CRISIS IN EDUCATION, FIRST AMENDMENT, AND US SCHOOLS

Robert Hansen

Some people think that's one of the biggest failings of Abraham Lincoln is that he did that and he shouldn't have. But there's a lot of good that could have come from not delivering the soldiers back to the enemy.

John Yearwood

Right and no. It was a way to expedite the end of the war, which needed to be ended. I'm not sure that putting 60 people in Guantanamo and then torturing them day and night and getting no benefit from doing that was actually a good thing. But that's not my decision to make.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. So, my understanding about Abraham Lincoln's case is many of the states found it to be unconstitutional and therefore they wouldn't follow it, and, or then it was sort of turned back on, and then they continued to do it even after it was turned back on.

Maybe that's a failure of mass media and communication and clear line of sight of who was in charge of what. But it seemed like there was a lot of confusion or disagreement about it even at the time, like outside of the academia, like individuals who actually in charge of doing it, that they couldn't even decide what was the right answer or not.

John Yearwood

Yeah, that's right. Well, and in the crisis you do basically what you have to do, and that was, I think those were the decisions that Abraham Lincoln was making. I think he was sleepless many nights worrying about those. He seemed to be, to me anyway, looking back on his administration, he seemed to be a very conscientious and intelligent person.

I think he paid a lot of attention to these decisions. I think he was very moral person. I'm not sure anybody would disagree with that assessment. You can't do things like that, that are obviously outside the powers given to you by the Constitution without worrying about what you're doing.

If you're the kind of person Abraham Lincoln was, if you're not that kind of person, then you can get away with all kinds of stuff.

Robert Hansen

I mean, the fear typically for a president is you're going to go to jail or your population is going to come and hang you. But I think because he was in the middle of a war, half the population was so fervently on his side, that the chances of that happening were very thin, I think. His detractors were well muted by the fact we were in a war.

John Yearwood

Right. And the union had not been very successful early on. So, it wasn't until those first disasters began to percolate through the population that the rest of the people in the north began to say, "Oh, wait a minute.

If we don't do something about this, it's going to be bad news." Meanwhile, in the South, people are just trying to defend their homesteads. There's an economic system that supports them and their communities, and they want to keep that economic system.

Unfortunately, it's an economic system based on slavery. Morally, it's repugnant. But we still see slaves states in the world today.

Robert Hansen

Yes. We do.

John Yearwood

Some of whom we are in direct competition with.

Robert Hansen

Some of whom we get our iPhones from.

John Yearwood

Absolutely. I was heading South today on MoPac. I know you were too. It got to that choke point there where MoPac turns off and the lane goes down and turns under and comes up on Cesar Chavez and 5th Street. MoPac has been cooking along at three solid lanes, and then suddenly it chokes down to two lanes.

The traffic just backs up for a couple of miles, every afternoon. Just creeps. It just creeps. If there's a flat tire or breakdown or a fender bender, and then nobody gets home that night. I was just thinking we've got 45 billion or 35 billion surplus in the state budget.

Austin is going to pay 90 million to the airport to buy them out of operating contract out there. I wonder, what if we weren't spending that money on the airport, or if we could get some money from the state, could we extend the toll lane in both directions.

Robert Hansen

Past that point. Yeah.

John Yearwood

Past that point and over the river. And use that, open the toll lane up so you don't have that two lane choke point there. How much would that cost? I started trying to calculate that in my mind, and I realized, I remember a story from when China hosted the Olympics.

Three weeks before the Olympics were hosted, there was not a super highway from downtown out to the stadium. They started working, and within three weeks, they had a super highway built. It was eight lanes in both directions and freshly concreted. They did that in three weeks.

If you have a slave economy where everybody works for the government and gets what they're going to get, depending on whether or not they show up for work that day you can do things like that.

Robert Hansen

So, it sounds like you're saving slavery is a great idea. I'm obviously kidding.

John Yearwood

I know. From a capitalist point of view, it's not so bad because it simplifies your labor costs. It made a fabulous wealth of the South what it was and you can go anywhere. River Road along Mississippi River and see remnants of those plantations.

You go to Natchez, Mississippi and see some of the most beautiful homes. But they were built with slave labor, and they would not have been built if it hadn't been for the slaves being not having to be paid a wage. So, I'm not arguing in favor of slavery by any means.

What I am saying is, we started off talking about Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and what I was saying is, people in the South were trying to defend them of an economic system was morally repugnant, but very successful for them.

The result of their dependence upon that one form of economy meant that they were unable to move away from it. They were making so much money doing that, that they couldn't find new ways to make money for themselves.

So, when the war came and the slaves were freed, and they didn't have that source of labor anymore, the whole territory plunged into poverty. It's still in poverty. It's still in poverty. A hundred and something years later. 150 years later or 160.

Robert Hansen

I think we're going to get back to that in reference to your book, actually. So, let's put a pin in that one. We'll come back. The other one was the Japanese internment during World War II. That was another one of those very specific wartime things that the president just decided one day, I'm going to put anyone in jail who happens to come from another country for years, potentially.

John Yearwood

Right. And take away their property. They were American citizens and they were born in America.

Robert Hansen

A lot of them were actually born here too.

John Yearwood

Yeah. A lot of them were born here. They had relatives in Japan. Well, they did the same thing with some of the German citizens that were here. It was pretty dicey to live in a place like New Braunfels or Bernie when either of the World Wars came along because there were German citizens who were still speaking German down there.

Some of them still do. They were looked on with suspicion.

Robert Hansen

Understandably. So, these extra powers were given at a time when the general public was allowed to look the other way. They were given sort of permission to say, "This is just war time."

John Yearwood

Yes.

Robert Hansen

And that, I think that's a really, really slippery slope.

John Yearwood

No fooling. When does the crisis end? Who makes that decision?

Robert Hansen

Right.

John Yearwood

If you control the media, then the people never get a chance to make that decision, and you never get that freedom back. That gets back to our earlier point about the First Amendment. That's the purpose of the First Amendment, is to protect the freedoms of the people from being taken by a government, which may be at any one particular moment encouraged to do what George W. Bush did.

Launch a war. Just gather up anybody looked Arab and put them in jail, waterboard them. On the one hand, and then on the other hand, you have people from the FBI going on national television saying, "We really need some Farsi speaking people. Is there anybody in the United States who speaks Farsi that would like to come work with us on this?" Do you remember saying that?

Robert Hansen

I was a bit young at the time.

John Yearwood

Oh, of course. This is before your time. I'm sorry.

Robert Hansen

Not before my time. I was a bit young, so I don't remember that detail. But I do remember a number of other things kind of similar.

So, there was this, the Presidential Emergency Action Documents, PEADS, there was, I don't know, I don't think anyone knows other than maybe somebody in the government what the actual number of these documents are. But there's potentially hundreds of these secret laws that we have on the books.

John Yearwood

Yeah. There are.

Robert Hansen

We don't really even have a strong idea of what they are, let alone, like the specific details on how to interpret them. It seems odd to me.

This is one of those things one of my buddies always said, "Well, if you ever want to know that the government or anyone worse than the government doesn't really know what they're doing, just ask them how many laws there are. How many? Give me a number."

This is the reason why that would be impossible. You'd have to disclose things that would actually be impossible to show to the public.

John Yearwood

The public classified documents committing the United States to go to war against certain sorts of behaviors. You mean, there are emergency declarations that are in effect since Richard Nixon. A lot of them having to do with fuel efficiency and in response to the Arab oil crisis. When was that? 1962? Is that right? No, no.

Robert Hansen

I think that's right. 70s.

John Yearwood

It was a little late. 1970. 1972.

Robert Hansen

Remember the long lines and I think that was colored TV did exist at that time.

John Yearwood

Yes.

Robert Hansen

That's kind of my demarcation point.

John Yearwood

Yeah. Before that it's really ancient history. I understand.

Robert Hansen

Well, I can just remember visually. If it's all like monochromatic, but it's kind of yellowish, monochromatic.

John Yearwood

Yes.

Robert Hansen

That's the seventies.

John Yearwood

My brain is one of those, it stores images. One of my images is of the price on a gas pump at ASO station before it changed its name to Exxon, on 24th Street. It was 37.90 cents a gallon for gas in 1971 or 72. And then bam it went to a dollar a gallon. And it's never gone down.

Robert Hansen

It's not going back down.

John Yearwood

It's not going back down.

Robert Hansen

No, it's not.

John Yearwood

In some ways that's a measure of inflation or the devaluation of the dollar. But in other ways it's a measure of how the economy has grown in demand. It could still be sold for that.

Robert Hansen

There's also a lot of tax added to gas. So, some of that's, I'm not sure exactly what the percentage is. So, back to this PEADS thing.

Apparently the church committee after Watergate was the first one to kind of open the books that this thing even existed and what sort of its scope was, and I don't think they published the specifics, but they were able to kind of allude to what might be in some of them.

Seize property and commodities, seize control of transport communications, organize and control the means of production, assign military forces abroad and restrict travel.

John Yearwood

Yeah. Nationally. Inside the borders of the United States.

Robert Hansen

That is basically every power you'd want.

John Yearwood

Right. In direct contravention of the Constitution, which says you can't do that, you can't restrict travel between states.

Robert Hansen

And yet you can.

John Yearwood

Yet, guess what? The feds can do that.

Robert Hansen

Sure can.

John Yearwood

Then the question is, do we want that power taken away from the feds or do we just want it regulated by a vote of the people? If people were really upset about that, it would disappear.

Robert Hansen

I don't think anyone knows. I mean, other than a handful of people like you and who dig in a little bit, I don't think people know that.

John Yearwood

Well, I mean, it doesn't exist by and large. The federal government's not out there manning the borders of Texas saying, you can't come and go. They're not doing that. Although they have the right to do it under that act.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. I think this is how Trump was able to block certain countries from flying in as well, using this same set of laws that we can't see.

John Yearwood

Right. And then declaring the national health emergency, which gave him other rights. I mean, when he made that declaration, he wrote into that declaration certain powers that he was going to be authorized to take, which included isolating people offshore. So, he did.

Robert Hansen

So where does that leave us? What do you think should happen?

John Yearwood

I'd love to have a country by the people and for the people. I think Congress is the place where those decisions need to be made, but I don't think they can be made by an uninformed or ignorant population.

I think in my lifetime, certainly in the last 20 years, we've seen a dramatic decrease in the effectiveness of public education. I think we've seen a growing dependence upon randomized tests of trivia of students to see if they have acquired the proper amount of knowledge to graduate from one grade to another.

Robert Hansen

AS far as I can tell the answer's a hard no. From my point of view, the general failure of public education is that the focus has shifted from critical thinking skills to memorization and discipline. Well, kids are not naturally disciplined, so there does need to be an adult in the room.

But critical thinking, it's written into the curriculum. Now, don't get me wrong, it's written into the curriculum, but the curriculum says you will take this memorized fact and compare it with this memorized fact and using your critical thinking skills, you will write a paragraph saying that you have done so and so, such and such as a result.

Okay. That's a start on critical thinking. But it takes away from the student's agency of expressing and discussing with one another their ideas and testing their ideas against those of other people and carrying on a lively discussion of some kind of interesting fact that leads them to a higher level of comprehension.

The wonderful thing about teaching, and I wish we could encourage more people to be teachers. The wonderful thing about teaching is to watch the daily progress of kids' brains. It's amazing.

They go home on at 3:00 PM on one day, having gone through your class, and they come in the next day it's as though they've made a quantum leap in their ability to think.

I mean, their abilities increase geometrically if you have been engaging them. Kids engage by play and learning needs to be a game. It needs to be fun. It needs to be something you do because it's fun. Not because you're being browbeat or whipped into some standing in a straight line and keeping your shirt tail tucked in. My God, who cares?

Robert Hansen

So, my understanding is some of this came from the No Child Left Behind Act. Is that when you noticed that that started happening? Has this been weld when you got started, because you've been in education for a long time.

John Yearwood

I've been in education for a long time. I've had a career of over 50 years in education. I noticed that that George W. Bush was a really fine governor for the State of Texas, but he was also the governor who started the testing regimen for students on the theory that you could test student knowledge level and determine whether or not the schools were actually teaching kids anything.

Now, I don't know why they thought schools were not teaching kids anything because if you look at the result of now over 20 years, almost 25 years of that kind of testing regimen, you discover that people by and large are a lot more ignorant than they used to be.

Robert Hansen

Especially about things like American history.

John Yearwood

American history.

Robert Hansen

It's strange.

John Yearwood

Yeah. People will go on and say things. I mean, they'll come out and they'll stand up on stage and they'll say, "I'm an American. I can do anything I want." Well, yeah, they can. You can do anything you want in America. You just can't choose the consequences of your behavior.

Well, if you don't have the critical thinking skill to reason ahead from what you do to what is likely to be a consequence of that behavior, you're just ignorant.

Robert Hansen

I think that describes most people. Very ignorant.

John Yearwood

Well, and you drove on MoPac today too, didn't you?

Robert Hansen

Yes, sir.

John Yearwood

The largest collection of idiots in the world outside of Congress are on the highway.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. I try to avoid it when I can, but unfortunately, there's no other way to get here. Not expeditiously anymore.

John Yearwood

The other thing I was daydreaming about was, where's my flying car? Remember when we growing up, the Jetsons had those flying cars?

Robert Hansen

Yeah.

John Yearwood

Can you see teenagers in flying cars?

Robert Hansen

They keep promising us any year now. I think popular Mechanics every single year says the flying cars almost here. It's been wrong every year for the last 50 years.

John Yearwood

The way people drive, can you see them in the air? My gosh.

Robert Hansen

They have to be all computers. Actually, to your point about driving though, I got to say this. There's this meme out there that's, I think, it's a picture of the 405 or somewhere in LA or something, and there's, I don't know, 10 or 15 lanes on one side, 10 or 15 lanes on the other side.

And the meme's just like, "Come on man. Just one more lane, bro. Give me one more lane. All I need is one more lane, bro." That's a good point. A good point.

Robert Hansen

To your point about COVID the children pre and post COVID have lost a huge amount. They've backslid tremendously.

John Yearwood

Yes. They have.

Robert Hansen

I just imagine being a kid and having a social life and having friends and whatever, and suddenly one day you're just stuck at home with your boring or annoying parents for 24 hours a day for the next year. There's nothing about that that's fun. I don't care. I mean, the parents can try, but it's not going to be the same as their friends.

So, even if the kids don't really care about school, exactly, what they do care about is, the interacting with the people around them and just having things to do and talk about and whatever, and study groups and the kind of things that go along with school.

They're kind of accidentally learning if for no other reason, right? Even if they kind of anti-school, they're sort of accidentally learning through osmosis. I think that was probably the best example of why you're right about that. Because if kids aren't having fun, they aren't learning.

John Yearwood

They aren't learning. They're not learning.

Robert Hansen

So, how do we make that more fun? Like what's the process?

John Yearwood

Obviously I'm not the kind of genius that comes up with a solution to that problem. I hope we have somebody in this country.

Robert Hansen

Come out now. I'm sure you have ideas.

John Yearwood

I have some ideas, but as we were saying earlier, you have to throw those ideas out there and let them get in conflict with other ideas and we'll see if something doesn't emerge that makes a better overall solution.

About 100 years ago, in this country, we started looking at education and we decided that we would employ the mass assembly line of principle in education. Well, that had never happened before.

So, we divided up education by subject matter, and then we assign teachers to do subject matter, and then we move the students along as though they're on an assembly line, running them through. Then you get to the end of the century, and people are saying, well, "Let's test our students and see if they're actually developing any skills."

Then everybody doubles down and on the assembly line process, and there you go. Well, when you remove kids from their humanity, which is what that does, you remove them from the learning process. I'm not sure those kids actually didn't learn. They just didn't learn stuff that you could measure. Well, not you individual, but you know that.

Robert Hansen

Well, me too.

John Yearwood

Well, you too. They didn't learn 19th century political theory which they could have if they'd been interested in it. There were some who were individually interested in it and did their own reading. There were some. You know there were?

Robert Hansen

Of course.

John Yearwood

It's a big country.

Robert Hansen

Some people, that's all they can do, is read the books about that.

John Yearwood

I mean, they're not interested in doing anything else. They're people like that.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. Of course.

John Yearwood

But if you have an assembly line process, thank you Henry Ford, if you have an assembly line process, then you're trying to turn education into an industry. Well, it's never been an industry. It's been, education's been going on in the human race for thousands and thousands of years.

It's not until 1920 that we start deciding that, oh, we're going to make an industry out of it and make and just put all these kids on an assembly line and then isolate their learning into a little discrete package. No, it doesn't work that way.

The human brain does not work in terms of discrete packets of information. It works in terms of the ways in which information intersects and interacts and blends and reemerges into new ideas. That froth that you get from that inter-germination of different ideas from different people as well as from the different ideas that you get. That's what's important.

The Brits never gave up on the tutoring system. They too are overburdened with too many kids. So, their tutoring system has begun to devolve into what looks like an American educational system. I sympathize with them.

But the idea that you have a tutor who is knowledgeable in many subjects and who individually supervises a small group of students and helps guide them through learning as a group where they can talk and discuss and develop ideas.

A smart tutor is the most valuable person in your society because the result is literally the industrial revolution. That's where that came from. Those people were the ones went through that system, and they're the ones who created the modern world.

Well, we've got a new world coming on, but we're not prepared for it because we're not educating these kids in a way that will allow them to grow in creativity and express their intelligence and their understanding.

Robert Hansen

I definitely agree with the sentiment of certain people are going to gravitate towards certain subjects.

John Yearwood

They will.

Robert Hansen

They just prefer it. For whatever reasons. Let's not get into why because that's a big rabbit hole. But I definitely look at certain kids and I can tell the books that they're naturally reading that are not on any assignments. They picked it up for whatever reason, because that interests them.

They are not the same books. They all went to the same classes, but their interests are still not the same. They're still gravitating towards different thing. Having a non-bespoke way of teaching people where everything's routinized and everything's the same and everything's cookie cutter and bland.

You're going to make the best out of the mean. You're not going to make the best out of the best. Because the best are going to want to go do something more directly in line with their interest. That's where they're going to gravitate towards.

There's some kids that just really love robotics. They love getting their hands in machines. They like to see how things work.

John Yearwood

And some love to dance.

Robert Hansen

Exactly. Why are you trying to teach them each other's things.

John Yearwood

Some love to play basketball. Hey, those are good things.

Robert Hansen

I think it's important for everyone to have a little bit of all of those things.

John Yearwood

Oh, I agree.

Robert Hansen

Just so that they get exposed to it and understand. "Well, like, that's not for me." It's neat. I'm really good friends with half the people on the baseball team, but it's not for me.

John Yearwood

I'm not going to write a world history of basketball. I'm going to go out there and learn how to make some dunks.

Robert Hansen

Exactly. So, I think I think you're right. At least directionally, right. And I haven't heard any good reasons to the contrary, but I do like the idea of testing people. I like the idea of knowing that, let's say, some percentage. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent anywhere near that.

Let's say 1% of the schools are doing a relatively good job. Because if they're not, and the students are coming out and they're not learning something, okay, we've got a problem. We've got to intervene.

So, I'm thinking, because I really don't know, maybe the idea was they did some testing and came back and like, well, these kids are not at the standard that we'd expect in the other states or other countries or wherever, so that we have to start doing this.

John Yearwood

They haven't learned this degree of information according to our cookie cutter mold. What did they learn? Anybody ask that question? What did they learn? What did they want to learn?

Robert Hansen

How do you test for that though? That's so difficult because I mean, it's literally the entire wealth of all human information.

John Yearwood

Right. Here's the tidal wave coming at us and right now we're calling it ChatGPT. It's artificial intelligence writing college level essays for kids. So, I downloaded the app and I decided I'd play with it and I asked some questions and it answered my questions.

I collected five or six pages on a theme and it was okay. If I had not already known that it was artificial intelligence generating this stuff, and I had not already been familiar with the information I was asking it about, and it had been turned in as a freshman essay to me, I'll probably would've given it a B or a B minus. It was adequate. It wasn't genius, but it was adequate.

Robert Hansen

It passes your term test?

John Yearwood

No. That's the interesting part. Knowing where it came from, I was able to analyze what it did and I realized, among other things, it was just copying stuff off the internet.

Robert Hansen

Which no student has ever done.

John Yearwood

Off the book cover, if I'd been more knowledgeable on that particular subject, I'd have caught it immediately. But the point of that is that's the future of technology. Well, that changes, doesn't do away with education. It changes the way we do education. We have to be prepared for that change.

We have to be smart enough to make that work for us and not against us. So, when you say, I want to test the kids, yeah, I do too, but I want to test them one-on-one.

I want to test them in a classroom where I can watch them answer a question. I don't want to have 65 students that I've got to try to monitor. I've had classes that size.

Robert Hansen

I know some very, very intelligent kids. A question I would ask them to determine whether they're learning things would look completely different than somebody who I thought was, a median level of intelligence.

I wouldn't bother asking them those question because it's irrelevant and vice versa. I'm not sure that these hyper-intelligent kids would get this medium level question because it's kind of more about like popular culture or something.

You know what I mean? It's about like current affairs or something like, "Oh, I don't really watch TV."

John Yearwood

Right. I'm in the stamp collecting no into Seinfeld.

Robert Hansen

You know what I mean?

John Yearwood

Yeah. Not into Seinfeld.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. It's obvious to me anyway, that you have to treat these kids very individually. You have to individualize their schooling and even very young. I think that's true.

John Yearwood

Absolutely. It's probably even more important very young. It's probably more important before age six than it is later. All kids are individuals and that's the point I've been making.

We ended up somehow falling into this idea that an assembly line educational process was going to work for us because it looked like an easy solution to the problem that we were having. But that problem was that we dropped out a bunch of individuals and we ended up depressing in some ways, depressing the more creative kids.

We should have had hundreds of 14-year-olds going to college and getting college degrees. We should have had hundreds of them in the last 20 years. We've got kids that smart in school. Why are they not going? Why are they being held back in their educational systems?

Meanwhile, we have other kids, who have more mental capacities that need to be encouraged and they need to be taught.

Some of them have to be taught how to brush their teeth. I mean, the human population in the United States is very broad but if you focus on the people who have less capacity, on the assumption that the people who have higher capacity don't need that much instruction.

Well, what happens to these people? They don't get the encouragement. They drop out. I mean, the guy who is tested with the highest IQ alive in the United States today raises pigs in Minnesota.

Robert Hansen

He's probably happy as one.

John Yearwood

Well, he looks back on his time and he thinks, "I could have done a lot better job, but I'm okay here." He's got a wife, he raises pigs. He's not using his intelligence. He's using his intelligence to stay alive, but he's not using his intelligence in the way in which it could have potentially changed the world. Could have changed the world.

Robert Hansen

I tend to agree on the very young end what I have seen is children being bucketized into the good kids versus bad kids. Which is very strange because all kids are kind of bad kids. I mean, they're really all pretty bad. It doesn't really matter.

John Yearwood

Yeah. Little barbarians.

Robert Hansen

Terrible.

John Yearwood

I mean, the other name for an elementary school was a bio-terrorism laboratory. My gosh. Every human disease floats freely in the hallways on every surface

Robert Hansen

A polio back in the kindergarten. But what I see is these children that are clearly intelligent, clearly top thinkers about the things they enjoy. Then you sit them down and you try to make them sit in a chair for eight hours.

John Yearwood

Can't do it.

Robert Hansen

I mean, they're just going insane. Like, this is too slow. I already understand this material. I got accused, not that I'm calling myself top level intelligence or anything, but I got accused of always slacking off in class. "He's so smart. You should do better in school."

I hated school. It just wasn't for me. It was a mix of too slow and I always felt like the teachers didn't know what they were really talking about.

If I hadn't had that customized learning where people would really actually cared about me specifically, not just about the cohort of people who I was in class with, I feel like that would've been very different for me and a lot of other people I know.

John Yearwood

There's an old Charlie Brown, a cartoon done by Charles Schultz. Charlie's walking home from school and he says, "The hardest thing in the world, the hardest thing in the world is the burden of a great potential."

Robert Hansen

Yeah. I actually think intelligence and potential due to intelligence or great ability. I think those in the same realm is really more of an adversity than a benefit. Because you really are now forced down a path, and a lot of people really resist.

They don't want to do it and they don't have the mentorship to help them realize why it's so good for them.

John Yearwood

This is going to have geopolitical consequences. The pandemic is going to have geopolitical consequences down the road because there's going to be a strata of students who didn't get the education that they needed at the time that they needed it.

But it should be pointed out that if you take the top 10% of the students, top 10% of the best performing students and assume those are honor students. It's just, arbitrarily call them honor students. They may not be. We'll call them honor students.

There are more honor students in China than there are students in the United States.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. I've seen similar things out of India as well.

John Yearwood

Correct. If we do not have an educational system that is encouraging our students to reach for their universe of creativity so that we can keep up, we are going to be swamped.

Robert Hansen

I am really curious to hear what you think about this. So, I have a number of friends who homeschool children. What do you think about that? 

John Yearwood

I think it's a wonderful idea.

Robert Hansen

Really?

John Yearwood

I do. I think it's a bad idea if you're not very good at being educated yourself. I think that parents know more about their kids' abilities and their intelligences than anybody else. I think that a lot of parents have a very hard time keeping their kids on task.

I think a lot of parents take the easy way out and purchase a curriculum from somewhere that is attempts to do at home. What attempts to build the assembly line process at home.

The same way they do it at school. But if you actually look, as I said earlier, in the show, if you actually look at the long history of human education, that's where it occurred. It occurs in the home or it occurs as they get older.

It occurs with tutors. In medieval England, I don't know why I keep going back to England. I know England better than other countries. In medieval England your son got to be six or seven years old, you shipped him off to your neighbor 30 miles away. The neighbor shipped his son to you so that there was not that familial bond between you. The kid grew up in a different house being taught different skills from each family.

Well, it helped create a tighter bond between the families, which was extremely useful particularly in times of warfare. But it also removes that familial blockage that you get when you have a parent trying to deal with a kid. When you have a parent who's trying to deal with his or her own kid.

The kid doesn't want to make his bed in the morning. Then instead of teaching the kid how to read, or how to tell a story, or how to draw a picture, or how to act out a line of literature or what do we need to know from a mathematical point of view to determine how much the weight of the rain was that fell yesterday on our farm.

The weight. How much? It is two inches. How much did it weigh? What do we need to know? How do we solve that problem? That's creative thinking. Instead, you're worried because kid didn't make his bed up. Or didn't finish his breakfast. Or hasn't yet taken the garbage out. Where's the education?

Robert Hansen

Agreed. I have seen a hybrid model where, I haven't seen this much, but a handful of families will band together and get one very good teacher, presumably, to teach their four or five children in a small cluster. I don't know what the right word for that would be. Little cohort of kids. The idea being they grow together. They're a team.

It's not like they're at home with their parents. It's not like they don't have social interaction. It's a very, very, very small school. But I've also read studies that seem to conflict a little bit with that theory. Where it doesn't matter what the classroom size is. Basically that's a misnomer. A class could be 500 people or five people. It really doesn't seem to matter very much.

Statistically doesn't move the needle enough to make it matter. Then I think what you're really betting on is that that teacher is the cream of the crop. That's the best teacher out there. I don't know how you vet that exactly. Sounds like another test.

John Yearwood

That's another test? Well, I'm not saying testing is wrong.

Robert Hansen

A lot of money to be made in testing.

John Yearwood

Certainly not a lot of money to be made in testing in Texas done the way it is. A lot of friends made a lot of money from their friends.

Robert Hansen

Any thoughts on how we might fix all this big old mess of education?

John Yearwood

Of course. I'm fond of ideas. None of them are really genius level. But it's pretty obvious to me that individual attention to students makes a much more difference to what they learn and how they learn it. Than just sticking them in the back of the classroom and saying, do this, do this, do this. Don't speak to me. I've been in classes like that.

Robert Hansen

Getting rid of the standardized testing in general.

John Yearwood

Getting rid of the sage on stage thing. Where it's the teacher delivering the information to the student, and the student trying to copy it down. In all of my years of teaching, what I realized is that 90% of the time, students are studying the teacher. They're not listening to what the teacher says.

They're studying the teacher because what they want to know is, why is this person interested in this subject? If you're not interested in that subject, you better not be teaching it. Because that's your job. Your job as a teacher is to help the students understand why this is interesting for you.

Robert Hansen

Funny though. I don't disagree that that doesn't work at education level, let's say ninth grader or below. I think that definitely. But as we get older, that's exactly what we end up doing. We go to conferences. We'll have the sage on stage, who's teaching all of us how to do cardiovascular surgery. Or here's how to break into websites in a more interesting way.

Or even in law school, for instance, you'll have the Socratic method of the teacher who's just picking on individuals until they can come up with a concise reason why their case is correct or wrong. I think maybe that's the type of education that adults, they are exposed to in their daily life. They expect that that would probably translate back to an era that they don't remember being a child in that seat and getting antsy after two hours sitting there listening to the same person talk over.

John Yearwood

Well. You bring up the idea of the Socratic Method. Well, it's been a very effective teaching method for 2500 years. It's still a very effective teaching method. The nature of the Socratic dialogue is it's a one-on-one exchange. Socrates proposes an idea. He says, “What do you think about it?” Then he says, “Why do you think that?” Then he says, “Let's take a look at your first premise. You said, now, why did you say that? What do you think justifies that premise?”

Robert Hansen

Why do you think you said that about that? Investigating, interrogating the language.

John Yearwood

Not just the language. But also helping to develop the mind of the student in a one-to-one exchange. Even if there's a group of people standing around listening to this.

Robert Hansen

I say language because of the word can't. I rail on this fairly regularly. People say I can't do X, I can't do Y. They can. Why did you say you can't? What am I trying to actually say here by saying these words? A lot of times it is language. But your point is absolutely valid? Yes. It's more than language.

John Yearwood

Right. That is a valid traditional system of education. It's extremely useful and extremely effective. Honestly, I don't know how it would translate to calculus. I wonder.

Robert Hansen

It's probably how calculus was invented actually.

John Yearwood

Well, actually Sir Isaac Newton, he invented calculus. I've got some stories to tell you about Isaac Newton if you're interested.

Robert Hansen

But Isaac Newton, the man who is completely right about everything and also completely wrong at the same time. It’s interesting.

John Yearwood

I mean, Halley's Comet is named after the guy who rescued Newton's work from obscurity. Edmund Halley became Isaac Newton's friend and companion. He walked into Isaac Newton's upper storey of rooms which were over the main gate at Trinity College in Cambridge on the second floor where he could get plenty of sunlight to do his work with prisms. The place was an absolute jumble of papers. Halley said, “What's all this?”

He said, “Oh, it's just some calculations I have been doing. I’ve been figuring out gravity. I figured out gravity. I figured out prisms. I figured out light refraction. I figured out angles.” Haley pulled it all together. That's how the Principia Mathematica got published. It's the single most important scientific book maybe to ever be published. Maybe ever to be published. But Newton himself was really not a very pleasant person to be around. He's this tall. Curio cane. Beat people with it.

Robert Hansen

I think Socrates was also renowned for smelling bad and yelling at people.

John Yearwood

I'm convinced this is why the Greeks finally got rid of him.

Robert Hansen

He’s my spirit animal. I'm just going to stop bathing right now. That’s great.

John Yearwood

He won't take a bath. Let’s kill him.

Robert Hansen

It's not a bad point. I might have to use that.

John Yearwood

Yeah now we've wandered off. I'm thinking about Isaac Newton. I'm sorry. Oh, I don't know where we were.

Robert Hansen

I love Isaac Newton. He's a great guy.

John Yearwood

I spent a year in Trinity College, Cambridge.

Robert Hansen

That's why you think about England all the time because you've been there.

John Yearwood

I’ve spent a year there. I spent a year in the Wren Library at Trinity College. Christopher Wren, who also is the architect for St. Paul's in downtown London, among other many famous buildings. He built this library. It's a beautiful library. It is 40 feet wide. It is 40 feet tall. It is 120 feet long. After several months of ingratiating myself to the library staff, I was finally given permission.

Which has almost never happened with anybody else who hasn't been an employee. Permission to wander through the library and look at things. They have one of the most outstanding collection of manuscripts in the world. Handwritten copies of points by Milton and Tennyson. Not just first edition. This is stuff that was written from the pins as they were holding at the time.

Robert Hansen

Was that 0thedition?

John Yearwood

This is the original. This is what got sent to the printer. This is what got written before the final version got written to be sent to the printer. All of Isaac Newton's books are collected. They are in the library. There's a nook, it's about the size of this room, lined with bookcases.

It's all these books that belonged to Isaac Newton. And his death mask. Because that was typical in those days. If he dies and goes in the grave, we’ll never remember what he looked like. That is, what shall we call it? An idea that has outlived its usefulness.

Robert Hansen

Now we have Facebook. YouTube.

John Yearwood

Facebook pages that never go away. All his books are there. His walking stick is there. You can tell basically how tall he was from how short the stick was. Genius man. Absolutely genius man. Probably crazy late in life. Certainly a very unpleasant person. I made a friend who was studying physics at another one of the Cambridge colleges, who said, “Can I come over and visit the Wren Library and just get a tour with you? Can you walk me around? Show me what's going on?”

I said, “Yeah, sure. Come on.” I mentioned it to the librarians, wonderful staff. Absolutely wonderful staff at the library. “I have this friend who is coming over from Keys or somewhere and studies physics. He wants to see the Isaac Newton stuff. Is there anything else in the library you think he might be interested to see?” The librarian said, “Sure.” The sub librarian. Trevor, that’s his name. Trevor said, “Sure. When is he coming?” I said, “10 o'clock tomorrow morning.” He said, “No problem.”

At 10 o'clock the next morning, my friend shows up. We walk around the library. It is beautiful. It's got checkered marble floors, beautiful wood carvings by Grinling Gibbons. It's a 40 foot soaring ceiling. It's just an absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous place. We got all the way back to the back corners on the far backside on the right. On the table, the librarian had laid out a couple of things that he thought my friend would be interested in seeing as a physicist.

One of them was the manuscript of the opening pages of the Mathematica Principia. One page. They had all of it, and he just put out one page. Next to it was a letter from Albert Einstein. Right there, 500 years of the most brilliant minds in physics in the history of mankind.

Robert Hansen

Math and physics. It goes to both.

John Yearwood

Einstein is the guy who revolutionized Newtonian physics. It just changed the way we thought. It's fascinating. Yeah, I love that those kinds of events can happen. As you can tell, I'm fairly passionate about this stuff. I will help educate you by raising your interest and sparking your sense of wonder and creativity. Because that's what a teacher does.

Robert Hansen

I actually like that a lot. Well, I disagree with you, sir. That's what a good teacher does. I've met a lot of teachers who are not of that caliber.

John Yearwood

Some of the most sadistic, fill in the blank, I've ever met were teachers. And some of the most boring people.

Robert Hansen

The kind of teacher I think is both great and terrible at the same time, because they're the best in the world at it. And they're the worst teachers of it. They will say, “Here's the thing I have to teach you. This is the curriculum I've created. You don't know it, you fail.” It's like, what? Not everybody is going to pick up every concept as quickly as you want them to pick it up. Some people, they'll burst.

They'll pick it up really quickly, and then they'll low. I've definitely seen teachers who have just taught too many people. They probably should have retired 10, 20 years earlier because their passion is gone. Their passion for teaching is gone. But very good teachers, I've had a few of them that I can remember off the top of my head that were just, they were so passionate about it that it was infectious. Not necessarily in subjects that I would normally gravitate towards. It was refreshing to see that.

John Yearwood

A teacher who treats students with dignity, and compassion, and understanding. Who is genuinely interested in the subject will be a good teacher. That teacher will be a good teacher.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. In the college context, I would say that the biggest delta were the ones who were willing to meet with me afterwards. Those were almost always better teachers just on the whole. They made themselves available. They wanted to talk to you. They wanted to tell you some cool things about what's going on. It was a passion for them.

John Yearwood

A good teacher recognizes the fact that just because the person happens to be 19 years old, doesn't mean they haven't come up with some pretty good ideas of their own. Maybe we can share some stuff here and I can learn something. As a teacher, I can learn something. One of the other things at Trinity College is a manuscript which actually was written by a 19 year old student at Trinity College, and won the Nobel Prize.

It was the first. A description of the way in which cold temperatures affect electronic transmissions. He'd been skiing in the Alps and realized that his battery in his flashlight lasted longer at altitude in the cold than it lasted when it was down. He ran some tests. He wrote it up. He figured it out. He did the mathematics. 63 pages later, he was finished. He had a Nobel Prize as well as a degree from Trinity College. People like that exist. Some of them exist in Austin, Texas.

Robert Hansen

I remember I ran into this one guy. He was very high up in the security industry when I started. He was already quite in the little thing there. He was very good in mathematics. Individual super good at cryptography specifically. I asked him, “I know, you're past school now. But what grade would you be if you were still in school?” He's trying to do the math. He's like, “26th I think.” I’m like, “Fair enough.” There's just those people out there. He's a really, really fascinating guy actually. Well, let's talk about your book.

John Yearwood

Some of what we've been talking about applies to the book.

Robert Hansen

I think so. Exactly. First of all, give us some premise. How did you come up with this idea? What is it?

John Yearwood

There are a couple of things you probably ought to know before we actually get into talking about the book. One of them is that the stories that are in the book are mostly true. You can't tell everything that you know. I changed names, changed locations. I invented a fictitious town, fictitious county, fictitious characters.

But the ribs of the story, the skeleton of the story are all true events. The story is about a series of murders that occurs in East Texas. It's not really a mystery. You really know who is doing all of this. The question is, why is he doing it? That's what the story is about. Why is he doing this stuff? It's hard to peg as a murder mystery.

I don't think I would call it a murder mystery. But it is true crime in that sense. I was a newspaper reporter in this area. I owned a newspaper. You have no idea what owning a small town newspaper is like, except that you get to know everybody and their dogs.

Robert Hansen

Literally. Actual dogs. Not a euphemism for something.

John Yearwood

Literally. Actual dogs. Their pickups and the license plates on their pickups. In a small town, you might as well live in a glass house. Because what people don't know about you, they'll make up. There's really no difference between that and living in an actual glass house. It's a community. That's the way we are as a community.

The story is about a series of murders. I follow the career of the villain up to a certain point. The narrator of the story is a newspaper reporter whose job is not an enviable one. I think people don't understand how hard it is to be a journalist.

Robert Hansen

Can you tell us why?

John Yearwood

Yeah, well, for one thing, it's the long hours. The hours really are long. But also the money, it's hard. The old saying is, ‘in January publishers eat snow.’ Well, yeah, they do because they got all their money at Christmas time from the ads. The merchants have spent all the money they have on advertising in December. You don't have any advertising.

You have to have advertising to support the newspaper. It's a matter of squeaking through. Squeaking through. Cutting corners over and over and over. One of the ways in which you do that is you save a lot of money. You do a lot of work. You're not on a 40 hour workweek. You're on a 100 hour workweek.

Robert Hansen

Especially if you own it.

John Yearwood

If you own it. You feel a constant gnawing at your back. I was fortunate in the way that I got set up. My situation with my newspapers. Not the situation this character has. But it is in East Texas. One of the things I tried to do is capture the folksy community spirit of the place. How those people respond to a world in which fatal things can happen to you from any direction.

The world itself in East Texas can be pretty dangerous. But no more dangerous there than it is in West Texas or Sweetwater Texas famed for its rattlesnakes. They have a Miss Rattlesnake contest every year. 

The girls who are in it are always beautiful. Then they have rattlesnake chili. They have rattlesnake sausage. The rattlesnakes are a metaphor for the danger of nature. No matter how advanced we become as human beings, we still live in a nature that can be fairly dangerous to us.

But we have more to fear from one another sometimes. In order to protect ourselves from one another, we have to develop this mask that we use in our relationships. The purpose of the mask is to separate us from one another. When you enter a place, you go through this ritual. As a man, when you meet another man, you go through this ritual, where you have to put on your mask. You have to appear to be someone who cannot be intimidating.

It's the tilt of the chin and the direction of the eye and the sound of the voice. “How's it hanging Joe?” You better have an answer for that one. “I don't know let me check,” is probably not the correct answer.

Robert Hansen

“Do you want to check?” is even a worse answer.

John Yearwood

Do you want to check?

Robert Hansen

I wouldn't recommend that one. Guys don't take that one well.

John Yearwood

There is this little ritual if you go through. Then once you get through the ritual, the masks are off and you can be honest and open with wandering, sitting shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, drink coffee, tell jokes, have a great time. But there's always that introductory. It can happen every day with the same people. Every day with same people.

But sometimes you run into people who are not people that you are familiar with. Well, then you go through the ritual. The mask doesn't come off. You circle one another, trying to figure one another out. What is this person really saying? Everybody at that point, everybody tries to look tough and dangerous. Everybody.

Robert Hansen

I certainly met people like that. Absolutely.

John Yearwood

It's easy to find them in Texas, I think. But in East Texas, there's that little ritual that you go through.

Robert Hansen

Is it easier to find those people in East Texas versus Downtown Austin?

John Yearwood

I don't know. I'm not sure. There are bars in Austin where you would better be prepared to leave if you read the room and decided you weren't welcome. There are places like that. But in East Texas and these little small communities in East Texas, where people have been basically isolated for 100 years or more, the town is that way.

Sometimes the whole town is that way. It takes a while to get to the point where you are familiar enough to them, that they will relax a little around you and open up. You can become friends with them.

Robert Hansen

They're cordial. They're just distant.

John Yearwood

Well, that's one way to put it. But it's also this kind of macho, I'm tougher than you, attitude. I'll give you an example.

Robert Hansen

Were they tougher? Could you have taken them? I'm just being funny.

John Yearwood

I would not. To them the answer is yes. I had a little sign I put on my desk that said, ‘I'm too fat to run and too big to hide. You know where to find me.’ I'll tell you what I did. The new sheriff was going through. It was a dry county. You weren't supposed to sell alcohol in the county. Just recently changed. I mean, it's no longer a dry county, but it's only recently changed.

The sheriff was going through. He would go down to certain sections of town. He would bust people for selling alcohol out of the trunks of their car. He'd end up with 30 or 40 cases of beer. Then he’d take it out to the dump. All the deputies would go out and lineup out there and have target practice at the different bottles and cans of beer.

Robert Hansen

I'm sure a few went missing as well.

John Yearwood

No one counted. I went and bought myself a 45 Long Colt, 45 caliber Long Colt pistol revolver. Smith and Wesson, six inch barrel. Hog leg. It is a hog leg of a pistol. I practiced with it. Shot maybe 1000 rounds through it. Then one day he said, “Well, we're going out to shoot the beer at the county dump.” I said, “I'd like to come along”

He said, “Okay.” Up until then I had been shaky in my relationship with all of them. I went out there. I took some pictures of them shooting beer cans. Then I pulled my gun out. I shot six cans of beer off a hill at 30 yards. From that point on, I noticed they were very cooperative.

Robert Hansen

You were one of them.

John Yearwood

I was one of them. You do go through those initiation rites I think.

Robert Hansen

I definitely know what you're talking about. It doesn't really happen to me that often these days. I think maybe it's because I've got a bit of a reputation. I don't know. Or I'm a pretty affable person and I don't really care. They wanted to post up. I'm like, “Okay, fine. I guess you can beat me up. Anyway, can we have this meeting?”

Or I don't really care and we move on. Or I really think that a lot of that is insecurity. When I just stopped caring immediately, then they're like, “Oh, you're not going to do that back.” I'm like, “No, I don't really care. Can we just keep talking? You see me interesting. 

What's your story?” Very quickly those boundaries just grow permeable.

John Yearwood

I agree. It's an insecurity thing. But the fact that it occurs every single day with the same people, it's interesting to me.

Robert Hansen

The barriers come back up.

John Yearwood

They come back up. Then you have to go through the whole little ritual again. Somewhere, I've described it as human equivalent of dogs sniffing butts over and over. My dogs do it all the night. They know those dogs that are out there. They'll do it anyway. It's a social pattern. Fascinating.

Robert Hansen

What if that's a learned behavior? That does not sound like normal. Because normally you see the same person 50 times. You're like, “Oh, that's Joe. Hey. How’re you doing Joe?”

John Yearwood

The same pickup and the same cigarette butts. Well, one of the things about East Texas that just drives West Texans absolutely crazy is there's no horizon. My brother in law is from San Angelo. You drive into East Texas. He can stay there for about 30 minutes before he starts looking around sort of wild eyed because he can't see anywhere.

There's nothing but trees. Far as you can look, there's nothing but trees. There's no place you can go except more trees. You climb the top of the water tower and you can see trees. But you can't see land. There's no horizon.

Robert Hansen

Coming from California, that is a weird thing. Because normally you navigate by a mountain or the ocean. You really don't have that. I mean, downtown Austin, there's a lot more. There's some geography. There's some movement of the hill country in some areas. But I know that area you're talking about. It's just goes on forever and ever.

John Yearwood

The other thing about East Texas is it is an uneasy marriage between West Texas independence, that sense of West Texas independence and a deep South nostalgic longing for a forgotten aristocracy.

Robert Hansen

Aristocracy of what kind? What do you mean?

John Yearwood

The planters were aristocratic. They were the American aristocracy. They were so wealthy that nothing mattered. Kind of like the oil barons in Houston today. Just so wealthy that there was nothing that they needed. There was no way in which they could be circumvented, if there was something they wanted.

Robert Hansen

It sounds a little bit like an appeal towards authoritarianism. That's interesting. It's weird they were passed down generationally like that.

John Yearwood

Well, the other thing about East Texas is that it is isolated. It is just very difficult to get anywhere in East Texas. There are very few roads even in Texas, that go east and west. There are what, two interstates across the state, east and west.

Robert Hansen

You can spend all day on one and still be in Texas.

John Yearwood

I mean, Texas basically begins at Beaumont on the eastern border with Louisiana and it goes 840 miles to El Paso. Well, Beaumont, as it turns out, is midway between Jacksonville, Florida and El Paso. It’s a big state.

Robert Hansen

Texas is a big state.

John Yearwood

Texas is a big state. It has a lot of different little cultures in it. But the ones in East Texas because of the isolation, and because of the transportation problems, the flow of people has not ever been very great. People don't move in.

Robert Hansen

Why would you? Is there any industry or natural resources?

John Yearwood

There’s timber. Timber. In the county where we live and where my wife grew up, it is 95% timber. It is 1000 square miles, and it is 95% timber. That 5% includes all the paved roads, all the parking lot of which there are a few. All fields of hay.

Robert Hansen

How many people are in this town?

John Yearwood

Well, the town in the book, there's 1800. In the town she grew up there was 2200 maybe. It's similar in that regard. Small place. It’s a small place. There are more people in the street than there are in that town. In the street where we are. The people there have been there for generations because nobody has moved out. Their kids grow up and move out.

Sometimes they'll come back to raise their own kids because they had a good time as kids growing up. They do. Or they inherit property there and they come back to manage it. But basically, the town where she grew up, the population didn't change by as much as 100 people for over 100 years. Steady state.

Robert Hansen

That must mean people are egressing. They're leaving. If they're adventurous, or military, they just leave. Because naturally they would have some population growth otherwise.

John Yearwood

Otherwise yeah. There are babies being born. As they grow up, they go off to college, and then they stay off usually. Or they go in the military as you say. Or they go to Houston to look for a job. They go offshore working on oil rigs. But for the most part, the only business in that area is timber.

Timber can be a fairly brutal industry. A lot of really good people make their living cutting trees and planting them again. It's a viable and wealthy business. But if it rains, you don't cut timber. Because you can't get your trucks into the woods. Well, it rains all the time. It rains all the time. They'll never be a drought in East Texas. Never.

Robert Hansen

It's pretty close to the ocean there.

John Yearwood

Where we were was about 70 miles inland. An hour drive basically from the ocean. It is rolling grass plains from that point on down to the ocean. Hills suddenly rise. It's like there's a rim of hills round around that area. Used to be a 100 million acres. It's called the Big Thicket. I don't know the actual geology would bear this out, but if you look at the Gulf of Mexico, it looks like a huge crater from some asteroid strike.

Robert Hansen

Or mass erosion of some sort.

John Yearwood

You can find oil down 30,000 feet so something happened. Those were all living organisms at one time. But you go inland about 80 miles and you run into a line of hills. It's about 750 to 950 feet above sea level. That's the highest point between the Gulf of Mexico and the Ozarks in Arkansas.

Robert Hansen

Very flat.

John Yearwood

But there's that line of hills. If you look at the territory south of that line of hills, for example, it has every species of hardwood tree that grows in America, grows there.

Robert Hansen

Even redwoods?

John Yearwood

No. Those are not hardwoods. Redwoods are a conifer.

Robert Hansen

Wow. I didn't realize it.

John Yearwood

27 different species of oaks. Dozens of unique orchids. Cacti growing next to orchids. Growing next to Trillium. It's an absolutely incredible place. 390 species of birds. It's unbelievable the natural wealth of the place. That wealth survived largely because it was inaccessible.

People managed to carve out, literally chop out a place to put some farms and grow little corn and at one time cotton. But the rest of the time they were cutting timber and selling it down the river to Beaumont where it became the lumber that builds the rest of America. But they didn't build. They sent the lumber to those places.

What I'm talking about is a place called The Big Thicket. The Big Thicket has been designated by the United Nations as a unique biosphere, 107 I think, on the planet. The United States has created a National Preserve down there. It's really fascinating. I urge people to go and look at it. Two kinds of carnivorous plants.

Robert Hansen

To put your finger in it.

John Yearwood

Mommy look.

Robert Hansen

In this ecosystem, you have these characters who are very isolated. I think that's probably what we're going for.

John Yearwood

Yes. They're isolated from the rest of the world. The only updates they have on the way the world is going are through pretty limited television access. That was pretty scratchy. A lot of static in the television reception.

Robert Hansen

What time was this? 60s?

John Yearwood

The book is set in the late 70s, early 80s. In the county where I had the newspaper, there were two stoplights. 1000 square miles, two stoplights. Two stoplights. There were within one block of one another. No, I'm not kidding. Literally on the street that ran in front of the courthouse for one block. There was a stoplight and then there was a stoplight. That was it. There were no other stoplights in the county.

Robert Hansen

The judge was tired of having his car hit.

John Yearwood

The town had always been poor. They bought the stoplights from another town that had decided to upgrade. Those are stoplights that were put in in the 1950s and are still in operation. Still using those incandescent bulbs. Every once in a while, they'll send somebody out in a truck and change the bulbs out because they burned out. It's fascinating. Things don't move quickly in East Texas.

The people don't move around quickly. Ideas don't float very quickly. It's an interesting culture. That was the kind of culture I tried to capture in this book. Capture through the eyes of the newspaper reporter who's not from there. He comes and moves in. He's observing this world. The villain of the book is a kid who drops out of high school. If you drop out of school, if you just give up with school, then you're condemned to a life of ignorance. That’s worse than a prison sentence.

As they say, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Well, some people do. That's what they choose. The result is they miss out on critical thinking skills that they might have been able to develop if they had been paying any attention. Or if they'd had a teaching system, an educational system to help them or encourage them to do that. The result of not having critical thinking skills is that you just go through life reacting to things.

As I said earlier, you can do anything in this country you want to do. You're free to do anything you want to do. But you're not free to choose the consequences of your behavior. Unless you have critical thinking skills, you can't figure out what those consequences are. He doesn't. Well, I'm going to cut to the chase here on this character. This is the part of the story that is based on actual events.

The villain decides he's going to go next door and steal food from his neighbor because he's hungry. He thinks he sees her drive off. He knows he sees her drive off. He assumes she's going to be gone for a while. He goes over and breaks into her house and starts going through the refrigerator. Well unknown to him, she comes back with her two year old daughter in tow. He kills both of them, puts their bodies in the trunk of her car and drives off and drops the bodies about 40 miles away in an abandoned barn.

Then he drives back to her house, leaves her car, goes back inside, steals two pound package of frozen meat from her refrigerator. As he's about to leave, he looks around and he sees a jar of pennies sitting on the counter. He decides to grab that jar of pennies. It was that piece of evidence that ended up sending this man to the death chamber in Huntsville. He was executed for it. He was the first person executed in 2000 in the state of Texas. That's a true story.

Robert Hansen

The thinking it takes to want to go back after all of that. The money makes sense at least. But why would you go back to the scene of the crime?

John Yearwood

Then to steal food. Well he was still hungry. This happens to people. People who don't acquire the education that we're trying to get them, they end up like this.

Robert Hansen

Would you describe this person as mentally insane? Or were they just very ignorant? Or drugs? Or what was the mentality?

John Yearwood

Well, he may have had some brain damage from an accident. That in fact happened to the real guy. But it had been 40 years or 20 years after the accident that he committed the crime. One of the things that stuck with me about that story is that I met this guy. At my newspaper, we had a distribution manager. I would go for two days without sleep, getting the paper together. Maybe an hour of sleep.

Then on Tuesday night, we send it to the press. On Wednesday morning when the distribution manager would collect it, he'd bag up the papers that had to be mailed out. Then he would drive around the county putting up the papers in the coin racks to be sold to the public. Well, on this particular morning, he called me up at about 4am. He said, “John, the press broke down. We're not going to make the deadline to get to the post office unless we get some more help down here.”

I said, “I'm on my way.” He said, “I've got some people I can hire. Do you mind if I add some extra work? I can call them in at four in the morning. But I need you to come in.” I said, “Yeah, sure.” I pulled on my jeans and T shirt, went down there to help them bag the papers and get them addressed. You have to address all these papers in these big mail sacks. There's a limit to how much the sacks can weigh. The post office has all these regulations.

One of the people that he had called was his son who was working. I came in. I met him. I spoke with him. I watched him work. I watched the others work. I figured they were all doing their job. I would do my part. They would do their part. We got the paper out. We got it distributed. Everything was fine. Well, the son is the one who ends up being the murderer. I had that personal connection with him. I don't know how many people have met a murderer in person before he commits the murder. But I did.

Robert Hansen

What was your impression?

John Yearwood

He was a large man. He was large, shaggy looking. Not shaggy in the sense of messy, unkempt or anything. Just one of those people whose posture was, his arms just hung down by the side. He was friendly enough. Didn't strike me as being a genius.

Robert Hansen

Hardworking?

John Yearwood

Yeah. He did. He worked hard. He was hard working. I was glad he was there. But because he was doing his job, I didn't have to pay any attention to him. I just remember. But then, about 30 minutes later, my distribution manager comes to me. He says, “I know you got a little girl at home.” I did. I have a seven year old daughter.

He said, “I hate to say this about my son. But no matter what happens, do not let your daughter get close to my son. Keep her away.” Oh, well, that's the kind of thing that a young dad, I think I was 34 at that time. It is the kind of thing a young dad remembers.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. I would remember that too.

John Yearwood

You think through your head, okay, the daughter is home. Her mother's there. Everything's fine. I know I locked the door when I left.

But then the next day, then the next day, then the next day. Then a year later. Two years later. 10 years later. Then the murder occurs. Then he gets arrested. I go, “Oh, my God. I knew this guy.”

Robert Hansen

You had a warning too. It's not just that you knew him.

John Yearwood

I had a warning. Somebody knew that he was a person who needed to be watched.

Robert Hansen

Did you find out why?

John Yearwood

I mean, his dad said he'd been in a car accident. He had rolled his pickup truck. He thinks he may have suffered some brain damage because his personality changed after the wreck. So, maybe that's what happened. I loved his dad. The rest of his family's just wonderful.

Robert Hansen

There are some circuits, like the inhibition circuits and rage circuits that are kind of vaguely related to one another that have gone out or whatever.

John Yearwood

Oh yeah. Who knows what kind of brain damage it would take to knock something like that out. I mean, I'm not a neurosurgeon, I don't know what areas of brain got injured and I wasn't there. I don't know what kind of accident he actually suffered.

Robert Hansen

It tends to usually be a frontal or back just because that's how people are traveling. So, a lot of brain trauma is very similar to one another because of that fact.

John Yearwood

Right. If you have brain trauma to the front of your forehead, you're also losing some logical capacity, or the potential to lose some logical capacity.

Robert Hansen

And very often if you have it in the front, you also have it in the back, because your brain kind of sloshes around there. So, it's often pretty similar.

John Yearwood

So, it was an awful thing. And it's just something that stuck with me. Now it's been 20 years later and I've written a book about it.

Robert Hansen

This really stuck with you.

John Yearwood

It really stuck with me.

Robert Hansen

Because this could have been you and your family.

John Yearwood

Yes, it could have. It wouldn't have, but it could have. I paid a lot of attention to how my family was situated. Somebody could have broken in, but I don't think that would've happened without some different circumstances.

We didn't live out in the country, for example like they did. I was always careful to know my neighbors and for my neighbors to know me. And I had a dog. Teeth, right? Canines are useful.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. Those strong jaws.

John Yearwood

And noisy. They're noisy little.

Robert Hansen

Well, that's a pretty incredible story. So, does your story also follow the evidence chain as well?

John Yearwood

Yes, it does. And how it all came about and what happens. This was so hard on the woman's husband. It was so hard, because automatically the first thing a law enforcement person will do is say, "Well, you're our prime suspect." Your wife disappeared and your kids disappeared.

So, you're the prime suspect because you're the last one to see them. It's so hard. I mean, when you know that it wasn't you. Are they looking for anybody else? Because they've already said, "You're our suspect." Are they looking for anybody else?

Given what we know about the people who end up in law enforcement, sometimes they don't look for other people. A lot of that depends on your social standing and on how long you've lived in the neighborhood. I mean, it just does.

Robert Hansen

Whether they shot cans that day or not. Coming home a little sloppy. That kind of thing does occur sometimes.

John Yearwood

Right. It was awful. It was awful from every aspect. It was awful from every angle you can look at it. Particularly awful for the husband who lost his wife and daughter. The wife had never, never been taller than 4ft 11. And this guy who's in the book, he's called Jesse Grinder, and this guy he's 6'4".

Robert Hansen

Wow. It's a monster.

John Yearwood

Yeah. He's been working in the woods. So, he's been picking up 400 pound logs. I mean, he's muscular. He knows what he's doing. Well, he doesn't know what he's doing. He has strength. He has physical strength.

He survived up to this point in his life because he had physical strength and he didn't mind doing boring work. But again, he was a high school dropout. Not every high school dropout ends up murdering somebody and being executed by the state of Texas, thank God.

Robert Hansen

Jinx. Chris geez.

John Yearwood

It could be worse. So, there's that. Well, another major character in the book is Charles Henagar. Charles Henagar is a retired Air Force colonel. People don't hear about the Special Forces unit in the Air Force as much as they do about the...

Robert Hansen

Those are like PJs, is that right?

John Yearwood

Well, they're commandos. They're literally Air Force Commandos. That's what they're called. You have the Army Rangers and people hear about the Army Ranger, and you have the seals, and people hear about the Navy Seals. You don't hear about the air command. Well, what they do is they rescue pilots, basically.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. PJ's, right? Isn't that the other name for them?

John Yearwood

Yeah. Well, that's what he was, but he was a colonel. So, he was way up there. He retires. He's 42. He's retired. He'd been previously married. His wife dies. He's got an extensive family in about 20 miles or 40 miles away in east Texas and he's got his master's degree from some northern college in political science.

He decides he's going to do what his wife wants, would've wanted him to do. He's got a nice retirement income. So, he moves to this little town and puts it in an application to be a high school teacher, and they hire him. He's black.

So, he has to deal with all of the racial stereotypes that are so prevalent throughout Texas, but certainly in East Texas. He also has to learn how to teach. He has this commitment to teaching because he realizes that the only way war will ever end is if you have intelligent people.

If you have educated people. That war is a result of ignorance and stupidity. It's always a result of ignorance and stupidity.

Robert Hansen

And a vicious desire for power.

John Yearwood

And a vicious desire for power.

Robert Hansen

Sometimes straight up disregard or hatred for other people. Sometimes it's literally really just hatred.

John Yearwood

Sometimes it is. The Balkans are a good example of that. The war in Ukraine is a good example of that. It's just hatred.

Robert Hansen

I mean, why this part of this story? Why now? Is this relevant to what actually happened or is this more of a commentary? Like why that part of the story?

John Yearwood

Well, I decided I needed a character who would balance the villain, the Jesse Grinder. I decided that I would take a person who was absolutely the opposite in all regards.

So, I created Charles Henagar an educated black man who feared nobody could not be intimidated, had an officer's bearing, and was willing to submit himself to the terrors of the classroom.

A lot of people would get pretty scared in a high school classroom if they weren't fairly secure themselves, and with good reason. Because 16, 17-year-olds can be pretty intimidating. They can be frightening.

Robert Hansen

You just need to have a gun on you. They'll calm down.

John Yearwood

Or they need to understand that if they're carrying a gun, it's not going to help them.

Robert Hansen

That's right. Exactly.

John Yearwood

Being an exceptionally fit and intelligent person who wants his students to succeed and to think and he figures out ways to make the learning fun, and so there's some examples of him doing that.

On the one hand, and on the other hand, dealing with the racial prejudice that crops up all the time over there. Personally, I think it balanced out pretty well.

I think those are diametrically opposed people, and at the end of the book he's the one who helps subdue the villain. And the Jar of Pennies is what helps send the villain to them.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. You mentioned that before. So, what about the pennies was the linchpin?

John Yearwood

Well, it was finally found in his possession.

Robert Hansen

I see.

John Yearwood

Yeah. He didn't throw the jar away. They found the jar. It had her fingerprints on it. So, there you are.

Robert Hansen

It's about as much of a smoking gun as you can ask for.

John Yearwood

Well, and once they had that, he confessed. So, they had a confession. You can't confess to capital murder charge. It has to be proved by the State. They won't execute you just because you say you did it. They have to prove it but they proved it.

Robert Hansen

Wow.

John Yearwood

Yeah. Fascinating, fast-paced story. One of the things that I realized writing this book is that... Let me back up. Let me just say, I don't know when the last time was you went to a funeral.

Robert Hansen

Pretty recently, unfortunately.

John Yearwood

Unfortunately. Right. And I'm looking at one in the next couple of days.

Robert Hansen

Sorry.

John Yearwood

Thank you. My next door neighbor, wonderful man, 82. Every funeral I've been too sooner or later, somewhere in the ceremony, remembering this person's life, they start telling funny things that the person did and laughing about it.

Robert Hansen

Of course. That's the only way you got to make fun of him.

John Yearwood

Well, they can't answer.

Robert Hansen

That's right. It's the best time. You finally get the last word.

John Yearwood

So why? In our most solemn states of grief do we turn to humor for relief? It occurs to me that humor may be the only way we can deal with terror. Otherwise, we are overwhelmed by terror for ourselves that we too are mortals.

Robert Hansen

Are mortals.

John Yearwood

Remember Caesar Thou Art Mortal. So, writing the book, I realized, you know what? The way this really works is it has to have humor in it. It has to have humor in it. Okay, I'm a literary guy. I have a graduate degree in literature. Sorry. I'm sorry everybody. You don't have to worry about spelling words in front of me, or your grammar. I'm not going to call you.

Robert Hansen

Good thing my grammar's really not great.

John Yearwood

Great. You've done a very good job today. A plus on your grammar. So, naturally I've read all Shakespeare.

Robert Hansen

As one would.

John Yearwood

As one would. I mean, why not?

Robert Hansen

It's there.

John Yearwood

Yeah. It's there. It's there to be read.

Robert Hansen

Almost every single literary fictional story has been based on it in some form or another.

John Yearwood

Another, in some form or another.

Robert Hansen

Yap. Useful.

John Yearwood

I used to love teaching Shakespeare in school. I loved it, loved it, loved it. And I think because I loved it, the kids loved it. Many of them will see me and remember lines that we studied together, and recite them to me. I mean, that's wonderful.

40 years later, and I'm having students meet me on the street and say, "I remember when you said..." And repeat the line from Shakespeare. My gosh. It's wonderful. So, teaching is such a rewarding job. Every single one of Shakespeare's tragedies has humor in it.

Robert Hansen

Of course. Even just a moment. Even just one line.

John Yearwood

Just one moment. The most horrifying plays. Othello and Macbeth, they have moments of raucous humor. It's as though we have to go through a period in order to temper the terror to really penetrate our heart. We have to temper it with humor.

Robert Hansen

I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare actually is truly a literary genius. Because if you actually look at normal conversation between men and they're having a serious conversation, there will always be someone cracking a joke in a very serious conversation. Always.

John Yearwood

Absolutely. Always.

Robert Hansen

100% of the time.

John Yearwood

Always. Sometimes it's an off-colored joke.

Robert Hansen

Quite frequently. But it's important because that gets everyone, like, "Okay, all right, we can take a breath." All right. Like, we're back at it again. I think it's somehow important and I'm not exactly sure why.

John Yearwood

Yeah. There's a psychological effect. There's been some study recently that laughter is a way of uniting a group. It takes the place in humans of what grooming activity does with chimpanzees and bonobos.

They groom one another to be close socially to one another, so that there's that actual physical contact that breaks whatever barriers they have between themselves.

Robert Hansen

I try to groom my friends. They just don't have it.

John Yearwood

You now want to know what they think about.

Chris Debiec

You've got to stop combining my hair, Robert. Stop it.

Robert Hansen

Never.

John Yearwood

Right. And we are not going to check, Chris, on how they're hanging.

Robert Hansen

Not my job. I paid enough for that.

John Yearwood

Yeah. It's above my pay grade. But you're right. I don't know what the psychological dimensions of humor are. I only know that I observe. That humor gets us through these times when otherwise we would be devastated and terrified. So sad, humor lifts us. It lightens our hearts.

Robert Hansen

I mean, I find that the most, most somber, most awful moments, there's always some jerk telling it’s really terrible joke. That's what makes it feel more real. It doesn't make it feel less real. It doesn't take me away from the moment. Actually, it's like, "Okay, we're all in this."

We're all having this moment together. That's how bad it's become is now we have to tell these kinds of jokes to. Come on guys, we got to get out of this and start moving on and emotionally getting over this. I'm sure you've been through a lot of very emotional, turbulent moments in your life.

John Yearwood

Oh, of course.

Robert Hansen

There's some moments where you really, really need to stop obsessing about how bad this moment is and move on. Some people don't. Some people go in this never ending vortex where they just start drinking themselves to death or drugs or whatever.

John Yearwood

Running from it. They're running from it.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. Different form of running

John Yearwood

Yeah. You can run as hard as you want. You're not going to get away from it. The only thing you can do is laugh in its face.

Robert Hansen

And there's a lot of PTSD research about this. The faster you can come to terms with the actual realities of what happened as opposed to running from them, as opposed to compartmentalize them, and then having this emotional reaction to it, the better.

So, the faster you can say, here's what happened, here's the details and the logical process of what happened. Punctuated by a joke, now we're past it. Now we're moving to the next topic. You're much less likely to have that intense, awful sensation ongoing.

John Yearwood

Right.

Robert Hansen

You also wanted to talk a little bit about some of the corruption involved in the sort of East Texas towns. I think that would be worth mentioning and talking a little bit. What sort of corruption were you implying?

John Yearwood

Well, the thing about corruption of government officials is that it's universal. We've certainly seen it in Washington D.C within living memory, shall we say? So, it's not unusual to find it in other smaller communities. I'll tell you a story. Do you mind if I tell you a story?

Robert Hansen

I do not. This is your hour or multiple hours. You can do whatever you want.

John Yearwood

I'm a brand new reporter in this little town, and I hear that the school board is going to have a meeting, and I figure, well, "I ought to go cover the school board." Because they spend a lot of money and they're the biggest employer. And they do. They're the biggest employer in any town as school board. True in Austin, by the way.

So, I go to the meeting. Well, and they're reading down the list of things that the board members have to vote on. They've come to this little thing and there's something about a car accident and how the superintendent's car was in wreck.

Then they just go, then they just move on. They get to the end of that little presentation and they say, "Well, are there any questions?" And I said, "What is this car wreck? I mean, why do we have to buy the superintendent a new car that's kind of an expensive wreck if we have to buy him a new car?"

The superintendent's sitting there, and the board member says, "Oh, he was in Orange, there was a stop sign and somebody ran a stop sign and totaled his car. So, we have insurance, but we're going to have to buy him a new car." I said, "Oh, okay. Why was he in Orange?"

The superintendent speaks up and he says, "Oh, I was negotiating some purchase of some athletic equipment for the school." I'm brand new at this. I'm willing to say, "Okay, yeah, sure guys."

I said, "Oh, what kind of athletic equipment?" And he says, "Oh, just stuff we needed for the athletic department, things like jock straps and weights for the weight room." I said "Well, did you buy some?"

He said, "Yeah, we made a deal." I said, "Good. Did you, you get any bids on this stuff?" I don't know why I thought to say that. The superintendent said, "Well, we didn't need to get any bids because we know what it cost, and we felt like we were getting a really good deal on this particular sale."

I said, "Okay, well that's good. Good business practice." Not legal, probably. I didn't say that, but good business practice to get the best deal you can get. So, we rock along. A month later, the car business has not died down.

A month after that we realized that he had actually been in Orange, this is Orange, Texas. He'd actually been in Orange, Texas visiting with the female representative of the sporting goods company who had been coming to his office every week to visit with him.

Robert Hansen

He's a man about town.

John Yearwood

Then a couple of months pass and there's a UIL contest. Now, for people who don't know, UIL stands for University Interscholastic League. I don't know why they call it university, except it got started by the University of Texas.

Then University of Texas doesn't have anything to do with it anymore, but it's still named the UIL. It's a competition on various academic and athletic programs between public schools and Texas. They're divided into categories of school, by the size of the school and so on.

There was a UIL contest and this little town had sent teams to here to Austin to compete in the UIL contest. Well, things like ready writing and poetry reading and prose reading and band and speech. Not the general sports thing that most Texans would be interested in.

John Yearwood

Not football.

Robert Hansen

Wasn't football, wasn't track. So, he had taken off four days of school to go to attend the UIL conference. Well, you don't send students to a UIL conference unless they're accompanied by teachers as chaperones.

Because they're going to be spending the night away from home for a couple of nights and you're still responsible for them.

It's a school trip and you're the adult in the room and they're kids and you can't ask them to be responsible for themselves if they're under the age of 18, even though they should be perfectly capable of being responsible for themselves. They still have to be supervised.

Well, teachers came back and said, "Well, we don't know where the superintendent was." Because he never showed up. So, we started talking.

Robert Hansen

He and his sporting good story at any point today.

John Yearwood

So, we started talking and it turns out that instead of coming to the UIL thing, taking four days off and coming to the UIL contest, he had taken four days off and gone to San Antonio where he had checked into the Manger hotel.

Robert Hansen

Buying more sporting goods.

John Yearwood

He was buying more sporting goods. It was sporting, I'm sure.

Robert Hansen

And good.

John Yearwood

Good enough. Gentlemen, if you're married, be aware of your wives and don't try to get away with stuff because they will figure you out every time.

Robert Hansen

Eventually. Yes.

John Yearwood

Probably faster than you believe.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. That's always true. Like, "I'll do one more time." "Nope."

John Yearwood

Probably faster than you will believe. My wife called up the Manger hotel and she talked to the desk and she said, "I just have to know. I mean, I have to know. Did so and so spend the night at your hotel on the nights of so and so and so?"

The lady who answered the phone down there said, "Oh, honey, you know we can't tell you that. What was his name?" Flip, flip, flip. "Yeah. He was here in room so and so for four nights." "Was he alone?" 

"Well, it says two people." He left education and the last I heard was selling tires in Texas, Kena.

Robert Hansen

Might have been happier with that job.

John Yearwood

He was certainly under a lot less pressure. You talk about corruption, corruption crops up everywhere in small towns, big towns. It's everywhere. People are people.

One of the themes of the book is that, it's not history that repeats. It's people who repeat. People are always the same. We learned the lessons of history, but we can't figure out people.

Robert Hansen

You also talked about fear and how it might have played a role in how people interact with one another and how to use that. Is that the kind of fear you were talking about where you kind of post-up and you sort of, "I'm going to beat you up." Or is it a different type of fear?

John Yearwood

I think there are all kinds of fear. Particularly in this book, I'm trying to deal with all kinds of fear. Certainly the fear of nature is one of them. The symbol of that is a rattlesnake. I call it coil. This is actually a true story. Rattlesnake lived in the basement of the courthouse.

Robert Hansen

No one thought to remove it? That's an odd pet, I would say. It's not like a dog that you feed out the back.

John Yearwood

It was an actual rattlesnake. And I commented that it was the only rattlesnake in the courthouse, unlikely to be re-elected. Not standing for re-election. He was killed by one of the deputies.

There was a group of domino players out on the courthouse lawn and in spring had come and this six or eight foot long rattlesnake comes up out of the basement and starts slithering across the grass, gets close to the domino players, and they look over and freak out and go screaming.

The sheriff's office hears them screaming out there. 80-year-old men don't generally jump up and down and scream and the sheriff's office, which is right up an open window away. No air conditioning, of course.

They send a deputy down and sees a snake, follows it across the street, and pulls out his revolver and kills it on the sidewalk. Takes several shots to get it.

Robert Hansen

Of course. Yeah.

John Yearwood

And a bam, bam, bam.

Robert Hansen

No animal control in town?

John Yearwood

The broken concrete in the sidewalk where he shot, where the bullets hit is still there. If you know the history of that story, it's interesting sometimes to walk that sidewalk and see where 40 years ago, somebody...

Robert Hansen

Old coil had a match.

John Yearwood

Old coil. So, if there was one, there was probably more than one and I think that might have been the reason there were so few rats in the courthouse except those in elected office.

Robert Hansen

Sure.

John Yearwood

Anyway, I use old coil. Named him Old Coil, and I use him as a metaphor for the danger of nature itself, which can be fatal and will sneak up on you no matter how attentive you are.

Robert Hansen

Eventually we all get taken up by nature, one form or another.

John Yearwood

John McPhee points out, "Nature has time on her side, we don't." Nature always wins. So, that's one form of fear. Another form of fear is physical violence from other people. Another form of fear is fear that is promoted by racial hatred.

Another form of fear, and this is in the book. Another form of fear is economic fear that is caused by some people trying to take stuff from other people. Literally stealing their welfare, their property or whatever. That's in the book.

Robert Hansen

The fear you mentioned about being arrested unfairly.

John Yearwood

Yes.

Robert Hansen

That's a bad issue.

John Yearwood

Particularly now. Oh, absolutely.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. I mean, we have one of the highest incarcerations rates in the world, maybe even the highest in the United States.

So, it's always the back of my head. Well, all it really takes is someone deciding that they're going to make this your problem and pin this thing on you or rightfully believe that it's you, even though it's not you for whatever reason.

That is a threat I think every American kind of has to have in their back of their head to some degree. What would you do if the cops came to your door and like, "Hey, we know you committed this heinous crime across the street. You're the only one who was there at the time."

John Yearwood

I'd say, "You got a warrant?"

Robert Hansen

Yeah, I know.

John Yearwood

"Go away and come back when you have a warrant."

Robert Hansen

But they might is the problem.

John Yearwood

Well, they might. And then, and a hire a lawyer and I keep my mouth shut.

Robert Hansen

Exactly.

John Yearwood

I don't say, 'Well, I don't know why that gun was loaded on the set of Rust."

Robert Hansen

"You already said you have a gun, sir." We have it on the RSnake Show.

John Yearwood

No, you never succeed in the participating in your own investigation. You just have to let the pros do the investigating and you have to find somebody who can represent you.

Robert Hansen

Which is really terrifying because I know a lot of investigators were not very good

John Yearwood

Right. It can be so expensive to defend yourself. I'll tell you another story. Are you ready for another story?

Robert Hansen

I am. It's about that time.

John Yearwood

Okay. So, we had a fella living out there in the country. He had some cows and he had a fence pasture which constituted his backyard. Well, he had a swing set out there in the backyard and his kids would go out and swing on the swings and young kids.

They had a good time and doing that. He had these prized cattle, not very many of them, four or five, maybe six calves that he was hoping to raise.

He wanted to raise his kids in the 4-H Program and help them understand how to grow cattle and make beautiful cattle. That's a noble ambition.

Robert Hansen

Honest profession.

John Yearwood

Honest profession. We need people who do that and who understand how it's done. Well, he was home from work one day and he saw a dog, heard a loud commotion in the backyard and saw a dog biting one of his prized calves.

So, he grabbed his 30-30 rifle and he ran to the back porch and he shot the dog, which is what I would do. The dog belonged to one of his neighbors who claimed that it was worth more than $750. That by shooting it, he had stolen his dog from him which was a felony. He filed a criminal charge on the man for shooting the dog in his own backyard, attacking his own cow.

The district attorney knew the guy who owned the dog and he liked the guy who owned the dog. So, he took it to the grand jury and he explained this dog was easily worth $750, might have been worth 10 times that. The grand jury said, "Well, it is a felony that we're charging this man with."

The district attorney said, and I'm just making this up because nobody knows what goes in a grand jury. Nobody knows for sure. At any rate a true building, he got charged with a felony for killing the dog that was attacking his calf in his backyard next to his swing set. Where his kids had been playing earlier that day.

It went to trial and all the evidence was presented and the jury recessed to consider a verdict. They were out of the jury room in five minutes with a not guilty decision.

Robert Hansen

That's lucky. It could have gone the other way.

John Yearwood

It could have gone the other way. But they presented to the court as part of their verdict. A written statement signed by every person in the jury.

That this was the most worthless piece of criminal jury work or trial, most worthless criminal trial anybody had ever heard of and there's no reason why these charges should have been brought for something like this. Yay for the jury.

Robert Hansen

They don't usually do that.

John Yearwood

Sometimes it goes that way. That's a true story. So, the problem with being a reporter in a small town such as the Whitmeyer, Texas, which is the fictional town in this book is that you remember all of those stories and they jumble in your head, they never go away.

The day the guy threw the fire logs off a red bud tree into his fireplace because he thought they would burn and he didn't have any other firewood. Then turns out they were full of palmetto bugs.

Those big roach looking things that are 2 inches long. Thousands of them came swarming out in his living room and his wife goes screaming out the house trying to get them out of her hair. That really happened.

Robert Hansen

And were they on fire as well?

John Yearwood

No, but they were asleep because it was cold outside and when he brought them in the fire warmed them up and they came to life and decided it was time to migrate because they didn't like fire.

So, she suddenly had thousands of these bugs flying around in the air. I know that happened because it was just three doors down from where I lived. I knew the guy. You have thousands and thousands and thousands of stories like that.

They just crop up over and over and over. Some are funny, some are not so funny. Some have to do with corruption. It's not just money that will corrupt people, it's also the sense of power.

Deputies sometimes, some of them are not the smartest, they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer as they say. They may be playing with less than 52 cards in their deck.

They will abuse the power of their office in order to make a quick work of getting somebody charged with a crime. So, they beat him with a rubber hose until they confess.

Robert Hansen

Literally beat them?

John Yearwood

Literally.

Robert Hansen

Wow.

John Yearwood

Beat them with a rubber hose until they confess. So, then they have a spoken confession. They take him in, they charge him, they put him in jail, he comes to trial and his defense attorney says, "Well now, can you tell us the circumstances of your arrest?" "Did you confess to this crime?" "Yes I did."

"Did anybody force you to confess this crime?" "Yeah, well that guy right over there." "How did he do that?" "Well, he beat me with a rubber hose for about 20 minutes."

Robert Hansen

Is that guy still alive? That seems like a fast way to get yourself killed by the police.

John Yearwood

And the judge goes, "Mistrial."

Robert Hansen

Wow.

John Yearwood

Turns to the district attorney and says, "Meet me in chambers."

Robert Hansen

Wow.

John Yearwood

Corruption creeps in, again.

Robert Hansen

That's lucky because the judge could have not believed him. He could have ended up in a jail situation where the cop says, this guy needs to go because he might start squealing about something that is verifiable.

John Yearwood

Right. He might not have survived his first night in jail.

Robert Hansen

Oh, crazy. So, you have another story coming up the lie detector app. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

John Yearwood

Well, that was a fun book. It's done.

Robert Hansen

You finished it?

John Yearwood

I finished out.

Robert Hansen

It's just not out yet.

John Yearwood

It's not out yet.

Robert Hansen

Still editing process.

John Yearwood

Well, yes. It needs to be updated a little bit. It's a novel actually that explores the boundary between reality and digital gaming. Because I think when you're 14, maybe sometimes reality and the world of your digital games gets confused and you start seeing the real world in terms of the games that you're playing and vice versa.

So, that's the kind of world I create in that book. I think it's a fun story. It's not brutal in the way that this one is. It's certainly not based on actual events. But I just had this idea, these phones that we have now are so powerful.

The cameras can read all kinds of stuff. We program them to record visible light, but they're seeing a wide spectrum of light infrared and ultraviolet, which is way beyond the capacity of the human eye to see. Your iPhone can see it.

There may be ways in which when you're talking, you are actually revealing your innermost self. What you really believe versus what you're saying may be revealed through the way your face projects light in an invisible spectrum.

Robert Hansen

That is possible. Also micro-expressions. But there's also other things, like, for instance, your phone's vibration sensors, it's three-dimensional access control. It's so sensitive it can actually pick up voice.

Even if your phone is off, the microphone's off, if you have an app that has access to the calibration sensor to know which dimension it's pointing or whatever for your compass app or whatever. It could theoretically hear your conversation and know what's going on around you.

John Yearwood

And even broadcast it.

Robert Hansen

There's a lot of little things like that in aggregate. They tell a pretty good picture. A detailed picture.

John Yearwood

They do. So, it's lie detector app. The kid writes an app for his smartphone that ends up being able to tell whether somebody is telling a lie or not in the process of telling it. Yes, micro expressions, some narrowing of the pupil. Poker players do it. They make a living reading other players.

Robert Hansen

Absolutely.

John Yearwood

Sometimes they don't know these people.

Robert Hansen

I've actually talked with one of the best human lie detectors in the world. The guy, Lie to Me, that show.

John Yearwood

Yes.

Robert Hansen

It's based on a real person. I actually talked to him. There's a lot of both real science behind it and also like a lot of kind of tangential or more like statistical analysis. Like these 50 things have to be true for the one thing to be true.

You can't rely on any one of the signals. You kind of have to take them in aggregate. It's really interesting. It's halfway between science and not science, because it's just not been measured enough yet.

John Yearwood

Can't verify it with our numbers yet.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. I have to get you in touch with this guy. He's very interesting.

John Yearwood

Yeah. That's fun. Somebody asked me, well, "How did you celebrate finishing your book?" I said, "Well, I celebrated by starting another book." I did and it's going to be set in the same town.

Robert Hansen

Oh, really? It's literally the same town?

John Yearwood

Yeah.

Robert Hansen

Oh, how fun.

John Yearwood

Some of the same people, some of the same...

Robert Hansen

Oh that's good. Recurring themes.

John Yearwood

Yes. This one is going to be about, the hero is a single mother and she works for a bank and she uncovers an embezzlement, and life goes kind of haywire for everybody involved and she figures out how to rescue it.

Robert Hansen

Did you know you were going to write that when you're writing this?

John Yearwood

No.

Robert Hansen

Okay. All right. So follow up question. Do you know that you're going to write another book? Are you weaving in characters from this book into a future book?

John Yearwood

From the one that I'm writing now?

Robert Hansen

Yeah.

John Yearwood

Oh yeah, of course.

Robert Hansen

Okay, good.

John Yearwood

Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Hansen

That's how you have to do it.

John Yearwood

When you create these hundreds of people, to me, they're as real as you are.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. Because you've made them up and you know everything about them.

Chris Debiec

I feel a TV series in the making.

John Yearwood

Well, I hope so. That'd be fun.

Robert Hansen

That'd be fun.

John Yearwood

Well, one of the things I do when I'm writing a book is, I go scanning through the internet looking at pictures of people, and I'll find a picture of somebody and say, "Oh, that person is such and such a character. That face matches that character."

So, I'll capture that image and I'll put it up on my little clipboard. So, when I'm writing about that person, I can look at that picture. One of the more entertaining characters in this book is named Darrell Stewart.

The face that most represents what in my mind he looks like I found at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Hope, Arkansas. Is that the name of it.

Anyway, Arkansas Crystal Bridges Museum, and it was a painting of a 19th century Indian but he had exactly the right expression. Otoe Indian, I think the tribe has disappeared now. I don't think they can even be found anymore.

Robert Hansen

You got to get these photos and somehow incorporate them or get some artist to go through.

John Yearwood

Yeah. I'll pull up somebody else...

Robert Hansen

It'll make casting much easier when the TV show comes out.

John Yearwood

Right. Find a girl who looks like this. Find a guy who looks like this.

Robert Hansen

You find out Italian, Indiana who's like, "Come on man. Help me out a little."

John Yearwood

You worked with Cameron long enough to know that casting is not something that the author ends up having much choice about.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, that's true. Although it does help to have a sense of it. Okay. So, you can find this on Amazon or anywhere else?

John Yearwood

That's correct. And you can order it through any bookstore. It's available in paperback and hardback.

Robert Hansen

And do you have a website on social media?

John Yearwood

Yes. Johnyearwood.com. I'm also on Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram.

Robert Hansen

Great. And the lie detector app, when is that expected, do you think? I know it's hard to tell.

John Yearwood

Let me tell you. The lie detector app is my ace in the hole. I'm holding onto that in case suddenly a publisher says, "Yearwood. This is great. Give us another novel like tomorrow." And I can go. "Sure. I work all night. I'll let the shit out of it." Chris, you got to cut that word.

Robert Hansen

No. It's all fair game. You can say whatever you want. I should've told you that two hours ago.

John Yearwood

Yeah. I'll edit the stuff out that needs to be edited out and send it off and it'll be fine. And that one, that one really would make a dynamite movie. That would make a dynamite movie because of the mixture between reality and fantasy. The digital fantasy, the game world, and the real world.

Robert Hansen

So, when do you think it will come out if you don't get that crazy call?

John Yearwood

I don't know. Well, it may come out next because the one I'm writing now, which is the follow-up to this, I may end up putting that one in the bottom drawer and taking this one out and saying, "Okay, we'll see how this goes." Then I have two more that I'm working on.

Robert Hansen

Can you give us a hint?

John Yearwood

Well, one science fiction, and it involves colonization on Mars.

Robert Hansen

Same universe.

John Yearwood

It's not the same people. No, it's completely different.

Robert Hansen

Different. No, you can't draw lineage their great-grandchildren or anything?

John Yearwood

No, no. I'm not going to do that.

Robert Hansen

Okay. All right.

John Yearwood

And another one also set in the future is a world in which capitalism has finally reached its culmination.

Robert Hansen

Interesting.

John Yearwood

Yeah. Well, what do you think capitalism looks like when there's no longer capitalism?

Robert Hansen

I don't know what that means.

John Yearwood

How does capitalism succeed? How does it succeed?

Robert Hansen

I was actually talking to somebody about this just the other day. I forget who it was, but they were talking about like, what does the end game. Everyone knows what communism turns into at the absolute extremes, but we have never seen capitalism turn into its absolute extreme.

We're trying to figure out what that would actually look like and it's really just a bunch of monopolies. But I just don't think that would work. It would kind of fall over.

John Yearwood

It's only a bunch of monopolies until somebody starts accumulating the monopolies. Then it ends up with a small group of oligarchs running the entire.

Robert Hansen

Which could actually end up happening kind of inadvertently with people who own robotics for instance, or own AI or own some of these massive kind of future entertainment as a whole thing.

If you could, if you could turn, entertainment into a technology and own it, there's a way that you could own. Then you might have one or two or three companies on earth.

John Yearwood

Right. One of the driving factors in that book that right now I'm not working on it, but I will. One of the driving factors is that people confuse capitalism with morality and it's not. Capitalism is not a moral system. It's an economic system.

Morality is different. You choose what is the best behavior based on what is most right to do for the people who are involved. You don't choose it because you make the most money out of it. The state of Texas rights into its curriculum that we are forced to teach the benefits of a free trade system.

We are required, they require public schools to teach. Not the question, not the examination. Not whether free trade is good, but required to teach the benefits of a free trade system, which we do not live in. We don't live in free trade because free trade without government control...

Robert Hansen

Is monopolies. That's what you end up with.

John Yearwood

It's piracy.

Robert Hansen

Think about it.

John Yearwood

That's true. Because you don't have the idea of patents. So, you would end up with a lot of pirates. That's a good one.

John Yearwood

Or property rights.

Robert Hansen

Yeah. Interesting. John, we could probably talk about that for an hour.

John Yearwood

We could I'm sure.

Robert Hansen

I like that. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show.

John Yearwood

Oh, thank you, sir.

Robert Hansen

It was actually a real pleasure. I didn't think we'd go through all of this. So, that's been really great. Thank you so much.

John Yearwood

Well, good. I hope you get something you like.

Robert Hansen

We got a lot. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

John Yearwood

Good. Thank you.

Robert Hansen

Bye.

John Yearwood

Bye-Bye.