Jim Brown and Paul Anderson

00:22 Paul, can you hear me?

00:23 Yes, I can hear you fine. How are you today?

00:26 I'm fine. I don't seem to have a video feed. Is yours working?

00:32 I'm seeing myself. I'm not seeing you.

00:36 Okay, so I'm not sure what the issue is.

00:41 S.

00:53 Going to their help section.

00:55 Okay.

00:58 I suppose we can do this without.

01:00 Video, but yeah, we probably can. I don't see why not.

01:10 Oh, it looks like it's just giving me to I'm not finding any help here whatsoever.

01:56 Well, let's just go ahead with the conversation anyway. How's that?

02:00 That sounds fine. Perhaps this will resolve itself. Oh, wait a minute. I just didn't scroll down far enough to see you. Can you see me now?

02:13 I cannot.

02:15 You cannot? Yeah, I was looking at the upper part of the page and there was no image. And I just scrolled down and there you were.

02:28 Don't feel bad. It took me a second to figure that out myself.

02:32 Okay, well, I'm not sure what I can do from my end to do.

02:41 Well, I'm not greatly concerned about it.

02:46 All right. Well, obviously we've read a little bit about each other and we certainly do have some similar interests. And I was surprised to see that you live so close. I didn't know what to expect. But, you know, it could be, you know, Florida or anywhere that I might connect with somebody.

03:09 Yeah, I got about five or six possibles that popped up on was the I think you were the only one in Virginia and everybody else was in a different state. And you got here about three years ago?

03:26 Yes.

03:28 Well, so did we. So did we. We moved here about a little over two and a half years ago.

03:36 Well, what brought you to this part of the world?

03:39 Well, my wife grew up here, and when we got married, I lived in Maryland and she moved up to Maryland and we were up there for the best part years, and we're both long retired now and she wanted to get back and still has family in the Richmond area, so figured, what the heck? So we came back.

04:01 Well, that's another similarity then. My mother was from Richmond, and I spent every summer here as a kid living with my grandparents. So when it was time for me to retire and I was thinking about places where to go, richmond was pretty much number one on my list.

04:21 Well, I'll tell you what. I wasn't sure I was going to like it here, but I do. It's a nice city. People seem to be very pleasant. I definitely like the taxes here better than the taxes in Maryland.

04:37 That's a benefit? Yes.

04:41 Everything's pretty good. You're retired now.

04:49 Yes.

04:50 So so what do you do? What do you do for fun and for interest?

04:56 Well, I'm an artist by training, and every Friday afternoon, actually, I get together with a couple of friends and we go to a gallery or the big museum here in Richmond and look at art and then talk about it afterwards. We sit somewhere and have some coffee and talk about the art that we've seen and maybe compare it to other art that we've seen, that sort of thing. I'm a big fan of blues music, so I love to go out and listen to live blues music when I can. I enjoy being outdoors, so there's a number of places I like to go walk around and be with nature when I can. One of the reasons I moved to Richmond is I lived in the cold frozen north for a good number of years and had some bicycling accidents that damaged my knees and the cold was getting more and more problematic to walk or bicycle. Coming here has minimized some of that, but I'm not as capable as I once was of hiking in the woods and whatnot.

06:11 Yeah, I understand that. That's for sure. I am actually the recipient of two new knees. It had been getting pretty bad and I was having a lot of pain. Walking and doing stairs was getting increasingly difficult, so I had them both replaced not long after we got here. And now I can walk all day long, I can stand up all day long. I can walk up and downstairs and everything's good again.

06:41 That's a great thing. I can see from the poster behind you and what you had written that you're a big fan of certain types of racing.

06:51 Yes, I've been involved in it for over 50 years, actually. I've never driven. I don't know how much you know about racing or know what's involved. And particularly in the road racing, there's all kinds of racing. There's drag racing and oval track racing and dirt racing, and then there's road racing, which is what I've always been involved in, which is like Formula One, Indy car, that kind of thing. And I've always been a participant in that. I have been one of the people that staffs the races. I've been a flagger. Like I say, I don't know if you know anything about the sport. If so, you may not know what I mean when I say that, but when you have a road course, it's up and downhill, right and left hand turn, and you can't see the whole track from any one place, not even close to the whole track. So at every corner around the track, there are flag stations and there are people there who display the flags for the drivers who have communication to race control and who respond to vehicles when they have an incident, whether they have a crash or whether they have a mechanical or whatever. And that's what I've done.

08:22 When I was a young man, I was very much interested in sports car racing. Not that I was ever a driver or anything like that. I think I was drawn to it more because I found sports cars. So beautiful. And I love the competitive aspect of it too. And one of the grand loves of my life was a Jaguar XK 150, which I probably never should have sold, but I did decades ago.

08:53 Yeah, so anyway, I've done that and I actually met my wife at the racetrack, so that was an added bonus. And I've been involved in this sport. I've been regional executive of our local chapter of the Sports Car Club of America, which is we've got about 2500 members in our local chapter. So I've been involved in other aspects of the sport. I still do the flagging right now I'm doing race control at Summit Point and I'm also a safety steward for our track day program and a rally safety steward. So I've been involved across the board in it. Some people take up golf, I took up racing and cars.

09:45 Well, it sounds like it's been a big part of your life.

09:49 Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. But I have a lot of other interests too. So enjoy doing a whole bunch of different things.

09:57 Can you elaborate?

10:01 Oh, well, I've been involved in a bunch of other things in the community and so on, where I've lived, in the various places I've lived. Enjoy doing that. I enjoy the theater. Like doing now that we're here in Richmond, we go to the Altria Theater. And when we were outside of Baltimore, we went to Center Stage there, which was a local theater, which we had season tickets. Enjoyed that a lot and love to travel. And my wife loves to travel too. We were just in Scotland and Wales this summer and last year we were in Switzerland and we've been to New Zealand and Costa Rica and Patagonia and places like that.

10:51 Wow, that's pretty neat.

10:55 Yeah.

10:55 I've done some travel to mostly Central South America and Southeast Asia myself. So those parts of the world have been of interest to me, I guess.

11:10 So you said you've been an artist. What kind of art was that your career or was that kind of like a semi hobby?

11:21 No, it's hard to describe. I would just say that it's probably been the single most important driving force in my life. I started exhibiting back in the don't see that as it certainly hasn't been how I've been able to support myself and pay the bills. But I think it's important to exhibit and I view art not as a making art is more of a personal passion. It's the only way I can describe it. It's the the creative part of me and many other people as well is very important. And so I'm compelled. I wouldn't say it's an addiction, but it's something that's always there and it's always present for me is the need to do something creative. Whether it might be woodworking in some cases I enjoy doing that. Other times it is making art. But there's always something in me that wants to do creative things.

12:44 Cool. Very cool.

12:50 And I've spent my life pretty involved with the art world in lots of different ways, both as a teacher and community facilitator of the arts and things of that sort, too.

13:04 Yeah. Well, professionally, I spent my time, the vast majority of my time in distribution, warehousing, management. Worked for a number of different companies over the years, some of them quite interesting in what we did. And I found it very interesting and educational because working with all kinds of different people from all kinds of different backgrounds, and it sounds like you say somebody, oh, I worked in a warehouse. You know, there's more to it than that, particularly if you depending on what kind of a workforce you have and the type of people that you have and their backgrounds and how they intermesh with each other and how they can work more efficiently and work happier.

14:03 Yeah. Logistics is the key word there, I would say. That's a very complex and probably very creative job, too.

14:11 Yeah. And I've been pretty successful at it and always gotten rewarded for my efforts and always managed to make a more efficient place. Not necessarily at the cost of beating up the employees, either. That's not my thing. Try to make them productive and make them feel good about themselves while they're doing it, even though they're doing some of them doing a pretty job that is more or less drudgery. But if you can make them feel good about what they're doing and when they do it, well, that's a bonus for everybody.

14:52 That creates teamwork and team understanding.

14:56 Yeah. You just have to think about what's rewarding for people. Just a simple thing that costs a company almost nothing. You have a group of people do a good job on a particular day, hot summer day, you go over and you open up the soda machine and give everybody free soda. Costs the company nothing, but it makes all the people working there feel really good. Say, oh, wow, we really did something today. And it's not the value of the soda they got, it's the fact that they were recognized.

15:35 Yes. The caring behind.

15:37 Yeah.

15:39 My father had a similar kind of career. He was in the army for a good number of years and worked in the Quartermaster Corps, which is all about distribution and managing people and getting things to the right places. And then he went on to do that for a big defense contractor as well. So I got a chance to hear a little bit about that and see about that kind of life from him.

16:05 Yeah. So I understand you're divorced. How long were you married?

16:13 15 years. Not terribly long time, but a long enough time to feel very deeply committed to the person I was married to. It's probably still a very painful memory in my life. I've been working on that for quite some time now. I won't belabor you with all the gory details of it, but it was a huge loss. And in fact, that was one of the topics I thought we might share, because I know you mentioned you had lost a family member, and everybody has loss, but people don't talk about loss much and how that affects them. Certainly this loss affected every aspect of my life. It didn't affect it professionally anymore because I had retired, but the surprise of it certainly made me reevaluate. How could I have gotten to this place in my life and be this age and be going through this? So it raised many questions for me, as well as raising many strange and conflicting feelings. Yeah.

17:46 Well, my marriage was my second one. My first marriage lasted ten years. And she very nice lady, very talented lady. I don't bear her any o will whatsoever. The only real problem we had in her life was that she could spend money faster than I could make it.

18:14 Could be a big problem.

18:15 Yeah. So we split and I got back together with her previous girlfriend, who is now my wife, and we dated back in the 70s. We dated for about a year and a half, almost two years back in the she wanted to get married, and I didn't want to get married, so she did. But we stayed friends the whole time, and she'd gotten married, and her marriage broke up before mine, and she had moved back here to the Richmond area. When I called her up, I said, because we met at the racetrack originally, I said, you want to meet me at Summit Point, which is the local road racetrack. Well, not real local. It's two and a half hours from here, but it's the closest one, really. And she said, okay. And that's how we got back together. We made an agreement. I would look for a job down here, and she would look for one up there, and whoever found one first would move, and she found one before I did. So she moved up to the Baltimore area, and we've been married for 26 years now.

19:39 But ultimately you came back to Richmond.

19:42 Yes.

19:45 Well, it sounds like you have a good working partnership.

19:48 Yeah, works pretty good. We agree on a lot of things. We disagree on a few things, but the ones we disagree on, we work those out pretty amicably. So very pleased with the relationship we have.

20:02 Well, good for you. That's a real plus.

20:06 Yeah. No kids, though. We have no kids whatsoever. She had originally wanted children, but when she got married, her husband her marriage was not a great one from the start, and they never had any kids. And by the time we got back together, it was too late because I was in my fifty s and she was approaching her 50s when we got back together.

20:35 I never had any kids either. When I was a young man and married. I was very leery about becoming a parent because at the time I was a public arts school teacher and I had seen so much bad parenting and I didn't think my parenting parenting I received was terribly good either. And I was very leery about becoming another bad parent at the time. My wife and I were pretty much in agreement about that. So I never had kids as a young man, and if I had life to do over again, I probably would reconsider that. But I've had a good life the way it's been.

21:25 Very good. So what other areas would you like to explore?

21:34 Well, are you comfortable exploring that whole idea of loss in life and what it's like for us? Because everybody has it.

21:49 I have no objections to talking about that. And I understand it's the difficult thing and depending on how deeply and in what ways you're connected to somebody, it can be difficult. It can be very difficult.

22:10 I lost both my parents within three months of each other. It was a long time ago now, but I guess I'd just say it is another kind of life changing experience that I never expected. And of course, we all have our time and my parents were not young when they passed, but nevertheless, I don't think I was ready for it because I didn't think about losing them. I didn't maybe even embrace the idea of what loss might mean to me as a person. Ah, but it it was an event that I think I I was a different person for an entire year after that event, at least internally. In some ways, you become an orphan when you lose your parents. And it wasn't so much that as there was an emptiness inside of me. Even though I lived 800 miles away from my parents, their presence was always there. And when they were gone, the loss of that presence, it just was like pulling the plug on the bathtub, I think, in some ways. And it took a long time for me to get the plug back in, I guess, and learn how to refill that myself.

23:56 I can understand how that would be.

24:02 Yeah, everyone has those kinds of experiences. I talked to people a lot about it back then, losing elderly parts of the family and then unexpected losses of friends that just happen, I think.

24:26 Yeah, it can be very difficult because in most cases it comes out of the blue, just all of a sudden, bingo, there it is. And in some ways it's worse. In some ways it's better if somebody has an illness and passes from that because at least you're able to say your goodbyes to them, which if it's an accident or something like that, then you never have that opportunity. Of course. On the other hand, the other side of that is you have to sit there and watch somebody suffer, which is not a pleasant thing either. So it's difficult no matter which way you do it, or I shouldn't say which way you do it because you don't do it, but which way you have to live through it. But it's a different experience depending on which way it goes.

25:19 Yeah. I'm assuming you've had those experiences.

25:26 I have never had anybody who was really close to me who died suddenly, but then I've had my mother and my father and other people that I know who I was friends with who passed.

25:43 What was that experience like for you?

25:48 It was I was able to get through it in most cases. My mother died a number of years in. My mother and father had been separated and divorced since I was about three years old. And my mother was living and retired and living in Florida. And then my father was living on the Maryland Eastern Shore, and she died of a stroke, and she'd been having a few health issues, but she just died in her apartment of a stroke. And so I didn't know anything about it until I got a phone call. And my father had liver cancer, and he passed away after a year. When he was diagnosed, they said he had somewhere between two months and two years to live, and he made it almost exactly one year, new Year's Eve.

26:56 Was that a long time ago?

26:59 It is now. That was 1992, and my wife has gone through that recently. Her dad passed away in 2003, and her mom passed away about five years ago. And we just lost my brother in law this past year. I should say a year ago. It was a year this past June. My other brother in law is still going strong. He lives down in the Roanoke area. So.

27:52 Given the state of things, have you experienced a loss of friends because of the huge political divide that exists in our country now?

28:08 I have friends that we need to not talk about politics. I you know, I think it's some of the labels and so on are misleading, and I should make it very clear on my political standings. I am no question about it. I am very much a conservative, politically and economically. However, I do not want anyone to, under any circumstances, to think that I am a follower of I'm not. I refer to people like that as Trump, pets or trumpets. I can have no use for the man. I think he's a betrayer of conservative principles in the Republican Party. I think he is a cult leader. I have no use for him whatsoever. So I want to make that clear.

29:09 So is that something that's caused the loss of friends, that stance you've taken?

29:16 I have some friends, not many, but I have some friends who firmly support him and some of the positions he's taken, and and we have agreed to not talk about it so we can maintain a friendship and still have a civil conversation but not about politics.

29:43 I have some family members to which that's true as well, just not a good policy. And my politics are really way outside the mainstream. So I just generally don't engage in many political conversations. I have one friend, one of the people I meet with to talk about Art who is much more conservative than I am, and we have some wonderful conversations because of that. Our differing points of view are respected and sometimes questioned or challenged. But we are able to hang on 1 second.

30:26 Hang on a second. No, we're still on. Do you need anything?

30:31 No.

30:31 Okay, cool. Sorry about that. My wife was checking in with me.

30:41 Okay.

30:44 I'm sorry. Go ahead. You were in the middle of something there.

30:49 Well, just that I think that it's possible to my friend and I have these great conversations even though we have a very different political place for our beliefs and the whole idea of respect for another person regardless of whether they agree with you, I think is the critical piece. I sort of understand this particular process that we're going through right now as an opportunity to build more respect and understanding across people despite differences or whatever similarities that might exist. And I think that's a really wonderful idea.

31:44 I agree with that. And that's the reason I'm participating in our conversation and the reason I did the original interview. And one on one thing, because I think in the Internet age we have lost the personal contact between people and the Internet is a wonderful thing. I would not have it go away because it is a source of many good things. But the bad thing of it is the unpersonal nature of anything that happens on the Internet where people say things on the Internet they would never say, never even dream of saying to somebody in their face if they were standing next to them.

32:32 Right. And certainly there's a proliferation of ideas that are not based on what a common understanding of truth might be. And that truth.

32:47 No kidding. Some of the stuff I see out there is like, give me a break.

33:01 It's almost as if every piece of news that we might see there is immediately conspiracy developed about that piece of news. Even matter if it's something going on in this country, there is a conspiracy behind it somewhere. But that's not my problem. There does appear to be a lot of fear and anxiety which draws people to look for those things. But I'm glad I don't get caught up in all the fear mongering and anxiety of that stuff.

33:39 I'll tell you, some of the stuff I just have to laugh at. It's the same thing on both sides of the aisle. The far lefties are as bad as the far righties. They're both nuts.

33:56 Yeah, it's kind of curious. Well, maybe this is just the natural evolution of things. A country that was built upon collaboration and cooperation between all sorts of different kinds of people has become this place where divisiveness is more common. Um.

34:22 I'll tell you, I'm I'm I'm really more concerned looking looking forward. I'm more concerned in this country about the state of education starting at the lowest levels. And I think our kids today are not getting a proper education. I think there's a little bit too much touchy feely stuff in education and not enough attention to hard facts. And that's reflected somewhat by the number of kids who are not interested in the sciences at all. They want to do something else. And there's no where do I want to use here? There's no rigor taught in the schools about, you know, if you know, that the things in daily life and I'm not talking about philosophical things. I'm talking about, you know, you can't you can't build a better world if you don't understand how science works, if you don't know how things work together in the real world, no matter what your political leanings are, they're going to work that way no matter what, whether you like it or not. And you need to understand that, and you need to know that. And if you don't know that, then you're going to have a problem throughout your life.

36:08 Yeah. And one of the sad things that's supporting that is the fact that education, especially higher education, you need to go if you're going to study science and engineering, has become so expensive that more and more young people are opting out of going to college because of the expense. And I think many countries in the world recognize that education has always been the key to advancement. And this may become a political issue here, but in those countries, the government support for higher education is at a much higher level, so that education is affordable for young people to go to school.

36:53 Yeah.

36:55 We cut the budgets right and left of our state universities, which used to be the most affordable places for students to go, but it's put many kids out of the running to take on the debt necessary to go.

37:13 Yeah, it's gotten so if you're going to go for a higher education, you either sell yourself into servitude with student loans or you don't go. But I take a little bit different aspect on that. I think there's absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever of not going to higher education. There is nothing wrong with being in a trade. You can make a really nice living if you're good at a particular trade, whether it's a plumber or a carpenter or an electrician or what have you. There is a crying need for people in trades, and there's nothing not respectable or not worthwhile in doing that. And I think in this country, kids are being sold the idea that unless you go to college, you're nobody.

38:06 I think that's true also. It's a separate but parallel issue. I feel fortunate that I grew up in a family of people that were tradespeople. And so from my father and all of his family, I learned carpentry starting at age twelve and was able to support myself through college and a lot past college doing carpentry. And curiously enough, after retiring, I'm working part time as a carpenter again and loving it.

38:43 Yeah, a finished carpenter can almost name their own price.

38:48 Well, there certainly is that financial benefit as well, is that you can earn a very good living in any of the trades. The notion that somehow having a college degree makes you a better person is really fallacious. It's not true at you know, it's sort of how we look at our know, India has a caste system, and we sort of have an unspoken caste system where certain people are at the top and other people are at the bottom. And it's not defined with a name, but it's certainly there. And unfortunately, people in the trades are not given the same kind of appreciation, perhaps as a doctor or a lawyer.

39:37 Yeah.

39:43 It sort of comes back to a notion you were talking about in your work, is that the country needs team, a team effort. You know, some people have to know how to drive a locomotive across the country, and maybe other people do need to be doctors, but that doesn't make the locomotive engineer any less of a value to our culture than the doctor. And we've got that upside down. That's my thought about it. I think teachers also are not appreciated in a similar kind of way because there's been so much difficulty in getting educational systems to work.

40:27 Well, I'll tell you what. I have a theory that I could instantly improve the educational system in this country. If you waved a magic wand and put me in the charge, the first thing I would do is I would take 50% of the administrators and fire them, and then I would take all the salary that they've been collecting, and I'd take half of it and give it to the teachers, and the other half I'd put back into the tax base so we didn't have to tax people so much. Here.

40:58 You got my vote. I've certainly seen that in higher education where the proliferation of administrators that are paid more than faculty. And I'm not saying that there isn't a job to do administratively, but when it comes time for budget cutting, the administrators are seldom on the chopping block. In fact, they continue to get their raises and other people don't. I had the experience of being hired at a university, and at the same time a young woman was hired into the administration right out of her undergraduate program. And at the time I had probably too many degrees in my own welfare and a lot of experience. And within, I would say, three or four years, she was making tens of thousands of. Dollars more than I was at her administrative position. Now, she was smart, she was capable, I liked her. But that fast tracking and huge salary differential just astonished me, as you could probably hear in my voice. I'm still somewhat amazed that those systems exist that seem to value administrators more than the people who are in the trenches doing the work.

42:42 Yeah, well, you find that a lot of places, and that is one of the major fallbacks of bureaucracies of any kind whatsoever, that they they start off being a good thing, and then as they grow, they become like a cancer, and they grow out of control.

43:12 Too much complexity.

43:14 Yeah. And too much job justification.

43:19 Yes.

43:24 Stepping over slightly into political bounds once again, if I was put in charge, which will never happen in this lifetime or the next day either. Some of the things, like, for instance, in our federal government and I can say this with some justification and background the money that the federal government spends on our Department of Education, I would abolish the Department of Education in its entirety and take that money and give it back to the states to improve their own school systems. And one of the reasons I say that is from personal experience. One of the companies I worked for was a company that we ran six different government contracts, and one of them was for the Department of Education. And I've seen stuff, the publishing that's done by people getting $200,000 plus a year who are publishing reports that nobody reads, except maybe other people, and it's all job justification. They don't actually contribute anything to the education system, but they're soaking up all that money that could go to students. And that kind of galled me. When I was there, it was like, what are you doing? You're writing all these papers and stuff and doing these complex reports that nobody ever reads. So why are we paying you to do that?

45:08 Well, that's a good question. Where that information winds up going? I would hope that it's going somewhere into the educational stream, but maybe it winds up in somebody's file cabinet.

45:21 That's almost exactly what happens. It winds up on a file cabinet somewhere and over years gathers a nice patina of dust. And that's not what we pay taxes for. We pay taxes to get things done. And that's where my conservative leanings come in. We pay taxes to get things done. We pay taxes to build roads. We pay taxes to have the sewer system work. We pay taxes to have fresh water that's drinkable water that we don't have to worry about. I don't need some bureaucrat doing something else in know, going back this goes back ways to the early days of OSHA. OSHA came out with the design for safety, improving an electric drill. And the design that they came out with to make this electric drill safe so a worker wouldn't hurt himself using the electric drill meant that with all the stuff on it, the drill was so heavy the worker couldn't use it. Give me a break here. Where's your common sense? Who came up with this? And that's what happens. And it happens in the corporate world, too. I got to admit that corporations have their own bureaucracies. You get a committee of people together to work on something, and I guarantee you whatever comes out of it is not going to be good. It's going to be so convoluted and complex because you got to please everybody on the committee that it's kind of funny.

47:03 Well, I bet this is probably part of your experience that you know more about it than I, that race car teams are constantly working on suspension and steering and engine dynamics and things of that sort. And so they produce better and better race cars because they're there actually building and making the equipment.

47:30 Then they get judged on the results.

47:33 Yes. And it's not like some group of engineers over here designing some sort of product that goes through whether it's going to be saleable or not to the public and wind up with a product that is perhaps like the heavy drill that is overly complicated, overly engineered, and maybe not as useful as something else. Yeah, that multiple committees idea. But at the same time, in a democracy, those committees are sort of how the proho process works, is getting consensus between people. And so you lose something in getting consensus, maybe a lot.

48:19 You get some benefit out of it, but too often it just grows into a problem. I mean, how long did it take NASA to put an occupied rocket into orbit and how long did it take SpaceX to do it?

48:42 Well, they did it very quickly, but they could build upon all the learning and history that NASA brought to the table.

48:51 Yeah, and I understand that and I acknowledge that. But still there was the difference between SpaceX doing it and NASA doing it because once again, NASA is like any other government body. There's too many administrators and not enough doers.

49:12 Sort of like road construction or which pothole gets filled and which highway gets rebuilt. I'm not smart enough to understand and make those decisions, but I can't make the decisions that fix them.

49:29 Yeah, you need the engineers to do the work, but you don't need the administrators to tell the engineers how they should do their work. The engineers already know how to do their work. But there's other people who have a different take on things and and think that, oh, you absolutely have to do that. There's a lot of people in this country who think that consensus is more important than results.

50:05 There's always some kind of trade off. I'm thinking of being a Star Trek watcher long time ago that one of the leads in that series had a favorite saying, and it always worked. Whenever he wanted something done, he just said, make it so. And you have one Supreme Leader that can do that. It's very efficient. But that flies in the face of what democracy requires.

50:43 True.

50:44 And the trade off and the balance between those two things, those two ends.

50:52 Yeah. Well, a dictatorship is the most efficient form of government. However, it's only a good form of government if you happen to have a totally benevolent dictator. And sooner or later, that person is going to die off, and their son or their cousin or their brother or somebody else who's lurking in the background and has accumulated power is not going to be that benevolent person who comes in behind them. And I haven't seen too many benevolent dictators in the world anyway.

51:25 Actually, from my perspective, I think that corruption is worldwide regardless of the kind of government you have. Oh, absolutely benevolent. Democracies is probably a contradiction of terms.

51:39 Yeah. Because it goes totally against human nature, and I have to laugh at.

51:48 The.

51:48 People whose political leanings lend toward the communist form of government. And, yeah, you look at it on a piece of paper, that's the fairest way to do it, and then it should be good for everybody, but it completely leaves human nature out of the picture, and human nature is going to destroy it almost instantly because that's not how people are built. And there's always going to be people trying to game the system. That's why it doesn't work.

52:23 All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

52:28 It is a very true statement. Very true statement. And that's why it's a good thing why in this country, the President serves for four years, and then if he does a good enough job, he'll get another four years at it, but then he's gone. And I feel that we desperately need term limits for the Senate and for Congress.

52:47 Yes. And I would add the Supreme Court.

52:52 I disagree with the Supreme Court, and I'll tell you why I disagree with that. When you put term limits in there, then you're doing two things. You're politicizing the replacement even more than it's already politicized, because you're doing it more often. And the second problem that I see is that the reason the Supreme Court the reason our founding fathers were pretty doggone smart and the reason the Supreme Court was set up with lifetime terms was so they would not be weighed upon by outside influences and having to please other people that they therefore could look at the law from a much more objective position. And I think it would be a mistake to put term limits on the Supreme Court for that reason.

54:00 See, I don't think that should be an elected position. But by the time someone has the experience and wisdom to be in that position, to say, okay, you got 20 years, who's to say what political power will be? And we don't know who will be in control in 20 years, but we'll give you 20 years to use your wisdom and experience, and then we'll get someone younger, obviously, and with a different set of world experiences at a different period in time to take another look at how that system works. I think that the infusion of new ideas is an important one. Even something that is as constrained as a legal system certainly needs creative thinking about how it's employed.

54:56 I think you may have a point if you're putting saying, okay, a term is going to be like 20 years. Anything shorter than that I think would be a major mistake because then you do politicize it because it's coming up and coming open way too often. But yeah, I can see that you could make an argument for 20 years or something in that neighborhood term on the Supreme Court.

55:28 And the structure of the Supreme Court itself. Maybe there are ways of adding to its wisdom. Certainly each justice has a huge support staff, but maybe there are new ways of looking at how each justice is supported and how all that information is put together by the nine Justices or 25 Justices. Whatever we wind up with 100 years from now. The there's always this is another situation where I see there's a trade off. We are in a very different place in history than the Founding Fathers, and every system should be reviewed to see if it is as efficient as it was in the beginning. Or perhaps it might be even more efficient, but at least to be assessed and not just taken for granted that this is what they did. And it always works. So we should keep it that way. Ceren since your suggestion of eliminating the Department of Education, that's been a part of our country for a good number of years now, but to consider its elimination or any of the other departments, the evaluation of each one of those should not be said. Well, we're not going to do that because we have them. We're not going to get rid of all those administrators. We need to be able to look at those things and plan in a more open ended way, perhaps.

57:18 Well, I don't know, opening things up for larger groups, we're creating committees again and I don't know that that's a great way to go, but that's my opinion, and it's worth exactly what you paid for it. But definitely term limits for the Senate and for Congress. We've got people on both sides of the aisle who've been in there way too. Maybe I'm cynical in this, but we have the recent gentleman from New Jersey who's in trouble. Yes, but I think he's just the tip of the iceberg. I think the nature of politics today has created a corrupt system where there's too many of them who are on the take, maybe not the point of actually actively going out and seeking people to pay them for doing things, but certainly they're not against taking the money if someone offers some money. And that's one other place we really need to perform our political system is the money. It costs so much money to run a campaign even at the state level, if you're running to be in the house, it costs an incredible amount of money. If you want to have any chance ghost of a chance of winning that it brings corruption to the system just because of the need to get that.

59:22 Kind of money and the influence peddling that goes along with it.

59:26 Yes, exactly. This is one place I'd like the British system in the first place, there is no politicking except for six weeks before the election. And number two, your money comes from the fund and every political candidate gets the same amount of money and you don't take private donations. Yes, and I think they've got the right idea with that.

59:54 They're much smarter than we are about minimizing influence peddling, for sure.

59:59 Yeah, they've got their own political issues over there, to be sure. But that's one way to at least take the money and influence pedaling out of the game a little bit.

01:00:14 I remember reading an article some years ago that did an analysis of the incomes of people coming into the Congress and Senate and certainly the vast majority of the people entering the Congress were not wealthy people. Some were, but most almost all of them became millionaires.

01:00:34 Yeah, they're wealthy when they leave.

01:00:36 Yes, they're wealthy when they leave and I don't know whether that means all of them are corrupt, but we've set up a system again to benefit politicians in ways that leave open the possibility for corruption and influence pedaling.

01:01:00 It not only encourages it, it almost requires it so that you can get enough money to continue to run.

01:01:07 Well, the whole lobbying industry is built upon that. And that's if someone were to put me in charge of elections as put you as in charge of education, I would eliminate all lobbying and political action groups and all of that, maybe going so far as to adopt that English system of only six weeks of campaigning and have it on a level playing field instead of the way it is here. I doubt that will happen though, Paul, I think, oh, I agree. Too many people vested in keeping things.

01:01:41 The way they are and the people who are vested in keeping things the way they are the ones who get to vote on that. Yes, I agree with that. I agree with that. Well.

01:02:02 I don't know where we should go from here. Do you think there are any other things that you want to ask or bring into the conversation?

01:02:10 Yeah, one thing we haven't explored, which is one thing that's on the forefront of everything and that's environmental issues.

01:02:20 Yes.

01:02:21 You want to talk about that or you want to give it a pass?

01:02:26 Well, I again, am not smart enough to understand all the things maybe relevant here. But I do trust in the scientists who are studying these problems, and the vast majority of them are in pretty much agreement as to the immense problem that we are facing. And maybe you and I will not live to see the dire results that may happen, but I wouldn't want to pass on to anyone else's children what may come to pass by our inaction best in our future with regards to the environment seems to be a smart thing to do.

01:03:17 I am absolutely convinced that people in their teens and 20s today, as they become adults, are going to be living in a world much different than the one you and I live in. And it's not going to be a better world.

01:03:36 I'm afraid you're right.

01:03:41 The environment is one of those things. You don't stop it and turn it around on a dime. It's like the Queen Mary. Queen Mary takes 5 miles to stop, to get turned around, to go back the other way. Well, the environment is going to take longer than that and it's going to be very difficult to get it turned around. Living standards are going to go down. One of the reasons we have a crisis at the southern border not the biggest reason. The biggest reason is mostly political. But one of the reasons is the changing environment in the tropical areas of the world where people can't live the way they have lived up till now, because crops aren't as good, the heat is getting worse. And that's one of the contributing factors to people coming north. Not the biggest one, but it's one of the contributing factors, and it's only going to get worse. And as sea levels rise, something like 70% of the world's population lives within, what, 100 miles of a sea coast.

01:04:54 Right.

01:04:56 As sea levels rise, those people are going to have to go somewhere else. And that's not going to be a pretty picture. Yeah, it's not going to be fun.

01:05:07 Well, I see it as a problem of investment, but then that becomes a very thorny issue because that means that profit margins for the very wealthy will start dropping if they make a commitment.

01:05:27 To.

01:05:30 Reversing the tide. It won't come cheaply, but I don't think the people that garnered the profits are going to be willing to invest any of those profits towards making the world a better place. That's my cynicism and I'll own it. But I see very few people at the top of the corporate ladders and in the so called 1% that are standing up and saying, we need to invest in changing the way the world is. They are investing in building safe houses in New Zealand, so when the climate disaster happens, they'll have a place to go retreat to.

01:06:12 Yeah. Part of the problem is, once again, nobody is willing to think to stop and take a minute to think about it and too many people are oblivious to it. And once again I think that goes back to our educational system. It doesn't teach people how to think.

01:06:40 That is a key thing. I think there's more emphasis on facts than learning how to learn how to.

01:06:49 Problem solve or worrying too much about how you feel.

01:06:55 Well, there's a lot of science about that. That feeling does affect children's ability to learn.

01:07:04 Well yeah, I agree with you that it does. But as you get into your teens and going toward adulthood the real things in your life are a bit more important than how you feel today because everybody's feelings change from day to day and year to year and so on. And emphasizing your feelings today over the facts of life that you're living with is not a smart move.

01:07:33 You see, I don't think that teenagers or adults base their choices consciously on feelings.

01:07:46 No they don't.

01:07:48 I think feelings unconsciously drive most of our behavior and that is one of the other root problems we deal with that it's not the fact that a child may be depressed because their father has left the home or their mother died of cancer or 1000 other things that affects learning. And it's not that a teacher can be a child's therapist but if we don't understand the role of feeling for everybody we overlook a central part of human behavior and human motivation. And again that's a huge problem. I don't know how to sort that out but I don't think ignoring feelings is helpful to children whose feelings are driving their behavior whether they're or where they're even feeling.

01:08:45 No, don't get me wrong, I agree with that because children are I mean, they're learning how to be a person and their feelings are definitely going to impact that. So you have to be sensitive to that part. But I'm talking more as you move into adult life. You can have all the feelings you want but you got to understand that there's also the real world and your feelings are not going to trump the real world. Excuse the expression trump but you know what I mean. Your feelings are not going to trump the real world that you have to deal with and you need to learn to deal with it.

01:09:28 That kind of mature thinking is something that sadly a lot of young people don't grow up with.

01:09:35 Right.

01:09:36 I don't know whether that's where that fits into the educational scheme of things of telling teenagers, which are good portion of the time hormone driven, that they need to think more like adults who they don't want to be like. They want to be different than the primary adults in their life. Parents. Obviously they don't want to be like their parents.

01:10:07 Hey well listen, I've got a couple other things I've got to do this morning. I have really enjoyed our conversation and thank you so very much. For doing this.

01:10:17 Well, I've enjoyed it, too, Paul.

01:10:18 I appreciate I do have a question for you. What area of Richmond do you live in? I'm actually in Goochland County, but literally right on the border in the corner of Goochland, where Henrico and Hanover come together with Goochlin. If I had a rock on my hand right now and a slightly stronger arm than I have, I could hit either one of those counties with a rock from my front yard.

01:10:47 I know where you are, then. I live in Chestnut Hill, the section of Richmond. And if you were in the VCU area of downtown and were to put yourself on Fifth Street going east, you would travel well, there's so much construction in that area now, that's just difficult to say. But generally speaking, you would cross a viaduct going out of the downtown area, and you immediately be in Chestnut Hill. So I live very close to the VCU, what's known as arts district.

01:11:27 Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, fantastic. Well, this has been a great conversation. Someday I'd love to buy you a beer.

01:11:37 Well, let's make that happen. I'm sure we can continue to use the chat function and maybe we can hook up and have a beer, have dinner or something together.

01:11:50 Sounds like a good idea.

01:11:51 Okay.

01:11:52 I really appreciate it, like I said, and you have a wonderful rest of the weekend. Thanks.

01:11:57 You too, Paul.

01:11:58 Okay, day. Take care now. Bye.