Think Tank LA

TED Conference Starts Tuesday

2010-02-08T18:38:24Z

The extraordinary, annual TED Conference begins Tuesday, February 9, and runs until Saturday. The event, formerly of Northern California, is now held in Long Beach.

This year's happening is sold out. Pay-per-view live video ($995) is available here. And here's the long list of 2010 scheduled speakers.

]]> And all sorts of past and related TED vids are at the tedsite, and on YouTube.

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user whiteafrican. It was used under Creative Commons license.

World's Top Think Tanks

2010-02-04T01:49:35Z

The annual "Global Go-To Think Tank Rankings" are out -- released last week by UPenn professor and report author James McGann during an event held at the United Nations University, "a think-tank for the United Nations system" located in the U.N. Plaza, in Manhattan.

For the second consecutive year, the Brookings Institute was McGann and his team's big winner, placing first in the "Top 25 Think Tanks -- Worldwide" category. The rankings are based on the returned surveys of think tank staffers, academics, and journalists. TTLA received a nominating ballot but didn't vote.

]]> There are, according to McGann and co., 6,305 think tanks in the world, housed in 169 countries. Brookings is based in the global think tank capital, Washington D.C. "Global Go-To," reports that D.C. hosts 393 tanks. That's more than any country except for China, which has 428.

(Last year, TTLA ran a week-long interview with McGann. McGann said: "...The Russians, the Chinese... have developed fairly onerous regulations and laborious-by-intent review processes for certifying think tanks that operate in the country. So if you're a threat, you can be assured you're not going to be certified.")

"Global Go-To" calculates that the U.S. is home to 1,815 think tanks. After China, the U.K. is third, with 285, followed by India at 261, and Germany with 190. Only nine nations have more than 100 tanks -- compared with five U.S. states and districts.

California, of course, is one of those five, with 167 tanks, third place overall and trailing only D.C. and Massachusetts (175). Wyoming is the only state without a think tank, according to the report.

Nations with no think tanks, as far as McGann and co. can figure, include Comoros, Equatorial Guinea, Tonga, and Antigua & Barbuda, as well as Turkmenistan, Myanmar, and, oddly, Monaco.

Aside to the governments of Wyoming and most -- if not quite all -- of the above nations: Think Tank L.A. is willing to relocate and repurpose. Think Tank Monte Carlo, anyone?

Santa Monica-headquarted RAND Corporation continued to excel in the survey, placing fourth overall in the U.S. and worldwide rankings, same as during 2008. (Here's a link to the week-long interview TTLA ran with Michael Rich, RAND's executive vice president.)

RAND placed highly in various subcategories, including #1 in the new science and technology category, #6 in international development, #4 in health policy think tanks, #4 in security and international affairs think tanks, #6 in domestic economic policy, #4 in international economic policy, #7 in social policy, and #4 for most impact on public policy or policy debates.

The Bay Area's Hoover Institute placed tenth overall in the U.S., and 22nd on the worldwide list. TED, which holds its annual conference in Long Beach, came in at #40 on the U.S. list, and Reason Foundation was #43.

The Stanford University Program on Energy and Sustainable Development was ranked as the #9 environmental think tank. Of course, Washington D.C.'s Cato Institute placed #6 on that same list, and they fund climate change denial advertisements.

Cato made perhaps the year's biggest leap in the overall rankings, moving up from ninth place in the U.S. in 2008 to #5 in the U.S. and U.K. in 2009. And this was before the op-ed calling James Cameron's Avatar an eminent domain struggle.

The 2009 Global Go-To report is available for free-of-charge download here.

A powerpoint of McGann's recent U.N. presentation is likewise available, here.

TTLA readers will note upon arriving at that above link, they'll encounter a familiar-looking illustration -- twice. It's a "copyright and courtesy" original work done for TTLA by Los Angeles artist Richard Nielsen, and seen here last year. No credit is given. Did the U.N. ask Nielsen for his permission?

The complete 52-page report is available here as a free-of-charge .pdf download.

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post -- admittedly, swimming trophies and not think tank prize trophies -- was taken by Flickr user terren in Virginia. It was used under Creative Commons license.

Hoover: Food, the New Sex?

2010-02-02T16:47:15Z

Nothing quite says, "Happy Valentine's Day" like the February/March 2010 issue of Policy Review, from the Bay Area's Hoover Institute.

In particular, there's Mary Eberstadt's essay, "Is Food the New Sex?: A Curious Reversal in Moralizing."

Here's an excerpt:

]]>

"Who can doubt that the two trends are related? Unable or unwilling (or both) to impose rules on sex at a time when it is easier to pursue it than ever before, yet equally unwilling to dispense altogether with a universal moral code that he would have bind society against the problems created by exactly that pursuit, modern man (and woman) has apparently performed his own act of transubstantiation. He has taken longstanding morality about sex, and substituted it onto food. The all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is not."

The full essay is here.

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user 00dan. It was used under Creative Commons license.

Remembering Hank Gathers

2010-02-01T15:57:05Z

This week, shoot your free throws left-handed.

Honoring the 20th anniversary of the passing of Hank Gathers, and the thrilling, tragic, and inspirational season of Gathers, Bo Kimble, and their 1989-1990 LMU men's basketball teammates.

LMU* video is here and a book excerpt, here.

]]>

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user ryan_fung. It was used under Creative Commons license.

(*Disclosure: TTLA's blogger is a regular contributor to various LMU print and online publications, including LMU Vistas and LMU.edu.)

Get To Know J. Rosenberg

2010-01-21T01:28:39Z

From the KCET.org Pixeltown blog:

"Welcome back to 'Better Know a SoCal Blogger' on KCET.org, where we feature our city's plethora of fascinating and first-rate blogs. This week we are speaking with our very own Jeremy Rosenberg, a blogger obsessed with all things think tank, including "the tanks themselves, the people who work at them, and the big ideas so often born at tanks.""

The complete Q&A is here.

Snowboarding & Social Tech.

2010-01-15T00:26:05Z

Today is the fifth and final installment of TTLA's 2009 interview with Matt Harrison, founder and executive director of The Prometheus Institute, and author of the book, American Evolution.

TTLA: In addition to hip-hop, what's another example of modern "American Evolution?"

MH: Another example I give, very personal to me, is snowboarding. Back in the '80s, a bunch of stoner / surfers decided to strap some trays to their feet. It seemed stupid. Everybody thought it was stupid. Ski resorts banned them. There was a big civil war between the snowboarders and the skiers. And two decades later, snowboarding is a billion dollar industry. We have seven Olympic medals, we all watched on TV, there's a Wheaties box cover and inspired little kids.

]]> There's an example of freedom of choice – somebody deciding to slide a different way down a mountain created billions of dollars of economic growth, created national pride for our country – all from literally a rebellious decision. A rebellious decision created all this value in our society. That's freedom of choice. That's evolutionary freedom of choice in action. Those are the kinds of stories I talk about in the book.

TTLA: Is there a scientific evolutionary equivalent of hip-hop or snowboarding?

MH: Basically the scientific bridge that I draw is with this concept of what I call "social technologies," which I borrow from this author, Eric Beinhocker, who wrote a book called The Origin of Wealth that introduced the idea. [Beinhocker was a McKinsey Global Initiative Fellow.]

Social technology is defined as an idea in pursuit of a goal. It's literally anything – any sort of concept or rule to do anything. How to build this table. How to slide down a mountain on a ski slope. How to make this Kindle. For every idea, there is a social technology. So you can see that any economic growth is really just the progressive adaptation of social technology. You can break social technology down biologically to DNA in the genes and the phenotype, the individual organism, and by the way they interact, and the way evolution selects each organism versus selects the social technology in the social context. That would be the closest relationship you could think of – the music of Jay-Z as just an organism in the evolutionary scheme. So as we select Jay-Z's music, as we preserve it – it reproduces in a sense as people buy it and it goes platinum. Same thing as an organism reproducing and satisfying the natural selection.

Read part one, part two, part three, and part four of this interview.

TTLA: I admit I'm unfamiliar with the Origins of Wealth book.

MH: It's obscure. That's why I feel the need to write this book. Because it's a new idea and it deserves attention.

TTLA: I take it that title is culled from origin of species. Is this a significant now line of thought I've been missing?

MH: That's what's exciting. There actually is an undercurrent of broadly evolutionary economics is the biggest one – that's what Beinhocker's book was.

And this book came out last year, Michael Shermer who runs Skeptic magazine, he wrote this, Mind of the Market. It's on the same topic – his is more on evolutionary psychology. So it's a lot more primate experiments controlled behavioral economic experiments talking about certain ingrained features of humans and things like that. He actually alludes to the point I make explicitly in my book, which is that freedom of choice has an evolutionary value in adaptation in the human social context.

In my view, this is the next great movement in social science. You see it not only in evolutionary economics but you also see it in physical systems just about constant self-organization. Stuart Kauffman [Director, The Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics] is a science writer on the topic. Lee Smolen is a theoretical physicist who talks a lot about self-organization in the universe perhaps as being one of the newer scientific principles in the universe. Smolen specifically argues that self-organization, as he calls it, is really the next great movement in social and physical sciences. That its just beginning, it’s the newest thing. It's what relativity was right when Einstein was discovering it. Its Newton's law was right at the beginning. It’s the next great movement. For me, that's an exciting time.

TTLA: Is this coming of age due to social media?

MH: I think the potential for the idea to gain traction is greater now because we see self-organization now. That's what's profound. We see internet technology. Another example I use in the book is Amazon.com to represent freedom of choice. Everybody looks at Amazon and we all like it because we can find whatever we want. But you never thing that you also can also find tons of stuff you don't want. All the stuff you despise. Everything you disagree with. Everything you hate is on Amazon. And it's all for sale. Isn't that bad? Isn't that something that we should be boycotting Amazon for having these products? Nobody thinks that way, because we all realize, well, our freedom of choice is good because we can find what we want, we can see the value. This is all good. So I really do think that there are these cultural technological examples of freedom of choice, of evolution, spontaneous order, self-organization and I think that's making it easier.

As for the science, I can't tell you why it's now, and not in the 1940s. it just is. That's what I really think is the most important for everything, for there to be a bridge. Nobody knows about evolutionary economics, nobody knows about self-organizing. Unless they're into this field. But there's no broad-based understanding of it. But if there were, I think there'd be a lot more interest in it. I think all the trends together make for a really exciting topic.

[End of Series]

The Week
Monday: Meet Prometheus
Tuesday: No Litmus Test? And Clean-Up on Aisle Four
Wednesday: Sports, USC, and When To Stop
Thursday: Jay-Z & The Statue of Liberty
Friday: Snowboarding & Social Technology

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user king damus. It was used under Creative Commons license.

More From TiGeorges' Meeting

2010-01-15T00:01:55Z

Went to TiGeorges' last night. Shock. Unity. Action. Support.

200 people. Six television vans. A vase being filled with cash and checks for Yele Haiti. Organizers talking about their newly founded org, Californians for Haiti.

People asking after each other's families.

Members of the Diaspora sharing rumors. Others batting those rumors down. One man telling how a family member's house had survived the 7.0, and then fallen, not even during an aftershock. Another man saying the same thing, about a wall. People saying phone service barely extent. A man able to get in touch via Facebook and Twitter and email.

An organizer, saying he'd been in Haiti, at the Montana, just four days ago.

The restaurant announced as drop-off location for medical supplies and any other donations.

Relief Meeting at TiGeorges

2010-01-14T01:06:31Z

I've never been to Haiti, but like many Angelinos, I feel like I have thanks to TiGeorges Laguerre.

TiGeorges is a longtime friend, and I've been working with him on his memoirs. The manuscript is about Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Haiti, where Georges is from.

I stopped by his Echo Park restaurant, TiGeorges Chicken, a few minutes ago. Two television news vans were parked out front. No surprise -- TiGeorges is our city's preeminent Haitian cultural ambassador. He's also undertaken philanthropic, social, and business ventures both here and there.

Georges said he had been able to reach people in Haiti only once, yesterday, briefly. With the aftershocks, he said, he's had no contact today.

He said he's having a meeting at his restaurant Thursday @ 5pm to discuss relief efforts.

Anyone is welcome to attend, he said.

Also, here's a list of aid organizations and how to contact them, via KCRW and the Clinton Foundation.

Jay-Z & That Liberty Statue

2010-01-14T00:07:15Z

Today we run part four of TTLA's 2009 interview with Matt Harrison, founder and executive director of The Prometheus Institute, an upstart, Gen Y, L.A. think tank.

TTLA: Do you or anyone involved with Prometheus have goals of working in local, state, or federal government?

MH: I don't think so, right now. We try to represent ourselves as the anti-Washington group, being beyond what people think of as "politics." The difficulty is, anything with politics, people just think it's a dirty game and they don't care.

]]> In terms of influencing people in our generation who might be a little disillusioned with politics, having the appearance of being that beholden to the political system would really be disastrous for our brand, and disastrous for us in terms of differentiating ourselves from what's out there right now. One of the things that we really like is when people say, "Hey, this looks totally different from anything I've seen." If we're talking about, "Oh, this bill should be modified in this irrelevant way," then people would see what we're doing. They can see that we'd be trying to be in Washington, we're trying to be in the business of politics. And we never want to be that, we never want to be perceived as that. While who knows what anybody on that staff will do ten or twenty years down the road, in terms of what The Institute represents, we want to make sure that people don't expect that out of us.

Read part one, part two, and part three of the interview.

TTLA: So I shouldn't expect to go on the website and find text of a bill you all have written?

MH: No, you won't find that.

TTLA: But I can turn to page 135 of your book and find Jay-Z lyrics.

MH: You can find that!

TTLA: The conventional wisdom – cliché or not – is that Generation Y wants everything on the real.

MH: That's completely true. And we realize that, although I wouldn't say we've thought about it that explicitly. There is this sense that politicians are fake, that everything is fake about politics. So yeah, keeping it real would be a good way of putting it, in our generation's parlance.

TTLA: Let's talk about your book, American Evolution. The cover features a double helix and the Statue of Liberty. You've spoken already about marketing, so that cover must have mattered.

MH: That's a lot of Mike, our graphic designer's, work. In the book, I talk about "freedom of choice" as the evolutionary catalyst. I cite a lot of evolutionary science for support of that, as well as American history. The cover shows the light of liberty illuminating the DNA of the American system – what makes us great, what makes us unique, what helps us evolve.

In the book, I argue that freedom and liberty are the source of that evolutionary growth. So you can view that as lighting the source of our creativity.

TTLA: If I'm not mistaken, if you add an "R" to your title, you get "American Revolution." Is that a neo-tea party reference?

MH: The book was written before the tea parties. I pride myself on sometimes coming up with clever titles. This was one I thought was good – I had a couple others that weren't so good. I couldn't believe that no one had made a book with that title. There is an element of inspiring patriotism, realizing that our nation does stand for something unique and something valuable, and at the same time kind of implying a revolution, really changing people's perspective on things. I try to argue in the book that even though my perspective might seem different from what's considered the right-left political duality, in terms of American history, it's deeply rooted in our traditions. Trying to bridge that gap is a point of the book.

TTLA: And your bridge, your answer, is?

MH: Freedom of choice. I explain how different that phrase is from a lot of what people think, which is people just doing whatever they want and that's okay. I explain how freedom of choice is basically the search process for beneficial advancement – just as natural selection is in the natural world.

The natural world stumbles upon the innovative solutions that help it adapt to various difficulties. Freedom of choice is the same way – most times, we don't know where we're going. But we empower diversity, we empower entrepreneurship, we empower freedom of choice, and when we do, we discover we have much greater opportunity to discover the advancements that help us adapt to those situations. I explain in all these different situations how freedom of choice can empower that search process in various ways, in everything from the economic process to foreign policy.

TTLA: What, or where, is your Galapagos?

MH: I bring in real world examples of growth and change. You talk about Jay-Z – hip-hop is a great example. Jay-Z is now worth almost a billion dollars – $800 million or something like that. The hip-hop industry is a big job creator and has economic as well as social impact. A lot of people deride hip-hop but I mean, Michael Phelps listens to rap before he swims. Would you say that inspiration that he gets from that, however small, is something he shouldn’t have? That he should be forced to listen to Mozart instead?

You see how spontaneous events like the growth of rap music can really help our nation grow in unforeseen, unappreciated, and really almost invisible ways. You see freedom creating progress and progressive adaptation in our society.

COMING FRIDAY: Snowboarding & Social Technology

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user beezwaxxx. It was used under Creative Commons license.

Connecting Ideas & Sports

2010-01-13T00:07:26Z

Today we post part three of TTLA's 2009 interview with Matt Harrison, founder and executive director of The Prometheus Institute, an upstart, Gen Y, L.A. think tank.

TTLA: The Prometheus website features catchy, pop-culture related essays. Like, "Patriot Games: Lessons on American foreign policy from the former NFL superpower." Or, "Being Big Vs Being Powerful: Foreign policy lessons from the gym." You probably won't find those same pieces at Foreign Affairs quarterly --

MH: You wouldn't.

]]> TTLA: How do you and your contributors come up with the content?

MH: It's a fundamental approach of Prometheus to try and relate political issues to things that matter to people in their daily lives. We think that's a big disconnect at other organizations – even the best ones that do the best research. There's still an absence of that nexus between what they're talking about and your life. People would say, "Why do I care? Why does it matter?"

When you connect things to popular culture, like sports or music, people care more, people can identify with it. It's hard to find a connection and make it intelligent. "Competition in sports – competition is good." It's easy to do stuff like that. But it's much more difficult to make a nuanced, somewhat intelligent argument comparing two phenomenon that that are really considered discontinuous.

Read part one and part two of the interview.

TTLA: Do you draw your writers and other contributors from people already in your USC circles? [Harrison went there for grad school.]

MH: We find them wherever we can. Most of them are not USC students. Most of them are people we find at networking think tank type events who are interested in new approaches. Usually you can find them – they are the younger people, they are usually working for someone else who is not letting them express their opinions the way they want to. Those are the people we seek out, and they always seem to be attracted to our model.

TTLA: How will you know when it's time to stop, to shut PI down?

MH: Probably when we can't find any more money – that'd be the best way of knowing.

We try to be able to have adaptability in all of our work. We've had funded projects that we dropped after a year because we didn't think they had potential, we didn't think they were the right fit for us. We did one project on climate change that did okay, but we realized it probably wasn't in our core competency to continue, we didn't think we had much of an interesting angle. You can determine that based on the reaction of the initiative. We're really lucky to have a board that respects that kind of experimentation, and values that we're willing to take risks, but also learn from mistakes. So that's what we try to do, differentiate all of our work in these initiatives so that we can find what's working and what's not. And we can always reinvent Prometheus – in the sense we can always find that next thing that's going to work.

So in terms of the potential for that model, it would take a lot for me to think there doesn't need to be more done on engagement. There doesn't need to be more done on important issues facing America. And especially on engaging our generation.

The question is, are we able to do that? Are we able to fill that gap? That's where the empirical evidence comes in with our initiatives. What are they doing? What's their impact and their sustainability? We think what we have moving forward has great potential. And well see. If the book [more later this week] does nothing, if the book sells 2,00 copies in two years, then we might try to look for something else. So really that's what it is, trying to find the potential, experimenting, and modifying the approach after that.

COMING THURSDAY: Jay-Z & The Statue of Liberty

Video and screen capture by Jeremy Rosenberg of 2009 Prometheus staff, including Matt Harrison (center). Left: Rand Gitlin. Right: Mike Kelliher.

No Litmus Test? And Clean-Up on Aisle Four

2010-01-12T00:47:27Z

This is part two of TTLA's 2009 interview with Matt Harrison, founder and executive director of The Prometheus Institute, an upstart, Gen Y, think tank headquartered in a downtown L.A. loft.

TTLA: Did you set out to work for one of the established think tanks?

MH: I don't think so, because I've always had an entrepreneurial streak. It's always been my dream to do this. It's funny – people think I'm joking. But in my high school job, working at the grocery store, pushing grocery carts, I was dreaming about starting a think tank. I was sixteen, so it's been my dream as long as I can imagine.

]]> TTLA: How'd you get from there to here? From "clean-up on aisle four" to founding your own institute?

MH: In college, I had very supportive mentors. [Harrison went to Miami for undergrad and USC for grad school.] I told them what I wanted to do and they gave me the best advice I ever got. Which was: "If you have that dream, do it follow it, don't let anyone tell you you can't."

Read, "Meet Prometheus," Monday's part one of the interview.

It's true that a lot of failure would probably have been mitigated by working for somebody else during our initial years, like when I was writing grants and getting rejected so many times. (Laughs.) I probably should have tried to work for somebody else but I didn’t.

I would say, then, that I've always wanted to work with those other organizations, in terms of Prometheus partnering with them. That's something I'm very passionate about. But in terms of going to work for one of them, I don't think that's something that ever seriously crossed my mind.

TTLA: How much of your grocery story daydreaming has been realized, how much remains unrealized, and how much have you altered that early vision?

MH: In terms of the visualization, it really was what I saw as my talent at the time, being able to put creative approaches into a form that appeals to people and is thought of as something a little clever, interesting, a little bit avant garde. That's how vague the thought was at the time. Thinking of private sector examples might be better. Think of Apple's great "1984" ad. Or other marketing efforts that affect the public mindset in a way where you become the topic of conversation and become cultural phenomena that really influences people and gets people thinking and gets people looking at something in a different way.

I saw Prometheus as being an organization that would have that affect. Originally I saw Super Bowl ads – so we're not there yet. But when I look at our work now, I do see a lot of things that I envisioned early, especially in terms of our art director and the graphics he's able to do. That's why everything you see is so beautiful, that's his work. I [fore]saw a lot of aesthetic innovation. So in terms of what we're doing now, I see a lot of congruency. I saw some things differently – I saw us being huge and having millions of dollars. That part is not there yet, but we're getting there.

TTLA: Do you have a vision where you'd like to be, if not here in the loft?

MH: We want a dedicated office. We've wanted that for a while. This works nicely now because we could work and live at the same time while we were in school. We'd like an office. We'd like full-time staff. And then eventually, we'd like to do is many different issue oriented initiatives. Like "People for the American Dream." That's on entrepreneurship. We'd like to be working on civic engagement, globalization, and third world aide. All these issues that have appeal. We'll craft innovative marketing campaigns to find unique niches within each one of those issues. Use unique marketing methods to get the ideas out, and really, to provide a diverse array of thoughts, perspectives and ideas on all these different issues and promote those in ways that really just keep expanding and keep marketing the ideas the best ways we can.

TTLA: What do you mean by, "a diverse array of thoughts?"

MH: With vis a vis the existing libertarian organizations, a lot of times it's, "You have to agree with our entire platform or you're not one of us, you're not a peer, you're not on our side, you're against us somehow." That's something we really repudiate and we want to avoid at all costs. And so 'diverse' in that sense means ideologically diverse, personally diverse, diverse in interest, diverse in level of engagement, political knowledge, all those kinds of things. Because we want people even if they agree with us on one issue. If they like what we're doing on that issue so much that they see it as a value-added provision into the marketplace of ideas, that they find our work of value and they'll support us, then we're happy to have them even if they disagree with us on nine out of ten other issues.

That's a big paradigm shift in what the public policy industry does, especially the think tanks. They have their array of issues. "You must support all our issues or you're not with us." I think that's wrong. And I break it down to economics, to the law of demand. If the cost goes up, the demand goes down. When you have 75 issues you have to agree with, that's a big psychic cost to a person. Odds are, they don't entirely agree with you, anyway. They have to give up a lot of their deep-seeded perspectives in order to abide by your platform. In doing so, that raises the cost of adherence to your platform, which reduces your demand, which makes you unpopular. I say, if people want to identify with your perspective, let them do so on any issue, appreciate that in and of itself, and don't try to get more.

TTLA: So there's no litmus test to join Prometheus?

MH: Exactly. No litmus test.

COMING WEDNESDAY: Sports, USC, and When To Stop

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user hospi-table. It was used under Creative Commons license.

Meet Prometheus

2010-01-11T18:27:47Z

Last year, TTLA visited the downtown L.A. loft apartment headquarters of the The Prometheus Institute, an upstart, Gen Y, libertarian think tank. Founder and executive director Matt Harrison daydreamed about launching such a tank while he was an Orange County high school student, working in a grocery store. This week, TTLA runs – admittedly, belatedly – our 2009 interview with Harrision. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

TTLA: Let's start with the basics: What is a think tank?

Matt Harrison: A think tank is any organization dedicated to forwarding an idea or ideas. The approach can take a lot of different styles in terms of research or activism, or in our case, more marketing approaches.

TTLA: Do you consider Prometheus to be a tank?

MH: Yes. But there are a lot of other people who don't. It's one of those words with different definitions.

]]> TTLA: So we've heard. Could you talk some about Prometheus' mission and vision, and how you got started?

MH: Sure. I've always been fascinated by politics and policy, and I had a dual fascination with marketing as well. From an early age I had the interest to start an organization to combine creative marketing and branding – the kind of stuff you see in the private sector – with the intelligent approach that you see in the think tank sector.

Originally, this was an inspiration based off the work of William F. Buckley and guys in the latter half of the 20th century who helped ideas gain traction. Buckley – whether you're a conservative or not – he's know for making conservatism publicly acceptable. Whereas it wasn't when he started. It's hard for us to imagine that because it's such a big movement. But when Buckley started, he was really in the wilderness.

That one person presenting ideas can affect the climate of opinion in such a way that his or her ideas for the good of society could gain traction and eventually become policy really fascinated me. I wanted to do something similar to that for libertarian, more freedom-oriented ideas. I thought there was a need for that. I thought there was a lot of potential for those ideas among our generation.

There is a lot of support for the ideal of independence and freedom and I thought that if there was an organization that could harness the power of marketing, the power of branding, the power of imagery, and at the same time promote ideas that have potential, then there might be a market niche for a new kind of think tank that could really gain some traction and engage audiences that might not have considered the work before.

From the beginning, Prometheus was dedicated to doing things that no one else was doing. That's in terms of the methods, the approaches, the way we looked, the audiences we went after, the issues we targeted. We wanted to get people involved who might not know about a RAND or a Cato or a Heritage.

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TTLA: Are PI's ideas fundamentally different from those of Cato or Reason or the Ayn Rand Institute?

MH: There are substantial differences. Especially from Ayn Rand. Obviously, they are what most people consider extreme vis-à-vis the mainstream political perspective. What we wanted to do is find issues that really had broad appeal. That's something where we're very different from Ayn Rand. We're not happy to be in the wilderness – right but unpopular. We'd rather be popular. As much as possible we want to find the best areas where we can be right and popular.

One of the projects we're working on is called, "People for the American Dream." It's about entrepreneurship among the younger generations. That project could relate to things that Heritage has done – entrepreneurship is one of the major issues that they work on. So they do similar work here but do they promote it the way we do? For example, we interview young entrepreneurs – like musicians and artists – to show as role models. We'll be releasing YouTube videos, DVDs, stuff like that, of these young entrepreneurs in their own environment. So compared to Heritage, the issue is the same. But the approach is very different. The audience is very different. The tone is very different. The style is different. The way it's presented is different.

TTLA: Keep going.

MH: Ideally we're going to have people coming out of college, thinking, "Gosh, what am I going to do?" Hopefully, they'll see, "People for the American Dream" and the project will inspire them to alternate pursuits. Whereas they wouldn't really see something by Cato. They'd have to be already involved in policy issues to get exposed to that.

We want to get people who aren't already involved in policy, they are just looking for a better life. People who say, "I want things to be better, I don't know how things can get better." Right now I think a lot of people are looking for that. We want to reach out to those people and explain that policy is something of interest to more than just experts. Policy impacts all of our lives.

That fundamental approach is very different from catering to the audience already out there for policy issues, and then deciding, let's give that audience what they want. We actually try to find new people, and we don't think anybody else does that.

Coming Tomorrow: No Litmus Test? And Clean-Up on Aisle Four.>

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