And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. My guest today is Jim Manzi, founder

and chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies, not only a successful businessman but a very interesting thinker about business and about

Politics and government. So welcome Jim

Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. In your excellent book that came out a couple of years ago,

uncontrolled the surprising power of trial and error for business,

politics and society, I got that right? You got that right.

You were talking to a name to a company applied predictive technology.

So titles aren't my strong suit.

Right.

Well, uncontrolled. Just search for that on Amazon or any other place

to want to buy books.

The book's full of interesting things,

and we'll talk, of course course about its implications for public policy and government.

But in the book you also have kind of a, you go back in a way unveil, maybe it's quite the right word, but expose a prehistory, intellectual prehistory of the experimental method.

Bacon is really central to your argument.

That's correct. And you know, I think it didn't probably do a lot for sales and popularity of the book,

but I actually thought it was very important to really go all the way back to the nature of our understanding of causality

to explain why experiments are not this kind of nice interesting thing to have

when you come to public policy, but central to developing reliable predictive rules.

And I do think that Bacon is...

Spanish is Bacon, I should just say that.

Sorry, yes.

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