was still in the morning hours before dawn. three cats were in the lodging room. mather nephew had traveled from roxbury with two gentlemen into boston. walter had raced the epidemic to undergo the smallpox inoculation in the return to the service of his block, which had the continued begun among them. one of the cases they stopped

people from coming into boston for the purpose. i roughly 3:00 in the morning of november 14, the figure proudly stood in the shadows, staring out the windows of the home and planning. a metal of the palm was cool to the touch, but a source of fire was brought into contact with shoes. he hurled the western toward the house, shattered glass on the iron ball, smashed undertow walters bedroom and instantly woke him and the others in the room. mather came running it through with his wife, daughter nancy. they sought lena to pieces on the floor. he didn't come to expect it and i love this language, but could not go was charged, the upper part which i powercom developer with a mixture of turpentine and powder and what else i am not. looking around the room, mather

said the unexploded grenade passing through the window had paid the iron given such a turn to it that on the floor at the fire and the fuse as buoyantly shaken out without firing a granato. everyone, especially walter innis continued me they were the hbo life. are all as mather wrote come to where the iron ball alone had fallen on walters had would've been enough to do part of business design, to kill the people. but it had detonated, it surely would have killed them. upon it's going off it must've split and have probably killed persons in the room and certainly fired the chamber and speedily laid my house and ashes. now interestingly, mather picked up the broken pieces of the grenade to expect it and found a piece of paper tied to defuse with a string hassey wrote, that

it might outlive the breaking of the shell. now, i don't personally know why he would but a note on a bomb. [laughter] however, maybe he just wanted to get his feelings out, i don't know. as i write, it was a dubious proposition that survived the intermediary solution. but the assailant rode out the message, a red cotton mather, utah, dmu. i'll inoculate you with a pox on you. and mather did indeed survive assassination. in the smallpox at the time it did eventually wither away. at 11,000 people, 1000 people flooded, 6000 people got smallpox in 1721, 6000. i would imagine that the other 4000 who were remaining probably

already had smallpox, so it's probably likely that very few people who were in boston in 21 escaped, who worked susceptible at getting smallpox. out of the 6000, almost 1000 died. they're attacking that a death rate which we would expect about 15, 16%, very, very common. but more importantly and very benevolently we have the discovery of inoculation. they tested it out, inoculates almost 250 people. and out of those almost six died. because it was impossible to tell if they got smallpox maybe an hour before they were inoculated, it's very possible that no one died of inoculation although boylston admitted himself six people died. it was possible at least a few of those contracted it in blatant inoculation.

so they have this medical discovery and you can really trace this discovery and it was then active simultaneously although independently and i don't call that story because i really focus on boston. one of you can write it about the demonic key practicing the same. you can directly trace this -- it was practiced in the colonies and the successive decades and you can trace it to edward jenner and try to inoculate milkmaids over in england and being unable to and reasoning that it was because they had cowpox on their hands. they discovered the vaccine and this would lead to the eventual eradication of it, this great successful conquest of the dreaded disease, which by the way, i don't know if you know this, a lot of people would say the black plague and all that, but smallpox was the greatest

killer may be, the deadliest disease in all of human history. it was a great conquest and by 1880 they declared it across the world. what are the more immediate effects? what i argue in the vote "the pox and the covenant," the attacks of the ministers, they are getting into the mud with this vicious debate that rages in the street and in the public newspapers on campus. the authority of the ministers come the oath social covenant, this idea going back to the first or 10th of the city upon the hell that they're going to buy themselves together with the perfect society, perfect church be a model. it was simply torn apart. other events certainly contributed, but this epidemic and debate over inoculation

turned apart their covenant and could not survive. so what we given the success of the decade is a new covenant, a covenant rooted upon revolutionary consoles, this idea of constitutional liberty of self-government at the consent of the government, the eighth yeah right, natural rights and constitutional rights from england. that shaped in massachusetts and throughout the colonies the new covenant that the people were going to form. anyway, thank you very much for attention. i appreciate it. and i'll be glad to hear all your questions. [applause] don't all jump in that one, yes, okay. [inaudible]

>> and sometimes i'll write that erupt over things like measles, mumps and rubella or even the concept to whether chronicling disease even exists. and in thinking about it in one way, it easy to ascribe reaction of the colonists to this because it was something totally unknown, almost superstitious. and correct me if i'm wrong, but there was no germ theory of disease so they didn't really even know why people were getting smallpox when they certified your arms. but i will question is, you can also argue in a current day we're living in a time of unprecedented health, unprecedented longevity and get human still respond the same way to this issue. and the question for you is, is a really historically we're really not that different or is it that there's something about eating humans that responds this way? >> great question. let me just generally correct to

because cotton mather actually had an amazingly modern view of the theory of disease. he and from other scientists in europe looked under a microscope and thoughts and things living moving around in there and do something they thought might be some kind of disease that you couldn't just into your body, either through the pores of your skin, food, water, maybe with enclosing in the air. you can breathe again through your nose and your mouth. so with the help of a lot of other people, he believed in the idea that i should take that disease originates out at the body, which would radically change western medicine. in outcome in the the old way of thinking, it was an imbalance of the humorous, you know, for a flat, bio and blood and that's why they did there verging and

bleeding. neither did have a concept of the germ disease. he called them in and make you like, these things swimming around and could call it disease. in a 100 years or more before the sternum pastern and all those guys. so remarkably modern. as to today, i think you've are for answering my question. i think that, you know, let's look at the slides for example for each one and one. people were afraid, you know, people in my children's school got sick and when those children got sick, we were fearful of sending them to school or to a birthday party and so forth and there was a lot of fear. that same fear chase people away in boston and made them high in their homes and business wasn't conducted anymore and people

still went to their churches to pray to god, but the social interactions were really diminished during the epidemic. people were afraid for their lives. and with the whole debate over vaccinations in general, but there was also a huge debate raging in the blogs and on the pages of the book and i saw some of my friends doing this about the whole vaccination with the swine flu. people were afraid of it. and they didn't trust the authorities with the. and they had -- a very vigorous debate about it. i mean, it's odd how many similarities there are. and i think the answer is exactly what she said. i think that stretching across 300 miles -- and sorry, 300 years across the miles, across the centuries, there some team very human about cotton mather,

but frankly mothers, about dr. douglas, all the people and in many ways are no different from us. and mean, the fear they had, the mothers taking care of the children, the fear that was engendered by the epidemic. they're very human. i mean, we'd like to create historical figures we think and anyway are fully human and probably not all that different from us. being a bit different clothes hairstyles, but there reaction was very similar. >> before you begin, may ask you please the question. [inaudible] >> is there anyway to tell that the raging debate was what we call the opinion leaders? is there anyway to tell from diaries or other account how people were slated? ordinary people mostly with

the.yours are mostly with the pastors or data on that? >> i don't think it's that easy to tell because most of the diaries and letters and so forth were survived by the same opinion leaders, the great historical resource letters of cotton mather, i think, all these guys left very, for important records. there were -- i mean, the town was very divided, let me just say this good we can't get into exact numbers, but we can certainly tell people were divided because a lot of people did get inoculated, but also a lot of people including one bombthrower was for and against. i think it's impossible to quantify today going to this idea.

there were people for and against getting kids inoculated against h1n1. i think the most important thing is just the average in the debate self, you know, the support there is outrage and this really is the social havoc and that the most important point in the story. >> do you touch at all on the kind of medical education that was available through the 18th century? wasn't it a kind of individualistic apprenticeship rather than academia? >> yeah, very much so. dr. william douglas was the only university educated.there and he had studied in europe before coming over to what he thought was a very provincial backwater boston and really frowned upon the people.

he and another suffered from the same disease of vanity i think. so did a lot of people in this debate. they were apprentices, they read, that classical tax and there was medicine that was handed down and they use all of this two-part despair medicine. and again, let people and he was very interesting to see just how much the women of boston who hadn't even apprenticed her back at the same medical knowledge of the doctors. i mean, this was basically common wisdom at the time. but yes, you're absolutely right. and neither had studied medicine at harvard as a set set out of a collection of her thousand books. and there was a long tradition in new england of these physician ministers who would be at the service of their flock not only spiritually, but also medically. and so douglas does attack

mather for meddling in medicine during the full debate. but the simple fact is that it had a long tradition of this and is not out of the mainstream. as far as the medical knowledge, their highly danced. she knows as much, if not maybe more than william douglas and dr. douglas, so for the apprenticeship and leading the way. >> mr. williams, your subject is particularly riveting. [inaudible] has been the steward of the so-called smallpox cemetery for many years. i don't know if this is really working. and in addition to the smallpox cemetery in guilford, we have unless proven otherwise a past house, probably the earliest pest house we believe in the united states in the 18th

century building. and historical societies in guilford in madison has cooperated very closely for the preservation of this very important building, just as we worked on the preservation of the smallpox cemetery. have you studied any test houses in america and it often have a so-called past house? >> right, that specific. yeah, they did. it was out in the harbor. and in fact, boylston tries to reset the kp inoculations in the spring of 1722 and again, even at 250 people were successfully inoculated, the town is outraged again in a detail that towards the end of the park from the government. and the town authorities forced those few people to go over into one of the island into the past house because that's how they

quarantined people and ships when there was going back to almost 1649. i don't know if that compete, but they have these countermeasures in place. you know, they were lax or more careful about actually enforcing them year-to-year, but they did have test houses, dated quarantined ships and that was their usual defense, trying to quarantine these people and pray. i was really their primary defense. but as i said again about the regeneration. >> thank you for your talk. would you mind talking about how you came to this subject and why you chose to write about it? >> i think the question should be why wouldn't she read about this? it's fascinating. it was such a compelling story. i was working on an idea, another idea i had was engineman

franklyn and sourcebooks, you know, we were going around on the idea a little bit and then i kept coming across this and every 700 page biography that i can find here in rj julia, they mentioned a tear about 200 pages. it was frustrating because i wanted a detail. and i just mentioned actually in a nonstandard way to my editor they said that that, we love it, let's do that vote. and i was immediately consumed by it. they started digging around all the primary sources, reading a few older articles and even one book about 40 or 50 years ago and was just taken in by it. and the more i researched, the auditor and not very it got in there is such a dramatic story that i really wanted to tell the story. and here to come to fruition and that's very pleading for an

author. but he was just a great story to tell, a great story to research and become a bastion and the whole debate that was raging on this streets of boston back in 1721, so -- >> i have two questions, please. first, and this is beyond the scope of your boat about the lead up point in history and what were the events at which inoculations became to be accepted? >> can answer the first one, because i'm going to forget your second one. [laughter] i just turned 40, i'm getting old. okay, a very good question because as i read and other books and smallpox, this debate continued to rage, 1760, 1770, people will still average by inoculate her spirit in fact, inoculate her's were driven of town. they were banned from practicing

inoculations and towns all over the colonies. the outraged was particularly strong i know in my own state of virginia back when it was a colony. they still felt, you're spreading smallpox and they couldn't -- they couldn't get beyond that idea. and maybe just say that if there's one failing of boylston and indirectly mather had, the doctors were right in thinking them for not quarantining the people who are getting inoculated. they let them have -- they let them go out into the streets. in fact, one guy joshua cheever went out and fought a fire after he got inoculated or deed goes in taipei player. he has a bucket in his hand, building up a nice lather, he's interacting with everyone around

him. the minute she got the account, he just collapses. his smallpox sentence just erupts. can you imagine if you had thought that higher next to mr. cheever, you know, people were pretty outraged and so they were right that they didn't probably do that. there were many, many decades and obviously we talked about inoculations of vaccinations are still not totally except date. and so, the debate continues. interestingly, let me just build upon something i find fascinating. the successive decades for preparatory regimes which were unnecessary and they did to them in 1721. john adams was inoculated in 1764. the doctor put him on a milk diet for a couple of weeks and also get a mercury.

and we're poisoning one of our most important founding fathers. will we do? we would have no hbo video. how would we teach our children about the revolution? his teeth and his mouth were kind of kidding ready to fall out. john adams is being poisoned. and was completely unnecessary. why did they introduce out later? because it's hippocratic dilemma in madison. they want to get the humorous imbalance before they got inoculated. and so you can see that science and supersystem continue to coexist through the decades of the century. i mean, look at newton, galileo, copernicus, what did they do in their spare time? astrology, ostomy, they did all these other things. some of our most advanced scientists were the sites of

revolution and coincidentally they were also many of them devout christians. and so, all these things continue to coexist and that's really one of the arguments in the book, is that the kid a figure like cotton mather and even many of the top earners, they were men of science, but they were also believers in christianity. and so, they very easily reconciled the two. and i'm not so sure they're possible in the modern world, but they easily reconciled their belief in god and getting to heaven with how the heavens go in paraphrasing coding the galileo episode, but they very easily reconciled it. >> could you recommend a biography or more reading about cotton mather? >> i would start with talks --

there's a lot of biographical detail in this book. there were some great biographies and one with the pulitzer by kenneth silverman. so i forgot the exact table. after you read "the pox and the covenant" and give it to all your friends and relatives and it makes a great mother's day gift, maybe father's day. but after you read this, there are some great biographies, which really, you know, despite the publication of this, we so i think of a very one-dimensional view of cotton mather and that's about all we know of him. and he's just a fascinating character. and i try to bring out that here's a guy, a man of the cloth, a very devoted minister, very devout christian, but also a man of science as i said, a

very intellectual, but he's a father, he's the hottest and, he's a public figure with a certain authority, but also a certain concern. he's a real philanthropist. and i just wanted to tell that story, but cotton mather like many were fathers, husbands, public figures, their complex figures. and in many ways maybe not all that different from us. so if i communicate that to you, i'll be happy. >> i was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you write and how you do your research like you do in the morning at home, how many hours, how many days? how long did it take to read a book? >> right, i thought we'd have

free time to go to the park, have a nice blog amateurs of being self-employed is it's hard to turn off sometimes. why? at enough you'll be able to tell, i love history. i taught for 10 years, i love teaching and i love writing. it's hard to kind of turn off. as a father of two small children myself, i usually write when they're in school, every possible second front, you know, from the morning. i'm not like stephen ambrose, i don't wake up with orient. that's not my style. i'm more of a night owl. and so i'll write all usually and then i put the unimportant stuff aside and spend time with my family, with my kids, that's the good stuff in life, isn't it? mml writes in the evening, although sometimes generally alternate background reading or misreading of the sources in

order to actually compose. the most of the time i like sitting in my little library, a little street coryell, and i do believe take-out and branching among my previous on the shelf and just being engrossed in books and so forth. and i like to get out and be a people person. writing can be that solitary so i'll go to one of the williamsburg coffee houses. so if you're in town, and maybe i'll check me they are composing my next but. that's generally how i do things. but the actual book between the research and the writing, they're trying to compose a very dramatic narrative around the stories. because i've always liked hey, if you're going to teach or write about history, why not make it interesting? when i get to people who love history, young people and citizens alike.

and then you obviously have editing itself wasn't so the whole process for this book took the better part of a little over the year. during the editing process you have a few weeks between getting stuff from her editor with e-mail and you can start to develop and research your next book hopefully. >> just a quick follow-up, in terms of research, particularly the original resources, have the internet made that easier due to travel to the libraries are the originals? >> adventures in question. i don't use the internet for any research, but the source is alike comically do make things a lot easier than probably 50 or 60 years ago when you were to the dusty archives and dusted off the dust. its amazing comic and no, i live five millions from williamsburg and both have amazing resources

you can imagine blowing over recent history. there is a database over coney williamsburg rockefeller library, which the subscription two. you can punch out every single newspaper they have in existence. isn't that amazing? you click a button and you can hold up april 21 and you can read the original resource. how cool is that? that's great. and then also, all these pamphlets, every single pamphlet i found on another database. it's just amazing. and cotton mather, todd waller quoted, one of the others, one of the friends that william douglas is writing letters to, all their letters, others i reserve price. you know, scholars have assembled and they're great because you can go right down to the library. so they accomplished most of

what i needed to write then. [inaudible] >> well, i wanted to. [inaudible] but it's amazing the amount of research you could do a research library. again, i don't use the internet, but electronic communication of information have really made things a lot easier for scholars. >> how do people treat each other once a certain group had been inoculated and other people hadn't? were they angry with each other? today disdain -- we're watching health care debate that people who do and don't take care of themselves. i wondered if you could comment on that. >> i didn't find evidence either way. i mean, we can speculate and

imagine that coming up, they didn't know a lot about inoculation. they knew that that were, they tested it and we tested it and make sure that a work, but didn't necessarily have all the facts about how it worked, didn't know maybe with the long-term consequences with the. i think they assumed it would inoculate someone for life, but they probably were positive until they actually have evidence about it. but i didn't see either way. i think the anger was directed more at boylston and mather, people who are inoculating others. there were necessarily blaming the people who were inoculated. you raise an interesting point i want to extrapolate. the first person to go ashore and boston was an african sailor anti-infective and other african sailor who resided in boston.

and what's interesting in all of this is nobody ever blamed them for the race. the doctors made their racist arguments against others, but no one ever blamed them. they found no evidence of it. and it's really fascinating this whole thing -- you know, you have the ratification of smallpox, trace it back to jenner, trace it back to mather and then retreated back to non-western parts of the world. it's amazing how mather was able to use this medicine is being practiced in greece and turkey, being practiced in china as akin to the intention in the 1700's. i'm not sure they could always explain either. they knew that a word and they were then able to transmit this information to these enlightened europeans and colonists who were experienced in their scientific revolution and so it's

fascinating nsi said mather always gave credit and never claimed to be a genius and i think i was a very interesting part of the story. >> again, thank you area much for your attention. [applause] >> later people were being inoculated, was the more the wealthy people who were able to afford it? was that those who have money could he inoculated and the corn people couldn't? >> i don't know specifically. obviously there was a cost associated with it and you would have to, you know, take several weeks off of work while you experience it and this was a long process. and not everyone could necessarily afford to do that.

which brings us to an interesting point [inaudible] she was going to a grand tour of europe. but martha washington was terribly afraid because she had lost some of her other children. she had tossed her father, brother on a very short period of time. she was terribly afraid her two children, her daughter actually had epilepsy and would die pretty soon after 1771. but jackie went and got inoculated and didn't tell his mother. and george, his stepfather, actually conspires with him to allow him to get inoculated and hid it from arthur. and you could imagine her outrage when she found out that he'd been inoculated, but she would've never given her consent. she was terribly, terribly afraid of losing her children.

it kind of supply this whole idea among the generations back because death is so ubiquitous, people died early, people regularly outlived their children. the belief was that they didn't care about their children at much, didn't form a passion and obviously if you read the letters and diaries of washington and cotton mather and all these historical figures, you know that's not true. they were just like us, very human. >> thank you. [applause]

>> matt crawford, what to do for a living? >> a number of things. one of the mistakes motorcycles and that's kind of what the book is about good more broadly, it's an attempt to speak up for the manual trades and to suggest that could be a life that's worth choosing. >> where is your motorcycle shop? >> in richmond, virginia. >> what is it called? >> shopko moto. i work on european bikes. these are mostly vintage bikes, vintage cachet that makes people willing to spend the money on them and it's a very small

operation. >> any reason in particular you don't work on highways? >> yeah, people ask me sometimes why don't work on harleys and what i generally say is that i work on motorcycles, not lifestyles. i'm just not qualified to help them with their lifestyle issues. it's beyond my competence. >> what is soulcraft? >> well, actually the title of the book was a play on the title of the book i george will that came out 20 years ago. his was statecraft and soul craft and i thought it was funny to replace statecraft with shop class. i guess if pressed to define it would mean education, the forming of souls. >> what does that mean? >> well, we often think of education and very narrow terms of acquiring may be a mere road

set of technical skills. but i think most people would agree that it entails some kind of education of the affection, disconnected actually can be connected of technical skills and that's something i explored in the book how coming home to take it up in things and fixing things can actually cultivate certain virtues we normally think of as apical tissues. >> such as? >> individual responsibility. when you're dealing with material stuff, it generally lets you know right away if you've gotten something wrong. and mistakes can be quite high in fixing people's motorcycles. if you get iraq, someone could get hurt or you could hurt

yourself. so there's kind of a keen awareness with catastrophe of the this possibility that pumphrey over your shoulder and it tends to make you -- did swords and your work in a kind of keep away but i like. >> who is the theme of her phd thesis? >> it was the ancient political thought, so plutarch was the main character in it. there's no real connection between that and this book in case you were going to ask. >> i want to ask how you go from a phd keep this from had a think tank in washington to owning a motorcycle shop? that's not a normal career track. >> bright, it's actually not quite as bizarre as many people seem to think. i keep hearing from people who are sort of refugees from either academia or some kind of, you

know, certain knowledge work and are doing things in the trades. there's quite a few of them out there and it's been great to hear from them. in my own case, i try tried to get an academic job and did not. there's such a clutch of phd's, as you probably know. i did leave a job as a tank. >> which one? >> i'm not going to say. and he did it from day one. >> why? >> it was a policy organization and like any such place have taken certain positions. and so, there were some facts that we were more fond of the other facts. so the job sometimes seem to require that i read backwards from some desired conclusion to a suitable premise.

and as the figurehead of this think tank, i found myself making arguments i didn't fully by myself and that was demoralizing. and by contrast, in fixing motorcycles, you answer to standers a really aren't open to controversy or interpretation. it either starts and runs right or it doesn't. so, you might say the bs quotient is quite low and it serves as a kind of check on your own subject tbd you might say because you do have this external objective standard. >> are think tanks important to our system of governance in america? >> i frankly don't understand what the think tank is supposed to be.

it's often what you have -- speaking in general here, both serve interests of one sort or another, whether ideological or material, but have to present what they do in terms of science and that's, you know, some of them i think two very invaluable work. in my own case, there was a certain cognitive style that was demanded in this environment and is filed demanded that i project an image of rationality, but not indulge too much in actual reasoning because they could kind of lead off in the right direction. so it was sort of -- it was not at all like genuine academic inquiry and in that sense was quite disillusioning, whereas fixing motorcycles is genuinely

rational, often frustrating, but never a rational. >> with a stochastic hard? >> so meaning, have some element of randomness and if they turn that aristotle uses to describe medicine. so the.there is dealing with oddities, so did not make himself like a builder who builds a house. if you're building a house, every element you can sort of see and place deliberately. the building falls down, yucatán retrospect that the builder didn't know what he was doing. but a doctor deals with failure every day, even an excellent talk her. he's dealing with materials that aren't wholly within his mastery. and the reason i think that's important. for one thing, this parallels with mechanical work in the

important point here is that working with things that resists complete mastery in that way i think tends to chasten an easy fantasy, it's really pervasive in modern culture. we often view technology as a kind of magical thing that empowers us in various ways and whereas the person who actually fixes stuff has a very different kind of relationship to it. it's a more solid sort of command based on real understanding. paradoxically, i think also chasten this kind of self absorbed fantasy of mastery that permeates consumer culture. >> you write that those who blog to a certain order of society, people who make the decisions that affect all of us don't seem to have much sense of their own

fallibility. >> you agree? >> i just like you to explain that a little bit for me. >> you know, i was wrapping up the book where he quoted there, just as the financial crisis was really becoming this extraordinary team, that seemed to call into question a lot of the depositions we've had about our culture. and there was this revelation i think, the whole swaths of the economy were predicated on a kind of parallel universe that kind of take a break from reality. and i think the responsibility now that we see what is going on in wall street for them -- but not for example, but the essential thing here, was facilitated by kind of

abstraction from this primary kind of economic and to deduce that wall street was tracking. there's many layers of slicing and dicing that securitize it. i think it allowed people in that world to be very removed from the consequences of their action. and so, you know, maybe if people in that position spent the summers learning the trade and smashed their thumbs a few times with a hammer -- i don't know, maybe it would cultivate a bit more of a kind of a rick of individual responsibility. >> what do you mean when you write that people who promote free markets forget that we need free network? >> yeah, i think we developed a

sort of fetish of free-market. you can sort of located. it variously. the the reason is we should have a well formed people who are capable of independent reasoning and also kind of economic and when capital gets so concentrated that it preamps opportunity for self-employment by people and small business, small tradesmen were small shopkeepers, then you really have a kind of concentration of power of the sort that conservatives haven't been sufficiently attentive to. referred about the concentration of governmental power, but not about the concentration of the capital and sort of commercial power.

and if you think about it, so much of our lives are kind of ordered a economic forces, more than by government forces. so it seems that oversight that people obviously have taken out very much in the last two years i ain't, there's a lot of fresh thinking about this. >> who is alan blinder and why do you quote him? >> he's an economist at princeton -- excuse me, he was made a very interesting argument about -- he argues that the distinct ocean that's emerging in the labor market is not the conventional one between those with more education and those with less or rather it's between those who have a service that can be delivered over a wider versus those conservatives have to be delivered on-site or in

person and if a lot of are going to find their livelihood more secure against out sourcing to distant countries. so if he puts it, you can't hammer a nail over the internet of the whereas radiologists now find themselves competing with radiologists in india because that image can be transmitted electronically. thirty years ago, we learned that anything that can be put in a box and then on a container ship is going to be made wherever labor is cheapest, which turned out to not hear, it's china. and in the last 10 years, similar logic has emerged for the projects of intellectual labor accountants face this threat of outsourcing, programs, editors, but the indians can't fix your car for you because they're in india. so trade that are tied to

concrete security makes them attractive. >> and he also says were just at the beginning of these terms? >> yeah, he seems to see a very large disruption in the economy and this is all based on an article of foreign affairs and i think other economists have taken up this insight. and the upshot would be that for years we've been telling young people that a four year degree is the course to financial security. it remains true that those with a four year degree earn more, quite a bit more without. but you have to disaggregate these categories of little bit if you compare the person gets a four year degree in sociology to the person you get this masters taken as an electrician and compare their income five, 10 years down the road i could go find the electrician does pretty well. >> so, what are your thoughts

about higher education in the states today? worthwhile? >> i'm a huge fan of book learning. there's maybe been confusion this is an anti-lott intellectual statements. not at all. there are great reasons to go to college i think if you can spare for years and a fair amount of money to do it, the life of the mind is great. but it's also true that the life of the mind doesn't take place only on college campuses, both because in fact you can recharge in books of college, but most importantly work itself can be and they mean working in the trades can be intellectually very demanding and stimulating. so, i'm really trying to send

the life of the mind by pointing out that it can be connect it to real things. so i see this book is really continuous with my love of higher education, provided that we don't tell students that kind of love could then push them into it or the wrong reasons and also people are suited to different kinds of work. we've developed a kind of educational monoculture he think were just about every kid gets, you know, off to college and then on a different track where you end up working in a cubicle. i think the truth is that some people, including some who are plenty smart, would rather be willing to build things or fix things and i think we should honor that. >> what do you think when you hear the phrase knowledge-based society or information age?

>> you know, it's part of the hype i think. we've had this idea of the dictator rows in the 90's that somehow we are going to be gliding around an information economy. and accordingly, shot glasses were pretty widely dismantled in the 90's to make room for computer classes. i first became aware of this issue when i realized that there is a cause of shop equipment on ebay, milling machines, table five, menelaus and i think it was disturbing to see the stuff in warehouses that the disappearance of those tools from our common education i think is the first step towards a wider and other things, how

they're made and how to repair them. in parallel to that, there is a kind of defined philosophy that emerged, with the point seems to be too high as the works. so for example, if you've lived though i've done some cars now there is essentially a motherhood under the hood and i'm not sure what the thinking is, maybe at the sight of an alternator would defend us somehow. so it's become harder to get a handle on your own stuff and be self-reliant because of certain changes in material culture. some high-end cars don't even have a dipstick, so you could check your own oil if you wanted to. and i know i'm not the only person who's a little creeped by this. in some cases at the oil gets low, you're sent an e-mail.

now, you go down that thread a little bit, used to be that in addition to dipstick you at something called an idiot light. it was called an idiot light for a reason. i mean, we had a harsh judgment of anyone who was so uninvolved in their car that they let it get to a point that the light is coming on. but there's some weird cultural logic whereby idiocy, that is a lack of involvement, gets recast as something desirable. it's an indication of tech logical progress. and of course, it is a kind of progress and you no longer have to mess around with dipstick and dirty rags. i also want to notice that there is a kind of moral education that is tacit in material culture. it can go in various directions. so the way things are going currently, it often feels like a

modern personality is getting reformed on the basis of passivity and defendants. there's fewer occasions to be directly responsible for your own ethical environment. and without i think think comes less expectation comes responsibility. >> how many of you are customers know that you written a bestseller? >> word seems to have gotten out for the most part eared >> do you have the book displayed in the front window of your shop there for sale? >> no, but if been good for business. i've got a nice waiting list at this point. >> when did you write this and are you surprised it took off? >> i'm very surprised. it started as an article he wrote and it didn't think it would go any further, but the

response was really -- it was widely read and appreciated and so sort of the opportunity to turn it into a book was presented to me and i thought it would be a nice thing to do. >> has it been picked up by business organizations or personal direct heirs or managers to get to there -- >> not that i know of. >> in a business goals using the? >> i've heard from a couple professors who are interested in putting it into their classes. >> what you think about the? is it a how-to manual? >> no, it's not a how-to manual. >> it is a how-to tool? >> it's deeply critical of the very idea of management actually as a kind of science of manipulation, which has taken

uncanny form in recent decades. >> such as? >> now the manager appears not so much as a boss, straightforward boss, but as a kind of airbase or life coach. there's a kind of smarmy quality to a lot of contemporary management. i mean, i noticed mostly from reading sociological literature on management. i haven't been subjected to that in recent years. but the picture that emerges is like authority can prevent it help straightforwardly as authority coming down from a security. s. to present it help us sort it termite volunteerism, very egalitarian which makes it all the more kind of