I'm gonna introduce one of the writers. I'm sure you all have seen the show Penn and Teller tell a lie This is a please make them feel welcome. This is Matt Donnelly Thank you all for coming out it is my pleasure to be moderating today's discussion and please welcome the stage your guests for the last 38 years they have been defying the laws of physics and also sometimes good taste Please welcome the stage Penn and Teller That's how hypocritical Penn and Teller are do a whole show against bottled water, and they come out with bottled water We actually dump these out and put tap And let's just be clear I just for today's discussion teller you are indeed might so you'll be speaking to everybody here today All right, and just on things up. I saw you guys talking with Randy just before we came out on stage here Talk about a little bit. Let's talk about Randy Did you all know of him before you got together or was that you got together when you kind of discovered Randy and your admiration for Randy? that Information has been lost The three of us tell stories of Randy and how we met and I believe all three of us Tell different stories Somebody was really arrogant like sure. I'll like tell her sure why not Yeah, let me see here. Hold on a second. We got this. This is just really wicked fun Strangely I have some It's just It's it was odd, but I was looking through some ancient notebooks of mine today, and I found a letter a Draft of a letter to Randy saying that we were going to be at the The this this conference for college bookings and that we were dying to meet him I that's all I can say so we we knew he was going to be there It wasn't a random encounter and it was a sort of a fan letter to him Well, you know, I know that while I was in the high school I don't know because they're gonna tell me that there's a different year But I believe when I was in high school. I read flim-flam and Randy had already started Changing my life. The way Randy tells the story is that he put us together and I I would say that that's the lie that tells the greater If we hadn't both been fans of Randy, we wouldn't get together and certainly and I said this many times It's just simply true that if not for Randy, they would not be pen and tell her as we are today I mean, there's no doubt about that You know, I've told the story so many times. I won't tell it now, but I as a child was very very bothered by Kreskin and humiliated by Kreskin and I Actually lost all of my respect for science and all of my respect for magic. I Didn't have a lot for magic, but I mean a little bit that I had I lost and and it was teller Randy together that gave me the piece of information I needed and I Didn't understand before hours of conversation with teller and reading a lot of Randy then meeting Randy that you could take the worst thing possible which is lying to people knowingly and Make that an okay thing by putting a proceeding around and whether Whether you want to use any of the cliches of honest liar or any of those things However, you put that the idea that to say That you're a taxi driver when really you're an actor It's an immoral thing to do unless you're doing a movie called Taxi driver in your Robert De Niro And when it's in the theater, it's okay. So Teller and I work really hard to Not tell lies, but do magic which is Which I didn't understand how that was possible until I met teller and Randy so it's kind of teller was much hipper to all The kind of nuances of when it's okay to lie and what it's not but I was very very confused by that and Teller and Randy kind of led me by the hand and Randy was just you know, I've said this many times outside of my family outside of people genetically related to me No one is more important in my life Randy's everything to me. That's amazing. That is amazing. And that's why he referred to you guys as brothers So I know that the feeling is he said something more important than that Did you hear what he said last night after we did to serve with love? He said I love them like brothers I love them like lovers. Oh and That's when I started crying last night That ramps it up a wicked lot for sure does and it gets hotter for everyone else So tell her let's talk a little bit about this So so when he talks about when it's okay to lie or how to lie and magic you got into magic very early on So when did the ethics of doing magic play in your development of magic? Almost not until I met Penn really Penn I magic didn't didn't have for me a moral component. I think until I hung with Penn who is as you know Very clear in his morality If for me, I was I was fascinated by by magic because The most important decision that you make in your life At any given moment is what is really going on there? You can't make any decisions beyond that until you make that decision and Magic is this wonderful place where if you make if you make a mistake on that in real life if you if you if You're in a situation and you don't really know what's going on And you don't think there's a truck coming at you and the truck Is there and it comes at you and you make a mistake about that that can be a very fatal sort of thing If you go to the car dealership and the car dealer lies to you and you buy a bad car That's a very severe thing if on the other hand your What magic does is magic allows you to play with that most Difficult of all with that that most important possible decision in a situation where it doesn't matter In fact, it's a situation where if you get it wrong if you don't know where reality is and and make believe begins You're perfectly happy with it because you're just there to have fun. It's like a it's like a playground for that particular skill That is so important elsewhere Great and now when it comes to what's great about that man. I was just great That's why I took a a transition class and great was the first lesson I I always excelled at uh-huh I'm gonna I'm gonna listen to you want fascinated No, um No, and so, you know being in you know the skeptic atheist community bring that into your work You know that you were into entertainment first Talk about you know the you know growing up as entertainers and then becoming kind of skeptic or atheists entertainers That's not true for me. Okay. I was I was much more interested in atheism and skepticism than I was in show Okay, I I mean it was a juggler, which is you know It is the lowest level of show business possible People we can look down upon our ventriloquist and hypnotism That's it so I was a you know talent show juggler, and I knew that I am I Lacked enough musical ability to be successful in that I Didn't think I had enough comedy ability to be successful there I mean see Martin once said if you desperately want to be in show business and don't really have talent you become a magician and I Didn't desperately want to be in showbiz. I desperately want to be a writer and what I cared about My overwhelming passion Was atheism and out of that came on came skepticism So what we were really see me teller really did love magic. I had I don't think I had even Even the slightest bit of affection for magic when I met you Not much I mean the only interest I have in magic is the stuff that teller told me was good about magic the idea that Magic could be an intellectual art form because it has built-in irony this I'm just parroting things that teller said to me but that You had The intellectual engagement of what's real and the nutty thing is it you can't understand what a radical Insanely profound thing that was to say when teller said it to me because this was the time of Doug Hemming and David Copperfield and these people that came out and said what we're doing here in magic is this I had a dream last Night. This is what I felt And they would have you know their dreams always involved mutilating women With with fluffy clouds and tie-dye and woo and Teller pointed out that the idea of magic is the fact that there's trickery there You're not trying to tell The I'd be a measure like teller just do this but teller talks about the unwilling suspension of disbelief When you want Shakespeare Shakespeare writes, you know, here we are in this scene or as Johnny Thompson says here We are in Spain and you believe that the actor is you play along with it But magic you don't play along with you're supposed to watch magic with a chip on your shoulder so automatically you're dealing with his teller said the difference in reality and And falsehood and you're dealing with that particular idea. So even the stupidest magic trick, you know, the the suckiest mentalism automatically has some sort of political and moral component because you are dealing with what is truth, which is precisely what teller was saying and What is truth is a really profound thing and magicians just piss that away What you say to people just come with me on this journey. Here's a dream that I had Let's just make believe that you don't need to be doing magic. There's no reason to it's only the unwilling suspension of disbelief It's fascinating and teller telling me that magic was essentially intellectual not the lowest form of art But rather a rather high-up form of art got me interested when I was the magic that I've watched on TV You know what I've said a zillion times a greasy guy and it talks with a lot of birds torturing women to bad rip-off white boy small dick Motown music was Was just repulsive to me. I mean when I would watch Ed Sullivan When the magician came on I was just waiting to see the whole you know, I didn't care about I don't care about the magicians I was looking at the rock and roll bands in between and teller got that idea that you could say the word trick and Celebrate the word trick and get rid of words like effect and illusion Even even the dumbest dove act has an automatic intellectual component Because you're always looking at it with your eyes and measuring what you see against what you know And that's the fun of it the fun of it is you measure what you see against what you know Those two things come into collision with each other and there's a little explosion that can that's that's office has some emotional content Even if it's a crappy act, which is why the Steve's Steve Martin suggestion that magic is a very very low You know, it's the it's the form that you can you can do if you've got no talent elsewhere is Is really correct because people get work just coming out and doing tricks and even doing tricks with horrible narratives They come out and do these horrible narratives you look at me With the horrible narratives the pen was alluding to I Didn't say horrible narrators But because the form is intrinsically so strong they they can they continue to work So it's really it's a terribly terribly rich form that there's a terrible pile of crap it now tell her I mean you're also I don't know if magic a story and is too strong of a term but you're aware of a lot of history of magic and tricks and This is an old fight isn't it the magic be there being saying I do have superpowers or magic being the kind of thing that serves a Greater good or you know can speak to skepticism or being smarter, right? For a long time there was there was confusion about whether the guy who was on the street corner was doing tricks or whether he might have some connection with the devil and The first time that was articulated in English was in 1584 when Reginald Scott who was a a smart guy who was working under the realm of King James who was a Crackpot You know a crackpot who believed there was a witch under every rock and Reginald Scott dared to say you know It's actually sometimes when you see those guys on the street corner who are pretending to cut their arms off They're using gimmick knives like this and he put a little diagram in his book So naturally King James took the opportunity to have every possible copy of Reginald Scott's book burned So that I mean that that the question of whether lying is there or not is a fairly old one. Yeah It's so much safer to trash King James That's teller telling truth to power He called the 16th century King a crackpot It happened here. Yeah this year Revolution starts now No, no, you guys go ahead mock me, but would you have come up with a better answer to that question pen? No, I was gonna have the same one except with all the wrong dates and the wrong name. I mean That's the that's the essential difference between us I fill in these little gaps that don't matter to me like the date and what the person actually said and who they were Incidentally King James is famous for publishing a book too Now when you guys start to hit in New York as a do and you start to become you know a pretty big deal Let's say, you know, there's a tendency in artists to really kind of scale back their beliefs or scale back They're kind of underlying tones and just kind of go with their entertainment form first was that the case with you guys were you always outspoken as A distance skeptics while you were also starting to become famous as a comedy magic duo It's with the exact opposite with us. We were we were more careful early on and We are the kinds of kinds of guys that if you if you give us more rope, we will hang ourselves I mean we always have been I mean When we speak at these things, I think it's happened other years Someone often stands up and says something very kind about our our bravery speaking out about atheism and The fact of the matter is that the more we've talked about atheism the more money we've made We haven't I don't mean please I know that people suffer for atheism and skepticism and in very real ways with their families With their jobs. There's real persecution that I'm not in any way belittling I am just saying that we haven't experienced that in our particular Trajectory we haven't had I mean, I'm sure that there have been the people I've been I've been attacked more for not being a liberal than I have for being an atheist and Had lost jobs and stuff for that but for atheism really really none that I know of When we were a three-person group We were the asparagus Valley Cultural Society from 70 something to 80 something 75 to 81. Yeah And We had a three-person group for the third member named we're Christopher and We're was a was a Lutheran minister's son and was a religious man And so we first did those few things because it was a three-person group and we had to be respectful To everyone's feelings on that we had to stay away from anything religious In order for the group to function when the group split up Which is a very odd way to look at it when there's a three-person group and two people go off to work together You can see it another way besides just splitting up Took to go away to work together in a screamingly atheist project Yeah called mrs. Lonsbury's seance of horror, which was not Christian and when we When we were we were when we were away from him we then started to to be to be to be more More out of I mean we're always very very Outspoken atheists in our personal lives right, but we started doing it a little more professionally and You know that there is and tellers started it with this but There are two distinct schools of thought in magic I mean We have had long discussions with David Blaine who believes We like him we get along with them But artistically he really believes that the purpose of magic tricks is to obscure Where the trick begins is to bleed out into the world so that people may think you have supernatural powers It's not that David Blaine is Is not caring about this stuff. It's that he has a different opinion He believes that his job is to make people have Misconceptions about reality and specifically misconceptions about him. He really seems to believe that and I Believe we believe that that is not only artistically wrong, but morally wrong that we believe and this is something I've had a lot of trouble with I believe that sawing a person in half is The is the moral point in in a magic app Nobody except someone who is severely mentally ill or a very young child leaves after seeing Someone's sawn in half on stage and thinks that someone can be sawn in half without consequences Nobody leaves the theater like that and I believe that is the moral line for all magic performance Which means if you're doing Mentalism you cannot say you're reading body language You cannot say you're reading tone of voice you must keep it that way And I will also tell you that that's the ideal and not tell her but I have broken that and I have screwed up and not done That properly and I'm always trying to fix it and always fighting with that because I believe that that's The ideal of where we're gonna go, but a lot of times skeptics and skeptic magicians will consider that Out of magic comes skepticism and then your job is to tell people that this is tricks And this is real and that decision has to be made and that's not true. The other magicians are not just Making a mistake from what they believe is right They have an actual different Moral position and different artistic position than we do and it bothers me very much But there are magicians who Are good magicians and no tricks and can do tricks that are then also believers I talked with Randy for a long time about Doug Henning who whether you liked him or not He's the most important magician in the 70s and changed the whole view of magic It was very very powerful and he believed that with TM. He would be able to levitate I mean here is the person that had done fake levitations and believed there were also real ones and there are a huge number of People who are just on the cusp people who believe that they may really have a little bit of ESP But have to help it along with a trick so it's not an easy line It's a very easy line to draw for me, but it's not an easy line to draw in the world and artistically it always perplexes me Beyond description when a mentalist says Leaves it ambiguous about whether what he's doing is a trick or not Because if you really could read minds then there'd be that you wouldn't want to give that person credit, right? It's just a natural a natural thing. It's like I'm I'm on stage and I'm claiming that I'm five foot eight tall I mean it would just be a fact There's nothing to praise about somebody just doing what it is that they are naturally able to do It's it's being able to do to appear to do what what you're doing without doing it. That is the achievement It's the achievement of all arts, you know You can look at the scene and that doesn't you don't get credit for that You take that scene and you turn it into a canvas. That's something worth applauding for so I just cannot ever imagine why people make the choice of Not being able to take the applause for what they're really doing well, you know Just one one little slight difference of opinion there Ron Jeremy really could blow himself and that was cool And people have paid you see it. There's no arguing with that But I saw I'm doing I mean you guys talk about like it's cool, but do you give him that much credit for it? Yes, okay? You know how you know how you can tell I can't blow myself because I'm sitting here Forget my next question You guys You know you define the line so so distinctly but yet magic kind of you guys have a reputation for kind of a billing against that Right, you guys kind of ticked off magicians or ticked off the magic community over yelling against blowing ourselves That was that was Overwhelmed mostly a line There were some amateur magicians Who were a little upset about us, but when we hit New York in the 80s we very much wanted to do a magic show That wouldn't be for the same audience as magic shows and magic shows had a very They still do you know a very cheesy Kind of view and we wanted to pull people out of that we wanted to do a PR hype thing of doing a magic show in New York City That was just a magic show, but passing it off as something Post-modern as a magic show something beyond that and the way we accomplished that was by talking about How much magicians hated us so that the audience would say well This is something different from magicians and what we would do and this is so So disingenuous so unpleasant so cheesy so opportunistic and so self-serving and I'm rather proud of it We would find some guy who had a you know a mimeograph Newsletters Xerox newsletter that went out to like a thousand people You know and some guy who was going out to a thousand people would write a paragraph About seeing us and thinking that we were terrible You'd write something like the worst thing to happen in the 20th century something just insanely stupid like World War two blew by this guy and He wrote about how we sucked okay, and it went out to a thousand people Then we would give that quote to David Letter Who would go out in front of eight million people and say this is what they're writing about them They are persecuted here. They are pen and tell So a thousand people against eight million people and we're the victim We're the ones who are in trouble because he's terrible and why are magicians saying these terrible things about you? Well Dave and then we do our little bit Dave then tell our you know sell our soup and show And so it was it was kind of mostly PR hype now There were people who are upset but not many but there there was also a really great moment we had a very smart producer who brought us into New York and He had a lot riding on the possibility that this little off-broadway show might might make or break him It was his first independent production and he had studied the way people in New York think about theater for a long time and When he was about to bring us in he said For you magic is the M word you will not say it unless an interviewer asks you about it It will not appear on any posters It will not appear in anything that we put out Let the critics discover that there's going to be a little bit of magic in the show because if you say Magic to the public if you say they're coming to a magic show the the the station wagons will arrive Arrive from the suburbs and they'll drop their kids off in front of the theater and no first-string critic will ever take you Seriously, and we learned from that Wow And that's that's crazy and then when we got you know, there was we actually have the discussion It was it was rather formal, you know in about the end of the 80s We just said, you know, we are well-known enough as pen and teller We can now say we're magicians and we can all of a sudden say okay That's what we're doing, you know, and you see that a lot in In show business is someone in order to get some sort of traction acts like they're, you know Rebellious and a brand new thing and this is a whole different thing and then once they get a certain level of success Their name is known a little bit. They just go back and embrace that, you know people who are You know Bob Dylan comes out as this whole new thing and then a little while later says, you know I'm a song-and-dance man. It's a it's a formula That's used and for a very very good reason you're trying to find something to identify you Different from you know the form you're working in and then when once somebody knows your name you can then kind of Say that's what we're doing, but that That off Broadway producer was very shrewd He he wouldn't even put a subtitle on the show He just said I'm gonna call you're gonna call this show pen and tell her and there won't be a little the amazing evening A blah-blah-blah underneath it's gonna be just pen and tell her and he said let the audience decide what to call you It was very smart. Wow. It's something that you know The temptation is always with a promoter to say so what is this thing? And he had that he had the guts to not say And now and so you guys been doing your act after over 38 years and you guys go and to stay relevant You've also, you know start doing television specials several TV shows But there's one TV show in particular where you seem to kind of depart from your Places entertainers and really put yourself on a pedestal as skeptics.  Oh Someone has to kill Dexter Talk about Where the idea for bullshit came about or in the process of which you guys went from the idea to getting on the air Every time they talked was about doing a TV show We we would try to say less to a skeptic show be shot down and then a producer in the LA had a skeptic show and want us to host it and we kind of in a certain sense hijacked it and and What we wanted to bring to people was As a rule of thumb The person that's right on TV Is often the most measured and the quietest and the not is usually Exploding and fascinating and full of life. So you get these debates where? television gravitates toward the nut and really our pitch there were a lot of parts of our pitch But one of our the parts of our pitch was we said we could be right and also be passionate and be out of our fucking minds and All we wanted to prove with bullshit was that we could be As passionate and as aggressive as the people who were wrong and that was that was that was a big part of the idea and The reason it was called bullshit was you know, it was it was actually inaccurate, but Al Goldstein who Another person I look up to a pornographer in In New York who did screw magazine and also did the important case with to peek of the Goldstein where he fought for Being able to sit freedom of speech across state lines essentially in the mail service Uh and fought that all the way through and he told me when I was doing stern a lot And I would go on Howard Stern and then we would get a fax At our office that would say something like I want you to know how much I enjoyed listening to you Carefully on the Howard Stern show Erie Gellar and There there might be a subtext to that So, you know, I don't know I don't know what he meant by that, but you know some people could guess and and I Was told by Al Goldstein who had been sued a zillion times that you had to be very careful what she said and Al Goldstein's Advice to me was use obscenity.   So, you know We were not allowed the lawyers went crazy and said you cannot say the word quack The word quack is instant lawsuit. You cannot say the word quack. So I don't know if anybody remembers the chiropractor Segment, but we stood doing the monologue surrounded by ducks And he said, you know, they can sue the ducks because they'll be saying quack So the duck said quack quack quack quack quack quack quack and I said baby twisting motherfuck One of the later episodes something happened when you couldn't say the word pyramid scheme, right? right So you could say multi-level marketing. Yeah, and you guys did the entire on the set of a pyramid Took place in a pyramid and we also mentioned social security during that one Which was that a non sequitur? Tell her what are some of the favorite issues you tackle in bullshit. I mean all of them. I'm sure I Have a great fondness in my heart for the bottled water episode. I Just because it wasn't just about bottled water, but it was also about you know, the the this the psychological effect of Pretentious presentation, which is fun to me, you know when we sent that we sent an actor to play the role of Tim your water steward Who would come to come to the tables in a fancy la restaurant and he would have a little you know rolly cart on top of which were Beautifully presented bottles of water with glorious labels, you know that would show this is This this this water is imported from a from a glacier. This is from the mountains of Japan This is from France, which I believe used the phrase peace to shop as part of its identification and Presented the the water for for tasting by the by the patrons, you know would taste it You know sniff the bouquet of the water and comment on how they could feel the glacier in the water They never commented on the cat And then having concluded this wonderful presentation where they had oh generally speaking they they would at some point They would say oh it's so good to be able to taste real water the stuff I get out of my tap in Los Angeles is just horrible and then Tim the water steward would Reveal that in fact he had filled all of the bottles from the garden hose behind the restaurant And something about that just the the comedic element of that was really pleasing to me great I think there are there should be some microphones located Doesn't Pan have a favorite one? I think you know the last one we did we I have two favorites I like the Vatican episode that everybody always asked me why they didn't show up on the DVDs And I have an honest answer to that which is I don't know Never sent a word to us about it Just I was on opening Anthony the New York show and they had just gotten the new DVD And they said the Vatican episode is it on this DVD and I went what?    We couldn't do you know the syntax has to be that way So I think that's the one I'm most proud of because the Jenny McCarthy The way you know The showtime people who we will not say anything bad about the showtime was the only one who would support us on this And so when I make a little joke about what they said I mean no disrespect toward them because no one else has ever done a skeptical show like that full out and Showtime stood behind us and we're also I guess I'm not allowed to say this But we are doing a pilot for what I consider to be the next step in bullshit for showtime And don't act surprised because you're writing on it I'm surprised that you're saying it. It's not exactly a secret in this room But I'm not I won't say anything more about that but what they did say was that they didn't think the anti Vaccination thing was sexy enough and I said we'll have all the science said by a topless woman with very large breasts And they said okay Lawrence Krauss let that be a lesson to you I say implants Lawrence implants We want to take some questions from people in the audience Is there some is there a microphone? We're gonna we're gonna line up like we normally do on the far side over here So please come on over here orderly Let me see before we start q&a that pen and teller will be at the book signing table We have copies of pens book of course as well as copies of Multiple seasons of bullshit. So afterwards Go buy stuff because it makes the whole ship run. So line up right here first question. We got time for just a couple Question number one Um just real quick question So cold reading as a mentalist or psychic Some ethical issues. Do you think there's a space for cold reading within a magic show? Can you perform morally and ethically in a magic show? I think I answer that it is absolutely The sawing the woman in half rule if anybody leaves that theater thinking that Something is not true There is no ethical or moral room for it. It is completely wrong and that is what's wrong with all that I'm getting little hints all that sitting on the fence stuff I think you hate I mean that is the ideal and as I said I've violated that many times myself because when you're writing it's so nice And you have a little bit of a red herring in there or something, but if you're asking me just the Where I think it is morally I think you have to leave the theater With what you believe as the performer is the proper view of the universe Yeah, I for those of you who saw play dead the other night you would see exactly how how We thought mentalism in that kind of that kind of reading stuff should be handled, which is Todd would say I'm about to show you what can be done with the vulnerability Here's a reading that was a lie That was a lie. It was an immoral act on my part.  Am I evil next lie and and and played played it for comedy, but repeatedly Apologized for even a slight emotional effect that it might have on the person So that there would not really be a moment of question and still that made it better For the people in the theater because they left the theater going, okay, he's not psyching. How could he possibly know that stuff? That was a great trick Oh, no Everybody in the room knows you're smart It's a zero so yeah, it's it. Yeah, don't I just want to ask out, you know, because you were giving advice I just want to ask you Penn. Where did you get your implants from your mother? Could the two of you speak a little bit about the relationship between your skeptical activism and interests and politics?  There's this sense. Uh, and if you read the new york times They're always trying to make the sense that their position can be supported by science or by logic or by skepticism and politics have The issue Deep underneath them at the bottom Of how good you think people are and how you think they should live their lives And and how much force should be used? I mean my whole My whole political issue is how much force do we use for anything we want government to do? Where is the balance between force? Liberty and safety. Where's that balance? And I believe that that decision Is not a decision that can be answered by science Even if you can prove to me that a certain amount of force Can be used on someone and make their life better in an objective way and sand harris has written about this brilliantly He's right But even then you have to deal with a moral issue of the way you want politics to work And I think that I've trucked myself to cheat and tried to prove that um The skeptical position yields some sort of political position and I think when I do that I'm wrong And I I haven't really found a way that they connect. So on bullshit We kind of saw it as a Uh a libertarian show an atheist show on a skeptical show And I know that many people disagree with this. I don't happen to I believe that atheism and skepticism are the same I do not believe that libertarianism is and I don't believe you can make any case From science and skepticism and atheism that supports libertarianism whatsoever And uh, I know that there are people that consider libertarianism to be a pseudo science and fight skepticism against that I also think that's ridiculous. I think they're separate and we tried to have them They were not related except the fact that they were what we believed Well, and I apologize that you guys I see the line for it. We just have time for one more They will be signing books and everything you can talk to them I'd like to thank you both for the national exposure you're giving To skepticism and atheism here in las vegas. We have a large number of atheists We have about six atheist organizations. We have a united coalition of reason that's combining all of them Really large atheist meetup. Can you tell us what we all can do locally in our communities? to Publicize and to push the fact that it's okay to not believe in god I am I have such strong feelings about this and it's an argument that I've had with people in this room And it it may be a point that only exists in my head, but I'm still I'm still Going to say it I believe that the instant you ask the question How can we convince more people to be atheists? How can we convince more people to be skeptic at that instant that you asked that question?  This is how to act They are wrong because when uh, when a christian talks to me about christianity I should not have a script that i'm working through I should not have a way to manipulate them to convince them to my side I should talk with them as a human being So all these little lectures about when someone talks to you about UFOs Why not say to them? Is there any other explanation you can think of that is condescending that is wrong?  There's no special secret for how you talk to christians There's no special secret for how you talk to ufo nuts. You talk to people Respectfully as equals and you do that honestly Organizations of atheists who want to get together and have fun and share ideas and be like-minded I believe that's a beautiful thing But outreach programs that use any sort of social engineering or any sort of manipulation drive me crazy In the room somewhere here is one of my dear friends John whiteside who I call super atheist Who's the one in vegas who put up billboards who said there is no god? What I love about that is he is stating his opinion in an open freedom of speech forum This is what I believe but there's not manipulation. So Although i'm all four of those organizations and I belong to some of them and I always want to hang out And I know and I want to play rock and roll for them Um All of that I don't want to ever get into the how do you convince people, you know, whenever you get into On every level that it is. This is how you sell amway. This is how you pick up girls This is the way you sell used cars at that instant.  So I will join your organization I'll play music for it.  So that's my view And uh, before we let you guys go, we just want to bring out uh, randy for a moment randy come on out here Thank you And you don't you don't want to stand up Never thought I'd make this confession, but here it is I feel quite inadequate standing here to do this very simple task I'm not quite up to it and I I'm having a hard time with it frankly Because I'm afraid I'm going to break down I'll try not to I'll spare you that terrible sight The two guys standing on the stage with me here Are my giants one of them more than the other They are my giants. They are people that I have such respect for that I certainly can't express it in mere words you know Integrity is the one word that comes to mind when I think of talent teller They have stuck with their principles through all these years They have never disappointed any of us By lacking integrity in the way they think what they do The way they design their act and the way they speak About any matter that is brought up And um, that was sort of proven to me quite some years ago They have a workshop here in Las Vegas as you might strongly suspect When they're where they develop illusions and routines For rehearsal purposes. This is set aside for that very function And had the occasion to drop in when they were in the middle of developing a new illusion I could see that they were working very very hard on it And they were doing a lot of yelling at one another too as you might expect between partners Hand more than teller And uh As you can also imagine And uh, I saw them Flailing around with this thing and I left before I got involved in it and uh I think about two years past And uh, I got back to them again and I saw the show Here at the theater and uh I asked them afterwards but guys What about that that routine you were working on with the big cloth and the whole thing? And I've forgotten which one of them answered me Could have been either one of them He simply said to me well, it it wasn't quite pen and teller enough Now that that speaks a lot right there Because what they do on their stage as entertainers and what they say right here in front of audiences like this as well has to be Pen and teller it has to match Their thoughts their integrity their principles And their purposes in life Integrity is the word that I would write above them in In flames if I could manage it. Do you think we could work on an effect like that? I'll bet we come up with something Ladies and gentlemen what I'm about to present to pen and teller Is only an object It's a very small object and it will take its place Among other things that have been given to them over the years Um, can we place it on the table here? Do you think carry? Among the water bottles or let's let's can we get rid of those? Okay Thank you. All right Ladies and gentlemen, again, this is a very small token The object itself doesn't say very much But it's we we designed it from the heart And the inscription on the plaque at the front is very simple very brief But we mean it very very sincerely Ladies and gentlemen To pen and teller A small globe of the earth that turns through mysterious means No, it's highly technical the way this thing is designed to turn And the inscription on the front of it reads But could you hold the world for me for just a moment, please? Thank you. Yes. Don't shake it Presented to pen and teller at tan 2012 With our love and gratitude Gentlemen, thank you We love you. Don't we? Ladies and gentlemen, Amanda Randi Pen and teller


How do we train leaders, whether it's the Naval Academy or other leadership forums? There is obviously no, it's not, it's not engineering. It's not a science, right? There, there is a science to it, but it's mostly, I would argue, tends to be more art than science. So it's like, how do you teach someone how to paint? And while one, you, you give them, you try to give them a broad experience and a broad foundation that focuses on maybe successful traits of other leaders. I used to like to read a lot of biographies about famous leaders. You know, I love reading about Admiral Nimitz and, you know, what, how he grew up through the ranks and lessons he learned along the way. And so you're really just kind of building that base. And then I think it's important as a leader to understand to what your strengths are. There are, you know, some folks that are more introverted than others and they might lead in a different style. There's others that love to be, they're great communicators and, and you put them in front of a crowd and they can get them to do anything they want. Um, there's some that are very analytical and like the science and the math and there's some that are more intuitive.  And you have to stay true to what works for you. And, and so I think as you study other leaders and you study the, the fundamentals of leadership, that might not work for you. It might be something different. So, uh, I think that's important as you go along, you develop as a young leader, knowing you're going to have your own style. If you approach it that way, then when something happens, you're not necessarily trying to go to your playbook and try to look up the recipe for how to solve a problem because it's never going to be there. Right. You're going to fall back on, okay. Yeah. Maybe you might think about, okay, maybe what would Nimitz have done in the situation, but more than likely, you've just kind of, you developed a way to think over the years and how you approach problems and what your, your, your core fundamentals are. And that's generally where I found that, you know, when in doubt, you know, I, I defaulted to those types of decisions. So I think in my career, I learned early on that, you know, if you focus on your sale or if you focus on the people that, that you're leading, which I think is the number one fundamental of any kind of leadership role is you're taking care of your people. Um, and if you take care of your people, then they're going to take care of everything else. Um, but I found that, you know, if you, if you focus on that and you make sure when you make decisions, it stays true to that fundamental, you can really help drive a culture and you can really, I think, you know, build a, a superior organization. And I think countless times when faced with a decision on a carrier, whether I was the XO or water and CO, and I always try to default to, you know, how, you know, all right, I'm making a policy decision here that will affect the command. How will the sailors be impacted?  You know, that's not what, that's not what your folks want. They want to be, you know, lead given the resources they need and held accountable. But if you're making an arbitrary policy, because, you know, example B have, you know, one or two sailors getting trouble for something, right? They, they get in trouble because they came in after curfew. Well, you could, you could then make a decision to say that, okay, we're going to, we're not going to let anybody go out or we're going to make curfew even earlier. And then you, you have to kind of step back and go, well, there's, I've had two sailors out of 500, 1,000, 5,000. Why would I make a policy that's going to impact, you know, thousands of people because, you know, I wanted this to zero defect mentality. So for me, it was, you know, I knew a core belief for me was, as a leader, you're taking care of your people. Let's, let's think about how you're taking care of them. How, what would be the impact if I were to arbitrarily punish 5,000 or 2,000 or even just two people that were for me because of the, you know, one or two that made a mistake. And that, that kind of helped me, I think along the way. And I think with that, I built an effective organization. I was mindful of the impact of their time.  I think, again, it's leadership is science and art. There's a lot of art and it's also very personal based on your own skill sets. And you have to always understand what your fundamental tenants are, you know, which again, I, I think personally, it's that as a leader, you're taking care of your people and whatever scenario that is.


Going on everyone Sam here with late sports cards We're in one box of the sports card all-man act multi-sport personal box edition volume 5 box number 52 for mr. Shane W. It's good luck here Shane Come on. Let's see it. Oh, nice. That is gonna be mosaic fast-brake Cade Cunningham rookie auto for the Detroit Pistons nice one there Shane not too bad And once he's out of Detroit, that is gonna be huge does look pretty clean as well Shane Nice one there, buddy mosaic fast-brake Cade Cunningham rookie auto the former number one overall pick out of Oklahoma State former cowboy Shane that'll do it for your break buddy. Thanks again for the support. Get him right out


Welcome to our session at the Linguistics Career Launch of Summer 21, a session called Civic Tech. I'm the moderator and I'm going to host, my name is Nancy Frischberg, sorry. I'm an organizer of the LCL and I'm also being, I wanna recognize Marcus Robinson as our Zoom producer today. And he's gonna keep track of what's going on in chat and provide any kind of technical support that we might need. And without further ado, I'm excited to introduce all of you to Sid Harrell, who's going to tell us a little bit about her career from linguistics into Civic Tech and how they might be related and how you might be able to join her. Go for it, Sid. All right, hi everyone. It is so exciting every time I run across someone who is a linguist in the field or a linguist aspiring to the field and they're not so scarce on the ground. Hopefully I did the double thing where I talked and shared my screen. I am a user researcher by core profession, but here in industry, things are awfully fluid. So sometimes I'm also a product manager, but I've worked in the tech industry since depending on when you count it around 1993 and around 2010 I made a shift into this field called Civic Tech. So what are we talking about? Civic Tech is a branch of tech that aspires to make our public digital goods as good as the ones, but different because the values and goals are different that are made by commercial entities that are really good at this. So if you feel that booking an Airbnb or getting a stream of a movie from Amazon when you're quarantined and can't go anywhere is a good digital experience. We'd like more public spirited, good digital experiences at that level and we want public digital infrastructure to be better as well. Put another way, we want to access services we need and exercise our rights and build our communities with ease that the best digital technology can offer us. And there's an explicit goal to build modern digital capacity within government which doesn't always have it. If you have in the past year and a half tried to get unemployment benefits or know someone who has tried to get a COVID test, tried to register for a COVID vaccine, tried to figure out what the heck is going on with COVID vaccine proof. The work of doing those things well is a big part of civic tech but civic tech characterizes itself a little bit as an outside field trying to work inside. And that's a big part of why linguistics has been important in my practice. So government tech tends to be running what you might call an IT model where there are people who do program and there are people who do IT. And IT does things like fix the printers and copiers and for a long time, government and institutional folks have thought of that as a subordinate function that is kind of done over in a corner and that program folks shouldn't have to deal with. There's a very separate culture which calls itself tech as opposed to IT that is kind of what tech product companies practice. It's got its own problems for sure but it is good at producing technology that actually serves a goal. These two cultures have overlaps and clashes and so a lot of the work of civic tech is all about shifting practice and shifting the conversation inside of institutions. It's a ton of bridging. So I'm gonna say we end up negotiating vocabularies all the time between practice communities that think of what they do as very different and in some ways do things that are very different. One of the biggest uses of the sociolinguistics classes I took has been learning how to facilitate across major power dynamics. The ability to pull together a meeting that has maybe a departmental secretary of government agency and someone who works five levels below her in the IT department and a vendor and a bunch of mid-level career bureaucrats and an outside technologist, I believe would be much harder to do if I didn't have that educational background. The other interesting thing that's coming up more and more is being a smart and capable judge of what a computational version of a process can do. So in the work that I do with the California courts right now, there's a lot of people who would really like to sell machine learning chatbots to courts to answer people's legal questions because courts don't have a lot of resources for service staff to help people get through the process. And I know from my background or from my work in tech that this is incredibly hard to do well and there are a lot of important prerequisites to having a corpus of language that you can actually make an effective machine learning chatbot out of. Furthermore, the reality that if you ask three lawyers a question, you'll usually get three answers, means that it's not really suited to being able to tell a chatbot, yes, that's the right answer to a question phrased this way. You inferred the intent and now we're good to go. So it's been incredibly useful to have a linguistics background in doing this. If you think about the scope of this work just in the United States, we don't just have a federal government. We have another 25,000 or so government organizations once you start thinking about every government, including some of the tribal governments that have done the best work in COVID vaccination and in fact in COVID websites without close connections to these technology industry practice communities, including the water boards and regional transit bodies and all of this, every single one of them has some online interface to the public that probably could be better than it is now. One of the sticky things is just figuring out where to work to affect the thing that you want to affect. So a lot of us don't think about government in layers but this is from a table in my book where you can educate yourself on which levels of government from city to county to state to federal actually do what functions and figure out the way to work with the organizations and agencies that do that. And a lot of what we do, there's service delivery which you probably think of. So that's the unemployment applications. It's also much less fraught things like you need to sign up for swimming lessons with your city. There's a lot of infrastructure work in getting data opened and named and classified and published as appropriate, creating APIs and so forth. There are specific products that would only be used by government organizations like things for first responders. There's a lot of mutual aid work for things that don't need to involve the government but that can strengthen a community in disaster response or just connection. And then there's quite a bit in the citizen engagement either planning or election tech area. And you can join a volunteer project anytime you want. There are a number of government digital groups at different levels. So you've probably, maybe if you're in the US heard of US Digital Service or 18F, there are similar groups in six states and growing and many or most large cities have a team that does this kind of work too. There's an ecosystem of product companies and there are also consultancies, many of which were started by people who worked on the healthcare.gov rescue and decided to try and put forward a better model of government consulting. And then there are just mutual aid groups that could use all kinds of help. These are just a few of the really strong practice groups in the field and there are a lot more out there. I could edit this slide very often if somebody comes in the waiting room, it takes away my arrow control. We're getting some books, that's exciting. We are a new field where maybe 12 or 13 years old depending on when you count. I wrote one of them, yay me. It's available everywhere and the ebook versions are pretty inexpensive. And it's an onboarding guide if you're interested in the field. So what the heck do I actually do as a civic technologist? I thought I would talk a little bit about project that I've been working on for three years with the court system of the state of California. It's a big court system, seven plus million cases a year and about 80% of the non-criminal cases have at least one side that doesn't have an attorney involved. This very quickly becomes a mess because the court system while intended to be equitable and impartial and to protect everyone's rights is designed as if everyone has a knowledgeable advocate who can speak for them and act for them. And when people arrive in the court system without that knowledgeable advocate, they have a very hard time pursuing processes that are designed for experts with many years of graduate education and so forth. And that then slows down the operation of the courts as well. And it often means that the outcome isn't the fairest outcome that you could have because somebody misses a technicality because they don't have a lawyer and then they lose something that really if they had had a lawyer, they would have one. The court system has this kinda 2003 era website on the left and our work starting to move it along for its 2010s era practice on the right is part of what we're doing. But a really interesting thing that they have every county court and we have 58 counties in California already has a center where anybody can get basic legal help and they can often get it in multiple languages. Some really impressive language practice. The San Francisco Self-Help Center will help you on demand in English, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian and Filipino. And they do most of it before the pandemic with clipboards and ballpoint pens. And have a sort of like come down with a line, get a clipboard, eventually meet with one of our folks in the language of your choice and we will help you fill out court forms. That's not great for everybody. San Francisco is small. A lot of people can get to the courthouse where the center is. It takes something like four hours to drive across Fresno or San Bernardino County further south in the state. And there's not a lot of public transit options. So the in-person model becomes inequitable and during the pandemic it became unsustainable for almost every court. I wanna point out that a constant feature of civic tech is getting told that you don't know anything. After my first seven years or so in the field I had my first day with the courts after I had been at Code for America and 18F and I proudly told them that I had some experience in a way to sort of, I thought say that they could trust me. And they said why do we care if you have government experience? We're not the government. And sitting in this state government building talking to a bunch of people whose email addresses ended in .gov, I thought that was really strange. But I knew how to take feedback and ask a question in return. And this will come up in a minute but one thing that's really important to the courts is the value of impartiality. And the government is very often a party to a court case. So they managed to identify themselves as not the government and it's really important. And everybody refers to what the judiciary is as the branch. Well, here in the branch, we do X. It's a branch-wide standard that we don't give legal advice via the self-help centers. We only give legal information, which is another bit of language torture that I have some issues with. But if you want to always feel like an expert it is not the field for you. Luckily I did have some practice to fall back on. So in the fall of 2018, our team went out to 20 of the 58 courts to spend a full day shadowing the clerks who received court filings and intercepting people in waiting rooms, waiting for assistance and having semi-structured interviews with them enticing court staff to show us the best taco place nearby so that we could get some unfiltered information from them while they were out of the building and collecting packets of sort of folkloric homegrown form instructions that have been created in every court. And it's going to court without a lawyer feels overwhelming and prohibitive and like you are not allowed to do much and you might not be in the right place and if you do something wrong it's gonna be a big deal. Court behind the scenes is way more organized and less chaotic but extremely 20th century. People are using Xerox machines and physical stamps to enact work that actually directly affects people in the real world. So it's a rich, fascinating environment for kind of language actions and when something actually changes from a speech act to a real world act. We are in the end working on a website. That sounds always boring to tech people. They're like, oh God, a website, old technology, why? Well, there's a lot more to a website than it seems. So we are taking legal language and turning it into plain language and at the same time trying to establish a plain language practice at the courts. We are moving online, the best in class of these form-filling instructions. We're helping people find, not just the courthouse, but the right courthouse for the kind of case they might be involved in that can help them and when it's open. We're helping find the right one among 1200 standard court forms for what they're doing. And then we actually just got approval and budget in the governor's new budget for our fine reduction app that helps people who can't pay traffic fines. What it helps them do is easily provide information about their income to the court so a judge can make a decision about reducing their fine. And it's already reduced to millions of dollars, which is cool. And it's done that through plain language and good information design. The new website we're building looks a lot more like this. These are actually slightly old screenshots. So we've even reduced some of the copy more. And you can see that it doesn't just use copy. It uses more visual affordances to help people with what they're doing. As it turned out, one of the big upshots of that research tour was that people who are representing themselves get lost in their court case. They don't know where they are. They don't know how to take the next step. And wayfinding in between physical courthouses and these online sites and the paper forms is really, really difficult for anybody who hasn't had there three years to get a JD and clerkship and all the things that you've got to become a legal practitioner. So I wanna talk a little bit about accuracy. I said at the beginning that one of the ways linguistics is useful is negotiating vocabulary. In UX, we have things called design values, which are kind of goals that a particular design needs to serve and ideally they're testable goals. And one of the really obvious ones for legal information that nobody questioned much is accuracy. And it kept coming up. And frankly, for me as a design practitioner it's kind of a boring value. I like pointed ones. I like to say like, okay, the goal is victory. The goal is something really salient and important. And like accuracy just seems like a table stakes. Okay, yeah, it has to be accurate. It turns out though that attorneys are trained in a specific connotation of accuracy. They are trained to be both comprehensive and precise. And that often means adding a lot of words and using terms of art that are really specific to that community of practice. And what happens is that a member of the public, a regular person doesn't get an accurate understanding from a text that is written by people that are members of that community of practice. So we had this conflict over a core value that is sort of summarized in this one word that nobody thought was questionable. And so an attorney would write something and it would be judged by other attorneys. And the way that this happens by the way is people poke holes in it. And they insist that, you know, you missed something or this could possibly be interpreted slightly wrong by somebody who knows. And so in the review process, typically, copy would get more opaque to the actual eventual reader. And so we had to reorient this core value of accuracy to mean something different, at least in the context of web services for the public and get it reoriented to mean a regular Californian takes an accurate impression from the copy, not a judge can't poke any holes in your legal argument in the copy. And that's a lot of the day-to-day work in doing this, especially in an early stage civic tech practice. So there's more to what we're doing. Technically, one of the more interesting things that has ended up getting into reality is a web content attorney position, which is a mashup of a content position from the tech industry and an attorney analyst from the judicial branch into one person who has both of those capabilities and can therefore exercise authority in both realms. That, I think, is maybe the longest term, most solid impact of a lot of our work. The idea is if we do this well, if we make it easily accessible via your phone to at least figure out the process, if you want to get a divorce or you need to get a domestic violence restraining order, more people will be able to get through the process of a case. Assistors will be able to help people with some of the trickier parts like writing your declaration for the judge of why you need to ask the court for a particular relief and it'll be easier access to civil justice over the long term. So a quick recap of how I got here and then I would love to take questions. I made a GIF at one point of my career and it probably goes too fast, but I had ambitions in the 70s of becoming a ballerina and that did not work out. I ended up in publishing and on the side in the web. I ended up in financial services web, being a poet on the side. I ended up in UX consulting and then I ended up at Code for America doing civic stuff. Better summary. BA in linguistics, 92, I don't have a graduate degree. I got a crummy recession job right out of the gate answering phones. I learned a fair bit from that in the end and I'm glad I did it, but it was terrifying at the time that that would be my entire career. I went back to the University of Denver Publishing Institute to try and escape from that and ended up in a technical publisher called Morgan Kaufman, some of you might know it. Big, big things I learned there how to use and build the web. In 1997, I launched my first website. Nobody else really seemed to want to do it even though it was a technical publisher. So I did it. Moved on from there to what was sort of big tech at the time when stock trading was going online, believe it or not, people would have cost you on Muny in San Francisco if you were wearing a Schwab electronic brokerage shirt, kind of the way they do if you're wearing a Google or Facebook shirt now. Learned a lot about usability. They had a formal lab, they had PhD human factors folks. I got to learn and observe those and also see how that heaviness didn't fit every industry use and understand some of the lighter ways. I also learned management, which has been very useful. 2006, few years after the crash, I was laid off and discovered that UX was now an industry. Joined a tiny UX consultancy which I think is where I met Nancy. I think that's true. I was living in the city, I could walk to your offices. Our groovy warehouse offices South America. I was living in a warehouse, yep. Yep, and I ran somewhere between 250, oversaw, because I was the head of practice, I oversaw somewhere between 250 and 300 user research studies of various kinds in six years there. And that really amplified my practice and all of that kind of sociolinguistic underpinning is extraordinarily useful in user research where it's all about first talking to humans and understanding them and then talking with other humans who've done the observations with you and making meaning out of what you've learned. That got bought by Facebook in 2012 and I didn't go. Ooh, wrong button. So overlappingly, I'd heard about some of this civic tech stuff that engineers were doing with hackathons circa 2010, showed up at a hackathon, afraid that they would throw me out because I don't really code, I do a little HTML, but whatever, they didn't, turned out to be cool. I wrote my first article about how maybe UX folks should go do civic things in 2011 and then when the company was bought, I could have gone over to Facebook and made a bunch of money but been really unhappy or I could try to invest in the civic tech thing. So Dana Chisnell, who I think the group heard from yesterday if you attended, invited me to join a research project she was doing called Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent, which is a great thing to look up if you're interested in Civic UX that's actually in the Cooper-Hailuit now as a design project that has impacted the world. Anyway, I led research on one of them and we did a country-wide survey of election department websites and made recommendations for them in a tiny booklet. Then I finally got Code for America to hire me because that was really the first thing I wanted to do when I left and they said, no, why would we have a UX person on staff? But I got in in 2013 and Code for America mostly helped American city governments with a couple of small states in there or rather one state in one county improved their tech practice and do work to try to solve specific problems. After that, I decided to try federal in 2016 thinking it'll be interesting. I'll see a presidential transition. And I got a lot more than I bargained for on that front. I also eventually got the opportunity to serve as chief of staff there. I did one two-year term and didn't renew for another round with the Trump administration, came back to California and started this work with the courts and some other side projects. And then I had the book come out last year. And if you're interested in getting started in this area, even now, if you're still working on degrees or in academia, there's probably a local Code for America brigade near you. They are amazing. They have onboarding materials and kind of shovel ready projects you can work on and you can start to meet the sort of people who do this kind of work. There's also an org called US Digital Response that spun up during the pandemic to help governments do what they needed to do when they couldn't operate in person. Serving as a poll worker in an election near where you are is an incredible education in how technology fits into that core process and how service designs for the public work. And consider also just writing an industry resume, which is somewhat different from an academic CV and applying for content or UX or computational, some of you probably work on deep NLP stuff or something that was not part of linguistics when I was getting a BA in the late 80s. So all of those things are pretty transferable if you can represent them on a more industry style document. And that is enough of me presenting. Let's talk. All right. I see one clapping. Thank you, Andrea and Nina. And I'm ready for questions. Thank you, Samantha and Christine and Janice. And whoever else I'm not viewing right this minute. So I appreciated very much. I think that last bit about getting in with Code for America, I think you can be more explicit about that because that's probably not familiar. And the other part is I think talk about citizenship or green card holders with respect to all these different roles because we have a number of students from other places. Great, yeah, great question. So Code for America has run for a number of years in network of volunteer groups in cities and it's quite extensive. They are called the brigades. And usually right now, most of them run a weekly or monthly hack night and they have been doing them virtually during the pandemic and they're very, very open. And they were not necessarily at first in 2012 to 2014 but they have worked really hard to be more inclusive and open. And so if you show up, you'll be welcomed and people will help you and they're usually nice evenings. Right, so you don't have to actually do the coding. You get to do other things. If you don't want to, right, you can do all kinds of other things like create the comments, describe what's being built and test what's being built. Do, yes, help show it, help design the information. They end up sometimes helping their cities redesign forms and doing like real information design kind of things like that too. And we did, you may not be aware Sid, but I'm hoping that everybody on the call is aware that Rosenfeld Media is a sponsor for this. And so we're getting good discount rates on all their books and materials and Carolyn Jarrett's book about forms just came out from Rosenfeld. I haven't read it, but I already know it's a very good book. Exactly, I've read a lot of things and I haven't read this particular book. Rosenfeld has a civic design conference that is happening for the first time later this year if you're interested in that. I just saw that notice. Yeah. As far as citizenship, many, many of these opportunities are available to anybody with a work permit. Obviously the volunteer ones, I think even 18F did not require citizenship as long as you were qualified to work in the US, you were fine. The word citizen is highly fraught in the field. It's appealing in that it has this participatory aspect that many of the other descriptors we use for constituents or residents don't, but much of the field has a justice oriented political bent. A justice oriented political bent. And so the word, I used to use the word citizen experience following Jess McMullen, who was the first one to put up a citizen experience site and practice up in Alberta. I don't talk about it that way as a default anymore. And I sort of bracket it every time I say, we're talking about the citizen as a participatory member of these institutions. We need to use some word like that. But we always want to work for all residents or all participants where that is possible. Good, okay. More questions for Sid. So we had a question. And I know that we have. Yes, yes, go for it. So we had a question in the chat asking if Sid could share an example of an industry resume format. You wanna see mine? Why not? If you're willing. Okay, let's see if I can haul up Google Drive real fast here and reshare my screen. I hope also without mentioning the person who put the question up, you realize that you can Google that as resume, the default resume is one that's probably aimed at industry. Yeah, although they often say a lot of old stuff like must be one page. And if you are mid-level, it doesn't have to be one page. Here, let me share again. I am pretty senior. So mine is actually three pages as an industry resume. So some characteristics. Like here is a chatty statement at the top about who I did it share. It's shared, but it's very tiny. Ah, let's do this. And let's... Yeah, one of those accessibility things, right? Yeah. Is that better? Okay. Much better. So it has a chatty statement at the top about who I am and what I do. And then the vast bulk of it is very action-oriented experience stuff. And it brags on purpose. Like I led this. I proposed, specified and implemented this. And I have a lot of experience. So that's what takes up the bulk of it. But even for some place that I was for six years, if it's this long ago, it's at a summary level. So this is my 26 to 2012 running user research practice where I met Nancy. And we're down to this part on my resume now because mostly what's relevant is I did this at Code for America. I was chief of staff at 18F. And so both, I think, I would comment that both because they're older and because they're not in the civic tech space, you can make those extremely concise. Yeah. Right. And then as we get farther back, even I don't do bullets anymore. I'm just kind of like, yeah, I did this. I was there for eight years. I got promoted to director. And then my talks and publications this isn't all of them. And you'll notice it's not really in citation format. It's a lot of conference talks. If there's a link, I absolutely put a link. This is doing a job of signaling that I'm respected by other people in the field more than a job of listing everything that I've done. And then, you know, if I have been on boards and stuff and then like my education is just here at the end as a sort of, if you are more than five years into an industry career, education goes at the end even if you have a fresh master's or a PhD to share. One of the things I'll start sharing. So I would say two things about the length of your thing. One is you are working as a consultant now. And so for you, you need to put things on there that show your credibility and your reputation like the talks and your service and so on and so forth. So that is, that gives you a pass for having a three page resume. It's also the length of my career overall. So I'm coming up on 30 years. And I only within the last five or seven years somebody said to me, I need a one page resume from you. And I've got, I came to out of academia and I teach. So I don't include everything. And I can, I can do the one page resume. And it means I leave off that little paragraph at the top and I squeeze it and I don't include those other things. But yeah. So I have it on my website too. Good. In this format, like here's a short summary. Right. I've worked at these kinds of places. And if you want more, you can just go to LinkedIn or download the PDF. Right. I'm sure I could make a one page version. I'd leave off the talks and really, really shorten a whole bunch of those early to mid career experiences and focus on recent. But that's not useful to you at this point. And it's not useful to the potential clients who need to know about you. However, Same if I was getting hired at this level, honestly. Yes. But if you, if you are new, you do want closer to a one page or going on to a second page a little bit is okay. Because a lot of these things are are now electronic. So it's also fine not to fill out two pages and to have something goes onto a quarter of a second page if you need it. Isn't like it has to fit on a page that you hand somebody now. So we had another question in the chat asking if civic tech was considered nonprofit. Sometimes. So very often it is actual government employment. There are some nonprofits that you can be part of in the field. There are ones that actually have paid staff and ones that organize volunteers. And then there are for-profit companies. Some of them are organized as public benefit corporations, which is a special class of for-profit companies. So they are not a nonprofit. They don't accept charitable donations, but they are not trying to maximize their profit and they follow certain additional practice and ethical reporting requirements. And then there are just product companies that are organized for profit and are mainly selling to government and are trying to do good and do well as a motivation. So it's a, what is public sector is a great and not clear cut question. And I think this very much relates to the panel that was on immediately previous to you where people were talking about, mostly it was focused on federal, but they say you can work for the federal government or you can work for some of these a for-profit contractor or a federal lab or some of these university agencies that are funded by the federal government and doing work for the federal government but housed inside a nonprofit. So I think civic tech can span several of those different kinds of categories. Yes, I'd like to hear, absolutely. Whether things like training employees in the courts and budgeting, yeah. All of that affects civic tech work along with things like union job classes and one of the things that happened during the kind of anti-government and government cut era over the last three decades is government didn't build new job classes for modern tech work. So when I was at 18F formally, my title was IT specialist. Even though I was a very senior UX and product person, that's just the class into which they could shoehorn everybody and then my title was originally a strategy lead, but then I became chief of staff. So there is very often this kind of, things don't quite fit and we make them work and we try to formalize them more and that's part of the field being kind of a teenage field. It's still growing. I just joined the board of an organization called technologists for the public good that is aiming to be a professional association to formalize some of this and help people practice in this field. Very cool. Procurement, if you wanna look up rants about bureaucracy and civic tech, procurement is the term. No, these jobs are not all contractor jobs. Some of them are. When I worked at 18F, I was a federal employee. I am now a contractor through an agency on a weird little authority for the state of California, but state of California has several innovation focused specific places to hire technologists into these kinds of roles as well as employees. So I guess the answer is it's complicated. All of the above, I think we love all of the above. And I know for example, that in various big cities I have seen over the past two years, a lot of openings for innovation offices in connected with large cities. And then that would be a city employee. Yes, and very often you kind of progress from an innovation lab to a digital service team. And it was really interesting when the pandemic got rolling that cities that had digital service teams established basically like made 10 people work a weekend and had informative coronavirus sites for the public. And cities that didn't have that established yet, scrambled for a couple of months to get stuff up and we're trying to, I mean, overworking 10 people over a weekend in the hot phase of a pandemic, I think is okay. Like you don't want it to happen every weekend but that is an actual emergency. This is one of the interesting things, right? That government needs to have access capacity for true emergencies to be able to step things up when there's a hurricane or a pandemic or et cetera. So yeah, look for those. They're often called ex-digital service or innovation lab or digital team. And they are really interested in a lot of things around language that linguists can help with. Most large cities, many states are pretty multilingual and nobody has figured out multilingual practice yet. If you work in a, if you study bilingualism or multilingual language communities, there's a huck of a lot to do there as well. We have more and more multilingual communities in the United States, despite the fact that people think we only speak English but that's not true. All right. I am going to say thank you to Sid for squeezing us into her schedule today and thanks for this rapid trip through the first decade or two of civic tech. And I wanna underscore one more thing and that is you started out in technical writing. And so we're gonna have several sessions about technical writing next week and also about storytelling and content. So all of those are wonderful preparation for any kind of role in civic tech.


Hi everybody welcome to the latest edition of Nets Post Game Plus with Richard Jefferson I'm Nancy Newman the final score on Sunday at Broccoli Center the Nets fall to the Thunder 129-116 and Richard definitely a turning point that third quarter Brooklyn outscored 37 to 18. Yeah no it was crazy if you really watched this entire game the first quarter the Nets came out with that intensity that focus it was great to have Kevin Durant on the floor to see him back and and playing with his teammates but slowly but surely that second quarter they had a long stretch about over a five-minute stretch where they didn't score a bucket but they kind of picked it up there the last two minutes and then in the second half you just could never see any sort of defensive rhythm. A ton of turnovers got killed on the fast break there just there wasn't much fight and I think that's part of the reason you know even we talked about it at you know a little bit at halftime we talked about a little bit early in the post game and then Steve Nash came out and pretty much echoed everything that we were saying. One bright spot definitely for Brooklyn Kevin Durant returning after three games on the shelf and poured in a season high 36 points on 11 of 21 from the field Kara's Liberty adding 21 not enough though for a Nets squad that gave up a season high worst 66 points in the paint afterwards coach Nash not a happy camper. I thought the second quarter was turnovers you know unforced turnovers kicking the ball over the gym up 15. Lack of focus gets them right back in the game. Third quarter I mean 66 points in the paint tonight 72 points in the second half it's just pride you know no matter what defense you're in you got to sit out and guard someone and we didn't guard tonight. That was that was my follow-up they expounding on that you know how much of what we're seeing out there defensively just comes down to personal pride with the matchup. I mean that's that's got to be it I mean you can get beat you can have a hard time guarding someone but I didn't I didn't sense the pride I didn't sense the competitive fire in the second half. Now I thought it was a lack of respect and we just got to learn from this and get better. I mean I wouldn't say it was a struggle you know I would definitely would love to be out there with my teammates but this is circumstances you know COVID just put us under these circumstances and a lot of guys around the league under protocol so you know it's something we knew coming into the season that may happen so I wasn't too upset about it I'm glad I'm back playing though. What do you feel has to change on the defensive side of the ball in order for this team to be successful? We just got to get consistent and I felt like we played some great defensive games when this past week when I was out and you know throughout the season I just think we've been up and down on that side of the ball and you know it's a matter of time before we start to put it all together put it all together and become more consistent with it and that's gonna happen over time. The Nets return to action on Tuesday when they host the Nuggets are covered starts with the pregame show at 7 p.m. For Richard Jefferson I'm Nancy Newman thanks for watching Nets post game plus