. That happened in 2016, 2017. And we just had it again. We have a having. Then we had an all-time high in 2021. Then we had a dip and then a reset. We're going with that right now. And I think we're going to go through it again. I know for a fact, 100%, that we will go through a Bitcoin having.  That's baked in the cake. Every four years that happens, somewhere on April or May of 2024, that's going to happen. The real question is, will we see an all-time high?


He decided to write a children's book and said that if it was published that he would donate 50 books to Cromland's Children's Hospital and he has helped with fundraising there over the years as has his mum Eleanor who in fact has volunteered for over 30 years at the hospital. But it turns out that an American publishing company actually picked up the book it's called Sonny a Christmas Tale. So true to his word Morgan did donate 50 books to the hospital and the book is out now for Christmas and Morgan joins us on the line. Morgan a very good afternoon to you if you just bear with me one second. Morgan good afternoon. Hi how you doing? Nice talking to you John. Yeah likewise so you you came good on your promise anyhow you said that if it if it came to be that you got your book published that you would donate 50 copies to the to the hospital and how did well we'll get to the the pledge in just a moment but how did how did the book come about in the first place? I suppose it was just an idea I had I went to film school I've done a lot of traveling with my music over the years I was a singer-songwriter for 35 years still and I was over in London for a year trying to chase that elusive deal and I was in 2008 when the whole belly of the whole police the beast fell out and I came home and I enrolled in Dunleary School of Further Education and it was a film course and one of the classes was screenplay and I've always been writing always writing music poetry bits and pieces over the years and one of the teachers there was great inspiration and I just came up with the idea many years ago and kind of just it kind of just fell by the wayside you know and then when a when lockdown happened so we were stuck looking at each other and I thought you know what this is the time this is the time yeah yeah so it took me a while you know got it done was very happy about it you know so you should be I mean it's it's a brilliant little book in fact it's not a little book it might it feels quite slim but there's it tells a great little story and has a great drawing or great art in it as well and just perfect for this time of the year and a great wee story for kids to enjoy yeah I was thinking that as well like a perfect little stocking filler it's 11 euro you can't go far wrong you know and like I said the dog's sonny is real we got her at the very start of lockdown would you like to meet sonny oh yeah absolutely baby look at this everybody very good just so it's based on her yeah just like the cover her all her markings and she's just the most loveliest dog in the whole world she makes us so happy myself and my wife is going to yeah if I was gonna write a book we'll get something with such a lovely little heart like this yeah brilliant and and well whereabouts are you because and you you work between Belfast and Berlin so between Dublin and Berlin actually sorry thank you pardon yeah where are you at the moment I'm in Berlin actually yeah we're just out East Berlin a little place called Cooper Nick hey and yeah planning to move out to the country so I would like everybody else but the lockdown got in the way you know so yeah in Berlin and yeah just what's what's Christmas like in Berlin at the moment oh it's beautiful the Christmas markets are finally coming back it was the last two years was quite harsh a lot of them closed down and stuff you know but Berlin at Christmas time is beautiful it's beautiful at the moment now we're in a very harsh peak we've got three inches of snow outside and it is it was minus 13 when I woke up this morning all right you see we think it's harsh here at the moment because it was like minus one minus two overnight so yeah minus 13 and three inches of snow that's a different story yes yes and there's so they say there's a book in everyone and you realize that during during lockdown did it take you to take you long to complete it didn't it didn't you kind of go through phases you know like my wife is the technical side of the family if I just look at something digital it breaks down I still write my music with pencil and paper so yeah I just got out to sat on the kitchen table and started writing ideas ideas ideas and then would pass it over to her we'd read through it and she'd get her you know fingers out and start typing in for the publisher and stuff and it just slowly but surely came you know I worked with the with the guy from Dublin Brendan is his name and he he helped just edit it and kind of point me in the right direction and stuff you know the story to begin with was all the dogs were heroes and he said to me make sunny the hero I was like she's a baby how do we do that but anyway we did it and we got through and we changed little bits and pieces like everything it has a start and has an ending and you know so we got it done I'm very happy with it you know I mean and we all love a book that's you know it's it's got a Christmas at its heart and we you know kids love books with an animal Christmas huh exactly exactly and you know animal characters in them or animal characters at the heart and that's exactly what what Sonny is in this and how did how did it come about that you got an American publisher we just followed it out we sent it off to different people like you know to be honest with you it's not actually published per say by them we published it ourselves with them so if there's that there's us and there's them in between it like you know so it's not a full on publishing deal I'm still waiting for that contract but but it's self published with the with the company in America okay okay but widely widely available especially online yeah yeah you can get it on pretty much any Amazon you cannot get it on amazon.co.uk because of Brexit but every other amazon.com you can pretty much get it on anywhere else you can get it on and most bookshops if you order you can get it on in there as well like you know and the association with Cromland's Hospital and know that it goes back for your mom a long way and you've helped over the years as well with fundraising well me for a long way myself I was in a pretty bad accident when I was five years old and they pretty much saved my life I was in there for good few good few weeks so I've always had an affinity to them my mom has been working with them for my god 40 years 30 years you know I mean so a long time she's been doing the raising money for them and stuff like that you know I'd always just had a little place my heart for for them because they saved my life well if you can't be good to or someone like that then then who and you donated the 50 books anyhow through to your word yes yes which is great so that's that's in the children's words that they're yeah yeah yeah hopefully they're enjoying it like you know hopefully they're enjoying it okay so if someone's looking for the book it's it's the title is sunny and it's called sunny Christmas tale and it's by Morgan Mooney and it is out now just go online and just put in the title and and again it's if we go to sonny's tale calm you can it's a little website that brings you to that's easy enough it's just sonny's tale calm and if anybody would like to speak to us it's sonny's Christmas tale at gmail.com if they'd like to send us a quote or you know what they might think of the book or anything like that they can get in contact with us as well you know because it's always nice to get a bit of feedback and let's get ready for the next one you never know where Sony might end up next time I think she's an environmental activist to be honest with you okay never know she looks very adventurous anyhow so we wish Sonny well we wish you and your wife well and have a great Christmas thanks Morgan for having a chat with us. YouTube take care and happy Christmas to everybody bye bye


If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Lakeland Public Television presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Welcome to Common Ground, I'm your host, Scott Knudson. In this episode, join us as we tour Bemidji Brewing and Jack Pine Brewery and Brainerd Baxter as they share their unique recipes for fermentation. My name is Tom Hill, I'm head brewer and co-founder of Bemidji Brewing Company and we're sitting in our new taproom space and behind me is the new production space. I got into brewing kind of the way a lot of craft brewers of this era did and that's through home brewing. I started home brewing at BSU, my alma mater and started home brewing in sophomore year of college and just fell in love with it. So I went to school for design technology with emphasis in model making and it was something I was really interested in but I also had this side path of home brewing that I just love, production of beer, history of it. I just dug into as much as I could and it was during my time at school that I met Justin Keaney who was also in the same program and we had chatted briefly about starting a brewery and we both kind of went our separate ways for career paths and then in 2010 we found ourselves working in the prototype industry which is what I went to school for but we both kind of wanted to change and at that time our girlfriends and our wives were involved as well and we said well let's give this a go and we returned to the idea of starting a brewery and by then I had really dug into home brewing and I just attended the Siebel Institute in Chicago it's the nation's oldest brewing school and really just do as much research and development as I could prior to starting Bomingie Brewing Company. So this is our malt room and this is really where the process starts. Yesterday before the brew day we had a pal of the grain in here that had the whole recipe built on it. We measured out any small amounts that we need in the buckets and then we mill it into our malt mill. You can see there's two steel rollers that are ribbed and those roll against each other and it crushes the malt. If you look at the kernels of malt you can see that nature's wrapped that up in such a good little package that it's really difficult for water to get in there and pests to get in there. For us though we're interested in what's inside the malt we're interested in the endosperm and that's what's gonna convert to sugar in the mash.  And then we'll do that the day before that way in the morning we show up everything's prepped, ready to roll for mashing in. Chris is measuring out some phosphoric acid right now which we'll use to acidify our mash. So one important thing for our mash is we definitely want it to be in the right pH range and this will assist us with our current water profile in the midgy to hit the numbers that we're looking for. We preheat our mash ton with hot water at the beginning of the brew day just to kind of get everything up to temperature. That way when we bring in the room temperature malt and the hot water we don't lose any more heat than we need to just to the metal itself and the container itself. So just have some hot water kind of coming out of here right now. This is our two vessel 15 barrel brew house and we'll start the day in our mash ton which is a mixing vessel for our Crush Barley which is held up in this hopper right here above it. And it's got a stirring rake. We'll mix in water at a specific temperature and we'll conduct a mash in here and later on we'll be moving it over to our boil kettle literally just a large steam heated kettle. This will be adding hops and doing a 90 minute boil and from there we'll move on to fermentation. Today we're brewing our autumn IPA which is the first time I ever brewed this beer. It's Chris's recipe he devised kind of a big red IPA for the fall and they include some flaked wheat. We send this into the mash ton just through the man way. Our mill doesn't like sending flaked product through it so it's easier just to dump it in ourselves. I believe there is what 1122 pounds of malt in this batch. So we haven't pushed the mash ton quite that far yet so we will see what happens. So the first thing Chris is going to do is add a foundation water to the kettle, a layer of foundation water and that's gonna just bring that water up above the mash screen on the bottom. And from there we'll begin to add the malt in from the hopper. And throughout the water addition as it's flowing in the mash ton we also add the phosphoric acid and water mixture. Again just so it's thoroughly incorporated into the mash and helps us get our pH right where we want it. So once we get mashed in we'll recirculate upon itself for a bit and pull a sample. You see the rakes have been turned on now ready to begin stirring the malt as Chris adds it in through a slide gate underneath the hopper. So the goal of us mashing in right now is to incorporate the malted barley, any wheat products or adjuncts that we have with hot water. And that hot water activates enzymes in the malt that begin to break down the starches in the grains into sugars. And it's these sugars that will be fermented then by the yeast. Right now the mash looks very starchy, very milky and throughout the process it'll get clearer and more sugary. And you'll be able to visually see that happen as well as taste it. So Chris is keeping an eye on this flow totalizer that is letting him know just the amount of water that's come through the blending station. So right now we just finished up adding all the grain and we're shooting for 365 gallons of water total. So we've got about 20 gallons left to go here and it looks like we fit it all in there. So we'll slow the rakes down a bit and let the mash settle a little bit and then we'll recirculate upon itself to pull a sample for pH. So this is a grant and what it is it's an intermediary vessel between all the other vessels and it's got two radio frequency sensors on the back here that detect the liquid level. And as it comes above the bottom sensor it'll kick on our first pump and draw that liquid wherever it's going. In this case it's gonna go back upon the mash just onto the top so we just recirculate upon itself. And if it flows out too quick and fills up the grant top sensor kicks on and it'll stop the flow, allow it to draw down and it'll modulate it right in between those two sensors. We're just gonna do a quick recirculation here so we just kinda control it by hand just to get the quick sample we need. So right now you can see it's really chunky, it's full of some husk material, it's also very milky looking. Later on once the mash is complete and all the starch has been converted to sugar and we're sending it over to the boil kettle you'll see it'll be a nice clear red and be basically sugar water at that point. And then now if you look up in the top of the mash ton you can see it's coming through this sight glass here so it's going through our pump system through pneumatic valve up this tube and then right back in. So if you look up in there there's a spreader in there it just makes a nice gentle cone so that way we're not just digging a hole in the mash bed when we recirculate upon itself. We do this at this point to make sure that all the acid that we added, the salts, all that mixing just helps homogenize the whole mash. So when we take our pH sample we've got a consistent medium to take it from. Once we have our sample and everything's been mixed up and we've made any adjustments we need to make now the mash will rest for 40 minutes. And again that's when the starch and sugars are converting and after that we'll start the process called warlock. So Chris is taking the pH of our mash sample right now and we're shooting for Shooting for 5.3 pretty much. 5.3, 5.3.5 It looks like we hit 5.30 on the pH meter. That's all gonna relate to the enzymes that are active in the mash and how efficient they are in converting starches to sugar. The mouth feel the beer and the hop character of the beer and how crisp or round the beer is in the finished product. So to start the beer off at the right pH range is crucial it just kinda carries itself after that. So other than the acid that we added to the mash Chris right now is mixing up a variation of salts. So in this one we've got some gypsum or calcium sulfate, some canyon salt which is just sodium chloride and then some calcium chloride as well. And again we're fortunate to have really great water to brew with in Bemidji. It's a little high in carbonate. That's why we add the phosphoric acid to knock that down but with the salts we're really looking for a water profile something that's going to accentuate the hops, accentuate the malts that we're using. So the salts that are being added now are really for aesthetic purposes rather than functionality. So once we're transferring the wort over to the boil kettle and the liquid portion of the mash is moving out of there we want to start sparging and sparging literally means rinsing of the grain. So Chris is drawing in some water from our hot liquor tank right now and that'll just be slowly sprinkled over the grain bed and trying to keep the liquid level the same throughout the entire transfer. And what this is doing is helping rinse out all those sugars that are trapped within the grain husks and throughout the mash. At this point the entire mash bed is acting as a filter. So we have the screen that's on the bottom of the mash bed that's really just keeping out the chunks but then you've got all that husk material that forms a matrix within the mash bed and as the liquid flows through that it forms its own filter bed. And right now we're trying to be as gentle as we can with the beer. So we're sparging slow or rinsing real slow. We've got our pump turned way down and we're just slowly transferring over the boil kettle because we don't want to collapse that filter that we've created with the mash. So as the work flows out of the mash tun through multiple points on the bottom so it's drying nice and even it flows through a series of valves and up into the grants. And again this is just an intermediary vessel between the mash tun and the boil kettle and it prevents just gravity draining pulling down that mash bed. So it goes in here, it floats up and it's modulated with two RF frequency controllers that will keep it right in the middle of that sight glass. And this allows us to verify the clarity as well as more importantly control the runoff speed over to the boil kettle. There's a lot of proteins in here still. So once we boil those will coagulate and drop out and we'll really start to see a clear beer but you can start to visually see just the deep red color that we're shooting for with this one. Chris has just placed a sample into our refractometer and what this does is it measures light as it's refracted through the sample and the more sugar you have in there the more it's refracted. So we're able to look through this device and be able to see the percent sugar. For us that allows us to know kind of if we're on track for the recipe and just where the starting point is for the mash. So I've assembled basically the kit of everything I need to assemble this 15 barrel fermenter sanitizing as I go. And then we will be able to fill a portion of the cone with percetic acid sanitizer and recirculated amongst itself to get the whole vessel sanitized and just ready to roll for the end of the brew day. So then everything in the beer touches will have had this sanitizer ran through it and they'll be ready to receive the finished beer. So right now we're transferring the finished wort out of the boil kettle through our heat exchanger through the brewer's tube over to our 15 barrel fermenter. We've got cold water running in one direction of the heat exchanger and then we've got hot wort coming in the other direction. And then we're watching a thermometer here that's telling us what temperature is coming out of there at. So we're shooting for 66 today. Once it comes out of the heat exchanger we're also injecting oxygen into it and that's for yeast health. So that's gonna help the yeast grow and perform the way that we want it to. So you can see this whole mass of bubbles in there that we're injecting it in line through a venturi mechanism. And then we're going to inject the yeast pitch into the beer in line. So after counting our yeast we determined that 31 kilograms is exactly where it need to be for this beer so we're going to work to get that set in line here. We're all set with our yeast. So from here on out it's just a matter of continuing to chill the beer on its way to the fermenter until the kettle's empty. And then we'll put the blow off hose into a bucket of sanitizer and we'll be wrapped up with the brew day and it's just a matter of cleaning it up. I'm Patrick Sundberg, owner, founder and brewer here at Jack Pine Brewery and we are brewing beer, we're bottling beer and cleaning kegs all today here at the brewery. Well I started as a home brewer. Basically a home brewer in my garage got into the hobby more and more and really got interested in it. I started entering home brew competitions and doing pretty well in them. I became a certified beer judge and got more and more into it as a hobby level. And it kind of got to a point where I wanted to work at a brewery but there were no breweries in this area so I felt that it was time to start something up here. So I spent about four years putting together a business plan, doing research on what had worked for breweries and what hadn't worked and everything kind of fit together and we opened the doors to the tap room January of 2013. The crushed malted barley and the other grains are being stirred in with hot water. The temperature in here is gonna hit at about 154 degrees when it's all said and done. That will sit for one hour while the enzymes in the malted barley are converting the complex sugars into simple sugars that the yeast can use later on. Once the mash is done we'll run off the liquid portion into the boil kettle over here and we've got the first batch of the day is actually coming to an end here and we're just getting going on the second batch now. Once the liquid portions pulled over into the boil kettle it'll boil for an hour and a half and we add hops at different times throughout the process depending on the style and the type of beer that we're brewing. Once the batch is done we'll run it through a whirlpool which is what we're at right now with the second batch. Basically just a recirculation. What that does is it'll pull a lot of the hop particles together and any sort of proteins that are left over in the boil pull it to the middle so they don't end up into the fermenter. So we're just finishing up the first batch of the day and kind of about mid process on the second batch. We're doing the recirculation or the vorloff it's the official term for it. Basically in the mash we're pulling a little bit of the wort the liquid portion off and pumping it up to the top just to kind of get it to clear up. The grain in the bottom actually sets up its own filter bed so it'll trap a lot of the proteins and any of the grain bits from getting into the boil. You want to keep as much grain out of the boil as you can because if you boil grain you'll get kind of a harsh astringency. So we'll run this for about 15 minutes while we're cleaning out the boil kettle and getting it ready for the next batch to go into it. Now we're sparging the grains. We're gradually introducing hot water on top of the grain and then pumping it off of the bottom of the mash tun into the boil kettle. Starting out it runs pretty sweet. A lot of the concentrated sugars from the mash will come through into the boil kettle and then it gradually starts to thin out as the water rinses the grain. The goal is basically to get as much of the sugars out of the grain as we can during this process. And this is where it starts to get nice and toasty in here. Once the fermenter's full and the whole batch is chilled down to 60 degrees we'll actually pitch a fresh slurry of yeast. This is what does all the work. This is what converts it from the sugars that we set up in the mash into alcohol and then the byproduct is carbon dioxide. We're actually on the third generation right now. We harvest from batch to batch. We'll go out about seven generations of reusing the yeast. I use primarily one strain of yeast for the brewery just for that fact so I can recycle the yeast and use it from batch to batch. It kind of maintains its health a little bit better. The first pitch of yeast is always a little bit sluggish but then once it kind of hits its stride and gets a feeling for both our fermentation temperature and the beers that we're brewing then it really takes off and it ferments it really well. So that's the stuff right there. Those guys are the hardest working critters in the brewery. So after the whirlpool is done we'll chill the beer down as quickly as possible. Run it through a heat exchanger here which takes it from near boiling down to 60 degrees. On the way to the fermenter here it runs into the bottom of one of these fermenters. Right now we've got eight fermenters going. So once the beer is in the fermenter and chilled down it's time to put the yeast in here and get them to work. Correct a little bit. Now this is a nice thick slurry of yeast on the bottom here. This is third generation. It's been pulled from a few other batches. Get as much as we can out of there. Now the real work starts. The yeast will eat the sugars and convert it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. And the yeast during fermentation also produces a lot of other compounds in there that would give the beer kind of its unique flavor. We've got eight fermenters up and running it right now. We can brew about four batches a week. This room is temperature controlled. I keep it at 62 degrees. Kind of keeps the fermentation under check. Fermentation actually produces heat. So the fermenters will heat up if left to their own devices. But since the room is set at 62 it kind of keeps the fermentation under control and keeps the yeast doing what we want it to do. So once the beer is done fermenting it will get pumped into these bright tanks. And this is where the beer clears out. We chill it down, clear it up and carbonates all in these guys. The beer will sit here for two to four days, something like that, depending on the brew schedule.  We actually use one of these. There's a racking cane in here that pulls off the beer from a little bit above the bottom so we're not pulling any of the yeast that is yeast or proteins that have settled out. So we'll keg it off right off of here. And once it's in the keg it's ready to go. Ready to go to either our tap room or to our wholesale accounts around town. So we're bottling our 22 ounce bombers right now. We just launched bombers in the liquor stores over Memorial Day weekend. And so we kind of run through the process here. We bottle right from a keg. So this is a little sanitizer rig. We've got the sink full of sanitizing solution. Let me blast it through here. We've got ice packs in there to actually chill it down so it cools down the bottles. We'll get less foaming on the bottler if the bottles are chilled before we run them in through the bottler. We give them a quick rinse of sanitizer, let them drip dry and then run them through this counter pressure filler. So what this does is it'll flush any oxygen out of the bottle with a CO2 first and then it fills from the bottom under pressure. Similar process that larger breweries would use but a little bit more manual. You lose just a touch of carbonation between the filler and the capper but because we're not leaving the bottle sit out for an extended period of time. The goal is, is we try to cap on top of foam so it does push all of the oxygen out but there's such a small amount of oxygen in there. And another thing we have going for us is this beer isn't filtered, it's not pasteurized. So there's actually living yeast still in the bottle. So if there's a little bit of oxygen in there the yeast will kind of scavenge that up and take care of it. An hour for a half barrow keg. So we can do about seven cases an hour with two people is really nice. Aaron's been running it on his own for a little bit here but it does work pretty good with two people. And then all of the bottles get a date stamp too on the fill date. So we can keep track of rotation and make sure we've got fresh stock rolling around the liquor stores. That's usually not a problem because the beer we're on such a small scale the beer tends to move fairly fast. It took a little bit to dial the system in. We were getting a lot of foam initially and it was just, it was a little bit of a headache but we're about to the point where we need to be brewing a batch every single week now just to keep up with how fast it's moving. That's one of the advantages of being a smaller brewer. We're brewing four batches a week. So if we kind of anticipate a need going down in the future we can kind of scale up and be like, okay let's brew two batches of it this week just to kind of get ahead of it and catch up versus being a larger brewery in a smaller community. If we were only brewing every other week it'd be a little tough to try to plan the production out. We wouldn't be able to have as many beers as we have right now. I mean the tap room right now has about 11 beers on tap give or take depending on the week. We wouldn't be able to keep up with with that many different brands and beers on tap if we didn't have such a small system. There is absolutely a community about Minnesota breweries and especially with so many being added in the last few years. So we started planning there were just over 20 breweries in Minnesota and this last year we capped over 100. So within four years we really just skyrocket with the number of breweries available in Minnesota. While there are a lot of little breweries that are popping up all over the place we're all kind of in this together. We like to use the term cooperation. So even though a lot of craft brewers in Minnesota and other regional brewers that distribute within this area going for the same customers there's absolutely the competition side of it vying for tap handle space and shelf space in the bottle shops but there's also that community aspect that we are all small brewers and we're all operating right at the same guidelines. As competitive as the market is we're all still little guys trying to make it go at it and there's so many more aspects into getting a business up and running. And it's almost more of how do we navigate the larger brewers, the aniser bushes and the millers and the cores and the import brands and how do we make our footprint as stable as possible within Minnesota. You know the business side is actually a lot more difficult than the brewing side or it should be anyway. I think my favorite part of the brewery business from the brewer's perspective is just being able to share with somebody and with the public something that I've made and has been developed in my mind's eye in our brewer's mind's eye and being able to really have a goal for something, see it through and then see somebody enjoy it. Thank you so much for watching. Join us again next week on Common Ground. If you have an idea for a common ground piece that pertains to North Central Minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call us at<PHONE_NUMBER>. To view any episode of Common Ground online visit us at lptv.org We order episodes or segments of Common Ground call<PHONE_NUMBER>. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. If you enjoyed this episode of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground consider making a contribution at lptv.org.


I am Andrew Snyder. I am the fourth generation to be here at the Snyder Ranch at our current location. We are nestled against the Black Hills in between Sturgis and Rapid City, South Dakota. We have a ranching operation with myself, my middle brother Daniel, and my dad. We predominantly are a cow-calf operation.  We also develop bread heifers. Along with that we run some stocker cattle. On the cropping side we grow alfalfa and grass hay. And then also on annual crops we'll grow barley, oats, sorghums, millet, and everything is for forage for the cattle. We've started to get into the cover cropping side of things. Putting a cover crop in following harvesting barley or taking off winter wheat. And we've also done a little experimenting with grazing standing corn for the first time this year. We do have a rotational grazing system in our forest unit. We will do a rotational grazing on our native pastures too. If you turn out in this pasture early, you don't turn out early in that pasture next year. Try to vary up your season of use and give those plants an opportunity to recover. So when you think about the whole no-till scenario, you first start with no-till and eliminating disturbance, stopping your disking and your primary tillage. The next thing that people always think about in a no-till situation is cover crops. That's where we are working on right now is the cover crop side of it. When we'll grow barley or wheat for hay, we can come in behind that with a cover crop. And those cover crops in our environment will give us the opportunity to grow forage out of season. Grow something that we normally wouldn't have. Here in western South Dakota, we have a drastically different moisture situation than east river South Dakota. Anything you can run through the cow, graze it and leave nutrients where they're at. Create residue and you're not transporting those bales that hay from the field back to your home place. All the different bugs of the soil that are taking that apart, they're disassembling a complex item that the cow put on the ground. And they're taking that back into the soil for the benefit of everything else that's growing to make the whole cycle start again. In the multi-species cover crop that we have growing on one particular field, the idea with that is you cover your bases from your warm season grasses, your cool season grasses, your warm season broadleaves, brassicas. One thing that grows good one year may not grow so good another year. Instead of rolling out a bale and feeding the cattle with stored forage, make them graze it. This whole thing started when I was in college in brickings at SDSU. I was invited to go to Dakota Lakes Research Farm and Dr. Duane Beck would talk about the different things he was doing in the soil health and he kept relating to you got to feed the livestock in the soil. That's something as a rancher I can relate to that. This makes sense. You feed the cows above the ground, you got to feed the cows in the soil.


Friends, first of all, to say that the people who were arrested in August, which led these five petitioners, and it's been an honor and privilege to represent these petitioners, were represented by many, many councils. Prasanth is here with us. And there were many other lawyers who voluntarily came forward and stood in court and wanted to be part of the legal team that was representing. And I think that in itself indicates to us the significance that is attached to it and why these petitioners in the first place put their names forward and others came forward too. I will just give a little sense of where we are in the legal case today. As you know, this was the second round of arrest. It's a, you know, if it wasn't that there were real people who are being put into prison and it's part of the manner in which the present regime is going to suppress our rights, the rights of other citizens and the voices of those who wish to contest the kind of socio-political imagination that is being made available to us. It begins with an FIR and an event which dates back to 31st December 2017 and 1st January 2018, organized by two judges. It leads to many FIRs because there was a targeting and an attack on the Dalits who went to pay homage to the, on 1st January to a particular site where the Vijay's Thumb is. And on 8th January there is another FIR lodge which becomes a magical device through which rolling arrests are being made. And even as we speak here, it would not be surprising if this fate of arrests continues. We saw one set of arrests in June, early June 2018, again in end of August 2018 and since the event actually has nothing to do with what people are being arrested and charged and falsely implicated for, it is quite clear that this has become an occasion to rope in anybody who disagrees, who has ideas that disagrees, whose activism disagrees and who challenges various vested interests or represents people who are challenging various vested interests. The two judges, former judges who had organized on 31st December, there has been a recent media report, which tells us that our statement in the charge sheet was not given. This is a former Supreme Court judge speaking. Surely a former Supreme Court judge would know what is a police, what is it, what you give as a statement to the police, what is the value of it, should it be in a charge sheet. After two rounds of arrests, one set of charge sheet against the June arrestees who are also all activists has been filed. On 22nd November 2018, the Maharashtra police has asked for time of further 90 days to file a charge sheet against the August arrestees. Under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the law allows not only the first set of 90 days, if you don't file a charge sheet, the person in jail has a statutory right to bail, but you can ask for another 90 days because they are saying that we have to do a lot of research. So you have arrested the first people who were not running away, who work in this society and now you are saying that you need more time to gather evidence against them. The charge sheet that has been filed, there are two or three things which I would like to draw our attention to. They have increased the provisions. It's not only the Indian Penal Court and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, but within these two statutes, they have added many very, very open-ended, loose offenses which we know have repeatedly been used. The offense of sedition, the offense of waging war against the state, which are all political offenses and against which there has been a long-standing campaign by democratic rights groups that these are meant to be abused. So it's not as though there is a misuse taking place here. They are only meant for that purpose. The incident which has led to these two rounds of arrests, it has been repeatedly placed before the court that there is nothing to connect these people. What are we finding is now coming in the charge sheet. Apart from the letters that were initially made available, which have no, which are very vague, whose authenticity, veracity is yet to be tested or proved, we are now being told that there are other organizations who are being called frontal organizations. One important one that I want to underline here is the Indian Association of People's Lawyers. There are many, many lawyers who are, who are cause lawyers who do human rights lawyering across the country who are members of the Indian Association of People's Lawyers. The patron in a sense of which is Justice Hospit Suresh, a former judge of the Bombay High Court. In the Supreme Court, we had placed before the court, the Constitution, it's an organization which has a set of rules, which publishes an annual brochure, which has a perspective and where people say, yes, we represent, we are people's lawyers. It's interesting that almost every judge of the higher judiciary will at a public function, particularly to young lawyers or law students, encourage and enthuse them to become cause lawyers. Well, that is precisely what IAPL lawyers are, but then they become inconvenient and then their liberties are at stake. They are today being mentioned along with Kabir Kalamanj, which we know is a cultural organization, a cultural group. They are being named as frontal organizations of the banned CPI Maoist. In order to be a frontal organization under the UAPA, you have to be listed as a front organization by that particular state or central government. There is no such listing of either Kabir Kalamanj or IAPL, yet it passes off in a report of the public prosecutor to the court of law, which brings me to my main point, apart from what are the details of the cases. The legal system works on the assumption of good faith of the state and the agents of the state, whether it is the police or others. Do we not have an evidence of 70 years of democracy, which actually proves bad faith by agents of the state? Why is it that we continue to operate with a colonial jurisprudence where the citizen is suspect, but the state is presumed to act in good faith? What we are seeing repeatedly is the use and abuse of various authorities and agencies, whether it is through the police or the enforcement directorate or again unleashed against human rights organizations, that we see the use and abuse of these against those who are raising issues, ideas and challenging and contesting state power. The assumption that the court will make that what the police is saying is correct, is not written in the law, it is a burden on the police and the state to prove it and yet they are able to actually get away because legal scrutiny is diuted in the larger interests of the nation-state and that needs to be seriously challenged. We today do have the activists are in jail, their bail petitions in Pune were rejected, they will now have to at an appropriate time move the Bombay High Court. You would recall that when the case was going on in the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court itself gave a fractured verdict. There was a dissenting judgment by Justice Chandrachur who not only upheld the that these people were and should be considered as human rights defenders and what was a prayer before the Supreme Court? A prayer was for a credible investigation. At no point have we said that you cannot investigate anybody. Every citizen of this country I hope should be subjected to investigation if there is reason to suspect. We only ask for a credible investigation which was the minority judgment was in our favor but two judges ruled against us. We filed a review petition. The review petition was heard in chambers. We did seek an open hearing which was denied and the review petition was dismissed. So now the case is before the trial court and I think we cannot allow it to only be seen through the lens of criminal law because the issues are much larger and also because we can already see through the documents that are being filed that they are hoping to rely exclusively on conjectures, on hyperbole, on fear and on facts which cannot be proven to keep the activists away and to have a chilling effect and perhaps law today has become an instrument in many cases of actually suppressing rights rather than an instrument or a mechanism of enhancing rights. The fact that the evidence will not yield anything as it has not in many cases of many activists is perhaps known to the state. The process therefore must constantly be challenged by all of us and I'm very grateful to the petitioners for keeping this conversation alive even as we continue to demand that this is what is being put out in the public domain remain narratives that are being spun and which have no legal basis and as was said by Professor Romula Thapard the urban knuckle is one whose ideas are dangerous it is nobody's case that there is any use of violence so I think it is a contestation of ideas and law is being used to not allow us to think and the provisions of sedition and UAPA are only reminiscent of the colonial jurisprudence which exactly as Professor Thapard said was what we challenged at the dawn of democracy. Thank you.